52 pages • 1 hour read
Rachel HawkinsThe Villa
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2023A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
History, Haunting, and Houses
The past in The Villa looms large in both the present and the future, represented by the houses that witness past events and serve as stages for the present and future. Mari first writes the line, “Houses remember” (1) in Lilith Rising, presented in the unnamed preface to The Villa, and this phrase is repeated seven times in the novel. The early use of this phrase and its repetition emphasizes the novel’s interest in spaces and their preservation of memories and presences; it also echoes the patterning of repeated and altered meaning as time and the novel progress.
One signal feature of the Gothic novel, including the Southern Gothic novel, is the dark and foreboding space, usually the medieval castle or cathedral or decaying plantation. Hawkins subverts these generic expectations, transplanting her narrative to the sun-drenched environs of Italy, with a tidy, elegant, and proportionate villa with a manicured lawn. In doing so, she creates a world in which the darkness is hidden, whether in the past, inside the characters, or in the layered narratives themselves. The focus on physical spaces and their histories appears The Villa in regard to every home: Mari’s childhood home, the flat she shares with Pierce, Villa Aestas, and Emily’s family home. The Villa does this most markedly through the thoughts of Mari, who invests houses with agency, personifying them. Mari considers the relationship between history, houses, and haunting when she asks herself “did she even believe it, that houses had memories? Did the little house near St. Pancras hold on to Mari’s past?” (29). Thinking through her traumatic birth and subsequent death of her mother, Mari wonders to herself if the house in central London observed her mother’s last exit and her father’s entrance with a “face ravaged with grief, the tiny, screaming bundle that was Mari herself in his arms” (29). As Mari thinks about whether houses have memories, The Villa shows them as locations which remain central to her memory and history, which she then processes and reinvents through her fiction. In Lilith Rising, Mari describes Somerton House, her setting in England, as a place that “was old, for one thing” (71) and she compares it to a “snail’s shell, curling around itself” (71). These descriptions, including the organic nature of the house, reinforce the house’s ties to memories, accumulating space, and additions, as a person might collect memories, reflecting the old idea of a memory palace—a mental structure where memories are stored. The house in Mari’s novel appears sinister—“a dark house, a place that seemed not to sit upon a hill so much as crouch on it” (71), making it a foil for the light-filled Italian villa. Mari translates the villa and the events of 1974, moving her narrative to a more traditionally Gothic setting and making explicit the darkness concealed at Villa Aestas.
The Costs of Fame
The Villa explores the costs and tradeoffs of fame, tracing the ambitions of fictional authors and musicians in the 1970s and the present day. Fame, The Villa suggests, exacts a heavy price, not only in terms of effort but also to personal relationships and dynamics. These costs differ along gendered lines. It is harder for women to attain recognition in The Villa, often having to balance the work of the home and the demands of motherhood with the pursuit of their creative dreams. Mari notices this tension, as she strives to create a novel and work as an artist, admitting that, “It was hard for two people to be artists when the rugs needed hoovering, and food needed to be purchased, dishes washed” (27). These tasks fall to Mari, even though she chases her artistic goals more consistently than Pierce and is, ultimately, shown to be more talented. Emily echoes these tensions: Matt desires the financial rewards of his wife’s efforts but puts pressure on Emily in other ways too. During their marriage he pressures Emily to have children despite her feelings, prioritizing her traditional creative role as a mother over her chosen one. He forces her to change her last name, affecting her identity and allowing him to increase his status. Similarly, he demands a share of her profits and tries to take credit for her inspiration. The Villa explores the difficulties for a successful and famous woman when her male partner is threatened and jealous of her.
Through this theme, The Villa explores the pressures of family life and, especially, the zero-sum-game scenario of motherhood versus personal creativity and fulfillment. The Villa presents a world in which motherhood and personal success are effectively incompatible: Mari’s mother gains success but dies in childbirth; Mari writes her novel but loses her child and, moreover, dies before her own success is realized; Emily prioritizes her famous writing career over starting a family.
