Ophellia_Crewsdon_Schattschneider

=Ophelia, Gregory Crewsdon=

(Commentary by Ellen Schattschneider)
I’m Ellen Schattschneider, a faculty member in Anthropology and Women’s and Gender Studies here at Brandeis.

In one sense, Gregogy Crewsdon’s chromogenic print Ophelia recalls John Everett Millais’ mid-19th century painting of the drowned Ophelia, painted in the style of the pre-Raphaelites. Yet while Millais placed his subject in a pastoral setting, surrounded by the flowers mentioned by Shakespeare, Crewsdon positions his Ophelia in the quasi-submerged living room of a modern American house. While the head of Millais’ Ophelia adjoins green reeds emerging out of a pond, Crewson’s model abutsthe edge of a green sofa, reflected in the eerily smooth flooded surface.

Looking at this haunting work, I am reminded of Freud’s classic discussion of the Uncanny, the deeply uneasy sense of encountering strangeness in the midst of that which is vaguely familiar. The German word for Uncanny is Unheimlich, literally the un-homely, that which is not the “Heimlich,” the homely, the familiar. Freud notes, paradoxicallly that there is nothing more “Unheimlich,” unfamiliar or uncanny, than the Heimlich, the home like. Houses and homes, which ought to be the most familiar of spaces, often are associated with the most uncanny, disturbing and unfamiliar of experiences.

The more we gaze at Crewsden’s intricately composed cinematic image the more uncanny it becomes. Consider the various white objects that surround the snow white floating woman. Do the white slippers on the staircase and the white nightgown that she wears suggest she has descended from her bedroom at some point during the night? Does the glass of water and bottle of white medicine on the coffee table suggest she has taken sleeping pills, perhaps never to awake? Does the white telephone by her pale white feet remind us of the help that was never called for? Does the white face of the clock to the upper left suggest that for her time has stopped forever, at a little past five in the morning? The tiny windows in the white door and the windows, themselves covered in white curtains, are reflected below her body. They seem to permit early morning light to enter. illuminating the ephemeral floating figure, But are we to read her as living or dead, as sleeping or awake?

The central figure also puts me in mind of the psychoanalytic concept of “splitting”. At times of crisis the ego in effect divides powerful objects in two separate entities, each associated with diametrically opposed emotions and orientations. How are we to understanding the dark face reflected in the water, just below the above-surface face of the beautiful young woman? Is the submerged face her alternate, tortured self? Do the darker submerged photographs, reflected from the family photos hung along the upper staircase, hint at a darker family drama that has driven her to despair and suicide? Or are we only witnessing a dream she dreams upstairs, safely in her bed, as she is suspended between fantasy and nightmare, between reverie and longing?

Finally, this film-like still image calls to mind the psychoanalytic concept of the Gaze. Feminist film theorists argued that cinema often reproduces a powerful male gaze, reducing women to passive objects of desire, who become subordinated to this external power. Looking at this tableau, I think in particular of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s analogy between the gaze and windows. Lacan tells his audience,

QUOTE “ I can feel myself under the gaze of someone whose eyes I do not see, not even discern. All that is necessary is for something to signify to me that there may be others there. This window... is straight-away a gaze” UNQUOTE

And so I wonder: Are the windows, above and below,the floating woman, tangible reminders of the gaze of others that has so long pursued her and which now suspends her for all eternity?