Aubrey Beardsley’s The Story of Venus and Tannhäuser
A study of Beardsley's unfinished novel basd on the Venus and Tannhäuser legend
As early as March 1894, Aubrey Beardsley (1872-1898) began working on what was to become the obsession of his remaining years, a reworking of the Tannhaüser legend. “An article published in the same month and entitled ‘An Apostle to the Grotesque’, reported that Beardsley was working on a ‘rococo rendering’ of the Venus and Tannhäuser legend. a ‘fin-de-siècle version that would, ‘in nowise resemble Wagner’s bastard version’” (Sutton 50). Beardsley was familiar with Wagner from performances of his work at Covent Garden and Drury Lane.
Beardsley attended numerous performances of Wagner’s work in London at Convent Garden and Drury Lane, and included a portrait of the manager of the two theatres, Augustus Harris, in his frontpiece to John Davidson’s Plays (1894). In 1890 or 1891 he saw Tannhäuser at Covent Garden, and then Tristan, Siegfried, Die Götterdämmerung and probably Tannhäuser in June and July 1892 during the seasons at Convent Garden and Drury Lane. (Sutton 9-10) … Though the text was not, on first publication, identified as a ‘version’ of Wagner’s opera, and though Beardsley was familiar with a number of accounts of the Tannhäuser legend, Wagner is undoubtedly the major presence behind the text. And, though the characters’ names were changed from Venus and Tannhäuser to Helen and Chevalier Fanfreluche, readers may none the less have identified the Wagnerian parallels: the text included a substantial reference to another of Wagner’s dramas, ‘Das Rheingold’; it was published with two of the ‘Rheingold’ illustrations; and in interviews, Beardsley contrasted his text with Wagner’s representation of the legend. Its parodic divergence from the Wagnerian source was, however, conspicuously indicated in the original title: ‘The story of Venus and Tannhäuser, in which is set forth an exact account of the manner of state held by Madam Venus, goddess and meretrix, under the famous Hörselberg, and containing the Adventures of Tannhäuser in that place, his repentance, his journeying to Rome and return to the loving mountain. (Sutton 132)
The Tannhäuser legend had already attracted the attention of two contemporary artists, who after initial admiration became disenchanted with Beardsley’s work, William Morris (1834-1896) and Edward Burne-Jones (1833-1898) (Whitaker 68-69; Sturgis 219). In 1870 Morris published, after extensive redrafts, The Hill of Venus, the last of his cycle of twenty-five tales of The Earthly Paradise.
In its final form, then, “The Hill of Venus” offered a miniature emblem of Morris’s larger work. As he composed The Earthly Paradise, Morris gradually learned to displace his sense of alienation and search for “fellowship” from narrower erotic and mythological venues into much wider projections, and his final tale’s blend of generous eros and idealized praxis offered an aesthetic frame for the cycle’s imbricated patterns of desire, renunciation, anonymity, and remembrance. (Boos 610)
Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909) dedicated Laus Veneris to Burne-Jones in his 1866 Poems and Ballads.
Swinburne’s poem obsessively investigates the spiritual agonies of the renegade knight of the Tannhaüser legend who, falling under the spell of Venus, abandons morality and salvation for the fatal pleasure of sensuality. Burne-Jones’s version is less frenetic, cooler than the overheated eroticism of Swinburne’s verse while sharing its sense of menace and fatality: “To have known love, how bitter a thing it is,/ And afterwards be cast out of God’s sight’. The possibility of action and event, hovering just on the edge of realization, are conveyed in the hot vibrancy of Venus’s dress, the compressed, flattened space in which she sits, and the poised, receptive glances of her companions. (Corbett 84)
In Laus Veneris (1873-1878), Burne-Jones depicts Venus being entertained by her female companions while she reclines in a dream-like state with a crown on her lap, while a group of five knights pass by the open window.
