 |
| Her speech is nothing, Yet the unshaped use of it doth move The hearers to collection. Hamlet 4.5.7-9 The final difficulty of reading madness [...] is that in the act of doing so, one dissociates oneself from it or associates oneself with it, and in either case becomes disqualified as an interpreter. To read madness sanely is to miss the point; to read madness madly is to have one's point be missed. Carol Thomas Neely1 `But I don't want to go among mad people,' Alice remarked. `Oh, you can't help that,' said the Cat: `we're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad.' `How do you know I'm mad?' said Alice. `You must be,' said the Cat, `or you wouldn't have come here.' How can I read Ophelia's madness? How might I read "both as mad and as not mad,"2 as neither associated with nor dissociated from Ophelia's cryptic ramblings? How might I assume Carol Thomas Neely's challenge to "`tell' Ophelia's `story"'3 without simply forcing her "unshaped" nonsense into a "collected" sense, dissociating myself by deciding on a logical even polemical reading? Conversely, how can I proceed without simply glorifying Ophelia's demented ravings, associating myself by choosing to celebrate her painful fragmentation? Perhaps I set myself an insane task? In such an (arguably) appropriate spirit, I'll proceed.... -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From the first, Ophelia's psychic identity appears externally defined, socially constructed. Although every human psyche might be said, from a psychoanalytic perspective, to be constructed largely as a result of social interactions, Ophelia's unique development has given her an especially permeable psyche. Motherless and completely circumscribed by the men around her, Ophelia has been shaped to conform to external demands, to reflect others' desires. Her name deriving from the Greek word for "help" or "greatest possible succor,"4 she appears condemned to martyrdom on the altar of male fantasies and priorities. The young woman Jacques Lacan calls "that piece of bait named Ophelia"5 is used, abused, confused--utterly manipulated by the men in her life: father, lover, brother, king. Scoffed at, ignored, suspected, disbelieved, commanded to distrust her own feelings, thoughts and desires, Ophelia is fragmented by contradictory messages. With her only mother figure, Gertrude, shown reluctant to offer empathy in the moment of her most dire need,6 Ophelia has clearly been bereft of maternal fostering, exiled on a barren island of male circumscription. Seeming to absorb the general absence of belief in her own intelligence, virtue and autonomy, Ophelia is left with an identity osmotically open to external suggestion; that is, she appears to lack clear psychic boundaries.7 Both brother and father smother Ophelia in an incestuous stranglehold, each the self-appointed tutor of her moral, intellectual, even psychological development. To Laertes, Ophelia figures as a chaste goddess whom he can place on a pedestal high above the French "drabs" whom his father assumes he is wont to frequent. While (he believes) he has her safely secreted from the clutches of (other) men, Laertes attempts to teach his sister to dread male advances. "Fear it, Ophelia, fear it, my dear sister" (1.3.33), Laertes repeats again and again--"it" being Hamlet's desire, lying in wait to plunder the "chaste treasure" (1.3.31) which Laertes seems so eager to keep the key of. With his "minist'ring angel" (5.1.234) ensconced in Elsinore (maidenhead safely intact), denying herself upon his request even the natural physical craving for sleep so that she may write to him (1.3.3-4), Laertes can return with unburdened mind to France, to what Polonius insists is his life of "wanton, wild, and usual slips" such as "drinking, fencing, swearing, / Quarrelling [and, of course] drabbing" (2.1.22-26). Until the last, Laertes sees Ophelia only as his Galatea, his "rose of May" (4.5.157), an aesthetic object to whose specific personal torment he can remain blind. Even as the tortured Ophelia mouths obscene remarks in her madness, her brother notes myopically, "Thought and affliction, passion, hell itself / She turns to favour and to prettiness" (4.5.185-86). Whereas Ophelia is angel to Laertes, she is asset to Polonius, a commodity to be disposed of, ideally at the greatest profit to himself. Relegating her to a perpetual childhood, Polonius educates his "green girl" (1.3.101) to be an obedient automaton willing to acquiesce to his every command. Warning her that should she act for herself she will "tender [him] a