The Dead Girl Formula: Ophelia and Sharon Tate

by: Danielle Byington , March 24, 2026

Introduction

In her 2021 text, Women in the Picture: What Culture Does with Female Bodies, Catherine McCormack divides women’s presence across the spectrum of art history and new media into four categories: Venus, mother, monster, and dead damsel. While the first three labels are familiar discourse—Eva C. Keul’s ‘Split-Feminine Psyche’ of Venus and Hera, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s ‘Angel and Monster,’ and Sigmund Freud’s ‘Madonna-Whore Complex’—dialogues surrounding the dead girl trope surfaced more recently during the late 2010s. Though examples not unlike said motif can be found in narratives reaching back to the ancient world, news articles like Anne T. Donahue’s ‘How Twin Peaks Gave the Beautiful Dead Girl™ Pop-Culture Currency’ for Esquire and Clare Clarke’s ‘Our culture is obsessed with beautiful dead girls’ for The Irish Times explored the theme’s surge in popularity, often examining television and film, where specifically David Lynch’s Twin Peaks is a common model; other commentaries like Priscilla Frank’s ‘Our Cultural Obsession With “Pretty Dead Girls” Began Long Before Twin Peaks’ for HuffPost examined of the trope further by searching for evidence in art history like Henry Fuseli’s The Nightmare and Giorgione-Titian’s Sleeping Venus. Predictably, references were made to paintings of Ophelia’s death in Hamlet. This large sample of artwork depicting Gertrude’s eighteen lines is a scene that dominates visual arts based on literature, perhaps only surpassed by scenes of Greek mythology and the Bible. It is not, however, only Ophelia’s death iconography as the dead maiden depicted by centuries of artists, but the way throughout Hamlet in which she fulfills the roles of maiden, mother, and monster; the connection between these labels rarely considered, I argue that the dead girl trope is not an isolated category, but instead, contributes to a formula of the other three archetypes.

To understand how this combination affects us and where it is headed, we must look at where else the formula has appeared in our history. Looking at the explosive and culturally significant events of late-1960s America, the tragedy which closes the decade involves the death of American actress Sharon Tate. Interestingly, unlike the standards of the dead girl trope, there is no prevalent imagery of Tate’s corpse when it comes to discussions of her murder by the Manson family. Of course, a Google search makes the crime scene photos accessible, but they are not inherently connected with a search of her name, like Ophelia and imagery of Ophelia’s death. Sharon Tate has a cult-like legacy online, however, with social media groups sharing images daily of her beauty, in essence prohibiting discussions of her death, seemingly to prevent the ruin of her youthful image. It is as if the widely known, passive knowledge of her murder parallels Ophelia’s death iconography, Tate’s position as a movie star fulfilling the Venus role, her pregnancy at the time of death fulfilling the role of the mother, and the salacious gossip columns about ‘hippie parties’ at the Tate-Polanski home dressing her as a monster at fault for her own murder.

Through aligning these two figures with posthumanism, we can better understand this dead girl formula as both an embodiment and a disembodiment of our mortality. Posthuman studies generally focus on decentering the human from our perception of the world, making apparent what humans are because we can define what humans are not; I would like to take that a step further by pointing to our capacity for intellect and our unavoidable death as characteristics that separate us from animals and gods, respectively. The presence of stories across time that portray tragedies fills the Western canon like cautionary tales, and, as the dead girl trope embodies those tragedies, her singular death becomes the disembodied collective death of the Anthropocene. Stefan Herbrechter describes that the ‘cultural malaise or euphoria that is caused by’ our recognising ‘the “end of the human” without giving in to apocalyptic mysticism or to new forms of spirituality’ is an element which defines posthumanism (2013: 3). The unique intellect and eventual death with which our bodies come equipped inform our interpretation of the dead girl trope, and on her image our species perhaps projects not our singular mortalities but our destruction of the planet and of ourselves, the concept of humanity’s progress we have developed—if not embroidered—over time, and the hesitation to acknowledge our actual insignificance in the grand scheme of things because of the anxiety it might provoke. In my essay, I apply what I call the dead girl formula, as well as posthuman studies, to better understand how the dead girl trope’s imagery functions as an extension of the definition of the human. I do so by explaining why Ophelia and Sharon Tate are part of the repeated dead girl formula that reflects our mortality, what the formula reveals about humanity’s attraction to self-destructive tendencies, and how it points to a deeper, ontological value in the liminal space of beauty and death.

