Race and Gender in the Global Hispanophone: "The Weight of Ophelia: Archetypal Water Woman and Galician Cultural Myth in the Nineteenth Century" by Rhi Johnson (Indiana University Bloomington)

Please join the Race and Gender in the Global Hispanophone research group for a talk entitled "The Weight of Ophelia: Archetypal Water Woman and Galician Cultural Myth in the Nineteenth Century" by Rhi Johnson  (Assistant Professor, Spanish and Portuguese, Indiana University Bloomington).

Abstract:
Marine estuaries, the ecotone where sweet waters pour into the sea, are some of the most fertile places on earth, with as intense of biotic productivity as occurs in highly cultivated farmland.[1] And yet, the highly elevated nutrient levels in marine estuaries put them at risk for eutrophication: oxygen depletion caused by the decomposition process of the phytoplankton and macro-algae whose growth and reproduction cycles are massively stimulated by high nitrogen and phosphorous levels in littoral water systems, with negative repercussions all life.[2] The waters are so nutrient dense that they cannot continue to support life. Reading water in literature leads to this same problem. The water, in its relationships to the human, is overloaded with meaning, with story and with history; it holds too much to be encompassable. And yet, encompassing it is the project that serves as the starting point for this talk, Water Women: Fluxes of the Feminine in the Nineteenth Century: a book that explores the relationship that female agency and autonomy have with bodies of water in the cultural imaginary of the nineteenth century, from the consummation of love affairs described through the movement of waves on the beach, to appropriations of Ophelian suicides, to the transgressive power of women’s labor and the transgressive freedom of female water monsters.

In addition to laying out the form and function of the water woman on a large scale, this talk will embark on a deeper exploration of one element: the proliferation of visual and literary representations of Ophelia in the nineteenth century that allow her to function as a nexus for cultural discourse. The nineteenth century’s Ophelia exists at the confluence of ideals of representation, subjugation, and subjectivity; she is a figure defined by multiplicity, that can, in her madness and her death, embody both purity and licentiousness, passivity and agency. As a case study of this recurrent and infinitely inscribable image in the poetic production of the century, and as a case study, I will offer a breakdown of two of the three water suicides– ideated, curative, fatal – in Rosalía de Castro’s La hija del mar [Daughter of the Sea]. Finally, and moving into new and ongoing research, I will offer the new, autochthonous model of female water death that Castro’s novel births, and which spreads from Galicia through the peninsula and across the sea via the network of Galician émigré communities. That myth, and its network of diffusion offers a particularly Iberian – and more particularly Galician – variant of the archetype of female water death: the “tola das olas,” the madwoman of the waves.

[1] Kennish, Michael J., ed. Estuary Restoration and Maintenance: The National Estuary Program. CRC Marine Science Series. London: Routledge, 2000, p. 1.

[2] Villares, R., and A. Carballeira. “Trophic Categorization in the Rías Baixas (NW Spain): Nutrients in Water and in Macroalgae.” Scientia Marina, vol. 70, no. 1, 2006, p. 90.

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Sponsored by the Division of Literatures, Languages, and Cultures and the Race and Gender in the Global Hispanophone research group.