La Beale Isoud at Joyous Gard was illustrated by Aubrey Beardsley’s for the 1894 edition of Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur. Beardsley depicts Isoud strolling through a garden (Kooistra 71) with dark and Decadent imagery. The black backdrop, prideful peackock motif on Isoud's cape, and pears resembling female bodies (Kooistra 71), imply that Beardsley's inclusion of the sundial (not included in Malory's original text) must have a Decadent quality— most likely the elision of Decadent horror and ancient civilizations. The sundial is an ancient device with roots in 1500 BCE Egypt and as “a pagan symbol…” like Stonehenge (Robinson 83). Arthur Machen often portrays horror in the re-emergence of the ineffable ancient in modern civilizations, and Beardsley, who illustrated for Machen that same year, may be gesturing that the sundial represents the unknown antiquum beneath places, like Isoud’s garden, especially since the ancient sundial itself was re-emerging in popularity in Britain near “the beginning of the twentieth century…” (Robinson 71).
Works Cited
Beardsley, Aubrey. La Beale Isoud at Joyous Gard (1894) Le Morte d’Arthur, by Thomas Malory, J.M. Dent, London, 1893-94
Kooistra, Lorraine J. “Beardsley’s Reading of Malory’s ‘Morte Darthur’: Images of a Decadent World.” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature, vol. 23, no. 1, 1990, pp. 55–72. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24780575. Accessed 4 Dec. 2024.
Robinson, Peter. “Visible Maps of Time: British Sun-dial Gardens in the Early Twentieth Century”. Japan Women's University Studies in English and American Literature (58) (Professor Yasuo Kawabata Memorial Collection), 2023, pp. 69-87. Academia, https://www.academia.edu/109022537/Visible_Maps_of_Time_British_Sun_dia…. Accessed 4 Dec. 2024