It is an image through which Burne-Jones asserts a relationship which couples the visual character of paint and the word in dialectic relationship between dominant and subaltern. The aggressive flatness and stasis of the painting subdues the drive towards narrative which the story of Venusberg implies. Laus Veneris is about the subjugation of narrative, the ’realism’ of the word, in favour of a vivid and assertive visuality. (Corbett 98)
Beardsley saw in his Tannhäuser project the means to combine his artistic talent with his literary ambitions.
Like a piece of precious old porcelain reset in a brilliant, rocaille ormolu mount, Beardsley took the old German legend and gave it a new and unlikely mise-en-scène, steeped in the artificial world of his beloved French novelists. All his characters and many of their curious actions reveal, however, a thoroughly modern and perverse sensibility. (Calloway, Beardsley 134)
On the publication of the heavily censored version of chapters I to IV of the work titled Under the Hill in Volumes I and II of The Savoy in January and April 1896, W. B. Yeats judged the work to be: “a Rabelaisian fragment promising a literary genius as great maybe as his artistic genius” (Yeats 249). Ill-health, however, prevented further publication in The Savoy and the story remained unfinished.
In spite of intensive efforts, writing, revising and endless polishings of the enamelled phrases of Under the Hill, at Beardsley’s death his “romantic novel” remained unfinished. The original and heavily re-worked manuscript draft is preserved in the Rosenbach Foundation library in Philadelphia. The history of the novel’s publication is highly complex. Having originally offered the book to John Lane, in the event the early chapters were first published in serial form by Leonard Smithers in early numbers of The Savoy. On Smithers’s bankruptcy, Lane acquired all the surviving material for the book, including most of the pictures, and in 1904 issued a heavily bowdlerised illustrated version of the manuscript in a handsome quarto volume: as had Smithers in The Savoy, Lane published the work as Under the Hill. In 1907 Smithers himself issued a pirated version, this time, however, under Beardsley’s original title, The Story of Venus and Tannhäuser, printed without illustrations and with Smithers’s usual typographic panache completely absent, was limited to 300 copies “for the use of literary student who are also admirers of Beardsley’s wayward genius.” Its chief merit lies in the fact that it makes available a much fuller text than had Lane.[1] (Calloway and Colvin 113)
It is uncertain how Beardsley would have completed the novel, and in particular whether he would have shifted the focus to Tannhauser’s repentance.
Though which text to use may be open to debate, it’s indisputable that in both its published and draft forms, Beardsley’s narrative depicts only Venus’s realm. All versions of his tale thus exclude sin by drastically truncating the familiar narrative promised by the title, which engages to ‘set forth an exact account of the manner of state held by Madam Venus, Goddess and Meretrix, under the famous Hörselberg, and containing the Adventures of Tannhäuser in that Place, his Repentance, his Journeying to Rome and Return to the Loving Mountain’ (9). This ‘radical cropping’ of the tale seems to support Malcolm Eastman’s claim that ‘Aubrey had intended the triumph to be, not Christ’s but Venus’s’ (134); the novel then comes into focus as not merely revising but reversing the Tannhäuser legend’s moral in its preference for pagan values over Christian. (Fluhr)
Critical opinion has been divided on the literary merits of The Story of Venus and Tannhäuser, both contemporary and retrospective.
When Arthur Symons called Venus and Tannhäuser “the story which could never have been finished” (Symons, p.90), however, he was not so much indicating the impediments raised by Beardsley’s failing health as he was describing what he felt to be the erratic inspiration of Beardsley’s literary imagination and the self-exhibiting ambitions of the story itself. Symons’ view has, for the most part been shared by Beardsley’s other early critics: relieved that Venus and Tannhäuser was left unfinished, they would have been happier still if it had never been begun. For them the story validates the charges of rampant and unclean eroticism that Beardsley’s’ censorious contemporaries had always raised against him. Even for some later, more tolerant, critics the story, speaking as it seems to from Beardsley’s frustrated inner life, becomes rather an embarrassment, an all too eloquent expression of the artist’s adolescent sexuality or his tragically disruptive disease. Interpretations that concentrate upon the autobiographical or pathological aspects of the work, however, ignore its larger satiric and essentially self-parodic dimension. And if we ignore its satire, we shall fail to recognize the place of Venus and Tannhäuser in the characteristically self-conscious revaluation of contemporary aesthetic assumptions carried on by avant-garde writers, artist and poets of the Victorian fin de siècle. (Dowling 26-27)
However, as Zatlin has emphasised, the work is erotic rather than pornographic.
