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UGALDE, Sharon Keefe. Ophelia: Shakespeare and Gender in Contemporary Spain. U of Wales P, 2020. 272 pp.
In contemporary scholarship it is rare to encounter books that combine philological rigor with a unique deployment of a motif to produce decisive consequences in the present. In her new monograph Ophelia: Shakespeare and Gender in Con temporary Spain, Sharon Keefe Ugalde measures up to this task in a highly original study about the Shakespearean tragic figure of Ophelia as it has been reformatted and translated in an array of cultural practices such as poetry, theater, autobiography, photography, and other contemporary art forms. More than a study about the reception of a literary figure, this book also delves into the cultural imagination of the Spanish post-transition years across regions. In doing so, the figure of Ophelia unravels gender tensions and opens up to multiple feminist approaches that displace the centrality of the male-centered gaze around womanhood (9). As the author reconstructs in detail throughout her book, Ophelia cannot be read as a homogeneous figure; rather, her form enunciates a tropic force that generates "multiple and unstable roles" of the female subject (12). At the core of the book is the claim that Ophelia mirrors "a deep structure of social reality" in Spain, which, in turn, sheds light on the locus of repression that has organized the cultural body of the peninsula at least since the death of el caudillo Francisco Franco. The power of Ophelia, then, becomes a compelling lens through which the inscription of gender, the corporeal, and female desire are disentangled from the hegemonic order of the transition years to the turn of the millennium across different regions of Spain.
In Chapter 1, "Breaking Silence: Ophelia in the Lyric Tradition of Spain and the Pioneering Innovations of Blanca de los Ríos," Ugalde stages a useful revision of the figure of Ophelia in Spanish Romanticism, confirming the dominant representative model of Ophelia as a virgin and religious figure "apt for the male gaze" (24). In fact, up to the Generación del 27, in the work of the vanguard poet Adriano del Valle, the figure of Ophelia takes the form of the silenced subject whose aura is unleashed once agency is defaced. This is...