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  • Ophelia and Victorian Visual Culture: Representing Body Politics in the Nineteenth Century
  • Alison Smith (bio)
Ophelia and Victorian Visual Culture: Representing Body Politics in the Nineteenth Century, by Kimberly Rhodes; pp. viii + 212. Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2008, £55.00, $99.95.

In 2008 the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam staged a display entitled Me, Ophelia to complement its showing of Tate Britain's exhibition Millais featuring the artist's iconic Ophelia (1851–52). Chiefly consisting of sharply focused photographs of dreamy introspective adolescents by contemporary artists including Hellen van Meene and Rineke Dijkstra, this display brought home the enduring influence of John Everett Millais's [End Page 528] disturbing realisation of the tragic victim in Hamlet. The obsession with youth, sexuality, psychiatric derangement, and mortality that marks much of the visual culture of today can very much be seen as an extension of the Ophelia phenomenon that Kimberly Rhodes identifies as taking root in the nineteenth century. Her tenacity in unravelling the complex interrelated factors that account for this development raises many questions regarding our continuing fascination with this vulnerable, elusive figure.

Ophelia has been described as probably the most static and one-dimensional of all Shakespeare's heroines—a cipher for the projection of filial, paternal, and sexual feeling on the part of key male characters in the play, and a foil illuminating Hamlet's dual view of women. Because she is often seen to epitomise the English ideal of female beauty and fragility, it is hardly surprising that representations of her should merge with other interpretations of damsels in distress. J. W. Waterhouse's Lady of Shalott (1888) is one such interchangeable example and, together with Millais's Ophelia, is one of the most popular paintings in the Tate collection. The author is hard pressed to find her own territory given the lively interest in the subject shown by other scholars in the field; notable recent publications include Carol Solomon Kiefer's The Myth and Madness of Ophelia (2001) and Alan R. Young's Hamlet and the Visual Arts, 1709–1900 (2002). Elisabeth Bronfen's Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (1992) has been further influential in tracing the historical origins of contemporary culture's preoccupation with images of youthful female mortality.

Rhodes's work differs from the existing literature in that she focuses exclusively on the Victorian period, which witnessed both the regular appearance of paintings of Ophelia at the Royal Academy (the book contains a useful appendix listing works shown between 1791 and 1901, compiled in collaboration with Nancy Rose Marshall) and the multiplication of images in different contexts, including cartes-de-visites, medical illustrations, and art photography. Taking the form of an interdisciplinary study, Rhodes's text examines the variety of sociocultural reasons for Ophelia's ascendancy to show how representations became increasingly complicated—even politicised—as they meshed with debates about gender, sexuality, and identity. Chapters are arranged thematically around two interpretative trajectories: one examining the essentialist stereotype of Ophelia's natural innocence; the other detecting a transgressive side to her image associated specifically with unrestrained sexuality and mental instability. The final two chapters, "From Life: Ophelia and Photography" and "Performance Anxiety: Pictorial and Theatrical Representations at the Fin-de-Siècle," focus on the different ways in which female artists and actresses appropriated Ophelia's "pathetic" qualities to assert their own autonomy, interiority, professional status, and success, and in so doing repositioned Ophelia as a type of protofeminist icon.

The great strength of Rhodes's book is her close reading of the images in relation to the play itself. She is particularly persuasive in her arguments regarding how the editing of theatrical productions of Hamlet influenced artists' representations of Ophelia as well as the critical reception of paintings of the subject. In referencing the unexpurgated text, artists became bolder in their conception of the figure, a key instance being Millais's Ophelia, which is a meticulous rendition of lines in Gertrude's monologue that were often deleted from performances up until the end of the nineteenth century. Included in the original Royal Academy catalogue that accompanied this painting are references to Ophelia as a "poor wretch" with...

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