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ByB.N. Harrison on March 3, 2015 in WRITING

The Unified Theory of Ophelia: On

Women, Writing, and Mental
Illness
B.N. Harrison’s previous work for
59
The Toast can be found here.

When I was nineteen, I made an

astonishing discovery that was
Like
going to revolutionize the field of
Shakespeare scholarship: Ophelia is
Tweet the unsung hero of Hamlet. I was so
certain that I understood Ophelia
better than anyone else who had
written about her in the last 400
years that I wrote a purely elective
research paper about my theory. It
wasn’t for a class; I didn’t even get extra credit. All I got was ten
hours of being crammed into a van next to the dean of the
Honors College on a trip to Whitewater, Wisconsin, so I could
spread the good news about Ophelia to five bored and sleepy
strangers during a Sunday morning presentation at the National
Conference for Undergraduate Research.

Edgar Allen Poe, Natalie Merchant, Sofia Coppola, Ingmar

Bergman, Sylvia Plath: what do they all have in common? If
you’re me in 2001, the answer is Ophelia. Everywhere I looked,
I seemed to glimpse her in poetry, art, music, and films. In my
eyes, she was the most startlingly original character of
Shakespeare’s most popular play. But my fervor was as much of
:
 a stumbling block as an inspiration in my efforts to do her
justice. The paper I presented at the conference fell far short of
my aims. My advisor called it “fascinatingly close to being
convincing”, which was as much as to say that I had failed to
convince.

The problem was that I saw myself in Ophelia, and my passion

to explain her was equally a passion to understand my place in
the world as woman, a writer, and a person with mental illness.
At nineteen, I had thoroughly internalized the idea that to be a
great writer, I had to overcome the handicap of being female,
and develop a voice that was “universal”—that is, a voice
unencumbered by any of my lived experiences that weren’t
easily relatable to the experiences of the men in my writing
classes. (I would specify “white men”, but we were all white. It
was that kind of school, and at nineteen, I was the kind of white
person who barely even noticed.) But as much as I wanted to
compete on the level of the boys, I couldn’t fake their
enthusiasm for Hemingway or Faulkner or Cormac McCarthy.

I found a precedent for girls like me in the work of confessional

poets Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. They represented a
respectable compromise between “real literature” and my
irrepressible tendency to let the personal creep into my writing. I
related intensely to the ferocity and focus in their work, but I
soon felt the hinges of a trap closing around me. To identify with
Plath and Sexton was to take up the mantle of the mad female
poet, madness being what they were chiefly remembered for.
Hemingway’s suicide was just a footnote to his biography; Plath
and Sexton’s suicides defined them. I wanted more for myself,
as a person and an artist. But there were a limited number of
luminaries that a young writer in a university English department
could safely emulate and still be considered mature and serious
about their craft. Plath and Sexton had blazed a trail I felt I could
follow. So I began to grapple with women’s “madness”, as both
a personal and a literary conceit, trying to discover why it both
allured and repelled me.

My unsettling devotion to Shakespeare was born from a slightly

different set of interests. I started college fresh from an abrupt
:
 and traumatizing de-conversion experience, following eighteen
years of devout belief in Christianity. Atheism had descended on
me almost overnight, sweeping the cathedral of my mind bare of
its enshrined occupant, but leaving the structure intact. I was
ripe for acquiring a new idolatry. As it happens, the field of
Shakespeare scholarship is full of borderline mystics who
consider Shakespeare’s time on earth an event little short of a
messianic visitation. No greater writer will ever exist, or ever
need to exist, because everything important that can be
observed about the human condition is depicted in the body of
Shakespeare’s work. Confronted with evidence to the contrary,
like the misogyny of Taming of the Shrew or the anti-Semitism of
The Merchant of Venice, these critics will react a bit like a
serious scientist who believes in intelligent design, folding the
fabric of reality around their need to keep believing in
Shakespeare as the apotheosis of literature. I’m not mocking
those people. I fell under the same spell. Honestly, deep in my
heart, a very small part of me still believes Shakespeare was
everything Harold Bloom said he was. It’s the same part that still
slightly hopes I’ll go to Heaven when I die.

My Unified Theory of Ophelia germinated in the intersection

between the twin literary obsessions that defined the first half of
my college career. (The second half was more defined by my
turning twenty-one and discovering red wine.) One afternoon,
early in the fall semester of 2001, I was sitting in the university
center, reading Plath while eating a Chick-fil-A sandwich, when
the following lines from “Tulips” caught my eye:

I watched my teaset, my bureaus of linen, my books

Sink out of sight, and the water went over my head.

