Ophelia

Cora Rodriguez

Rethinking Modern British Literature Unessay

Project 1

Ophelia

For my unessay, I made an art piece of Gertrude and Ophelia from Hamlet. Ophelia stands on the riverbank watching Ophelia’s lifeless body float face-down below her, flowers around her head like a halo. I drew the figures and the flowers, while the backgrounds I printed out, turning the piece into a multimedia one. I found a few sources as to what would have been worn in the time period Hamlet is said to take place and reflected the outfits based on those.

Shakespeare never physically described the characters of Ophelia and Gertrude, so for Ophelia, I took the paintings by Sir John Everett Millais and Friedrich Heyser and based my Ophelia on those. One thing about those paintings that bothers me is that Ophelia is face up. Real drownings have the corpse face down, as the buoyancy in the body is centered in the chest, and everything else is considered dead weight.

The flowers around her head are the ones that Gertrude mentions her picking before she meets her fate. I originally had the flowers strewn out around her, like in most of the other paintings of Ophelia, but having them in a halo seemed so much more dramatic so I went for that. The flowers (and plants) are daisies, crowflowers, nettles, decaisnea (described as Dead Man’s Fingers in Hamlet), and early purple orchids (described as long purples in Hamlet).

Gertrude is usually portrayed with blond or reddish hair, but I’ve always envisioned her with brown hair so that’s how I drew her. I based her crown on the Danish Crown Jewels, and one of the sources I found for clothing mentioned that royalty would wear very bright clothes, so I made her outfit red and yellow. I know Gertrude most likely isn’t at the body of water when she sees Ophelia die, but having her looming over was important to me as she sees Ophelia drown and doesn’t lift a finger to help her.

Why I believe my piece matters is this: all the characters in the play say that Ophelia’s death is a shame and just move on. To be fair, a lot is going on for them, but Ophelia’s death was a tragedy. Not only that, but they also just completely skip over the part where Gertrude says she watched it happen. It does take only a few minutes for a person to drown, but if Gertrude had seen the whole thing happen, she could have sent help for Ophelia. It might not have saved her, but at least someone would have been trying to help. I feel like my piece captures the absence of empathy that everyone had towards Ophelia’s passing. I think that’s important because if someone had just shown some empathy towards anyone else in Hamlet, then maybe that whole situation could have been resolved sooner with fewer casualties.

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