When you think about daily life, you don’t tend to think about the simple things. No one is going to think back to that one awesome night you had with your friends and remember that you were breathing the entire night. The same tends to go for looking. Just like breathing, something I do every waking second of my life, is looking. I look at the street in front of me so I don’t fall or step in something, I look at my phone to check the time or maybe see if I have a text from someone, but most importantly, I look at people. I know that sounds incredibly creepy, like I’m lurking in a dark corner and leering at people who are passing me, but it’s true; I look at people. And don’t deny that you don’t, because people are interesting. They’re fun to look at. They’re unique. Just like Ophelia.
In Annette Debo’s “Ophelia Speaks: Ressurecting Still Lives in Natasha Trethewey’s Bellocq’s Ophelia,” Debo writes about the mundane act of looking, except the way she tells it, it’s not so mundane anymore. She says, “The sex industry is as much about theatricality as it is about sex, and in Bellocq’s Ophelia, the act of looking is layered, circular, and reflexive.” (Debo 207) What she is saying, is that looking at Ophelia is on the same level as having sex with her. Debo goes on to continue the different people who look at Ophelia, and how each of them look at her differently. I agree with Debo about the fact that Ophelia is being looked at and each person looking at her, does it differently. Ophelia is a strong woman, and she keeps her head held high, through all the objectification and lurking she’s put through. When she is found outside of her Quarters, and she is slathered with paint and forced to pose for a mugshot, she decides not to let it tear her down. She sees the picture of herself, “paint smeared on my face, my hair/loosed and wiled—a doppelgänger/whose face I loathe but must confront,” (Trethewey 29) and she doesn’t shy away from it. She confronts herself, and I find this to be one of the moments where you can see how strong Ophelia really is.
Being able to take in and survive under people’s gaze and judgment, Ophelia is certainly a strong and independent woman. As a sex worker, Ophelia tries her best to live everyday life and get the most out of it through her work and her thinking. She gets earning from work, and she gets stress reliever from her thinking and writing. I agree with you that there are a lot of little things going on in our daily life, and we don’t even notice how these things matter a lot most of the time. To breath, to talk, and to look are all essential elements in life, and just like what I write in my blog post, Ophelia uses these seemingly mundane skills to strengthen herself and makes herself worth more.
Emily, I agree with you that there is this constant ‘looking’ in the novel, both the readers looking in at Ophelia’s life and Ophelia looking back at us. I think it is important that this concept of ‘looking’ is evident in one of the first poems, “Letter Home”, where Ophelia first description of the brothel is the auction in which Ophelia must perform a tableau vivant, a motionless pose so that the customers can ‘look’ at Ophelia. However, after discovering the power of photography, Ophelia looks back at her customers, her past, and her audience. Ophelia, through the lens of camera, looks at the world and herself. Through the use of a camera and photography, Ophelia can transform herself, capturing the images of what she is looking at, rather than Bellocq or her customers looking at her.
I don’t think that I would say, Emily, that looking at Ophelia is the same thing as having sex with her; instead what Debo is saying, as I read her, is that the looking-at is just as important as the sex.