"Ophelia" and "The Ninth Wave"

[IEDSRI@aol.com]

 > On the back cover of HOL, Kate is supposed to 
 > be Ophelia in a lifejacket, and not a witch.
 > Ophelia was in love with Hamlet who pretended to 
 > be mad to get rid of her. She then went mad herself. 
 > She drowned in a river that she used to put flowers
 > into as a message to people (the flowers not the 
 > drowning). The picture itself is inspired by a 
 > painting by John Everett Millais.

 > -- Steve ZPJ

This is not strictly accurate.  All that we can
say for sure about this photograph is that
it represents the protagonist of "The Ninth Wave".
All else is supposition, however reasonable.

Kate has not actually acknowledged the close visual 
link between the Ninth Wave photo(s) and Millais's 
1851-52 painting, "Ophelia".  An interviewer once 
suggested an indirect connection, in noticing the 
likeness of the Ninth Wave shots to a picture 
which Kate owns, painted by an unidentified artist,
entitled "The Hogsmill Ophelia".  Kate once mentioned
that she bought this picture at a time when she 
hadn't anything like the money to afford it.  It 
depicts an infant (or a doll) floating on its back 
in a dirty gutterlike area. 

Kate has, however, acknowledged and expressed a 
deep love for Millais's early Pre-Raphaelite work, 
and specifically praised his "A Huguenot, on St. 
Bartholomew's Day, Refusing to Shield Himself from
Danger by Wearing the Roman Catholic Badge" (1851-52).  

Kate's brother, John Carder Bush, has said that
Kate and he attended the great "Pre-Raphaelites"
exhibition mounted at the Tate Gallery in 1984, so
there is good reason to assume that she is at 
least somewhat familiar with the imagery in 
question.  Of course, some of it, including 
"Ophelia", is famous, and part of the English 
people's collective subliminal self-image, 
so to speak; reasonable assumptions of familiarity 
can be made on that basis, too. 

There are several other veiled references to 
Pre-Raphaelite sources in Kate's work, including 
two likely allusions to J. W. Waterhouse's 1888 
version of "The Lady of Shalott" (or possibly
to other related images, including the many "Elaine"
scenes in the British canon).  Knowing that Kate
is aware of this pictorial legacy, then, we may even see
the photograph of ivy on the back of "The Dreaming" 
as a Pre-Raphaelitesque (sorry!) reference; but no 
evidence proves it.

-- Andrew Marvick (IED)
   S        R         I