Vernon Lee’s Dionea tells the tale of Dionea, an exotic child found adrift from sea, through a man’s letters to his higher up. Although the purpose of the letters is to inform the higher up of their protégé, Dionea’s, progress, the letters mostly fixate on unrelated topics, such as Dionea’s exotic beauty and her supernatural powers. Since Dionea brewed love potions and celebrated mysterious deaths in town, the town treats her as a frightening, powerful supernatural. The man’s letters despise Dionea’s exotic beauty and mysterious powers since they do not adhere to the typical religious townswoman’s role.
In addition to beauty, the man emphasizes religion in many of his letters. When the town attempted to baptize Dionea as soon as they adopted her, “she kicked and plunged and yelled like twenty little devils, and positively would not let the holy water touch her” (Lee 5). The man notes that this failed baptism meant that Dionea had already been baptized, but his diction implies the opposite. By comparing Dionea to “twenty little devils” and specifying the water was “holy,” the diction implies that Dionea refused to ever be baptized because she is an unholy devil. Her supernatural powers often harm religious persons, which suggests her powers are unholy too. At one point Sor Agostino dies right in front of Dionea, which she happily terms “an accident from Heaven” (Lee 15).
Dionea strays from the town’s accepted roles for woman as much as she strays from their religious standards. When describing the exotic natural curls of Dionea’s hair, the man writes “I am glad she should be pretty, for she will more easily find a husband…Unfortunately, her character is not so satisfactory; she hates learning, sewing, washing up dishes” (Lee 6). Dionea detests typical chores women are excepted to take care of, like sewing and washing dishes. The man notes that at least Dionea’s beauty will get her a husband, since heterosexual marriage is part of a religious woman’s accepted role in society. Due to the town’s discomfort that a woman has power, they use religion and beauty to fit her back in her place, much like what Lucy experienced in Dracula
As soon as Lucy turned into a vampire, the men that had once loved her knew “had she then to be killed, I could have done it with savage delight” (Stoker 225). Vampires have more power than humans, considering vampires can kill humans by sucking their blood. The men view Lucy as pure when she is human, but unholy when she is a powerful vampire. They called her “callous as a devil” and claimed “her eyes blazed with unholy light” and warded her off with a crucifix, which she “recoiled” from (Stoker 226). Yet the men were still fixated on her beauty, noting her “languorous, voluptuous grace” and “wanton smile” (Stoker 226). Lucy falls into the same situation as Dionea, where they are both women with supernatural powers that humans fear. The men in both books use the women’s beauty to convert her back to the more traditional, powerless woman. For Dionea, the men use her feminine beauty as a reason to make her into a wife. For Lucy, they focus on how her beauty has become unholy as a result of vampirism, and determine she must be killed at once.
I like your comparison of Lucy and Dionea in this blog post. I think its interesting to think about how these two female characters create fear in the men in their stories because they are perceived as having some kind of evil power over, characterized by sexualization. I wonder about what we talked about in class with Lucy in her transformation into being a vampire being part of the catalyst for her sexualization. We had talked about how Lucy’s transformation was a result of Dracula, obviously, but the sexual nature of the transformation had tainted her once pure form and thus the men then describe her with “voluptuous lips”, etc. I feel there could be a similar connotation with Dionea, maybe in the context of mermaids since we had mentioned in class about how her washing up on shore attached to a board seemed to hint that she was one of the girls tied to the front of the ship.