Throughout this post, I've included images of Ophelia I've found on Flickr that were creative-commons licensed. I've linked back to the artists page in the captions underneath.
Gosh, I've gotten distracted looking at artwork (and movie clips) of Ophelia for at least an hour!
Ashley's blog gave me a spring board and I dived right in. These portraits of Ophelia are absolutely mesmerizing! And how disturbing is that!? What is it about a suicidal girl that has
so captured the imagination of artists for centuries that they cannot stop recreating her?
I think
Ashley's paper is very significant in this respect and boy does she ever have an audience to draw upon! Ashley does great character analysis of Ophelia, a character who's personality is not her own but is made up of the intents and wishes of others. Ashley quotes an article in her paper that sums it up rather well: “Indeed with her identity constructed always in reference to another, Ophelia is, in essence, nothing, an empty cipher patiently waiting to be infused with whatever meaning the particular mathematician should require. Lacking personal ego boundaries of her own, Ophelia seems compelled to absorb whatever psychic identity is thrust upon her (Dane 410-411).”
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| photo courtesy of Ло |
But Ashley, I don't think you need to draw stretched allusions to identity theft on the Internet to find an authentic audience for your ideas. You have one! Our culture is obviously obsessed with the idea of dead females (or I might argue the loss of the feminine). Just take a look at some popular movies that have captured the public imagination in the last few years: Inception (dead wife), The Dark Knight (dead fiance), Harry Potter (dead mom)... In just the last year, Hugo (dead parents), The Descendants (seriously injured wife), The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (missing woman), Breaking Dawn (girl who essentially dies/ gives up life? by becoming a vampire - ok maybe that's a stretch), etc. People are really obsessed with this idea of the missing or dead feminine. "Frailty, woman is thy name!" - yes, but only because we keep killing her off!
It might be interesting for you to look into this idea more - is the loss of Ophelia's identity significant for the other characters in the play. Music and flowers are feminine-infused objects and so the fact that Ophelia uses them once there is no hold or pressure on her is interesting. Also, in folklore and mythology, the ocean and water is associated with the womb and so the mother or the feminine. So Ophelia dying in water is like returning to the feminine because the world was too masculine and violent for her to remain there.
I think Ashley is absolutely correct that this paper is incomplete without artwork and movie clips to back it up. There are hundreds of paintings, photographs, etc that have been created around Ophelia and they say so much more than you can in a ten page paper! Ashley, I think you could have the most impact on potential audiences by creating your own artwork perhaps and writing short blurbs about it.
Wouldn't it be wonderful to show Ophelia's loss of identity through artistically set up photographs that suggest Ophelia's loss of identy by either not having her whole self in the frame or just having items that suggest her floating on water or something? How eerie would that be?! Or show how she is just a cipher into which others pour their own identities by a photo of Ophelia looking into a mirror and seeing the men in her life or a basin with a woman painted on it with men inside. I've been just obsessed with checking your blog just to see the photos of Ophelia that you post. They are positively chilling. I think you could really make an impact by creating your own artwork and linking back to what you've written. You can find audiences on flickr and other photo sharing sites. There are social networks for artists like
SANe and
artists2artists.
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