Ophelia, drowning in beauty
IMAGINARIUM: An Alternate History of Art
Welcome to Imaginarium: an alternate history of art. A podcast where we delve in to the most obscure parts of art history.
Hello dear listeners, I’m your host Nadjah, and in this podcast, we try to shed light on less studied parts of the history of art and visual culture. In today’s episode, we’re going to talk about the representation of ophelia in the world of art, and generally the reasons why ophelia is still such a source of fascination despite arguably not being the main character of the Shakespeare play hamlet. Hamlet is one of the most known and performed plays across the world. Even if one might not necessarily know or remember every single plot-point of the story, it is embedded nonetheless in the cultural consciousness to a point that is almost omnipresent, and it might feel like Shakespearean works have always enjoyed that sort of popularity, which is not true, but since their return on the scene in the 19th century, it has not left the general culture.
There is something to be said about how the writing of Shakespeare in itself is very much a masterpiece of literary talents, as he is able to paint a scene extremely vividly with only words, and also let’s not forget how the art of theatre is a world that is very much an interdisciplinary venture and relies not only on the suspension of disbelief of the crowd to believe the story that is happening on the stage, but also the talent of the cast to give life to the words of the writer. The 19th century was one that was, excuse me the expression, absolutely mad for the character of Ophelia and the archetype she represented, and this is what we’re going to explore and discover all the ways in which she is present in the landscape of visual arts.
Before we truly get started, I wanna take the time to put out some trigger warnings for this episode as we are going to be discussing mental illness, suicide and the idea of madness, so if for any reason at all, these subjects are triggering to you, please just take care of yourself and I will see you next episode !
After all, something is rotten in the state of Denmark.
Hamlet is one of the most well known Shakespeare plays, a story that has been staged times and times again, both by utterly amateur enthusiasts, isn’t there something absolutely delightful and beautiful to see a high school play, which will often be the first time any of them has ever dealt with that kind of material, and also by professionals, on the biggest stages of the world. Shakespeare, everyone knows the famous playwright. He is often cited as one of the best selling authors along with the bible and Agatha christie. When it comes to Shakespeare, unfortunately, it is the kind of author that you are like. there is no way his work is as good as everyone says and is still relevant today, and then you read Shakespeare and unfortunately have to admit you are wrong. that it is still as good and relevant as it always has been, and that you have to understand why his work has maintained its relevancy through the centuries since they have been written. Romeo and Juliet, Othello, countless titles that have been studied, performed and adapted again and again and again. But today, we’ll focus on Ophelia, and her numerous visual depictions, to try and unearth how the way this character and her scenes from the play are pictured influences our understanding of the story but also of art.
I’ll just give some quick spoiler alerts for if you haven’t read nor watched the play, I mean it has been around for more than 400 years now, however I am aware that not everyone is familiar with the story, and it is not because something has been around for a long time that you might no want to experience it correctly. So.. consider yourself warned ! This is a tale of the Prince Hamlet’s revenge against his uncle Claudius who had killed his father and seized the throne of Denmark, it is a story of ghosts, real and figurative, it is a story of several crises, personal and external, that plague the young prince. And in the midst of this, Ophelia, our principal subject today, is living her own tragedy and fall into madness.
Shakespeare’s stories, whether the tragedies and the comedies, have been a huge inspiration to the world of art, especially since they were brought up again to the limelight during the 19th century with the romantics and the revival of interest toward the medieval and the renaissance period and that British desire to valorize their own cultural history. But I want to focus first and foremost on Ophelia, who was driven to madness throughout the story and died by drowning. I think there is so much to say about her, and so often I feel like while her name is known, she is largely left out of the conversation and so I really want to dive into the way she has been represented in art. She is a tragic figure in the sidelines of Hamlet’s story that captured the imagination of so many, especially since the 19th century, and this is what we are going to explore today.
The first time the renaissance of Shakespeare works happened was during the late 18th century during the age of the romantics with a capital R and of the early gothic romances, I have already talked a it about the history of the gothic romances in episode 3 of the first season if you want to have a little refresher or if you want to know more about it, but suffice to say, that during this era of the sublime, of grand emotions and hugely extravagant feelings, passion was something that was supposed to submerge you entirely and that often ended badly. And thus, the tragedies of Shakespeare, with Romeo and Juliet’s tragic suicides and Hamlet’s death and the drowning of Ophelia, all these stories of murder, betrayal and madness were simply right for the cultural context of the era. It is important to understand, that for us, Shakespeare is such an overbearing presence on the general popular culture that his work is almost innocuous, however it has not always been the case, he was successful when he was alive, but it is when he was brought back that the success became truly enduring. I do think there is something to be said about Shakespeare being also a colonial export that explains his continuing presence in culture, as he is one of the quintessential British authors, and the British Empire was one that reached far and wide. However, this is not the subject of the conversation today, however there is something to be said about that for sure.
