HISTORY & FILM Not Whether to Be, But Who: Rewriting Ophelia
In Ms. Scheide’s Honors English study of Hamlet, my group was assigned to present Act V. I was Hamlet, and Shannon was Laertes. We wrapped a stick of cardboard in aluminum foil to serve as the poisoned sword and carefully choreographed a fight scene which, in the performance, we flubbed, but nonetheless we died with suitable dramatic flourish, leaving Charlie, as Horatio, to mop up. None of us can recall who played Ophelia. It’s possible we left her off-stage entirely, the ninny who tossed herself in a river because her boyfriend broke up with her. I recall sobbing cathartically on the blue carpet in my college dorm room as Mel Gibson’s Hamlet twitched his last, but Helena Bonham Carter’s Ophelia failed to elicit any sympathy. Kate Winslet in Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet fared even worse; I couldn’t finish the movie, having moved on in my college studies from existentialism to irony. When I taught Shakespeare at Lewis-Clark State College, my students didn’t know what do with Ophelia, either. We simply weren’t drawn to Ophelia’s inner drama the way we were to Hamlet’s. Maybe she was hiding a pregnancy, but where to go with that? We read Ophelia as a casualty of her own compliance, a victim of the patriarchy, an inert body strategized, scrutinized, and fought over by the men in her life — a cipher, not a character. Her one act of agency was to obliterate herself, but the poetry, and poignancy, of her gesture fell flat. Tina Packer suggests in Women of Will (Vintage, 2016) that Ophelia is one of a cluster of Shakespearean heroines who die for speaking truth to power, but that elevates her tragedy, not her relatability. Once I learned that Elizabeth Siddal, the model for John Everett Millais’s gorgeous pre-Raphaelite Ophelia, nearly died of pneumonia from a bathtub of cold water to give the artist that look of ecstatic surrender, I felt I’d found the key to why Ophelia didn’t resonate with my feminist students. They weren’t about to die for their art, or a man, or the patriarchy. In a feature on history and film, I’ll acknowledge here that Hamlet is historical fiction; “Amleth” in Saxo Grammaticus’ Danish History was already a legend in Shakespeare’s time. But Hamlet, considered by many to be Shakespeare’s most sophisticated and complex play, is
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COLUMNS | Issue 95, February 2021
an established artifact of world literature, firmly embedded in even our daily lexicon. Beyond their self-evident beauties, Shakespeare’s works have survived in teaching, reading, and performance because the plays respond so readily to our current cultural concerns. Harold Bloom, that bardolator, claims in Hamlet: Poem Unlimited (Penguin, 2004) that the play resonates so deeply because of its exploration of human experience, though he forgets to footnote that what he means is white European-born male experience. Mary Pipher’s landmark 1994 study Reviving Ophelia made Shakespeare’s heroine a template for how Western culture robs adolescent girls of their selfrespect, self-assurance, ambitions, and joy. The name has become a shorthand for brief, doomed struggle, much like poor Ophelia’s life. Ophelia is due for a feminist retelling, but the challenge of how to fit this character into a narrative palatable to contemporary audiences — that is to say, relatable to my Shakespeare class — is no small one. Lisa Klein’s novel Ophelia (Bloomsbury, 2008) makes a very readable effort, telling the coming-of-age story of a young woman with self-possession, agency, and pure good sense. Ophelia navigates her way through a competitive court, falls in love with the popular boy, and then must extricate herself from his bloody mission when he dedicates himself not to Ophelia, but to revenge against his usurping uncle and punishing his sexual mother. Klein’s Ophelia participates fully in the dramatic action. She’s in league with Hamlet in his charade of madness. She finds the vial of poison proving that King Hamlet was murdered. And when (spoilers ensue) she suspects that Claudius set her father up to die by Hamlet’s hand and plans to end her life, too, she uses her knowledge of herbs, in the manner of other notable Shakespearean heroines, to fake her own death. Once free, she flees to France, finds refuge in a nunnery, and pursues a life of peaceful industry. Not only does Ophelia escape the madness and devastation of Elsinore, but she goes on to raise her child in peace and safety — yes, there’s another little Hamlet by the end. The losses of revenge are salved by a happy ending, much like Nahum Tate’s version of King Lear in which Cordelia marries Edgar. Claire McCarthy’s cinematic re-imagining of Ophelia (2018) furthers Klein’s take on female agency in the court of Elsinore, but this version — much like the discussions in my Shakespeare seminars — turns Hamlet from a crisis of internal resolve and kingly succession to a knock-it-down-and-drag-the-body attack on the patriarchy. I found it utterly delightful and a bit confusing, and in the end it made me consider my chief objection to these feminist retellings of classic literature, much as I love them. The film’s chief charm, it must be said, is its gorgeous visuals. The cinematography is my favorite kind: colors lush enough to eat, fabulous costumes, and elaborate sets. (I want Queen Gertrude’s bath for my house.) Crowd scenes are staged like a medieval tapestry, a profusion of texture and colors, and there’s a soft, hazy filter over every scene, even the final carnage. All this, and the chief actors are some of the prettiest working in film. The opening frame establishes this aesthetic by duplicating the famous Millais painting: Daisy Ridley, as Ophelia, floats faceup in a murky pool, trailing watery flora. An opening voiceover affirms the intention to recraft Hamlet’s legacy: having seen more than is in heaven or hell, Ophelia declares, now she is going to tell her story. Interwoven with Ophelia’s assertion of control over her narrative (and her showing that she’s a strong swimmer, unlikely to drown) is an
