52 pages • 1 hour read
Rachel HawkinsThe Villa
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2023A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context: Rachel Hawkins and The Villa’s Influences
Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses death by suicide and includes references to miscarriage.
Hawkins’s background illuminates her interest in the Gothic and Southern Gothic genres: a graduate of Auburn University, Hawkins studied sexuality and gender in Victorian literature. Her knowledge of these literary traditions is revealed in her use of the intertwined 19th century lives and literature of Mary Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Lord Byron, which influences her portrayal of the complicated fictional arrangements in London and Orvieto in 1974. Although Mary Shelley and her contemporaries predate the Victorians, writing during the Romantic period (1798-1837), they cast a long shadow over the Victorian Gothic and into present day literature.
Also guided by more modern influences, The Villa draws on parallels to the band Fleetwood Mac, a band with complex sexual and artistic rivalries. The is album Rumours, a commercial and artistic success and particularly expressive of these emotional currents, is recalled by Lara’s album Aestas in The Villa. Often considered their best album, Rumours also marks the crisis point of their personal and artistic relationships. With songs like “Go Your Own Way” and “Dreams,” the album details these shattered and shifting relationships, with different songs expressing different voices and perspectives, whether real or imagined. An iconic album that has become symbolic of the costs of fame, Rumours, like Aestas in the novel, demonstrates how artistic creation can sublimate pain and trauma. The Villa, too, traces this connection, from Lilith Rising to Aestas to Chess’s and Emily’s co-authored book in the novel.
Literary Context: Italy and English Literature
English authors and authors writing in English have used Italy as a setting for centuries, going back to at least Geoffrey Chaucer (1342-1400). Italy has functioned as a place that is both foreign and familiar in English Literature. From Shakespeare’s Othello (1622) to E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View (1908), there is a strong literary tradition of Italy as a setting, drawing particularly on ideas of art and beauty, exoticism and otherness, and the origins of Western civilization. For these reasons, Italy was particularly influential on English Romantic writers, including Byron and the Shelleys, as both an inspiration and a retreat. Authors writing in English have placed narratives in Italy to dislocate and test the conventions of English and American society, to trace the origins of ideas, and to map the limits of human identity and character. Rachel Hawkins’s novel mostly takes place in Orvieto, either in the present day or in 1974. Italy functions in Hawkins’s novel as it does for many of her literary predecessors—an opportunity to evoke the scenic beauty of Orvieto, and the picturesque villa offers a contrast to the drudgery of Emily’s life. Italy is a place where Emily and Chess, like Noel Gordon and his companions before them, and the Romantics before them, can write and think.
Apart from the villa itself, St. Patrick’s well, almost 200 feet deep and surrounded by a double helix staircase, serves as the most striking physical feature of Italy in the novel. As a device to induce and depict horror and suspense, this well creates a foreboding atmosphere, offering Orvieto’s guests in 1974 and in the present day, a place to feel terror and experience the brink. The well also connects to the strand of death by drowning that runs through the narrative.
Character Context: Mari Godwick and Mary Godwin/Shelley
In the character of Mari and the events and setting of the 1974 to 1976 plot, Hawkins reimagines the famous relationship between Byron and the Shelleys—which included unconventional romantic alliances, fame and notoriety, friendship and competition, literary creation, a step-sister love interest, and the eventual death of Percy Bysshe Shelley in Italy by drowning. While never explained by the narrative, Mari’s character and narrative follows that of Mary Godwin (later Shelley) precisely. Mary Godwin (1797-1851) was born in London to William Godwin, a renowned political philosopher and the writer Mary Wollstonecraft, who authored A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1791), a strongly proto-Feminist treatise. An outspoken and independent woman, Wollstonecraft was both hated and revered in her lifetime. She died giving birth to Mary. With his second wife Mary Jane Clairmont, William opened his house to intellectuals in London. From that time, Mary lived with her stepsister Claire Clairemont, with whom she would have a troubled relationship. When, at the age of 17, Mary met and eloped with the married Percy Bysshe Shelley, she was disowned by her father and ostracized by society. They never married although she took his name, and they escaped scandal in Europe, especially Italy, often living with Lord Byron and other artistic friends; much of Mary’s work, including her most famous Gothic novel Frankenstein, was written in Italy. Mary Shelley had numerous miscarriages and lost her living children in infancy. Percy’s wife (whom he left for Mary Godwin) died by suicide and Percy himself died by drowning in 1822.
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