From drowning to rebirth

transfictionality and interart relations in “The Fate of Ophelia”

Abstract

The song and music video The Fate of Ophelia, associated with Taylor Swift's artistic persona, can be
understood through the articulation of transfictionality and interarts/intermediality studies. Based on the concept of
transfictionality proposed by Richard Saint-Gelais (2005), Ophelia is not only regarded as an intertextual reference to
Hamlet by William Shakespeare but also as a fictional figure who traverses different works, media, and aesthetic
regimes, being displaced and reconfigured in new narrative contexts. The analysis begins with the first seconds of
the music video, in which the painting “Ophelia” by Friedrich Wilhelm Theodor Heyser (1900) is visually recreated,
establishing a chain of mediations between theater, painting, pop music, and audiovisual media. To discuss this
movement between artistic languages, the studies of Étienne Souriau (1983), Mario Praz (1982), Thaïs Flores Diniz
(2005), and Claus Clüver (2001) are mobilized, whose contributions allow for reflection on the relationships among
literature, visual arts, music, and moving images. It is argued that The Fate of Ophelia not only reprises the
Shakespearean character, traditionally associated with madness, silencing, abandonment, and death by drowning,
but also rewrites her tragic fate by transforming her into a sign of survival, rebirth, and narrative contestation. From
this perspective, the work demonstrates how fictional figures celebrated by tradition can be reactivated within new
cultural and media systems, challenging historical representations of female suffering as beautiful, passive, and
inevitable.