1
Sons, Mothers and Lovers in Thackeray and Virgil
In Ch. 27 of Vanity Fair, Thackeray describes the relatively infrequent visits of his anti-heroine Becky Crawley to see her small son Rawdy, and presents the young boy’s view of his glamorous but cold-hearted mother as distant and god-like :
Sometimes – once or twice in a week – that lady visited the upper regions in which the child lived. She came in like a vivified figure out of the Magasin des Modes – blandly smiling in the most beautiful clothes and little gloves and boots. Wonderful scarfs, laces and jewels glittered about her. She had always a new bonnet on : and flowers bloomed perpetually in it : or else magnificent curling ostrich feathers, soft and snowy as camellias. She nodded twice or thrice patronisingly to the little boy, who looked up from his dinner of from the pictures of soldiers he was painting. When she left the room, an odour of rose, or some other magical fragrance, lingered about the nursery. She was an unearthly being in his eyes, superior to his father – to all the world : to be worshipped and admired at a distance.
My contention is that this passage recalls a famous scene in Virgil’s Aeneid, Book 1.314-418, where the goddess Venus, disguised as a huntress, meets her son Aeneas soon after his landing in Dido's Carthage, and reveals her identity only at her departure, when Aeneas complains bitterly that they never have a proper mother-son relationship (1.405-9) [1].
The thematic links between the two episodes are strong. Both scenes represent emotionally neglectful mothers who are in some sense divine figures, Becky metaphorically, Venus literally, appearing briefly to their sons and then leaving again after a short time [2]. Both mothers are glamorously dressed in a way which recalls an artefact : Becky is explicitly compared to a fashion plate, while Venus’ dress as a huntress also resembles a work of art, a statue of the virgin huntress Diana – Aeneid 1.318-20:
namque umeris de more habilem suspenderat arcum
venatrix, dederatque comam diffundere ventis,
nuda genu nodoque sinus collecta fluentes.
She had a light bow hanging from her shoulders in hunting style, her hair was unbound and streaming in the wind and her flowing dress was caught up above the knee.[3]
This dress and pose is familiar as belonging to Diana in ancient art, a fact which incidentally seems to have been known to Thackeray from his period as an artist in Paris [4]. Though Diana (by a splendid irony) is Venus’ ideological opposite, representing virginal athleticism rather than erotic glamour, there seems little doubt that Venus’ Diana-like appearance here is calculatedly alluring – even when she is encountering her own son in disguise. This erotic allure clearly parallels her with the femme fatale Becky in Vanity Fair.
The detail that really assures the parallel, however, is that of the fragrance left at Becky’s departure [5]. In Virgil, this, a traditional divine trait [6], is one of the main factors which reveal Venus’ identity to her son only as she leaves him (Aeneid 1.402-5) :
dixit, et avertens rosea cervice refulsit,
ambrosiaeque comae divinum vertice odorem
spiravere: pedes vestis defluxit ad imos,
et vera incessu patuit dea.
When she had finished speaking and was turning away, her neck shone with a rosy light and her hair breathed the divine air of ambrosia. Her dress flowed free to her feet, and she walked he knew she was truly a goddess.’[7]
In both cases the ‘divine’ mother leaves a fragrance behind as she departs; the English uses virtually the same word for this as the Latin (odour/odorem), and the adjective ‘divine’ (divinum) in Latin is picked up by 'magical fragrance' in the English. Even the rosiness of Venus’ neck, rosea cervice, is transferred to the fragrance and picked up by the ‘odour of rose’ in the English.
Thackeray clearly knew the Aeneid relatively well [8]. In Chapter 65 of Vanity Fair he makes a clear allusion to a familiar tag from Aeneid 6.126 facilis descensus Averno, ‘easy is the descent to Avernus’ [the underworld] :’Little boys at school are taught in their earliest Latin book, that the path of Avernus is very easy of descent’; and there are a number of Virgilian allusions in his other works [9]. Of particular interest are two further allusions already noted by editors [10] to the Virgilian episode I have just discussed, which show a similar use of it and perhaps an acute comment on the Virgilian scene. When in the first chapter of Henry Esmond the twelve-year-old hero first meets the glamorous Rachel, Viscountess Castlewood, his view of her, similar to Rawdy’s view of Becky, explicitly alludes to Aeneid 1.328 :
‘My name is Henry Esmond’ said the lad, looking up at her in a sort of delight and wonder, for she had come upon her as a Dea certe, and appeared the most charming object he had ever looked on. Her golden hair was shining in the gold of the sun; her complexion was of a dazzling bloom [11]; her lips smiling, and her eyes beaming with a kindness which made Harry Esmond’s heart to beat with surprise.
The Latin words come from Aeneas’ compliments to his disguised mother, where he suspects her divine identity (though not that she is his mother) - Aeneid 1.327-9):
O – quam te memorem, virgo ? namque haud tibi vultus
mortalis, nec vox hominem sonat ; o dea certe –
an Phoebi soror ? an Nympharum sanguinis una ?
‘But how am I to address a girl like you ? Your face is not the face of a mortal, and you do not speak like a human being. Surely you must be a goddess ? Are you Diana, sister of Apollo ? Are you one of the sister
nymphs ?’ [12]
This parallel is repeated in Chapter 7 of Henry Esmond, where the narrative cleverly returns to this same point having analeptically [13] filled in much background information, this time with explicit allusion to Virgilian authorship :
The instinct which led Harry Esmond to admire and love the gracious person, the fair apparition of whose beauty and kindness has so moved him when he first beheld her, became soon a devoted affection and passion of gratitude which entirely filled his young heart … O Dea certe, thought he, remembering the lines out of the Aeneis which Mr. Holt had taught him.