fool" (that is, in a sense, a cuckold; 1.3.109), Polonius forbids Ophelia autonomy of desire, choice, action, even thought. "You do not understand yourself so clearly / As it behoves my daughter and your honour. [But] I will teach you," the pedant informs his adult pupil, "Think yourself a baby" (1.3.96-97, 105). The father's infantilizing lessons, while detrimental to Ophelia, prove beneficial for himself. Having denied her free access to Hamlet for "many a day" (3.1.91), Polonius then eagerly delivers his dutiful daughter up to the Prince, in his publicly acknowledged "turbulent and dangerous lunacy" (3.1.4), in order to prove his loyalty to Claudius, and perhaps to elevate his social status via a royal union. After Ophelia has been verbally and very likely physically assaulted by Hamlet in the course of Polonius's little love test, the King and his councillor debate the Prince's mental state for seventeen lines before her father remembers to notice her. When, at the scene's close, the two "lawful espials" (3.1.32) sweep from the room, no line exists to suggest that either moves to comfort or to help Ophelia from the site; the lure has served her purpose, proven a disappointment, and now the statesmen must have leave to consider important matters, such as the Prince's future residence. Later, even after having overheard and witnessed the results of Hamlet's abuse of his daughter, Polonius still seems anxious to employ the malleable Ophelia to effect a royal liaison, insisting before the performance of The Mousetrap that Claudius mark Hamlet's dubious attentions toward her as making manifest the Prince's passion (3.2.109). Utterly unconcerned with Ophelia's needs, Polonius manipulates both her mind and her body to gratify his love of power. Through Laertes's careful "lessons" (1.3.45) and Polonius's harsh tutorials, both brother and father retard Ophelia's psychic growth, stifling her personal development to satisfy their own needs. Similarly, Ophelia's lover blithely disregards her psychological needs in favor of his own. Within Hamlet's imaginative universe, for a woman to be "honest" means that she be both chaste and loyal. Lacking autonomous desire, Hamlet's honest woman would serve as an inert mirror, distorted just enough to reflect back his royal image slightly enlarged. Gertrude has proven herself dishonest by exercising her autonomy, which Hamlet experiences as the terrifying release of indiscriminate female desire, or of "the sexualized maternal body."8 Entering Ophelia's chamber, perusing her face, then heaving a regal sigh both "piteous and profound" (2.1.94), Hamlet seems to deduce her guilt, appears to align Ophelia with the "fallen" Gertrude. When Hamlet projects his anxiety about his mother's "betrayal" onto Ophelia, the two women conflate into one two-faced (painted) female in the Prince's distorted imaginings. Thus when Ophelia does appear to engage in autonomous action (as Gertrude had), denying Hamlet a lover's access and returning his ardent remembrances, he becomes violently abusive toward her. Ironically, of course, Ophelia behaves not autonomously at all but obediently. Through her filial subservience, Ophelia proves herself the very essence of the honest woman, from a patriarchal (that is, Hamlet's own) perspective--one who will dutifully obey first father, then husband. Yet, regardless of Ophelia's actual behavior, anything she might do would seem to reinforce Hamlet's doubt,9 his inability to believe in her intrinsic honesty. Not a person to Hamlet, Ophelia represents merely a spectre of his psychic fears. This spectre of the dishonest woman figures, in his neurotic projections, as a duplicitous whore (3.2.241-46), decaying both figuratively and literally (5.1.186-89), completely fallen and utterly false (3.4.82-85), a sexually corrupt beast (3.4.91-94), essentially reduced to her womb which is a nest of corruption, a dark pit for breeding sinners (3.1.121-22). Thus when Hamlet casts Ophelia in the role of dishonest woman, he implicitly equates her with the female genitalia which in the parlance of Elizabethan England equal nothing.10 Indeed, with her identity constructed always in reference to another, Ophelia is, in essence, nothing, an empty cipher patiently waiting to be infused with whatever meaning the particular mathematician should require. As Laertes's sister, she represents a slice of female "perfection" (4.7.29) whose chastity he can legislate and in whose memory he can prove his manhood. As Polonius's daughter, she offers a perpetual "baby" he must continue to "teach" (1.3.105), a