The Eunuch in Lee’s ‘Virgin of the Seven Daggers’
An 1889 ghost story with Don Juan as tomb raider
--
The British writer Vernon Lee, whose real name was Violet Paget, wrote the story “The Virgin of the Seven Daggers” in 1889. You can find it on pp. 190–222 in this 2004 version from Dufour Editions, readable on Archive.org.
Lee had been involved with the poet Mary Robinson, but a difficulty in their relationship in 1888 upset her, and she traveled to southern Spain to recover. Encountering the Spanish Catholic aesthetic, Lee felt it was grotesque, and she wrote this short fiction perhaps to process her feelings about it in the way that certain confusions are processed in daydreams, as suggested by Leire Barrera-Medrano, after Freud.
The tale is a campy, ironic ghost story featuring the famously womanizing character of Don Juan. (A more famous Don Juan story is Lord Byron’s poem, written 1819–1824.) Lee’s story includes stereotypical portraits of a Jew and a sultan’s eunuch. I’m interested in fictional portrayals of eunuchs, especially evil ones, and this story illuminates that stereotype.
The Church
This story centers on a “yellow free-stone Church of Our Lady of the Seven Daggers” in Grenada (that’s the author’s spelling), described as an example of the 17th-century architecture from the time of Spain’s King Philip IV (r. 1621–1665). The story takes place during the time of Philip’s successor, King Carlos II (r. 1665–1700).
The church—it’s fictional—has arches decorated with “monstrous heads with laurel wreaths and epaulets.” There are two belfries, each with a “weather-vane, figuring a heart transfixed with seven long-hilted daggers.” It’s decorated with marble, stone, wood, stucco, jasper, alabaster, and paper, and “everything on which labour can be wasted is laboured, everything on which gold can be lavished is gilded.”
Among various “waxen Christs” and “madonnas of lesser fame,” there’s an icon of the Madonna of the Seven Daggers.
“Her skirts bulge out in melon-shaped folds, all damasked with minute heart’s-ease, and brocaded with silver roses; the reddish shimmer of the gold wire, the bluish shimmer of the silver floss, blending into a strange melancholy hue without a…