I am a nun now, I have never been so pure.

I didn’t want any flowers, I only wanted

To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty.

How free it is, you have no idea how free—

:
 The peacefulness is so big it dazes you…

I wonder if you can see Ophelia in

those lines as clearly as I could that
day thirteen years ago? Granted, my
making the association was
undoubtedly speeded along by the
fact that I had a giant poster of John
Everett Millais’ painting of Ophelia
hanging on the wall behind my desk
in my dorm room. My interest in the
Pre-Raphaelites had started in high
school, before Ophelia meant
anything special to me; the fact that I
collected art of dead girls was just a coincidence of my
temperament. In any case, the Millais painting was what I
pictured when I pictured Ophelia, and in that painting, she’s
floating with her hands turned up, dead eyes open and staring.
“Tulips” is an autobiographical poem about Plath’s stay in a
hospital after an appendectomy, but I didn’t know that at the
time. I assumed she was describing her stay in McLean
Hospital, the psychiatric institution famous for treating people
like Plath, Sexton, Robert Lowell, and David Foster Wallace.
Between the references to flowers, nuns, and drowning—and
most importantly, the big red stamp of MADNESS superimposed
on everything Plath has ever written—I was convinced I was
seeing a conscious allusion to Ophelia.

For an undergraduate poetry analysis paper, such an

assumption doesn’t push things too far. It’s even a bit clever. But
what followed is the surest proof that, despite my teenage
ambitions of getting a Ph.D., I don’t really think the right way for
academia. I make huge intuitive leaps and am too lazy to back
them up with meticulous research. Once I’d spotted Ophelia in
“Tulips”, I started seeing her everywhere. She was on the cover
of the soundtrack to Sofia Coppola’s 1999 film The Virgin
Suicides. She was in each of Poe’s stories about beautiful
women who died young. Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring
invoked her through imagery. Psychologist Mary Piper and
musician Natalie Merchant both treated Ophelia as an essential
:
 archetype of women’s experience. She seemed to haunt the
consciousness of western art and literature; and the reason was
easily understood if you accepted the basic premise of
Shakespeare’s divine powers. In Ophelia, he had given shape
and voice to a new and incredibly important idea. She might as
well be a goddess from classical mythology, so enduring was
her influence.

Unfortunately, the paper I wrote on this subject wasn’t so much

a piece of research, or even analysis, as it was an overly-
excited Tumblr post written a decade before the advent of its
proper medium. I can’t even really reconstruct my hypothesis at
this point. I don’t think it was very coherent, though to be fair, it
isn’t easy to be coherent when you’re nineteen and trying to
make sense of misogyny for the first time.

The title of my paper was “The Aesthetics of Female Suffering”,

which owed a great deal to Poe’s line from “The Philosophy of
Composition”, in which he states that “the death…of a beautiful
woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world.” I
was trying to make sense of the different ways men and women
related to Ophelia. Women seemed to invoke her like a patron
saint; men seemed mostly interested in fetishizing her flowery,
waterlogged corpse. I tried to argue that Ophelia resonated
because Shakespeare had made an extraordinary discovery in
writing her, though I had trouble articulating the nature of that
discovery. I didn’t want to admit that it could be something as
simple as recognizing that emotionally unstable teenage girls
are human beings. It would be depressingly close to admitting
that a male writer would have to be as gifted as Shakespeare in
:
 order to come to a conclusion like that.

About a year ago, I made a post on Tumblr that went viral: it

was a photo set of eight portraits of Ophelia, with text from the
play. I’d never had a post go viral before, and it reminded me
that I wasn’t just imagining things back in the days when I was
seeing the face of Ophelia in my breakfast cereal. She is
incredibly popular, and she resonates with people in a powerful
way. I think it may be for the same reason that I reacted to her
so intensely: she explodes the incredibly harmful myth of the
melodramatic teenage girl.

When Ophelia appears onstage in Act IV, scene V, singing little

songs and handing out imaginary flowers, she temporarily
upsets the entire power dynamic of the Elsinore court. When I
picture that scene, I always imagine Gertrude, Claudius,
Laertes, and Horatio sharing a stunned look, all of them thinking
the same thing: “We fucked up. We fucked up bad.” It might be
the only moment of group self-awareness in the whole play. Not
even the grossest old Victorian dinosaur of a critic tries to
pretend that Ophelia is making a big deal out of nothing. Her
madness and death is plainly the direct result of the alternating
tyranny and neglect of the men in her life. She’s proof that
adolescent girls don’t just go out of their minds for the fun of it.
They’re driven there by people in their lives who should have
known better. I think Shakespeare probably understood that
better than most people do today.

