Ophelia

Shakespeare and Gender in Contemporary Spain

Sharon Keefe Ugalde

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781786835987
• eBook ISBN:
  9781786836007
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: European Art

It is astonishing how deeply the figure of Ophelia has been woven into the fabric of Spanish literature and the visual arts – from her first appearance in eighteenth-century translations of Hamlet, through depictions by seminal authors such as Espronceda, Bécquer and Lorca, to turn-of-the millennium figurations. This provocative, gendered figure has become what both male and female artists need her to be – is she invisible, a victim, mad, controlled by the masculine gaze, or is she an agent of her own identity? This well-documented study addresses these questions in the context of Iberia, whose poets, novelists and dramatists writing in Spanish, Catalan and Galician, as well as painters and photographers, have brought Shakespeare's heroine to life in new guises. Ophelia performs as an authoritative female author, as new perspectives reflect and authorise the gender diversity that has gained legitimacy in Spanish society since the political Transition.

1

Breaking Silence: Ophelia in the Lyric Tradition of Spain and the Pioneering Innovations of Blanca de los Ríos

The gaps and ambiguities in Shakespeare’s Hamlet make Ophelia an exceptionally malleable figure. Her death by drowning is elided, present only as an enthralling, pretty picture described by Queen Gertrude, who did not witness the event at first hand. The textual void, what is not seen on stage, is an invitation to the aesthetic imagination. Ophelia’s silence (she speaks only 170 lines compared to Hamlet’s 1,476) and the contradictions of her character further summon artistic interpretations. The cause of her madness is opaque. Is her instability a result of her father’s death, Hamlet’s rejection, or both? Did she accidentally fall into the stream or was her death intentional? Was she sexually astute or an innocent virgin? By the mid-nineteenth century, Ophelia becomes dislodged from the context of Shakespeare’s drama and enters ‘the psychic map of the contemporary art as a kind of phantom, an apparition of a sort whose image replaced everything about her that was missing in her when she was a stage representation’ (Romanska, 2005, p. 43).

The new looks for Ophelia created by Spanish poets from the Transition period (1975–82) forward converse with nineteenth-century representations. Authors scrutinise the mythic-iconic Ophelia of the Pre-Raphaelite, Romantic, Symbolist and Modernist traditions, which reiteratively depict a fragile, chaste creature, a beautiful sight. Renderings of her drowning or being submerged in water, strewn flowers, undulating tresses, delirious wanderings, lost gazes and unkempt hair are re-examined. The watery demise is an aesthetic jewel but also, as feminists and contemporary poets and artists make transparent, a cultural construction that equates femininity with death, epitomized by Edgar Allan Poe’s affirmation that ‘[t]he death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world’ (1846, p. 164).

Viewed with fresh eyes, floating Ophelia’s lack of agency and marginality are startlingly apparent. She is an object, ‘the antithesis of voice’ (Owen, 2007, p. 782); an empty space, not a subject: ‘There is no integral selfhood expressed through actions or utterances … She has already died. There is now only a vacuum where there was once a person’ (Laing, 1960, p. 195); a white, transparent object, a mirror that reflects the colour of Hamlet’s moods (Showalter, 1985a, p. 89). John Everett Millais’s canvas Ophelia (1851–2), a seminal inspiration for refigurations, is an irresistible aesthetic masterpiece, but also a palimpsest of the death of female subjectivity. Gaston Bachelard’s formulation of the ‘Ophelia complex’ similarly negates agency by emphasizing a forever lovely body floating on the surface of the water, an image that captivated the oneiric imaginary of French and Spanish Symbolist poets (Bachelard, 1982, p. 89).

Ophelia’s objectified body confirms the power of the masculine gaze, which belongs ‘to the voyeur so often found ogling the drowned women of poetry’ (Owen, 2007, p. 782). For the masculine artist, the beautiful drowning is an abstract sign that locates death away from the self, clearly marking death as ‘being other, as being not mine’ (Bronfen, 1992, p. xi). The sleep-death representation of woman in the nineteenth century came to symbolize ‘the extreme form of woman’s compliance with the dualistic notion that make female–male relationships a simple matter of dominance and submission’ (Dijkstra, 1986, p. 61). Representations of Ophelia were both a reflection of and prescription for the denial of female agency in the lives of historical women, be they members of the Danish royal court or models like Elizabeth Siddal, who fell ill posing in a tub of cold water for Millais’s painting.

