Reading and performing at once: Ophelia

Abstract

Since Max Patrick (1953) called them as ‘sentimental’ and ‘erotical’, two kinds of opposite critical appreciations about Ophelia may be recognized in Hamlet, as a play where nothing seems to be exactly what it seems. The first appreciation (also called ‘traditional’), presents Ophelia as an instrument for the plot by her father Polonius to keep his power and influence in the court of King Claudius, being inconditional.  The second one (also mentioned as ‘romantic’) shows Ophelia as a young woman who decides to be free from his father’s tirany living her true love for Hamlet, in flesh and blood. Indeed, in her silence of madness and death, she gives effective reality to the virtual content by Prince Hamlet in his soliloquies.
So a tragic Ophelia, far from being version of a universal archetype reproducing patriarchal values, may be also read as the place where indecidibles (in Derridean word) are put in tension without fixed resolution. Because Ophelia as a character cannot be considered ‘as a whole’; there is no concept for her presence or absence in the scenes of the play. She is the Otherness/Alterity from a spectral phenomenology (Derrida again), reacting against every trying to get at her.  If -since her flowers, poems and puns- we could think about Ophelia as an artifact in a foucaultian sense, she would be a girl who, far from feminine stereotypes, becomes the place where the subjectivation process begins, opening new ways to the sense multiplicity, proliferating.