Back when I was still wrestling with my imagined destiny as a

writer stamped in the mold of Plath and Sexton, I felt a huge
ambivalence; I sensed that in donning the mantel of the mad
female poet, I would become something that was easily
dismissed. But if I wrote what I wanted to write, there was no
escaping the label. At the same time, I felt an intense attraction
to women’s writing about mental illness. They wrote the kind of
words that could burn the page they were inscribed on. The
insipid male darlings of the literary establishment were limp as
windsocks on a still day compared to them.

I don’t think I quite managed to make this connection when I

:
 was in college, but it’s perfectly clear to me now what Ophelia
and the confessional poets have in common. It isn’t that their
madness makes them powerful—mental illness doesn’t make
you anything but sick—but when they find their voice and
articulate the experience of their madness, they become
devastatingly powerful. That is why I both longed and feared to
walk in their footsteps. At nineteen, the idea that the more
powerful a woman becomes, the harder society will work to
dismiss her, was a paradox I couldn’t quite wrap my head
around. But it accounts beautifully for why Ophelia means so
much to so many people, and why critics of Hamlet have
ignored her so studiously over the centuries. A girl like Ophelia,
abused, abandoned, and stripped of options, is supposed to
fade away quietly. But why should she? What has she got to
lose? No one has more power to terrify than a person who is
desperate enough to embrace madness and death. Just ask
any young woman who has ever had to deal with people’s
reactions to her self-harm, or her eating disorder.

A few years ago I did a line-by-line analysis of Hamlet on my old

LiveJournal, and when I came to Ophelia’s first scene, it struck
me that her first line in the play is a question that no one
answers. Not so in her final scene. When she is interrupted, she
interrupts right back. Laertes watches her sing and dance and
name the properties of flowers, and observes that “she turns to
favor and to prettiness.” Would Ophelia resonate the way she
does if Shakespeare hadn’t turned her death into a beautiful
picture, adorned with images of flowers and streaming hair and
billowing gowns? In Reviving Ophelia, Mary Pipher describes
anorexia as an attempt to wrestle bodily autonomy back from a
society with punishing standards for women’s bodies: “You want
me to be thin? Fine. I’ll be as thin as I want, and you can’t stop
me.” Ophelia uses the outward forms of beauty and femininity to
articulate her devastating grief, and in doing so, transforms
herself from an object that is pleasant to look upon, into a
person with a story that condemns and reproaches. She
embarrasses, horrifies, and discomfits onlookers. She is
impossible to dismiss; the only way to avoid confronting the
indictment in her words is to turn your back on her completely.
:
 Anne Sexton found that her confessional poetry about her
struggles with mental illness produced similar embarrassment
and distaste in her writing teachers. She responded by writing
the poem “For John, Who Begs Me Not to Enquire Further”:

And if you turn away

because there is no lesson here

I will hold my awkward bowl,

with all its cracked stars shining

like a complicated lie,

and fasten a new skin around it

as if I were dressing an orange

or a strange sun.

It’s not romanticizing mental illness to feel that the poetry or art
or songs that you manage to produce in spite of it is a triumph of
Herculean proportions. There is a special beauty and power and
strangeness in the testimonies of survivors. And Ophelia was a
survivor up to the moment she died.

In 2001, my dormitory walls were plastered with art prints of

every Ophelia painting I could get my hands on. For Christmas
that year, my roommate gave me a gift bag containing a small
Tupperware container full of water. Floating in the water was a
little doll with red hair and a long dress, unmistakably
reminiscent of the Millais print that hung over my desk. Doll
Ophelia was later transferred to a larger bowl, where she floated
serenely atop my bookcase for the rest of the school year. I still
have her, though I’ve since let her dry out and retire to the shelf
with my other dolls.
:
 I no longer worry that having a
distinctive personal voice as a female
writer will make people dismiss me.
The path I chose for my career
means I don’t have to worry that
much about being measured against
Ophelia, John William Waterhouse,
the standards of people who 1910.
dehumanize me. As a student,
frustration and a sense of urgency
drove me to write a fifteen page research paper, not for a grade,
but because I thought it needed to be written. Nowadays, I no
longer have to go to such extremes to make myself heard when
I want to speak in defense of young girls. I don’t have to be
Ophelia anymore; I left Elsinore, and I’ve never looked back.

