Ontology and Eroticism: Two Bodies of Ophelia

Through looking at the staging tradition of Hamlet and the representations of Ophelia's corpse in turn-of-the-century Western art, it is suggested that Ophelia's exclusion from Hamlet's "to be or not to be" soliloquy helped to displace her voice as an ethical subject onto a...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inWomen's studies Vol. 34; no. 6; pp. 485 - 503
Main Author Romanska, Magda
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Taylor & Francis Group 01.09.2005
Subjects
Aesthetics
Cults
Eroticism
Morbidity
Ontology
Representations of the body
Romanticism
Sexuality
Women
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Summary:Through looking at the staging tradition of Hamlet and the representations of Ophelia's corpse in turn-of-the-century Western art, it is suggested that Ophelia's exclusion from Hamlet's "to be or not to be" soliloquy helped to displace her voice as an ethical subject onto a sensual image of her dead body, inspiring countless depictions of her glamorised corpse, and creating an archetypal model of Western necro-aesthetics. In short, excluded from Hamlet's existential contemplation, her image became an object of beauty, aestheticised in the morbidly erotic representation of her corpse.
Bibliography:ObjectType-Article-2
SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1
ObjectType-Feature-1
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ISSN:0049-7878
1547-7045
DOI:10.1080/00497870500277914