Ophelia, Her Death as Mad and as Picturesque as Our Imagination Paints It

Discovery in Unrelated Reading

Today I was reading Brothers Karamazov for one of my other classes (Honors 202, a Civ 2 class, called The Bible in Western Literary Tradition) and I was surprised to find a Shakespeare reference. At the bottom of the first page and the top of the second in Part One, Book One, there is an interesting passage

And so she died, entirely to satisfy her own whim, and to be like Shakespeare's Ophelia. If this precipice, a chosen and favorite spot of hers, had been less picturesque, if there had been a prosaic flat bank in its place, most likely the suicide would have never taken place. This is a fact, and there probably have been a few similar cases in the last two or three generations.

Wondering About Ophelia-Deaths and the Picturesque


I wonder how many suicides have been modeled on Ophelia's death, or inspired by her death, since I'd hardly call jumping off a picturesque cliff modeling Ophelia's death. True, there is something of a picturesque romantic image to Ophelia's death... it has certainly been the subject of a lot of paintings, but she died because she went crazy and fell into a brook while gathering flowers and sitting on a willow branch, not because she jumped off a cliff. She may or may not have been committing suicide anyways.

Tangent

I thought I remembered Anne in Anne of Green Gables and her friends re-enacting Ophelia's death, but I looked it up, and they were re-enacting Elaine from the Arthurian legends being sent down the river in a barge... the scene shows up in another form in Tennyson's "Lady of Shalott." Both these scenes are picturesque, involving innocence, femininity, water, and death.

Despite the similarities between Ophelia and the Lady of Shalott (the innocent young women whose deaths were associated with water, both painted with long white dresses and loose hair with trees hanging over the water). I did not spend long with Anne or the Lady of Shalott once I realized that I had misremembered what Anne was thinking about.
 End Tangent
 
Madness and Ophelia

I looked around for a good while, for interesting visual interpretations of Ophelia, and I found a site with a whole bunch of Ophelia paintings... some of them I was shocked at and navigated away from pretty quickly... but the one that I found most interesting is this photo here, because of the description of it.

This is Dr. Hugh Diamond's photograph of a young female patient taken during the 1850's in an asylum for the insane. The image, reproduced by Elaine Showalter in "Representing Ophelia," is Plate 32 in The Face of Madness: Hugh W. Diamond and the Origin of Psychiatric Photography, ed. Sander Gilman. The image of the sexually obsessed Ophelia had so thoroughly saturated the popular imagination that the fictional character and the real madwoman had become one, as in this photograph where the young woman has been garlanded in flowers and leaves for her portrait.
"The iconography of the Romantic Ophelia" was so fixed in nineteenth-century culture that, according to Showalter, one way for a young woman to express her psychological anguish was to imitate Ophelia, and "where the women themselves did not willingly throw themselves into Ophelia-like postures, asylum superintendents, armed with the new technology of photography, imposed the costume, gesture, props, and expression of Ophelia upon them" (86). As Oscar Wilde had observed, life imitates art--at least in the incident of this young woman.

This is not the usual image of Ophelia, but it is a fascinating view of how Ophelia's iconic death image became related to the common insane women a few generations after Shakespeare's time. I also read an interesting article that discussed how the lack of full Christian rites is not at all surprising, since suicide was considered by the Elizabethan's as self-murder and a terrible crime which would be harshly punished. Their bodies would be treated horribly and their everything they owned would be forfeit to the crown, nothing would be left to their heirs. Even though insanity was a valid plea which could soften punishment, usually mental instability was just considered as a factor common to people who commit suicide and so more proof that the death was suicide. I now understand a little better why the gravediggers were so cynical about Ophelia being buried in sanctified ground despite her questionable death made more questionable by her insanity. The article also discusses Horatio worrying about Hamlet committing suicide

What if it tempt you toward the flood, my lord,
Or to the dreadful summit of the cliff
That beetles o'er his base into the sea,
And there assume some other horrible form,
Which might deprive your sovereignty of reason
And draw you into madness? Think of it.
The very place puts toys of desperation,
Without more motive, into every brain
That looks so many fathoms to the sea
And hears it roar beneath. (I.iv.69-78)

The article goes on to more talk about the evils of suicide, but the jumping off the cliff part caught my attention. This death is a lot closer to what Dostoyevsky describes as the death of the silly woman who jumped off a cliff, though that was a picturesque spot, and this sounds more bleak. I wonder if the silly woman got these ideas of death by suicidal leap and death by drowning mixed up or if it just didn't matter, it was still death by drowning in a pretty spot. Really, suicide is never picturesque in the end, though some art can make the beginnings of it seem so.

Other Ophelia Art

I found these two pictures as part of a collection of Ophelia paintings put together by some random person. The first one is evidently by someone called cotofana. It's a more fantasy-like picture than most, but it still kind of has a drowned, flowery, elegant look that goes well with Ophelia.

The one on the below did not have an artist name. I love how just a dress in a bathtub is clearly Ophelia-inspired. Just the white dress of a maiden, drowned, can represent Ophelia.

I like this next picture too... it's just cool looking, even beautiful. I found it through a google search for Ophelia.

Connection to Something Else Mildly Literary

I also have a mental picture... of Narcissa Malfoy in The Half-Blood Prince in that second chapter when she shows up to talk to Snape, "She was so pale that she seemed to shine in the darkness; the long blonde hair streaming down her back gave her the look of a drowned person." I don't know if this description was supposed to remind us of Ophelia, the most iconic drowned woman, often thought of as pale and with long blonde hair, who was also mad. I wonder if we are supposed to pick up on this reference, or to feel, that Narcissa is at this point, like Ophelia, a little bit mad.

Perhaps Sarah could find some use for some of these ideas, I really don't deal much with art.