‘Dolls in Agony’: Vernon Lee in Southern Spain
When Vernon Lee visited Southern Spain in 1889, she found the Catholic practices of the country extremely unsettling. The overloaded decoration of the churches and the preference for representations of bleeding Christs were, in Lee’s eyes, ‘obscene’ and ‘excessive’. Above all, the Spanish madonnas,...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée
2016-05-01
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| Series: | Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://journals.openedition.org/cve/2457 |
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| Summary: | When Vernon Lee visited Southern Spain in 1889, she found the Catholic practices of the country extremely unsettling. The overloaded decoration of the churches and the preference for representations of bleeding Christs were, in Lee’s eyes, ‘obscene’ and ‘excessive’. Above all, the Spanish madonnas, always represented ‘in agony’, distressed her. Lee’s open repulsion to the Catholic country and especially to the Spanish representations of the Virgin Mary would prompt her to write ‘The Virgin of the Seven Daggers’, the most consciously Decadent of all her works: a sacrilegious tale in which Catholic and Moorish Spain are intertwined to explore notions of spiritual and moral perversity. This essay thus examines the relatively unnoticed visit that Lee made to Southern Spain and suggests that, besides its disturbing character, the grotesque Spanish Catholicism that Lee found in 1889 resulted in fruitful productivity: it contributed to shape Lee’s pacifist aesthetic conscience and awakened her imagination. |
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| ISSN: | 0220-5610 2271-6149 |