With full control over text and drawings, Beardsley created an atmosphere in which "sex is part of a style not the style itself (Venus and Tannhauser , Introduction, p. 17). Beardsley combined emblems and motifs of the verbal and visual traditions of pornography to challenge that tradition which denigrated and abused women. In his poems, in his allusive drawings, and in Venus and Tannhauser, he succeeded in ridiculing pornographic fantasies and in mocking English prudishness. By imagining a world of pleasure in which male and female alike explore their sexuality and enjoy anticipation as well as fulfillment, Beardsley bequeathed to us strikingly erotic works. (121)
While Beardsley in his short life reached the perfection of his talent as an illustrator, the same cannot be said of his works of poetry and prose which were episodic and of fleeting substance. While he harboured high ambitions for The Story of Venus and Tannhäuser, the incomplete version that survives is more proof of his literary potential than a work of substantial achievement. Like many of his artistic contemporaries and friends who died before their full talent was realised, Beardsley’s untimely death left us with a jewel that glitters in isolation from its crown.
Works Cited
Boos, Florence, Ten Journeys to the Venusberg: Morris’ Drafts for “The Hill of Venus”. Victorian Poetry, vol. 39, no.4, 2001, pp. 597-616. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40002737.
Beardsley, Audrey. “Under the Hill: A Romantic Novel.” Black and White: The Literary Remains of Aubrey Beardsley, edited by Stephen Calloway and David Colvin, Cypher Press, 1998, pp. 1-109.
Calloway, Stephen. Aubrey Beardsley. V&A Publications, 1998.
Calloway, Stephen and David Colvin, editors. “Note.” In Black and White: The Literary Remains of Aubrey Beardsley, Cypher Press, 1998, pp. 113-14.
Corbett, David Peters. “Visuality and Unmediation in Burne-Jones’s Laus Veneris.” Art History, vol. 24, no. 1, 2001, pp. 83-102. Doi: doi.org/10.1111/1467-8365.00250.
Dowling, Linda C. “’Venus and Tannhäuser’: Beardsley’s Satire of Decadence.” The Journal of Narrative Technique, vol. 8, no. 1, 1978, pp. 26-41. JSTOR, jstor.org/stable/30225628P
Fluhr, Nicole. “‘Queer Reverence’: Aubrey Beardsley’s Venus and Tannhäuser’.” OpenEdition Journals, vol. 90, 2019. Doi: doi.org/10.4000/cve.6482.
Sutton, Emma. Aubrey Beardsley and British Wagnerism in the 1890s. Oxford UP, 2002.
Trail, George Y. “Beardsley’s Venus and Tannhäuser. Two Versions.” English Literature in Transition, 1890-1920, vol. 18, no.1, 1975, pp. 16-23. Project Muse, muse.jhu.edu/article/374578.
Whitaker, Muriel A. I. “Flat Blasphemies — Beardsley's Illustrations for Malory's ‘Morte Darthur.’” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature, vol. 8, no. 2, 1975, pp. 67–75. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/24776977.
Yeats, W. B. “The Tragic Generation.” Autobiographies, The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, vol. III. edited by William H. O’Donnell and Douglas N. Archibald, Scribner, 1999, pp. 219-266. Archive.org.
Zatlin, Linda G. “Beardsley Redresses Venus.” Victorian Poetry, vol. 28, no. 3/4, 1990, pp. 111–124. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40002293.
[1] See for details of the unexpurgated and expurgated versions: Trail, George Y. “Beardsley’s Venus and Tannhäuser. Two Versions.” English Literature in Transition, 1890-1920, vol. 18, no.1, 1975, pp. 16-23. Project Muse, muse.jhu.edu/article/374578.