Ophelia: Shakespeare and Gender in Contemporary Spain

Introduction

Since the 1970s Ophelia has been enjoying a remarkable resurgence in literature, drama and the visual arts. Feminist critics, most notably Elaine Showalter, placed Ophelia at the centre of a discussion of gender, and this focus is the principal impetus for her revival. Since her debut in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, she has been objectified on stage and in literary texts as a beautiful, fragile creature, ensnared in the binary straitjacket of virgin/whore, depictions solidified in Pre-Raphaelite and other nineteenth-century European paintings. A figure that embodies subjugation would appear to be of little interest to feminists and post-feminists; yet for late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century writers and artists concerned with gendered agency, she is irresistibly attractive. Turn-of-the-millennium writers and artists dust off Ophelia precisely because her debilitating lack of agency is an invitation to challenge patriarchal hierarchies and cast her in new roles.

Recent critical works, such as The Afterlife of Ophelia (Peterson and Williams, 2012), and catalogues of twenty-first-century exhibitions of Ophelia-inspired art, including Ophelia. Sehnsucht, melancholie en doodverlangen / Sehnsucht, melancholia and desire for death (ed. Santing, Wildschut and Clevis, 2009), Ik, Ophelia (Rodenburg, 2007) and The Myth and Madness of Ophelia (Kiefer, 2001), attest to Ophelia’s present-day resurgence in Western culture. Her current popularity, as was the case in the nineteenth century, overflows the boundaries of high art. For example, the psychological metaphor of female adolescent anorexia foregrounded in Mary Pipher’s Reviving Ophelia (1994), Natalie Merchant’s pop CD Ophelia (1998), fashion layouts in the Financial Times monthly magazine supplement How to Spend It (Holloway, 2009), Alan R. Young’s website on Ophelia in popular culture, and Ophelia.indd 1 12/05/2020 09:01 computer avatars corroborate Margaret Atwood’s emphasis on the adaptability of myth: ‘Strong myths never die. Sometimes they die down, but they don’t die out. They double back in the dark, they re-embody themselves, they change costumes, they change key. They speak in new languages, they take on other meanings’ (2005, p. 35). Spain is no exception to the recent refigurations of the Ophelia myth.

During the political Transition from the dictatorship of Francisco Franco to democracy (1975–82) and continuing into the twenty-first century, the cultural production in Spain confirms that there, too, ‘Ophelia never drowned, always ready to come alive … An intact jewel under all disasters’ (Mallarmé, 2007, p. 128). Despite the originality and abundance of literary, dramatic and artistic transformations of Ophelia, the Spanish context is consistently overlooked in recent analyses of the fascinating and complex refigurations of the Shakespearean character. The purpose of this book is to remedy this critical oversight and to highlight for an international audience the range and quality of creative endeavours produced in Spain since the Transition. Some of the country’s most renowned turn-of-the-millennium literary figures and visual artists enlist Ophelia to enhance the affective, sensual and conceptual intensity of their works and for the purpose of reformulating gender. The study reflects the cultural and linguist diversity of Spain, which has reached new levels of vitality and visibility since the death of dictator Francisco Franco in 1975. Most literary refigurations of Ophelia are in Spanish, but original variations appear in Galician as well, notably in the poetry of Xohana Torres and Marta Dacosta, and in Catalan, as exemplified by the theatre of Manuel Molina. Catalan visual artists Eugènia Balcells and Joan Foncuberta also play a major role in the post-Transition reformulations.

Iberian authors and visual artists approach Ophelia from feminist and other gender-related perspectives, and in some cases via metaliterary or meta-artistic paradigms. A poetics of resignification salvages the character’s accumulated expressive wealth while altering the patriarchal ideology embedded in historical representations. Ophelia emerges from her watery death transformed. New looks both reflect and authorize the gender diversity that has gained legitimacy in Spanish society since the Transition. The study examines Ophelia’s depictions in diverse arts – poetry, narrative, drama, painting and photography – mirroring her historic figurations. The book is organized around these distinct forms of cultural production.

