KAREN ALKALAY-GUTand Ballads, including "Laus Veneris" (1866): Tannhauser's dramatic
monologue about his entrapment by Venus. In this story, immortalized in
Richard Wagner's opera that Swinburne may have seen in Paris in 1861,
the knight Tannhauser complains bitterly of his sexual imprisonment by
Venus, voicing his fears of her evil power while she (like Rossetti's Jenny)
remains fast asleep, apparently unaware of his erotic torment. Referring to
Venus impersonally as "it," he immediately betrays his abject condition.
Focusing on the passionate mark that he has just made on her throat, he
wrongly assumes that the fading love-bite signals that Venus is responding
to him:
Asleep or waking is it? for her neck,
Kissed over close, wears yet a purple speck
Wherein the pained blood falters and goes out;
Soft, and stung softly - fairer for a fleck.
But though my lips shut sucking on the place,
There is no vein at work upon her face;
Her eyelids are so peaceable, no doubt
Deep sleep has warmed her blood through all its ways.
(ACS I, 11)Venus appears completely unaware of the role she is supposed to be playing.
Indeed, she seems blameless of the accusations that he makes against her,
accusations that construct her as a devouring goddess and inspire even
greater desire on the part of Tannhauser. The more he contemplates the
rumors of her sexual powers and her control over men, the more he desires
her. At the same time, the more he perceives her as evil, the more he
apprehends his own life as virtuous. He has, after all, been a model knight,
plundering and murdering in the name of God, and not like Venus, wasting
his life in making love. In this manner, "Laus Veneris" lays bare some of the
false pretenses of dialogue upon which the dramatic monologue is built,
since this poetic form offers only one side of a conversation. Moreover,
"Laus Veneris" suggests that the entire concept of evil is a projection of the
self: an externalization of inner torments caused by the inculcation of
twisted religious precepts. In this respect, "Laus Veneris" uses the poetic
form to reveal questions about both the meaning of love and the meaning of
morality. Therefore, even if Swinburne believed that art should exist for its
own sake, he also had a marked interest in revealing the implications of
this concept for contemporary moral attitudes.
Poems such as "The Leper" and "Laus Veneris" certainly indicate that
aesthetic considerations, the nature of relationships, and questions about
the perception of reality and morality were fundamental preoccupations of
2-34