Cypresses

Cypresses are mentioned twice in "The Duchess at Prayer".

First, before the unnamed first-person narrator and the old man enter the Duchess’s apartments. The unnamed first-person narrator is here describing the gardens about the manor house, observing “vanishing trances of that fantastic horticulture of which our dull age has lost the art”[1]

“An opulence of dahlias overran the box-borders, between cypresses that cut the sunshine like basalt shafts.”[2]

Interestingly, the cypresses are also named in "The Duchess at Prayer"’s third chapter, right before the old man begins his tale about the Duke and Duchess: “The villa looked across it [the garden], composed as a dead face, with the cypresses flanking it for candles. . .”[3] Here the garden takes on a more menacing flavor, setting the tone and leading the reader neatly into the darker parts of the story.

The cypresses are mentioned at two pivotal moments in the story: before the unnamed first-person narrator and the old man first enter the Duchess’s apartments and before the old man divulges what he knows about the Duchess’s fate. In Ferber’s Dictionary of Literary Symbols, it is stipulated that cypresses “became associated with funerals and tombs”[4] and remind readers of a story told in Ovid in Metamorphoses, Book 10: a young boy Cyparissus who accidentally kills a holy deer whom he loves and, through his subsequent grief, is transformed into a cypress tree to ”stand wherever there are mourners.”[5] The two mentions of cypresses become a chilling herald of things to come in light of this information.

[1] Wharton 1901, p. 2

[2] Wharton 1901, p. 2

[3] Wharton 1901, p. 6

[4] Ferber 2007, p. 49

[5] Ferber 2007, p. 50