The collection of poems At the Sweet Hour of Hand in Hand and the short story “Prince Charming” emphasize the themes of love, death, and secrecy. “Prince Charming” follows the story of a tomboyish girl (Terka), her effeminate brother (Bela) and how in their later years the former impersonates the latter, enticing their former neighbor Sarolta into falling in love and marrying her. The love between Sarolta and Bela (who is actually Terka) is described as pure and unreal in “Prince Charming”, seemingly only preserved by hiding in “the depths of a Venetian castle or Florentine mansion”. Much of Vivien’s work is written through the lens of homosexual, sapphic love between a woman and a woman. The bias towards feminine features (and the excellence of femininity in general) is made center-stage through the following exposition. “Curiously enough, Bela possessed all of the feminine virtues and Terka, all of the masculine faults.” Prince Charming and Sarolta’s self-exile to Italy seems to imply them trying to preserve the sanctity of their love in a society that is unaccepting of it – I would rather posit that it is only in this castle that their love thrives because it does not have to deal with the outside world, and not only because of its unacceptance of a homosexual relationship. In the castle/mansion, their “unreal” love can remain within a vacuum, untouched and unscathed by reality. This ending makes more sense in light of Vivien’s poem “May a Wave Carry it Away”:
Vivien’s pain and hurt as a result of love are portrayed intensely in the poem. She is tired of loving transient forms, and of how her youth pains her. The sea – emblematic of an eternal graveyard – is meant to take her love and do with it what it wants. Below are two quotes that best exemplify my interpretation, the first towards the beginning and the other the end of the poem:
"Everything is hostile to me, and my youth pains me. I am weary of loving transient forms."
“Everything is hostile to me, and my youth pains me. I am weary of loving transient forms.”
She is giving away control of her love to death, to the sea, because she can no longer bear the pain which it causes her. This contrasts significantly with “Prince Charming” since they are untouched by the waves (the vicissitudes and actual effects of life) and can live distanced from the sharp realities that await their love if ever revealed or dealt with. In reading “May a Wave Carry it Away”, it becomes more clear that Vivien may be coming from a place of heartbreak, and it becomes more intriguing that she did not write a potentially very grim story in place of one with a fairy tale ending.
To speak of the actual object, the book itself is of a medium size and very dense, with each page being very thick. The pink cover is reminiscent of etched-in linoleum and possesses many of the same traits, as if you can feel the texture of the image on the front. The image itself seems to depict fingers as trees reaching out from the ground, perhaps describing the story of on of the poems inside. The books seems like it could be owned by the average person and kept on a household bookshelf. the works inside (when thought of in reference to “Prince Charming”) add a better understanding of Vivien’s general themes of love and death throughout her love, particularly the Eros/Thanatos correlation she has with the two themes.
As an aside, many of Vivien’s own relationships were plagued with death, infidelity, and otherwise trauma. Her writing and themes of heartbreak are representative of the history of her life in relation to her condition as a homosexual woman in the late 1800s to early 1900s. “Prince Charming”, in contrast with “May a Wave Carry it Away” and her other works, seems to be a tale of escapism for individuals like Vivien who have been struck so strongly by heartbreak and the norms of her heteronormative society.
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