In my opinion, the most tragic thing about Ophelia is that she

didn’t have that option. When I think of her now, I like to picture
her in the life she could have had, far away from the royal court,
in the company of people who valued and respected her, with a
garden of her own. It’s full of rosemary, pansies, columbines,
daisies, and violets—hundreds of violets—not one of them
withered.

Tags: b.n. harrison literary obsessions mental health

ophelia shakespeare
:
 Y OU M IGH T L IKE…

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Depression Therapy: Lady with Jillian Speak”:
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Strategy Death Female Silence

Brittany Harrison writes fiction about scary children and

blogs about faith, memory, and survival. You can read
more stuff she's written at Language and Light or follow
her on Twitter @bnharrison.

Comments (58)
Sort by: Date Rating Last Activity

jld0340 · 382 weeks ago +50

I don't really know how to put it into words, but I thought this was
fascinating. I love the way it captures that feeling of, "oh, I've just
discovered and fallen in love with [thing]--now [thing] is in
EVERYTHING EVER."

JKL · 382 weeks ago +12

I was at that NCUR conference!

1 reply · active 382 weeks ago

bird_internet · 382 weeks ago +16

:
 One of my lasting grudges from college is the fact that i had a
women's studies paper rejected from NCUR for being "more of a
meditation than a research paper" or something like that. In
retrospect it's probably best that I didn't have to defend it in front of
an audience?

GreenGrasses · 382 weeks ago +46

Ugh this is amazing. Feminism! Shakespeare! Atheism! The

patriarchy in regards to the Western canon! It's got it all!!! But really I
just loved this - any exploration of learning and growing and living as
a woman is interesting, for me this one especially so because it hits
on so many things that are dear to my heart.

cinnatron · 382 weeks ago +92

Oh adolescence, pre-internet daze. I now have words for those

feelings I had while reading Taming of the Shrew. Sure there was
some humor but why can't he just leave her the fuck alone? Does
she have to accept this? Do I have to accept this? No and no,
teenage self. Keep on shrewing.

2 replies · active 382 weeks ago

juliadomna · 382 weeks ago +8

This is simply phenomenal! Your observations are so spot on and, as

a fellow Pre-Raphaelite fan (as many of us are), I salute you.

RuncibleSpoon · 382 weeks ago +65

I was similarly Shakespeare obsessed as a teen, and Ophelia

resonated with me with a similar set of revelations. To me it seemed
like the overall interpretation/criticism of the character was wrong,
and sure I was in high school and not a literary critic but so many
men seemed to see her as tragic and innocent and essentially fluffy.
They didn't seem to get the spark or the power. This bothered me
enough to compose a long poem, most of which was probably not
good and happily forgotten, but there was a bit that went "enmeshed
in these ideals/a veil of innocence/like thick tulle/so stiff there's little
left of you" so, there's that.

I also re-wrote a good chunk of Hamlet where she poisons everyone

:
 and leaves, as a literary response journal entry. I was a fun high
schooler.

3 replies · active 345 weeks ago

Mrs_Peel · 382 weeks ago +66

"My advisor called it 'fascinatingly close to being convincing'".

I have to start working this phrase into all my legal arguments at

work.

KayHay · 382 weeks ago +99

Hemingway’s suicide was just a footnote to his biography; Plath and

Sexton’s suicides defined them.

Thank you! Mention that Ariel was the first book of poetry you bought
and people glance surreptitiously at your wrists. Meanwhile dude
writers in the south rhapsodize about Hemmingway and no one
questions their gun ownership.

Dr LadyBusiness · 382 weeks ago +29

Hellllllp I love this article so much

I'm currently teaching an undergraduate class in confessional poetry,

and it is startling to see how vivid and real Plath and Sexton are for
my students, especially women students. They have not lost any of
their power (while, I would argue, their male counterparts have).

1 reply · active 382 weeks ago

Roninette · 382 weeks ago +8

If you like Ophelia, this essay feels mandatory.

http://www.wordriot.org/wordpress/wp-content/uplo... It's
FANTASTIC! As was this article, naturally. :)

celery · 382 weeks ago +16

Wow, this is beautiful! Thank you for writing it. This seems like
blasphemy to say now, but I've never really found Ophelia extremely
:
 interesting before now, despite being a Shakespeare-loving English
major. But this hit me in the heart AND hits my love of literary
analysis.

I also had completely forgotten that Hemmingway committed suicide,

and I am outraged at the unfairness.

lmdunc · 382 weeks ago +1

This is really fantastic. Flashbacks to my college days included.

