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Kimberly Rhodes, Ophelia and Victorian Visual Culture. Representing Body Politics in the Nineteenth-Century, Ashgate Publishing Limited, Aldershot, 2008.

By Luca Caddia

To say it in patriarchal terms, Kimberly Rhodes’s book fills a void that needed to be covered, and it does it pretty well, as far as her targets are concerned. Indeed, the purpose of this book is to demonstrate that the selective close reading of nineteenth-century representations of Ophelia images discussed in its pages “creates a flimsy feminist foundation. […] Exploring the contradictions of Ophelia’s representation as a mode of agency for women actresses, writers, and audiences can also lead us toward a more nuanced feminist view of the heroine. (18)” Since Rhodes never forgets the main target of her book, her research, serious and interesting as it is, sometimes ends up being more straight than “nuanced”. Therefore, even though I enjoyed the book tremendously and I found her analysis convincing most of the time, I would like to dedicate this review to those parts which seem to me not to do her declared task justice.

Basically, Rhodes reads “idealized images of Ophelia as markers of anxiety as well as affirmations of normative femininity”(19). In this sense, the employment of a term like body politics to indicate the pervasiveness of Ophelia in Victorian visual culture proves particularly fit in such a context, both because of the prescriptive character her image has in that era and because the expurgated stage representations of Hamlet, which popular images are often informed by, silence Ophelia’s loosest speeches and focus the public’s attention on her physical presence.

Rhodes’s research is almost always engaging, very well documented and convincing. Nevertheless, in some instances she is so focused in showing how Victorian simplifications of the heroine’s role were made in order to generalize “natural” definitions of femininity, that she sometimes misses the subtleties present in the paintings themselves. In the first chapter, for example, Rhodes writes that “aestheticizing Ophelia’s madness distorts the disruptive power of her hysteria, drawing attention instead to the pathos of the scene” (18). However, the pathetic pretty images displayed in Victorian gift books often show her with no contextual background, which leads to the paradox of absolutizing a figure whose “original sin” is strictly related to the men she is connected to. This urges readings of her redundancy, a particularly up to date subject in the mid-Victorian age, and one that Rhodes herself picks up only later, while analyzing Richard Redgrave’s Ophelia Weaving her Garlands (1842) and also in the fifth chapter, through fin-de-siècle representations like Edwin Austin Abbey’s The Play Scene in ‘Hamlet’ (1897) which, according to Rhodes, disrupts the conventions that pictures in gift books are supposed to sustain.

Again, in chapter two, while analyzing Daniel Maclise’s The Play Scene in ‘Hamlet’ (1842), a painting rich in biblical references, she never openly mentions or develops the idea that Hamlet’s snaking figure might be connected to his transgressive relationship with Ophelia, that is, the crawling Hamlet may well be a metaphor of his role as the tempter of her virtue (among other things, of course). Rather, she establishes an unconvincing comparison between that picture and Augustus Leopold Egg’s genre painting Past and Present, Number 1 (1858), which ends up by paralleling Hamlet with the adulterous wife because of their central stretched out position in the canvas and which doesn’t contrast Ophelia’s reticence with the surprised gaze of the daughter in the latter painting (71).

Such a reading of Hamlet’s crawling on stage as the one I suggested above is sustained by Victorian notions of manliness, a performing standard Hamlet falls short of embodying and which preoccupied all the conservative critics who believed that women’s “restlessness” could be fixed by resolute men. If such a reading seems to relegate the heroine to the rank of Hamlet’s rib, it should be considered that Victorian patriarchs, well conscious that women’s “awakening conscience” would lead them in the opposite direction from that taken by Hunt’s character in the eponymous painting, redefined social standards of fit masculinities in order to keep their control of women. Therefore violent men ended up with being considered unmanly and severely criticized, not to say cast out from society because unfit to be public citizens of the British Empire (for this subject, see Martin J. Wiener, Men of Blood: Violence, Manliness and Criminal Justice in Victorian England, 2004); the main consequence of this shift was that women who happened to have their lot cast in relationships with abusive men like, say, Hamlet, were really pitied! When I read that Ruskin defines the male protagonist of this drama as “indolent, and drowsily speculative” (21), and the London Herald criticizes Edmund Kean’s impersonation of a crawling Hamlet because of the effects it might have on women, I cannot but conclude that, generally speaking, for many Victorians Ophelia is to be pitied also – or above all – because she has fallen in love with a man so incapable of embodying their gentle-manly standards. In other words, if the woman’s mission is companion to manhood, what is a woman to do when her man doesn’t reach manhood?

