UC Santa Barbara

This dissertation discusses the operatic mad scene of Ophelia (or, Ophélie) in Michel Carré, Jules Barbier, and Charles Ambroise Thomas’s 1868 Hamlet. Mad scenes have been widely studied in vocal performance, musicology, and feminist studies, with scholars such as Leslie C. Dunn claiming that madness in women (especially looking at Shakespeare’s Ophelia) acts as a revolution against the hold of the patriarchy, and Mary Ann Smart discussing how Gaetano Donizetti used the bel canto musical style to portray madness in his 1835 Lucia di Lammermoor. However, Ophélie’s mad scene is studied very little. In fact, while examining this scene, I came to realize that performers and directors of opera play her like a nineteenth-century hysterical woman without understanding the history behind views on women’s hysteria and mental illness as well as how these beliefs were used to keep a patriarchal stronghold on women during this era. As a result, in performing these roles without studying the history, we are portraying Ophélie as a stereotypical madwoman instead of as the victim of circumstances put upon her by the men who held power over her. In other words, we continue to dehumanize her character instead of respecting the trauma she suffered and accurately and believably portraying her mental illness in the terms a twenty-first-century audience would understand. Thus, this dissertation endeavors to take the histories that affected Carré, Barbier, and Thomas in their creation of this Ophélie to show how they created the archetypal nineteenth-century hysteric. Specifically, I will look at the musical underpinnings of Thomas’s Hamlet—bel canto mad scenes and tropes in French grand opera—as well as the history of hysteria and views on women’s mental illness, and alterations made to Ophelia’s character and the actors who played her to show how Thomas’s character was created in the image of a nineteenth-century audience’s perception of the ideal operatic madwoman. I then argue that we must re-define Ophélie’s mental illness by studying these histories. We must use them to find specific symptoms in her text and music (and possibly create an overarching twenty-first-century diagnosis) to change how we portray women, and especially those with mental illness, on stage to better fit twenty-first century views on women, mental illness, and the patriarchy. In conclusion, by studying the history behind mad scenes, this dissertation elucidates how nineteenth-century composers used onstage madness to disempower women and how we, as twenty-first-century performers, directors, voice teachers, and vocal coaches, can legitimize Ophélie’s mental illness and humanize her character.