Working
Paper
SeriesCGS No.2021-01

Literary Mobility in 19th-Century Europe
ᖹᡂ30ᖺᗘࢢ࣮ࣟࣂࣝ♫఍ᩥ໬◊✲ࢭࣥࢱ࣮◊✲ࣉࣟࢪ࢙ࢡࢺ㸿 ◊✲ᡂᯝሗ࿌◊✲ᮇ㛫㸸ᖹᡂ30ᖺ4᭶1᪥ 㹼 ௧࿴2ᖺ3᭶31᪥

Manami TAMURA
Akemi YOSHIDAԚԱՆԳԸӣӼӺӼӼ

College of Economics, Nihon University

Literary Mobility in Nineteenth-Century Europe

Manami TAMURA, Nihon University
Akemi YOSHIDA, Kindai University

CONTENTS

1. Samuel Rogers’s Italy as Travel Literature in the Early Nineteenth Century
Manami TAMURA ….. 1

2. Doubles and Doppelgängers in Andersen’s “The Mermaid,” Poe’s “William Wilson,”and Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities
Akemi YOSHIDA ….. 17

3. Secrets Veiled and Unveiled: Wilde’s Femme Fatale Images and Their French
Sources㻌Anna SUGIMOTO, Chiharu TANAKA, and Akemi YOSHIDA ….. 34

6DPXHO5RJHUV¶V,WDO\DV7UDYHO/LWHUDWXUHLQWKH(DUO\1LQHWHHQWK&HQWXU\Manami TAMURA1
In 1830, Samuel Rogers (1763-1855) published a collection of poems and short stories
titled Italy.2 The book was richly illustrated with engravings, more than half of whichwere designed by Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851). The book was an instantsuccess and popular throughout the nineteenth century.
Many travelogues on Italy were published in Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, and as travelling modes and travellers’ interests were changing rapidly, only a
few could retain enduring public attention. The popularity of Rogers’s Italy is therefore
worth considering. Did it owe its success mainly to its illustrations as many have claimed?
This study examines and re-evaluates Samuel Rogers’s Italy in the early nineteenthcentury British interest in Italy.
%ULWLVKWUDYHOOHUVWR,WDO\LQWKHHLJKWHHQWKDQGQLQHWHHQWKFHQWXULHV
Italy was one of the most popular destinations among British travellers during the ageof the Grand Tour. Young men of the ruling classes travelled to Italy as the finishing partof their classical education. They went there to see historic sites, art works andarchitecture, enjoy opera, and buy antiquities for their collections (Black 22). As Italy andthings Italian became fashionable among the upper classes, not only aristocratic men but
also women, and then the middle classes began to visit Italy.3
From the invasion of Rome by Napoleon’s France in 1798 to the end of the Napoleonicwars in 1815, Italy was temporarily inaccessible to the British. However, during thisperiod, many Italian pictures in France were brought to Britain to keep them safe fromthe revolutionary turmoil, which resulted in a rare opportunity for most British people tosee Italian art firsthand for the first time (Brand 138). Moreover, travel books about Italy
continued to be published, and, with Mme de Staël’s international bestseller Corinne ou
l’Italie (1807), aroused people’s interest in Italy.4
In 1815, when the Italian travel was resumed for British citizens, well-to-do tourists
1

Professor at College of Economics, Nihon University.
E-mail: tamura.manami@nihon-u.ac.jp
2
Italy was first published in 1822 without illustrations but did not attract muchattention. A detailed account of publishing Italy is presented later herein.
3
According to Brand, “By the 1790’s [sic] the fashion for things Italian was arecognized feature of English social life” (2).
4The English translation of Corinne was also published in 1807.
1

and artists began to rush to the country. Romantic poets such as George Gordon Byron(1788-1824) and Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) also headed there, as well as Samuel
Rogers. 5 By 1840, travelling to Italy lost its fashionable appeal to the upper classes
because it became too “common.” In fact, some tourist spots were so crowded with British
tourists that writers of travel books often complained about it.6
As Italian travel became popular among the middle classes, travelling styles alsochanged. While the Grand Tourist went to Italy for a year or more, nineteenth-century
tourists in many cases travelled for several months. Knowledge of history and classicalliterature was still regarded as preferable, but not essential. Many tourists were rather
influenced by Romantic literature and sought the scenes depicted in Corinne or Byron’sChilde Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto IV (1818). Furthermore, publishing the pioneering
travel guidebook series began in the 1830s, and foreign travel became more accessible tothe public.
The first of Murray’s Handbook for Travellers series was published in 1836. It
contained all the detailed information travellers would need before and during theirjourney, and was entirely different from previous travel books, which were mainly
personal travel memoirs. In addition, Murray’s Handbook was compact in size and easy
to carry around; this especially appealed to middle-class travellers, who were not attended
by many servants and had to take care of their own luggage. Murray published handbooks
for many different destinations and frequently updated their information. “By 1848
Murray was offering over sixty ‘Works for Travellers’” (Buzard 72), and they became amust-have for nineteenth-century travellers. Some tourists even looked at the picturesquesceneries, historic sites, architecture, and artistic objects only to make sure that they weretrue to the descriptions in Murray’s Handbooks, not the other way around (Buzard 76).
Murray often quotes poets in his descriptions of places, and Byron was found to be themost popular. Samuel Rogers is among other poets quoted in Murray.
5RJHUV¶VWUDYHOSamuel Rogers travelled to Italy for the first time in 1814-15. He was one of the first
Englishmen to travel there after the Napoleonic War. In fact, it seemed to be too early
5

Although Rogers is not usually classified as a Romantic poet, he shared the view
towards Italy among his contemporaries under the influence of Romantic movement, as
highlighted below.
6
Charles Dickens mentioned “a great crowd of people (three-fourths of them English)
gathered at the ceremony of Easter in the Sistine Chapel, Rome” (Pictures 153). FrancesTrollope bitterly criticised bad behaviour of her compatriots and attributed it to theirlower social status (2: 272).
2

because he had to hurriedly return home when he heard the news of Napoleon’s fleeing
from Elba and arrival at Cannes in March 1815 (Hale 58).
At the time of this trip, Rogers was known as a “banker poet,” which was bothpejorative and not accurate. He was from a dissenting middle-class family. At the age of17, he began working at his father’s bank, and soon came to run the bank with his brother.
While working there, he launched a literary career and his first successful work of poetry,
The Pleasures of Memory was published in 1792. In 1795, he more or less retired fromhis job as a banker while still in his thirties. Therefore, when he first went to Italy, he wasno longer a banker. Thus, Rogers established himself as a poet, and settled himself in ahouse at St. James’s Place, London in 1803. By that time, he was wealthy enough to leada dilettante life. His house was a kind of salon where he entertained celebrity guests. He
was also famous for his art collection, which was recommended in a guidebook of the
London’s private art collections, together with those of Royal and aristocratic families.7
He had visited Paris twice before his first trip to Italy and had seen masterpieces by Italianpainters at the Louvre. Hence, his principal purpose was to see Italian artworks, as wellas landscapes that had been painted by Italian and British artists.8 He bought some piecesof art for his collection, just as the Grand Tourist of the eighteenth century did. Unlike thehigher classes, he did not receive classical education, but educated himself and readwidely on Italian literature, history, and art. In this respect, he was similar to the tourists
in the preceding century. Considering Rogers was in his fifties at the time of his first
Italian trip, as Hale aptly describes, “he was anxious to make up for the long delay inmaking his Grand Tour” (51).
However, Rogers was also influenced by the Italian fad of the early nineteenth century.
His interest in Italian literature was not limited to classical literature. Like many of his
contemporaries, he was fascinated by Dante (1265-1321), Petrarch (1304-74), Ariosto(1474-1533), and Tasso (1544-95). Interest in these poets and their works among the
British was aroused in the second half of the eighteenth century by Italian scholars whocame to Britain as political exiles (Brand 50). For the tourists in the late eighteenth and

