The Marriage Portrait

Ideas of duality and switching between two variations of the same type permeate O’Farrell’s novel, especially with regard to the two main characters, Alfonso and Lucrezia.

The painter’s assistant Maurizio aptly compares Alfonso to the Roman god Janus, noting that he has “two faces, two personalities” and can change between them by snapping his fingers (258). The Roman god, who gives his name to the first month of the year, is associated with beginnings and endings. Therefore, he can be both an initiator of conflict and a peacemaker. This is relevant to Lucrezia, as Alfonso both initiates her married life and adult identity and presides over their end when he intends to strangle her. In the beginning of his relationship with Lucrezia, he exposes affectionate playfulness when he pretends to be her pet mouse or gifts her the picture of the stone marten, knowing her love of wild beasts. He professes his admiration of the stone marten as “an attractive yet shy” wild animal, suggesting that he admires similar traits in Lucrezia, yet he also wants to see both of them “tamed in oils,” reduced to a harmless, biddable state on the canvas (106).

Alfonso’s need for power in the face of an alarming fact he cannot control—his infertility—causes him to alternate between extreme courtesy and self-control and brutal violence. Lucrezia notices that he is more polite than her father in addressing his servants. His ability to make civilized conversation at times of great tension imbues him with a formality that stands in stark relief to his most sadistic actions, such as forcing his sister to watch as her lover is being strangled. O’Farrell uses Alfonso’s opposing elements of cerebral self-restraint and visceral violence to show the terrifying power that he can command and to heighten the suspense of Lucrezia’s challenge in outwitting him.

Another key duality in the novel is that of Lucrezia and her maid, Emilia. The girls physically resemble each other and were nursed by the same balia, Emilia’s mother, the woman for whom Lucrezia longed for in her early life. As toddlers, the girls were affectionate playmates, but Emilia’s pattern of taking life’s blows in Lucrezia’s place also began then. Emilia explains that she got her distinctive crescent-shaped scar from a falling, boiling pot that missed Lucrezia “by this much” (230) and caused her to scream as though she were the one burned. As a working-class woman, Emilia is trained to think of her life as having lesser value than that of her noble mistress; thus, she says, “Better that it was me and not you” (231) who was burned. Lucrezia, however, observes that it would have been better if neither girl had to go through such misfortune. In adulthood, when Emilia accompanies Lucrezia as her maid to Ferrara, they repeat their childhood pattern of intimacy. For example, the girls share secrets and a bed, and Emilia again sacrifices for Lucrezia, who traded places with her by creeping through the Fortezza in Emilia’s clothes, saving herself from Alfonso’s murderous plans. In contrast, Emilia, who is left alone in the duchess’s bed, with her fair hair “fanned out” and sleeping in the typical night shift of the era (425), is suffocated in a case of mistaken identity. In this instance, the girl with the appearance of the maid is the fortunate one, while the one who passes as nobility is doomed. Emilia’s death creates a sense of poignancy that counters the joy of Lucrezia’s liberation, in addition to highlighting the injustice of the structural inequality that valued noble lives above all others. This inequality in echoed in the text, as O’Farrell grants Lucrezia an artist’s sensibility, while she makes Emilia a flat character who is a satellite to her mistress’s whims and has no personal ambitions beyond serving her.

The theme of exchanged bodies and fates continues a theme from O’Farrell’s 2020 historical novel, Hamnet, in which William Shakespeare’s 11-year-old son takes on his twin sister’s fever and dies in her place. In both cases, O’Farrell draws attention to the random whims of chance and the fragility of human life. In her works, the fate to be saved or doomed becomes a character that can enter and inhabit different bodies.