This is KZSU, Stanford.

Welcome to entitled opinions.

My name is Robert Harrison, and we're coming to you from the Stanford campus. Our topic today is women in

literature, and what a copula that is.

How far back does the end of women in madness go?

All the way back to the crazed women of antiquity haunting our unconscious.

The Medeas, the Medusas, the furies, the harpies, the menads.

They all still rave inside of us, Antigone along with them.

Such is the power of archetypes. They endure,

their stories reiterate, they take on ever new incarnations. I've said it before on this program.

Almost all the archetypes in our collective unconscious were discovered by the Greeks. No one knows exactly why. Shakespeare maybe added a couple of new ones to the conventicle. Ophelia of the Willows, for example,

she's the type of a more tender kind of madness, the madness of an infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering thing.

Ophelia moves us rather than terrifies us.

Her passive, helpless, profoundly wounded folly marks her as a modern rather than a classical

feminine type.

Stay tuned, friends, a show about what happens to the figure of the mad woman across the

20th century coming up.

Okay. I needed something. Ophelia, incapable of her own distress, climbing a willow tree that grows a slant of brook, its branch falling into into the river with Ophelia on it.

Let me take this occasion to call on Comrade Arthur Rambeau, whose voice we haven't heard

for quite some time on entitled opinions.

When he was 16 years old, Rambeau wrote a poem about Ophelia that remains one of the most exquisite of the

modern French canon. Here's how it begins.

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