7

The guidebook is Companion to the Most Celebrated Private Galleries of Art in
London (1844) by Anna Jameson. Other collections introduced in this Companion are
the Gallery of Her Majesty the Queen, the Bridgewater Gallery, the Sutherland Gallery,
the Grosvenor Gallery, the Collection of the Marquess of Lansdowne, and theCollection of Sir Robert Peel. All the collections except for Rogers’s were owned byupper-class families.
8
He had also read Giorgio Vasari’s influential book on Italian art, Le vite de’ più
eccellenti pittori, scultori e architettori (1550). Its English translation did not appear
until 1850, so Rogers read it in Italian.
3early nineteenth centuries, the knowledge of these poets was regarded as important asclassical literature. In Italy, Rogers refers to these poets far more frequently than classicalpoets, such as Homer, Virgil, or Horace. He even mentions his contemporary writers suchas Count Alfieri (1749-1803) and Alessandro Manzoni (1785-1873).
Rogers’s itinerary also reflects the influence of the Italian fashion of the earlynineteenth century. His travel route itself was basically the same as that of the Grand Tour,
although it was a much shorter trip, especially because he had to cut it short due to thepolitical unrest. He left his home in late August and crossed the Channel to France.
Leaving Britain in early autumn (in many cases, September) was common among
nineteenth-century tourists to Italy to avoid the summer heat. Since the days of the Grand
Tour, most travellers had preferred to travel to France by sea and then from France to Italyby land, instead of sailing directly to Italy (Black 6). Rogers followed the examples ofmost other tourists and went from Paris to Italy through Switzerland. He entered Italy via
the Simplon Pass. He visited major tourist destinations in Italy and stayed in Venice,
Florence, Rome, and Naples longer than in other cities, just as other British tourists. The
highlight of his Italian journey was Rome, but Rogers also stayed in Naples for more thana month. Southern Italy suddenly became a place of historical interest after the discovery
and excavations of Pompeii and Paestum in the latter half of the eighteenth century. He
also visited the small town of Arqua, which is where Petrarch lived for his final years and,for this reason, suddenly attracted tourists’ attention in the late eighteenth century.
Rogers kept a journal during his first Italian tour, which tells us much about his travel.
He went to Italy for the second time in 1821-22 and travelled around more or less thesame route. However, he did not leave any detailed record of this second journey.
Moreover, he had already finished writing the first draft of Italy before his second Italiantrip (Hale 108). The events of the second trip, most notably the meeting with Byron in
Bologna, would be included in the later editions.9
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As mentioned above, Rogers kept a journal while he was travelling from 1814 to 1815.
He did not write most of his poems in Italy on site, but they were later composed inEngland from the notes in this journal. According to Hale, Rogers did not have a plan towrite a collection of poems on Italy when he was travelling (107). He was working on
another book of poetry around this time (published as Human Life in 1819), and the9Rogers met Byron in Bologna in October 1821, and they travelled to Florence
together. Rogers mentions this encounter for the first time in the 1824 edition of Italy.
He met Byron again in Spring, 1822 (Blockside 232-33).
4journal was intended just as a commonplace book. However, a couple of poems on the
Italian journey appeared in his collections published before 1820. The first one is “Written
at Meillerie, September 30, 1814” (hereafter referred to as “Written at Meillerie”)
published in Poems by Samuel Rogers in 1816. Another poem titled “Lines Written atPæstum: March 4, 1815” (“Written at Pæstum”) appeared with Human Life in the same
volume. Both poems were to be retitled “Meillerie” and “Pæstum” respectively, andincluded in Italy.
These titles indicate that they were composed on site on the designated dates, but there
is doubt as to whether this was the case. As for the poem “Written at Meillerie”, a roughdraft is certainly found in the journal (Hale 307-11). However, the date in the title,
September 30, is the day he left Meillerie, and he first arrived there on the 15th. Moreover,looking into the journal, almost the same words and expressions as used in the poem arefound in the entries from the 14th to 30th September. This means that the poem was not
improvised on site as its title may suggest, but was composed with careful thinking,referring to his travel journal.
“Written at Meillerie” had undergone many revisions before it was published again in
Italy. On the other hand, “Written at Pæstum” was included in Italy as “Pæstum” with
only a few alterations. This is not usual for Rogers since he was known for repeatedly
revising his poems. This means that the poem was already thoroughly polished when it
was first published in 1819. Therefore, “Written at Pæstum” is also the work of detailed(probably later) consideration, not improvisation. Again, he must have referred to his
travel journal during the process of composing the poem since the ideas and words caneasily be detected in the journal. For example, both in the poem and in the journal, he
writes that the ruins of Paestum stand “between the mountains and the sea” and describes
the columns bathed in bright sunshine as “iron-brown” relieved with “brightest verdure.”He even quoted some phrases from the journal. “How many centuries did the sun go
round / From Mount Alburnus to the Tyrrhene sea” in “Written at Pæstum” comes from“How many suns have risen from behind the mountains, & set in the Tyrrhene” in thejournal. In addition, “The air is sweet with violets” in “Written at Pæstum” was “the air
sweet with violets” in the journal. Thus, it is most probable that he wrote poems on Italy
after the journey from his memory with the aid of the journal.
Rogers continued to write poems on Italian travel and finally, in 1822, Italy, a Poem,
Part the First was published by Longman. As the title suggests, this edition covers only
a part of his travel: Switzerland and Northern Italy (see Appendix 1). It did not attract
much attention partly because it was published anonymously. In 1823, the second edition
was published by another publisher, John Murray. This time, Rogers’s name appeared on5the title page, but the book still did not sell. Rogers edited the work repeatedly, and thethird and fourth editions appeared in 1824. Italy, a Poem, Part the Second, which covers
Southern Italy, was published in 1828, but was again a failure in terms of sales. Rogers
bought the unsold stock and destroyed it (Hale 110).
Before publishing Part the Second, Rogers had already planned to put parts one andtwo together to make a one-volume illustrated edition. Illustrated books were notsomething special at the time. Collections of poems and short stories called “annuals” or“keepsakes” often included illustrations, which made them ideal for gifts and collections,and their readers were mainly women.10 Rogers himself had his book Poems publishedwith numerous engravings in 1816. These engravings were designed by Thomas Stothard(1755-1834), who was renowned for his book illustrations. Rogers again asked Stothard
to draw illustrations for Italy. He also commissioned Turner, who had offered illustrations
for annuals and keepsakes (Rawlinson xlvi). The designs offered by Turner, Stothard, andothers were engraved on steel and printed “under the constant supervisions of Rogers
himself” (Hale 111). Altogether the book would contain as many as 55 illustrations. It
was costly to produce a book with so many fine engravings, but Rogers owed all the
publishing costs. Cecilia Powell explained the publishing process in her book, Italy in theAge of Turner:[Rogers] commissioned twenty-five landscapes from Turner and nineteen scenes from
Stothard, a long-established illustrator of literature and famous for his graceful figures.
He employed a team of thirteen engravers. He designed the book so that readers could
have the rare luxury of savouring both words and steel-engraved vignettes on the same
page; this was fiendishly expensive since each illustrated page needed two separate
printing processes and had to pass through the press twice. By such means, and layingout £7335 in publishing just 10,000 copies, Rogers ensured both the instant successand the widespread fame of his Italy (96-97) .
As shown in the above quotation, when it was finally published in 1830, the book
immediately attracted people’s attention, and 4,000 copies were sold by the end of theyear. By May 1832 it had sold 7,000 copies, but still did not pay for the publishing costs.
Rogers did not stop editing Italy, and a new edition was published in 1839 with
autobiographical notes added to the final poem “A Farewell.” According to Hale, Italy
became an institution, and “[for] two generations it remained the ideal present for those10

Maureen McCue argues that Rogers were well aware of this fashion and deliberately
made his book suit the taste of the readers (112) .
6

about to leave for Italy or who had just come back” (Hale 111).
(YDOXDWLRQDQGLQIOXHQFH
The 1830 edition of Italy was not only successful in sales, but also favourably acceptedby reviewers. The London Literary Gazette reviewed the work in the issue of August 28,
1830. In fact, there were two reviews of the book in the same issue: one for the text (56163), and one for the engravings (564-65). The engravings were heartily applauded: “We
are really unacquainted with any volume of a similar size and character, on which somuch expense has been liberally and tastefully bestowed in the way of illustrations” (564).
The text was also praised, but in a more reserved way. The review in the Athenaeum (21August 1830) is short but enthusiastic. It commends the book as a whole: “Poetry, wealth,taste, are here blended beautifully” (526). However, there is no doubt that its enthusiasm
was mainly for the illustrations.
It may be a little ungrateful to Mr. Rogers, but we cannot attend to him now—weremember indeed his sweet poetry and his pleasant tales, and shall read them again andagain with infinite delight, but with this unpublished volume in our hands, it is
impossible to do anything but turn from picture to picture, from jewel to jewel, andrecall the scenes brought to our remembrance. (526)The reviewer of the New Monthly Magazine (1 November 1830) is more ironical andimplies that Rogers secured a success by spending enormous amounts of money toembellish his book (454). Views on Rogers’s poetry and the illustrations of Italy have notchanged much since then. In 1980, Kenneth Churchill wrote, “it was a success whichcame less from the poetry than from the illustrations” (50), and Rogers’s poetry “isattractive and readable” though “it lacks the stature of the work of Byron or Shelley” (51).
Twenty years later, Cecilia Powell acknowledged the poetry’s enduring popularity in its
own right, but implied that Italy could rival Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto IV in
Italian travelogues solely because Rogers could afford to publish the luxurious book (96).
In 2013, Martin Blocksidge published a new biography of Rogers in which he attempts
to re-evaluate Italy’s literary value:
In purely literary terms, and despite its initially unenthusiastic reviews, the second
part of Italy is in no way inferior to the first. Rogers is more confident in his handlingof blank verse, and the inherent fragmentariness of the poem is now more consciously
a means to greater variety: there is a mixture of longer and shorter pieces; a mixture of7

description, narrative and anecdote; a more subtle movement between the past and thepresent. There are also dramatic monologues, and, most innovatory of all, sustained
sections in prose. . . . The most obviously successful parts of the poem remain thosewhich describe scenes and places, where once more Rogers’ receptive eye shows its
power. (272)
Blocksidge’s defence is mostly based on the harmony and finished style of the work.
However, the last sentence of the above quotation is intriguing because Rogers’s
description of scenes and places is exactly where the illustrations are most helpful. Lookat the extract below of the poem “Como” and its illustration based on Turner’s vignette(fig. 1).

Fig. 1. Illustration for “Como.” Internet Archive / the University of California.
https://victorianweb.org/painting/turner/graphics/13.html.
So I sit still,
And let the boatman shift his little sail,8

His sail so forked and so swallow-like,
Well-pleased with all that comes. The morning-air
Plays on my cheek how gently, flinging roundA silvery gleam: and now the purple mists
Rise like a curtain; now the sun looks out,
Filling, o’erflowing with his glorious light
This noble amphitheatre of hills;
And now appear as on a phosphor-sea
Numberless barks, from MILAN, from PAVÌA;Some sailing up, some down, and some at rest,
Lading, unlading at that small port-town
Under the promontory—its tall tower
And long flat roofs, just such as GASPAR drew,
Caught by a sun-beam slanting through a cloud;A quay-like scene, glittering and full of life,
And doubled by reflection. (33)
The poet first reflects on the history related to the Lake Como, and then, as seen in thequotation, sitting in a boat, looks around him. He describes the scene referring not only
to the surrounding hills, boats and boatmen, and glittering surface of the water, but also
to the sunlight, fresh air, vapour, and the reflections on the water. This is already apicturesque description. It is also something Turner is famous for depicting, and Turner’s
touch is not at all lost in the engraving. Even if it is printed in black and white, the glorious
morning light and cheerfulness of the working people can be felt. The text and theillustration are perfectly harmonious here, enhancing each other’s impression.
However, the illustrations do not always match the poems. The most obvious case is
the illustration for “Pæstum,” again designed by Turner (fig. 2). This illustration is one of
the most impressive and instantly catches readers’ eyes. While the engraving is impressive
in its dramatic nature, the poem as a whole is pensive and static. It is true that the poet
mentions thunder, but he does so to explain the long history through which the ruins ofPaestum survived:
But what are These still standing in the midst?
The Earth has rocked beneath; the Thunder-stone
Passed thro’ and thro’, and left its traces there;
Yet still they stand as by some Unknown Charter! (211)9

Fig. 2. Illustration for “Pæstum.” Internet Archive / the University of California.
https://victorianweb.org/painting/turner/graphics/8.html.
“Pæstum” is one of the best poems in the book. The site is legendary and magical, so thepoet’s mind moves naturally between the past and the present, nature and human activities,
the peace and the past warfare and destruction. Thus, in this case, the poem itself stands
as a masterpiece without the help of the illustration. Turner did make a watercolour study
for “Temples of Pæstum” that is closer to the poem’s impression, more static andpeaceful.11 Meredith Gamer argues that the fact Turner prepared two different designs fora poem clearly indicates his close attention and respect for Rogers’s text.
It is true that the success of Italy owed much to its illustrations. John Ruskin (18191900) first came across Turner’s work when he was given Italy on his thirteenthbirthday.12 In his autobiographical work, Praeterita, he wrote that he was enthusiastic
11

See the watercolour study in Gamer. https://www.tate.org.uk/art/researchpublications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-study-for-temples-of-paestumrogerss-italy-r1133326.
12
In Praeterita, Ruskin actually wrote “on my thirteenth (?) birthday” (79).
10about the engravings in Italy but did not have “equally vivid interest in the compositionof the poems themselves” (93). Ruskin’s words are sometimes quoted as if they were a
proof that the value of the illustrations surpasses the poems. Rogers’s poems are surely
no match for Byron’s; they are not innovative, and Rogers did not dare to be provocative.
However, his ability to describe scenes and the ambience of places is worthy of notice. It
makes Italy an ideal travelogue, arousing expectations for or evoking memories of readers’
Italian trips.
&RQFOXVLRQRogers travelled to Italy when such travel became popular among British middle
classes in the early nineteenth century. He followed the steps of the Grand Tourist of theeighteenth century, but he also shared his interest in Italy with his contemporaries under
the influence of the Romantic movement. These attitudes are evident in Italy. Thus, thework is on one hand firmly in the tradition of travel memoirs from the previous century,
and, on the other, it had an appeal of the times.
The illustrated 1830 edition was readily accepted by the public, who enjoyed the trendof annuals or keepsakes, although Italy is rather exceptional. No other work could boast
the luxury of so many carefully prepared illustrations of quality because it cost so muchmoney and time. When preparing to publish Pictures from Italy in 1846, Charles Dickens
wanted his book to be like Rogers’s Italy. However, considering the difficulty of
reproducing images in wood engravings, which were less expensive than steel engravings,
and the publisher’s wish to keep the publishing costs lower, he gave up the initial plan,
and Pictures from Italy was published with only four wood engravings (Letters of Dickens
521, 624). The trouble Rogers took was rewarding. A great number of travel books on
Italy were published in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but most are no longer
readable and have only historical value. Although Rogers’s Italy is no longer in print
either, it still has its appeal, that is, the harmony of words and images, which rouses thereader’s curiosity and makes them aware of their yearning for the faraway.
:RUNV&LWHG
Black, Jeremy. The British and the Grand Tour. Croom Helm, 1985.
Blocksidge, Martin. The Banker Poet: The Rise and Fall of Samuel Rogers 1763-1855.
Sussex Academic Press, 2013.
Brand, C. P. Italy and the English Romantics: The Italianate Fashion in Early
Nineteenth-Century England. Cambridge UP, 1957.

