Ophelia Reimagined: Representations of Female Suicide in Ibsen&;#39;s Plays

• Main Authors: Casey Ru-Jin Hsu, 徐儒瑾
• Other Authors: Louis Lo
• Language: en_US
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/ayw8g4

碩士 === 國立臺北科技大學 === 應用英文系碩士班 === 103 === Suicide was once regarded as “English Malady” in the eighteenth-century Britain. However, it was considered as “Female Malady” in the nineteenth-century. Taking up a historical approach, this thesis will explore how female suicide is represented in nineteenth-century writings, by tracing its changes back to the early modern when Ophelia is reported drowned by the queen in Hamlet. By focusing on how suicide is being imagined and portrayed in literature and paintings, this thesis goes back to such ‘classic’ female suicides as Lucretia and Ophelia, and examines how these images are ‘recycled’ and transformed in nineteenth-century paintings, including John Everett Millais’s Ophelia (1852), Eugene Delacroix’s The Death of Ophelia (1853), Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s The First Madness of Ophelia (1864), Augustus Egg’s Past and Present, and two Ibsen’s plays, Rosmersholm (1886) and Hedda Gabler (1890). The issues of female suicide will be analyzed through critical theory including psychoanalysis, gender theory and Nietzsche-influenced criticism. The Introduction gives a survey of history of female suicide, gender differences in suicide and theoretical framework of the thesis. The key concept governing this study is that representation of Ophelia’s death functions as a sign, which was used as a model for other female suicides in the nineteenth century. Chapter 1 examines female suicide in the earlier modern period, including Lucretia represented in Lucas Cranach the Elder’s painting of 1533 and Isabella in Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (1592). It shows how women’s suicide is reproduced and reimagined. Starting from their suicides, the drowning of Ophelia severs as a motivation to discussion of suicide and how suicide is gendered. Chapter 2 presents how drowning of Ophelia was reinterpreted in the nineteenth century by comparing Augustus Egg’s paintings Past and Present (1858) and drownings in Ibsen’s Rosmersholm (1886). Chapter 3 discusses Ibsen’s other play, Hedda Gabler (1890). In contrast to other drowned female suicides, Hedda as a pregnant woman commits a double, ideal and paradoxical suicide. Struggling with various causations, these female characters display the aesthetic of suicide on their stage.