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| Portrait of Vernon Lee by Sargent, courtesy of the Tate Gallery. | |
Vernon Lee's "Dionea"
commentary by rbadac
The ancient Gods & Goddesses, subsumed by history, revisit us in imagination, & are every bit as capricious as when their edicts & affairs emanated from Olympian origins. In imagination they regain their lost fecundity & potency; as myth they reflect human realities within godlike frameworks, & as archetypes they persist in Deity within the subconscious of human endeavor, which in the act of creation has its own pretensions to godhood.
Thus the frequent incidence of their placement in the weird story, almost a cliche of supernature, has resulted in numerous efforts ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous. For every "Great God Pan" there will be twenty more inferior or hopelessly derivative offspring to disappoint, even as the original possesses defects of its own. Yet at its best, as in Prosper Merimee's "La Venus D'Ille," or in the deft & entertaining incarnations found in the works of Forster, Garnett, Onions, Robert Graves, Thomas Burnett Swann, & others, the pantheon of Graeco-Roman belief still informs the short story or occasional novel with a vital fantastic quality peculiarly at home with the imaginative processes which generated it in the first place.
A leaven of Awe usually accompanied by Terror characterizes the most successful forays, & may help explain why Pan & Venus, with their sexual connotations abetting these goals practically without effort, are two of the most popular motifs extrapolated upon. Though they are then also subject to the most abuse & mishandling the most distinguished among them remain the best revenge upon the trite & ill-conceived variations attempted at the time when this type of story was fashionable.
Vernon Lee's "Dionea" in Hauntings: Fantastic Stories (Heinemann; London, 1890, & New York: Books For Libraries Press, 1971) belongs to the Venusian subset in that the name of the central character, the only possession of a little girl found lashed to a plank & washed up on the Italian beach presumably from a shipwreck, is believed by the locals to be derived from Dione, the mother of Venus (an alternative maternity to Venus' having been born of the foam around Uranus' naughty bits after Cronus threw them into the sea). The story is told entirely in letters from a Doctor De Rosis to a Lady Savelli, who act as on-site guardian & financial patron respectively to this orphan of the sea. Dionea is placed with the nuns at San Massimo, who fail to baptize her in a well-meaning attempt to avoid possible sacrilege -- they believe that Dionea's tantrum at the ceremony is Heaven's way of telling them that she has already undergone the rite.
As time passes Dionea exhibits more examples of doubtful character: she has none of the conventional skills fostered in 'proper' young girls; she seems to cause increased plant growth wherever she lingers ("That child makes all the useless weeds grow," remarks one of the sisters); she is accompanied by pigeons constantly; & she has an unsettling penumbra about her that only becomes more disturbing as she grows into an unusually attractive young woman.
She soon proves to be a malignant love goddess in her own right; though no one dares approach her directly with amorous intention (with one disastrous exception), all around her succumb to impostures of this nature, acting as if driven in the face of all their previous morality. Dionea leaves the convent & becomes the local sorceress, fashioning love potions of a renowned efficacy, but not free of consequence. When the famed sculptor Waldemar & his wife Gertrude come to live in San Massimo they too fall under Dionea's spell. Gertrude insists that Waldemar have Dionea model for him, & Waldemar reluctantly begins what may result in his masterpiece, that is, if the dire influence of its subject does not prevail.
Despite an epistolary format the story achieves surprising heights of narrative power, due to Violet Paget's built-in conceit of her Doctor De Rosis, who fancies himself a poet. His erudition, politics, & Classical references also pepper his letters to Lady Savelli & provide an amusing backdrop to a profoundly serious situation. Besides his poetry he is also usefully at work on a book concerning the very theme of the tale. But these devices, rather than appearing pat, are skillfully employed to legitimate purpose, & do not undermine the image of awful & prescient Dionea, who propels all the action to the story's grim conclusion.