11

Buzard, James. The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to
Culture, 1800-1918. Clarendon Press, 1993.
Churchill, Kenneth. Italy and English Literature 1764-1930. Macmillan, 1980.
Dickens, Charles. The Letters of Charles Dickens. Edited by Kathleen Tillotson, vol. 4,
Clarendon Press, 1977.
---. Pictures from Italy. 1846. Penguin Classics, 1998.
Gamer, Meredith. “Study for ‘Temples of Paestum’, Rogers’s ‘Italy’ c. 1826-7.
Watercolours Related to Samuel Rogers's Italy c. 1826-7 by Joseph Mallord William
Turner", catalogue entry, August 2006, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J. M. W.
Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours. Tate Research Publication. Dec.
2012. www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-williamturner-study-for-temples-of-paestum-rogerss-italy-r1133326. Accessed 13 December
2021.
Hale, J. R., editor. The Italian Journal of Samuel Rogers: edited with an account ofRogers’ life and of travel in Italy in 1814-1821. Faber, 1956.
Jameson[, Anna]. Companion to the Most Celebrated Private Galleries of Art in
London. Saunders and Otley, 1844. Google Books,
books.google.tm/books?id=2Q5FtQEACAAJ.
McCue, Maureen. “Reverse Pygmalionism: Art and Samuel Rogers’s Italy.” Romantic
Textualities: Literature and Print Culture, 1780-1840, issue 21, 2013, pp. 108-23.
Bangor University, research.bangor.ac.uk/portal/files/7335113/PDB5523-00.pdf.
Powell, Cecilia. Italy in the Age of Turner: “The Garden of the World”. Merrell
Holberton, 1998.
Rawlinson, William George. The Engraved Work of J. M. W. Turner, R. A. Vol. 1.
Macmillan, 1908. Google Books, books.google.co.jp/books?id=nixFAQAAMAAJ.
Review of Italy. The Athenaeum, no. 147, 21 August 1830, p. 526. HathiTrust,
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.l0063912836.
Reviews of Italy. The Literary Gazette, no. 710, 28 August 1830, pp. 561-63, 564-65.
HathiTrust, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd.32044092531243.
Review of Italy. The New Monthly Magazine, vol. 30, no. 119, 1 November 1830, pp.
454-55. Internet Archive, archive.org/details/sim_new-monthly-magazine_january-1december-1-1830_30_109-120.
Rogers, Samuel. Italy. T. Cadell & E. Moxon, 1830. Internet Archive,archive.org/details/gri_33125010658330.
[Rogers, Samuel]. Italy, a Poem, Part the First. Longman, 1822. Internet Archive,archive.org/details/poemitaly00rogerich.

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Rogers, Samuel. Italy, a Poem, Part the First. John Murray, 1823. Internet Archive,archive.org/details/italyapoem01goog.
Rogers, Samuel. Italy, a Poem, Part the Second. John Murray, 1828. Internet Archive,archive.org/details/italypoem02rogerich.
Rogers, Samuel. “Lines Written at Pæstum: March 4, 1815.” Human Life, a Poem. John
Murray, 1819. pp. 83-94. Internet Archive,archive.org/details/humanlifeapoem00rogegoog.
Rogers, Samuel. “Written at Meillerie, September 30, 1814.” Poems. T. Cadell, 1816.
pp. 143-46. Internet Archive, archive.org/details/poemsrog00rogeuoft.
Ruskin, John. Praeterita. 1886-1889. The Works of John Ruskin, edited by E. T. Cook
& Alexander Wedderburn, vol. 35, George Allen, 1908, 4-562. Internet Archive,archive.org/details/worksofjohnruski35rusk.
Trollope[, Frances]. A Visit to Italy. Vol. 2, Bentley, 1842. Google Books,
books.google.co.jp/books?id=QDJqAAAAIAAJ.

13

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VeniceVeniceVeniceBergamoColl’alto

Como

The Alps

Italy

The Alps

The Alps

Marguerite de Tours

Italy

Marguerite De Tours

Margaret De Tours

Jorasse

Italy

JorasseJorasseThe Descent

Bergamo

The Descent

The Descent

The Great St. Bernard

Bergamo

The Great St. Bernard

The Great St. Bernard

The Lake of Geneva

Como

The Lake of Geneva

The Lake of Geneva

1824 edition

Como

1823 edition

1822
Italy, a Poem. Part theFirst

Appendix 1: Contents of each edition

14

1828
Italy, a Poem. Part theSecondSt. Maurice

St. Maurice

Foscari
Marcolini

Marcolini

The Brides of Venice

The Gondola

St. Mark’s Place

Luigi

VeniceColl’alto

Italy

BergamoComo

The Alps

Marguerite de Tours

JorasseThe Descent

Foscari

The Brides of Venice

The Gondola

St. Mark’s Place

Luigi

VeniceColl’alto

Italy

BergamoComo

The Alps

Marguerite de Tours

JorasseThe Descent

The Great St. Bernard

Meillerie

Meillerie

The Great St. Bernard

The Lake of Geneva

1839 edition

The Lake of Geneva

1830
Italy (with illustrations)

15

Don Garzìa
The Campagna of
Florence

Florence

Don Garzìa

The Campagna of
Florence

Don Garzìa

Florence

An Interview
Rome
A Funeral
National Prejudices
The Campagna of RomeThe Roman Pontiffs
Caius Cestius
The NunThe Fire-Fly
Foreign Travel
The Fountain
Banditti
An Adventure
NaplesThe Bag of Gold

An Interview
Rome
A Funeral
National Prejudices
The Campagna of RomeThe Roman Pontiffs
Caius Cestius
The NunThe Fire-Fly
Foreign Travel
The Fountain
Banditti
An Adventure
NaplesThe Bag of Gold

15

The Pilgrim

The Pilgrim

The Campagna of
Florence

Don Garzìa

Florence

Bologna

Bologna

Florence

GinevraArquà

GinevraGinevraGinevra

Arquà

Arquà

Arquà

Appendix 1: Contents of each edition

The Bag of Gold

Naples

An Adventure

Banditti

The Fountain

Foreign Travel

The Fire-Fly

The NunCaius Cestius

The Roman Pontiffs

The Campagna of RomeNational Prejudices

A Funeral

Rome

An Interview

The Pilgrim

The Campagna of
Florence

Don Garzìa

Florence

Bologna

Ginevra

Arquà

16

Notes

Notes and illustrations

Appendix 1: Contents of each edition

16

Notes and illustrations

A Farewell

Notes

Notes

A Farewell (addition)

Marco Griffoni

Marco Griffoni
A Farewell

Genoa

The Feluca

The Harper

Genoa

The Feluca

The Feluca
Andrea Doria

The Harper

The Harper

Monte Cassino

AmalfiAmalfiMonte CassinoPæstum

A CharacterPæstum

A Character

Monte CassinoPæstumSorrento. Amalfi.

A CharacterDoubles and Doppelgängers in Andersen’s “The Mermaid1,” Poe’s “William Wilson,”and Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities2
Akemi YOSHIDA3㸦ྜྷ⏣ ᮒ⨾㸧 Kindai University, Osaka, JapanIn his Introduction to the Penguin Edition (2002) of A Tale of Two Cities, Richard
Maxwell points out that even though this novel, employing a spectacular historical
panorama as its setting and also a high number of characters, has succeeded in producing
and giving the illusive or illusory impression as if it were a large-scale work, it actuallyis not:There are occasions in A Tale when hundreds, even thousands, of people do appear.
The novel describes several scenes from the French Revolution which would call(and every so often have called) on the full resources of a major Hollywood studio[. . . ] Nonetheless, it remains basically a small-scale work that somehow succeeds
in giving a larger-than-life impression of itself. (Maxwell, “Introduction” ix;
underline mine)
As Maxwell says, the plot construction of A Tale of Two Cities is rather compact,
developing around the relationships among very limited few central characters, which has
succeeded in presenting the plot as clearly traceable without becoming too complicated.
Part of the secret that has enabled this unusually successful combination of thecompactness of the core plot and the magnificent settings on which Dickens develops
could be traced back to some possible sources of inspiration that helped Dickens conceive
his own novel. This paper, drawing upon some notable similarities in narrative devices
and the plot pattern, considers the possibility of the thematic framework being based onprose works by Dickens’s contemporaries: Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale “TheMermaid” and “William Wilson,” a short story by Edgar Allan Poe, specifically. The
theme of physiognomical twins, or Doppelgänger, is commonly employed in these works
as a device to effectively run the plot.
That Dickens and Poe fondly read and highly appreciated each other’s works is a
supposition on which some further new light was shed at the Annual Symposium of
Dickens Fellowship Japan Branch in 2019. Episodes from the mutual literary exchange
and personal friendship between Andersen and Dickens also are famously known. LouisJames, drawing upon their common experience of being deprived of their childhood atquite an early age, explains the literary affinities between these writers:

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For both, childhood came to an abrupt end. When Andersen was eleven, hisfather died, and he was sent to work in the local paper mill. [ . . . ] For Dickens,sent to work in Warren’s Blacking Factory at the age of twelve, the shock of
immersion in an alien culture was even greater. The trauma placed the recovery
of childhood innocence at the heart of Dickens’s vision as it did of Andersen’s.
Aligned to a child’s view of the world, Dickens’s and Andersen’s writing took on
a quality more commonly associated with poetry than prose—the animation of
the material world. (James 226)
Both Andersen and Dickens retained a tendency to romanticize childhood, aligningthemselves with the innocent vision of idealized child characters. Though their friendshipcollapsed when Andersen’s stay with Dickens, on his second visit to Britain in 1857,
extended as long as five weeks so that the Dickens family came to feel wearied, there isno denying the significance of the influence Andersen exerted upon Dickens’s creative
imagination. Some elements Dickens seems to have borrowed from “The Mermaid” to be
used in his novel Little Dorrit (1855-57), written just before this disastrous second visitof Andersen, have been detected by Louis James, who has found a parallel between Little
Dorrit inquiring about the world outside the prison and the mermaid heroine asking her
grandmother what the humans and their lives on land are like. Similarities between A Taleof Two Cities and “The Mermaid,” on the other hand, do not seem to have hitherto drawn
any critical attention. By comparatively observing the human relations among chief
characters, however, some intriguing parallels could capture our attention.
From “The Mermaid” through The Frozen Deep to A Tale of Two Cities
Shortly before Andersen’s second visit to Britain, Dickens is known to have been deeply
and ardently involved in the theatrical performance of The Frozen Deep, a play whose
nominal author is Wilkie Collins but to which Dickens himself also is believed to havemuch contributed toward its completion (Saijo 167). Dickens had an affair with Ellen
Ternan, an actress performing in this play with him. As discussed by Saijo, The Frozen
Deep played a great role in helping Dickens conceive of ideas for his A Tale of Two Cities.
No copy of its original scenario version unfortunately exists, but the revised novel version
published in 1866 is easily accessible through the Internet. We can see the germ of some

