Popular Culture Review Vol. 4, No. 2, June 1993 | Page 46

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Popular Culture Review

home in the tomb. In a herculean effort she disinters Joconda's coffin
from the churchyard and takes it across the Maremma to one of the
inner chambers of the tomb where it becomes a kind of shrine. Yet,
like her father, she has robbed a grave and will be brought to justice.
In thematic symmetry, Mastama is recaptured selling the funerary
gold. Ouida lets her imagination travel widely in these episodes, but
the psychology of the Family Romance remains intact.
Musa's sadness is relieved by absorption in nature, with O iida
lavishing attention on the changing seasons (565-78). The theme of
transferance of love from the dead onto nature, instanced already in
the lucumo's apotheosis, is perhaps based on the experience of the
young Ouida, who may have associated her own "foreign,"
mysteriously disappearing, reappearing father with the very nature
he taught her to love. Musa identifies with birds and animals,
destroying hunter's nets and traps wherever she finds them. In the
process of mythification she is likened to Antinous, the favorite of
Hadrian (489, 601), Dante's Pia (511) and Francesca da Rimini (741),
Artemis (571, 596), Tanaquil (572), Cleopatra (603), Nausicaa (609,
614, 625, 655, 656, 717), Psyche (609), Maia (611), AtagarHs (611),
Persephone (625,653), Luna, Cupa, Juno (646), Circe (676), Penthesilea
(688, 704), Britomart (695, 704) and Una (695, 705), Eve (745), Electra
(748), Glauca (755), and Laena (792, 803). Ouida is not a careful
mythographer, but it is noteworthy that some of these figures are
young virgins pledged to their fathers or traumatized by sex, while
the list includes a sorceress, a queen of great sexual power, and an
adulteress.
Three men enter Musa's life. The first is Villamagna, a Sicilian
mariner who falls in love with her at first sight, because "in this
land this sudden birth of love is still a truth" like "the red in the
pomegranate's flower" (579) (Persephone's fruit, a symbol of
"heterosexual union with its seeds and blood-red juice" [Spitz 414]).
Musa rejects his propx)sal flatly. The second suitor is Joconda's grand
nephew, Maurice Sanctis, who learned of her through the letter to
his kinsman and seeks to bring her back to the Alps. Sanctis is an
artist of rising fame and heir of a fortune (588): Ids 'Teuton" (593,
594) demeanor contrasts with Villamagna's southern ntanner. Musa
spurns him too. After a few weeks he succumbs to marsh-fever and
leaves reluctantly, without divulging the secret of her origins.