In 1892, Sir John Everett Millais finished Ophelia, a Pre-Raphaelite painting depicting Ophelia’s drowning scene from Shakespeare’s Hamlet. In the one hundred and twenty eight years since then, this scene and particularly this painting have been discussed in great detail. In her article, “Framing Ophelia,” Kaara Peterson states that in the mid 19th century, “Ophelia was the single most popular literary subject for artists, with more than fifty portrayals recorded in exhibition catalogues” (3). Considering this fascination with and romanticization of Ophelia’s death scene, I want to highlight the differences in its treatment, with how the deaths of Indigenous women that occur in the Red River, and across North America, are handled and portrayed, if at all. To do this, I employ digital media and adapt Sir John Everett Millais’ painting Ophelia, but supplant Ophelia with an Indigenous woman in a red dress with woodland beading on it; by altering and adjusting other aspects of the painting, adding braided sweetgrass clutched in her fist, for example, the original painting is still very recognizable, but the new Indigenous additions change its impression and allow for a comparison and introspection. By analysing my adapted image and employing it as a tool for decolonization, I want to highlight the obsession with Ophelia’s death scene in Shakespeare’s Hamlet versus the inattention towards the deaths of Indigenous women, revealing how differently the narratives have been framed around these two occurrences and recognizing the racial intolerances that continue to persist.

The painting’s scene is imagined by Millais and solely based on Gertrude’s speech in 4.7 of Hamlet. Gertrude insists Ophelia’s death occurs “in a glassy stream. / Therewith fantastic garlands did she make / Of crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples” (4.7.191-193); the controversy and fascination among Shakespeare scholars stem from the fact that “not being a witness to the drowning, Gertrude cannot be an “authority” about the events she relates” (Peterson 6). Shakespeare purposely shrouds this death in mystery by keeping it off-stage and having this account be in direct conflict with what the gravediggers say in the next scene. When one Gravedigger states that Ophelia will be having a Christian burial, indicating she did not suicide, the other Gravedigger asks, “How can that be, unless she drowned herself in her own defense?” (5.1.6-7) and they argue back and forth about the semantics of the drowning. Gertrude alludes to a fall (4.7.199-200) and they allude to suicide, but regardless, this literary character Ophelia, and the attention her death scene garners, is a direct departure from society’s disdain of Indigenous women and the apathy concerning their ongoing deaths in the Red River and beyond. Touching on Western culture’s preoccupation with these kinds of scenes, Peterson includes an infamous quote from Edgar Allan Poe, “the death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world” (Peterson 1); however, I think it’s more plausible that Poe was exclusively referring to “white femininity” when he includes “a beautiful woman.” A woman that looks like Ophelia and as seemingly virginal, innocent, and fragile-looking as Ophelia as well. Indigenous women who are murdered or missing do not garner this kind of attention and having my rendering interacting with the original painting on many levels highlights that disparity.

To highlight the differences in their portrayals and reception as victims, I change specific details on my “redux” rendering; I have changed the pale face of Ophelia into an Indigenous woman’s face, but I purposely chose a face, stoic in its demeanour, that was painted with the Murdered Missing and Indigenous Woman (MMIW) red hand symbol on it. I want my woman’s face to be fierce and unapologetic, and not look as pathetic and as complacent as does the Ophelia that Millas painted. I include several Anishinaabe elements to make it even more clear that she was Indigenous. In my “redux,” instead of a bunch of flowers, she is clutching braided sweetgrass in her right hand; when sweetgrass is burned, a ceremonial smudge is created that heals the spirit and body. I added this component to include the idea that she was spiritual and connected to her culture and to her people. The red dress I overlay onto Ophelia’s pale blue dress is also a symbol of the MMIW campaign, and with its added beading, it makes it clear as well that she is Indigenous. I coloured the water, and surrounding foliage, darker and took away the colourful flowers nearby, to make the whole scene look more foreboding and sinister than the original painting. I hope these changes would show that my woman’s death was not at her own hand or from a clumsy fall, but that it indicated she was the victim of a brutal crime. Even so, this is something that Ophelia and MMIW have in common; their deaths are both scrutinized and examined to see if their own actions, or even their own sexualities/actions, caused their own deaths.

