The Intermedial Aspect of Paratext of the Novel The Virgin in the Garden by A.S. Byatt

The article discovers the intermedial aspect of the paratext of the novel The Virgin in the Garden (1978) written by the contemporary British writer A.S. Byatt. Numerous literary researchers, including the authors of the article, investigated the ekphrastic discourse of Byatt’s fiction (tetralogy on the Potter family, other novels and stories). The article introduces quite a different approach in the study with the accent on the analysis and interpretation of the par-atextual relationships in the intermedial aspect. Based on the works by Gerard Genette, Virve Sarapik, Irina Rajewski, the research shows the connection between the paratext of the novel (title, dedication, table of contents, essays, book covers) and the text and context of the novel, the combination of the visual and verbal fragments on the cover and intermedial references to other texts. The article centers upon the 2003 edition of the Vintage publishing house, the cover of which visually explains the role of the iconography of Elizabeth I and particularly of the Darnley Portrait (1575) of the unknown artist, in the world of the literary work. Fragments of the tablecloth Bradford Table Carpet (1600-1615) with the images of deer and dogs are connected with the pagan image of Diana (Artemis), “knowingly replacing” the Christian Virgin Mary in The Little Garden of Paradise (1410-1420) and displacing it to the inner cover of the book, which Byatt herself explains in the essay “Portraits in Fiction” (2001). The Tudor Rose from The Pelican Portrait (1572) expresses symbolically the idea of the whole tetralogy of Byatt and the play Astraea written by the imaginary dramatist Alexander Wed-derbum to the coronation of Elizabeth II in 1952 and to which The Virgin in the Graden was devoted. In the essay “Still Life / Nature morte” (1986), Byatt explains the main metaphors of the novel The Virgin in the Garden, and namely the metaphor “language is the dress of thought” in the painting Primavera (1477-1482) by Botticelli. Byatt associates the flowery dress of Flora with the wreath of red and white roses on the Phoenix Jewel pendant (15701580). A fragment of the pendant is on the first cover of The Virgin in the Garden; the center of the wreath, instead of the image of Elizabeth I, has a black-and-white photograph of a garden alley. The combination in the metaphorical language of the novel of pagan (Boticelli’s Primavera and The Birth of Venus) and Christian (The Annunciation and Pieta) iconography can be found both in the interpretation of the Virgin Queen as the Virgin Astraea, alluded by Virgil and Ovid, and in the characteristics of the main female (Frederica and Stephanie) and child (a boy involved in a car accident, Marcus) characters of the novel. Comparison of two covers of the novel helps to make a conclusion that the paratext of the first edition of 1978 by Chatto & Windus set people to read the novel about the 1950s, while the cover of the edition of the early 2000s by Vintage reveals problematics of the reflections of the intellectual characters, highlighting mythological and intermedial layers of the text. Without any doubt, Byatt herself participated in the selection and layout of the elements of the cover designs. However, most of the contemporary editions of the tetralogy put depictions of garden and flowers on its covers.

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