Review of THE MARRIAGE PORTRAIT by Maggie O'Farrell

 4 Stars

I’ve always loved Robert Browning’s dramatic monologues like “Porphyria’s Lover” and “The Bishop Orders his Tomb at St. Praxed’s Church” so I was definitely interested in Maggie O’Farrell’s latest novel which is based on “My Last Duchess.”

The novel begins after Lucrezia de’Medici has been married for about a year to Alfonso, Duke of Ferrara.  She has been brought to a hunting lodge and she is convinced, “He has brought her here, to this stone fortress, to murder her.”  The rest of the novel alternates between this present and the past beginning with her childhood and adolescence in Tuscany. 

Just like dramatic monologues are character studies, this novel is a character study of both Lucrezia and Alfonso.  From birth, she is a spirited wild child, restless and rebellious.  She is also curious, intelligent, imaginative, and artistically gifted.  She grows to become a strong-willed, passionate young girl who is interested in everyone and everything.  She is very attuned to the natural world.  The rigid expectations of women are like a cage in which she is trapped.

Alfonso is best described as “’Janus, with two faces, two personalities.’”  He can be courteous and considerate, but it soon becomes obvious that he can be unbelievably cruel and has a need for control:  “He will always need to triumph, to be seen to win.”  His comments are very revealing:  “’when I ask something of you, I expect you to do it.  Without delay.  Without hesitation’” and “’Do not . . . be foolish enough to interrupt me when I am speaking.  Now or ever.’” 

Lucrezia’s father has a menagerie and he adds a tigress which fascinates Lucrezia.  When she sees it, she is convinced she “had never seen anything so beautiful in her life” and she feels great empathy for her, “the sadness, the loneliness, emanating from her, the shock at being torn from her home.”  Of course, the tigress is a metaphor for Lucrezia who finds herself trapped in a marriage far from her home.  She thinks of her spirit as a “beast – muscled and brave” which “lives somewhere deep inside her.”  And Alfonso tells a physician, “’There is something at the core of her, a type of defiance.  There are times when I look at her and I can feel it – it’s like an animal that lives behind her eyes.’” 

An issue I had is that these metaphors are rather heavy-handed.  Lucrezia’s wedding gown, described as both a cage and “a fortress of silk,” is “poised to encase her body.”  Then there’s a dead bird which flew in a window but couldn’t find its way out.  Alfonso takes her hand and “imprisons her fingers in a strong, cool grasp.”  “The ends of her hair are trapped between his torso and the mattress.”  Lucrezia hates the pattern on a dress because it makes her “feel confined.”    The references to Iphigenia being lead to a “duplicitous altar” by her father mirror how Lucrezia feels about her father’s arranging her marriage.  What are also heavy-handed are the descriptions.  Lucrezia dreams and daydreams and dissociations are described in detail.  Some of these become tedious, especially as they continue for paragraphs. 

What I did enjoy is the direct and tangential references to “My Last Duchess.”  Alfonso, the “duke with an ancient name” gifts her “a white mule.”   In the portrait, the Duchess’ face has a “depth and earnestness” so the duke calls the painting “a wonder.”  The portrait is “covered at all times in heavy velvet drapes.  No one is permitted to pull back the curtain and look upon the Duchess’s face without the Duke’s express permission.”  The poem makes reference to Neptune taming a sea-horse, and in the novel Alfonso becomes “a river god, a water monster . . . seizing her with his webbed fingers, rubbing his scaled skin against hers, subduing her with strength gained in aquatic depths.”

A major theme is the hidden depths that lie beneath the surface of people and things.  Lucrezia becomes interested in underpaintings, the hidden paintings that lie beneath.  She also likes to look at the reverse side of embroidery which displays “the labour needed to attain the perfection of the finished piece.”  She learns to hide her true emotions behind a façade, just as her husband can look calm and poised though he may not feel this way.  Her portrait shows her physical appearance but “also excavates that which she keeps hidden inside her.”  It could even be said that Browning’s dramatic monologue serves as an underpainting to the novel.

Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet and Judith left me in awe (https://schatjesshelves.blogspot.com/2020/07/review-of-hamnet-and-judith-by-maggie.html).  Though The Marriage Portrait has some weaknesses, I still highly recommend it.