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main elements constituting A Tale of Two Cities, for example, in the triangular relationshipinvolving the young main characters of both sexes. It could also be pointed out, however,that even in The Frozen Deep already, some indebtedness to Andersen’s “The Mermaid”
seems detectable.
Richard Wardour, the male protagonist of The Frozen Deep, ends up in tragicallysacrificing his life by rescuing his rival who is loved by Clara, the object of Richard’s
desperate love for the sake of the welfare of his beloved. There seems to exist a lineage,
then, that is traceable from the little mermaid through Richard Wardour to Sydney
Carton—a hypothesis which I hope could be demonstrated through comparing somescenes and episodes sharing notable resemblances.
The Frozen Deep, as its title suggests, has its main stage set on a sea voyage to theNorth Pole. Richard, having been rejected by Clara, to whom he had devoted his onesided love for long, volunteers to go on board to relieve the pang, with an oath in his mind
that he would surely kill the unseen rival who has won Clara’s heart during his absence
for military service, should he encounter him. Frank Alderley, his rival, coincidentally,
participates in another yet similar Arctic expedition at the same time. Though initiallythey have launched on separate ships, Richard on “Wanderer” and Frank on “Sea Mew,”
respectively, Fate is to converge their courses as Clara, with a vein of clairvoyance in her,
has feared: these two ships undergo wreck amid icebergs at the identical spot, so thatcrews from both expeditions join to cooperate together for survival. Richard then comesto identify Frank as his enemy to be revenged on and destroyed, on detecting the initials
of Clara and Frank, inscribed by the latter on his bed, which are exposed when this bed is
dismantled to be used as firewood. We could hear certain resonance of this scene in A
Tale of Two Cities, in the episode of the discovery of the initials of Alexandre Manette on
the wall of the cell after the demolition of the Bastille, which ironically leads Charles tobe rearrested and to be brought on the verge of being executed.
The influence of Andersen’s “The Mermaid” on The Frozen Deep would bedemonstrated through some comparison of notably similar episodes in both works,
including the depiction of the moment where the protagonists are driven by theirmurderous impulse nearly to satisfy it, but finally come to reconsider. Just as Charles in
A Tale of Two Cities, would have surely been executed if it were not for Sydney’s selfsacrificial help and wit, Frank in The Frozen Deep, too, being mentally gay but of delicate
physical composition, falls into a crisis out of which he could never have survived on his
own, without Richard’s altruistic support and devotion.
It having become clear that there would be no prospect of their being discovered andrescued if they just remained camping on the same untrodden spot, half of the members

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chosen by the throw of the dice set off from the hut to seek out their chances. Both of therivals, Richard and Frank, are among those thus dispatched, but Frank, having become
too weak to catch up with others, is left by the rest of the company on an iceberg under
the care of Richard. All alone with Frank, who is so helplessly and defenselessly asleep,
laying his head on his knee, Richard feels the life of his enemy to be completely within
his power and at his mercy. Without any witness being present, he could now quite easily
do away with Frank even without actively committing murder; only a small bit ofnegligence, or dolus eventualis, would suffice:Leave him neglected where he lies; and his death is a question of hours, perhaps
minutes—who knows?
Frank is dreaming, and murmuring in his dream. A woman’s name passes his lips.
Frank is in England again—at the ball—whispering to Clara the confession of
his love.
Over Richard Wardour’s face there passes the shadow of a deadly
thought. . . . The sleeper on the iceberg is the man who has robbed him of Clara—
who has wrecked the hope and the happiness of his life. Leave the man in his
sleep, and let him die!
So the tempter whispers. (Collins 84-5)
It seems highly probable that this above episode was created, based on the scene in “TheMermaid” where the mermaid heroine is driven to mad fury on hearing her beloved prince
murmur out his human bride’s name in his sleep. This happens on the very night of thewedding of these human royalties which the mermaid had much feared.
After a storm attacked the ship where festive events celebrating his birthday weretaking place and threw him into the sea, it was this mermaid who exerted her power toswim among the wreckage and raging water to safely bring back the fainted, unconscious
prince to the seashore and laid him gently there to be easily exposed to people’s view.
However, having been deprived of her tongue and speech in exchange for the magicaldrug to turn her fishtail into human legs, she can never convey that fact to the prince, who,
meanwhile, has been longing to be reunited with the human princess as the very saver of
his life, though, in fact, this latter had only been enabled to find him thanks to themermaid’s kind arrangement. Their marriage meant the expiration of the mermaid’s lifeon this world, and moreover, even without the prospect of any afterlife, for, animperishable soul was to be given to her only on the occasion of the human prince’s truly

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with him what little food and drink he could obtain. For this sacrifice, Richard himself inturn has become exhausted and enfeebled by the time he finally manages to hand overFrank to Clara, who has come over from England to America, seeking their tidings, when
he flaunts a little his heroism: “‘Saved, Clara!’ he cried, ‘Saved for you!’ He released theman, and placed him in Clara’s arms” (Collins 131). An echo of this cry by Richard could
be heard in A Tale of Two Cities, when Sydney, having determined upon sacrificing his
own life by being executed in Charles’s place, murmurs: “A life you love” (Dickens 349);
these words, though unheard, are dearly addressed to Lucie. Richard’s cry also remains
unheeded and unheard, for Clara is too rapt at this unexpected reunion with her lover,whom she has almost given up for dead after more than two years’ absence and silence:
She never answered; she clung to Frank in speechless ecstasy. She never evenlooked at the man who had preserved him—in the first absorbing joy of seeing herlover alive. Step by step, slower and slower, Richard Wardour drew back and leftthem by themselves. (The Frozen Deep 131)
Richard certainly resembles the little mermaid in that his strife and exertion to safely
bring another body over the sea is never to be duly recognized, rewarded or appreciatedby the beloved one. His posture of withdrawal, retreating from the foreground, as if togive up any hope of his own happiness while witnessing the others realize the very joy
and happiness which he has dreamed and craved for, would remind the reader of the imageof Sydney Carton depicted in the frontispiece to the first edition of A Tale of Two Cities
by Hablot Knight Browne (fig.1). Sydney Carton, retreated in the background in shadow
and melancholy, is observing the others who are carelessly courting, conversing andsocializing. The source of such an image could be traced, via The Frozen Deep, further
back to the little mermaid at the Prince’s wedding, where she is compelled to celebrate
the young couple, serving as a bridesmaid:
The little mermaid stood behind the princess clothed in silk and gold, and held up
the train of her bridal dress. But neither did her ear hear the solemn music, nor her
eye see the holy ceremony; ʗshe was thinking of her death, and of the hopes oflove and the world to come which she had lost for ever. (“The Mermaid” 389)“[Richard’s] noble-mindedness allowing him to throw away his life for the woman heloves must have been generated out of Dickens’s pursuit of a new hero unbound by
existing moral values. It goes without saying that this was to be the theme of his next

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novel, A Tale of Two Cities,” Takao Saijo says (167). The setting of the play and the novel
The Frozen Deep is said to have been modelled on an actual historical incident, a
shipwreck during a polar expedition, “the ill-fated 1845 Franklin expedition to discover
the Northwest Passage” (Gasson) and the subsequent cannibalism that occurred. Should
there be any way for humans to remain humane and not degenerate into sheer egotism
and brutality under such an extreme situation? Contemplating upon and exploring such aquestion in his mind, Dickens might have found a great clue in the notion of altruistic
love that can overcome any murderous and egotistic impulse, or even instincts of selfpreservation, as presented in Andersen’s mermaid.

Fig. 1. “Frontispiece” to the first edition of A Tale of Two Cities. Project Gutenberg.
www.gutenberg.org/files/98/98-h/98-h.htm

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Sydney/the Mermaid Rescuing Charles/ the Prince over a Raging Sea
Sydney Carton in A Tale of Two Cities, like the little mermaid and Richard Wardour, is a
protagonist who dies a self-sacrificial death so as to ensure happiness for the object of his
unrequited love. The recurrent metaphor, or motif, or his struggle against the harsh, raging
sea, supported by the power and strength of his love, also is inherited from “The Mermaid”
and The Frozen Deep. While in both “The Mermaid” and The Frozen Deep, twocontrastive stages, the land and the sea, have been employed, so that events are unfoldedand develop in separate ways, following their respective, distinct logics, in A Tale of Two
Cities two capitals--the steadily unchanging London, and the radically metamorphosing
Paris at the commencement of the Revolution, in which existing social and moral values
are at once subverted, thrown down and nullified--are quite consciously confronted. It
seems highly likely that such a clearly dualistic construction of A Tale of Two Cities owes
much to the land vs. sea opposition in “The Mermaid.”
The social and political turbulence under the Revolution constantly is describedthrough metaphors of a stormy and raging sea, “a great storm in France with a dreadfulsea rising” (221) whose echo reaches the then peaceful household of the Darnays in
London, where the little Lucie, the daughter of Lucie and Charles, is being soundly
nurtured and raised. Then, in the next chapter entitled “The Sea Still Rises,” the mob
crowding toward the Bastille forms and constitutes a great wave in Paris: “[T]he living
sea rose wave on wave, depth on depth, and overflowed the city to that point. Alarm-bells
ringing, drums beating, the sea raging and thundering on its new beach, the attack begun”(223-4). Charles’s deadly adventure into this turbulence is doomed to shipwreck, just likethe two Polar expeditions in The Frozen Deep. Like the prince in “The Mermaid,” who,
but for the little mermaid’s unseen and unrecognized exertion, would certainly havedrowned, or Frank in The Frozen Deep who, without Richard’s self-devotion, would have
perished in the midst of the frozen ocean, Charles could never return alive from thevoyage he has launched himself upon without the sacrificial deed of Sydney Carton.
Seeing that he is seriously in danger, Sydney, who had once made a prophetic oathto Lucie; “For you, and for any dear to you, I would do anything. If my career were ofthat better kind that there was any opportunity or capacity of sacrifice in it, I would
embrace any sacrifice for you and for those dear to you” (107-8). He sets out to Paris tosave Charles at the cost of his own life, thus proving true to his words. On confronting
for the first time with, and hearing the terrifying words of, Madame Defarge, the lethal
enemy of the Darnays and the embodiment of vengeful spirit with her heart set upon
eliminating all the family members of the St. Evrémondes, including Charles and even