As to Maclise’s Ophelia as an example of moral rectitude “neutralized by her simple white dress” (68), I will add that in the first part of the book Rhodes often tries to sustain this interpretation of nineteenth-century images of the Shakespearean heroine by comparing her to early images of Queen Victoria, most notably that painted by Sir David Wilkie in The First Council of Queen Victoria (1837). Although the bibliography of this book lists Margaret Homan’s masterpiece Royal Representations: Queen Victoria and British Culture, 1837 – 1876 (1998), Rhodes chooses to simplify the subject of Her Majesty’s complex presence in the visual culture of the age named after her and misses the subtlety inherent in “the vulnerability that betrays chivalry’s illusory idealization of woman power” (Margaret Homans, p. 13).
The third chapter is dedicated to Pre-Raphaelites’ representations of Ophelia. The paragraph on Dante Gabriel Rossetti focuses on his intricate relationship with Elizabeth Siddal, whom, as many readers will know, was also the model of the most famous Victorian Ophelia to date, that painted by Millais in 1852. It is here that Rhodes’s otherwise rich close reading seems to me too straight. While analyzing the character of Ophelia in Rossetti’s drawing Hamlet and Ophelia (1858-9), she persuasively identifies model and character, but dismisses both as “passive”, adding that Ophelia’s role in the picture and Lizzie’s integration of Ophelia into her identity role “emphasize traditional gender roles and power relationships” (104). In my opinion, it is important to abandon the prejudice of passivity as a synonym of helplessness, and Lizzie Siddal’s Ophelias seem to me perfect examples for such a revision. When I look at Rossetti’s drawing I see her attitude more as “reactivity” to Hamlet’s larger-than-life pose in the picture, and since we don’t mind blurring life and art, I will add that I cannot but sense Rossetti’s disturbing reaction to his wife’s death as an ultimate, dramatic adjustment of forces still at play . “Not in thy body is thy life at all / But in this lady’s lips and hands and eyes”. These verses, taken from Rossetti’s poem Life-in-Love, published in 1870, convey a very strong idea of passivity’s power over him, and dooms to silence any simplistic reading of his relationship with women.

If, as Rhodes writes, “Rossetti never conceived an image of Ophelia as an individual character”, it may well be because, to say it with Oscar Wilde, Ophelia “is swept away by circumstances” (173), or, according to Victorian psychiatrist John Conolly, madness “falls” on her (37), that is, it is not an intrinsic quality of her character. Victorians so believed in the osmotic nature of interpersonal identity that it might have been inconceivable for them to consider Ophelia’s drama – or any other character’s, female or male – without referring to her people’s responsibility in the (de)construction of her character.

The fourth chapter is my personal favourite. The first part is dedicated to photographic representations of the Shakespearian heroine by Hugh Diamond and Julia Margaret Cameron. Whereas Diamond makes a diagnostic use of photography by delineating the feminine attributes ascribed to mental illness through Ophelia, Cameron complicates her subject “by deflecting the focus from the model’s face”, a choice that “concentrates more on the character’s state of mind and creates an inner life for her and questions society’s privileging of rationality” (134). Nevertheless, Rhodes trivializes a potentially fertile analysis by complaining that by so doing Cameron perpetuates the commonplace of Ophelia as a madwoman. Later she shows that it was common practice for actresses impersonating Ophelia to go and visit asylums in order to take inspiration for their character (among them, Ellen Terry, who is also the protagonist of the second part of this chapter). As regards this habit, Rhodes urges viewers to consider what is at stake in the labeling of images of women’s distress reduced to the specific drama of Ophelia. There is much at stake here, no doubt, but this can hardly be the point in a book that up to that moment had seemed willing to defend Ophelia’s drama from normative interpretations. What is the specific drama of Ophelia? Through Rhodes’s meticulous and motivated research, I have learnt that the nineteenth century has very complex ideas on this subject, but I am left wondering whether or not the author of this book is interested in them.