The things you think when you are in the privacy of your own mind and the things you tell other people are both very different things. For instance, if the guy you have a thing for winkes at you at a party, you\u2019re definitely going to tell your friends it happened, but you might not admit how happy it made you in that moment.<\/p>\n
The same thing goes for Ophelia. I mean, obviously she doesn\u2019t have a thing for any of the guys at the brothel and she definitely didn\u2019t run into him at a party, but the main idea stays the same. In Ophelia\u2019s letters to Constance, she writes about the things that happen to her and yes, sometimes she discloses her feelings, but she never writes the way she does in her diary in the second part of the book.<\/p>\n
What I\u2019d really like to focus on, are the last few months of Ophelia\u2019s stay at the brothel and her departure from it. I believe that the biggest turn for Ophelia was in January of 1912, when she ventures out to take photographs with the Kodak she saved up for. She\u2019s trying to take a picture of a bird, however, the bird flies away. \u201cAs my shutter fell\/he lifted in flight, a vivid blur above\/the clutter just beyond the hedge\u2014garbage\/rats licking the insides of broken eggs.\u201d (Tretheway44) The redbird flying off, not sitting still for the camera, reminds me of Ophelia, posing for photographs. I know that might sound backwards, but as she poses for Bellocq, she feels trapped. She says \u201cI fade again into someone I\u2019m not,\u201d (Tretheway 40) meaning that she feels captured in somebody else, which she is being forced into by Bellocq. Escaping, flying away like the bird, is something she wants to do herself. The bird blurs away, leaving an unsightly sight behind, which is exactly what Ophelia wants to do. Plus, in her February 1912 diary entry, she once again paints her surroundings negatively, calling the city \u201cdull\u201d and \u201cgray\u201d with \u201cweathered ships docked at the quay, rats\/dozing in the hull, drizzle slicking dark stones\/of the street.\u201d (Tretheway 45) She obviously dislikes where she currently is.<\/p>\n
Now, in her last letter to Constance before the postcard, Ophelia writes that she longs to travel. She writes \u201cI lost\/myself, for a moment, and found\/upon waking from my daydream, the book\/clutched to my chest, and the globe\/set in motion, spinning beneath my hand.\u201d (Tretheway 32) While she doesn\u2019t mention any of the negatives about her living space, she does mention wanting to leave.<\/p>\n
And finally, in her last diary entry, she finally realizes that she needs to get out of there. By \u201c[seeing] only [her] own clear eye,\u201d (Tretheway 46) she realizes what she really wants, and gets out of there. However, in her letter to Constance, she never reveals what made her flee from the brothel and her life, she just tells her that she\u2019s moving on. She writes that the changing of winter to spring reminds her of herself, how she does not fit her skin anymore, much like the trees who blossom again. But her revelation, her special moment, her wink<\/em>, she keeps for herself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The things you think when you are in the privacy of your own mind and the things you tell other people are both very different things. For instance, if the guy you have a thing for winkes at you at a party, you\u2019re definitely going to tell your friends it happened, but you might not<\/p>\n