Ophelia and Tate as an Expression of Humanity’s Collective Tragedies

As early as the ancient Greek stage, through American literature’s characters like Annabel Lee or Myrtle Wilson, as well as activists like Mary Richardson in 1914 and ‘Just Stop Oil’ protesters in 2023 attacking Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus, literature, drama, and visual art frequently assign the most intense presentations of grief and suffering to women characters. Looking at this tradition illuminates the presence of the stereotypical feminine labels for which we now so often find as common rhetoric in gender studies. While academic fields pertaining to women, gender, and sexuality prevalently discuss how damaging these one-size-fits-all labels are and have been, it is also impossible to overlook how said labels have firmly established portrayals of women in real life and fictional narratives within a socio-patriarchal world. It is certainly reductive to suggest that there is an abundance of tragedy to exorcise from human history—memories of war, social injustice, climate change, and poverty just to name a few examples—that surface and resurface in familiar forms and situations, but one manifestation which tends to be the horse to the cart of these sufferings is the beautiful dead woman or dead girl trope. Her role tends to be not just a standard incarnation of misogyny, but, rather, part of a psycho-social formula expressed by the collective unconscious.

The Formula and Archetypes                                                                             

The feminine stereotypes of maiden, mother, and monster I mentioned earlier have typically been discussed in modern theory as various dichotomies, each having a foil. If we look beyond complex theory and philosophy to better understand the space between two opposites, we might turn from complicated ideas like the angel and monster motifs to simpler renderings: hot and cold, sweet and sour, or day and night. At this simplified level, the possibility of recognising the depth of the spectrum between the two opposites becomes clearer and less abstract. We know what hot feels like because we know what cold feels like, our general experience of these sensations informing our knowledge of the temperatures between; we recognise sweet because we can identify sour, and our sense of taste—as well as smell—further indicates to us how we might react to flavors in between like tart desserts or bitter-sweet chocolates; we learn what day and night are through the amount of light we perceive outdoors, as well as the hours indicating the beginning or end of a twenty-four-hour cycle. To know one abstract concept requires an understanding of its binary, which then provides insight into the characteristics and possibilities of the spectrum between the two. The dead girl trope functions no differently. The opposite of a dead woman is a living woman, and the aforementioned feminine labels comprise the in-betweeness, the spectrum of understanding shared by this dichotomy. This concept is easier to understand if we lay out the labels not as pairs but by making each term its own category.

Looking at the labels displayed chronologically (see Fig. 1) as maiden (representing angel, Venus, and whore), mother (representing Madonna, Hera, and also overlapping with angel), and monster (representing crone, Athena, and overlapping with whore), biology is the inherent marker of these titles, one transforming into the next; when looking at it through this biological lens, it becomes an attenuation of life and the ability to reproduce. The sequence, however, does not finally result in the beautiful dead woman step by step. Instead, all three labels act as an amalgamation, as seen in Fig. 2, comprising a formula which results in the dead girl trope. This formula reveals how the role of this trope has functioned as an expression of suffering and tragedy across cultures and time, whether fictional or based on real events, such as the deaths of Ophelia and Tate, respectively.

 

MAIDEN 🡪 MOTHER 🡪 MONSTER

LIFE 🡪 DEATH

Fig. 1. Chronology of Stereotypical Labels Assigned to Women.

 

Friedrich Nietzsche’s concepts of the Apolline and the Dionysiac in The Birth of Tragedy best clarify this formula. Defining the Apolline as a concrete image, and the Dionysiac as an imageless primitiveness, he describes ‘these two very different drives’ as ‘an opposition only apparently bridged by “art”’, their conflict ‘engender[ing] a work of art’ which we know as ‘Attic tragedy’ (1999: 14). The Apolline characteristics apply to the stereotypical feminine labels; they are standard archetypes recognisable across time and are not difficult to understand. On the other hand, the Dionysiac attributes delineate the dead girl trope and its abstractness, the resulting formula housing the liminal space between beauty and death, or as Nietzsche might call it, tragedy.

 

 

Fig. 2. The Dead Girl Formula.

 

We see the Apolline roles in modern literature, film, television series, and general popular culture. Our collective understanding of the behavior assigned to maiden-, mother-, or monster-portraying characters is not taught commonly in education like other literary terms such as protagonist or antagonist, but, because we also see these characteristics in real life and commonly repeat them in various cultural texts to children from an early age, it is not difficult to discern the virginal or seductive nature of the maiden, the nurturing care of the mother, or the villainous actions of the monster. Just as Nietzsche describes the Apolline, it is tangible imagery carried by art which proves most persuasive. The intangible Dionysiac essence portrayed by the dead girl trope, however, is a sort of invisible-visible which might best be explained with another relevant, if not literal, Dionysiac image.

Cy Twombly’s Untitled (Bacchus) series (see Fig. 3), 2008, consists of massive canvases covered in energetic red swirls that border on the haphazard, as their arches drip with excess acrylic paint. Like Nietzsche’s imageless Dionysiac, Bacchus—which is also the Roman name for Greek Dionysus—seems formless, without direction, and lacking subject as art.

