"O pallida Ofelia, bella come la neve!"Intreccio tra soggettività e follia nello sviluppo dell’identità femminile

"O pallida Ofelia, bella come la neve!"Intreccio tra soggettività e follia nello sviluppo dell’identità femminile This paper discusses the difficult journey of female identity. Women often struggle between their primary identification with the maternal body and their subsequent internal and external identifications. The conflict, often shown through symptoms, becomes more evident in the different phases of woman’s body transformations when she has to change the image of her own body/self. The psychic discomfort, searching for a new body/self, finds sometimes a dramatic and paradoxically reassuring answer in a diagnosis that gives to the woman a pathological identity, that cancels her voice. The literary character, Ophelia, is presented to show how the female words not listened to, not recognized, become a delirium. These words reveal Ophelia’s own view of reality, but inscribe her into madness, bringing her to death.;

Claudia Zanardi, "O pallida Ofelia, bella come la neve!"Intreccio tra soggettività e follia nello sviluppo dell’identità femminile in "SETTING" 24/2007, pp 117-128, DOI: