‘Queer Reverence’: Aubrey Beardsley’s Venus and Tannhäuser
During his short career, the writer and artist Aubrey Beardsley, who rose to prominence in the 1890s, cultivated a reputation for mannered excess that helped establish him as one of the aesthetes and decadents whose company he kept and whose works he illustrated. His unfinished novel Venus and Tannh...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée
2019-12-01
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| Series: | Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://journals.openedition.org/cve/6482 |
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| Summary: | During his short career, the writer and artist Aubrey Beardsley, who rose to prominence in the 1890s, cultivated a reputation for mannered excess that helped establish him as one of the aesthetes and decadents whose company he kept and whose works he illustrated. His unfinished novel Venus and Tannhäuser, which Stanley Weintraub calls ‘a triumph of excess,’ exhibits to the full Beardsley’s penchant for shocking readers and mocking aesthetic conventions. Its nominal source is the medieval legend featuring a troubadour who sins by visiting the subterranean kingdom to which Venus has been exiled by Christianity. After sojourning there awhile, Tannhäuser’s conscience revolts, prompting him to quit the Venusberg in moral revulsion and journey to Rome, where he petitions the pope for forgiveness. The pontiff’s disappointing response is that only when his own wooden staff buds may the penitent bard win God’s pardon. In despair, Tannhäuser returns to Venus, accepting that he is damned. The staff then miraculously blossoms, but though the pope has Tannhäuser sought across the land, the troubadour cannot be found. Enormously popular in the 15th century, the story faded from view for a few hundred years, when it was rediscovered by Romantic writers and repeatedly reworked over the course of the nineteenth century, yet even within the context of this centuries-long tradition of tinkering with the tale, Beardsley’s revisions are calculated to shock. It recasts the legendary Christian bard who tries and fails to renounce pagan pleasures as a sexually adventurous dandy; visiting the underground realm of the exiled goddess Venus, he finds it equal parts Alice in Wonderland and My Secret Life, peopled by decadent courtiers who feast, gamble, and gambol together. Critics have read the text as an autobiographical reckoning with mortality; as authorial wish-fulfillment; as a self-reflexive satire of Decadence; as an exposé of excess; as a ‘decadent counterpublic’ that critiques nationalism; and as a parodic rewriting of Wagner that seeks to undercut his political and aesthetic legacies. My analysis focuses on its rejection of the source legend’s central themes of guilt and redemption, both of which are not only absent from but unimaginable in the world of the novel. In both its published and draft forms, Beardsley’s narrative depicts only Venus’s realm. The text thus excludes sin by drastically truncating the familiar narrative promised by its title, which engages to ‘set forth an exact account of the manner of state held by Madam Venus, Goddess and Meretrix, under the famous Hörselberg, and containing the Adventures of Tannhäuser in that Place, his Repentance, his Journeying to Rome and Return to the Loving Mountain.’ This radical cropping of the tale has the effect of not merely revising but reversing the Tannhäuser legend’s moral in its preference of pagan values over Christian. In excising the physical journey to Rome along with the guilt-induced repentance that sends Tannhäuser there, Beardsley’s text denies the pope the power to condemn or to save; at the same time, it refuses the troubadour the identity of sinner. Indeed, The Story of Venus and Tannhäuser celebrates neither sin nor shame, but the ‘inexhaustible license’ of a world where all desires are licit; in the Venusberg, taboos cannot be broken, because there are none to break. The decision to restrict the setting to the Venusberg thus effects a dramatic shift in the significance of both this erotic playground and the narrative as a whole; the former is no longer the sinful ‘before’ that must be renounced to achieve the penitent ‘after’ and, as a result, Beardsley’s Tannhäuser doesn’t need to be redeemed and his story ceases to be a conversion narrative. Instead, the land ‘under the hill’ is constituted as a genuinely alternative paradise, a counterpublic of perverts who communally flout the dictates of heteronormativity, together constructing a world that does not simply exclude shame, guilt, and sin but disavows them entirely. |
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| ISSN: | 0220-5610 2271-6149 |