‘To muddy death’: The Fantasy of Ophelia in Visual Culture

Ophelia, Sir John Everett Millais, 1851-2

The ambiguity between text and reality is crucial to Shakespeare’s Hamlet. It motivates the central question, around the murder of the previous King, but it also vitally shapes Ophelia’s death. The moment’s tragic, unsettling qualities are diffused by the beauty of Gertrude’s account (4.7.). Consequent representations of this moment have dismissed the tension between what is real, though unseen, and what is heavily visual but manufactured. Pre-Raphaelite adaptations are particularly illustrative of this phenomenon. Painters of the 19th-century artistic movement repeatedly returned to this moment in the play, relishing in its aesthetic appeal. Sir John Everett Millais’ Ophelia , painted 1851-52, and the first of John William Waterhouse’s series on the character, dating 1889, exemplify the key traits of the movement’s interpretation. Pre-Raphaelite paintings can be credited as the creators of Ophelia’s archetypal image. They defined her presence in the popular imaginary. Their focus on the moment of her death has created a prevailing association between Ophelia and nature, which has gone on to inform consequent representations of the character. Claire McCarthy’s 2018 film Ophelia, a loose adaptation of Shakespeare’s play, endeavours to retell the story through its titular protagonist’s eyes. Though it aims at empowering the female characters, their unchallenged use of Pre-Raphaelite aesthetics hinders their goal: the Victorian movement’s staple objectification of women burdening McCarthy’s feminism. The reinvention of Ophelia for a 21st-century audience is undermined by the continued commercial appeal of the Pre-Raphaelite rendition of the character.

    Beginning by considering the role of the mediator in Ophelia’s death, it is crucial to note the death itself is absent from the stage. It exists, instead, as a purely verbal retelling. Gertrude’s description, delivered to Claudius and Laertes, goes as follows:

“There is a willow grows aslant a brook

That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream.

There with fantastic garlands did she come

Of crow-Flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples

That liberal shepherds give a grosser name,

But our cold maids do dead men's fingers call them.

There, on the pendent boughs her coronet weeds

Clambering 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.”

(Shakespeare 4.7.141-158)

    The fact most visual representations of Ophelia are interested in this speech is of little surprise. Shakespeare’s notorious dearth of stage descriptions leave a less compelling impression of the living character. By contrast, the passage’s lyricism and the vividness of its imagery are much more evocative and thus propitious to visual media. However, the fact that these lines are only ambiguously connected to reality within the narrative is at times lost. Though the Pre-Raphaelite paintings and the 2018 movie alike remove the mediator, their presence is originally important. Gertrude is an unreliable narrator. Not having witnessed the fatal event, the death’s aestheticisation must be a conscious process. The scene is constructed by Gertrude, not just Shakespeare, as its author. Harold Jenkins describes the Queen’s account as “chorus-like,” reaching into fantasy beyond what the reader is expected to accept (546). Narrative and fact are in tension in her speech, the first attempting to embellish and obscure the latter, but failing to do so entirely. 

    There is something rather aseptic about the image Gertrude constructs. Her focus is on the landscape and objects that make up the scene: the brook, the garlands, its varieties of flowers, and the dress Ophelia wears. The girl herself must be constructed through her material surroundings. For instance, when she falls into the water — “down her weedy trophies and herself / Fell” (4.7.149-150) — she is mentioned only after the flowers; when she drowns, it is her dress, not her, that is "heavy with … drink” (4.7.156). Ophelia becomes a secondary presence in the story of her own death. Physicality is avoided. The girl, violence, and suffering are things that can be extracted, but not things Gertrude wants her listeners thinking about directly. Rather, the lengthy and ornate verse, its lulling, iambic rhythms are interested in euphemising reality, withholding confirmation until the end: “To muddy death” (4.7.158). This line is isolated from the remainder of the text. Not only visually, as distinctly shorter than the others, but in terms of tone, too. Image-wise, it is thinking differently. Far less encouraging of imagination, the final line imbues the scene with a sense of gravity. 