After all, when it comes to art, there is not only the art and the artist, but there is a third, lesser known presence, that is more active than we think, and it is the audience. Even a passive audience, that simply looks and receive a work of art without participating in its inception, will understand it and interpret it in a unique way. The act of looking is an extremely charged one. In John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, he says and I quote “Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed is female. Thus, she turns herself into an object of vision: a sight.” unquote. This is a quote that truly reveals how women were represented in western art, and how the figure of the woman has been generally pictured and rarely in control of their own portrayal. Ophelia, as one of the quintessential female archetypes is often portrayed in her visual representations, posing and being turned in a beautiful and vision of madness that does not illustrates the realities of her suffering. I mean I use the word realities very loosely here, as I think we can all agree that these are fictional characters we are talking about, and yet it say something about the general societal understanding of women going through periods of mental distress. After all, they had to be palatable in the end, they had to be easy to like and to empathize with, the emotions couldn’t have too much complexity or depth to them, and god forbid it made a woman unattractive in any way, shape or form.
Ophelia by Robert Westall is a print that was in The Dramatic Works of Shakespeare that was edited by George Steevens in 1803. This print is such a reflection of its time, of that very gothic atmosphere, and the way, maybe, Ophelia was understood as a gothic heroine in her own right, with the tragic ending that surely befits such a heroine. After all, there is something potent to the tragedy of a gothic heroine, the way she is driven by the tempest of her emotions and is walking outside, only in a dress and with a lamp, fits very much with the visual codes of gothic romance.
Ophelia is often pictured in art, as young and overly fragile woman, with long hair, with flowers and garlands as a sign of her connection with the natural world, which is often a symbol of femininity. It is mother nature after all. There is a certain femininity to the way madness is understood in media and stories, after all the word hysterical is rarely one that is being assigned to men. The character of Ophelia is one that does not take center stage in the story of Hamlet, she is a side character, living her life on the margins of the story and of everyone’s lives.
The few paintings of ophelia during the first half of the 19th century are representations of ophelia’s sadness and gloominess, and her as a gothic heroine, however none of these paintings depict the moment of death, none of these represent the moment of her drowning in the river. The river is still there, ostensibly, in the background, as a reminder of what is to come, of the tragedy that is going to happen, that ophelia does not get to have a happy ending, but they still shy away from directly mentioning the topic of her suicide. It is implied, it is a subtext, and yet it is not told to us, the same way that the verses of Hamlet skirt around what truly happened with ophelia’s death even though it is easy to read between the lines and understand the reality of her passing.
When it comes to stories that stand the test of time, they are constantly reinterpreted through the social lens of the current time, each generation needs to reckon with Which can be a way to understand to the way history as well, is constantly understood and analyzed through the current social and historical understanding. History always has two timelines after all, the one it happens in, and the one we currently are in.
From the renaissance to the 19h century, there was a clear hierarchy when it came to fine arts in the western world. So you have, in order : History painting, which depicts historical events, biblical events and moments of greek mythology, was at the top of the chain, and then portraiture, landscape, still life, and the last one would be genre paintings which designated scenes of everyday life.
There was a rigid understanding of the subjects that were acceptable as being represented in art that started to get lax as the 19th century came to, of course that scale of painting styles was still used and relevant within the circles of art academies and the higher sticklers of fine art, however it started to get looser. As scenes from theatre and fiction suddenly were becoming acceptable subjects for serious art and paintings were not strictly restrained to biblical, historical or mythological events. I have to say that this type of painting was treated as the epitome of western art, and thus, often the ones managing to get exhibited at museums and artistic salons. It was about prestige and status, and I talked a bit about this notion in relation to the world of fine arts in the first episode of this series, so if you haven’t listened to that one, and want to know more about this topic, please give it a listen !
