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.
Symbols & Motifs
Pozzo di San Patrizio
Pozzo di San Patrizio, the well of St. Patrick, symbolizes the role of History, Haunting, and Houses in the novel, suggesting how living spaces are living, holding, and preserving memories. The well itself is a deep shaft, that reaches into the bowels of the earth in Orvieto. Surrounded by a double helix staircase, the well is accessible by those who come up and go down without these groups ever meeting. According to the guidebook a tourist gives to Emily and Chess, “Pozzo di San Patrizio is a marvel of Renaissance engineering. Double helix staircases allowed for easier access and constant traffic both down into the well and up from the well” (114). This staircase conveys how the villa itself works as place haunted by the past: Emily and Mari can sit in the same place in the house, separated by 50 years, yet contact between seems possible: Mari’s diary saves Emily from Matt, and Emily seems to hear the echo of Mari’s visit to the well decades earlier, as she compares Mari’s inclusion of St. Patrick’s Purgatory in Lilith Rising to her own visit. Like St. Patrick’s Purgatory in Ireland, the well exists as a dark and foreboding place, a fitting setting for Gothic novels. Close to the villa, yet different in function and form, the well shows how memories become sticky, remaining with a place, as the voices that echo in the well demonstrate. When Mari visits, “she wonders how many feet have walked this same sloping ramp, wearing grooves in the rock. How many people, long since dead, made this same descent” (158-59). As Mari thinks about the steps of the dead, she admits that, “People are never just gone, after all. There are always marks, always signs” (160). This well, like Villa Aestas, functions as a place where history happens and haunts those who come after. The well is also a traditional symbol of artistic inspiration; the “well-spring,” is associated with creation, divinity, and rejuvenation. The waters of the well, however, can only be accessed by those willing to dig deep into the darkness; of the earth and in themselves.
Aestas
Like Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, the album Aestas chronicles the personal lives of musicians and artists, symbolizing The Costs of Fame. As Lara’s Rolling Stone profile makes clear, Aestas creates her reputation, but “‘ate her the fuck up” (136). Latin for summer, Aestas carries an ironic meaning. While Lara writes the album that summer, the music, and the events the lyrics describe take on a darker meaning—this season is not about leisure or fun, but rather the unraveling of relationships and the death of a man Lara loved. Emily, after seeing Chess’s draft, recognizes this connection, claiming that “Aestas—and Lara—are just as important to this story, and that means I need to read, and listen. I’m hungry for further clues, any hint of the truth of that summer in Lara’s lyrics” (230). As Emily probes the album, she implicitly connects the pain of Lara and her friends to the mastery of Lara’s craft—pain appears as the price of admission for fame. Lara’s fame, of course, depends on that pain—Emily observes that “Aestas will eventually be heard everywhere […] People will play it when they’re in a good mood, but it’s the heartbroken that it’s written for, and they’re the ones who’ll play it the most” (179). Although the costs for that kind of fame seem high, Chess jokes that she would take the deal, claiming she would “make an actual deal with Satan to sell twenty million copies of anything” (55). This statement foreshadows the conclusion of the novel, where both Emily and Chess murder Matt to reach the kind of fame and success that produces profiles in Rolling Stone, as in Lara’s case, or adaptations of books for HBO. The novel’s eponymous villa is renamed Villa Aestas in homage to Lara’s creation, showing how her fame and inspirational experiences have come to shape the identity of the house.
Lilith
Defying the ties between women and monsters, Hawkins concentrates on Lilith and her reclamation in the novel, using a symbol of primeval femininity and monstrosity to invoke survival. Lilith highlights how Femininity, Monstrosity, and Truth intersect in a line of women touched by tragedy and controlled by men. Mari makes this connection explicit in Pozzo di San Patrizio, when Noel asks Mari about her mother and what she wrote about Hell. Correcting him, Mari declares that, “She did. Although the entire point of that story was that Lilith wasn’t a demon at all, just a wronged woman”(161). Lilith becomes the symbol for falsely accused women, for women who become monsters by choosing to battle men for their freedom. As the narrator explains, Mari’s mother discusses Lilith in the
shortest story in Marianne’s collection […] a metaphorical, lyrical take on the legend of Lilith, said to be Adam’s wife before Eve. But Lilith had been made of the same earth as Adam rather than made from him, and she hadn’t been obedient, which of course made her wicked (161-62).
Linked by blood, Marianne and her daughter Mari both deploy Lilith to make explicit feminist points about power and freedom. Emily sees this link, expressing a wish to write “about Mari’s mom, about Lilith and the connection between Marianne Godwick’s short story and Mari’s book” (192). As Emily imagines her writing, she considers these ties between Mari and her mother, thinking “about the ways in which a legacy is both a gift and a curse” (192). Referring to Marianne’s writing on Lilith, her premature death, and Mari’s invoking of Lilith in her title, Emily’s characterization of a legacy also points to Lilith herself, the first link in a long chain of women men attempt to control, representing their curse. This genealogy from Lilith also serves as a gift, however, as they, like Lilith, break free. Sometimes these women, like Lilith before them, rebel completely, as Chess and Emily do when they murder Matt. Lilith rises in them.
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