non-rational creature he can "loose" (2.2.162) to the Prince in order to ingratiate himself with the new King. As Claudius's subject, she provides a piece of bait employed to test "the very cause of Hamlet's lunacy" (2.2.49), a handy excuse behind which he might obscure his guilt. And as Hamlet's lover, despite her sexual loyalty, she figures for the "frailty" (1.2.146) of female virtue, to whose dead (that is, inert) flesh he can finally surrender and publicly acknowledge his passion (5.1.264-66) without having actually to manage an adult erotic relationship. Lacking personal ego boundaries of her own, Ophelia seems compelled to absorb whatever psychic identity is thrust upon her. Conflicting messages, mostly negative, whirl around in Ophelia's mind, each demanding primacy. From Hamlet, within the space of several minutes, comes a dizzying array of mixed communications. "I did love you once," he confesses to Ophelia, before going on to contend, "I loved you not." "Why, wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners?" he asks her a moment later. Save yourself from denigration, "go thy ways to a nunnery" by which he might mean either a convent or a house of prostitution.11 But then fear not, he concludes, "Thou shalt not escape calumny." In the midst of these schizophrenic mind games, Hamlet inserts a paradox into the discourse which asks that she doubt the veracity of all his words: "[Men] are arrant knaves all, believe none of us" (3.1.115-38). Who and what should Ophelia believe? Commands are fired at her: "Walk here!" "Read this!" "Think that!" Like a medieval Alice, endlessly drawn down into the vortex of a psychic rabbit hole, she can only respond weakly, "I do not know, my lord, what I should think" (1.3.104). Providing "succor" for male anxieties, serving as a screen onto which men might project their fantasies,12 a passive body on, around, and through which they might enact their dramas, Ophelia's discrete identity seems to disappear from the story. Male voices fill her head, guiding her very thoughts. When the voices' directions become increasingly muddied, she grows more and more confused, more sundered from any sense of personal identity, until she finally admits to Hamlet, "I think nothing, my lord" (3.2.116-emphasis added). Then suddenly--with her brother in France, and her lover banished to England for the murder of her father--the voices stop. Confronted with such a thunderous silence, Ophelia becomes mad.13 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Though this be madness, yet there is method in't. Hamlet 2.2.205-6 O! matter and impertinency mix'd; Reason in madness. King Lear 4.6.172-73 Madness becomes Ophelia's last resort, her unconscious revolt. Indeed, what else is left her to do? Constituted to accept male command, how then, without it, can she act on her own behalf? How might she find the words to communicate her frustration and longing, how to lodge her protest? To do so, she must explode outside of the categories designed to circumscribe her, must journey beyond the boundaries of sanity, to a place where she can first locate and then express her rage. All of the men in her life would play upon her as though she were a pipe, would seem to know her stops, would pluck out the heart of her mystery, would sound her from her lowest note to the top of her compass. Ophelia has been a vessel into which an identity has been poured. Offering her an escape, madness provides her with the ability finally to speak her anger and desire. All men merge in her mad imaginings--all the controlling voices of her life, her conscience, her psyche--all the outside forces determined to manipulate her for their own ends. Madness releases Ophelia from the enforced repressions of obedience, chastity, patience, liberates her from the prescribed roles of daughter, sister, lover, subject. The heretofore silenced Ophelia now demands to be heard, exclaiming, "Pray you mark!" whenever the Queen of Denmark ventures to interrupt her (4.5.28-35). Since Ophelia's "self" has been defined by the men who have demarcated her world, her flight into madness promises to enable her to discover her own identity. Ophelia becomes, as Neely claims, a "mad prophet,"14 not driven to but freed for the uncanny insights of madness. Through this emancipation from the confines of reason, Ranjini Philip contends, "Ophelia moves to a greater, though [still] incomplete, reconciliation of self."15 Throughout Hamlet, the category of "madness," both real and feigned, conveys what "rational" (that