 

 

Yet, Untitled (Bacchus) is not unlike the dead girl trope: both involve a concrete image while simultaneously imageless—we can look at the image and know what it is of, swirling red lines, but at the same time we cannot understand its meaning due to its sublime nature, ultimately creating what Nietzsche proposes as art from the conflict of the Dionysiac and the Apolline. The dead girl formula operates no differently in conveying tragedy; her imagery consists of a deceased, feminine body, hyper-romanticised in either its presentation or associated lore, but most importantly, it represents a deeper, ontological value that is not immediately apparent. Elisabeth Bronfen questions how we can ‘delight at, be fascinated, morally educated, [and] emotionally elevated’ regarding the aesthetic success, if not popularity, of dead girl trope imagery, referring to it as “a symptom hiding the dangerous thing even as it points precisely to that material for the failed repression of which recourse to an indirect articulation, to psychic representation, was taken in the first place” (1992: x). Just like a doctor’s visit to solve a riddle of illness, the symptom does not always come with answers, and in the case of the dead girl trope, the ‘symptom’ is not necessarily ‘the literal meaning of the image. In other words, what is plainly visible—the beautiful feminine corpse—also stands in for something else’ (Bronfen 1992: xi). The dead girl formula, however, has upheld a prolific presence in visual culture not because ‘the disguised articulation is a form of self-protection’ (Bronfen 1992: xi), but because of the formula’s components, the feminine labels which I have addressed, making it simple for us to apply complexities of our anxieties regarding mortality to figures found in culture, the part of society which allows us to measure growth and regression of humanity.

Ophelia’s Death Iconography and Tate’s Legacy

After an art museum tour, when it is the notorious moment to exit through the gift shop, a customary array of souvenirs emblazoned with well-known artworks is available, such as coffee mugs, magnets, and tote bags. The desire to replicate the experience of viewing an artwork is entirely sensible; besides enjoying the aesthetics of a piece, perhaps the visitor has other memories associated with it, such as those from a holiday involving a museum tour, or they were fascinated by the story behind the artefact. Either way, the reality of the artwork’s content remains on the surface, such as Sir John Everett Millais’ painting, Ophelia (see Fig.4), depicting the Shakespearean character on the cusp of death, or even already dead.^[1]

 

 

In contrast, it is not uncommon to see images of celebrities we might associate with the dead girl trope printed on merchandise as well, such as memorabilia of Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield, or, more importantly for this essay, Sharon Tate. Such products, on the other hand, are careful to exclude their death. Despite this difference, there is a parallel of what Ophelia’s death iconography and Tate’s legacy express when it comes to the dead girl trope.

Of all Shakespeare’s plays, Hamlet is perhaps the one most revisited in paintings, cartoons, and other visual media, with its iconic scenes, such as the ‘Alas, poor Yorick’ (5.1:174) moment of Hamlet holding a skull with the gravediggers, and of course, Gertrude’s eighteen lines describing Ophelia’s drowning. The latter, however, has generated a multitude of artworks over four centuries, to the point that it has become a recognisable iconography. At large, Ophelian iconography is typically distinguishable as two categories: the first involving her madness, whether when she is singing in the court or gathering flowers outside before the fall from the willow, and the second, arguably more iconic, picturing her death.^[2] Furthermore, it is especially Millais’ Ophelia that serves as the sign for all other Ophelian death iconography, its monetary value, as declared by Tate Britain, £30,000,000, demonstrating its significant cultural value as well.

Millais’ Ophelia is an image not only associated with its respective iconography or Hamlet, but has become, like da Vinci’s Mona Lisa or Van Gogh’s Starry Night, an image used as commentary on our current events, such as its usage in early 2010s news articles discussing the dead girl trope. Richard Howells and Joaquim Negreiros explain that in the final, most intricate level of iconography, the image at hand portrays something about its respective culture, for example, history, politics, or economics (2012: 24-25).^[3] The repetition of the painted scene and of Millais’ Ophelia as a cultural icon speaks of not just Shakespeare, the Pre-Raphaelites, or the blending of highbrow arts with lowbrow media. Still, more accurately, the dead girl formula is a mimesis of tragedy, just as the final level of iconography allows us to understand Millais’ Ophelia.

Only known widely since the beginning of her acting career in the 1960s, Sharon Tate’s legacy has only had half a century to compete with the presence of Ophelia, and the public’s fandom has not left her too far behind in the sense of the dead girl trope. Ophelia’s death iconography centres on her final moment, but the repetition of Tate’s imagery displays her life while almost always clumsily alluding to her death. Social media fan accounts for the late actress total approximately 100,000 followers collectively, and while the groups have rules forbidding blatant mention of the murders, photos posted of Tate still clearly stir the recognition of the dead girl trope with comments wishing for her to ‘Rest in Peace,’ others commenting on how old her unborn child would be today, and petition links to deny the living Manson family members parole. Although even when her violent death is inescapably part of the conversation, such as in the best-selling true crime book Helter Skelter, written by the prosecuting attorney in the Manson trial, Vincent Bugliosi, and co-written by Curt Gentry, it seems as if she is made to still somehow be morbidly romanticised:

