This article accompanies the fable
Splendour in the Grass



Ophelia

Shakespeare's Ophelia, the poster girl for doomed women, has inspired endless speculation as to whether or not she committed suicide, when she "fell in the weeping brook" and was drowned. I'm with the gravediggers on this one.

Shelley's wife, Harriet, chose to drown herself in the Serpentine, following the path set by Ophelia. It would be the path taken by Virginia Woolf in 1941 and, although it was likely not a suicide, Natalie Wood, who appeared in the 1961 film Splendor in the Grass, was drowned in 1981.

Ophelia's fate appealed to the pre-Raphaelite painters. Shaped like a tombstone, this is John Everett Millais' Ophelia (c. 1851-52) which is in the Tate Britain. Below is a close-up - the luminous corpse recalls Robert Browning's My Last Duchess (1842): "That's my last Duchess painted on the wall,/ Looking as if she were alive..."

Drowning as a motif affected a number of Victorians. Shelley himself drowned in 1822, in a boating accident. Elizabeth Barrett Browning lost her beloved brother Edward the same way in 1840 off Babbacombe Bay and partly blamed herself.

It was in the popular imagination that Ophelia was best known - after all, everyone knew young women who went crazy or fell into prostitution after being seduced and abandoned, and who threw themselves off Waterloo Bridge. Although there were famous examples of this, such as Mary Furley in 1844, which angered and inspired many poets and writers, the legend far outran reality. Some of the favorite "falling women" of the era included Sappho and The Lady of Shalott. In Dickens' novels, drowning is a popular motif, although it is all men who drown and fallen women who think about it.

"To be, or not to be?"-- Ere I decide,
I should be glad to know that which is being…
For me, I sometimes think that Life is Death,
Rather than Life a mere affair of breath.
    - Byron, Don Juan, Canto the Ninth