Ophelia and “Vocality”

In recent years, questions about female vocality, female singers, and the feminine qualities attributed to musical performance and to music itself have emerged as a diverse yet coherent body of concerns for feminist literary critics and musicologists alike. Much of the resulting work, which I characterize here as “feminist hermeneutics,” relies on a psychoanalytic model of creativity according to which the artist consolidates himself against inchoate matter—sound, color, or line—and against the existential dread of not-being. The fundamental assumption is that Freudian and post-Freudian models of individual development may be mapped onto the creative process; or (to put it the other way round) that the creative process recapitulates the developmental task of individuation, the subject’s sense of an individual self and of mastery over the Other. The artist’s presumed antagonism against his “feminine” material in this model resonates with narrative paradigms that align “Woman” with obstacles to be overcome—a structural presumption summarized in Teresa de Lauretis’s oft-quoted remark that “the hero is always male.” The result is a system of identification and projection according to which artist, protagonist, and audience share the position of an individual subject confronting a (feminized) other in the artwork. This essay will examine one element of that interpretive model, namely, the troping of the indispensable object of mastery as a female voice. The particular voice will be that of Ophelia: not in her muchdiscussed capacity as performer of mad songs, but as the singer of fragmentary death songs, “snatches of old lauds,” as she floated to her “muddy death.”

Even at the outset, when Ophelia’s death is first recounted in Act IV of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, there exists a small but significant gap between the real event of the death (real, that is, within the play’s fictional universe) and its representation. Although the poetic beauty of Queen Gertrude’s narrative and the pathos of the events described imbue the story with an effect of vivid truth, the content of this narrative must logically be no more than an imaginary reconstruction of unseen events: any witness to Ophelia’s leisurely death would surely have intervened to stop it.