Ophelia’s entanglement in gender is not limited to the absence of agency and its corollary of dependence. Female identity as a dichotomy oscillating between the angelic and the licentious also haunts the character. The ambiguity is implanted in Shakespeare’s tragedy, in which ‘fellow protagonists cast her into contradictory roles of virgin and harlot and into an impossible ideology in which female sexuality both exists and is denied’ (Browning, 2013, p. 74). James M. Vest meticulously describes the contradictory figuration of Ophelia in Hamlet, proposing that for the first two-thirds of the play, ‘Ophelia’s most consistent trait is lubricity, like the maiden in Amleth tales, her life is defined largely by imputed sexuality’ (1989, p. 31). Despite evidence of a resemblance to wanton forerunners, Ophelia is represented predominately as pure and innocent, a Virgin Madonna archetype, reflected in the epithets of poor, beautiful, dear, pretty, sweet and fair. Strange behaviour and bawdy, sexually charged ballads are attributed to a desperate state of madness rather than to carnal knowledge. The beauty of her intact flower-adorned body reifies purity. Like the Virgin Mary, Ophelia can be read as an allegory for the defeat of death and the triumph of restored order and regeneration.

In the nineteenth century, saintly purity as a model for female behaviour reached new heights, reflected in the publication of Coventry Patmore’s The Angel in the House (1854). Thinness, pallor and weakness became convincing signs of female virtue: ‘what better guarantee of purity than a woman’s pale consumptive face, fading in a paroxysm of self-negation’ (Dijkstra, 1986, p. 23). Arthur Hughes’s Ophelia (1852) exemplifies her identification with the ideal of saintly purity. A child-like figure, dressed in a hazy white garment, sits on a log near the edge of a stream strewn with flowers. She appears disoriented and emaciated, and the dark circles under her eyes indicate illness, as does the paleness of her skin. Crowned with a wreath of thorns, Hughes’s Ophelia is the paragon of the self-sacrificial, virtuous female.

The elevation of Ophelia to an idyllic realm is wedded to the role of passive victim, dependence and sexual repression. The white dress symbolizes not only chastity, but also a blank page written over by masculine concerns (Gubar, 1981, p. 259). Complete reliance on male figures is evident in Ophelia’s reactions to Polonius’s instructions regarding her relationship with Hamlet: ‘I do not know, my lord, what I should think’ (I. iii. 591); ‘I shall obey, my lord’ (I. iii. 623); ‘My lord, I do not know, / But truly I do fear it’ (II. i. 1043). Subordination makes Ophelia vulnerable to romantic thralldom: ‘Viewed from a critical, feminist perspective, the sense of completion or transformation that often accompanies thralldom in love has the high price of obliteration and paralysis, for the entranced self is entirely defined by another’ (DuPlessis, 1985, p. 178–9). With Polonius’s death and Hamlet’s rejection, the fair maiden is unable to cope. Nineteenth-century European poets and visual artists were captivated by this unsalvageable, love-struck, melancholy woman (Kromm, 1994, p. 511).

Precursor Blanca de los Ríos (Seville, 1862–Madrid, 1956) and late twentieth-century female poets of Spain are drawn to the Ophelia that congealed from the 1840s through the 1920s, but project on to her the preoccupations and cultural values of their own historical moment and place (Peterson and Williams, 2012b, p. 2). Innovative revisions create an Ophelia who speaks out about – and with time, talks back to – the gender ideology that the character has long embodied. While Shakespeare’s heroine is transnational, consideration of her representation in the lyric tradition of Spain enhances an understanding of Blanca de los Ríos’s pioneering innovations and later refigurations by poets from the Transition era forward.

Ophelia in the lyric tradition of Spain: 1840s–1920s

The tendency of Spain to look to France for emerging cultural trends influenced not only the first translations of Shakespeare into Spanish and Catalan but also the figuration of Ophelia in poetry. In France, the heroine acquired instant acclaim after Harriet Smithson’s performance in the role of Ophelia in an 1827 production of Hamlet in Paris. French authors and painters were increasingly captivated by the character as a sign for female madness and death. The essay William Shakespeare (1864) and poem ‘Fantômes’ (Les Orientales, 1829) by Victor Hugo (1802–85) contributed to Ophelia’s expressive value, associated with flower imagery, moribund beauty, a watery death and derangement (Vest, 1989, p. 120). For the Symbolist Charles Baudelaire (1821–67), a poet preoccupied with self-alienation and overwhelmed by melancholy, Ophelia’s folie is secondary to her death. For Baudelaire, and for Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–98), she is also a mirror that allows Hamlet to see himself and the poet to create (Vest, 1989, p. 177).

In nineteenth-century Spain there was greater enthusiasm for the mythic-iconic Ophelia than for translations and theatre productions of Hamlet. While inspired by French figurations, major Spanish poets from Romanticism through modernismo collectively created their own national tradition. Poems by José de Espronceda (1808–42), Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer (1836–70), Manuel Reina (1856–1905), Francisco Villaespesa (1877–1936), Juan Ramón Jiménez (1881–1958), Josep Maria de Sagarra (1894–1961), Adriano del Valle (1895–1957) and Federico García Lorca (1898–1936) contribute to Ophelia’s dominant image in Spanish poetry. Over nearly a century, the gender underpinnings of poets’ renderings of Ophelia reflect, prescribe and enforce female dependency, chastity and objectification. José de Espronceda, Spain’s premier Romantic poet, sanctions an Ophelia without agency, a figuration that his successors reiterate.

