Things to keep, things to kill: some thoughts on “Ophelia aesthetics”

“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.” -A Unified Theory of Ophelia, B.N. Harrison

When I was eighteen, I designed the costumes for my high school’s production of Hamlet, and as I stood at the back of the auditorium watching my friend playing Ophelia jump through the stage trapdoor to her watery fate in a schoolgirl uniform I got chills down my spine. From there, she kept following me. On a family vacation to London I stood transfixed in front of Millais’ painting at the Tate; I made a friend lie in a bathtub full of wet grass while I filmed her, and one Halloween I turned one room of a party into a “Queer Ophelia” themed installation, complete with a shrine of Virginia Woof books and water projected on the walls.

When I saw B.N. Harrison’s article A Unified Theory of Ophelia: On Women, Writing and Mental Illness popping up on tumblr I was thrilled that anyone else was as excited as I was about my favourite Shakespeare character. Harrison left her Ophelia phase behind long ago: I’m still emerging, disentangling myself. It wasn’t until recently, seven years into my obsession that I was able to articulate what she meant. I scribbled on the margin of a drawing “Ophelia is the symbol of tragic girlhood, projected and embodied, destructive and nurturing.”

To Harrison, Ophelia’s expression of mental illness placed in the context of culturally sanctioned femininity makes her grief compelling, and “impossible to dismiss,” and it is this that gives her her power. She is a way to be heard, a refuge. She represents not only her specific character, but what I’ve started calling “Ophelia aesthetics,” which encompasses the range of creative and curatorial processes, including self-presentation, practiced by girls as a feminized, aestheticized form of channeling trauma.

Ophelia aesthetics relies on the idea that girlhood necessarily contains trauma in the recognition that you will not be shielded from violence. Maybe you realize this when you’re five, or seventeen, or maybe it’s a long slow unravelling all your life. This framework creates a powerful means for girls to cope with and express traumatic experiences, because it creates a shield by providing a shared, surrogate iconography. A soft visual language of flowers and long hair and subtle bleeding and bruises that codes girl-world a level deeper.

In all this Ophelia is not a solitary figure, she is a constellation of images and ideas. Ophelia aesthetics fits neatly into the self-aware girl culture so dominant on the internet, rooted in a socially approved femininity. Examples include Lana Del Rey, Audrey Wollen’s Sad Girl Theory, and various tumblrs by teen girls posting pastels and knives and sad eyes. They hover between positive reclamation and glamourization of trauma, violence and mental illness through the aesthetics of girl culture. There is always something disturbing or unsettling about the parts as a whole, although individual fragments might seem innocuously flowery.

I’m drawn to this idea, this archetype that I see coming up again and again not just in my own art but in that of a lot of other girls. The deeper I wade into Ophelia’s aesthetics, the more I feel their complications and the more I mistrust their ability to channel the forcefulness that draws me to them.

It’s an aesthetics of response, that can either spit itself back up or rearrange its parts into something flowering and poisonous, but it always, always loops back to thing that made you want to scream in the first place. It doesn’t want you to build outward, to build something new. It’s language structure is a self-reflexive one that powerfully addresses itself as a subject, that is “tragic girlhood, projected and embodied, destructive and nurturing” but that can feel limiting as a maker-of-things, when you want to use the visual language you communicate with to address things beyond your own identity.

There is a really exciting emphasis in the last few years (at least in a corner of the internet) on valuing the cultural productions of girls, especially teenage girls. Sometimes I get tired of the way that this plays out because I feel there is a focus, stemming from an external cultural pressure, to defend these things as essentially good, positive, and as expressions of identity. This is the lens through which we view the work of all young female artists who want to use this kind of language. They are in possession of their own unique visual language, but are expected only use it only to address their own being, not the diverse range of content available to artists using a more “neutral” vocabulary.

I want to be able to accept that like all powerful cultural products the products of “girl culture” (online and irl) are complex and often contradictory, and that art is not its maker. I want to make and see work in which the imagery associated with girlhood is not bound to addressing only itself but is a much richer tool. The initially radical idea of the legitimacy of the feminine is not enough if it doesn’t give you a better way to speak about the rest of the world.

I think that art that purports to directly express identity and self, as opposed to an understanding of the world as influenced by ones own social position runs several risks. One is that its under an enormous amount of pressure to be positive and valuable: This leads to things like contorted justifications for upholding socially sanctioned white femininity, or explanations of why self-destructive behaviour on the part of teen girls is actually an act of power. When this goodness by virtue of self-identity is your lens, it undersells girls ability to show their understanding of the world in all its overlapping reality, complexity and fucked-up-ness. It narrows the window to show things with ambiguity rather than didacticism. It discourages girls from synthesizing this visual language with ideas from other realms beyond their personal, literal, direct experience of the world.

(via Saturday Morning Cartoons: Baopu #15) by Yao Xiao