    The harsh conclusion of the passage is vital, sobering the magical quality of the text. Pre-raphaelite adaptations, however, neglect the inclusion of a disagreeable, grounding element. Taking the narrator’s voice as gospel, they indulge in the richness of the text, without considering the reason for its being. Kaara Peterson, for instance, suggests that Gertrude’s aestheticised account could be socially motivated. Portraying Ophelia’s suspicious death as an innocuous fall would decriminalise it, since suicide was not only a sin but a crime as well (5). This would mean the innocence portrayed in Ophelia’s movements, the infantile character evoked by her use of benign flower names, for instance, was purposeful. This characterisation has since been enjoyed by male artists’ imagination, as Waterhouse’s painting is representative. There, Ophelia appears youthful, pure in white, and vulnerable, as the positioning of her body communicates. Gertrude may have weaponised the attraction for this image, to protect the girl. This type of interpretation, which develops the relationship between the two women, subverting the patriarchal system and imaginary from within is, however, made impossible by the loss of the mediator. The forsaking of the idealism of Gertrude’s speech introduces the beauty of Ophelia’s death into the objective world: fact and fiction collapse as the lyric elements are materialised in the artwork.

Ophelia, John William Waterhouse, 1889

   Ophelia’s death is a recurring topic of fascination within the movement. Waterhouse alone revisited it on three separate occasions, each describing a progressive approximation to, but never a realisation of the fatal moment. The violence that underlies the scene, like that which seemingly underlies every moment of Hamlet, is obscured, leaving Ophelia isolated from the narrative. Peterson, in her analysis of Ophelia’s presence in visual culture, describes how Pre-Raphaelite paintings “fragment” (2) this moment. Decontextualising it from the remaining story — from Gertrude’s voice, its sub-textual reality — they are claiming the disembodied scene for their own.  Disposing of the need for scepticism, and approaching her death unilaterally, they are creating a stable, and repetitive image. Eroding her death’s ambiguity, they fundamentally change the relationship the audience has with Ophelia’s tragedy.

The paintings enjoy the material wealth of Gertrude’s account. Stuart Sillars highlights the importance to Pre-Raphaelite painters of accuracy and detail in their representations of life: “their guiding principle of truth to nature involved painting in extreme detail, especially when presenting landscape” (271). Applied to a text, this attention may manifest as a keen reproduction its images. Curiously, in the play itself, the audience never sees her beyond interior spaces, courtly or domestic. Both her madness and eventually her death take her into nature, but they are not scenes that count within Shakespeare’s action. The fact the vast majority of paintings of Ophelia set her amongst nature speaks not only to the staying power of Gertrude’s speech, but also to a growing divergence between Hamlet’s Ophelia, and the Ophelia that exists within visual culture.

“The variety of images produced reenacting the scene of Ophelia's drowning presents us … the implicit statement that Gertrude's powerful rhetorical figures are not simply the tail-end to ‘Ophelia's story’ … but that this one aspect of her life (death) has become essentially her entire story through a kind of synecdochic process.”

(Peterson 8)

    In Millais’ painting, one sees this process take place: Ophelia becomes interchangeable from her environment. For one, the painting’s very craft saw an equal distribution of time and effort devoted to each component: four months copying the marshes in Surrey, another four for painting the submerged model, Elizabeth Siddal (Riggs). The picture’s composition sees the distinction between human and nature similarly weakened. “The image of woman-as-flower is … pervasive in Pre-Raphaelite painting,” notes Michael Benton. He writes that the woman appears “fragile, fragrant, and passive,” suggesting that, in Millais’ artwork, Ophelia “is returning to a fertile, natural element into which she will gradually be absorbed” (57). Her vacant expression, lacking any sign of interiority, makes her distant. She is numb, unreachable, and at this point incomprehensible. The viewer can look at her but is unable to empathise. Whether as an object or another form of life, she exists in a state no longer fully human. It is unclear whether she is alive or not in the painting, but the distinction seems pointless, as her fate is sealed if not yet fulfilled. Ophelia’s identification with nature, her fashioning into the landscape, restricts her being to its very perishing.

