Fantasies of Time and Death by Anna Vaninskaya;

Author:Anna Vaninskaya;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781137518385
Publisher: Springer Nature

Antiope is, of course, dead, and Lessingham himself is killed the following second, but the ‘flash’—like the flash of lightning in the night over Ambremerine which lifts the veil on eternity —suspends the successive nature of time and illuminates the simultaneity of moments. They are all folded up in this final scene: the opening moment of Mistress of Mistresses when Lessingham, drinking wine in Mornagay, first experiences an intimation of the nature of reality and hears Aphrodite’s/Antiope’s voice; the moment in the throne-room, another ‘world-without-end hour’, when the Duke first recognises Lessingham’s identity with Fiorinda (106; see also 279); the moment of the two men’s meeting after Antiope’s death, when they face each other, as before, with a third presence ‘perceived but by them alone … present strangely to the Duke in the person of Lessingham, and to Lessingham in the Duke’, each man perceiving in the other the near-incarnation of his female ideal (280). Whether in male or female dress, Aphrodite makes her presence felt in these encounters. The divine wells through the mortal and raises it, for that moment, ‘beyond time and circumstance’: the words that describe not just the love between Lessingham and Antiope, but the intimate male brotherhood between Lessingham and Barganax (106, 257).

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