Baker’s daughters

Last night, and for many nights, owls have haunted trees that stand around the field behind where I sleep.  Always at least one pair.  Sometimes more.  They hoot softly, answering each other gently as night cools the day away and shadows flood the tall, dry, blond grass, and twilight deepens into starlight.

These barn owls seem endlessly liminal, active in the time between day and night, perched in trees that mark the margins of human activity, between the earth and the sky, light and dark.  Their hoots seem hauntingly mournful, bringing to mind the thin line between this life and whatever, if anything, might lie beyond it.  Whatever (or whoo–mever) we may have lost, the owl plaintively seems to cry for that as much as for losses of its own.  Grief echoes our own there in the dark, as if lonely wee hours are wrapped up in those sounds, when we lie awake alone with our regrets while they agitate soundlessly around our weeping.

Then, Ophelia enters, unkempt, disheveled, staring wildly about herself, surrounded by enough invisible armies to conquer the world.  Her world, her wold, in any case, the relentless assaults of grief gathering her and crumpling her into a human rain.  Loss of lover, father, and a self.  Call me legion for I am many.  Legions of sorrows marching all at once like tears inside the consummation of all human sorrow crying rivers.

Night has gathered within Ophelia.  It is no longer a nighted garb that can be separated from her.  Night has fallen and rolled into her being.

We may accept what Chateaubriand wrote as resonant with truth:

Le comédien chargé du rôle de spectre dans Hamlet était le grande fantôme, l’ombre du Moyen Age que se levait sur le monde, comme l’astre de la nuit, au moment où le Moyen Age achevait de descendre parmi les morts; siècles énormes que Dante ouvrit et que ferma Shakespeare. *

Yet, if this might be the case, then what does Ophelia represent besides the long agonized cry of generations of women trod on by men who hurry on to other purposes?   Although she remains isolated (from the other characters, although it is doubtful that her experience isolates her from the play’s audience) in her experience and in the perspective that madness lends her, she also becomes a kind of prophesying angel of vengeance and its attendant downfall.  Seemingly alone, and yet surrounded by enough invisible armies to conquer the world, she carries the flaming sword of the liberated vantage point.  Experience.  Wisdom.  Death.  Her world, her garden, has been populated by legions of relentless assaults of gathering grief–gathering like clouds and crumpling her at last into a human rain.  Loss of lover, father, and a self.  Call me legion for I am many.  Legions of sorrows marching all at once like tears inside the consummation of all human woe crying rivers.

First she sings of a true love gone away as a religious pilgrim–a traveler whose journey is mandated by a faith.  Hamlet is not at Elsinore when Ophelia’s mind slips away.  Instead, he has become a pilgrim on the path of revenge, a lonely faith that will soon lead him, both literally and figuratively, to leap into a grave.  She sings of death rites, often assumed to be her father’s, but they could just as well be for her lover, or for anyone around her.  The sexual references too would easily lead to dying, again figuratively and more literally.

Although most of us cannot see them, perhaps the armies around Ophelia also somehow consist of owls.  “They say the owl was a baker’s daughter. Lord, we know what we are, but know not what we may be. God be at your table.”  (Hamlet, 4.5. roughly 45-7, depending on the edition).  The wandering Ophelia remains intent here, but does she reference only the folk tale?**  Or is demon Lilith here as well, standing with her owl feet?  Or if the bird footed figure in the Burney relief in the British Museum is not Lilith/Lilitu, but is instead Inanna/Ishtar or Ereshkigal perhaps it matters little.  Any way you look at her, angel of death, goddess of war and fertility, or earth mother, she is still flanked by owls.

Wisdom?  Death?  Do these not make good companions?

Lilith inhabits a tangled collection of tales, far too many to be included here in a brief post.  If we pick up what seem to be the dominant threads, however, they suggest some shape.  If Lilith was Adam’s original wife (before Eve) then she seems to have fled after quarreling with Adam–in what is often celebrated as a feminine rejection of a patriarchal establishment (Adam on top, masculine Lord, and so on).  So, when viewed through certain perspectives, Lilith becomes a symbol of female sexual power and feminine authority.

The very idea of rebelliousness, however, also (in some versions of the story) casts her in an adversarial light–as an adversary to God’s initial structure.  This sympathetic vibration manifests variously, with Lilith sometimes being rejected by Adam because she has sex with Samael (Satan), or with Lilith herself being a feminine aspect of Satan.  Feminine versus masculine.  Chaos against order.  Quiet against unquiet.  Wisdom and death walking hand in hand.

In some traditions, Samael/Satan remains a part of God’s host–the avenging angel, the scourge of God, the face of Allah that the Quran tells us one might rather wish not to encounter after death.

The question becomes whether Ophelia resonates and reverberates with the quality of vengeance here–the feminine aspect of the angel of death, come to sing of journeys, graves, sexual union, and the flowers that grow in the graveyards afterwards.  In the mad scene, Ophelia already walks with death.  “One that was a woman sir, but rest her soul, she’s dead.” (H 5.1.115)  Her hollow songs point in only one direction, culminating in flowers.

If Ophelia were a kind of Lilith, then owls might easily be mixed up in the baker’s dough, where the daughter becomes a casualty of a cycle of expansion and consumption that she remains powerless to interrupt.  She would also telegraph the owl’s mourning at what revenge may bring.  “To seek revenge may lead to hell, but everyone does it, though seldom as well as Sweeney, as Sweeney Todd.  The demon barber of Fleet Street.”

Ophelia’s last line, in the scene and in the play, is that of an owl as well:

Good night, ladies.  Good night, sweet ladies.  Good night, good night.

Horatio’s “Good night, sweet prince” echoes this so closely.  Remarkable.  Owls, angels of death.  Wisdom.  Foresight.  Ophelia swooping into the mad scene like an owl, and singing soft, sad, faintly hooting songs that predict the future.  Rebellious against the human order in her madness, in Hamlet, she becomes a walking omen.  An owl on her feet.

 

*  “The actor entrusted with the part of the ghost in Hamlet represented the great phantom, the shade of the Middle Ages, which rose over the world, like the moon, at the moment when the Middle Ages finally sank among the dead; a mighty epoch which opened with Dante and closed with Shakespeare.”            —from Chateaubriand,  Memoires d’Outre-Tombe, ed. Maurice Levaillant (Paris, 1949), I, 502.

** Christ (in most versions in disguise) walks into a baker’s shop and asks for bread.  The baker begins working a large amount of dough to back for the stranger.  The baker’s daughter scolds the baker for setting out such a large amount and reduces the dough by half.  Still, the dough swelled to a huge size, and when the daughter cried out, she was turned into an owl.