AESTHETIC TRUTHS OF THE FIABESQUE: VERNON LEE’S VENICE
AESTHETIC TRUTHS OF THE FIABESQUE: VERNON LEE’S VENICE

Summary/Abstract: While living in Venice, Italy in the 1880s, the Victorian writer and aesthetic philosopher Vernon Lee began formulating what would become her definition of the genius loci, or “spirit of places”: a divinity sacred to “the substance of our heart and mind” (5), who constitutes a geographical area’s conscience, character, sensory and extra-sensory effects. Like Yeats’s Byzantium,Venice was for Vernon Lee at once the subject-matter and ultimate destination for the artist’s imagination: not an eternal, naturalistic paradise on the order of the Paduan hills or Roman forests about which she wrote with uncomplicated devotion,but instead a constantly shifting representation of conflicting aesthetic ideals:frivolity and sustenance of the soul; demonic possession by the holy rapture of the beautiful. With its undulating waters, in which cheerfully-illuminated music boats do little to dispel the evanescent mysteries of shadow and reflected sound, Venice physically embodied for Lee the imagination’s forced submission to the voluptuous lure of epiphany. As she discovered early in life, the fiabesque Venetian Fairy Comedy expressed most eloquently the sensory and imaginative chaos-banquet that was Venice, using the homeliness of ancient fairy tales for plot and character.Throughout a career that spanned seven decades, Lee repeatedly witnessed the power of Venice to inspire “the weaving of subtle and fanciful shapes; the realizing in dream or nightmare the distant and the impossible.” In her communion with the genius loci of Venice as with her more straightforward interpretations of the city,Lee articulated the beautiful as at once the highest good and the most profound danger, dispensing with the artificial separation of history, philosophy, and creative fiction.

• Details
• Contents