The late 19th century’s had fascination with beauty that it to permeates the way we understand media today. A lot of the stories and art only being kind to women once they are dead and immortalized in beauty and youth. It speaks of a culture that does not care about women when they’re alive, but seeks to immortalize them in myth and legend once they are dead. Not that Marilyn Monroe is anywhere near as being similar to ophelia, I mean one of them was a real woman, and the other is simply a character of fiction. However, it’s true that a lot of people have treated Marilyn Monroe as if she was a fictional character in a story, denying her the complexity of her humanity to turn her into a figure of the sexy dumb blonde, instead of understanding her as a person. While she was always an extremely popular actress, it is her tragic death made her larger than life and turned her into a symbols and depleted her of her humanity. Dead women in 19th century art are often women who are beautiful. Women who are dead can no longer do any wrong, and god knows that everything a woman can do is always ground for criticism, no matter what. When she is beautiful and dead , nothing can tarnish the image she projects. She is no longer a person, she is an object to be seen and adored and put on a pedestal. The woman in European painting especially in earlier art pieces is usually offered as a visual object to be seen and admired, posed as to showcase her beauty. And this is what happens to Ophelia, even at the moment of her death, she is represented peacefully, with a lack of gore and realism considering she is dead, but she is pictured as if she is sleeping, almost as if she was sleeping beauty.
Of course, we cannot ignore that this is white womanhood that is treated that way and revered and admired in such a way, however, i do think that the idea of a beautiful dead woman does apply to women in general. Ophelia is an archetype. She is the young virginal beauty who is driven to suicide and madness by the death of her beloved. And it is only in her death, that her beauty, and her perfection is immortalized. With no risk of growing older or of her personality taking too much space, it is at that moment, that she is absolutely and utterly perfect. The same way that beautiful insects or plants can be captured in amber and glass, the young woman is stuck eternally at that moment where she is deemed to be absolutely perfect, where she can do no wrong. And that is when she is immortalized. And there is something deeply problematic about this, I mean not to use this word lightly, however, the thought that women are only beautiful, perfect and deemed worthy of respect as long as they stay young and never age, look placid and calm and dead.. It is about crystalizing and immortalizing that moment before a woman becomes quote unquote undesirable.
Undesirable in the way she acts, if a woman is deemed mad or hysterical, or a woman who is getting older. This worship of youth that is something we still have to confront in our modern world, I have to say I am one of them, it is difficult to be a woman in a world that prioritizes youth, and I'm not even anywhere near old, and yet sometimes I do feel like I might be. I’m only in my late twenties at time of recording, but the amount of targeted advertisement to start doing fillers and botox as early as your early twenties is simply bonkers, we fear a woman that ages, we fear a woman that is confident and in who she is. And yet, it is undeniable to me I am feeling way better in my skin now that I am in my late twenties than i ever did when i was 19 or 20, and I am looking forward to growing older and wiser, and feeling even better with myself as time goes on. There is definitely something to be said about who gets to be considered that way as a beautiful innocent beauty, after all it is often young white women, but this is not .. in my opinion at least, a privilege. She is revered, yes. But also, most importantly, she is dead.
The victorians ideals of beauty, which were very much a focus on a natural face and good health. They sincerely believed that your outer appearance reflected your inner beauty, that if you were a beautiful person, this meant that you were inherently a good person, and on the flip-side if you were considered as ugly, had any sort of visual quirks that they considered as defects, this meant that you, as a person, were not a good person and that your quote unquote flaws were as much physical and moral. I mean I don’t think i need to tell you how messed up this any of this is and how classist and absolutely despicable this way of thinking is. Even today, beauty is very much easier to obtain if you are rich, especially with how normalized and common it is to be able to get procedures and tweaks, and how easily available products are. But in the victorian era, any sort of visible cosmetics were frowned upon, there was a desire of cleanliness, not only of the body but of the soul. The victorian era is a very particular one and that lasts from the 1830s to the 1890s, and so whether we’re talking about early victorians or late victorians, there is a different sort of culture, mindset and society that we are talking about. The late victorians knew something about the repression of every single feeling and impulse one could feel and yet there was an extremely dark underbelly to society.