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his little daughter Lucie, Sydney Carton reflects that “it might be a good deed to seize[her] arm, lift it, and stab under it sharp and deep” (354), but decides to leave and release
her intact. This episode could be read as homage and allusion to the little mermaid who,
though once having wielded her knife on the verge of stabbing the prince to death, on
second thoughts, decides to sacrifice her own life to let him live on.
The heroic and sacrificial acts of Sydney, like those of the little mermaid, remain
unseen and unrecognized, his unconditional love likewise unreturned and unrequited.
Though the lawyer Mr. Stryver is recognized, regarded and applauded as the benefactor
of Charles who successfully rescued his life through his performance in court, it has
actually been Sydney Carton who has diligently prepared for the brilliant performance ofStryver and come upon the decisively clever idea of pointing to the amazing
physiognomical resemblance between Charles and himself. While Charles shows his
gratitude towards Stryver, saying: “You have laid me under an obligation to you for life—in two senses” (83); that is, he owes his “life” to Stryver and would feel obliged to him
as long as he lives, no thankful words are to be poured upon Sydney Carton: “Nobody
had made any acknowledgement of Mr. Carton’s part in the day’s proceedings; nobody
had known of it” (85). Sydney, employed under Stryver, somehow seems compelled to
be in a muted, hidden and ghost-like position to secretly support him, which might becomparable to Dickens’s position in the composition of the play The Frozen Deep, whose
authorship ostensibly was ascribed to Wilkie Collins while Dickens remained a ghostwriter: “The Frozen Deep was written by Collins during 1856, although conceived, castand revised by Dickens” (Gasson). This muted obscurity, too, links Sydney to the little
mermaid, who has been deprived of her voice and words to convey that it is she who has
played the chief role in saving the prince’s life even at the risk of her own.
Later, Charles, who has once retrieved his freedom thanks to Sydney’s wit and effort,
is arrested again to be imprisoned in the Conciergerie, as the document Dr Manette had
hid embedded into the wall of the Bastille is taken out to be used as evidence against him.
There, on the night before his planned execution, Charles writes farewell letters to his
wife, his father-in-law, and Mr. Lorry, a devoted friend of the family, but “never even[thinks]” of Mr Sydney Carton:
He wrote a long letter to Lucie. To her father, he wrote in the same strain; but, hetold her father that he expressly confided his wife and child to his care. To Mr
Lorry, he commended them all, and explained his worldly affairs. That done, withmany added sentences and grateful friendship and warm attachment, all was done.
He never thought of Carton. His mind was so full of the others that he never once

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thought of him. (361-2; emphasis mine)
Intriguingly, the narrative here seems to be intentionally putting emphasis upon the factthat Sydney’s presence is completely obliterated from Charles’s mind, there being noroom left for him. We can find a parallel between him and the mermaid, whose presence
is totally obliterated, on the fatal night when her life is to expire, from the prince’s mind
totally occupied with the thoughts of his bride.
Having seen off her husband taken to the Conciergerie, Lucie swoons; then, Sydney,
having hitherto concealed himself in a dark corner, instantly runs towards her to support
her, but insists upon quitting the spot before she recovers herself to see he is there. At thesame time, however, he expresses his desire to be allowed to kiss the forehead of theunconscious Lucie, as if to trace faithfully the life course of Andersen’s mermaid:“Before I go,” he said, and paused—“I may kiss her?”
It was remembered afterwards that when he bent down and touched her facewith his lips, he murmured some words. The child, who was nearest to him, told
them afterwards, and told her grandchildren when she was a handsome old lady,
that she heard him say, “A life you love.” (349)
Just as the little mermaid feels “rejoiced” (389) to hear the prince, whom she has saved,
being highly spoken of by peasants, Carton, too, shows a “flush of pride” (349) in theabove scene, both physically supporting Lucie from the fall and also having determined
upon sacrificing himself for her.
Physiognomical Twins
Let us hereafter turn our eyes to one intriguingly conspicuous element, or device, which
has made Sydney resemble Andersen’s little mermaid closer than Richard in The Frozen
Deep: the protagonist possesses an outward appearance almost identical to that of his rival
in love. In The Frozen Deep, while the heartbroken Richard is of a rough type, called the“Bear of the Expedition” (53), the triumphant Frank is such “a young officer,” a “bright,
handsome, gentlemanlike lad” (24) that Mrs. Crayford, Clara’s confidante, understands
him as “just the person to seriously complicate the difficulty with Richard Wardour” (24).
Then in A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens brings a new setting by which Charles and Sydney,
two rivals over the love of Lucie, are formed to resemble each other in appearance somuch that they can be indistinguishable at times. This, of course, functions as a necessary
condition for Sydney to devise tricks to miraculously save Charles’s life twice; first, in

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the first court scene, by subverting the credibility of the witness’s testimony that he is“quite sure” that the person he has seen is nobody other than Charles (76), and thensecondly and lastly, by dissimulating his identity to replace Charles to get executed. At
the same time, however, it is worth noting that this motif of physiognomic twins is highly
likely to have been borrowed from Andersen’s “The Mermaid.”
The human prince, though living with the little mermaid under the same roof, isnever hit by the idea that this maid of unknown identity could be his benefactress heshould feel grateful to, and yearns for the maiden inhabiting a convent whom he believes
to be the saver of his life:“[ . . .] I was once on board a ship, which was wrecked in a sudden storm, and thewaves washed me on shore near a convent wherein many maidens lead a religious
life; and the youngest amongst these maidens found me lying senseless on the shore,and she saved my life. I saw her but once, and yet her image is ever before me, andshe is the only woman whom I can ever love. But thou art strangely like her, -- solike that at times thy image effaces her from my soul; and she whom I love belongs
to God alone, but thou wert sent by fate to comfort me, and never will I part fromthee!” (“The Mermaid” 387)
Thus, the prince cruelly declares that he cannot love the mermaid since she does notdeserve it--he feels he owes her nothing, but that she remains his favourite just becauseof her resemblance to the one he really longs to reencounter, as a kind of a surrogate. On
hearing this, the poor mermaid sorely laments in desperation:“Woe is me! he knows not that I it was who saved him!” thought the mermaiden,with a heavy sigh. “I bore him through the angry waves to the grove wherein theconvent stands; I hid myself behind the rocks, and watched until some one shouldcome to help him; and, alas! I saw the beautiful maiden approach, whom he loves
more than me!” (“The Mermaid” 387)
Her act of helping the loved one unite with her rival also underlines her resemblance toSydney.
It would be appropriate to consider what significance lies in one’s bearing a very
similar physical appearance to that of one’s rival. In the period when Dickens lived andwas active, that did not just simply mean that the person possesses a similar degree ofphysical or sexual attraction, but would imply there being similarities also inside, even

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under the visible surface. The science of physiognomy schematized and systematized thecorrespondence between the outward and inward qualities of human beings, based on thefirm belief that the former should always faithfully reflect the latter. Johann Kaspar
Lavater, a Swiss clergyman regarded as the authority on this branch of science who
remained influential throughout the nineteenth century, stated:
The moral life of man, particularly, reveals itself in the lines, marks, and transitionsof the countenance. His moral powers and desires, his irritability, sympathy, andantipathy; his facility of attracting or repelling the objects that surround him; these
are all summed up in, and painted upon, his countenance when at rest. (Lavater 8-9)
That Dickens held a strong interest in this science of physiognomy is evident fromthe fact that he focused on the topic of the “physiognomy of door-knockers” in an essay
entitled “Our Next-Door Neighbour,” collected in Boz’s Sketches:
For instance, there is one description of knocker that used to be common enough, butwhich is fast passing away—a large round one, with the jolly face of a convivial lion
smiling blandly at you, as you twist the sides of your hair into a curl or pull up our
shirt-collar while you are waiting for the door to be opened; we never saw thatknocker on the door of a churlish man—so far as our experience is concerned, it
invariably bespoke hospitality and another bottle. (Dickens, “Our next-door
neighbour” 23)Though, in the above quotation, he might appear to be employing his physiognomic
knowledge rather playfully and jokingly, that does not necessarily mean that Dickens
found this branch of science an object of jest, for, as Taylor M. Scanlon discusses, his
character descriptions in A Tale of Two Cities are largely based on the physiognomical
theory of the school of Lavater:
As I have suggested thus far, the role of physiognomy in A Tale of Two Cities is to
reduce the ostensibly terrifying collective of the crowds to the recognizablesingularities, thus homogenizing potentially threatening masses to legible—and
therefore knowable—individuals. (Scanlon 19)
Scanlon argues that the employment of physiognomy in this novel functions to simplify
and reduce the “collective of the crowds” to legible signs, with a special focus on the

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analysis of facial descriptions of Marquis St. Evrémonde and Madame Defarge, while,curiously, never even touching on the issue of the physical resemblance between Charles
and Sydney. Nevertheless, if, as Scanlon claims, the outward appearances of characters
in A Tale of Two Cities function as legible signs that faithfully reflect their inward natures,
should their almost identical outward forms not mean they also share almost identicalinward qualities and personalities?
When Stryver asks Sydney how the latter could come up with the idea of bringing
out the issue of “identification” at court to save Charles, Sydney answers: “I thought hewas rather a handsome fellow, and I thought I should have been much the same sort offellow, if I had had any luck” (91). These words should not be thrown aside as just a vain
or groundless remark: if the same physignomical features mean the presence of the same
inherent potential, then what Sydney puts in the subjunctive mood; “I should have beenmuch the same sort of fellow” could sound quite plausible: there might be a significant
truth in it. It is indicated that though much was expected of him in his youth (“Long ago,
when he had been famous among his earliest competitors as a youth of great promise”[325]), he came to be obscured by outward circumstances including Stryver’s presence,
to be what he is now. Charles is described and defined as “a young man of about fiveand-twenty, well-grown and well-looking, with a sunburnt cheek and a dark eye”: “Hiscondition was that of a young gentleman” (65). A surprising resemblance lurks between
him and Sydney, whom the narrator endearingly calls “my learned friend”: “[A]llowing
for my learned friend’s appearance being careless and slovenly, they were sufficiently likeeach other to surprise, not only the witness, but everybody present, when they were thus
brought into comparison” (77). Inherently endowed with identical qualities to those ofCharles, though, Sydney has differentiated himself through acquired habits, attitudes andfeelings:
Something especially reckless in his demeanour, not only gave him a disreputablelook, but so diminished the strong resemblance he undoubtedly bore to the prisoner(which his momentary earnestness, when they were compared together, hadstrengthened), that many of the lookers-on, taking note of him now, said to one
another they would hardly have thought the two were so alike. (79)

A vicious cycle seems to have formed as his frustration in life leads to dependence on andaddiction to alcohol and thus to further dilapidation. The way Sydney deploringly talks
to his image in the mirror could remind the reader of Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray facing
his dilapidated self in the fatal portrait:

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‘Do you particularly like the man?’ he muttered, at his own image; ‘why should you
particularly like a man who resembles you? There is nothing in you to like; you know
that. Ah, confound you! What a change you have made in yourself! A good reason
for taking to a man, that he shows you what you have fallen away from and what
you might have been! Change places with him, and would you have been looked atby those blue eyes as he was, and commiserated by that agitated face as he was?
Come on, and have it out in plain words! You hate the fellow.’ He resorted to his pintof wine for consolation [ . . . ] (A Tale of Two Cities 89)
Indeed, for Sydney, Charles is what he “should have been” or could have been, if he “hadhad any luck” (91).
Sydney’s words in the above quotation could also remind the reader of the little
mermaid’s lament on the discovery the human princess is taking the place where sheherself should have been: “Woe is me! he knows not that I it was who saved him!” Thismermaid heroine is endowed with a beautiful appearance similar to the bride andsupposedly with similar inward qualities accompanying it as well. Moreover, since thedecisive factor in the prince’s choice of his bride has been who saved him from the stormysea, the mermaid would have been much more highly qualified than the human princess,had she not been deprived of speech.
Why has Dickens created and so sympathetically depicted such a hero sorely
suffering from a hopeless love, and ever powerless to express himself? Perhaps one could
detect a resonance of his own unrequited love for Maria Beadnell, to whom he devoted
four years’ passion in vain; or the frustration he had undergone still earlier in life, when
he had to quit school due to his family debt and penury, while his sister Fanny was stillallowed to pursue her musical training and succeed, applauded and admired on all sides:
Fanny received one of the prizes given to the pupils of the Royal Academy of Music.
“I could not bear to think of myself—beyond the reach of all such honorable
emulation and success. The tears ran down my face. I felt as if my heart were rent. I
prayed, when I went to bed that night, to be lifted out of the humiliation and neglect
in which I was. I never had suffered so much before. There was no envy in this.”(Forster Vol. I, 66)
The young Charles, who had hitherto been a pupil no less brilliant than his sister andnaturally expected to pursue his studies up to a higher level, was abruptly deprived of that

