Although Arthur Hughes may casually allude to Redgrave's painting in his Ophelia (1852) with the trunk of the tree and the bank of the stream, the resemblance ends there. Hughes depicts Ophelia as a sickly, pale, almost girlish figure who looks down into the water and idly drops blossoms into the stream. Elaine Showalter's distaste for the work is obvious; the painting "shows a tiny waiflike creature--a sort of Tinker Bell Ophelia--in a filmy white gown, perched on a tree trunk by the stream. The overall effect is softened, sexless, and hazy, although the straw in her hair resembles a crown of thorns." Ophelia is a "juxtaposition of childlike femininity and Christian martyrdom" (84-5). But then perhaps Hughes, like most Victorian men, preferred his women childlike, ill, and therefore dependent, as Bram Djistra suggests as he evaluates the painting: we find Ophelia "at the edge of the brook where Shakespeare placed her. In a state of madness and anguish, she has crowned herself with reeds as she watches the flowers she drops in the water float away in anticipation of her own imminent fate. She is emaciated and tubercular and therefore has all the requisite attributes of the icons of illness. Consumptive fever has heightened the contrast between the pallor of her skin and her red lips and the deathlike shadows around her eyes. In the issue of The Art Journal in which the engraving . . . was first published, an enthusiastic commentator remarked on Hughes' singular success in bringing a 'look of vacancy' into Ophelia's 'sweet, child-like face'" (43).

Hébert's portrait of Ophelia is charged with a latent sexuality. The dark, hollow eyes stare defiantly at the viewer and suggest a pain and betrayal beyond her ability to cope. Dijkstra quotes the French magazine Je Sais Tout which reproduced this picture with "an especially telling caption": this Ophelia is "truly that helplessly abandoned ideal creature, whose hallucinating eyes see nothing more than what is within, and who, hair loosened and streaming down, will in a few moments enter gently into the stream which will carry her--a cut flower among other cut flowers--away to that world beyond whereof her madness is already an expression" (43). This stark portrayal of madness and sensuality is among the most striking of the various pictures of Ophelia.

The Ophelia of Madeleine Lemaire, painted in the 1880's, presents a strikingly different interpretation of the character. Breasts bared, she looks lasciviously into the distance as she steps into the stream. One has little doubt that this Ophelia's madness is related not just to grief but to frustrated sexuality. Dijkstra says that Lemaire depicted Shakespeare's heroine in the precarious, tottering stance introduced a century earlier by Sir Joshua Reynolds in certain of his full-length studies of society ladies. In addition, she placed her, as was generally customary, among the reeds and flowers at the water's edge. But what was far from customary was that she made Ophelia leer with the glowering light of a vampire in her eyes, thus emphasizing the sexual origin of her madness--an aspect further accentuated by the very undecorous fashion in which her dress has slipped off her shoulders to reveal her breasts. Male painters, in contrast, preferred to show Ophelia fully clothed to emphasize the heroic nature of her choice of madness and death over a state of dangerous arousal. (44)

This is Dr. Hugh Diamond's photograph of a young female patient taken during the 1850's in an asylum for the insane. The image, reproduced by Elaine Showalter in "Representing Ophelia," is Plate 32 in The Face of Madness: Hugh W. Diamond and the Origin of Psychiatric Photography, ed. Sander Gilman. The image of the sexually obsessed Ophelia had so thoroughly saturated the popular imagination that the fictional character and the real madwoman had become one, as in this photograph where the young woman has been garlanded in flowers and leaves for her portrait. "The iconography of the Romantic Ophelia" was so fixed in nineteenth-century culture that, according to Showalter, one way for a young woman to express her psychological anguish was to imitate Ophelia, and "where the women themselves did not willingly throw themselves into Ophelia-like postures, asylum superintendents, armed with the new technology of photography, imposed the costume, gesture, props, and expression of Ophelia upon them" (86). As Oscar Wilde had observed, life imitates art--at least in the incident of this young woman.