is, polite, temperate, non-treasonous) discourse cannot; madness ignores temporal authority, sabotages it. Having found an irrational voice, the mad Ophelia now becomes the one who undermines authority, speaking ambiguously, through pun, allusion, riddle, even veiled threat. Her entrance line, for example, "Where is the beauteous Majesty of Denmark?" (4.5.21) while superficially seeming to mean, "Where is the Queen?" might also mean, "Where is my banished lover, `the glass of fashion and the mould of form' (3.1.155), Prince Hamlet?" or, "Where is the former (unrotten) state of Denmark?" or even, "Where is the murdered King Hamlet now?" Before the onset of her madness, Ophelia learned of the throne's dirty secrets. Present at Hamlet's entertainment, she received a running (if elusive) commentary from the play's co-author and producer, who assumed the role of "chorus" (3.2.240) for her (and most likely his "parents"') edification. The Mousetrap cast consisted of a queen who loves falsely (Why, of course! the recently re-married Gertrude), a murdered duke (Could it be...? Yes! King Hamlet!), and a usurper-murderer who seduces the widow of his victim (Why, who else but Claudius?--inheritor to the throne of, and new husband to the wife of, his suddenly deceased royal brother). With all not as it seems in Denmark, Ophelia's mad ramblings reflect the schism between appearance and reality, between what "seems" versus what "is."16 As Philip suggests, "In her madness [Ophelia] mimics the corruption of the state of Denmark,"17 providing a discourse of multiple connotations, in which what on the surface appears to be her meaning unravels upon analysis to reveal the duplicity underneath.18 Through her madness with "method in't," Ophelia speaks subversively, expressing "dangerous conjectures" (4.5.15) and uttering specific allegations. Ophelia's songs, Peter J. Seng states, "reflect, if only darkly, all the major issues of the play."19 All overdetermined, each "fragment of a popular ballad"20 contains numerous levels of accusation and mourning, protest and longing. Ophelia begins the first song immediately upon being admitted into Gertrude's presence: How should I your true love know From another one? By his cockle hat and staff And his sandal shoon. He is dead and gone, lady, He is dead and gone, At his head a grass-green turf, At his heels a stone. White his shroud as the mountain snow, Larded with sweet flowers Which bewept to the grave did not go With true-love showers. 4.5.23-40 Superficially, this song, with its predominant death and burial motif, indicates Ophelia's preoccupation with Polonius's death and over-hasty, "hugger-mugger" (4.5.84) interment. Yet, given Ophelia's clear obsession throughout the scene with both lamenting and berating her father's bizarrely inappropriate burial, is it logical to assume that Polonius "bewept to the grave did not go"? Despite the absence of stage directions, it seems clear that Ophelia's first song is addressed to Gertrude ("He is dead and gone, lady"), who is alone with Horatio at the scene's onset. While on the most obvious level, Ophelia's song does indeed challenge her father's indecent interment, on another level, her song implicitly indicts Gertrude, who has not distinguished her "true love" from "another one," who has not appropriately mourned her first husband "with true-love showers," before taking a second. (And, ironically, this "second" enters at line 36 just as Ophelia sings about the "first" who "bewept to the grave did not go.") Then too, on yet a third level, Ophelia refers to her banished love, Hamlet. The song's "cockle hat and staff" and "sandal shoon" imagery suggests a pilgrim.21 And in a sense, Hamlet has been sent on a "pilgrimage" to England in order to atone for his sins. Furthermore, as Robert Tracy notes, "the `grave' is a common term for bed in Elizabethan literature,"22 just as "death" commonly denotes sexual climax. Thus, by relating the story of a "true love" on a pilgrimage which ostensibly ends in death, Ophelia unveils her desire for the absent Hamlet. Of course, this song, reflecting her yearning for an unnamed, missing, beloved pilgrim might also signify Ophelia's (possibly incestuous) longing for the absent Laertes. "Death," in the song, becomes a diverse metaphor, figuring the conflicted Ophelia's trope for both the literal loss of father and king, and the more figurative loss of lover as well as brother. Moreover, "death" represents her yearning for the sexuality denied her by Polonius's and Laertes's sexual politics and Hamlet's sexual angst. The second song, a