Along with the mainstream ideas of health as beauty, there was also the standards of beauty in the mid to late victorian era that veered toward what can only be called tuberculosis chic. A woman was considered to be at the height of her beauty when she was pale and sickly, when she looked frail from the sickness that was plaguing her. There was an obsession with death and mortality that was extremely prevalent in art. It was the age of the occult and the beginning of the movement of spiritualism and the desire to communicate with ghosts and ghostly séances, of the style of Edgar Allan poe, who was one of the precursor of that specific flavor of the victorian gothic. Within the visions of victorian femininity, somehow in dying by way of drowning, Ophelia cemented herself as the ultimate show of femininity and beauty.
Along with the the rise of psychology and psychiatry, there was he rise of female madness and hysteria, because the moment where a woman would dare to react to the world around her in a way that wasn’t prim and proper or meek, she would be deemed as being hysterical. Women were often being trapped in a life that wasn’t necessarily of their choosing. I don’t ascribe to the fact that women only gained agency in the past 60 years, i fully believe that we have to give back the intelligence, agency and resourcefulness of people born in the past. However, we will not start and pretend that life was easy for all women in the centuries past. But there, is no denying that the way life was extremely harder, and often there were few or no choices for them, which must not have been easy at all and had negative mental effects which must have lead to anxiety, depression and other mental health problems. But, before the advent of modern medicine, any deviation from the norm and what was expected was deemed as female hysteria, and Ophelia being driven mad by Hamlet in the story before her tragic death, is an example of that. The art becomes a study of the understanding the artists, and their societal context, had of female mental health. This is very much within the western world though of course.
Why is the spectacle of a woman slowly descending into madness and destroying herself something we are looking in sort sort of voyeuristic manner ? Ophelia’s behavior is distracted and erratic, and in the understanding of her, the female body and the presence of female insanity becomes a spectacle of everything that can turn wrong when there is no rationality, after all it was understood that only men were creature of reasons or something like that. The representation of female madness is something that is used to set women who do not conform to a certain standard apart, and to punish them. Ophelia is a symbol of tragedy, of that moment where things can never truly go right. There is something about tragedies that ring into something deep into the human psyche. Like a wreck happening that we cannot take our eyes off of. And her death, as described by Gertrude, Hamlet’s mother and the queen of Denmark is very poignant.
Gertrude:
There, on the pendant boughs her coronet weeds
Clamb'ring to hang, an envious sliver broke,
When down her weedy trophies and herself
Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide
And mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up;
Which time she chanted snatches of old tunes,
As one incapable of her own distress,
Or like a creature native and endued unto
that element. But long it could not be
Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,
Pulled the poor wretch from her melodious lay
To muddy death.
What is interesting about this particular passage, is that it is a description of Ophelia’s death, but this death is happening off stage. It is being related to us, the audience, through Queen Gertrude, and it is this description, very painterly and pictorial, written in such a visual language, that truly captures the minds of artists who heard it. It is a very striking image indeed, one that evokes a very specific kind of mood and feeling, It creates a picture, without delving in her personal feelings, but showing only her actions and the image she depicts, she is a vision, she is one with nature, and yet even in this scene she stays unknown to the audience, even in this last moments of her life, she is somewhat being staged for an external observer, there is always the act of posing and having to appear beautiful.
There is a certain wildness to some of the plays of Shakespeare set in the medieval era, that i think is very much part of the mystery of the middle ages, it feels like an era so foreign and mysterious to us, no matter where you position yourself in the world and what kind of culture and history you are studying. There is a certain wildness and fierceness to that era that feels very representative of the idea of magic, nature and myth. It stands as a sharp contrast to the subsequent eras, from the very tidily repressed victorian era to our modern days. Those medieval ages, however, were a huge source of inspiration for the artists of the 19th century, whether it was the Romantics or the Brotherhood of the Pre-raphaelites.The Pre-Raphaelites, who are the group of artists who got together during the mid- victorian era, took a lot of inspiration from medieval and early renaissance era. It was an art that thrived on sentimentality and emotions. We will be actually doing a deep dive into the art of the Pre-Raphaelites later this season so please look forward to it, and this is why I will not be getting into it as much during this time around, but I do want to mention the work of some of these artists in relationship to painting Ophelia, because they are seminal works of art of the subject.
