Content area
Full text
With the publication of Mary Pipher's Reviving Ophelia in 1996, Shakespeare's Ophelia became a symbol for adolescent girls who are drowning in the pressures of their day-to-day life. Pipher's appropriation of Ophelia resonated with readers, inspiring teenagers and their mothers to write back with texts entitled Ophelia Speaks, Ophelia's Mom, and Surviving Ophelia. Ophelia even lends her name to a national program to prevent relational aggression, called "The Ophelia Project." The idea of saving Ophelia has become a metaphor for the act of helping young women to withstand the social pressures of the twenty-first century. Speaking directly to young readers, authors Lisa Klein and Lisa Fiedler take the current connotations of the character back to Shakespeare's Hamlet by creating Young Adult (YA) novelizations of Shakespeare's play from Ophelia's point of view. In Dating Hamlet (2002) and Ophelia (2006), Fiedler and Klein re-create Ophelia by presenting her as a capable, headstrong teenage girl who can survive the painful circumstances that drive her Shakespearean predecessor to madness and early death. By revising Ophelia and creating newer, more assertive versions in their novels, Fiedler and Klein subvert the critical tradition of Hamlet and invert the popular perception of Ophelia in an effort to create "relatable" (recognizable and accessible) role-models for their young readers.
Centering Ophelia
Ophelia's association with contemporary teenage girls raises the stakes of adapting her character in YA romantic historical fiction, a genre aimed primarily at young female readers. As Jennifer Hulbert argues, seeing Ophelia as a "mainstream assignment as synecdoche for all teenage girls" can be problematic, both in interpreting Shakespeare and in understanding contemporary adolescence (Hulbert 2006, 201). By making Ophelia into a YA heroine, Fiedler and Klein implicitly affirm the dubious association, but they do so in a way that transforms Ophelia from a pathetic symbol of lost innocence to a competent young woman. In her contribution to The Afterlife of Ophelia, Coppélia Kahn models a close reading of Shakespeare's Hamlet that moves away from the "truncated story of blighted girlhood" that dominates Ophelia's afterlife and find "another story, a different Ophelia - a subject more than an object" (2012, 232). Fiedler and Klein address Ophelia as subject by adding to her complex afterlife. By using Ophelia as a first-person narrator, Fiedler and...