She was young, blond, very pregnant. She lay on her left side, directly in front of the couch, her legs tucked up toward her stomach in a fetal position. She wore a flowered bra and matching bikini panties, but the pattern was almost indistinguishable because of the blood, which looked as if it had been smeared over her entire body. (1974: 30)

In a subsequent section, Bugliosi goes on to provide a brief background of each Tate-LaBianca murder victim, stating that ‘autopsy reports are …. cold, factual’ (1974: 52), spending approximately five pages on Tate, and just one to two pages on the others. This content appears about 100 pages before the pictures from the crime scene.

Tate almost immediately became the icon of the crimes. Other victims of the Tate-LaBianca murders had suffered more significant or bizarre assault, such as Voytek Frykowski, who was stabbed the most—51 times compared to Tate’s 16 times—and even beaten and shot, or Leno LaBianca, whose body was found with a carving fork stabbed into his stomach and the word ‘WAR’ cut into his chest. Tate’s murder, however, came to wholly represent the tragic incident. The subconscious urge to make Tate an icon of the loss was likely fueled by not only her up-and-coming stardom as well as her third-trimester pregnancy, but especially how those two factors fit not only the structure of the dead girl formula but that of the ‘American Dream’.

Her climb to fame, accompanied by her being on the verge of starting a family, made Tate’s death feel as if the American Dream had been brutally slaughtered, which might be why there is such a staunch conviction to focus on imagery of her glowing life, as if such ambitions, no matter the country, have not been lost. Millais’ Ophelia seemingly contrasts with this motive of the dead figure unavoidably before our eyes, practically a nuisance of loss we must examine. Just as Millais’ painting should ‘be considered … as an object of material culture,’ the presence of Tate’s legacy functions similarly, especially when considering both not just as imagery ‘in [their] own right but also a symptom, an open tomb in which to bury one’s deepest anxiety or a screen onto which one can project one’s innermost desire’ (Roussillon-Constanty 2019: 2). The Dionysiac qualities of the dead girl trope are found in this ‘open tomb’ between Ophelia’s death iconography and Tate’s legacy. Just like my previous example of Twombly’s Untitled (Bacchus) being recognisable as a frenzy, although its ultimate meaning may not be immediately apparent, so Millais’ Ophelia and Tate produce this same conflict. The departure from the Apolline can be seen in the relationship between Untitled (Bacchus) and Tate, as its radical red loops feel like that unhinged night in August of 1969, the paint reminiscent of the blood Bugliosi described smeared across Tate’s corpse in the passage above.^[4] The same way we might step back from Untitled (Bacchus) to comprehend it fully, so have many zoomed out the camera lens, attempting to understand Tate’s murder. Similarly, the fixation on Millais’ Ophelia is like stepping back from Twombly’s painting, like coming home from the museum’s gift shop to realise the cup purchased is not just a Shakespearean character but has a dead woman on it, slipping back into the Apolline as we acknowledge we have been charmed by violence and death. This fascination is not just about our mortality but also a compulsive curiosity about tragedy. A further look at their behaviour in the maiden, mother, and monster labels can help us better understand this allure of tragedy, which both figures stimulate.

Ophelia and Tate within the Dead Girl Formula

Regarding this dead girl formula, posthumanism allows us to study social constructs and their effect on how we define ourselves as humans (Bolter 2016). Bolter elaborates on how feminist ideologies ‘displace man from his central position in the definition of human’ (2016), attaching categories and new systems to the possibilities—forms of breaking down the human in posthumanism—of who can be human. In Gender Trouble, Judith Butler describes her idea through the work of Luce Irigaray in stating how ‘women are the “sex” which is not “one.” Within a language pervasively masculinist, a phallogocentric language, women constitute the unrepresentable. … In this sense, women are the sex which is not “one” but multiple’ (1990: 13). The labels of maiden, mother, and monster within the dead girl formula are far from feminine ideals, matching what Simone de Beauvoir designates as the Other, and what Irigaray defines as a linguistic ‘exclusion of the feminine altogether’ (Butler 1990: 13). While I do not disagree with these points, I do find importance in recognising how these elements of the dead girl formula have been utilised to construct, even if inadvertently, abstract extensions of understanding tragedy, and how they do so as extensions of the human.