So John William Waterhouse had several paintings of Ophelia in his oeuvre, she was a subject that he came back to at least three times, with a painting in 1889, in 1894 and in 1910, all following the same trajectory, and yet it is possible to see the progress, not only in the artistic and formal characteristics of his pieces, but within the narratives of it. His paintings all represent Ophelia in the moments preceding her death or surrounded by nature and water, as she is lying down on the grass, or sitting on a wooden log near the river. Her hair is long and decorated with flowers, the colors of the two earlier paintings are within a palette of greens, browns and touches of yellows, making it very monochromatic. It is only that last and final depiction of her that Waterhouse departs from that formula, and is the one where Ophelia, instead of being admired and looked at, is bravely advancing toward her destiny. She still has the long hair, the wild look in her face and flowers adorning her, but her vibrant blue dress contrasts with the strong greens of the nature surrounding her, this piece feels visually and emotionally stronger than the two previous ones.
Ophelia by John Everett Millais, painted in 1851 to 1852, was modeled by Elizabeth Siddal lying in a bath in her dress as the model for this painting. She was one of the first muses and models of the pre-raphaelite brotherhood, but she was also the example of a new kind of beauty that was outside of the mainstream ideal, the beautiful women of pre-raphaelite paintings looked wild, mysterious, and had strong features. Their hair were let loose, and while not conventionally beautiful for the times, they were still incredibly charming and magnetic. It was an imperfect sort of the beauty, but one that fit well with the tenets of the pre-raphaelite movement. It is also important to note that this painting of Ophelia is the one that truly marks the general imagination of this character, it is the one that is often most cited when it comes to Ophelia. The paintings of Ophelia were thus an embodiment of a certain shift and change in the way of thinking about feminine beauty.
Women and madness and the way it has been represented in art and in various stories, you have this archetype of the beautiful young woman who is dead, or the crazy woman, who is living on the margins of society and of respectability, because any woman who is suffering from mental health issues or was considered too emotional was too much for society. The emotions of women were only ever acceptable if they were palatable and pleasing. Any expression of true anger, sadness or any deviation from the role of the ideal mother or woman as they conceived it were shunned and ignored.
Ophelia (1864) by George Frederic Watts is one that I think is worth talking about because it does show a departure from the usual representations of Ophelia in the 19th century. It is not a very well known piece, I only learned of it through researching this episode, and it is one that I think is very peculiar because it represents an Ophelia that is not as pretty nor as made up as the others. Even though the paintings of Ophelia are representing a woman who is on the verge of suicide and losing her mind, she is always pretty, beautiful, polished and put together. Her hair is well brushed and shining, her face is luminous and serene, even in madness and sadness, she looks conventionally beautiful and for all the wild emotions and despair she is supposed to feel, she looks calm and attractive. George Frederic Watt’s Ophelia, is one that still looks ragged and tired, her hair is unbrushed, she has some shadows under her eyes and she looks, as the kids say, like she is going through it.
What means Ophelia to us nowadays anyway, is she even a figure that is still relevant in the popular culture and the general consciousness. I say yes, in so many ways, that are invisible to us. The fact that this character has transcended its origin in the Shakespeare play to become an archetype of a very specific kind of character, but also of a certain of womanhood, and even girlhood, might I add. The figure of the lolita, the nymphette and the coquette are all associated in an adjacent way to the figure of Ophelia, she is a symbol of a delicate sort of femininity that is still very much a tragic one. She is that symbol of youth, of that extremely delicate period where every feeling feels transcendent and overwhelming, and specifically of a youth that often does not make it to adulthood.
The 19th century was an age of Ophelias, where painters and artists constantly reprised this character in their paintings, and the understanding and representation of her evolved and changed as the years went on. Her struggles, emotions and early demise were incredibly inspiring and in tune with the cultural changes of the era as the Romantics gained traction in the late 18th century and early 19th century, and then getting wilder and more in touch with the mystery that the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood attached to the Medieval era. Art can help us makes sense of our society, and studying art history helps us not only makes sense of past societies, but can help us understand ourselves in our current moment, because the lens through which we will understand the past will always be the lens of the present.
On this, my darling listeners, thank you for listening to this episode of Imaginarium, I hope it was fun and we’ll meet again next month for a new episode and a new deep dive into another lesser known subject of art history and visual culture. If you want to support this podcast, you can do so on patreon @ patreon.com/nadjah. Otherwise, talk about it to anyone you’ll think will like it. And as the youtubers say, like and subscribe, and give us a good rating if you enjoyed. As always, all the relevant images will also be on all of our social platforms @ imaginarium_pod on instagram as well as on twitter. This podcast was written, narrated and produced, by yours truly, Nadjah. On this, I wish you all a very lovely day, evening or night, and I hope to see you again very soon.