Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of this material. Please do get in touch with any information relating to this text or the rights holder. One becomes aware of a dual intention: to shock the bourgeois through intrepid mentions of panoramic sex, but also to educate him emotionally. This relationship between narrator and reader animates the tale and compensates for what static artificiality might result from a mere sequence of hedonistic pursuits, suited as these are to the timelessness of the Venusberg.
Elegance is a guarantee of control, but invention reigns supreme against a backcloth of shared values in a social life conceived as permanent spectacle. Venus as universal whore is a theme found from classical times to Offenbach and lending itself to heroi-comic treatment. But this radiant meretrix is saved by the child-like amorality at the heart of her relationship with a tamed Priapus. The logic of the orgy, with orgasmic culminations, is in fact the controlling device of the narration, practically all chapters ending in such shocks after an idyllic beginning.
The Dionysian representation of uncontrolled desires, with all its farcical potential, is the indispensable counterpart of the Apollonian control of elegance and self-knowledge. This helps the reader to discover the disquieting nature of the Venusberg β a familiar device in many similar textual or filmic narratives. Beardsley has in fact invented a genre, the erotic pastoral. So this arcadian landscape is not without shadows after all β ethical and existential.
The puerility of hero and heroine seems at first to confer the innocence of the polymorphous perverse. This is a feature of the Decadent period, and not devoid of virtue, since its scepticism could usefully deflate the pompous hypocrisy of Victorian worthies.
We do find one adult, in his tale, the painter in oils significantly called De la Pine slang for penis. Could this De La Pine hint at an unreachable fulfilment symbolised by the earlier age of Delacroix β as well as provide a neatly blasphemous opposition between the cross and the phallus?