In comparison with France and Germany, Spain’s interest in Shakespeare developed belatedly and was filtered through French culture: ‘[L]a corte y los eruditos gustaban ya de afrancesarse, tomando por modelo París en publicaciones, frases y vestidos … de modo que la difusión de Shakespeare en España dependía exclusivamente de su llegada a París’ (Par, 1935a, p. 64) (The court and the scholars liked to be Gallicized, taking Paris as the model in publications, phrases, and fashion … for that reason the dissemination of Shakespeare in Spain depended exclusively on its arrival to Paris).¹ The first translations did not appear until late in the eighteen century and were not based on the English originals, but on French adaptations (Shaw, 1993, p. 95; Ruppert, 1920, p. 13). Hamlet is no exception. Ramón de la Cruz’s 1772 translation of Hamlet, the first of Shakespeare’s dramas to be rendered into Spanish, was based exclusively on a highly altered neoclassical version of the tragedy by the French playwright J. F. Ducis, who in turn utilized a translation by Pierre Antoine de la Place (Par, 1935a, p. 85). In 1798, Leandro Fernández de Moratín translated Hamlet into Spanish directly from Shakespeare’s text. The Cruz and Fernández de Moratín translations reflect the bifurcated history of Hamlet in Spain. The latter initiates interest in critical studies of Shakespeare and in translations faithful to the original, for example by José María Blanco, published in 1823, and by Guillermo Macpherson, in 1873 (Regalado, 1994, pp. 55, 58). Cruz’s version, on the other hand, sets a precedent in Spain for staging substantially altered versions. Ángel-Luis Pujante explains the contradictory reaction to Shakespeare in France, which was reiterated in Spain:

[L]a poética clasicista francesa impedía aceptar plenamente lo extranjero si no se ajustaba a sus reglas y convenciones. Así Shakespeare llegó a ser un fenómeno literario que fascinaba y moles-taba: seducían el vigor y la fecundidad de su genio: contrariaban su falta de gusto, su mezcla de lo trágico y lo cómico, de lo noble y lo plebeyo (2019, p. 12).

[French neoclassic poetics disallowed full acceptance of foreign works if they did not adapt to the rules and conventions. Thus, Shakespeare became a literary phenomenon of fascination and annoyance: the vigour and fecundity of his genius were seductive: his lack of taste, his mixture of the tragic and the comic, of the noble and the common were repudiated.]

Until the 1860s, there were only two productions of Hamlet, neither faithful to Shakespeare’s text. The first successful stagings of the tragedy were produced by the Italian company of Ernesto Rossi and were in Italian, not Spanish. In 1866 Rossi had great success in the role of Hamlet (Berenguer, 1989, p. 141). Motivated by Rossi’s triumph, the Spanish actor Antonio Vico appeared in 1872 in an adaptation by Carlos Coello, El príncipe Hamlet, with representations in Madrid and Barcelona. Ángel Berenguer underscores a general historic lack of enthusiasm of the theatregoing public for Shakespeare’s Hamlet, due in part to the scarcity and inferior quality of productions and in part to national character, already vested in imaginary characters antagonistic to Hamlet, such as Segismundo, Don Quijote, Don Juan and the Mayor of Zalamea (1989, pp. 141–3). Nevertheless, it is clear that by the end of the nineteenth century, critical opinion heartily endorsed the bard: ‘En 1881, y en pleno bicentenario de la muerte de Calderón de la Barca, Emilia Pardo Bazán aseguraba que no cabía paralelo entre Calderón y Shakespeare porque Shakespeare lleva a Calderón muchos codos de altura’ (Pujante, 2019, p. 16) (In 1881, at the height of the bicentenary of the death of Calderón de la Barca, Emilia Pardo Bazán affirmed that there was no parallel between Calderón and Shakespeare ‘because Shakespeare is well above Calderón’). During the Franco regime (1939–75), stagings of the play declined and did not reignite until the early years of the Transition.

