Abstract
Because of her limited stage presence and objectified status as a “document in madness” (4.5.175), Shakespeare’s Ophelia has posed a problem for traditional character criticism, which takes the genre of the novel as its paradigm for literary identification.1 Surprisingly, however, social remediations of this elusive character have “revived” Ophelia — to use Mary Pipher’s term — making her a focus for online creativity by girls and young women.2 We suggest that Ophelia, arguably a mere object in Shakespeare’s play, inspires young users of new media to become cultural producers through their identification with and critique of Shakespeare’s doomed maiden.
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Notes
William Shakespeare, Hamlet, The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997) 1067–1168. All subsequent references to the works of Shakespeare come from this edition.
Mary Pipher, Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls (New York: Putnam, 1994).
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991).
Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (New York: Little, Brown, 2005) 18–47 and passim.
Joel B. Altman, The Improbability of Othello: Rhetorical Anthropology and Shakespearean Selfhood (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010) 20.
Gibson did not himself coin the term “meat-space,” but the word entered cyberpunk via Gibson’s use of “meat” to refer to nonvirtual bodies and environments. William Gibson, Neuromancer (New York: Ace, 1984) 6, 10, 38, and passim.
Christy Desmet, Reading Shakespeare’s Characters: Rhetoric, Ethics, and Identity (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992) 11.
Rebecca West, The Court and the Castle: Some Treatments of a Recurrent Theme (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957) 22.
A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy: lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan, 1905) 160–61.
Jacques Lacan, “Desire and the Interpretation of Desire in Hamlet” Yale French Studies 55–56 (1977): 11–52, esp. 20.
Elaine Showalter, “Representing Ophelia: Women, Madness, and the Responsibilities of Feminist Criticism,” Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (London and New York: Routledge, 1985) 77–94, esp. 79, 91.
N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
Altman, The Improbability of Othello 20; Clifford Geertz, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,” The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic, 1973) 3–32.
Robert Miola, “Seven Types of Intertextuality,” Shakespeare, Italy, and Intertexuality, éd. Michele Marrapodi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004) 13–25, esp. 23–25.
James G. McManaway first makes the connection between Ophelia and Jephthah’s daughter in “Ophelia and Jephthah’s Daughter,” Shakespeare Quarterly 21.2 (1970): 198–200, esp. 200. Later critics who examine Ophelia as an obedient or rebellious daughter include R. S. White, “Jephthah’s Daughter: Men’s Construction of Women in Hamlet” Constructing Gender: Feminism and literary Studies, ed. H. Fraser and R. S. White (Nedlands: University of Western Australia Press, 1994) 73–89
Nona Feinberg, “Jephthah’s Daughter: The Parts Ophelia Plays,” Old Testament Women in Western literature, ed. R-J. Frontain and J. Wojcik (Conway, AR.: University of Central Arkansas Press, 1991) 128–43
Sharon Hamilton, Shakespeare’s Daughters (Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland, 2003) 69–92
Juliet Dusinberre, Shakespeare and the Nature of Women, 3rd ed., rev. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) 77–109
Maurice Hunt, “Impregnating Ophelia,” Neophilologus 89.4 (2005): 641–63.
On Ophelia in burlesque, see Richard Schoch, Not Shakespeare: Bardolatry and Burlesque in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) 51–55.
Arthur Rimbaud, “Ophélie,” Complete Works, Selected Letters, ed. Wallace Fowlie and Seth Whidden (1870; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005) 22–24.
For the elegy’s cultivation of scopophilia, see Anthony Easthope, Poetry and Phantasy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) 59.
Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (London: Routledge, 1992) 18.
Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997).
Paul Ekman, Telling Lies (New York: Norton, 1985) 38, 176, and passim.
Richard Lanham, The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).
N. Katherine Hayles, “Print is Flat, Code is Deep: The Importance of Media-Specific Analysis,” Poetics Today 25.1 (2004): 67–90.
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© 2012 Kaara L. Peterson and Deanne Williams
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Iyengar, S., Desmet, C. (2012). Rebooting Ophelia: Social Media and the Rhetorics of Appropriation. 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_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137016461_5
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
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