Biography gabrielle bellocqs ophelia

Bellocq's Ophelia by Natasha Trethewey

(Graywolf Press)

The name Ophelia is synonymous with tragedy and loss.

Bellocq's Ophelia, and Native Guard, for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize.

It has survived not only in literature, but also in music, in film and in art since Shakespeare�s time. Natasha Trethewey, whose previous collection Domestic Work won the 1999 Cave Canem Poetry Prize and the 2001 Lillian Smith Book Award, uses two sources as a point of departure for her second collection, Bellocq�s Ophelia.

One is a portrait of Ophelia painted by Millais. The other, a set of photographs taken by E.J. Bellocq.

Natasha Trethewey has published four collections of poetry: Domestic Work, Bellocq's Ophelia, Native Guard (which won the Pulitzer Prize), and Thrall.

Ophelia is a young, fair-skinned, mixed-race, Black woman who becomes a prostitute in New Orleans in the early s.

Ophelia in popular culture responds to particular textual aspects of her character: a “rose of May” or emblem of innocent, beautiful, doomed sexuality.

Trethewey discussed her recently published (at the time) poetic sequence, Bellocq's Ophelia.

Bellocq's Ophelia,” and “Domestic Work.” Trethewey is a professor of English in the Northwestern University Weinberg College of Arts and.

Using Bellocq�s portraits to establish a time and place, New Orleans around 1912, Trethewey imagines the life of a young prostitute. She uses Millais�s portrait of Ophelia to establish a tenuous link between the Ophelia of literature and her own imagined Ophelia and then delivers a cycle of poems that detail her character�s life working in an octaroon brothel.

Ophelia is the daughter of a black mother and white father, raised with har