THE DEEP ONES: "Dionea" by Vernon Lee

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THE DEEP ONES: "Dionea" by Vernon Lee

2housefulofpaper
jan 16, 2022, 6:51 pm

I've got this in Late Victorian Gothic Tales.

3housefulofpaper
jan 22, 2022, 8:18 pm

Not only do I own a copy, I had managed to read Late Victorian Gothic Tales (I think the percentage of my books that are "TBR" tops 50% now). I had forgotten everything about it, but that shouldn't be taken as counting against the story; it's just where my memory is these days.

I had mixed feelings about this one. Or rather as I read it, I was responding to it on at least three levels:
- as a "Weird Tale". I've put that in quotes because like the Erckmann-Chatrian story it doesn't feel 100% "Weird". In his introduction, Roger Luckhurst says that the story's "structure and furniture is quintessentially Gothic" but goes on to say that it "represents Lee's Aestheticist appropriation of the genre, and is indicative of the kind of cross-fertilisations that began to happen in the 1890s". It does feel like something from a different tradition, with some overlap but certainly not a transitional form, on the way to a fully achieved Weird in the following century.

- as a piece of late Victorian fiction that felt old-fashioned; that I felt Modernism would have me distain the way the Punk movement hated the Hippies and Prog Rock (disclaimer - I know the story was more complicated than that!). And I think a some level, however you try to engage with art of this period on its own terms, you can't get away from a knowledge of what came after, and how that showed up the limitations of the Victorians. I suppose it's a composite picture of Pre-Raphaelite sharpness of image and scrupulous antiquarianism, and strains of melodrama and melancholy, that easily descends into a newish mass culture of advertising, sentimental dramas, and maudlin popular songs (and I would suggest that the sentimentality AND the antiquarianism-through-a - Pre-Raphaelite-lens look was carried over into the new medium of cinema. I know the Modernists liked Charlie Chaplin but I don't know what they thought about e.g. De Mille's Biblical epics. But I've strayed into a digression).

- as a work that , despite the feelings noted under the previous bullet point (that were saying "don't take this too seriously, everyone had the number of this sort of stuff before the outbreak of WWI", I did find myself shedding those distancing feelings and being fully involved and convinced by the emotional lives of the characters - even though on stepping back, as it were, the bare outlines of the story make it look pretty hackneyed - a Wild Child growing up to be a kind of Vamp, an Artist with an Artistic Temperament, and so on (I won't go into any more details, as that would go into spoiler territory). I suppose there are vague parallels with "The Great God Pan" but this is different in mood and I think world-view too. Luckhurst points out that Vernon Lee's fiction consists of The Past erupting into the present in a way that's almost not supernatural, there's rarely an explanation given. It's the Pagan past here of course, but maybe also the village and the convent school carrying an almost Medieval lifestyle into the (19th Century) Modern world of newly-independent nation-states and telegrams? So reality is a palimpsest, and things from different layers can and do merge, and if you only look, you see it's going on all the time?

I was taken by the sentiments expressed by the narrator, Doctor Alessandro De Rossis, in almost the last letter (this is a story told in letters to an English-born Italian Princess and...ruler of this part of Italy? I confess I don't know where the Italian nobility fit in after the Risorgimento (and that's after reading The Leopard AND watching the film version). Anyway, these sentiments, a kind of disenchantment that his (that word again) Antiquarian search for survivals of the Pagan Gods into Christian times had come to nothing..."Reality, my dear Lady Evelyn, is always prosaic"{...}"And yet, it does not look so. The world, at times, seems to be playing at being poetic, mysterious, full of wonder and romance". One one hand it is only the calm before the storm of the tale's climax and could arguably be included for reasons of structure and pace; but on the other hand it is clearly the heart and soul of the tale and perhaps of Vernon Lee's fiction as a whole.

4RandyStafford
jan 23, 2022, 12:20 pm

The sinister foundling and the Wild Child are common motifs, but I liked this story. Amidst his chatty talk about his past with the Princess and life among the locals, Dionea becomes more and more the subject until the doctor himself comes to think Dionea sinister. >3 housefulofpaper: I agree that the passage where the doctor regretfully deflates many Medieval legends but is still, perhaps only half-knowingly, involved in a mythic story was key.

I thought Lee's choice of Dionea was interesting. There are plenty of stories of Greek gods and goddesses showing up in contemporary settings, but they rarely use Dionea. And I liked the chaotic effect of Dionea on the romances of people she encounters. Sometimes she destroys them, sometimes (as with the nun) she encourages them. She may be regarded a great beauty, but she doesn't seem to inspire universal lust in the local men. Lee's Dionea is more mysterious than her daughter, Aphrodite.

5AndreasJ
jan 23, 2022, 4:16 pm

Finally managed to finish this one today, after a number of interruptions.

I didn’t care greatly for the epistolary frame - I rarely do - but the story had a certain charm.

>4 RandyStafford:

In some versions, “Dionea” is a name of Aphrodite herself, as the daughter of Dione.