In her article “Representation as a Technology of Violence,” Paulina Garcia-Del Moral explains, “in Canada, more than 600 Aboriginal women have either gone missing or are thought to have been murdered in the communities across the country in the past two and half decades… Their bodies have been found in ditches along highways, in swamps, and on a ‘pig farm’” (35). This issue is so resonant with the refusal to see Indigenous women as people, and to reduce them and their deaths to speculation about their culpability in their final hours. This “representation is never innocent: power is at the core of the construction of what is newsworthy and, when it comes to the representation of violence against women, newsworthiness is invariably linked to the discursive production of ‘worthy’ and ‘unworthy’ victims,” continues Garcia-Del Moral (35), and this type of narrative is what has allowed the violence against Indigenous women to continue as the victims, in their representations, seem to be culpable for their own deaths. The questions surrounding Ophelia’s virginity also show the propensity to only mourn innocent women; to this Peterson writes, “but that this one aspect of her life (death) has become essentially her entire story through a kind of synecdochic process-the part represents the whole. A ventriloquized history becomes overwhelmingly the ‘story of Ophelia’” (8) and this is true of MMIW as well, where their deaths become their whole life’s narrative and solely how they are remembered.

On my image, I include Gertrude’s lines, “Her clothes spread wide, / And mermaid-like awhile they bore her up” (4.7.200-201); this part of Gertrude’s eighteen-line speech does not include as much about the scene’s surroundings as the preceding lines, rather it focuses on Ophelia. I also do my best in my “redux” to obscure the willow shown in the Millais painting, as it seems to play a part in how Ophelia drowns and I want my image to be focus on my Indigenous woman; “An envious sliver broke” (198) conveys that as she was hanging on the branch and partly “blaming” the branch when it broke. “Her clothes spread wide” (200) could have been indicating that her fall into the stream was dramatic enough to cause her dress to spread out away from her body; however, I include it in my “redux” because the action of both clothes and body spreading wide can indicate rape and assault, which is how I want to frame the death scene for my Indigenous character. The other line I include from Hamlet, also supports how my MMIW is shown in the scene; Gertrude continues, “And mermaid-like awhile they bore her up” (201), speaking to these clothes keeping her afloat on top of the water, like a mermaid. Many MMIW are found partially submerged in the Red River, and there is more speculation on their manner of death than there is concern for just how many Indigenous women are dying at/near this river. The ones that are fully submerged are rarely found unless they “drag the Red,” which is the local description of when authorities use divers and technology to check the river’s bottom for bodies. My “redux” has an Indigenous woman that should be found as she is not submerged; I want this to serve as a metaphor to call attention to the fact that the issue of MMIW is widespread and out in the open, and yet not scrutinized enough by the media, police, or public. This is a direct contradiction to the scrutiny given to the Ophelia Millais painted: as Peterson notes, “For over a century, it is precisely the dead, beautiful, painterly Ophelia that gets articulated over and over again in the ‘high’ art tradition, coincident with the fairly regular ascendancy of Shakespeare as a figure of vast (multi) cultural importance” (19). By using the Millais painting, an extension of Shakespeare’s literary brand, and adapting it with Indigenous symbols and the MMIW campaign, I hope to call attention to this articulation disparity between the two paintings and the two cultures they represent. As a tool of decolonization and re-appropriation, illuminating this Indigenous plight through the works of Shakespeare is a step towards healing and reconciliation.

Works Cited

Garcia-Del Moral, Paulina. “Representation as a Technology of Violence: On the Representation of the Murders and Disappearances of Aboriginal Women in Canada and Women in Ciudad Juarez.” Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies / Revue Canadienne Des Études Latino-Américaines et Caraïbes, vol. 36, no. 72, 2011, pp. 33–62. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/43599274.

Peterson, Kaara. “Framing Ophelia: Representation and the Pictorial Tradition.” Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal, vol. 31, no. 3, 1998, pp. 1–24. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/44029808.

Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Edited by Barbara Mowat and Paul Werstine, Simon and Schuster Paperbacks, 2012.