Ophelia, the Singing Corpse: Pleasure and the Gaze in Where the Wild Roses Grow
Zeleny, Rachael Baitch (University of Delaware, USA)
Neo-Victorian Studies 3:2 (2010)
Abstract
This essay deconstructs a very strange reinterpretation of John Millais Ophelia (1852) as found in Rocky Schenck’s music video, Where the Wild Roses Grow (1997). Drawing from Jan Marsh’s ‘Pale Ladies of Death’, 
Elisabeth Bronfen’s Over Her Dead Body and Ann Kaplan’s revisions of Laura Mulvey’s ‘gaze’ theory, this work explores the compulsion to render or to gaze at a beautiful dead woman. Marsh, Bronfen, and Kaplan provide helpful avenues through which to begin approaching the complex operations of a contemporary Neo-Victorian representation of an eroticised Pre-Raphaelite woman, as in Where the Wild Roses Grow. This work demonstrates that the music video is symptomatic of the contemporary Western audience’s desire not only to see, but also to interact with, the visual aesthetics and icons (especially the female icons) of the Victorian era.
Click here to read this article from Neo-Victorian Studies
Related posts:
- What Is Neo-Victorian Studies?
- Leading the Gaze:From Showing to Telling in Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V and Hamlet
- “A Study in Starvation”: The New Girl and the Gendered Socialisation of Appetite in Sarah Grand’s The Beth Book
- A Comparison of French and Italian Singing in the Seventeenth Century
- Ruling the World: The Cartographic Gaze in Elizabethan Accounts of the New World