Representation of Оphelia over time

Abstract

The article discusses two works of art – William Shakespeare’s eminent play “Hamlet” written during the Elizabethan period and a modern film “Ophelia” made by a female director Claire McCarthy in the second decade of the 21^st century – in 2018, and adapted from Lisa Klein’s young adult book with the same name. The article looks at these cultural products through the lens of a literary theory called Cultural materialism that came into being in 1985. The main objective of this paper is to study how a minor character Ophelia is portrayed in these two works and explain how a change of perspectives from a male character to a female one became possible nowadays. It has been found that the second wave of feminism, the emergence of feminist literary criticism in the 1960s-70s and a shift of attention from ‘androtexts’ (books written by men) to ‘gynotexts’ (books written by women) had a great influence on the perception of women in society and art. Moreover, the development of gynocriticism encouraged the public to recognize and acknowledge works produced by female authors and change the attitude to them. Summing up the results, it can be concluded that because of the reasons mentioned above it is possible now to place Ophelia at the center of the story and look at the events of the play from Ophelia’s point of view.