song of seduction and betrayal, Ophelia appears to address to Claudius, who lately entered the scene and who responds throughout as if her attentions were directed his way: Tomorrow is Saint Valentine's day, All in the morning betime, And I a maid at your window, To be your Valentine. Then up he rose, and donn'd his clo'es, And dupp'd the chamber door, Let in the maid that out a maid Never departed more. By Gis and by Saint Charity, Alack and fie for shame, Young men will do't if they come to't - By Cock, they are to blame. Quoth she, "Before you tumbled me, You promis'd me to wed." "So would I a done, by yonder sun, And thou hadst not come to my bed." 4.5.48-66 Most manifestly, Ophelia sings about a young woman, like herself, used and then abandoned by her lover.23 The bawdy, rustic quality of the song might reflect how deeply she has internalized both Hamlet's uncouth treatment of her as a whore ("Lady, shall I lie in your lap?... I mean, my head upon your lap.... Do you think I meant c(o)unt-ry matters?" 3.2.110-15, altered), as well as the fears of lascivious male desire which were planted in her head by her father and brother (Hamlet's vows are "mere implorators of unholy suits, / Breathing like sanctified and pious bawds / The better to beguile," 1.3.129-31). Yet on another level, Ophelia brashly denounces the illicit seducer, Claudius. Conflating the new King with Hamlet, she castigates both for employing deceptive "music vows" (3.1.158) to effect an unlawful seduction--Claudius of his brother's wife, Hamlet of the unjustly rejected Ophelia. Two of Ophelia's next three song fragments, sung in the presence of Claudius, Gertrude, and Laertes, appear to be a dirge: They bore him bare-fac'd on the bier, And in his grave rain'd many a tear. After an interruption, during which she attempts to arrange a choral round and distributes flowers to the company, she continues: And will a not come again? And will a not come again? No, no, he is dead, Go to thy death-bed, He never will come again. His beard was as white as snow, All flaxen was his poll. He is gone, he is gone, And we cast away moan. God a mercy on his soul. 4.5.164-96 These two fragments, making up Ophelia's dirge, appear manifestly to refer to Polonius, a white-bearded, flaxen-polled corpse. Indeed, her song of lamentation, accompanied by her distribution of flowers, suggest that Ophelia is enacting a funeral--but not simply in her father's honor. She allocates bitterly appropriate flowers to each party (for Laertes, rosemary and pansies signifying remembrance and thoughts24; for Gertrude, fennel and columbines representing marital infidelity; for Claudius, rue and a daisy denoting repentance and a love doomed to be unhappy),25 as though she were staging an elaborate elegy in honor of the entire assembled company. As Cherrell Guilfoyle suggests, these "are funeral flowers, handed to those who will shortly die--the King, the Queen, Laertes, and herself."26 Yet curiously, in the midst of Ophelia's somber ritual, during the interruption between her two melancholy fragments, she had sung another line, emphatically non-funereal in tone: For bonny sweet Robin is all my joy. 4.5.184 Since, as Harry Morris has shown, "robin" was a colloquial Elizabethan term for penis,27 Ophelia's line is plainly a bit of sexual innuendo. Moreover, since this line apparently derives from a Robin Hood ballad, Ophelia seems to be assuming the role of Maid Marian, who "sometimes distributed flowers in the May Games,"28 and who "had become a by-word for promiscuity."29 Following up her mutterings on her father's death ("They say a made a good end," 4.5.183) with this line from a ballad, Ophelia both unleashes her desire in despite (or perhaps because) of Laertes's presence, as well as includes the figure of the absent Hamlet, the object of her desire (who had cast her in the Marian role of prostitute, 3.2.108-246), in her mass funeral ceremony. Thus, she implicitly mourns her thwarted desire in the presence of the brother and in the memory of the father who outlawed and helped to circumvent it, and in the honor of the lover who so cruelly exploited and then perverted it. In her madness, Ophelia provides a singular exposé of society, of the turbulent reality beneath its surface veneer of calm; she touches on the myriad discontents of (her) civilization. Through her convoluted discourse, Ophelia implicitly emphasizes the vacuity of banal pieties, inappropriately muttering certain religious epithets and distorting others--thus, "God yield you" becomes "good dild you," "By