Framing Ophelia: Representation and the Pictorial Tradition (1998)

Focusing on way that Ophelia's is in Hamlet and then depicted in a series of visual modes ranging from 18th-century classic paintings to contemporary pop art, this essay explores how arts, regardless of medium, conventionalize death of a beautiful woman. In her far-ranging study Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and Aesthetic, Elisabeth Bronfen elucidates Western culture's fascination with depictions of dead, beautiful women in literature and visual arts respectively, concluding that because such images are so omnipresent we are scarcely aware of their status as a resolute cultural tradition. Likening portraits of dead women to Poe's famous purloined letter - so numerous as to be invisible to viewer's eye - Bronfen elaborates aesthetic association between women and death, quoting Poe's notorious statement, the of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, most poetical topic in world. Bronfen's study, of course, is part of a general concern these days with implications of representation, and her discussion can also be situated in larger context of current interarts debates about whether traditions in one aesthetic mode affect and should be studied in conjunction with each other, or whether such approaches end up as a kind of ecphrastic iconology, wherein verbal invariably becomes interpreter of visual. Insofar as Ophelia is arguably Shakespeare's most recognizable female character, with a long and significant history of purloining in both verbal and visual media, she would seem to be an excellent focus for discussions of this kind. And indeed she is, albeit ironically so, for just as Bronfen's examples of dead women tend to remain distinct - generically categorizable as or visual bodies, either/or - so analysis rarely seeks to consider ever-present visual interpretations and popular imaginings of Ophelia's character, and equally in discussing her representations art historians regularly prefer to concentrate on aspects of formal composition rather than explore her origins within Shakespeare text. At same time, in case of Ophelia, we have an instance of a character whose portrait has been painted with such consistency that she has become something of a visual cliche, whereby typical Ophelia of plastic arts has so imprinted itself on our imaginations that we tend either to ignore how her is reported in Hamlet or we tend to augment text to include a drowning scene, which literalizes into a seen, appearing in our mind's eye as we read. My purpose in this essay is to bring together these previously disparate methodologies that split Ophelia's up between disciplines. In addressing Shakespeare's character in this manner, however, I do not seek to establish an unequivocal body of work in which we can locate true Ophelia, for my direction here will point out reverse, that Ophelia is always elusive despite fact that she is so in artworks. She is an elusive figure because such artworks regularly take as their subject a fragment from Hamlet reporting Ophelia's death, a fragment in which it is doubly impossible for Ophelia's to be present. The method I adopt is partially paradoxical, for I wish to unearth literary of Ophelia present in different visual representations at same time that I want to utilize these same media to suggest degree to which they have formed our understanding of dramatic-textual character. In order to position Ophelia's dual representational history more precisely within both art-historical and dramatic-critical frameworks, I start by tracing history of painted Ophelias as they first appear typically in 18th century. My discussion of Gertrude's narrative of Ophelia's drowning next establishes crucial context for understanding important innovations of Arthur Hughes's 19th-century painting which I examine at length before returning to complete my catalogue of other important but more general examples of visual media from 19th and 20th centuries; thus, I locate my investigation into Ophelia's origins in Shakespeare between visual arts contexts purposefully, hoping to elucidate Ophelia's extraordinary connection to both genres. …