ABSTRACT
The author of this essay analyzes Restoration and eighteenth-century adoption of the figure of the mad Ophelia, arguing that this figure is sited at a conjunction of the histories of sexuality and women's public (and political) influence. The early realizations and uses of the mad Ophelia speak to our understanding of how conceptions of women's 'normative' sexuality developed, and prompts the reassessment of many feminist working assumptions about connections between free ' sexual expression and 'freedom ' from patriarchal oppression. More locally to eighteenth-century studies, the author shows how reinventions of the mad Ophelia are in fact one of the few sites at which Restoration and eighteenth-century writers, painters, actors, and commentators could openly display what they conceived to be 'natural' and undissembled expressions of virtuous, female heterosexual desire.
