All ye who enter here, look on these portals and beware… but don’t abandon hope by any means. You are about to pass through the gates of Hades, where Vergil and Aeneas have walked in storied shadows, into the world of arms and men… and a woman loved and honored for her poet’s silent muse.
It may have been inevitable that a legendary girl of pre-historic Italy, born to be a princess and a queen, a foreign hero’s wife, would have a moot story while men and battles clashed in endless words of grave and epic verse, but it certainly wasn’t the end of her in the timeless space of the creative imagination. Certainly Vergil’s Lavinia was not the product of excess, not the face that launched a thousand ships, not a goddess rising on a shell, and not the maid of feuding warrior’s tents. But somehow out of this sparse beginninng.. swelling out of the fiction where lines proceed in stately gravity, where she was forced to sit unseen.. Lavinia found another muse. This muse turns fiction on its head when the little silent wife becomes a girl who tells her story with the same Vergilian ink but a different voice animated in a modern strain by the Lavinia of Ursula K. LeGuin
Lavinia’s book is the autobiography of an ancient art, an epic fiction turned as real as her poet’s shadowy ghost come to visit her in dreams. Timeless while she runs the streams and woods, or performs the sacred duties of a place in time, she makes a life in the sun. This sun does not cast shadows, and it blinds us to the illusions of the storyteller’s magic. We move with the poet’s invisible pen through a meta-reality of a girl’s plain world before the destiny of an empire grew from her womb.
That, my friends, is the genius of an author who can live in any world and give to anyone a voice as real as yours. Now you can take the book and walk through every line of a life with form and voice, a real Vergilian wife conscious of her own fine fiction which we love to live.
Then there are the details both mundane and epic, ceremonial and artistic, ancient and modern. The daily life of a royal Roman house, of village people and farm is shown through the eyes of Lavinia and the women who surround her, and through the important men in her life: her father Latinus the king of Latium and Aeneas the Trojan hero come to claim his place in Italy and found a dynasty. A very rich fabric of history and contemporaneity is woven by Lavinia as she seeks to show how daily life and a vast sense of past and future create the tapestry of a life and a world. Her mind and culture were steeped in this oracular view of time and destiny, and Lavinia had the gift of dreams and visions. On Aeneas’ shield she could see the entire history of a hero’s death and a future empire, and she had to live with this knowledge and come to terms with it in a big way. Fortunately, the life of motherhood and duties somewhat mitigates the terrible pain and fear of knowing too much too soon.
There are even dueling oracles. Her mother, Amata, had dreams that show Lavinia marrying Amata’s favorite nephew Turnus; while Latinus and Lavinia see a completely different future. The battle of the oracles is, in a way, at the heart of Lavinia’s story.
The epic strain is not ignored either. Battles, heroes, ships, and the language of the lives and destinies of men and arms are given fine shrift. Aeneas is both a man and a father, and at the same time a figure larger than life until he meets his fated and ironic end. His son Ascanius, however, is not the heir destined to create Rome, that fate given to Silvius his young son by Lavinia; and she is most conscious of the duties of herself and her son in this grand scheme… and she plays it out through the mundane and ceremonial duties that play such an important role inside the epic landscape. Yes, her role and her thinking are ancient and prescribed; but at the same time she shows an acute awareness of the way the place of women might be considered problematic or restrictive. Thus, every so often, she tries to justify or explain her various roles and positions which might be perceived as constrictive, sexist, or disempowering; and she willingly takes on the role of Gaia in her marriage ceremony and takes on the strength of wife and queen when making decisions that affect her son and his kingship.
Here is an example of the kind of justification that she sometimes seeks to make, due to the fact that several times in her life she was forced into difficulties due to her status as a woman and certain cultural beliefs, customs, and constraints. This passage serves to underline her view of her life as a married woman and queen, and it has a flavor both ancient and modern.
