For a moment he
wondered what his wife was doing there, prone on the floor, her fair hair spread
as if she were flying. Then he stared at his bashful claws.
(Transparent Things, chapter
20)
Hugh Person strangles his wife Armande in his
sleep, as he dreams of Julia Moore (Hugh's former mistress whom in his
dream he struggles to save from falling to her death).
The name Julia Moore hints at Romeo and
Juliet. Othello strangles Desdemona in her bed. And it is Macbeth
who looks at his hands after he murdered the
sleeping Duncan:
MACBETH
(looking at his hands) This
is a sorry sight.
LADY MACBETH
A foolish
thought, to say a sorry sight.
MACBETH
There's one did laugh in's sleep,
and one cried "Murder!"
That they did wake each other: I
stood and heard them:
But they did say their prayers, and
address'd them
Again to sleep.
(Macbeth, Act Two, scene 2)
A character in Byron's Don Juan (Canto
Six, LXII), Dudji is a kind of sleepy Venus who can "murder sleep" (an
allusion to the above scene in Macbeth) in others:
A kind of sleepy Venus seem'd
Dudji,
Yet very fit to "murder sleep" in those
Who gazed upon her
cheek's transcendent hue,
Her Attic forehead, and her Phidian nose:
Few
angles were there in her form, 't is true,
Thinner she might have been, and
yet scarce lose;
Yet, after all, 't would puzzle to say where
It would
not spoil some separate charm to pare.
In Canto Six Juan is placed in an apartment of the
palace where many of the sultan's concubines are quartered, for it is assumed
that he is a new member of the sultan's large harem. He is assigned to a pretty
girl named Dudji as a companion. During the night the whole harem is awakened by
a loud scream from Dudji. She is pressed for an explanation. She has dreamed,
she says, that she was walking in a wood in which there was a tree with a golden
apple.* The golden apple fell at her feet, but when she picked it up to bite
into it, a bee flew out and stung her.
Lord Byron and apple trees are mentioned in
TT:
Armande Chamar. La particule
aurait jure avec la derniere syllabe de mon prenom. I believe Byron uses
'chamar,' meaning 'peacock fan,' in a very noble Oriental
milieu. (Chapter 9)
"Diablonnet always reminds me of
the Russian for 'apple trees': yabloni." (chapter 12)
*When Hugh first meets Armande, she reads a paperback
edition of Figures in a Golden Window (chapter 9).
Alexey Sklyarenko