Daisy Ridley as Ophelia in Ophelia, (2018)

    The Ophelia that resides in popular visual culture is heavily derivative of Pre-Raphaelite depictions. It is this version of the character for which the 2018 movie reaches: the medieval setting, the vibrant colour palette, and the fact they give Ophelia red-coloured hair, reminiscent of Elizabeth Siddal’s, all point to the pre-Raphaelite origins of the film’s aesthetic. More direct still is the movie’s very first shot, which echoes Millais’ painting. The styling and costuming of the half-submerged character, the disposition of her hands at her side, clinging to bunches of flowers point to this inspiration. Moreover, the fact Ophelia is floating motionless, rather than being dragged by running waters, itself alludes to the painting’s stillness more than to the motion in Gertrude’s description. 

Opening shot of Ophelia (2018) which echoes Millais’ painting

    Beginning in media-res with this image proposes some awareness of the cultural arena the film is entering. The fact it is Ophelia, not Gertrude, who assumes the “chorus-like” voice as the teller of her own story — beginning and closing with her narration — is meaningful, representing a desire to subvert the character’s normative interpretation. Indeed, screenwriter Semi Chellas confirmed in an interview the movie’s interest in centring its titular character. Shakespeare’s plot is thus reconfigured to her benefit, as are the elements that make up her core, archetypal representation: the brook is overcome; Ophelia’s relation to nature is reinvented. Initially, the adaptation seems to be creating a new cultural space for the character.

    In the film, she is immediately defined by her close relationship with nature. Gertrude describes her as smelling like a garden, and even before Polonius’ death she wears flowers in her hair. Nature is reintroduced as a positive, intimate, and feminine space. No longer a foreboding entity or moribund landscape, it is idyllic. However, while Pre-Raphaelite imagery may be reinterpreted, at no point is there a conclusive break with its aesthetics. There is a deeper reluctance to separate the modernised character from her archetypal portrayal. For instance, by continuing to separate her from the court, they continue to isolate her from the very story and events the movie means to reconsider. A dissonance remains between the legacy of the aesthetic movement the film is pointing towards and their proclaimed feminist goal.

Hamlet and Ophelia get married in Ophelia (2018), nature reintroduced as a positive and intimate space

A vital component of the Pre-Raphaelite’s aesthetic is how it presents its female figures. Looking at the most popular Shakespearean women among these artists’ work — Ophelia, Miranda, and Juliet — they share in their youth, desirability, and fundamentally in their powerlessness (Benton and Butcher 55). There’s a recurring interest in the traits that George Mauner ascribes to the “Femme-Enfant” (Loss 12). The child-woman’s appeal lies in the tension between the sensuality of her portrayal and the innocence of her vulnerability. In Waterhouse’s painting this characterisation is evident, for instance, in her dishevelled, but virginal white dress. In the same way that Millais’ Ophelia’s vacant expression impedes any type of connection between subject and viewer, the distant expression on Waterhouse’s representation, her faint acknowledgement of the viewer, too, invites the character’s objectification. The movie, by giving Ophelia agency over her actions, control over her sexuality, wants to distance itself from this type of characterization. Yet, because visually it remains immersed in Pre-Raphaelite imagery, it continues to profit from its aesthetic. One founded on the exploration of women: of their painted figures for the benefit of the male gaze, but significantly of their model, Siddal, who just to pose for Millais became seriously ill. It’s an aesthetic that takes pleasure in the very practice the movie opposes.