Foreign theatrical companies played a role in introducing Shakespeare into Catalonia. The 1886 staging of Hamlet by the Italian company of Ernesto Rossi, the same company that performed in Madrid, was key. Of note in Catalonia is the role of the Noucentista programme in promoting translations of Shakespeare into Catalan. Noucentisme viewed translation as a means of ‘universalizing Catalan through texts of recognized cultural value’ (Buffery, 2007, p. 11). In 1907 Josep Carner summed up the cultural need as follows: ‘Perquè el català esdevingui abundós, complexe, elastic, elegant, és necessary que els mestres de totes les èpoques I tots els països siguin honocrats amb versions a la nostra llengua’ (So that Catalan might become abundant, complex, elastic and elegant, it is necessary that the masters of all the ages and all the nations should be honored with versions in our language) (cited in Buffery, 2007, p. 113). The first complete translation of Hamlet, by Antoni Bulbena i Tosell, appeared in 1885, followed by Arthur Masriera’s in 1889, Gaietà Soler’s in 1889 – an altered version that deleted the role of ‘lewd’ Ophelia – and Magí Morera i Galícia’s in 1918. In the early years of the twentieth century productions of Hamlet were scarce, predominately Soler’s ‘censored’ version, performed on local stages (Buffery, 2007, p. 29). In the aftermath of the Civil War, when the Franco regime attempted to suppress the Catalan language and culture, the presence of Shakespeare in literary journals, theatre groups and new translations into Catalan by Josep María de Sagarra constituted a clandestine effort to maintain the Catalan culture alive (Buffery, 2007, p. 37). However, there were no major productions of Hamlet until 1979 , the year that Terenci Moix’s translation was broadcast on the newly established Televisió de Catalunya (Buffery, 2007, p. 41).

Translations of Shakespeare into Galician lagged behind those into Castilian and Catalan. The Merry Wives of Windsor was the first play to be translated into Galician. The 1918 translation by Anton Vilar Ponte, entitled Xan entre elas, was based on a Portuguese version, and performed on 4 January 1920 (Lorenzo-Modia, 2017, p. 77). It was not until after the death of Franco in 1975 that productions and translations of Shakespeare slowly re-emerged in Galicia. A translation of Macbeth by Fernando Pérez Barreriro Nolla was published in 1972, and eleven years later Miguel Pérez Romero’s translation of Hamlet appeared (Lorenzo-Modia, 2017, p. 77). Because of the delay in translations, early refractions in the form of criticism, commentary and allusions to Shakespeare in creative works were essential in establishing the reputation of the English dramatist in Galician culture. For example, Álvaro Cunqueiro’s commentaries were highly influential. From 1961–81 he published a literary column in the Faro de Vigo and frequently referred to Shakespeare and, on several occasions, specifically to Ophelia (Jarazo and Romero, 2010). In a column published in 1978, the author endorses the idea that a cultured language must have translations of the great classics, which he deemed lacking in Galician, and points to Shakespeare in Catalan as an example to be emulated: ‘Agora en Cataluña vanse reeditar, en edición popular. A Diputación de Barcelona ofrece un millón de pesetas. Vinte e oito foron as pezas traducidas por Segarra, e vanse a publicar cinco tiduos por ano’ (cited in Jarazo and Romero, 2010) (Now in Catalonia they are going to publish a new rustic edition. The city council of Barcelona is offering a million pesetas. Twenty-eight works were translated by Segarra, and they are going to publish five titles every year). Allusions to Shakespearean characters in Cunqueiro’s creative works also popularized knowledge of the English dramatist. His drama O incerto Señor Don Hamlet príncipe de Dinamara was particularly significant in this respect.

In Spain, Ophelia was not a favourite subject of nineteenth-century artists, as she was in other European countries. The only two major paintings, both in the collection of the Prado Museum in Madrid, are Ofelia (1871), by Eduardo Rosales (1836–73), and Ofelia aldeana (1922), by Juan Luis López García (1894–1978). Perhaps artists overlooked mad Ophelia because Spain has its own lunatic female in the historical figure of Juana I de Castilla (1479– 1555), known as Juana la Loca. In the nineteenth century, the mad queen acquired iconic status in Francisco Pradilla’s masterpiece Doña Juana ‘la Loca’ (1877). She was considered the embodiment of Spanish nationalism, representing ‘tanto los valores que la nación espera de su población femenina, como una serie de defectos romantizados que apuntan con orgullo hacia las peculiaridades consideradas esencia de lo español’ (Soliño, 2017, p. 21) (as much the values that the nation expected of its female population as a series of romanticized defects that point with pride to peculiarities considered the essence of Spanishness).

