Revisiting Ophelia: An Exercise in Self-Discovery
Like most, I first “found” Shakespeare in high school. While I enjoyed Romeo and Juliet in 9th grade (and detested Baz Luhrmann’s adaptation of the tragedy), I truly became enthralled with all things Bard of Avon in college, especially through the guidance of a professor who shaped my initial passion for the playwright and enkindled my confidence in a discipline that can feel intimidating and difficult to approach. This zestful appetite for Shakespeare only grew stronger with each passing year of college and into graduate school part 1, which was, of course, followed by graduate school part 2: the OH MY GOD I’LL NEVER FIND A JOB IN “ENGLISH” edition, where I became the school counselor I am today.
An image of Hamlet (and all of the lines of the play) can be found on my office wall. A tiny, sometimes headless, Shakespeare figurine stands in front of my three complete works and the Arden Hamlet. That tiny porcelain bard also guards David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest on that same side table. A pillow baring famous lines from the plays, dingy and discolored from moves and time, sits on my guest room bed. And yet, as I write this, I know Shakespeare has left my life, or at least taken a lengthy sabbatical, along with Hemingway, Faulkner, Marlowe, and Steinbeck. It seems they also took Chopin, Wharton, and Bradstreet with them.
Somewhere in between “Human Growth & Development through the Lifespan” and quarterly progress reports, I lost my literary academic voice. At times, I find myself referring to “old” Bernadette as “the smart one” and new (though older) Bernadette as “the boring one”, the one who writes countless parent emails and measurable IEP goals. The years between speaking at undergraduate Shakespeare conferences and repeating the same information about SAT and ACT registrations and FAFSA deadlines feel greater in length and distance now.
I’ve struggled with this change internally for a long time. In the busyness of graduate school (you know, part 2) and the years of leading the guidance department at a therapeutic high school after obtaining my license, I didn’t quite notice how far away my curious “bookish” past was moving. Once it became evident, however, a quiet sadness set in, accompanied by an eerie feeling of: did any of that really happen?
I’ve found myself re-reading old papers, at least the ones I can find. Having graduated college in 2008, I didn’t quite upload everything to the cloud and my current Google Drive has more “transition assessments” and bills spreadsheets than I’d care to possess. Recently, it has occurred to me that perhaps this (Medium, blogging, etc…) might be my gateway into some existential relief from the contention between who I was and who (I think) I am now. The thought crossed my mind: should you just start where you left off?
I left off with Ophelia, my Elizabethan obsession, and her, as I put it, “transcendence through time, culture and language”. I had counted her lines in Hamlet: 58. The brooding Prince of Denmark himself has the most lines in any of the 38 plays, so it’s no surprise that other characters are a bit more quiet, but 58 is strikingly small for a character who many recognize with even the most vague awareness of the play. “[H]er character, her image, and her madness are familiar to us despite her minor role in the play”, I wrote way back then. I researched her name, finding out that it can be traced back to Ancient Greek, ōphéleia, or “help”, as in aid or succor. I remember feeling gripped by that fact and her presence, because of and in spite of the manner in which she is completely defined by the men in her life (Hamlet, her brother Laertes, and her father Polonius) and that, upon losing them, she both literally and figuratively loses herself.
She doesn’t technically move the plot further. Her dad is killed by her would-be boyfriend, her brother is away at war, and her accidental murderer prince has lost his ever-living mind (possibly), so Ophelia forgets how to swim. Yes, she causes Hamlet (among others) to feel regret, but it initially struck me that she truly became a recognizable figure despite a small, seemingly weak role. This is not the witty and brazen Kate of The Taming of the Shrew or the steadfast nature of Imogen in Cymbeline. She’s not making an attempt to blur the lines of gender like Rosalind, either.
But wow, has she stuck around. Back then I found her in others’ research, such as Elaine Showalter’s “Representing Ophelia: Women, Madness, and the
Responsibilities of Feminist Criticism”, and in an absolute plethora of artwork, including John Everett Millais’ Ophelia and Gregory Crewdson’s modern take Untitled (Ophelia).