As a young man, Espronceda conspired against Fernando VII and was exiled, first to London in 1827 and then to Paris in 1829, returning to Spain in 1833 after the death of Fernando VII. The poet was fluent in English, German and French, and while in London, his preferred authors were Milton, Shakespeare and Byron (Churchman, 1909, p. 201). El estudiante de Salamanca [The student of Salamanca], originally published in serial fashion, beginning in 1837, and in its entirety in Poesías in 1840, confirms Espronceda’s knowledge of the English bard. Critics agree that Shakespeare’s Ophelia is one of the models that the poet had in mind when he created the character of Elvira (Carnero, 1974, p. 66; Rees, 1979, p. 20; Casalduero, 1983, p. 158; Marrast, 1984, p. 625). In Part II of the three-part work, a combination of poetry and drama, the natural settings and Elvira’s death recall elements of the mad scene in Hamlet and Queen Gertrude’s description of Ophelia’s drowning.

El estudiante de Salamanca highlights Espronceda’s adeptness at integrating a Shakespearean character into the Spanish literary tradition. El estudiante is patterned on the Don Juan legend, whose history in Spanish literature dates back to Tirso de Molina’s drama, El burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra [The trickster of Seville and the stone guest], first staged in Córdoba in 1617. The bold, rebellious protagonist Félix de Montemayor seduces the beautiful Elvira, who dies of a broken heart when abandoned. To avenge the dishonour, Elvira’s brother challenges Félix to a duel and both die.

The culmination is Félix’s descent into hell. Part II and the last sections of Part I contain Elvira’s story. She is seen first before abandonment, then in a state of madness after the betrayal, on her deathbed, and finally entombed. When Elvira appears in an idyllic moonlit garden in the countryside, her Ophelia traits – a white dress, flowing hair, wanderings near a riverbank, songs and strewn flower petals – are immediately recognizable:

y vedla cuidadosa escoger flores,

y las lleva mezcladas en la falda,

y, corona nupcial de sus amores,

se entretiene en tejer una guirnalda.

Y en medio de su dulce desvarío

triste recuerdo el alma le importuna,

y al margen va del argentado río,

y allí las flores echa de una en una;

y las sigue su vista en la corriente

una tras otra rápidas pasar,

y, confusos sus ojos y su mente,

se siente con sus lágrimas ahogar:

Y de amor canta, y en su tierna queja

entona melancólica canción,

canción que el alma desgarrada deja,

lamento ¡ay! que llaga el corazón.

(Espronceda, 1991, pp. 58, 60)

[And see her, careful, choose a flowery treasure,

With intermingled blooms her apron lined,

A nuptial garland weaving for her pleasure,

A floral diadem for love entwined.

On her mind a memory then flows,

Sad torment of her soul amid sweet raving,

And to the silver’d river’s edge she goes,

Its surface one by one with flowers paving;

After them as they sail along she gazes

Borne one by one away, rapidly scudding,

Her eyes and mind shrouded in misty hazes

She feels her tears rise high, choking and flooding:

Of love she sings, entoning tender plaint,

Singing sadly a melancholy ditty,

A song leaving the soul pierced and faint,

Deeply wounded, the heart transfixed with pity.

(Espronceda, 1991, pp. 59, 61)]

Espronceda idealizes Elvira/Ophelia; emphasis is on purity and ethereal beauty: a pastel cloud, a pristine morning, a graceful, supernatural sylph. A mysterious garden, transparent blue skies and brooks of silver ribbons enhance otherworldliness. Elvira is the silent object of the third-person narrator’s gaze. She does not speak; it is the narrator who, addressing her with the familiar form of you (‘tú’), recounts her story of love and sad, painful betrayal. The irrational, love-struck Elvira/Ophelia is confounded with the category of woman through the repetition of the noun ‘mujer’ (woman): ‘¡Una mujer...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Series Editors’ Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• List of Figures
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Breaking Silence: Ophelia in the Lyric Tradition of Spain and the Pioneer Innovations of Blanca de los Ríos
• Chapter 2: Talking Back: Opheliain Turn-of-the-Millennium
• Chapter 3: The Myth of Ophelia in the Narratives of Clara Janés and Menchu Gutiérrez
• Chapter 4: Ophelia Takes Centre Stage
• Chapter 5: From Madwoman to Cyborg: Artist Marina Núñez’s Ophelias
• Chapter 6: Ophelia in Front of the Camera
• Epilogue: Ophelia: Refigurations in the Arts, Reiterations in the Fashion Industry
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Back Cover