Ophelia’s feelings of New Orleans remain largely negative throughout Bellocq’s Ophelia: “the gray husk of winter”; “…the city’s dull palette of gray”; “flies buzzing the meat-stand, cockroaches crisscrossing the banquette…and mosquitoes skimming flat water like skaters on a frozen pond.” To her, it is a prison (a larger one from the brothel) that she cannot escape from. She thinks wistfully of all the places she has yet to travel to that she once learned about: “I recall how you spun it, showed us Africa, moving your finger back and forth across an expanse of blue.”; “…the word travel, no place so distant that I couldn’t dream myself there.” At certain points, though, she is able to find beauty in New Orleans—“I find myself drawn to what shines—iridescent scales of fish on ice at the market, gold letters on the window of the apothecary shop, sunlight held in old bottles and jars lining the sill.”; “…the wet grass throbbing with crickets, insistent, keen as desire.” She is even able to find beauty in the brothel in which she lives, the place that she loathes most—“Imagine, then, my surprise at finding that Countess keeps a library here, in the brothel! It’s a lovely room—stuffed chairs, a Persian rug, morning light through the window, a fat dictionary on one side and a globe on the other.”; “They like best, as I do, the regular meals, warm from the cooks in our own kitchen, the clean indoor toilet and hot-water bath. We like, too, the perfumed soaps and fine silk gowns we wear in the evenings.”
We’ve seen a similar approach to place in both The Awakening and A Streetcar Named Desire; while it does provide some comfort, some escape, it ends up doing more harm than good in the end. For Blanche, she travels to New Orleans to escape her past, to start again. She is able to find temporary happiness with Stella and with Mitch in this new setting, but ultimately, New Orleans is where she finally and completely loses her grip on reality. For Edna, everything that she hates about her life—her husband, her children, her acquaintances—ties her to New Orleans, and yet, she is able to find brief moments of happiness as well, such as taking her own house and spending time with Alcee and Robert. For Ophelia, similar to Blanche’s own situation, New Orleans is where she has come to begin again, to escape oppression and finally put her skills as an educated woman to use. Her outcome is initially cautiously optimistic, then turns hopeless as she becomes a prostitute, viewing New Orleans as a prison that she can’t escape from in which she is again being oppressed and used by men. Over time, though, as she finds ways to reclaim her own agency (sending money home to her mother; becoming an amateur photographer; becoming the subject of Bellocq’s photographs), she is able to find beauty in the city, most notably when she begins to take photographs of the area (“I find myself drawn to what shines—iridescent scales of fish on ice at the market, gold letters on the window of the apothecary shop, sunlight held in old bottles and jars lining the sill.”). In all three of these instances, place is both a comfort and a pain; each of these women is able to find both joy and sorrow in New Orleans.