Intertextuality, Creativity and Myth as a Metaphor of Aging in Daphne du Maurier’s “Ganymede” and Thomas Mann’s "Death in Venice"
- Autores: Marta Miquel-Baldellou
- Localización: Taking stock to look ahead: celebrating forty years of English studies in Spain / coord. por María Ferrández San Miguel, Claus Peter Neumann, 2018, ISBN 978-84-16723-51-5, págs. 111-118
- Idioma: inglés
- Enlaces
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Resumen
Daphne du Maurier’s short story “Ganymede” (1959) was significantly influenced by Thomas Mann’s novella Death in Venice (1912), since both narratives focus on the memories of an aging scholar’s holidays in Venice, where he indulges in an imaginary homoerotic relationship with a young man. The evident traces of intertextuality between these narratives and the fact of having an intellectual and writer as a narrator contribute to underlining the significant role that artistic creativity plays in them. Both texts also comprise pervasive references to classical mythology, such as the mythical dimension of the intergenerational affair between the aging scholar and the young man, which allows interpreting their relationship as a metaphor of the process of aging.
Through the importance attached to creativity and aging in both narratives, this paper explores du Maurier’s creative voice at this later creative phase, showing how her sexual identity remained inextricably linked to her writing persona and how aging influenced her creativity.
