Necrophelia and the strange case of afterlife
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Date
2013
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Adam Mickiewicz University
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Abstract
Drawing on Allan Edgar Poe’s provocative statement that “The death ... of a beautiful woman is,
unquestionably, the most poetic topic in the world” (1951: 369), I will focus on the pivotal role of
Shakespeare’s Ophelia in attesting to this assertion. Ophelia’s drowning is probably the most
recognizable female death depicted by Shakespeare. Dating back to Gertrude’s “reported version”
of the drowning, representations of Ophelia’s eroticized death have occupied the minds of Western
artists and writers. Their necrOphelian fantasies materialized as numerous paintings, photographs
and literary texts. It seems that Ophelia’s floating dead body is also at the core of postmodern
thanatophiliac imagination, taking shape in the form of conventionalized representations,
such as: video scenes available on YouTube, amateur photographs in bathtubs posted on photo
sharing sites, reproductions and remakes of classical paintings (e.g. John Everett Millais), and
contemporary art exhibitions in museums. These references will demonstrate that new cyber story
– digital afterlife – is being built around the figure of Shakespearean Ophelia, unearthing the
sexual attraction of the lifeless female body.
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Ophelia, popular culture, YouTube, feminist criticismv, representations of the body
Citation
Studia Anglica Posnaniensia, vol. 48.2-3 (2013), pp. 103-123