"Thus we have wheels within wheels." -- Lord Shaftesbury (1709).

[IED0DXM@OAC.UCLA.EDU]

Though many of you may already have taken notice of the following on
your own, IED has been so taken with these ideas that he felt he just
had to mention them anyway.
     The whole conceit of the heroine drifting in water refers to far
more than just the explicit, immediate context of The Ninth Wave.  In
fact, the implicit references are so deliberate that they may arguably
be more important than the explicit subject-matter. Actually, at least
three earlier such subjects loom in the collective English
consciousness.  All of them have important positions in British
cultural history. Of these the best known outside England is the story
of Ophelia in Hamlet.  The allusion to Ophelia's insane self-immersion
is plain to see in the photo for The Ninth Wave: the flowers. These
were explained away almost flippantly by (if IED remembers correctly
-- Doug, will you confirm or deny, since you were there too?) John
Carder Bush as being intended to show the chaos and damage on board
the ship during its sinking (or whatever ultimately forced the heroine
into the ocean). The idea was supposed to be that commercially
cultivated flowers, perhaps in the hands of the heroine at the time of
the disaster, perhaps thrown by happenstance into the water from a
dining table flower arrangement during the commotion and sinking, have
happened to end up floating in the very same waves in which the
heroine finds herself engulfed.
     This explanation has always struck IED as suspiciously
superficial -- not to mention implausible. The image of a beautiful
young Englishwoman floating on her back in a cold, deathly state,
dressed in a white lace nightie and set adrift amid exotic and
colourful flowers has, since the seventeenth-century premiere of
_Hamlet_, been inextricably connected with the fate of Ophelia.
     In fact, the image of Ophelia in the water is a relatively modern
variant on the Arthurian images of both Elaine and the Lady of
Shalott. These two earlier legends feature their heroines floating
downstream in open boats (in which they eventually are found dead).
This image, in fact, was reproduced precisely by Kate herself in what
was virtually her debut on video, the so-called Eftelink films,
specifically the last of the six, a setting of "The Kick Inside". The
reader will begin to see the extent of the convolutions involved; see,
in fact, a multitude of wheels within wheels, and all of impeccably,
classically English origin.
     But the images are not only associated with the word, but with
English paintings, as well, and these are predominantly Victorian.
The most famous of all of these pictures, and possibly the single
greatest image of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, is "Ophelia", by John
Everett Millais (1852).  Kate is definitely very familiar with the
painting; her brother confirmed as much in conversation with IED at
East Wickham Farm in 1985.  At the time this point made litte
impression on IED, but since then it has come to take on increasing
importance in his fevered brain...
     During that conversation IED and JCB discussed the connection of
the "Lakeside" images (photographs taken by Jay of his sister sitting
and stretching by the banks of the river or lake which appears in the
Eftelink videos) with Pre-Raphaelite imagery. We also talked about the
famous post-Pre-Raphaelite painting (in the Tate Gallery) of the Lady
of Shalott, by John William Waterhouse. There are at least four other
very familiar paintings of about the same date which depict episodes
from the legend of the Lady of Shalott, and which were inspired by a
poetic setting of the legend in...Tennyson's Idylls of the King. (More
wheels ...) IED has been purposelessly musing on all of this, mulling
over also Kate's own comments about the influence of Pre-Raphaelitism
on her own artistic vocabulary (see quote No. 1) as well as the large
painting, called "The Hogsmill Ophelia", which hangs in her studio
(see quote No. 2). And the more familiar he becomes with the images
and the references, the more sense it all makes. What do you think?

Quote Number 1:

NM: I'm reminded by a painting in the corner here, which is a sort of
    satire of a Pre-Raphaelite painting, that I always have thought that
    those Victorian painters, the Pre-Raphaelites, were an influence to
    the texture of your song writing.

KB: Yes, yes. I think that particularly in my very early teens I was
    very enchanted by the whole romance of it, yes. They find their way
    into songs, the imagery. I think that's what happens: something
    attracts you because of its imagery and you digest it and it comes up in
    a song. I think that's how artists work; they are like magpies,
    picking up little bits of gold and storing them away.

Quote No. 2:

    At one end of the studio is a huge painting of a drowned, cracked
doll floating face up past a sewer. For some reason this painting,
which might be described as macabre-kitsch, seems to say a lot about
its owner. Kate returns and sees me examining it.
     "That's called 'The Hogsmill Ophelia'. A lot of people find it
disturbing but I don't. I lived with it for ages. Looked at it every
day. That picture cost me all the money I had once. Paintings are a
great inspiration. One of my favourites is by Millais, 'The Huguenot'.
It's of a man going off to the wars being hugged to the breast of his
lover. She's holding him to her by a scarf around his arm. It's very
beautiful."