In the midst of my growing attachment to Ophelia, I was still studying Spanish, a language I loved because of my linguistically talented older sister and a high school teacher who I still think about today. Through that connection to language, I read Antígona Furiosa, a Griselda Gambaro play published in 1989, which comments on a troubling and tragic time in Argentina’s history when 30,000 people were “disappeared” by the government and through US-backed support under Operation Condor. I recognized someone familiar within the first few lines of the play. Yes, I saw Antigone, given the title character’s name, but Ophelia was also there, flowers and all. I studied the text and the time period further and brought them into my Ophelia-laden Shakespearean studies. “The play, written at the height of Argentina’s Dirty Wars and published in 1988,” I wrote “simultaneously conflates and expands upon the stories of Ophelia and Sophocles’ Antigone.” I certainly was not the first to notice this connection, but I recall a feeling of “a-ha”, much like figuring out the plot of a movie [read: pretending to have figured out The Sixth Sense before the end] as I read the description of the lead character’s appearance:
ANTIGONA hanged. In her hair is a crown of withered white flowers. After a moment, she slowly loosens and removes the rope from around her neck, adjusts her dirty white dress. She sways, humming. Sitting together at a round table, two men dressed in street clothes are having coffee. CORYPHAEUS plays with a flexible little straw. He tears small pieces from his napkin and puts them together like flowers. He does so distractedly, with a mocking smile. (Gambaro 137)
The suicidal imagery. The dirty white dress. The flowers. The flowers! And is that mocking smile similar to that of Hamlet’s? The connection quickly becomes more apparent as lines from Hamlet emerge. She’s singing Ophelia’s song. In Sophocles’ Antigone, the heroine “willingly and defiantly buries her brother despite direct orders from King Creon to the contrary,” I noted, forcing myself to ponder the extent to which “Ophelia, on the other hand, is much more passive and reactive…Gambaro chooses to conflate the two female heroines into one, allowing Ophelia to achieve agency in her death.” The play uses the combination of the two resurrected characters to lend their strong female voice to help two men articulate the tragedy in Argentina.
It was at that time I explored how Ophelia’s strong presence, made stronger by her amalgamation with Antigone, suggests that she can grant a voice to the silenced — in this case, the disappeared, martyred and dead — which she could never do for herself in Hamlet. It seemed that she attempted to help, aid, succor in her post-Elizabethan literary life.
Ophelia has also found her way into the world of psychology, which happens to be the world I now reside in professionally and, who I am kidding, personally. Her name and story appear within many psychological texts, especially within the book Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls by Mary Pipher and Ophelia Speaks:
Adolescent Girls Write About Their Search For Self by Emily Carmichael and Sara Shandler. It seems that at some point, or perhaps all along, she has stood to represent conflicted adolescent girls experiencing a lack of sense of self. She also stands as a warning.
It’s hitting me now, as I somewhat aimlessly write this post, that my borderline obsession with Ophelia, especially in the Spanish language and psychology, may be more closely connected to something personal. When I was 14 and before Shakespeare truly entered my life, I lost that Spanish-speaking sister mentioned earlier after years of watching her emotional turmoil wreak havoc on her mental health, her own identity swallowed up by manic depression (now categorized as bi-polar).
She died at only 17 years old. Now, almost twenty years later, I tell myself her untimely departure brought her peace from the anguish running rampant in her mind. At the time, my 14 year-old self was not as hopeful in mourning and it’s clear to me now that I focused on female characters who found agency in suicide or, at least, a way of freeing themselves from that which they couldn’t control. When Edna makes her way into the ocean at the end of The Awakening (spoiler alert?), she started to climb the ranks of literary heroines in my mental collection of female figures. When Lily Bart succumbs to sleeping pills in The House of Mirth (sorry), I recall analyzing the function of that behavior: like many suicides, was it escape, relief? Even in my own writing as an adolescent, I found myself writing stories hyper-focused on suicidal tropes, though none of them ending in completed attempts.
But it always came back to Ophelia. It always came back to my defense of her choice: that she was already gone before she was dead. And perhaps, in turn, it always came back to my older sister.
So while it is easy to chastise myself for abandoning literature for a school counseling degree and a public school job, I wonder if those two strong women brought me here, working with at-risk adolescents, some with identities wrapped up in social media, dictated by grades and achievements, or narrated by trauma. It’s possible that I belonged here all along.
Lord, we know what we are, but know not what we may be. (IV.v.43–44)