The act of surveying these labels of maiden, mother, and monster together echoes what Michel Foucault calls ‘four similitudes’ in The Order of Things, where the author looks at the ‘semantic web’ of defining and organising ‘resemblances’ (1970: 17), categorising things—especially their relationship to humans—being a hallmark of posthuman studies. First, convenientia pertains more to the space in which things or ideas are analysed: ‘Those things are “convenient” which come sufficiently close to one another to be in juxtaposition; their edges touch, their fringes intermingle, the extremity of the one also denotes the other’ (Foucault 1970: 18). We go from this concept of organisation where the resemblances are so much so that the things essentially bleed together, informing one another, with varying degrees of separation in emulation, analogy, and finally sympathy (Foucault 1970: 19-24). Foucault explains sympathy as ‘an instance of the Same’ which is so enduring that it does not cease “to be merely one of the forms of likeness; it has the dangerous power of assimilating, of rendering things identical to one another’ (1970: 23). The only way to maintain differentiation so that we may know something in this instance is the counterbalance of sympathy and antipathy, the latter maintaining ‘the isolation of things,’ dividing all things ‘within its impenetrable difference and its propensity to continue being what it is’ (Foucault 1970: 24). The amalgamation of the feminine labels I have discussed in this essay leads us through Foucault’s same four similitudes, and looking at the role of each through Ophelia and Sharon Tate can help us to know better not just the identities of maiden, mother, and monster, but also to begin understanding what we do not know about the dead girl formula and its duplication of an impending post-Anthropocene.

Maiden

During Shakespeare’s time, the popular motif of ‘Death and the Maiden’ had become a vogue in art, highlighting the pervasive and universal nature of death. It is assumed to be derived from the Middle Ages’ similar theme, Danse Macabre (‘Dance of Death’), which typically features skeletons delightfully dancing among the living in everyday scenarios. A byproduct of the respective times, as war and plague were inescapable, the transformation of death’s personification, dancing among all social classes in the Middle Ages yet exclusively embracing women (see Fig. 5), points to a fear associated with the feminine and with death. The maiden is, in fact, a terrifying figure because she can create life, which subsequently leads to death. Brigid Burke connects this association of the feminine and death to the prevailing religion of that era, Christianity, and that when Eve brought death into the world, she also brought lust (160). Eroticism and sexuality are certainly a feature in the Death and the Maiden motif, as seen in Fig. 5, and a key feature defining the maiden role is sex and the concept of virginity.

 

 

Terms like ‘maiden’ essentially held stronger linguistic links to the state of a young woman’s sexual preservation before marriage, more so than a focus on her age. As Judith M. Bennett details, ‘Maidenhood was, then as now, a malleable identity, but it carried a presumption of virginity and, to a lesser extent, youthfulness’ (2012: 270). Textually, we see a reference to Ophelia’s maidenhood made by Laertes early in the play as he cautions his sister about seeing Hamlet, so she will not allow her ‘chaste treasure open[ed] / To his unmastered importunity’ (1.3:30-31). Ophelia also promises her brother that he ‘shall keep the key of it’ (1.3:85). This metaphor of lock and key is an intercourse not lost on the audience. Still, it also takes the concept of virginity outside the woman’s body, allotting its control to men. If we consider marriage as the boundary where the maiden is still a maiden, Gertrude points to it, or the absence of it, later in the play during Ophelia’s burial, as she mourns, ‘I thought thy bride-bed to have decked, sweet maid, / And not have strewed thy grave’ (5.1:233-234). This conflation of marriage and death is evident in Millais’ Ophelia, in which the artist painted his model, Elizabeth Siddal, in an antique wedding gown. In a letter to Thomas Combe, Millais describes having ‘purchased a really splendid lady’s ancient dress—all flowered over in silver embroidery—and I am going to paint it for “Ophelia”’ (Riggs 1998). His choice of a white dress reflects the trend established by Queen Victoria only about a decade prior, when she married in a white dress, making Ophelia’s wearing of it in Millais’ painting a certain allusion to marriage and its relationship to the loss of maidenhood.

Extending this idea to Tate effectively bolsters the view that the maiden label’s demise is due to marriage. In November 2018, Julien’s Auctions of Beverly Hills, CA, held an auction for the estate of Sharon Tate, her wedding gown especially garnering interest. Even shortly before the sale, many of the belongings were exhibited in the Museum of Style Icons in Newbridge, Co Kildare, Ireland. Before the estate sale, Sharon Tate’s sister, Debra, had possession of the items but was forced to move them to a protected storage unit in 2011 following a robbery seeking her deceased sister’s belongings (Abrams 2018). The catalogue for the Julien’s auction of Tate’s things is 94 pages in length, and, as the auction house’s executive director, Martin Nolan, stated, ‘We’ve had more catalogue orders for this auction than any other auction we’ve done outside Michael Jackson’ (Abrams 2018).
Browsing the catalogue, it is apparent that the majority of items, some grouped, were estimated to average approximately $300-$1,000 in the final bid. The wedding dress, however, was listed at expecting $25,000-$50,000 (Julien’s Auctions 2018: 47). The fetish for her wedding gown actually exceeded anticipated prices, finally selling for $56,000 to Zak Bagan, controversial owner of the Haunted Museum in Las Vegas, Nevada (Hitt 2019). While the purchase and exhibit of her wedding dress could be viewed as honouring her life, pure disapproval was evident in a Change.org petition, which demanded sensitivity in exhibiting the dress, that it be isolated and not displayed alongside Manson family relics (Lupul 2019). This example seems to be the standard case in these forms of idolising Tate. There is no traditional dead girl trope imagery, such as Ophelia, but even photos of her life tend to be passively tied to her death, not because she is deceased, but because of the tragic way in which she died. As already noted, when Julien’s Auctions anticipated a radically high price for Tate’s wedding dress compared to her other personal items—including lingerie, sunglasses, and used cosmetics—this indicates the cultural allure and symbolism of the wedding dress itself, the costume of the maiden role Tate left behind, though never quite crossing the threshold into motherhood.