In his assessment of the reception of Shakespeare in Spain, Eduardo Julia Martínez sustains that the most frequent references to the English author are to be found in the lyric tradition (1918, p. 245). By the mid-nineteenth century, Ophelia gains prominence in the genre of poetry. Major poets from Romanticism through modernismo recognized the expressive potential of the Shakespearean character and carved out a space for her in their lyrics. José de Espronceda (1808–42), Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer (1836–70), Manuel Reina (1856–1905), Francisco Villaespesa (1877–1936), Juan Ramón Jiménez (1881–1958), Josep María de Sagarra (1894–1961), Adriano del Valle (1895–1957) and Federico García Lorca (1898–1936) depict her in their poetry.

In addition to considering the pioneering innovations of the poet Blanca de los Ríos, chapter 1 provides a historical overview of the canonical representations of Ophelia in the poetry of Spain, which serves as a backdrop for later revisions. Collectively, the poets’ renderings over nearly a century reinforce a demeaning image of female gender, a prescription for dependency, modesty and piety that leads to objectification and normalization of the lack of agency. For the Romantic poets, Ophelia is synonymous with angelic purity and ethereal beauty, a desired and unattainable ideal. Modernists Villaespesa and Del Valle nuance the ethereal ideal, emphasizing the melancholy sweetness of a slow death in water, while Reina underscores the patriarchal binary of female gender: dangerous seductress or angel. Broadly speaking, in Spanish poetry from the mid-nineteenth century through the early decades of the twentieth, Ophelia is predetermined by a controlling masculine gaze and by a third-person poetic persona that does not authorize her to speak.

With the publication of ‘Cantos de Ofelia’ (Songs of Ophelia) in 1881, Blanca de los Ríos makes visible the relationship of Ophelia’s image to the historical absence of female agency. Just when depictions of Ophelia as an idealized, pure, beautiful, passive woman are most numerous, de los Ríos posits Ophelia as sign for amorous passion. Unlike her male predecessors, de los Ríos emphasizes the character’s madness, associating it with the Romantic aesthetic of emotional release and poetic transcendence. The most noteworthy innovation is the recovery of voice. Ophelia speaks in first person and at times emphatically. Female madness loses its negative connotations and is embraced as a sign of female sexual agency and poetic intensity.

From the political Transition in Spain forward, Ophelia attracts a broad gamut of women poets of differing ages and representative of an array of poetic tendencies. Poets of the Generation of the 1950s – ‘las niñas de la guerra’ (little girls of the civil war), born between 1924–38 – of the culturalismo tendency of the 1970s, and of the 1980s and 1990s – an electric group that emerged in the early years of the new democracy – all discover in Ophelia a means of honing poetic artistry while questioning patriarchal ideology. It is noteworthy that poems ascribing a new look to Ophelia appear after the death of Francisco Franco in 1975, with a spike in publication clustered in the decades of the 1980s and 1990s. There is a distinct correlation between historical events in Spain and women poets’ widespread interest in Ophelia as literary currency. The official construction of female gender during the thirty-six-year dictatorship, enforced by the Catholic Church and the State, prescribed submissiveness, modesty, domesticity and dependence. The transition to democracy prompted an accelerated transformation of Spanish society, and new identities for women emerged. It is not surprising that outspoken Ophelias appear in poetry collections during a period when women, old and young, were experiencing dramatic changes in acceptable modes of behaviour and experimenting with new identities.

Mid-century poets scrutinize Ophelia’s painful entrapment in patriarchy and recognize it as their own, for example, in ‘Ophelia’ (Marta & María, 1976) [Martha & Mary], María Victoria Atencia (b. 1930) establishes a degree of complicity with the character in order to express a desperate longing for self-determination. Other poets of the Generation of the 1950s re-articulate the watery death as a desirable semiotic alternative that embraces female difference. Balneario. La memoria encantada [Hot springs hotel. The enchanted memory] (2000) by María Beneyto (1925–2011) exemplifies this tendency. Aurora de Albornoz (1926–90), on the other hand, incorporates the drowning into an imaginary green-world archetype, portraying an Ophelia drawn to an accommodating green world and to a comforting maternal house of waters. In As amants de Hamlet [Hamlet’s lovers] (2003), the Galician poet Marta Dacosta (b. 1966) also envisions an elsewhere for Ophelia, an island beyond the bounds of patriarchy.

