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Marvels & Tales 18.1 (2004) 126-130



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The Princess of Wax: A Cruel Tale. By Scot D. Ryersson and Michael Orlando Yaccarino. Illustrations by Anne Bachelier. Translation by Guy Leclerq. New York, CFM Gallery, 2003.

Telling her only that I was reviewing The Princess of Wax: A Cruel Tale, I recently gave my visiting 28-year-old, university-educated niece a textual copy to read; the next morning at breakfast I asked her what she thought of it. "Nobody's going to buy this book for the story" was her terse and acute reply. The Princess of Wax is a contemporary "art" tale, a brief (ten page in copy form) attempt at decadence, diablerie, and the macabre, with a failed love story tossed in for good measure. Based loosely on the sensational life of Marchesa Luisa Casati (1881-1957), The Princess of Wax is a pastiche of readily recognizable motifs and overtones from writers such as Wilde, Poe, Andersen, Pater, Stoker, Wagner, Lovecraft, and Symons. Note that Ryersson and Yaccarino have previously published on Casati (Infinite Variety: The Life and Legend of the Marchesa Casati [2000]) and apparently have established the Casati Archives [End Page 126] (www.marchesacasati.com). Casati's splendid eccentricity has been well documented: her pet cheetah; her nude male servants; her gaunt, phthistic appearance; her dressing in floor-length fur coats sans lingerie, and her desire "to be a living work of art" are all tantalizing tidbits into her fascinating life. So The Princess of Wax appears to be the latest step in Ryersson's and Yaccarino's energetic effort to develop a Casati industry.

Here's the tale's basic story (the capital letters belong to the story, not me): the grande dame La Marchesa will host a masquerade debut ball for La Princesse and all the glitterati Courtiers must attend. La Marchesa's "towering ebony manservant, Garbi, bare-chested" (2) informs her that a "genuine witch," The Sorceress, can provide her with the not-to-be outdone centerpiece that La Marchesa requires for the ball. So they row out to a convenient nearby ancient mausoleum, La Marchesa gives The Sorceress a goblet of blood and some gold, and she gets La Princesse, an exquisite wax beauty encased in a crystal cube, with a tiny reliquary of La Marchesa's cruel blood where her heart presumably would be, etc. In a past life La Princesse was a ballerina, and she's got some atavistic ashes (her own, some sparrow bones and seawater for her eyes) tucked away somewhere, which allow her to dance with "magical" beauty. So she's essentially an automata, and her dancing again and again enchants the Courtiers, until she goes nightly back to her crystal sarcophagus. Each evening, of course, La Princesse witnesses "collection[s] of [unspecified] barbarities" (4) orchestrated by guess who. Eventually La Marchesa tires of her exquisite toy and determines to give her to a noblemen (no caps for him) who has taken a fancy to Wax Girl (blow-up dolls weren't available back then in this murky Italianate past?). But wait—there's more. Muscular Garbi has also fallen for Wax Girl and cannot bear to lose her. So, with great love and intrepidity, he secrets her past the tethered cheetahs and python skins, into a waiting boat! But—oh no!—Garbi has not taken into account the effect of atmospheric change on the delicate Wax Girl or the vindictiveness of The Sorceress (who exposes Wax Girl to the light briefly through unnamed magic involving a scrap of apricot silk), and right there in the boat, before Garbi's very eyes, she melts away. And guess what—this does in La Marchesa too. The end. We never hear what happened to the lovelorn Garbi.

Pompous, turgid, and overwritten, the "tale" has virtually no internal logic, no psychological compulsion, no coherence. While one can argue that theme-and-variation is at the core of the tale form, such variation inevitably serves some form of "higher" purpose or insight. Not so here; where the authors might intend a frisson of...

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