Thank you for sharing this!!!

hergart · 382 weeks ago +11

So not only did I identify strongly with your early college self, but my
early college self perked up when you mentioned the withered
violets. My username is taken from another lady poet's novel,
HERmione by H.D., and I put together this whole gallery of flowers
with quotes from it when I was studying it in college and I didn't think
of Ophelia ohmygod I have to go reread that book again.

Edited because I was so excited to read the book again, I forgot to

finish my comment. And to add a link to the gallery if you want proof
of my nerdiness: https://flic.kr/y/c1thHP

2 replies · active 382 weeks ago

KayHay · 382 weeks ago +28

My first Boyfriend of Significance decided to break up with me by

asking me to read the "Get thee to a nunnery" scene with him.

3 replies · active 382 weeks ago

bethanykj · 382 weeks ago +2

That. Last. Paragraph. Really the whole essay was just amazingly
good and thanks for writing it.

1 reply · active 382 weeks ago

CleverManka · 382 weeks ago +17

A few years ago I did a line-by-line analysis of Hamlet on my old

LiveJournal
:
 5 replies · active 381 weeks ago

spaceturtle · 382 weeks ago +16

Thank you for writing this essay--everything in here is giving me

nostalgic feelings. But this bit especially:

"Unfortunately, the paper I wrote on this subject wasn’t so much a

piece of research, or even analysis, as it was an overly-excited
Tumblr post written a decade before the advent of its proper
medium. I can’t even really reconstruct my hypothesis at this point. I
don’t think it was very coherent, though to be fair, it isn’t easy to be
coherent when you’re nineteen and trying to make sense of
misogyny for the first time."

This was pretty much every paper I wrote in college, culminating in a

massive, typo-ridden rant (i.e., undergraduate thesis) on gender
politics in Sailor Moon. I had so much enthusiasm back then, and
found it intoxicating to be able to apply literary theory to my personal
obsessions (and get good grades for it!), but I don't think I really
knew how to construct a good argument, nor did I truly understand
the value of proofreading, until well after graduation.

3 replies · active 321 weeks ago

The Elitist Semicolon · 382 weeks ago +9

I saw the Millais painting in an exhibit on art and nature in Berlin in

2004 and I spent at least half an hour staring at it. It has an odd
luminescent quality that gave me a very powerful urge to climb into
the painting.

1 reply · active 382 weeks ago

Apollonia · 382 weeks ago +6

:
 This was just staggeringly beautiful. As a life long Hamlet fan, this so
perfectly illuminated the confusing feelings I'd always had about
Ophelia. Thank you for writing it and thank you Toast for existing so
we can feast on wonderful pieces like this.

voltairineballis · 382 weeks ago +19

Man, this article brought back memories. I wish for you, that instead
of being at a small liberal arts college surrounded by dudes who
loved Cormac McCarthy, you had attended my small, private
_womens'_ liberal arts college, where the professors were experts at
coaching bright women through grappling with misogyny for the first
time, and where our legendary Shakespeare scholar would have dug
into her desk drawer that was stuffed with nothing by identical red
pens (refreshed at the beginning of every semester) and said
brightly, "but you don't have a thesis!" And then underscored and
scratched your essay and argued with you until you spit one out in a
fit of exasperation. Would your life be better or worse now if you'd
had that experience? I have no idea, but if I could I would give said
experience to everyone who wanted it, and a few people who don't.
It was transformative.
I loved this article same as everyone else, and it reminds me of why I
love to study literature, and why I love the Toast. Thank you!

2 replies · active 382 weeks ago

saffiedarling · 382 weeks ago +6

I am fighting the urge to send this to my old Plath-obsessed English

teacher who valiantly tried to teach me Plath (and Hamlet!) when I
was 17 and 100% allergic to poetry. (Sorry Mel! And sorry I refused
to hand in drafts of any of my essays. And for writing my major
comparative project on two completely random unrelated books, that
was stupid.)

12 years later, I suspect that Plath's work would resonate with me a

lot more, so I might have to give it another try.

Elizabeth · 382 weeks ago +2

Beautiful essay! Thank you :).

In addition to writing fiction about teenage girls and blog posts about
:
 media, memory, and survival, you`d make an excellent
psychoanalyst (particularly of the Jungian variety)... just saying as a
convert from publishing to social work (who still writes on the side).

cleo · 382 weeks ago +14

It’s not romanticizing mental illness to feel that the poetry or art or
songs that you manage to produce in spite of it is a triumph of
Herculean proportions. There is a special beauty and power and
strangeness in the testimonies of survivors.
This.