Jesus" becomes "By Gis," "for charity" becomes "Saint Charity," and, perhaps most interestingly, "By God" becomes "By Cock" (4.5.42, 58, 61). With her "incoherent" speech, Ophelia reveals the hypocrisies which lurk beneath the surface of the ostensibly placid family unit (the King and Queen's incestuous marriage, Laertes's and Polonius's incestuous urges to extinguish her subjectivity). She condemns the falseness of sexual love (Hamlet's heartless seduction and betrayal, Gertrude's light loyalty). She decries the arbitrariness of political power (a younger brother's "inheritance" of his elder's wife and throne, and his concomitant privilege to banish his rival, Ophelia's lover). And throughout, the madwoman provides her critique in an overdetermined, cryptic patter, which defies exegesis. When Claudius attempts to offer his neat interpretation of her remarks, she undermines his presumption, stating, "Pray let's have no words of this, but when they ask you what it means, say you this" (4.5.46-47), before launching into the Saint Valentine's day song, presumably unrelated to her previous utterances. Resisting appropriation and translation, Ophelia demands finally to "speak" on her own behalf. Through her madness, Joan Montgomery Byles believes, Ophelia finally establishes a real dialogue "with herself but--the listeners, who really listen to her for the first time, are no longer necessary. She needs no reply. She has discovered her own voice, her inner self."30 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- But although she may have found an avenue through which to express her frustrations and protest her wrongs, has Ophelia really found an autonomous voice, a discrete self? Ophelia might elucidate the inanity of mindless orthodoxies, proclaim the hypocrisies of the family, denounce false love, suggest the arbitrariness of political power. Still, she speaks her critique, as Neely points out, in quotation.31 Her mad discourse, like her earlier "sane" self, is fragmented. Indeed, no longer the vacant receptacle through which the voices of father-brother-lover resound, now she seems to speak to and for herself. Yet she "speaks" through snatches of ordinary, albeit disjointed, discourse: popular ballads, traditional legends, routine pieties, even familiar expressions of greeting and farewell. The important work her psyche attempts, to pervert convention in order to find a vehicle through which she can protest her lifetime of repression, is ultimately undermined by the very conventionality of her discourse. Her recognizable songs and allusions mask the deeper subversive content of her ramblings, furnishing her listeners with a ready avenue for denial. Her conversation, while irrational and disconnected, also provides the relief of the commonplace, that which can be categorized, then disregarded as carrying "but half sense" (4.5.7). Ophelia is, in turn, dismissed as being "Divided from herself and her fair judgement, / Without the which we are pictures, or mere beasts" (4.5.85-86). Witnesses of her madness "botch [her] words up to fit their own thoughts" (4.5.10), diffuse them by interpreting her meaning into terms which will (once again) serve their own emotional and political ends. Despite her resistance, Claudius does translate her mad protest into uncomplicated grief, which "springs / All from her father's death" (4.5.75-76). And Laertes, while momentarily appearing to realize that "This nothing [Ophelia's mad discourse]'s more than matter" (4.5.172), in the end can see only the "prettiness" (4.5.186) of her passion. "The fair Ophelia" (3.1.89) sings snatches of familiar tunes, recites bits of old tales, disburses flowers--like a small child. Although she at last speaks truth, finally defies authority, Ophelia continues to be infantilized, then ignored. As Karin S. Coddon notes: The notion of tragic madness as overtly or even covertly "subversive" is problematic. In fact, madness displaces action, metaphorizing it but also taking its place. If madness seems to privilege and enlarge the tragic hero's subjectivity, so does it also fragment, check, and defer it. As an inversion of internalized "ideological controls" madness by definition precludes the realization of a stable, coherent subjectivity in opposition to the disorder from without.32 Ophelia's tragic madness, which her witnesses can classify, tame and so defuse, ultimately displaces action, neutralizing its subversive potential. Ophelia not only wants "real listeners," she requires them. Without anyone willing to listen to or able to hear her incoherent