If historically Ophelia embodied modesty and chastity, then her every appearance instructed women to suppress their sexuality, instructions countered by turn-of-the-millennium female poets who reveal that under the white dress is a desiring female body. ‘Minué’ [Minuet] (Agua de luna [Moon water], 1986) by Rosa Romojaro (b. 1948) and the three-part poem ‘Ofelia’ [Ophelia] (Memorial de Amauta [Amauta’s memorial], 1988) by Amalia Iglesias (b. 1962) refashion Ophelia in artistically well-polished poems with dense, intricate symbolism and original metaphors, transforming her into a sign for sexual desire and erotic pleasure.

Also prevalent is a voice that disavows Ophelia’s silence. It is the poetic word of female self-authorization, present in the neo-surrealist De una niña de provincial que se vino a vivir en un Chagall [About a girl from the provinces who came to live in a Chagall] (1981) by Blanca Andreu (b. 1959). Other poets, Aurora Luque (b. 1962), Maite Pérez Larumbe (b. 1962) and Loren Fernández (b. 1962), for example, locate Ophelia in a realm of humour or cynicism that debunks the idealization of love. Poems discredit the promise of a hero-prince and ‘happily ever after’ as an illusionary tale and caution against its socially perpetuated mandate. The presence of Ophelia expands significance beyond the personal to a reflection on the cultural construction of love. A new understanding of male/female relationships envisions the radical possibility that women can exist outside the parameters of the male gaze. Women become dead under the male gaze, but outside it, it is a whole different story. Re-signified Ophelias are proof of that.

In the autobiographical narratives of Clara Janés (b. 1940), the novel Los caballos del sueño [The horses of dreams] (1989) and the memoirs Jardín y laberinto [Garden and labyrinth] (1990) and La voz de Ofelia [Ophelia’s voice] (2005), Ophelia offers ‘a special fertile ground on which to develop a uniquely authentic version of personal identity, premised on a fictional character’s identity’ (Peterson and Williams, 2012b, p. 6). For the author Janés and for her autobiographical fictional self, Ophelia, immersion in the waters of creativity distances disorientation, submission and the silence of non-being. There is no death by drowning, but rather the discovery of agency and the authority to write. Ophelia, sustained by her naiad legacy, does not perish in the stream but is transformed. A subjectivity emerges, capable of creating an inhabitable literary space that engenders renewal of the intimate self and that embraces identification with the Other. A process of intimate self-exploration culminates in a joyous recovery of agency and an alluring vision of alterity.

In her novel La disección de una tormenta [Dissection of a storm] (2005), Menchu Gutiérrez (b. 1957), like Janés, recruits Ophelia as an accomplice in a process of self-contemplation and associates her legacy with the fluidity of a semiotic order that exists beyond the borders of symbolic law. Notwithstanding these similarities, there are pronounced differences. Gutiérrez re-articulates Ophelia as an emblem of abjection. The novel is an intimate close-up of a psychological state with no joyous resolution. Readers are left facing the painful entanglements of abjection and the precariousness of subjectivity.

The appropriation of Ophelia in drama is more confrontational than in the genres of poetry and narrative. Dramatists subvert the character as a repository of the history of gender, dismantling male domination/female subjugation and the angel–demon paradigm attributed to women. It is time to kill off the outmoded Ophelia, to free her from the binary prison. Ophelia is not only ‘a ‘symptom’ or effect of the culture she represents … but also the generator or site of meaning or cultural shift’ (Peterson and Williams, 2012b, p. 5).

Helénica. Poemas para ‘El Público’ [Hellenic. Poems for ‘The Audience’] (1996) by Margarita Borja (b. 1942) exemplifies Ophelia’s role as a site for remapping culture. She is simultaneously the embodiment of the tragedy of past repression and of a desired future of self-inscribed subjectivities and ambiguous gender boundaries. The mimicking of canonized artistic patterns – the linearity of the initiation quest and the binary patterns that juxtapose a sexy defiant Ofelia Oscura and a pure, silent, obedient former self – make transparent patriarchal strategies of female marginalization and objectification. Designs of multiplicity, fragmentation and instability enhance Borja’s utopian vision of a just future.

Una altra Ofèlia [Another Ophelia] (2007) by Manuel Molins (b. 1946), written and performed in Catalan, calls on audiences to recognize the similarities between Shakespeare’s Ophelia and the present-day psychological mistreatment of women. The dramatist seamlessly fuses two narratives, the story of Ophelia in Hamlet and that of her contemporary namesake, whose situation is investigated by a reporter. Although awakening to her unequal status, the contemporary Ophelia does not fare well in the end; like her namesake, she continues to be a victim of patriarchal power and political corruption.