Costanza · 382 weeks ago +2

Well I can only say that reading this was quite the experience. I have
been obsessed with Ophelia for a decade, I have been reading and
writing on her for a decade, and never could I figure out why I was so
interested in her - as it turns out, you have just accidentally solved
that mystery for me. Thank you for a rare moment of epic, Joycean
epiphany.
And, if this was to make you interested in anything I wrote on the
subject, here's a paper I wrote during my Undegraduate:
https://nottsaesthetes.wordpress.com/2013/11/27/j...

arlyndab · 382 weeks ago +42

This is wonderful. I admit to never having really gotten the motivation

for Ophelia's mental instability until recently. The best "production" of
Hamlet I ever saw was a student-directed single scene, the nunnery
scene, for directing class. Claudius and Polonius had hidden
themselves "above," (on the balcony) for their eavesdropping.
Hamlet was very physical with Ophelia, pinning her to the stage and
nearly raping her. At the height of that commotion, Polonius steps
out from behind the balcony curtain to look down at Hamlet and
Ophelia. Hamlet's back is to him, but Ophelia, pinned down and
struggling, sees her father. Their eyes lock for a long moment as she
pleads silently for help, and Polonius...steps back behind the curtain.
That is the moment she loses her stability, and it's crystal clear why.
[Edit: And for me, it completely rewrites her mad speech because,
for her, THIS is the moment that Polonius dies. He dies as her
guardian and protector, and his actual death gets mixed up in her
mind with this moment.]
:
 deleted6501527 · 382 weeks ago +40

"She’s proof that adolescent girls don’t just go out of their minds for
the fun of it. They’re driven there by people in their lives who should
have known better."

THANK YOU.

I hope you recognize the absolutely heroic level of insight and

courage it took you to figure this out. Everything in our culture is
weighted towards obscuring it, and virtually no one acknowledges it -
the people who are complicit in driving young women mad won't do
it, and the women they drive mad usually can't. Realizing it, and then
having that realization validated by an external source, is vindicating
in a way that few things short of divine revelation can be. No wonder
you were so besotted.

Really, this is such a wonderful post. I'm grateful to you for writing it
and to the Toast for sharing it.

Mary · 382 weeks ago +17

I was just thinking, "Woah, this is really interesting and lovely," and
wittering about Portia vs. Ophelia as models of female power, and
then I realized I USED TO READ YOUR LIVEJOURNAL. Religiously.
You were literally the first blog I read whose author I didn't know
personally.

God, I love the internet.

1 reply · active 382 weeks ago

tabkey1 · 381 weeks ago +7

Ophelia is resurrected as a badass protagonist in the 'Choose Your

Own Adventure Hamlet' book! Which works exactly as it sounds. I
got mine from Amazon for Christmas. Yes I am a Shakespeare geek
and trying to write a research paper on it...just because I can..I love
this post and think you should seek out Shakespeareacademia and
crush the form to your will ;)

enterreturn19 · 381 weeks ago +3

:
 Brilliant. Reminded me of this really incredible new composition
called "Let Me Tell You" commissioned by badass Canadian soprano
Barbara Hannigan. The text takes every word given to Ophelia by
Shakespeare and reorders them to retell the story from her own
perspective. I won't say more- you should watch her interview!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IxKkRWTiWDo

welltemperedwriter · 381 weeks ago +5

I am similarly obsessed with the myth of Persephone, which I have

written twice and acted once, and now I want to write it a third time
and incorporate some of this thinking. In the myth it's Persephone's
mother who goes mad, but the two goddesses are sometimes
conceived as two aspects of a single entity...

1 reply · active 381 weeks ago

Angela · 378 weeks ago +5

You know what, though? I actually will stake out ground here, and
say no, my madness does make me strong, not just sick. My mental
illness is not only crippling but also uplifting. I see the world better for
it, it helps and hurts in similar measures. It is not uncomplicated
sickness but rather a part of me that cannot be denied, and that
society has tried to deny. Men are allowed madness (and for that
matter, extreme idiosyncrasy that somehow is never labeled mental
illness) as part of their genius. I should be allowed the same.

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Emma · 371 weeks ago +4

I am absolutely floored by this piece. Ophelia has been very much

my patron saint as I've been ill. I did an assignment in art school last
year relating her to that very excerpt of Plath's Tulips.
:
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