Title: Ophelia Speaks: Resurrecting Still Lives in Natasha Trethewey's Bellocq's Ophelia
Abstract: [FIGURE 1 OMITTED] In Bellocqs Ophelia, Natasha Trethewey gives voice to the African American sex workers living in New Orleans' Storyville, legalized red-light district, in the early 1900s. This volume of poetry is based on photographs by Ernest J. Bellocq, commercial photographer who took remarkable series of photographs of women most likely working in Willie Piazza's or Lulu White's octoroon brothels. Trethewey creates composite character the volume's primary persona and uses her to envision the aspects of her life that transcend the written histories and recorded images. She is conflation of many of Bellocq's subjects: the woman pictured above who is reminiscent of John Everett Millais's Ophelia, woman visiting fellow sex worker dying from venereal disease, scantily clad woman enjoying drink of rye, pensive woman formally dressed in pearls and feathers, nude woman awkwardly arching her back. By naming her Ophelia, Trethewey participates in the tradition of recovering mythic female figures denied voice, what Alicia Suskin Ostriker has called revisionary mythmaking (212). Like Gloria Naylor in Mama Day, Trethewey chooses Shakespeare's Ophelia to redeem. Instead of insanity and death, Trethewey's Ophelia is given voice with which to recount lost American history. The poems think through the photographs, practicing Trethewey's idea quoted in the epigram that you look at photograph, if you really study the gestures and expressions that the people have in the photograph, you could see the rest of their lives, everything that's to come. In doing so, the poetry considers the historical setting of southern African American women in the early twentieth century, working-class women's labor, and the act of looking. The 2007 winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her third book Native Guard, Trethewey is fulfilling the promise Trudier Harris and Opal J. Moore identified when they each included her in their compendia of rising women writers to watch in the twenty-first century (Harris 235; Moore 346-47). She has also received acclaim from Rita Dove, who chose Trethewey's first volume of poetry, Domestic Work, for the Cave Canem Prize in the first year it was awarded and who wrote the introduction for that collection, designating Trethewey a young poet in full possession of her craft (xii). As well participating in Cave Canem, Trethewey is part of the Dark Room Collective, community of poets including Sharon Strange, Thomas Sayers Ellis, Major Jackson, and Kevin Young, and her work is well represented in anthologies like Young's Giant Steps: The New Generation of African American Writers. Reviewers of all three of her volumes comment on the life she brings to historical photographs, her complex examination of racial identity, and the authenticity of her voice. Likewise, they praise the fluidity of her language, her intricate use of poetic forms, and the lyrical beauty of her verse. Reviewing Bellocq's Ophelia in some depth, Sarah Kennedy writes that spare and elegant, Bellocq's Ophelia is not the tale of Storyville that American historians and popular culture have led us to see its 'truth,' but that is much of Trethewey's point (162). She comments particularly on Trethewey's usurpation of power she gives Ophelia camera of her own with which to capture her world. V. M. Kouidis is particularly interested in Trethewey's use of art and how art is complicit in Ophelia's victimization. Kouidis writes that as genre criticism and historiography, 'Ophelia' participates in the cultural and ethical criticism that has superseded French theory (iii). Literary and art critics Debora Rindge and Anna Leahy explore the intertextuality between Trethewey's poetic narrative and Bellocq's photographs, examining in detail the relationships between poems and particular photographs (291-92). These scholars, and Trethewey herself in two in-depth interviews with Charles Henry Rowell and David Haney, have opened the critical discussion about her poetry, and this article is at the very beginning of the scholarly attention Trethewey will no doubt receive. …
Publication Year: 2008
Publication Date: 2008-06-22
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 5
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