In the drama Una Ofelia sin Hamlet [An Ophelia without Hamlet] (1993) by Eduardo Quiles (b. 1940), the character is both an archetype of female gender and an individual personality, a contemporary woman suffering from an identity crisis. To convey the dominant notion of gender as a fixed construct still immutable in the present, Quiles has Ophelia and her mother ambiguously slip in and out of each other’s roles, creating an archetypal Ophelia/Woman that spans generations. Quiles’s mad Ophelia, like her mother and their Shakespearean predecessor, remains imprisoned; she has learned the gender script all too well. Economic and emotional dependencies keep her silent, unable to voice the injustice of her limited, predetermined role.

The visual artist Marina Núñez (b. 1966) breathes new life into Ophelia. This is not your ordinary makeover of hairdo, make-up and clothes. The changes are profound. The historically debilitating cultural constructs inflicted on Ophelia become visible. In some of Núñez’s works the poor creature flaunts her unbearable subjugation, appearing in contorted body positions, tied down, and covered with growths. The monstrous images constitute a liberating category that subverts social expectations. Núñez’s hyperbolic portrayals bid farewell to a lingering nineteenth-century legacy, a send-off reinforced with the appearance of the artist’s technological Ophelias in the year 2000.

Connected to wires, surprised by bolts of lightning, cyborg Ophelias shoot out of test tubes into unexplored realms of possibilities. Ambiguity, both human and scientific experiment, is an affirmation of unstable, multiple identities. Núñez embraces Ophelia as valuable aesthetic currency – images of beauty, death, madness, mermaids and nymphs – but rejects her ideological underpinnings, confirming the idea that Ophelia is located ‘uneasily between rejection and embrace, apocrypha and dogma, arousing our trust and dispelling it simultaneously’ (Auerbach, 1982, p. 10). The Spanish artist’s Ophelias are not acquiescent; they talk back and blast off toward exhilarating, unknown realms.

Photography is the most vibrant and diverse terrain of Ophelia refigurations. As an art form that ‘both recovers and erases her story’, photography ‘has evolved as the perfect tool for the recovery of her body’ (Perni, 2012, p. 196). The character’s presence addresses gender inequality, sexual orientation and gendered agency. Collectively, the Ophelia photographs in this study mirror the history of Spanish photography since the late 1970s. Discernible are the initial efforts to gain artistic legitimacy in the early years of the Transition, followed by anti-documental tendencies, first in the form of conceptual art and more recently as staged or constructed photography. Works by Eugènia Balcells (b. 1942), Joan Fontcuberta (b. 1955), Alex Francés (b. 1962), Carmela García (b. 1964), Rocío Verdejo (b. 1982) and Leila Amat Ortega (b. 1987) comprise the corpus of photographs analysed.

In her art book, ‘OPHELIA’ (variacions sobre una imatge) [‘Ophelia’ (variations on an image)] (1979), characterized by meta-artistic discourse, Balcells alters multiple photocopies of John Everett Millais’s Ophelia. The Catalonian artist emphasizes feminist perspectives and blurs the divide between high and low culture. No other Spanish photographer has been as vocal an advocate of the postmodern intent to undermine the camera’s claim to objectivity and authenticity as Fontcuberta. His Ophelia (1993) is no exception; it too questions the relationship of photography to reality, underscoring the need to view images with suspicion. Both Alex Francés and Carmela García enlist Ophelia to address the impact of the social construction of gender on the queer community. Beyond the exploration of gender identities, Ophelia enables Francés to explore the basic human need for contact with the Other, and García to capture utopic visions of the collective experience. Since the year 2000, many artists favour Ophelia in a context of staged self-portraits or the theatricalization of identities that highlight affective content. For example, in the series entitled Quietud [Stillness] (2008), Verdejo conveys a hopeful state of peace and tranquillity, while Amat, in Aristócrata suicida [The suicidal aristocratic girl] (2013), dramatizes surrender in the face of overwhelming circumstances.

The study confirms that following the political transition in Spain the mythical Ophelia ‘lives in the ideological present, transformed and reinvented in response to the cultural needs of each successive society which adopts her as its own’ (Keifer, 2001, p. 37). Artistic revisions