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Response to Luca Caddia’s Review of Ophelia and Victorian Visual Culture: Representing Body Politics in the Nineteenth Century

Kimberly Rhodes, Associate Professor of Art History, Drew University

One of the larger goals of Ophelia and Victorian Visual Culture: Representing Body Politics in the Nineteenth Century is to suggest a method for interpreting Shakespearean works of art produced in the nineteenth century that combines visual, literary, and theatrical evidence and therefore works toward situating this imagery within a network of sometimes conflicting cultural relations. By training his gaze on the sinuous image of Hamlet in Maclise’s painting, Luca Caddia suggests an important deployment of this method that insists on the reciprocity of gender conventions and directs us toward a novel, yet historically accurate view of Hamlet. In my text, I investigate Hamlet’s pose in Maclise’s painting through examination of theatrical reviews of various performances of the eponymous play to assert that the pose Maclise employs perhaps has theatrical sources. Caddia expands my iconographic analysis, a time-honored tool for art historians, to encompass broader Victorian notions of normative masculinity, deepening the overall reading of the picture. Shifting the hierarchy of Hamlet and centralizing Ophelia allows Caddia’s reading to thrive, as it displaces the burden of gendered notions of duty from Ophelia to Hamlet: it is Hamlet, with his latent violence, who strays from conventional gender norms here. Thus, Caddia persuasively proposes that reading Ophelia “with a difference” affects gendered interpretations of Hamlet and opens up fertile territory for further scrutiny of works of art that depict Hamlet and Ophelia in the same frame.

Caddia’s review draws attention to two of the female artists discussed in Ophelia and Victorian Visual Culture: Elizabeth Siddal and Julia Margaret Cameron. Although Siddal never visually represented the character, she appears as Ophelia in works by John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Again, Caddia usefully augments my reading of a
work of art (Rossetti’s Hamlet and Ophelia from c. 1858-9) by pointing to the relevance of gender norms to interpreting Hamlet as well as Ophelia, and I agree with his characterization. However, I discuss Siddal’s agency in this section of the book, and do not believe that I cast her as a victim. Instead, I look to her art for possible responses to Rossetti’s depiction of her, and surmise that in creating images of such literary figures as Lady Clare (from Tennyson) she asserts both her artistic and personal agency.

Cameron occupied a very different place in Victorian art and society than Siddal. She was economically privileged and worked as a photographer rather than a painter. Yet, like Siddal, she entered into a complex series of gendered negotiations through the figure of Ophelia. Caddia is correct when he identifies my discomfort with some of Cameron’s representations of the character, but I see these normative images as representative of Cameron’s own tenuous position as a woman photographer attempting to make money in the commercial market. In addition, I also discuss two photographs of Ophelia that I find transgressive within Cameron’s oeuvre and which she did not market for sale. Thus, I differentiate the works and their places within Cameron’s body of photographs and do not simply view her as an artist who internalized her oppression and produced safe, patriarchal images.

Caddia’s points about Siddal and Cameron are well taken, though, as they remind me that we must be diligent in our attention to the complexity of gender conventions and notions of agency. In addition, he inspires me to keep looking at images that have been on my mind for the past decade.

I am grateful to Luca Caddia for writing a thought-provoking review of Ophelia and Victorian Visual Culture: Representing Body Politics in the Nineteenth Century, and to Jessica Cox for inviting me to participate in a productive dialogue about the book. Caddia makes vital points that will, I hope, encourage continuing multi-disciplinary scholarship on the intricate topic of representations of gender in the visual culture of Hamlet that I introduce in my focused study of Ophelia.