Mari’s parents’ activities as famous intellectuals also create a legacy and expectation of her personal success, which her novel Lilith Rising eventually satisfies, albeit posthumously. Later, Emily’s understanding of this legacy through time leads her to write a book to discuss “the ways in which a legacy is both a gift and a curse” (192). Legacy here represents the fame and infamy with which Mari becomes associated, as Pierce’s pursuit of musical fame leads to his death in Italy. This tragedy, a consequence of Mari’s wish to remain at the villa and Pierce’s own scandalous and hurtful behavior toward his recently-deceased wife, represents one of the costs of fame—as the novel seems to suggest that fame and good art require pain. Even Chess’s renown, who becomes wealthy and famous for her airy advice and sage-like self-help, demands pain and sadness. Self-help requires readers who need help. By tying fame to tragedy and trauma and highlighting the personal costs of fame, Hawkins demonstrates the danger of a contemporary society that offers almost instantaneous infamy, renown, and possible cancellation.
Femininity, Monstrosity, and Truth
The Villa is considerably shaped by the novel’s exploration of femininity, which enters into a thematic dialogue with the portrayal of women in the Gothic literary tradition. One significant example of this is Hawkins’s mirroring of Mary Shelley in her character Mari. In deliberately making the parallel to a famous female author in the Gothic tradition, Hawkins invites the comparison of past and present views of women, especially women who live outside social convention. Mary Shelley and Mari both defy social and sexual norms; moreover, they are women acting in the traditionally male sphere of novel writing, asserting their intellectual and artistic talents and—in doing so—opposing the patriarchal view that women are mentally inferior to men and should be limited to their roles as wives and mothers. Obstacles remain, however. Like Mary Shelley in the early 1800s, Mari in the 1970s finds her productivity hampered by the demands and limits placed on her: housework, deference to egotistical men, the expectation of emotional support, and the toll of pregnancy and loss. Similarly, Emily in the present day finds her creativity disturbed by the past behavior of her husband and their ongoing divorce. In these parallels, The Villa suggests that women’s freedom to express themselves creatively and intellectually still comes second to the expectations of the men around them.
Hawkins’s novel also plays with ideas of the female as monstrous, particularly as a means to challenge the portrayal of women as “the other.” This is made explicit in the framing of the novel: The Other is the title of one of the patriarchal novels critiqued in the fictional prologue “excerpt” of Dr. Elisabeth Radnor, who writes that “Horror had, after all, been mostly the territory of men” (2). This raises the context that portrayals of women in the literary tradition often reflect a male-centric world view and display a deep-seated anxiety or fascination with women and their roles. The generic themes of Gothic fiction—horror, the uncanny, and boundary-breaking—have made it a particularly useful form for men to express this gendered conflict. As Hawkins points out, in the male Gothic tradition, female characters are stereotypes—the damsel in distress, the monster—and their narrative arc follows punishment or reward depending on whether they conform or confound female role expectations. In The Villa, Victoria, the protagonist of Lilith Rising, isn’t punished for her actions, an ending that male critics slam, according to Emily. In response, Chess describes the blood-soaked hand on the book’s cover as one covered with the blood of the patriarchy. Hawkins presents Mari’s novel Lilith Rising as a fictional point of departure from the rigid tradition of “good” and evil” women: A “revolution” in horror writing, Emily claims that, before Mari’s novel, “Horror was pretty straightforward […] Lilith Rising is just really ambiguous” (146).
In writing a world where the “truth” of a story is often deliberately ambiguated by an unreliable narrator or multiple perspectives, Hawkins creates a complex psychological drama where tensions and mysteries are an inherent part of the universal experience. In this she moves away from the traditional set up of tension between the male view and the—mysterious, desirable, or threatening—female object. This is added to the fact that her protagonists are all female, exploding the tradition of the male perspective and empowering her female characters to speak for themselves. The ambiguous truths of her multiple narratives are unknowable because the characters are humans whose truths are hidden to others and themselves, not because they are the monstrous non-male other. When Mari decides to name her book Lilith Rising, she is already imagining it as “a fitting title for a book about women, power, betrayal” (211). It is not only Mari’s heroine Victoria who escapes retribution but also Hawkins’s murderous characters Emily and Chess. In this way, Lilith Rising is a fictional cipher for The Villa itself, which reclaims the Gothic tradition as a world in which women can break moral and social taboos and go unpunished.
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