It was the year 1840 when John Everett Millais (1829-1896) joined the Royal Academy. He was only 11 years old and had just left his native Southampton to move to London without counting on that in mid-nineteenth century England, with the industrialization taking over cities and social problems giving rise to a sharp political upheaval, the panorama of art was at a point where the prevailing conservatism prevented him from getting rid of the Mannerist influence. This being so, as in any period in which art goes through a formal stagnation, there are only two options to propitiate the rupture: create something totally different or reinvent what already exists. In 1848, a group of seven students from the Royal Academy decided that it was time to do the second.
These artists, led by John Everet Millais himself, William Holman Hunt (1827-1910) and Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882) gave shape to what we know today as the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, the one that originally originated with such eagerness to secrecy that during his first period his paintings would be signed under the acronym PRB (Pre-Rafaelist Brotherhood). They would choose this name because their main objective was to return to art the purity and simplicity that they believed had disappeared since the appearance of the figure of Raphael onwards, thus vindicating the return to a style more similar to that of the first stage of the Renaissance or even to the medieval. For this they call for the return of the use of nature as a model, with an attention to detail and a color that sought to oppose the chiaroscuro and that sometimes reminds medieval temples by their bright colors and almost flat perspectives. All this seasoned with good doses of symbolism and a choice of frequently moralizing themes, in which the female figure and her sexuality played a preponderant role.
If defying all the rules of style was not enough, this aspect around the representation of the feminine was an even greater provocation within Victorian society, which completely disapproved of any hint of female sexuality but, at the same time, as usual. To happen with all the forbidden, I felt a morbid curiosity about it. No wonder, then, that Ophelia’s death was one of the fetish themes of painters in Victorian England. This crucial character in the work of Shakespeare, who finds death in despair after the rejection of Hamlet and the murder of his father Polonius at the hands of this one, represents as no one the woman destroyed by love. Ofelia thus becomes not only a literary icon, but the perfect idealization of the woman who succumbs to the passionate love and, therefore, pays a high price. It thus becomes a perfect reason for representation by the Pre-Raphaelites, who had a predilection for adapting literary passages and who also felt a particular fascination for endowing their works with a symbolic subtext that defies the well-known Victorian morality.
In this way Millais decides to show in his Ophelia (1851-52) a woman different from the one that had been represented before, opening the doors to the exact moment in which this one seems to exhale her last breath of life. We are witnesses of its fatal outcome, but despite the macabre gesture that is drawn on his face, the work as a whole is far from transmitting the desperation that is presupposed to a being who has seen his mind clouded by madness. On the contrary, the whole scene oozes serenity. From the position of his body, with open arms and palms exposed, the artist decides to present us close to the iconography that surrounds the martyrs, making the transition between life and death with resignation and calm. Therefore, while we can not say that John Everett Millais sought to escape the moralizing role of Ophelia as a woman physically and mentally devastated by succumbing to love, he does decide to present it in a different way to his contemporaries, showing in a crude manner the ultimate consequence that the Destiny saves for Ofelia, but fleeing to represent the young woman close to the iconography of the femme fatale to which her colleague Dante Gabriel Rossetti was so fond. We must not forget that in Hamlet (1599), Ophelia responds to the criteria of submissive and virginal woman controlled and manipulated by all men who appear on the scene, so in this case, it is more worthy of highlighting his redemption than his own downfall . Ofelia does not use her sexuality explicitly to manipulate Hamlet; However Hamlet does make use of constant mental and emotional games that end up breaking Ophelia’s mind. Millais offers us here the portrait of a victim who, once receives his mortal punishment for being guided by passion, liquidates his sins and enjoys the serenity of a martyr.
The flowers that