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prospect and Sydney, who is haunted by the ghost of “what should have been” might
represent part of Dickens’s own self.
Adding to these biographical speculations, I would like to mention still anotherpossible literary sourced from which Dickens seems likely to have drawn inspiration:“William Wilson” by Edgar Allan Poe. This short story of mysterious and monstrous
touch is known to have had influence upon Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray as
well. The first-person narrator, who calls himself by the pseudonym “William Wilson,” isannoyed by a boy pupil having the same name as and very similar appearance to his, firstin the boys’ boarding school. Though Wilson, the narrator, strives to be on top of others,
the other Wilson seems able to attain the same level with ease, quite without effort, andpreferring to remain in obscurity so that the narrator can be recognizable as outstanding
and conspicuous. The narrator is tormented by the doubt that the real winner should be
the other Wilson, not himself. Even after leaving the boarding school, at Eton and Oxford
also, whenever the narrator is on the verge of committing some deed that could
irretrievably incur his degradation or perdition, the other Wilson appears from nowhere
to intrude and intercept. This almost supernatural character of the other Wilson has
hitherto been interpreted as the super ego or the conscience of the narrator, but when we
picture these two Wilsons quite literally as two distinct individuals bearing identicalqualities both internal and external, then their relationship can be overlapped with thatbetween Charles and Sydney. For Sydney, Charles is an invincible rival who has attained
the ideal happiness which remains forever unattainable to him despite much devotion,
effort and identical physiognomic features; and for Charles, Sydney is an almost
supernatural agent appearing from nowhere to intervene in his life at decisive moments.
The narrator’s confession; “I could not bring myself to hate him altogether. [. . .] Wilson
and myself were the most inseparable of companion” (Poe, “William Wilson” 221) finds
an echo in Sydney’s soliloquy; “[W]hy should you particularly like a man who resembles
you? There is nothing in you to like; you know that. Ah, confound you! What a change
you have made in yourself! [. . .] Come on, and have it out in plain words! You hate thefellow” (A Tale of Two Cities 89).
Thus, as we have seen, one clue to the secret of the compactness of the scale of A
Tale of Two Cities might arguably be traced back to the compactness of some literarysources like “The Mermaid” and “William Wilson,” with whose protagonists Dickens
could identify himself, and in whose frameworks he found receptacles to give vent to his
hidden emotions, upon which his novel came to be modelled.

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Notes
1 This title, under which Andersen's fairy tale appeared in Bentley's Miscellany, isadopted in this paper for referring to it, though "The Little Mermaid" is the English
title now more commonly used and also faithful to the original Danish title "Den Lille
Havfrue."
2 This is an English version of a paper orally presented at the Dickens Fellowship Japan
Branch Annual Meeting on 3rd October, 2020, entitled “Doppelgängers and Doubles
in Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid,” and Poe’s“William Wilson” (ࠕA Tale of Two Cities, ࢔ࣥࢹࣝࢭࣥࠗே㨶ጲ࠘
ࠊ࣏࣮“William
Wilson”࡟࠾ࡅࡿࢻࢵ࣌ࣝࢤ࣮ࣥ࢞ࡢࢸ࣮࣐ࠖ).
3 Professor at the Faculty of Literature, Arts, and Cultural Studies.
Corresponding address: akemi.yoshida@lac.kindai.ac.jp

Works Cited
Andersen, Hans Christian. Trans. Lady Duff Gordon. “The Mermaid.” Bentley’s
Miscellany Vol. 19 (1846) 377-390. Web.
Collins, Wilkie. The Frozen Deep. Chatto and Windus, 1875. Web. Internet Archive.
Dickens, Charles. “Our next-door neighbour.” Rpt. in Jenny Bourne Talor and Sally
Shuttleworth Eds. Embodied Selves: An Anthology of Psychological Texts 18301890. Oxford UP, 1998. 22-4.
---. A Tale of Two Cities. 1859㸬Penguin Books, 2003.
Gasson, Andrew. “The Frozen Deep—A Drama in Three Acts.”<www.wilkie-collins.info/play_frozen_deep.htm>
James, Louis. “Flight from the Snow Queen: Childhood in the Imaginative Worlds ofDickens and Hans Christian Andersen.” The Dickensian 102 (Winter 2006): 222231.
Forster, John. The Life of Charles Dickens. Project Gutenberg.
Lavater, John Caspar. Essays on Physiognomy. Translated by T. Hocroft. Rpt. In Jenny
Bourne Taylor and Sally Shuttleworth, Eds. Embodied Selves: An Anthology ofPsychological Texts 1830-1890. Oxford UP, 1998. 8-29.
Poe, Edgar Allan. “William Wilson.” The Selected Works of Edgar Allan Poe. Norton,
2004. 216-232.
Saijo, Takao. すᲄ㝯㞝 ࠕࢹ࢕ࢣࣥࢬ࡜⣲ே₇๻ʊʊ₇๻άື࡜๰సࡢ᪂㡿ᇦʊʊࠖࠗࢹ࢕ࢣࣥࢬ࣭ࣇ࢙ࣟ࢘ࢩࢵࣉ᪥ᮏᨭ㒊ᖺሗ ➨ 30 ྕ㸦2017 ᖺ㸧 159170

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Scanlon, Taylor M. “The Face of the Crowd: Reading Terror Physiognomically inCharles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities.” The Victorian. 2: 3 (2014): 1-12. Web.

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Secrets Veiled and Unveiled: Wilde’s )HPPH)DWDOH Images 㻌
and Their French Sources㻌㻌㻌Anna SUGIMOTO,1 Chiharu TANAKA,2 and Akemi YOSHIDA3

Introduction

Even though Oscar Wilde’s play Salome and Aubrey Beardsley’s illustrations to it
are now regarded as an inseparably entwined set, to constitute the epitome of the decadentculture and atmosphere of the British fin-de-siècle, it is equally a well-known fact that
Wilde, though admitting the younger artist’s talent and appreciative insights, showedrepugnance towards the illustrations actually executed. Critics have hitherto speculatedon the reason why Wilde exhibited such a negative response—some argue that Wilde wasupset by Beardsley’s act of caricaturing the playwright himself on three of the plates, most
famously the “frontispiece drawing ‘The Woman in the Moon’” (Owens 12). However,the chief factor must have resided in the clash between their respective artistic visions
towards this dramatic piece; Wilde could not approve of Beardsley’s interpretation andthe general tone of his execution, which, to Wilde’s eyes, seemed to greatly misrepresent
what he had conceived as the essence of the play and the heroine as an ideal femme fatale,and his philosophy of art to be represented through them. While Beardsley, daringly
challenging the Victorian taboos and conventions, boldly exposed sexual and erotic
elements in crudely and comically obscene ways, Wilde had aimed to wrap and embrace
his moonlit dramatic space and decadent princess in misty, mystique and mystifying veils,
not in farce and obscenity, and thereby to represent through them much of his philosophy

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of art, love and life. Influences of French artists, especially Gustave Moreau, admittedly
much contributed to the formation of such an emblematic femme fatale figure.
This thesis aims to analyze how Wilde has been fascinated with the trope of the “fatal
women,” how he has exploited the existing stereotypes while differentiating his own
creation from them, and what he has intended to convey through his employment of suchtropes. Though well aware that the femme fatale images created and presented by Wildeand their French connections have already been the subject of much study and discussion,
it still attempts, by exploring specifically how Moreau’s sphinx and Salome images
inspired Wilde in combination, to shed further lights upon the symbolical significancesuch female prototypes have been intended to bear. The first chapter focusses on a muchunderread and undervalued short tale “The Sphinx without a Secret,” as an excellent
example that shows the notion held by the author as to what it is to be a femme fatale, anawareness of the fatal curse incurred upon those who try to exert mysterious allure uponothers—an awareness or insight which might arguably have been gained through theauthor’s getting in contact with Moreau’s painting Oedipus and Sphinx (1864) and which
would also resonate his later work Salome. To be considered together with this story is
the poem The Sphinx, which presents the ideal prototype of the femme fatale conceived
by Wilde, endowed with a legendary and supernatural capacity to transform herself
illimitably in multifarious forms. This mystique figure, by creating and recreating everrenewed aura of indecipherable mystery, succeeds in escaping any ultimate or definite
identification. Then the second chapter is devoted to an analysis of the characterizationof the heroine Salome, to reveal how she is constructed to embody her author’s artistic
principles. Despite the warning Wilde has given to the reader in his own “Preface” to The
Picture of Dorian Gray; “All art is at once surface and symbol./ Those who go beneaththe surface do so at their peril” (Dorian Gray 4), the temptation of biographicalinterpretation might not be so totally resisted.

Chapter One
A Portrait of an Artist as a Sphinx“The Sphinx without a Secret” literally can be read as a story of a woman who,
feeling compelled to live up to an ideal of a mysterious femme fatale, succeeds inenveloping herself in a mysterious and secretive aura and thus attracting a “LordMurchinson” in a maddening way. In The Rise and Fall of the Femme Fatale in British
Literature, 1790-1910, Heather Braun casually touches on this story and then dismisses
it only within the following few lines:

Wilde’s short story “The Sphinx without a Secret” begins to break down theimposing image of the “Sphinx” and the bewildering conclusion of Salomé. In thisstory, Wilde’s narrator falls for a familiar woman of mystery, “a Gioconda in sables,”and does all he can to learn more about her. “Lady Alroy was simply a woman witha mania for mystery. She took these rooms for the pleasure of going there with herveil down, and imagining she was a heroine. She had a passion for secrecy, but sheherself was merely a Sphinx without a secret” (Wilde, “Sphinx” l.3). What his
detective skills uncover is her fondness for anonymity and secrets. (Braun 122-3)

