Motherless Characters in Frozen Panes of Embodied Cognition in Lisa Klein’s Ophelia
Motherless Characters in Frozen Panes of Embodied Cognition in Lisa Klein’s Ophelia

Summary/Abstract: Troubled images of motherhood, the absent “presence” of mothers, dysfunctionalities in households hover over the deconstructed relationships in contemporary literature. The aim of the present paper is to demonstrate how motherlessness leaves space for personhood, for a development of identity in young-adult literature. Further on, I aim at exploring how timelessness and spatiality foster multiple displays of abandonment glued onto Ophelia from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and question whether Lisa Klein’s representation of Ophelia fails to mirror the Shakespearean one. I am searching for instances where the emptiness of a space left behind by the absence of a mother is used in today’s cultural identities (in such a novel as Ophelia) and can be retold, in a swift stride of modernity, from her own perspective. I used the phrase “frozen panes” — as in editing documents — since I considered that some diegetic spaces in the novel act as immoveable arrears from the past. My contribution refers to the concept of a (m)other space imagined in the never-lived, conceived and unperceived, that remains frozen in time. Down below the frozen panes, there is an embodied space, in a fractal-like representation of life’s cyclicity: a newborn, Ophelia’s child with Hamlet, the heir, the extension of time in a continual space.

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