Mother

The view of Death and the Maiden is an understandable relationship in the concept of the dead girl formula if marriage is dwelled upon as a sort of demise, because ideologically, the next platitudinal milestone expected is motherhood. The Shakespearean essence of what is maternal is, of course, a significant part of the criticism surrounding Hamlet, particularly the Prince of Denmark’s relationship with his mother, Gertrude. Ophelia’s relationship to the maternal, however, becomes apparent in her death iconography. Referring to Fig. 1, the transition of MAIDEN 🡪 MOTHER involves transcending a boundary comprised of the departure from virginity to procreation and nurturing. The physical body responsible for undertaking such a task is granted pseudo-sainthood status. Millais’ Ophelia is designed to replicate not just the maiden identity, but that of the maternal, its curvature at the top of the painting designed to mimic a holy relic like a painting of the Virgin Mary:

The arched format and golden frame and the horizontal position of the young woman align the painting with pictorial and architectural representations of the dormition of the Virgin Mary. (Roussillon-Constanty 2019: 3)

Ophelia’s death iconography bears a strong resemblance to Marian iconography, which includes an extensive body of images that can be grouped into categories such as the moment of the immaculate conception, the Madonna holding infant Christ, and Mary grieving the crucifixion of Christ. The first grouping parallels the dead girl formula as it represents the bringing of death into the world through a subsequent Judgment Day, not unlike Ophelia’s death representing our ontological mythos of existence and its end, even when her brother upbraids the priest who says, ‘No more be done’ at her funeral (5.1:225), Laertes declaring, ‘a ministering angel shall my sister be’ (5.1:230).

Looking at the moment with which the public most often defines Tate—her death—her relationship to the maternal is quite literal, as she was at the end of her third trimester of pregnancy at the time of her murder. As I previously pointed out, the differences in the degree of brutality committed against Tate and other victims who were stabbed far more times and even shot, the tragedy inevitably elevates Tate to a sort of sainthood due to the sinister crossing of moral boundaries in brutally murdering a pregnant woman. Even the terms associated with the mother role, Freud’s ‘Madonna’ as well as Gilbert and Gubar’s ‘angel’ from ‘angel in the house,’ echo the dead girl trope’s likeness to Marian iconography; Tate’s husband, Roman Polanski in his interview with the police post-murder referred to her as an ‘angel’, and numerous celebrity friends such as Mia Farrow and Patty Duke unanimously cited her otherworldly goodness (Bugliosi & Gentry 1974: 93). In an itinerary of her final day, one of the phone calls she received was about ‘a neighbor’s kitten that had strayed onto the property; Sharon had been feeding it with an eye dropper’ (Bugliosi & Gentry 1974: 83), perhaps anticipating nursing her child to come. While she did not have the opportunity to cross into motherhood during her life, Tate was interred in the image of the maternal; her unborn son was removed from the womb and buried with her in her arms, her association with the mother role of the dead girl formula made permanent in her grave.

Monster

While the role of the monster in the dead girl formula initially refers to the chronology of biology, and the end of fertility, its name also points to shaming. Calling someone a monster is not a compliment. Ophelia’s death iconography illustrates a place in the play between two scenes in which she is related to the monster role: her mad scene and her burial with the gravediggers. Distraught after Hamlet’s murder of her father, she sings of losing her maiden role, ‘Let in the maid that out a maid / Never departed more’ (4.5:54-55), her madness not just grief, but a sort of public humiliation as others in the court watch her. After her drowning, the gravediggers apply a similar scrutiny in discussing her death, the second player stating, ‘If this had not been a / gentlewoman she should have been buried out / o’Christian burial’ (5.1:23-25). Not unlike this criticism of Ophelia’s death, Tate was also blamed for inadvertently causing her own murder, salacious headlines following her death, featuring outrageous claims like ‘the queen of the Hollywood orgy scene’ and some accusing her of black magic (Bugliosi & Gentry 1974: 91).^[5]

This contrast between the idolisation of the virginal maiden and the nurturing mother, and that of the monster role, is evident in the model Elizabeth Siddal’s role in Millais’ Ophelia. The exhumation of her body so her husband, Dante Rossetti, could retrieve a poetry manuscript he buried with her, resulted in lore that her flowing auburn hair had continued to grow after death, filling the coffin. Gilbert and Gubar comment on the fantastic elements of this urban legend, stating that the supernatural qualities applied to her corpse define her as ‘a monster, a magical creature of the lower world who is a kind of antithetical mirror image of the angel’ (1979: 28). The beauty and horror assigned to not just the painting but also the real-life subject in the painting, conflates this combination of the maiden, mother, and monster labels in the dead girl formula.