These two allusions in Henry Esmond confirm that in Vanity Fair, and may well comment on it : the virtuous Rachel, showing motherly kindness towards a boy who is not her son, is a pointed contrast with the vicious Becky, wholly devoid of maternal feelings even towards her only child. But even more interestingly, all three Thackeray passages seem to sense and explore the clear tension in the Virgilian original between the two roles of Venus - her primary function as the alluring goddess of sex and her secondary and largely unfulfilled function as mother; the fact that both Becky and Venus appear to their sons 'dressed to kill' signifies that for both of them their erotic career is more important than parenthood, and in the Virgilian scene there are clear signs that Venus is so dedicated to her primary function that she seeks erotic admiration even from her own son, though this is done at least partly in order to prepare Aeneas for his more substantial forthcoming erotic encounter with Dido (Aeneid 1.494-505).The Venus/Aeneas scene plainly replays two earlier literary scenes with a more explicit erotic content - the meeting of Odysseus in Odyssey 6 with the Phaeacian princess Nausicaa, with whom the notion of romance is subtly present, and (even more pointedly) the encounter of Venus herself with Aeneas' father Anchises on Mt Ida in the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, as a result of which Aeneas himself was born [14].
In Henry Esmond this tension between motherhood and erotic concerns is of course strongly thematised in the novel; the initial quasi-parental relationship between Henry and Rachel, who is some seven or eight years older [15], turns ultimately into one of marriage. This ambivalence in the plot of the novel may not have owed its origin to Virgil, but the invoking of a Virgilian model at the important moment when the future spouses first meet certainly contributes literary depth to their relationship, as well as suggesting an intelligent comment on the Virgilian original.
S.J.HARRISON
Corpus Christi College, Oxford
[1] This allusion is not listed in the authoritative detailed notes on this chapter of Vanity Fair by E.F.Harden in idem, ed., Annotations for the Selected Works of William Makepeace Thackeray (New York, 1990), I.460, or in any other edition I have consulted.
[2] Though Venus shows much concern for Aeneas in the plot of the Aeneid, e.g. by guiding him out of Troy (Aeneid 2.589ff), she is usually absent and as a goddess can never be a 'proper' mother to him (as Aeneas complains at 1.405-9); this is the point of evoking her in the more neglectful figure of Becky.
[3] Tr. David West, Virgil : The Aeneid. A New Prose Translation (Harmondsworth, 1990), 13.
[4] See R.G.Austin, P.Vergili Maronis Aeneidos Liber 1 (Oxford, 1971), 120-1. For the young Thackeray's experience as a painter in Paris, cf. G.N.Ray, Thackeray and the Uses of Adversity : 1811-1846 (London, 1955) 167-9. Thackeray refers in Henry Esmond Ch.12 to a 'famous antique statue of the huntress Diana', normally identified with the Louvre Diana (cf. Harden, II.93), which he had surely seen and which is usually cited as a parallel for the Virgilian passage (cf. Austin, 120).
[5] Another is footwear : it is also worth noting that Venus, like Becky, wears boots (Aeneid 1.337) - but the long hunting-boot or cot(h)urnus, rather than Becky's smart little boots of Regency fashion.
[6] Cf. e.g. Homeric Hymn to Demeter 2.277-8, [Aeschylus] Prometheus Bound 115-7, Euripides Hippolytus 1391.
[7] Tr. West, 16.
[8] Despite the allusion to 'little boys at school', not much of this may have come from his schooldays at Charterhouse : for Thackeray's relative lack of classical reading at Charterhouse cf. Ray, 97-8 (reflected in the account of Pen's sketchy classical studies at Grey Friars in Pendennis, Ch.2).
[9] There are over forty allusions to the Aeneid in Thackeray's novels, listed in the index of Harden, II.723; for some detailed examples from The Newcomes see R.D.McMaster, Thackeray's Cultural Frame of Reference : Allusion in The Newcomes (Basingstoke, 1991) 35.
[10] Cf. T.C.Snow and W.Snow, eds., The History of Henry Esmond (Oxford, 1914), 469, and D.Hawes, ed., The History of Henry Esmond (Oxford, 1991), 469 [sic!]. Both note the parallel in Ch.1 but not its repetition in Ch.7, or the narratological effect gained by the repetition.
[11] The botanical metaphor of 'bloom' perhaps recalls the reference to roses in the Virgilian original (Aeneid 1.402 rosea cervice, discussed above).
[12] Tr. West, 13.
[13] On analepsis (flashback) cf. the discussion by G.Genette, Narrative Discourse (Oxford, 1980), 48-67.
[14] On the reworking of the Nausicaa scene see G.N.Knauer, Die Aeneis und Homer , Hypomnemata Heft 7 (Gttingen, 1964) 158-62; on that of the Homeric Hymn the only full treatment is still that of C.-A.Sainte-Beuve, Etude sur Virgile (Paris, 1857), 274-82.
[15] Her youth is specially stressed in the early chapters in order to prepare the reader for her eventual marriage with Henry : Ch.1 'indeed she seemed to be a girl; and was at that time scarce twenty years old' [Esmond himself is then twelve], Ch.9 'a child, the mother of other children'. In Ch.12 it is implied that she married at or soon after the age of fifteen.