Ophelia

phelia

According to [|Elaine Showalter], Ophelia is "the most frequently illustrated and cited of Shakespeare's heroines. Her visibility[is] as a subject in literature popular culture, and painting, from [|Redon] who paints her drowning, to [|Bob Dylan], who places her on [|Desolation Row], to [|Cannon Mills], which has named a flowery sheet of paper after her."

Here's a quick run-down of all things Ophelia. If you find some others, please add to this page.

John Bell, 1772. The oldest artistic rendering I could find. "dressed in her innocent, virginal white, adorned with flowers, and wearing a crownlet of flowers--was then, as even now, traditional."

Benjamin West, 1792. "[R]obed in white; her flaxen locks hang in loose disorder over her forehead and down to her waist; with her left hand extended she carelessly strews around the rue and thyme; her eyes exhibit a wandering mind and delicious indecisiveness, yet she is gentle; rage makes no part of her character."

Robert Westall, late 1700s.

Joseph Severn, Opehila. c.. 1831, Do you notice the name Hamlet spelled in flowers? Strange.

Redgrave. Ophelia Weaving Her Garlands. 1842

Eugène Delacroix - La Mort d'Ophélie (1853)

Arthur Hughes, 1852. A tinkerbell with a crown of thorns.

John Everett Millais, 1852

T 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.

James Sant. 1860s.

George Watts. Ophelia. 1864.

Jean Baptiste Georges Betrand. 1870s.

Pierre Cot. 1870.

Henry Nelson O'Neill.

Madeline Lemaire, 1880s.


 * Maurice Greiffenhagen. //Laertes and Ophelia//, 1885.**

John Waterhouse. 1889.

John Waterhouse. Ophelia. 1894.

John Waterhouse. Ophelia. 1899.

John Waterhouse (again). 1910.

Redon. 1905.

W.G. Simmonds. The Drowning of Ophelia. Her gown, filling with water, appears as angel wings. []

Others:

Nick Cave "Where the Wild Rose"

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Natalie Merchant's "Ophelia"

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[|Natalie Merchant]'s "[|Ophelia]." Not an official video. Here Ophelia becomes a stand-in for misunderstood and repressed women through the ages.

"Ophelia's mind went wandering you'd wonder where she'd gone through secret doors down corridors she'd wander them alone all alone..."

One other: [|Reviving Ophelia]: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls Mary Pipher, PhD From her work as a psychotherapist for adolescent females, Pipher here posits and persuasively argues her thesis that today's teenaged girls are coming of age in "a girl-poisoning culture." Backed by anecdotal evidence and research findings, she suggests that, despite the advances of feminism, young women continue to be victims of abuse, self-mutilation (e.g., anorexia), consumerism and media pressure to conform to others' ideals. With sympathy and focus she cites case histories to illustrate the struggles required of adolescent girls to maintain a sense of themselves among the mixed messages they receive from society, their schools and, often, their families. Pipher offers concrete suggestions for ways by which girls can build and maintain a strong sense of self, e.g., keeping a diary, observing their social context as an anthropologist might, distinguishing between thoughts and feelings.

What else?