As a wife, I never felt that grieving anger that I used to feel and once spoke out to my poet in Albunea, asking why must a girl be brought up at home to live as a woman in exile. Indeed my exile was a small matter, since I went only a few miles from my old home, my father, the dear Regia with its laurel tree, and the Lar Familiaris of my childhood. But there was more to it than that. Men call women faithless, changeable,and though they say it in jealousy of their own ever-threatened sexual honor, there is some truth in it. We can change our life, our being; no matte what our will is, we are changed. As the moon changes yet is one, so we are virgin, wife, mother, grandmother. For all their restlessness, men are who they are; once they put on the man’s toga they will not change again; so they make a virtue of that rigidity and resist whatever might soften it and set them free. But in giving up my girl self and taking on the obligations of womanhood I found myself freer than I had ever been. If I owed duty to my husband, it was very easy to pay. And as understanding grew between us and we came to trust each other, there were no restraints on me at all but those of religion and my duty to my people. I had grown up with those, they were part of me, not external, not enslaving; rather, in enlarging the scope of my soul and mind, they liberated me from the narrowness of the single self. (pp. 184-5)
As to the arts of fiction and autobiography, here we step into sticky ground and a bit of a tangle. Lavinia is a princess created by Vergil, the epic poet of the Augustan age writing about a much earlier Italy. In LeGuin’s book, she is still that woman, but upon her is conferred the role of author as well.. the author of her own life, her unique and storied reality. This is fiction as meta-reality at its finest, and Lavinia is very aware that she is a poet’s creation becoming herself the creator of her own life as history. There is, as she says, the poet’s reality of who I Lavinia am(p. 3) with no death and no real mortality: virginal girl marries Trojan hero. Then there is her sense of her own fictionality as she decides not to tell Aeneas about the dream visits from their poet Vergil:
It has not been difficult for me to believe in my fictionality, because it is, after all, so slight. But for him it would be very difficult. … the poet’s passionate, commanding, anxious, dangerous hero would find it hard to accept contingence, the nullity of his will and conscience. Piety, faithfulness, obedience to what must be rightly done, the fas, is the desire of his heart. To know that he has obeyed a poet, rather than his conscience, might be anguish to him – even if he saw, as I see, that the poet obeyed his conscience and followed the fas. (p. 119)
Even when she gets sick, Lavinia knows she cannot die. She will never go down among the shadows under Albunea to see Aeneas tall among the warriors, gleaming in bronze. She will never speak to the shades of Aeneas’ former wife Creusa or lover Dido. They lived and died as the poet sang them. But he did not sing me enough life to die. He only gave me immortality. (p. 271) Ironic understatement at its meta-fictional best is most definitely not ignored.
Thus, in a deep psychological way, the book deals – through the voice of the character of Lavinia – with authorial decisions regarding character and voice. There is the voice of the poet, that of Lavinia, and ultimately that of the author LeGuin who simply hides, very effectively, behind the rich fabric of Lavinia’s story and lets her speak of the nature of the fiction and the reality that is created.
To end, let another voice of Lavinia invite you into her world. Maybe you will find it as irresistible as I did.
Walk with me through the woods
And dream the poet’s form.
See my visions of war
And my role as the hero’s wife.
Laugh with me as I play
With my friend Silvia in the woods,
As we watch her beautiful pet,
Cerverus the stag of the forest.
Grow with me as suitors
Come into my life and play
Becomes the work of fending off.
Cringe as Turnus tries to take me on
And mother laughs to think of him
In my bed as though it were her own.
Smile inside when all my visions
Fired fulfillment in my father’s eyes.
My hero walks in fair proportion
On the Latin shore while I watch.
Learn my destiny and Rome’s as I do,
And be subsumed in daily life
When all my thinking thoughts
Flow out upon my female poet’s page.
Suffer the tragedies of home, hearth,
Heroes, and households of the bond;
Live through them and die with them
In hope and ruin, as a life unfolds
Through pages of time and space.