Death in Venice is a novella by the German Thomas Mann. The book was published in Germany in the early part of 1912. The book’s original name was Der Tod in Venedig. In1925, Kenneth Burke translated the book into English. It is, at heart, a story of homosexual lust.
Synopsis
The story starts with the protagonist, a man named Gustav von Aschenbach, a famous author who was widowed at an early age. The story starts with Aschenbach passing through a cemetery. While on his stroll, he happens upon a red-haired man who impolitely stares at him. Soon after this incident, he decides to take a trip. Aschenbach chose Venice and took a suite at the Grand Hotel des Bains on Lido Island. On his way to the island, he sees an elderly man with a group of youths. The old man tries to create an illusion of youth by wearing thick makeup and dyeing his hair. Aschenbach is disgusted at the man and turns away. He then encounters another red-haired gondolier who returns him to the wharf.
Aschenbach checks into the hotel and dines there for the evening. During dinner, he sees a Polish family whose daughters are so overdressed that they resemble nuns, but what caught his attention was the adolescent boy, beautiful and fair-skinned. He overhears from the conversations that the boy’s name is Tadzio.
Because of the humid weather in Venice, Aschenbach’s health suffers and he decides to leave Lido. On the day of his departure, he sees Tadzio once more and regrets his decision to leave. He is overjoyed when he finds out his luggage has been misplaced He then returns to his hotel and forgets the idea of leaving. As his stay in Venice lengthened, Aschenbach’s interest in the boy heightens; he follows the boy secretly around Venice. His obsession with Tadzio grew so rapidly that he declared it as love.
With his growing “love” for the boy, Aschenbach completely forgets his past self. He becomes a slave to his love for the boy and no traces of the famous aristocratic author remains. It even comes to the point that he begins feeling sexual attraction for Tadzio. Though his feelings for the boy are intense, he never touches him nor talks to the boy. Disgusted at his aging and ugly body, he visits the hotel’s barber daily until he is persuaded to paint his face and dye his hair to look younger.
After the makeover, Aschenbach closely resembles the old man he saw while in the Vaporetto. By this time Aschenbach has become the degenerate he previously thought disgusting. Days pass and Aschenbach found out that the Polish family intended to leave in the afternoon. Though ill and weak, he went down to the beach and sat in his usual spot. Tadzio was unsupervised and he was with an older boy. A quarrel breaks out between the two boys and Tadzio loses. He angrily leaves his companion and wanders nearer Aschenbach. Tadzio looks out to sea and then turns to look at Aschenbach. The latter feels the urge to follow the boy but his strength fails him and he collapses back to his chair. Aschenbach is found dead a few minutes later.
Book and Movie
The movie version follows the storyline of the book while introducing a few scenes for dramatic effect. The work is strewn with references to Greek mythology. Indeed, mythology is the very framework of the plot.
Before Aschenbach traveled to Venice, he was a disciple of the god Apollo, god of reason and intellect. Aschenbach led a disciplined life, generally thinking first before acting. He had never given himself up to the lure of emotional decisions. Then the book introduces Dionysus, god of tumult and passion.
He looms over Aschenbach, yearning to destroy his reason and intellect. Silenus, the lead devotee to Dionysus, also plays an important role in the novel as the red-haired man who kept crossing the path of Aschenbach, Every time that Silenus appears, Aschenbach seems to lose his grip and falls deeper and deeper into a passion.
The decline and withering of Aschenbach is the central tragedy of the story. In the beginning, he is a great author, a man filled with pride and dignity. He loathed those that succumbed to their emotions and changed their appearances to impress and earn the attention of others. The old man who dyed his hair and discolored his face with makeup fills with disgust and loathing.
As the novel progressed, Aschenbach loses his grip on reality by succumbing to depraved homosexual desire. This initially manifested as perhaps an amusing infatuation, an eccentricity tolerated in some European circles. But soon, this rises to a crescendo of unholy desire and lust. In so doing, Aschenbach succumbs to emotions, placing his heart above his head. He forsakes both reason and dignity.
Symbolically, therefore, the first battle that Dionysus won was in bringing about Aschenbach’s loss of reason. He lingered in Venice, knowing full well that his health could not tolerate the hot and humid climate. He thought the boy more important than his own health. The boy soon became an obsession and he followed him from place to place. Aschenbach had not only lost his reason, but he had also enslaved himself to a passion for the boy.
The next discernible change was in Aschenbach’s beliefs. The old Aschenbach who devoted himself to the beliefs of Apollo would never have tolerated changing his appearance to look younger and impress people. In fact, the old Aschenbach loathed and was disgusted by people like this, but the new alter ego had lost his reason, dyed his hair, and applied makeup on himself. Not only was this a change in principle, but it was also a loss of dignity. The worst thing that happened was his eventual change in gender. Aschenbach at first rationalized his situation as pure love in the aesthetic or platonic sense. It would have been harmless in this sense, but in the end, he even felt sexual urges for the boy. He became a homosexual, an outcast who could not express his unholy and unacceptable ardor to the object of his “affections.”
There can be no question that Death in Venice is a book about homosexual passion – at least this is the contention of some literary scholars of like persuasion and queer studies theorists (O’Hehir 1). There is tragedy writ large in the tale of a man who descends from great respectability to dying alone on a beach, the object of his desire so close.
When Aschenbach starts on his trip, it is as a search for something that had intrigued him during the encounter with the red-haired man in the graveyard. At the end of his journey, he finds solely his own destruction as human, loss of dignity, of self-respect, and in the end, his own life.
Works Cited
Ebert, Roger. “Death in Venice” Chicago Sun-Times. 1971.
O’Hehir, Andrew. “Just How Gay is Death in Venice.” Powells.com. 4th Edition. Web.