At the Margins: Ophelia in Modern and Contemporary Photography

Abstract

Displaced to the somber back room of a bar in Miller’s letter quoted above; vanishing down the long corridors of a castle in Laurence Olivier’s film; or partially submerged in a bath or in a river following the style inaugurated by John Everett Millais, Ophelia lives at the margins of our memory of Shakespeare’s play, as liminal and peripheral as one of Hamlet’s subplots.⁴

As for Ophelia, she is inseparable in my mind from a tow-haired girl who was sitting in the back room and whom I had passed on my way to the toilet every now and then. I remember the pathetic, stupefied look on this girl’s face; when later I saw somewhere an illustration of Ophelia floating face up, the hair braided and tangled in the pond lilies, I thought of the girl in the back room of the bar, her eyes glazed, her hair strawlike, as Ophelia’s.

(Henry Miller, “A Letter to Hamlet”)¹

Le mystère — si l’on veut à tout prix, pour les besoins du discours, donner une figure à ce qui, par définition, n’en pa — peut être représenté comme une marge.

(marginalia, Derrida’s Marges de la philosophie)²

Ofelia: Me gusta. Es mi oportunidad. Nunca tuve buenas frases. Me robaron el papel. Ni siquiera muero en escena.

(Angelica Liddell, La falsa suicida)³