The above reading by Braun, shallow as well as inaccurate, leaves much to be criticized.
Firstly, the male character who “falls for” the heroine is not “Wilde’s narrator” but thenarrator’s old friend from university days. Moreover, it does not seem very appropriate toput aside the essence of this heroine simply as “her fondness for anonymity and secrecy,”
just unquestioningly accepting the narrator’s words which might have been put to relieve
his friend’s chagrin, even though the speaker did not believe in his own words. A carefuland close reading would bring to light many motifs and images that are shared between“The Sphinx without a Secret” and Salomé, indicating that in the former work Wildealready had struck an undertone that would convey his philosophy of art and life, andresonate through many works into the later play Salome. It could be suggested, therefore,that though tending to be deemed as rather slight, this short piece deserves more serious
consideration, and it might owe much to Gustave Moreau for its main concept.
The heroine Lady Alroy is introduced into the narrative when the unnamed narrator
happens to “come across” (215) Lord Gerald Murchinson, his old friend from Oxford
days, unexpectedly at a café in Paris. Detecting “anxious and puzzled” (215) expression
on the latter’s face, the narrator asks him to tell him about the “mystery in [his] life” (215);
and in response to it, a “photograph of a woman” (215) is produced from his pocket: “Shewas tall and slight, and strangely picturesque with her large vague eyes and loosened hair.
She looked like a clairvoyante” (215). Thus is the first impression the narrator receives
from her appearance, which already is characterized with mystic and esotericinscrutability. Asked to put his opinions about this face, the narrator further “examine[s]it carefully,” which only strengthens the impressions of and associations with someundefinable secrecy: “It seemed to me the face of someone who had a secret, but whether
that secret was good or evil I could not say. Its beauty was a beauty moulded out of many
mysteries—the beauty, in fact, which is psychological, not plastic” (215-6). Thus, thisunknown woman’s chief attraction is composed of “many mysteries,” or more exactly, a

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suggestion of there being many mysteries. Then narrator’s subsequent words ofjudgement from the reading of this face are: “She is the Gioconda in sables͇(216). Thisreference to “Gioconda,” of course, could be associated not only with the famous portrait
by Leonardo da Vinci, but also with the laudatory description made of her by Walter Paterin The Renaissance:

She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has
been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been adiver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked forstrange webs with Eastern merchants: and, as Leda, was the mother of Helenof Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her
but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which
it has moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and thehands. (Walter Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance 118-9)

What is presented here in rich and bountiful vocabulary far exceeds the stature of any
life-sized image of a single human female being: the Gioconda is conceived rather as avast container as profound and inscrutable as the universe, an exhaustible resource ofmultiple and multiplex images of all that are great, mythical, and female. What, then, thus
characterizes this female image in this specific painting with such inscrutability andenables her to freely assume an unlimited range of roles and identities could be ascribed,
partly at least, to the vagueness and the illegibility of her expression. Her indefinable,
enigmatic smile invites and encourages limitless readings and interpretation. What the
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Victorian critic Edward Dowden has pointed out about Shakespeare’s Hamlet;“Shakspeare [sic] created it [=Hamlet] a mystery, and therefore it is forever suggestive,
and never wholly explicable” (Dowden 126) could also hold true to the Gioconda, and is
the very effect Lady Alroy, the heroine of Wilde’s story, aims to produce and assume.
The impression Lord Murchinson receives of Lady Alroy on their second encounterat Madame de Rastail’s dinner party is told in association with the “moonbeam” and “graylace,” which would remind the reader of the combination of the “moon” and the “veils,”
motifs employed in Salome in conspicuous ways: “She came in very slowly, looking likea moonbeam in grey lace” (216). Moreover, when, on heading to his uncle’s place, heunexpectedly witnesses her in an unlikely place, one of the “lot of shabby little streets”(217), she is wearing a “veil”: “Suddenly I saw in front of me Lady Alroy, deeply veiled
and walking very fast” (217). Both the moon and the veil hinder any full and ultimate
revelation of identities, controlling the degree of being exposed, as we will consider more
fully in the next chapter on Salome. Lady Alroy then is further compared to “one of thosestrange crystals that one sees in museums, which are at one moment clear, and at anotherclouded” (217), again strengthening the impression of the tantalizing illegibility, of aalways partly concealed identity never to be fully exposed or detected.
On seeing her entering one of the houses on the above mentioned “shabby” street,
Lord Murchinson, now seriously in love with her, is tormented with suspicions and keeps
asking her whom she has been meeting there, but her answer simply is that “[she] went
to meet no one” (218) and that is the whole and only truth. An interview with her landlady
after the sudden death also seems to support the truth of her enunciation. Lord Murchinson,
though craving for the truth, has paradoxically been attracted by the mysterious
invisibility of the whole truth about her: “I was infatuated with her: In spite of the mystery,

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I though then—in consequent of it, I see now” (217).
What is worth noting is that Lady Alroy, though sometimes lying and dissimulating,does not seem to be enjoying the secrecy light-heartedly or triflingly but does seem to bequite seriously and engaged in it. In danger of detection, she “[grows] very pale” (206),
again underlining the parallel between herself and Salome. She is aware her chief
attraction lies in the power of mystery with which she has successfully enveloped
herself—for her, “self-fashioning” is a life-and-death matter. Here, we can be remindedof the cynical epigram put by Lord Henry in The Picture of Dorian Gray: “Knowledge
would be fatal. It is the uncertainty that charms one. A mist makes things wonderful”(196) and “All ways end at the same point” (196), that is “disillusion” (197). In her
attempt to evade the fate of Sibyl Vane, who loses her attraction on parting with illusions
and performativity, Lady Alroy ends up finding herself in an impasse. Such image of hers
could be possibly overlapped with that of the author Wilde himself, who was suspectedof “posing as a sodomite” (Counter 349) as a fashion, and much of the attraction of whose
social comedies depended upon the hidden, secret identities of the characters, a device
effectively employed, for example, in Lady Windermere’s Fan and The Importance ofBeing Earnest. Lady Alroy could be regarded as a representative of the artists who aretrapped within the difficult space between truth and performance, artistic ideals andcommercial success. She is an artist who makes her life an art.
Why, then, is this heroine to be called “The Sphinx without a Secret”? To consider
this, we should review the image of the “Sphinx” conceived by Wilde as the prototype ofa femme fatale, as is presented rather playfully in his long poem titled The Sphinx, whichJohn Stokes calls “Wilde’s most Baudelairean poem” (65), referring to “Baudelaire’s
domestic cat” (Stokes 65). This poem is addressed to a “sphinx,” who, though not

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elucidated, seems to a domesticated member of the feline tribe: “In a dim corner of myroom for longer than my fancy thinks/ A beautiful and silent Sphinx has watched me
through the shifting gloom” (Wilde, The Sphinx 833). Though apparently tractable at a
glance, her contour soon dims with the overflow of magnificently multiplex images:

A thousand weary centuries are thine while I have hardly seen
Some twenty summers cast their green for Autumn’s gaudy liveries,

But you can read the Hieroglyphs on the great sand-stone obelisks,
And you have talked with Basilisks, and you have looked on Hippogriffs.

O tell me, were you standing by when Isi to Osiris knelt? (833-4)

This Sphinx, as the narrator pictures, might have survived, making love with various
godheads of different religious sects. While Baudelairean influence and Egyptologicalpassion are observed here in evident forms, the image of Pater’s “Gioconda” also can beoverlapped with this sphinx image with its vast historical scale, in whose creation Wildemust have quite consciously exploited the stereotype of femme fatale. Free of any ultimate
definition or identification, such is the ideal femme fatale Lady Alroy has aspired to be.
Adding to the sources already mentioned above, it should be also pointed out that
Wilde might have received much of the inspiration for the character Lady Alroy frompaintings by Gustave Moreau, notably Oedipus and Sphinx (1864; Fig.1).

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Fig. 1. Gustave Moreau, Oedipus and Sphinx. 1864.
www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/437153

What impresses the viewer of this painting could be the feelings of tension. For the Sphinx
depicted here as well as for Lady Alroy, the riddle, or the mystery, is no trifling matterbut a serious issue of life-and-death, for the solution and revelation of it means she should
perish therewith. Therefore, the expression on the face of the Sphinx, of a rather helplessly

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small size, is that of nervous tension and seriousness.
Lady Alroy, likewise, makes her best to allure by the power of her mysterious
attraction, which she tactfully and earnestly produces and assumes, until her tacts of
mystery-making are exhausted and she thereby expires. If she prefigures the tough destiny
that would await her author, then so does Salome, as we would look closely in the next
chapter. While it has been recorded that Wilde had seen Moreau’s The Apparition in
London, which certainly much contributed to the creation of the play Salome (Kawamura22), it is also quite tempting to speculate on the possibility that Wilde’s sphinx images,
too, might have received substantial influence from those by Moreau.

Chapter Two㻌The Re-velation of Salome㻌㻌This chapter will discuss Wilde’s figuration of Salome as a femme fatale,comparatively analyzing it with representations by Moreau and Beardsley. As I
mentioned in the introduction, it is well known that Wilde did not care for Beardsley’s
illustrations. Wilde engaged Beardsley to illustrate his Salome, expecting a “Byzantine
style like Gustave Moreau’s” (Ellmann 355). It is well known that he did not care forthe end product. As Richard Ellmann notes, he lamented: “My Herod is like the Herodof Gustave Moreau, wrapped in his jewels and sorrows. My Salome is a mystic, thesister of Salammbo, a Saint Theresa who worshipped the moon ” (Ellmann 355). Herdance is supposed to be “more metaphysical than physical” (Ellmann 355).
Wilde’s idea of Salome can be explained by analyzing his philosophy of art,
depicted in his essay The Decay of Lying. Wilde was also a great admirer of Flaubert’s

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Herodias (Maya 45), and his Salome was very much influenced by the work. However,a careful comparison of the two works reveals that there are, of course, differences
between them. By analyzing these differences, some characteristics of Wilde’s version
of Salome will be explained, and that she is an embodiment of his artistic vision will besuggested. As a prerequisite before my theory, I would give a brief how Salome cameinto being, along with the universality of the theme of femme fatale.㻌
The legend of Salome originates from an episode about St. John, described in
the New Testament in the third and fourteenth chapters of the Gospel of Matthew, thefirst and sixth chapters of the Gospel of Mark and the third chapter of the Gospel of
Luke. In the description in the Bible, after performing “a peculiar dance which is notconsidered in Syria to be suitable for a noble woman” (Shintani 50; my translation),
Herodias orders her daughter to ask for Jokanaan’s head. At this point, she is not given
the name Salome. Later, a young girl at her mother’s beck and call, was graduallytransformed into a representative of the femme fatale. In order to grind accurately themeaning of femme fatale in reading this paper, I will borrow the words of Mr. Ono andMario Praz to describe it. “Femme fatale means ‘woman of destiny’ in French and often
appears as a motif in literature and painting” (Ono). According to the Larousse
Encyclopaedia, “a femme fatale is a woman whose charms seem to have been sent by
fate to ruin the man she has fallen in love with” (quoted in Ono). Furthermore, “as areminder that the type was produced so frequently, even in classical antiquity, that it
became almost an obsession. [. . .] their lecherous loves which spread ruin and perdition
among men” (Praz 199-200).㻌
It was Gustave Moreau, a leading figure in French symbolism, who contributed
greatly to Salome’s being called a representative of the femme fatale. “In the nineteenth

