Panting titled 'Ophelia' by Sir John Everett Millais, completed in 1851 and 1852.
1 media/Ophelia Painting_thumb.png 2021-04-16T03:01:21-07:00 Sigi Jöttkandt 4115726eb75e75e43252a5cbfc72a780d0304d7d 30986 2 This image depicts the death of a female subject through submersion in water. plain 2021-04-16T03:01:43-07:00 Sigi Jöttkandt 4115726eb75e75e43252a5cbfc72a780d0304d7dThis page is referenced by:
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2021-03-21T01:26:06-07:00
Dismantling the idea of the subject
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Note by Claire - z3393668
plain
2021-04-18T19:48:11-07:00
I would like to elaborate on this important point about what happens when the poetic tradition of anthropomorphising non-human entities in order to explore them through poetry is inverted by instead metaphorizing a woman as water.
I would argue that through this subversive move, the idea of the subject is performatively taken apart by the water’s physically vast, fragmented and amorphous presence, which thereby deconstructs the idea of the human as a foregrounded subject against the objectified background of ‘nature’.
For this ‘woman who was water’ is described in such a way that they may metaphorically take on the qualities of repressed women that ‘lived on the edges of rooms’, in that they were pushed to the margins of natureculture in terms of the level of agency and presence they were permitted to have, but they also literally take on qualities that no human could possess by implicitly living inside pipes inside the walls of rooms, or ‘the edges of rooms’.
In this way, the premises that underly patriarchy are aligned with the premise of subject-object relations through this amorphous identity of a woman as water; the way in which water is relegated to the role of servant of the Anthropocene is aligned with the same process that relegates women to the role of servants to the idea of society – used as backgrounds against which the exploits of men are foregrounded.
And yet, this water-woman entity actively destroys the constructs of men/the patriarchy by destroying the buildings that represent the false dichotomy of nature-culture – this water-woman entity ‘gnawed through foundations’ and ‘burst out of pipes’, ‘could power a city,/or drown it’. Thus the identity of women and water converge to represent all that is backgrounded by the false dichotomy of nature-culture and embody the ways in which this foreground of culture owes its entire existence to this easily destroyed premise.
By Claire - z3393668
