Abstract
Displaced to the somber back room of a bar in Miller’s letter quoted above; vanishing down the long corridors of a castle in Laurence Olivier’s film; or partially submerged in a bath or in a river following the style inaugurated by John Everett Millais, Ophelia lives at the margins of our memory of Shakespeare’s play, as liminal and peripheral as one of Hamlet’s subplots.4
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As for Ophelia, she is inseparable in my mind from a tow-haired girl who was sitting in the back room and whom I had passed on my way to the toilet every now and then. I remember the pathetic, stupefied look on this girl’s face; when later I saw somewhere an illustration of Ophelia floating face up, the hair braided and tangled in the pond lilies, I thought of the girl in the back room of the bar, her eyes glazed, her hair strawlike, as Ophelia’s.
(Henry Miller, “A Letter to Hamlet”)1
Le mystère — si l’on veut à tout prix, pour les besoins du discours, donner une figure à ce qui, par définition, n’en pa — peut être représenté comme une marge.
(marginalia, Derrida’s Marges de la philosophie)2
Ofelia: Me gusta. Es mi oportunidad. Nunca tuve buenas frases. Me robaron el papel. Ni siquiera muero en escena.
(Angelica Liddell, La falsa suicida)3
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Notes
Henry Miller’s “A Letter to Hamlet,” The Cosmological Eye (New York: New Directions, 1939) 233. This letter was written in 1935.
Angélica Liddell, La falsa suicida, ARTEA 2011 (Cuenca: Universidad de Castilla La Mancha, 2011) 4. For the full text of Liddell’s play, see (http://artesescenicas.uclm.es/archivos_subidos/textos/175/Angelica%20Liddell-La%20falsa%20suicida.pdf).
See A. C. Bradley’s comments, Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth (1901; Teddington: The Echo Library, 2006) 84.
Elaine Showalter, “Representing Ophelia: Women, Madness, and the Responsibilities of Feminist Criticism,” Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (New York and London: Methuen, 1985) 77–94; 75.
On the “Ophelia Phenomenon,” see Alan R. Young, “The Ophelia Phenomenon,” Hamlet and the Visual Arts 1709–1900, ed. Alan R. Young (London: Associated University Press, 1984) 279–345.
Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-siècle Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1988) 42. Emphasis mine.
Wessel Krull, “The Drowned Bride,” Ophelia: Sehnsucht, Melancholia and Desire for Death, ed. Catrien Santing, Flos Wildshut, and Krien Clevis (Amsterdam: Uitgeverij De Buitenkant 2009) 142–89; 142.
See Michael Bartram, The Pre-Raphaelite Camera: Aspects of Victorian Photography (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1989) 8–9.
See Kaara Peterson, “Framing Ophelia: Representation and the Pictorial Tradition,” Mosaic: A Journal for the Lnterdisciplinary Study of Literature 31.3 (September 1998): 1–24; 3.
Kimberly Rhodes, Ophelia and Victorian Visual Culture (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2008) 127.
Rhodes, Ophelia and Victorian Visual Culture 128. See also Georges Didi-Huberman, Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT, 2007).
Pascale Aesbischer, Shakespeare’s Violated Bodies: Stage and Screen Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Aesbischer refers to the RSC production of Hamlet, directed by Ron Daniel, in which a new character, the gravedigger’s daughter, was going to be included.
See Jacques Derrida, “Tympan,” Margins of Philosophy (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1982) x–xxix.
In the fusion of her body with the landscape, Mendieta writes, Through my earth/body sculptures I become one with the earth … I become an extension of nature and nature becomes an extension of my body. This obsessive act of reasserting my ties with the earth is really the reactivation of primeval beliefs … [in] an omnipresent female force, the after-image of being encompassed within the womb. See her 1981 unpublished statement, qtd. in Anne Raine, “Embodied Geographies,” Generations & Geographies in the Visual Arts, ed. Griselda Pollock (London: Routledge, 1996) 228–52; 26.
María Ruido, Ana Mendieta (Hondarribia: Barcelona, 2002) 19.
Mieke Bal, Quoting Caravaggio (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999) 8.
Gregory Crewdson, qtd. in Carol Solomon Kiefer, “The Myth and Madness of Ophelia,” The Myth and Madness of Ophelia, ed. Carol Solomon Kiefer (Amherst, MA: Mead Art Museum, Amherst College, 2001) 11–39; 31.
Eugènia Barcells, Ophelia: variacions sobre una imatge (Barcelona: department d’art de la Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, 1979).
Estrella de Diego, “Ophelia’s Fall or How to Avoid Worse Trouble When Gardening,” Ofeliasy Ulises, ed. Rafael Doctor (Bremen: Barcelona, 2001) 27.
Kate Bush directly connects Cameron’s Ophelia with van Meene’s portraits: Ophelia is pictured turning her head, her hair messy and her mouth open, minute gestures of agitation that contrast with the perfectly focused rose at her neck-and thus she immediately characterizes Shakespeare’s tragic heroine, a figure of simultaneous beauty and madness. For van Meene, likewise, the model is important insofar as she, or he, is capable of incarnating and projecting a particular expressive or physical quality. Kate Bush, “Prologue,” Hellen van Meene: Portraits, ed. Andrew Hiller (New York: Aperture Foundation, 2004) 91.
See Michael Fried, Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008) 212. For a deeper insight in the concepts of “theatricality” and “self-absorption,” see also
Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1988).
See Laura Noble, “The Adventures of Guille and Belinda and the Enigmatic Meaning of Their Dreams,” Foam, International Photography Magazine 10 (2007): 55–74 and Alessandra Sanguinetti’s official website (http://alessandrasanguinetti.com).
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© 2012 Kaara L. Peterson and Deanne Williams
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Perni, R. (2012). At the Margins: Ophelia in Modern and Contemporary Photography. In: Peterson, K.L., Williams, D. (eds) The Afterlife of Ophelia. Reproducing Shakespeare: New Studies in Adaptation and Appropriation. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137016461_12
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