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century, Salomé was transformed into a bewitching young woman whose sensuality andsinful scent dazzled men. Moreau was the artist who made the greatest contribution tothis transformation” (Forest 57; my translation). Needless to say, his paintings would go
on to influence the artists that followed. “Moreau’s paintings Salome Dancing before
Herod and ‘The Apparition’ influenced Huysmans’ sensual and concrete depiction ofthem in A rebours and Gustave Flaubert’s Herodias” (Maya 48; my translation). Wilde,
who was “at home in French literature” (Ellmann 202), wrote Salome first in French,and three years later published an English translation.㻌
The play Salome was not just generated out of Wilde’s originality only, but
was schemed and constructed as a consciously intertextual project, incorporating
sources and influences from many different people. When one looks into theintertextuality of Salome, one realizes that Wilde must have consciously recognized andtaken into account the existence of the artistic and literary lineage that had created thefemme fatale stereotype, and tried to break new ground. With this in mind, I will try toanalyze, from my own point of view, what Wilde was trying to tell us through Salome.㻌
Beardsley drew the cover and ten illustrations for Wilde's English translation ofSalome, published in 1894. Reportedly, Wilde was discontent about Beardsley’s
illustrations, saying that his designs were “ like the naughty scribbles a precocious
schoolboy makes on the margins of his copybooks ” (quoted in Donohue 122). The
difference in the way Wilde and Beardsley perceive the nature of the femme fatale has
already been discussed, but I will examine the argument anew from a different
perspective than Donohue, who says “Salome has become the victim of an embattled
patriarchal society’s remorseless revenge” (Donohue 135).Wilde criticized Beardsley’s
illustrations not simply because of the “naughtiness” but because the latter’s satirical


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illustrations seemed to intentionally distort and misrepresent Wilde’s ideals and passion
for the IHPPHIDWDOH. Beardsley’s 6DORPH is not a visualization of Wilde’s play 6DORPH,
but a completely new and free version of his fantasy.㻌
Admittedly, Wilde called Beardsley “the only artist who, besides myself, knows
what the dance of the seven veils is, and can see that invisible dance” (Donohue 123). If
so, Beardsley should have understood the nature ofIHPPHIDWDOH Wilde wanted torepresent. Instead, by following and pursuing his own principles, he totally neglected
Wilde’s authorial intention, sneaking mischief and fun into his illustrations. For
example, he put a caricature of Wilde’s face on the Moon, and he painted sexual objects
on it. Wilde was disgusted with the way in which that Beardsley expressed secrets of his
sexuality.㻌
The heroine Salome became a battleground between Wilde and Beardsley, interms of artistic aesthetics. Wilde valued a veiled opacity, rather than clear depiction of
the visible. In fact, it would have been much better if Wilde had engaged Moreau for theillustrations of his 6DORPH, his image of Salome being much closer to that ofBeardsley’s. As Marie-Cecile Forest writes, Moreau’s “sketches are meticulously
rendered with delicate brushstrokes, but the drawing of Salome in the veil (cat. 57) isparticularly fine in its soft, transparent veil” (Forest 72; my translation). She goes on toargue that “Moreau’s attention to detail in the depiction of Salome's costume andjewellery is evident” (Forest 84: my translation). Compared to Beardsley’s version,Moreau’s image of Salome proves to be much subtler, more elegant and multilayered,
which is the way Wilde wanted his Salome to be.㻌In 7KH'HFD\RI/\LQJwhich probably is the work that most faithfully
represents Wilde’s theory of art, it is stated: “Art finds her own perfection within, and


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not outside of, herself. She is a veil, rather than a mirror” (Wilde 15). It can be inferred,then, that Wilde was in pursuit of a mode of expression which could produce that kindof ambiguity which enwraps what is being expressed in a mystic, secret veil—a modequite contrary to what Beardsley conducted in his illustration to Salome, by nudely andrudely drawing and exposing all in clear, bold lines. Rather than depicting everythingthat can be seen, Wilde believed that it is only by making things opaque, as if a veil has
been pulled down, that they leave a strong impression on the viewer and become
unforgettable (Braun 121).㻌
As specific examples, I will discuss the importance of the “Dance of the Seven
Veils” in Salome together with the symbolism of the moon in it. The dance constitutes
one of the most important features in Wilde’s Salome. Meanwhile, Wilde gave theMoon an important role comparable to that of the dance. Wilde has incorporated themystique into his own work with focusing on the Moon, which heralds Salome’s dance.
I believe that by linking the moon with the dance of the seven veils, Wilde was enabled
to express the ideal essence of the femme fatale as he conceived. In Wilde’s Salome,
there is an extremely short stage direction: “Salome dances the dance of the seven veils”(Wilde 54) . That is evocative of Salome’s body as she removes her veil one by one
during the dance, gradually revealing more and more of her body. I found in this scene asimilar structure to the “Moon” used as a symbolic image of Salome. The fact that
Salome is identified with the Moon in the play has already been studied, but I will
explain it borrowing Shimahara’s words because I find them helpful for understanding
my argument.

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At the beginning of the work, the page of Herodias personifies the “Moon”
as a woman: “She is like a woman rising from a tomb,” “She is like a deadwoman.” On the other hand, the young Syrian’s description of Salome as “alittle princess who wears a yellow veil” and “dancing with silver feet” arealso reminiscent of the “Moon” hiding between the clouds. Salome sees in
the Moon the characteristics of “chasteness” and “virginity,” and in the scene
where she speaks to Jokanaan’s head after his beheading, Salome herself
says “I was a virgin. [. . .] I was chaste.” All these attributes are Salome’s
attributes, as is clear from the line “I was a virgin”. Salome reflects herself ina mirror and projects herself onto the object “the Moon” as if looking into it,
and identifies the projected self with the object.䠄Shimahara 11; mytranslation)㻌

The Moon changes its appearance from day to day, depending on the time and place
where it is viewed, not to mention the fact that the Moon itself is not missing. We
cannot help but be fascinated and mystified by its dizzying changes. Sometimes it ishidden behind clouds, sometimes the whole surface of the Moon appears to glow in aperfect circle. It is also true that the Moon never shows its other side. A similar structure
can be seen in the “Dance of the Seven Veils.” This sensual dance brings the audience a
different appearance and a new expectation with each removal of the veil. The
sensuality of the dance makes it impossible for the audience to take their eyes off it.
But, just as the Moon does not show its backside, Salome does not show all of herself.
The dance itself, which conceals Wilde’s artistic philosophy, is also closely linked to
the Moon.㻌

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long nails of jade and russett cloaks, and Romans brutal and coarse, with
their uncouth jargon, Ah! how I loathe the Romans! They are rough andcommon, and they give themselves the airs of noble lords.” (Wilde 10)㻌㻌
It would be natural for a girl who had been looked at lustfully by her stepfather to be
disgusted with the male gaze sexually exploiting and preying on her. As a result, shecannot help but feel extreme disgust for all men who look at her in a sexually distastefulway, as can be inferred from the above quote. Forced to dance, Salome again makes thisstatement: “I have no desire to dance, Tetrarch”; “I will not dance, Tetrarch” (Wilde45). By repeating the same lines over and over again, Salome’s strong will of resistanceis emphatically expressed.
In Idols of Perversity, Bram Dijkstra prejudicially says about Wilde’s view ofwomen: “ʊAfter all, as we have already seen, Wilde was quite certain that women love
to be dominated” (Dijkstra 121). But even though he might have made some of his
characters put such remarks, it is a mistake to thus generalize as if Wilde himself was of
the idea that “women want to be dominated”; this clearly is not the case with Salome.
Wilde’s Salome is extremely reluctant to be ruled by King Herod (although she does
eventually obey him because of her own desires), and she even wants to have her own
way with Jokanaan. She follows her own desires and shows her desire to dominate men.㻌
While Flaubert describes Salome from a male point of view, the above
Salome’s dialogues reveals that Wilde depicts her female nature, so to speak, from awoman's point of view. It is as if he were projecting his androgynous self to her.㻌

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Hereafter, we would consider the second of the original scenes above
mentioned, where Wilde gets Salome arrested to be executed, under Herod’s command.
This last scene has already been discussed by Suzuki. However, her dualistic argumentthat “Salome did not take the path of the saints, but remained in sin and pleasure”(Suzuki 91; my translation) is simplistic and differs from mine. First of all, I will show
Suzuki’s argument about the execution scene.㻌
The image of Salome, which deviates from Wilde’s aesthetic sensibility,
underpinned by his own moral values, seems to illustrate the problem ofWilde’s sense of crisis. [. . .] Salome’s innocence of soul and her inextricable
cruelty have soaked everything in pleasure and she does not even recognise sin.
Wilde seemed to have erased his own sense of insecurity. (Suzuki 91; mytranslation).㻌
There may be a point to be made, but I do not think we can explain Wilde’s
cherished “veil” if we simply summarise it in this way: Salome was punished for her sin
and deviation. Wilde’s killing of Salome was not out of misogynous anxiety or a senseof danger, but by creating an unpleasant ending, the film sparks the audience’s
creativity and gives them something to think about even after the screening. While
Wilde has certainly made it possible for the viewer to be content with a simplistic andmoralistic interpretation, the last scene also could be seen to be bravely foreshadowing
or foretelling the author’s own destiny, according to which the revelation of the veiled
secret could fatally lead to destruction. Like the Dance of the Seven Veils, it was a final
device to make the story multifaceted and multilayered, so that it would not fit into any
one reading. By not exposing all the essence of Salome, various interpretations can be

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made by the reader, which has led to research and consideration by some literary
researchers as well as Suzuki. There is never one answer to the interpretation of theexecution scene. I think this was Wilde’s aim. Like the Moon, which changes its shapeaccording to the viewer, Wilde closed the play with Salome’s execution so that the work
itself could be examined in different ways by different viewers.㻌
There are two important original ideas of Wilde’s: that Salome wants Jokanaan’shead by her own will, and that she is executed. We can see now that these two scenes
are crucial to represent Wilde’s artistic intentions.㻌
㻌&RQFOXVLRQThis paper has analyzed how Wilde has been fascinated by the figure of thefemme fatale, how he has used existing stereotypes to distinguish his creations fromthem, and what he has tried to convey. I discussed some of Wilde’s works to see how
Moreau’s images of the “Sphinx” and “Salome” were connected to and influenced
Wilde, and found further significance in the symbolic meaning intended by these female
prototypes. By taking up the short story “The Sphinx without a Secret,” I showed
Wilde’s awareness of the fatal curse suffered by those who try to give men a mysticalcharm. Furthermore, I examined Wilde’s idea of what a femme fatale is from a newperspective by referring to Moreau’s painting Oedipus and the Sphinx (1864). The
second chapter analyzed the character of the heroine Salome, and clarified how Salome
is constructed to embody Wilde’s artistic philosophy, by focusing on the importance ofthe veil, which has not been clarified in previous studies, and examined Salome from a

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unique perspective. As a result, the artistic philosophy that the virtue of not clarifying
the essence that Wilde wanted to express through Salome became clearer than previous
studies. Oscar Wilde has been the subject of many studies even now, more than 120
years after his death, because of his excellent artistic sense. However, like Salome
dancing the Dance of the Seven Veils, the art he created is shrouded in veils,
multifaceted and serpentine, which would yet to inspire inxhaustibly rich and various
views and interpretations.

1RWHV
1

A Fourth-year undergraduate student at Kindai University, Osaka, Japan. This paper
is a revised version of Sugimoto’s graduate dissertation written under the cosupervision of Tanaka and Yoshida, and submitted to the Faculty of Literature, Arts,
and Cultural Studies, Kindai University on 17 December 2021.

2

Professor at the Faculty of Literature, Arts, and Cultural Studies, Kindai University.

3

Professor at the Faculty of Literature, Arts, and Cultural Studies, Kindai University.
Corresponding address: akemi.yoshida@lac.kindai.ac.jp:RUNV&LWHG
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Dijkstra, Bram. Idols of Prversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siécle Culture.
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Pater, Walter. Studies in the History of the Renaissance. Macmillan, 1873.
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