Created by Lara Quintanilla on Thu, 12/05/2024 - 05:24
Description:
Aubrey Beardsley’s illustration “For the Third Tableau of Das Rheingold” was published in the second volume of a magazine titled The Savoy in 1896, its title being after Richard Wagner’s Das Rheingold. Beardsley’s work depicts two human figures alongside a serpent-like creature, the latter hidden in the dark background with one of the figures and the other a bright white. This large contrast demonstrates how his illustrations may unsettle or emphasize sections viewers may otherwise overlook. This work incites questions associated with the weird, including “Who does it?” about who could be in this image, and “What is it? Is it anything?” when looking to understand how Beardsley’s art fits with Wagner’s Das Rheingold (M. John Harrison qtd in Luckhurst 87).
Works Cited
Beardsley, Aubrey. “For the Third Tableau of Das Rheingold.” The Savoy, vol. 2, April 1896, p. 193. The Savoy Digital Edition, edited by Christopher Keep and Lorraine Janzen Kooistra 2018-2019. Yellow Nineties 2.0, Ryerson University Centre for Digital Humanities, 2019, https://1890s.ca/savoyv2_beardsley_rheingold/
Luckhurst, Roger. “Gothic, Horror, and The Weird: Shifting Paradigms.” The Routledge Companion to Victorian Literature, edited by Dennis Denisoff and Talia Schaffer, Taylor & Francis Group, 2019, pp. 83-94.