    The film never considers aesthetics as part of the mechanisms that subjugated Ophelia, but they are intrinsically connected. Peterson describes Ophelia as “arguably Shakespeare's most recognizable female character” (2), and likewise as a “thoroughly marketable product” (20). Reproductions of Pre-Raphaelite paintings appear in everything from greeting cards, to CD covers where the imagery is used to illustrate music void of any relation to Shakespeare’s text (Peterson 20-21). The consistency of the imagery, too, cements those same visual tropes in the cultural conscious. The movie accesses this established and appealing set of images but never challenges them. Towards the end of the film, as Ophelia plans for her escape from Elsinore, she does cut her hair. Given its heavy association with the Pre-Raphaelite stylisation of women, this could have been an impactful and effective break from the norm. The character, at last, freeing herself from that burdensome image. Yet, in her happy ending, besides returning to a natural space, her hair has been restored to its archetypal length. The movie, while trying to empower Ophelia by moving away from her weak and limited traditional characterisation, is not willing to sacrifice its body. Ophelia retains the same appearance she has been given since Millais put paint to Canvas in 1851.

Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds, Kylie Minogue (2000), album cover for “Where The Wild Roses Grow” Pre-Raphaelite imagery of Ophelia’s mass appeal transcends reference to the character herself

The death of Ophelia has been a topic of fascination for visual artists since before the Pre-Raphaelites exhibited their own interpretations. Yet, it is these that created the visual language that continues to define the character since the High Victorian period. Their literal approach to Gertrude’s account of the girl’s death enjoys the imagery’s materialisation. It is its beauty, more so than the young woman’s tragedy that they represent. Their melding of the character to nature makes her not just inhabit, but embody the very landscape of her demise. Without ever realising the fatal moment, never grounding their artwork, it is allowed to linger in a fantasy-like reality. The ubiquitousness of their representations, however, has made it difficult for other adaptations of Hamlet to re-approach the character, as the commercial viability and mass appeal of Pre-Raphaelite aesthetics encourage acquiescence to its legacy. Consequent attempts, like the 2018 movie, find themselves struggling to redefine the immortal moribund state she has survived through. It fails to create a new space in the cultural imaginary for an Ophelia that has not been drawn for the male gaze.

Bibliography:

Primary:

Millais, John E. Ophelia. 1852, Tate Britain, London. Tate, www.tate.org.uk/art/look-here-upon-picture-shakespeare-art. Accessed 15 Mar. 2022.

Ophelia. Directed by Claire McCarthy, Covert Media, 2018. Youtube, www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z02DxYjpx6Q. Accessed 16 Mar. 2022.

Shakespeare, William. Hamlet, edited by Harold Jenkins, Arden, 1982.

Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Oxford University Press, 2008.

Waterhouse, John W. Ophelia. 1889, Private Collection. Daily Dose of Art, www.myddoa.com/ophelia-1889-john-william-waterhouse/. Accessed 16 Mar. 2022.

Secondary:

Benton, Michael and Butcher, Sally. “Painting Shakespeare.” The Journal of Aesthetic Education, vol. 32, no. 3, 1998, pp. 53-66. JSTOR, www-jstor-org.ezproxy.neu.edu/stable/pdf/3333305.pdf?refreqid=excelsior%3Ad8d0787025af7eab09df05fe9c4e44bc&ab_segments=&origin=. Accessed 17 Mar. 2022.

Chellas, Semi and McCarthy, Claire. Interview with Emily Rome. “Reviving Ophelia: Inside the New Film That Gives Voice to Hamlet’s Tragic Heroine.” Vanity Fair, 2019. www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2019/07/ophelia-movie-hamlet-daisy-ridley-interview. Accessed 16 Mar. 2022.

Loss, Archie K. “The Pre-Raphaelite Woman, the Symbolist ‘Femme-Enfant,’ and the Girl with Long Flowing Hair in the Earlier Work of Joyce.” Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 3, no. 1, 1973, pp. 3–23. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3830886. Accessed 17 Mar. 2022.

Peterson, Kaara. “Framing Ophelia: Representation and the Pictorial Tradition.” Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal, vol. 31, no. 3, 1998, pp. 1–24. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/44029808. Accessed 17 Mar. 2022.

Riggs, Terry. “Sir John Everett Millais, Ophelia.” Tate, 1998. www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/millais-ophelia-n01506. Accessed 15 Mar. 2022.

Sillars, Stuart. “Shakespeare and the Visual Arts.” Shakespeare in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Gail Marshall, Cambridge University Press, 2012, pp. 269-295.