Dionea

I haven't been very good about "Dionea," but I will get back to it, as soon as I finish my grading.

Archive 2009-12-01 Theodora Goss 2009

I was writing about "Dionea," and remembered that once I had come across a project to blog all of Dracula, day by day.

Archive 2009-11-01 Theodora Goss 2009

So I thought, why not blog Dionea, with one letter per day?

Archive 2009-11-01 Theodora Goss 2009

Pinned to her clothes – striped Eastern things, and that kind of crinkled silk stuff they weave in Crete and Cyprus – was a piece of parchment, a scapular we thought at first, but which was found to contain only the name Διονεα – Dionea, as they pronounce it here.

Archive 2009-11-01 Theodora Goss 2009

I don't know if this is at all what Vernon Lee intended, but I would read Dionea which technically means something like Divine Queen, if I remember some footnotes I once saw somewhere as "little Dione," just as Dracula is, in a sense, little Dracul.

Archive 2009-11-01 Theodora Goss 2009

Perhaps, however, your Excellency, who is, I fear but a Pagan woman for all the Savelli Popes and St. Andrew Savelli's miracles, and insufficiently appreciative of embroidered pocket-handkerchiefs, will be quite as satisfied to hear that Dionea, instead of skill, has got the prettiest face of any little girl in Montemirto.

Archive 2009-11-01 Theodora Goss 2009

The Mother Superior is greatly overcome by your Excellency's munificence towards the convent, and much perturbed at being unable to send you a specimen of your protégée's skill, exemplified in an embroidered pocket-handkerchief or a pair of mittens; but the fact is that poor Dionea has no skill.

Archive 2009-11-01 Theodora Goss 2009

It's certainly clear from the beginning that Dionea is a disruptive force in society.

Archive 2009-11-01 Theodora Goss 2009

It's clear that there's no such thing as Saint Dionea, and that our Dionea, our curly-haired child, is protesting the baptism not because she's a Protestant but because she's something quite other.

Archive 2009-11-01 Theodora Goss 2009

Half the population here have names as unchristian quite – Norma, Odoacer, Archimedes – my housemaid is called Themis – but Dionea seemed to scandalize every one, perhaps because these good folk had a mysterious instinct that the name is derived from Dione, one of the loves of Father Zeus, and mother of no less a lady than the goddess Venus.

Archive 2009-11-01 Theodora Goss 2009