truth, her "Reason in madness," any active possibility which seemed to arise from her release into that madness evaporates--except, of course, that of suicide. Yet even the active possibility implied by Ophelia's death, which M. D. Faber calls a "subintentioned"33 suicide, becomes obscured by way of subjective translation. After all, we have only Gertrude's description of the event.34 The Queen aestheticizes Ophelia's death, lyrically poeticizing what becomes the clearly non-intentional act of an eroticized child. Gertrude describes Ophelia's fantastic floral garnish, which includes "long purples, / That liberal shepherds give a grosser name, / But our cold maids do dead men's fingers call them" (4.7.168-70). Charlotte F. Otten, explicating the Queen's euphemisms, states, "The chaste Ophelia is garlanded in death with floral genitalia."35 Using botanical history and lore, Otten argues that the orchids with which Ophelia is strewn in her drowning scene metaphorically "suggest shamelessly immoderate copulation," "exude animal sexuality," and even "incite men to lechery."36 In fact, the poor wretch "adorns herself with flowers whose sexuality is so apparent that in the wearing of them she appears to bring dishonour upon herself," Otten frets. "Laertes rightly prays for more comely flowers."37 Thus, this reading suggests that a phallically-arrayed, lechery-inducing, distracted Ophelia falls quite unintentionally into "the weeping brook," and "as one incapable of her own distress" (that is, of autonomous action) is sucked "from her melodious lay / To muddy death" (4.7.174-82). According to Gertrude's rendering, Ophelia's death is the accidental drowning of an unconsciously precocious child. Conversely however, one might view her final mad scene, when Ophelia disperses funeral flowers to the company, as a determined farewell. To herself, she presents rue, signifying repentance--an appropriate flower for one contemplating her own death. Ophelia's drowning, Philip claims, rather than being simply "an act of self-negation is an intelligible response in her patriarchal world. It is an existential act of partial self-awareness."38 Yet is Ophelia's death a deliberate act, a suicide? Well, as the "absolute" (5.1.133) and utterly prosaic grave-digger notes, if the water comes to the man "he drowns not himself." But if the "man go to this water"...? In sum, the fellow concludes, it's quite simple: "He that is not guilty of his own death shortens not his own life" (5.1.15-20). Of course, between Gertrude's and the grave-digger's accounts lies the subjective ground of interpretation; the most that Shakespeare will surrender to the reader is the mad Ophelia's partial ("subintentioned") purpose, her unwillingness to resist succumbing to a watery grave. In determining to read Ophelia's madness,39 I place myself within Neely's conundrum. I can offer only another possible translation (like Gertrude's), a "sane," reductive reading, circumscribing whatever potential feminist power Ophelia's insanity might imply into a rational construct. Paradoxically, any reading which attempts to persuade (that is, any critical reading) to some extent appropriates, domesticates and so diminishes its subject. So, having painted myself into the proverbial corner, why not effect a fantasy escape, a (slightly mad) re-writing of (Shakespeare's-via-) Gertrude's version of Ophelia's watery death?... I like to see Ophelia deliberately climbing out onto the willow branch which "grows askant the brook" (4.7.165) with heavy stones tied to her belt. From this pleasant height, the exhausted yet strangely contented Ophelia gazes for some time into "the glassy stream" (4.7.166) at her reflection, and, at long last recognizing it, chooses to merge with it.... Now, having circumvented the trap of reading Ophelia's madness as effective feminist protest, I do not mean to be ambushed by the similar problematic of fetishizing Ophelia's death (as Shakespeare's characters and so many subsequent pens and brushes have done).40 Rather, I intend to suggest an offstage scene in which Ophelia, having struggled through her own existential monologue, emerges to make her first autonomous choice. Reflecting on the rotten state that robs her of viable alternatives, Ophelia decides that in order authentically "to be" she must choose "not to be." While the notion that suicide becomes the only possible route to autonomy for this woman is undeniably tragic, Ophelia's choice might be seen as the only courageous--indeed rational--death in Shakespeare's bloody drama. University of Minnesota |