How the Formula and Posthumanism Point to the Ontological Value of Tragedy

Reflecting on an anthropological look at the origins of ancient Greek religion, Walter F. Otto comments that the drive behind cultus (organised religious belief) indicates ‘that fertility and death did not belong to two separate realms in the belief of early antiquity’ (1965: 11), an important point when revisiting the Apolline and the Dionysiac. Fertility, or rather its forms such as vegetation and reproduction, is the substance of life that creates death; the former is of the stable Apolline and the latter of the imageless Dionysiac—as Otto suggests, they come from the same place. What the dead girl formula allows us to see, and a large part of the trope’s prolific nature, is the space where life and death, or even sex and death, are separate yet blur together like Foucault’s four similitudes, imagery of the beautiful dead woman motif summoning some archaic call in the unconscious to define imageless death with the concrete matter of life.

In Bruno Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern, he begins by addressing the way we observe crises, utilising the example of newspaper headlines, going on to demonstrate how the impending doom is a hybrid of ‘biology and society’ (1993: 2). Latour further argues that we have never been modern because, like an anthropologist, we examine how our scientific and technological crises shape society and how society amplifies scientific and technological crises; if we are observing ourselves the same way an anthropologist observes premodern man, then we never reached modernity in the first place (1993: 7). One might argue that is what I have done in this essay, attempting to analyse human behavior toward existentialism with a breakdown of the reoccurring dead girl trope as a formula, striving to provide a revelation about the attraction to tragedy which uses women’s bodies as the vehicle—the Apolline biology and the Dionysiac society. Further illuminating Latour’s work and its relationship to posthumanism, Karen Raber, in her text Shakespeare and Posthumanist Theory, suggests a stance that is not ‘anti-humanism or anti-modernity’ (2018: 2), going on to point to the end of his book in which he argues that ‘we must relocate the human’ (Latour 1993: 136). Latour then asks, ‘Where do we situate the human?’ (1993: 136). The human has already been situated in tragedy.

While tragedy functions as a static space for humans, the dead girl formula acts as an extension of this space, providing a sort of cartography of the human psyche by utilising imagery of the sex which carries out gestation, which brings with it our death. Rosi Braidotti defines this posthuman cartography as ‘a theoretically based and politically informed reading of the present’ (2013: 164); women’s bodies have been used to embody a past—via mythos—which represents a disembodied geopolitical present. Statues of Columbia, Britannia, and Germania are found atop the United States Capitol and St. Pancras Station, as well as overlooking the Rhine, respectively, all figures meant to establish the endurance of a nationality, essentially identity, the presence of their bodies also carrying with them the inherent colonialism and thus demise of previous cultures. Here, the women are not overtly dead bodies, but we can infer that if there are other women figures representing the previous irradicated civilisations, there are dead women just outside the frame.

The way in which we attach such a massive yet unique chapter of the Anthropocene to these statues—histories, languages, beliefs—animates their state as objects, or what in Vibrant Matter Jane Bennett calls ‘thing-power’, a ‘strange ability of ordinary, man-made items to exceed their status as objects and to manifest traces of independence or aliveness, constituting the outside of our own experience’ (2010: xvi). Ophelia and Tate have succumbed to such application of this ‘thing-power’ in modern culture, their roles in the dead girl formula acting as ideologies from which we might assess our humanness and mortality. Millais’ Ophelia becomes the ultimate object of the idea of not just Ophelia but the sign of the dead girl formula, the painting acting as an exhibition of Latour’s ‘biology and society’, providing us with a window to review ourselves as humans, the way in which objects are investigated and dissected in posthuman studies. Despite no imagery of her death, Tate’s role in the dead girl formula is fueled by objects, as well. Not unlike the aforementioned auction for her belongings in 2018, a 2023 auction sold the door from the Tate-Polanski home, on which ‘PIG’ was written in Tate’s blood, for approximately $127,000 (Neath 2023). This staggering price demonstrates the ‘thing-power’ attached to the door, the object acting as the unseen imagery of the dead girl trope. Both Millais’ painting and the Tate-Polanski door demonstrate how Bennett’s ‘objects [appear] as things, this is, as vivid entities not entirely reducible to the contexts in which (human) subjects set them’ (2010: 5), such as a painting in a museum and a door to a house. In attempting to examine our ontological place as humans, we seem to perform this type of archaeology on things around us, as the history and insight they carry, much like the statues previously mentioned, fulfil curiosities about our collective mortality.

