“The first thing I think about is depression,” says Chaitanya Lakkimsetti, an enthusiastic young College Fellow in Women and Gender Studies (WGS) who teaches classes on topics ranging from the sex industry to gender politics. As an educator in WGS with a Ph.D. in sociology, Lakkimsetti’s interpretation focuses on feminist theory and psychology. “I think about Betty Friedan’s work from ‘The Feminine Mystique’ and the suburban housewife’s life,” she says. “I’m also thinking about how grotesque [the woman in the picture] is, and I’m not sure how to interpret that. If her grotesqueness is a way to represent depression, it’s almost as if she’s submerging in domesticity. She’s consumed by this ideal suburban life, a psychologically depressing space to be.”

Lakkimsetti heavily draws on Freidan’s research into suburban housewives from the 1960s, using images and ideas from Freidan’s study to explore emotions and background knowledge in the photograph. She imagines that Crewdson’s Ophelia exists in the unfulfilling world of housewives that Friedan examined. “I think it’s morning [in the photograph],” Lakkimsetti says, “and she is in her house after sending her husband and her kids away. That seems to me what I see in this—this whole idea of this idealized feminine domesticity.” Theory is the primary organizing force in this response, as Friedan’s study creates the lens through which Lakkimsetti views Crewdson’s morbid scene.

The suburban housewives are supposed to be happy to have this suburban home and a middle class lifestyle and a husband and a child,” she says. “As Betty Friedan says, the ‘problem without a name’ is that women are supposed to feel good about [their lives] but are not feeling fulfilled. They go to psychiatrists and therapy, but therapists … they’ll never acknowledge the women’s feelings of depression or lack of identity. This is what the picture presents for me.” A variety of disciplines coalesce in Lakkimsetti’s interpretation, which fits the interdisciplinary approach of her department.

The woman’s death in the photograph symbolizes the inner struggle of the housewife, Lakkimsetti says, in her attempt to overcome the oppressive expectations engendered by her role in society. “A certain idealized domesticity does [this] to a middle-class housewife.”

SHAM CEILING

For philosophy graduate student Aleksy I.V. Tarasenko-Struc, it is the synthesis of various details in the photograph that merit consideration. Taking advantage of the last warm days of the year, he is conducting office hours under a fiery red tree in the Yard when I approach him. He admits to me outright that there’s no real philosophical connection he can draw between this photograph and his studies, but he is intrigued nonetheless.

“[The photograph] seems to be about the kind of dazed paralysis that you might think is a piece of this kind of lifestyle,” he muses. “I sort of like how the figure is ... tacked on as an afterthought onto the rest of the image.” What lifestyle is he referring to—just a domestic one? Instead of specifying a time period or a cultural marker like suburbia, Tarasenko-Struc first makes a claim about the aura of the photograph, finding a unifying theme into which Ophelia is projected.

Our conversation reveals stranger elements to the picture that I had overlooked. “I like how the wall kind of gives way to this kind of patch of color,” Aleksy says, pointing at the amorphous ceiling.

“The ceiling reflects the water,” I suggest. “It doesn’t look like a real ceiling.”

He nods. “It looks like it’s taken from a watercolor painting. I like that. It makes this look like a diorama—it kind of no longer looks like a real home once you notice that. I like how it’s cut into three distinct parts—here’s the ceiling, there’s the home part, and there’s pool of water.”

“It’s kind of like a landscape,” I say. “A landscape inside a diorama.” This confusion of settings is key to the mystery of the photograph, which I realize is one of the elements that drew me to the picture to begin with. Its compelling to think about which elements remove the image from the real world and imbue it with a dreamlike sorrow.

OVERCOOKED STAGING

Art interpretation within the English department offered a completely different approach. Some faculty searched for meaning in terms of composition or theory, while others latched directly onto the Shakespearean reference and built their analysis of the photograph around their grounding in literature.

“This is a riff on [John Everett] Millais’ Ophelia,” writes Ernest Bernbaum Professor of literature Daniel Albright in an e-mail, referring to the English painter’s famous 1852 image of the doomed character. In his analysis, Albright focuses in on the formal elements of the photograph and draws meaning from the basic composition. “This Ophelia seems about to fall through the shiny reflective floor,” Albright offers, “as if the surface tension of our commonplace lives were so weak that we were all in danger of drowning if we relaxed our vigilance.”

In “Hamlet,” the majority of the action is contained within the increasingly tension-filled walls of a castle, Professor of English Gordon Teskey reminded me in an e-mail. Yet Ophelia’s death occurs outdoors—Ophelia sings songs and weaves flowers into her hair until her demise. Her death, immersed in the natural world, stands in contrast to the rest of the play, which divorces itself from nature through its ubiquitous indoor setting.