Lost in Venice: Maps of Beauty and Terror in "The Aspern Papers, "Don't Look Now", "The Comfort of Strangers"

Abstract

Venice has always had a bewitching effect on writers, who have often portrayed it as a place where beauty and terror coexist. For this reason, the lagoon city represents a perfect setting for Gothic stories, whose characters usually get lost in its labyrinthine streets, encountering mysterious and obscure figures operating in its peripheral alleyways or luxurious palaces. This thesis aims at investigating three literary works using Venice as their sinister background. All three chapters begin with a brief introduction of the authors and then continue with a detailed analysis of their works. The first chapter analyses Henry James’ "The Aspern Papers", in which Venice is a deeply ambiguous city where past and present intermingle. The second chapter deals with “Don’t Look Now”, a short story written by Daphne du Maurier and published in 1971, in which the lagoon city starts to be a place of labyrinthine streets and violent deaths. Eventually, the last chapter has Ian McEwan’s "The Comfort of Strangers" (1981) as its focus; in this novella, Venice shares the features of both James’ and du Maurier’s works, but here violence reaches its peak, ending with a brutal, sadomasochistic murder.