These objects do not only carry some answer to our identity, but also come to represent tragedy—not just their respective tragedies like Ophelia’s drowning or Tate’s murder, but a rhizomatic narrative which eventually involves the end of humans and whatever importance we believe to provide reality. If we have an insurmountable ending in which our presence is no longer known or discussed, then the concept of tragedy helps define us. The Apolline labels of the maiden, mother, and monster combined with the Dionysiac dead girl trope produces tragedy as a subject-object, a thing doing the affecting in the present natural world, but which is also affected by present society, Latour’s ‘biology and society’ (1993: 2). The present we are always closest to, however, is that of our mortality, the ontological value of tragedy allowing us to transition from prehistoric humans looking at our handprints in first-person perspective on cave walls, to a third-person view that observes our anxieties through the death of others, such as in the dead girl formula.

Conclusion

In many epics, there is the familiar journey to the underworld, the hero visiting the dead for insight; that motif is typically now reversed in popular media, such as those involving zombies or vampires. Today, the dead come to us, not for advice, but perhaps so their presence will yield a meditation on our own ‘LIFE 🡪 DEATH’. Simon Critchley describes tragedies as ‘an experience of moral ambiguity. The right thing is always on both sides and invariably also wrong’ (2019: 34), which suggests there is some moral ambiguity to the dead girl formula. The fixation on fictional characters like Ophelia or true crime victims like Tate can then be assumed as both wrong and right, simultaneously a taboo and a revelation about our humanity.

In 2019, both Ophelia and Tate were resurrected in film, their respective narratives, however, not portraying their typical tragedies. Claire McCarthy’s film, Ophelia, based on the novel by Lisa Klein, retells Hamlet from the perspective of Ophelia, providing her character with far more agency and presence, rewriting her ending without drowning, living a ‘happily-ever-after’ life of marriage and children. Not unlike McCarthy’s Ophelia, Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood rewrites what we know, preserving Tate in the end. Tarantino not only sends her murderers into the wrong house but also brutally abuses and kills them. These choices are deeply intriguing, coming at a time just before the COVID-19 pandemic, rejecting the dead girl formula, attempting to resist tragedy as we know it. Though there was much humanity during the health crisis, we also especially went on to see some of society’s worst flaws with the misinformation and preference of conspiracy theories, which followed a few months later during lockdown. Perhaps the desire for McCarthy’s and Tarantino’s films at the time were based on the fairytale notion of overlooking death, as is even evident in Tarantino’s title, but post-2020, we seem more driven to appreciate life because there is death.

Considering Greek drama, tragedy’s literal translation, ‘goat song,’ indicates an element of ritual in retelling stories of grief and suffering (Puchner 2019: 390), an emphasis placed on ritual as it distinguishes its practice as more routine than a ceremony, so much so that we can assume it is part of everyday life. Rituals are there to reground us with our needs in reality, so how does tragedy provide us with ritual? Where is tragedy in our daily lives, and why is it useful? This is the utility of the dead girl formula: as in the Greek tragedies, women characters—the likes of Medea, Antigone, Hecuba, Andromache, Iphigenia—were often the vessels telling and retelling the Trojan cycle, a story necessary to share as it communicated how what was once a tangible, visible city and people fell to a Dionysiac decade of war. While Ophelia represents the Dionysiac qualities of the dead girl formula in a larger, ontological context, Tate varies in how her lack of dead girl imagery represents not just the end of a decade, but the dissolution of something that was lore, discussed but often unseen: the American Dream. Like the city of Troy, the ideology of the American Dream shimmers in the past, but, just like Troy, perhaps it is mere mythos. With Millais’ Ophelia, it seems there is no ending represented, its cultus recharged with each new incident of the dead girl trope, making it a sign of not just the dead girl formula, but the sign of the ‘LIFE 🡪 DEATH’, or the human experience. And, just like the painting captures her blithely singing as her own actions drown her, so the human race sings a metaphoric ‘goat song’ before the post-Anthropocene.

Notes

^[1] The canon of Ophelia iconography in art history includes many images depicting this scene before her death, but whether Ophelia is alive in Millais’ painting has long been a point of debate.

^[2] I have specified this category as Ophelia’s death iconography in this essay to distinguish it from the former iconography of her madness.

^[3] The first level of iconology is the image itself, and the second level involves understanding the narrative’s surface.

^[4] It may be of interest to the reader to also compare this scenario to the women of Euripides’ The Bacchae.

^[5] Bugliosi and Gentry’s text goes on to describe how Polanski held a press conference to defend his late wife’s reputation, detailing her goodness; this subsequently led to backlash, as the press later attacked him.