Ophelia: Shakespeare and Gender in Contemporary Spain by Sharon Keefe Ugalde (review)

In contemporary scholarship it is rare to encounter books that combine philological rigor with a unique deployment of a motif to produce decisive consequences in the present. In her new monograph Ophelia: Shakespeare and Gender in Contemporary Spain, Sharon Keefe Ugalde measures up to this task in a highly original study about the Shakespearean tragic figure of Ophelia as it has been reformatted and translated in an array of cultural practices such as poetry, theater, autobiography, photography, and other contemporary art forms. More than a study about the reception of a literary figure, this book also delves into the cultural imagination of the Spanish post-transition years across regions. In doing so, the figure of Ophelia unravels gender tensions and opens up to multiple feminist approaches that displace the centrality of the male-centered gaze around womanhood (9). As the author reconstructs in detail throughout her book, Ophelia cannot be read as a homogeneous figure; rather, her form enunciates a tropic force that generates “multiple and unstable roles” of the female subject (12). At the core of the book is the claim that Ophelia mirrors “a deep structure of social reality” in Spain, which, in turn, sheds light on the locus of repression that has organized the cultural body of the peninsula at least since the death of el caudillo Francisco Franco. The power of Ophelia, then, becomes a compelling lens through which the inscription of gender, the corporeal, and female desire are disentangled from the hegemonic order of the transition years to the turn of the millennium across different regions of Spain.

In Chapter 1, “Breaking Silence: Ophelia in the Lyric Tradition of Spain and the Pioneering Innovations of Blanca de los Ríos,” Ugalde stages a useful revision of the figure of Ophelia in Spanish Romanticism, confirming the dominant representative model of Ophelia as a virgin and religious figure “apt for the male gaze” (24). In fact, up to the Generación del 27, in the work of the vanguard poet Adriano del Valle, the figure of Ophelia takes the form of the silenced subject whose aura is unleashed once agency is defaced. This is a motif that will also carry into the works of more well-known Spanish poets of the Generación del 27, such as Federico García Lorca and Juan Ramón Jiménez, whose representations of Ophelia are emblematic of a distant pulchritude embedded in tragedy and loss. Ugalde, however, urges her reader to reflect on the work of Blanca de los Ríos. She argues that the importance of this poet resides in her being the first to “overtly break the silence regarding the entanglement of Ophelia in patriarchally determined roles” (35). In her “Cantos de Ofelia,” Ríos is able to craft a subject that embodies an exuberant passion that can reify the Romantic ideal of aesthetic sentiments and irrationality in order to legitimize the authority of the female subject (41). The reconstruction of the sentimental poetics of Ophelia in Blanca de los Ríos’s work not only sheds light on a lesser-known Sevillian poet of the Spanish tradition, but also, and more importantly, showcases a decisive literary imagination that “[conquers] the taboo-ridden realm of female sexual desire” as a counter-resistant writing practice. In this light, “Cantos de Ofelia” renders the textualities organized through the force of the logocentric parasitic relation unstable (43).

In the second chapter, “Talking Back: Ophelia in Turn-of-the-Millennium Poetry,” Ugalde turns to a substantial group of Spanish poets writing in the 1980s and 1990s that rework the trope of Ophelia as self-authorization of the female voice vis-à-vis postmodern paradigms such as fluidity, permeability, and preadolescent subjectivity in order to celebrate the corporeal as a site for unrepressed sexual desires and nonmale symbolizations. In poetry such as Xohana Torres’s fluvial poetics, Ugalde explores...