Corruption in Venice

Creeper Alert!: Don't talk to strangers, kids.

    Well, that was a weird one. Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice is an odd short piece of fiction that was inspired by some true events, which only adds to the unsettling aspects of the novella. A well-respected author, Gustav von Aschenbach, begins to feel uneasy about the repetition of his pattern and so he departs for an island in Venice to vacation and refresh himself. Instead of being refreshed, he instead develops decidedly impure feelings and the city mirrors his decent into corruption.

    Once Aschenbach reaches the Grand Hôtel des Bains on Lido Island he immediately is enraptured by a striking Polish youth whose name he learns is Tadzio. What starts as an artistic appreciation of the youth’s features and poise is soon revealed as a more erotic and unchaste attraction, and Aschenbach comes into the role of the pederast many centuries after is has gone out of style and social acceptance.

    Even though the novella presents this attraction in vivid prose, Mann doesn’t let it become a positive outlook on the pederasty. Aschenbach notes at several points in the novella that he feels less than healthy, and that he is suffering from the weather of Venice. When the news becomes more open that Venice is suffering from a health risk, Aschenbach seeks to know more to warn Tadzio’s family. The discovery that the epidemic is really cholera parallels Aschenbach’s continually more open admiration of the youth, as if the city is mirroring his growing corruption. Aschenbach finally succumbs to his ill health after he fails to fall Tadzio out into the surf.

    In Death in Venice, Mann balances the pederasty and its real-life basis for fact from his own time in Venice with the city’s own declining collective “health.” Aschenbach travels because he feels ill at ease in his pattern, but, as most of the novels we cover like to show, this travel doesn’t end well. In this case, his own personal corruption is reflected on his new scenery as a literary tool to enhance the feeling of growing sickness, mental or physical, that Aschenbach endures and eventually falls to.