Lisa's Identity In Don Giovanni, The Gastein Journal

In these first three chapters, Lisa’s identity is entirely obscured, first as the ambiguous and mysterious author of a nonsensical duo of erotic texts, and second as a subject under Freud’s microscope, given alternate traits to obscure her true self. There is great significance in the concealment of her career as an opera singer, as, metaphorically, her voice has been taken away, similar to the fact that in Don Giovanni, The Gastein Journal, and Frau Anna G., Lisa never narrates her own story. At this point in her life Lisa is almost without agency. She has fallen victim to these episodes of psychosomatic hysteria and grown dependent upon her aging aunt to support her as her illness has both ravaged her body and addled her mental faculties,

rendering her unable to perform. Similarly, she is reliant upon her therapist, Sigmund Freud to make sense of her condition and act almost as her interpreter in a time that she is so outside herself, governed by her impulses and blinded by her physical pain. She is forced to let Freud’s highly biased portrayal of her character and her own seemingly mad ravings speak for her, leaving the notion of her true identity up to the reader’s interpretation.
This idea of lack of identity is echoed in the opera Don Giovanni, in which Lisa writes her erotic poem and in which it is suggested that she is rehearsing to perform a role. Lisa is vocally classified as a soprano, and though, in opera, there is typically only one major soprano role in each show, in Don Giovanni there are three. It is never specified which role, either Donna Anna, Donna Elvira, or Zerlina, Lisa has been cast in, and while she has the capacity to play any of the three, each role also reflects back some element of Lisa’s life learned through Freud’s case study, lending even further to the mystery.
Don Giovanni tells the story of the infamous, titular lothario Don Giovanni and his insatiable compulsion to seduce woman through guile, deceit, and if necessary, violence.

Over the course of the opera three women, Anna, Elvira, and Zerlina, fall victim to his charms and are each instrumental in his finding retribution for his indiscretions swallowed up by the pits of hell. Donna Anna first encounters Don Giovanni when he sneaks into her home, masked, with the intent to seduce her. Misled by his disguise, she believes him to be her fiancé Don Ottavio, but when she discovers otherwise she cries out for help. Her father, the Commendatore rushes in and Giovanni, in desperation, challenges the man to a duel. Giovanni comes out victorious, slaying the Commendatore, and Anna vows revenge on her father’s unknown killer. Though her major motivator over the course of the opera is vengeance, the loss of her honor and the tainting of her reputation through her accidental involvement with Giovanni also scar Anna. She blames her own careless actions for her scandalous state and carries this undertone of guilt with her throughout the show. Similarly, Lisa is deeply shamed by her own past sexual exploits, though very few people know about them. She is prone to self-degradation and thinks herself no better than women of “…the lowest class who sold their favors?” (Thomas 174) despite the fact that her deviant impulses are an uncontrollable symptom of her psychosexual hysteria. Like Anna’s

guilt, Lisa’s illness burdens her for the entirety of the novel and is partially the source of her equation of sex with violence.
In contrast to Donna Anna, Donna Elvira is motivated by her love for Don Giovanni and the agony she feels as his abandonment. Though he does little more than belittle her, claiming that she is merely another notch on his heavily nicked bedpost and continually pursuing other women in her presence, she is a slave to her attraction to him. While she too longs for revenge against Giovanni for his betrayal, she is torn by a conflicting desire to protect him from harm, and is horrified when, in the second act of the opera, she has a vision of him burning in hell. Chalking up her ravings to those of a woman driven mad by hysterical lust, Giovanni brushes her aside and when her vision comes to fruition he is helpless to save his soul. Elvira shares the most significant similarities with Lisa as she too is governed by her overwhelming conflict of emotions, is declared insane by those around her, and even possesses a touch of clairvoyance. While Lisa’s verses and journal appear to have no method behind them upon initial reading, with additional explication of her thought processes and the key knowledge of the circumstances of her death at Babi Yar as unveiled in the fifth chapter of the novel, her writings become an abstract premonition of the massacre. What is believed to be a hysterical outpouring of uncontained sexual impulses is in fact a patient written manual to the sources of her condition, but Lisa’s credibility is so constrained by her illness and Freud’s finite, psychoanalytic scope that its significance goes unnoticed by all until it is too late. As Elvira’s premonition of a virile, rampantly sexual man’s demise is ignored, so is Lisa’s of falling, burning bodies interwoven with shameless and perverse sex acts. The end result in both premonitions could not have been altered by the actions of any of the characters in either The White Hotel or Don Giovanni (except perhaps Giovanni himself, who was given multiple opportunities to repent for his actions, but declined to each time)
The final soprano role in Don Giovanni is Zerlina, a young peasant girl betrothed to an abusive fiancée, Masetto, and under the hot pursuit of Giovanni. Like Lisa, Zerlina lacks any real sense of agency throughout the opera, as her livelihood is dependent upon her staying in the good graces of the men in her life. The only power she can exercise is her freedom of choice, though not without consequence, and her seductive abilities, both of which she utilizes as means of protecting herself and gaining the upper hand. Though she is often considered a victim in the context of the opera, preyed upon by Giovanni and bound to Masetto, she is not entirely innocent as she uses the sexual and violent inclinations of the men around her to her own advantage, flexing what little control she does have. As aforementioned, Lisa and Zerlina share a lack of agency within their own lives. Zerlina’s path is dictated by Masetto just as Lisa’s has been influenced by her father, her husband, her various lovers, and her therapist, Sigmund Freud. They are both women bound by the patriarchal societies in which they live and are therefore reliant upon men to give them voice, but while Zerlina deliberately uses her sexuality to assert herself in the male dominated world, Lisa does so inadvertently. At the point that she becomes Freud’s patient, Lisa’s identity past the point that her illness incapacitated her has been completely lost to her sexual impulses and mysterious pain. She is a difficult patient during analysis for she believes the source of her illness is organic and fails to see the connection

Neither woman invited sexual pursuit or male violence into their lives, yet they both find themselves swallowed up by the juxtaposition of the two

In the latter half of the novel beginning with chapter four, The Health Resort, Lisa’s identity and agency take a dramatic shift as for the first time she begins to narrate her own story.

The Health Resort sees Lisa several years after her encounter with Freud, almost entirely cured of her hysteria, though still given to brief lapses, and making progress in her operatic career. She has been asked to sing the role of Tatiana in the classic Russian opera Eugene Onegin, taking over the role for renowned soprano Vera Serebryakova after a broken arm ends her run in the production. In addition to the fact that Lisa’s true identity, pseudonyms aside, is now unveiled, for the first time she is seen actually performing a role rather than merely referencing her career, symbolic of the notion that she has regained her “voice” both figuratively and literally. She is now capable of acting as her own agent having been able to move past her incapacitating illness. As homage to her regained talent, Thomas even includes an understated reference to La Traviata (translates directly to ‘the fallen woman’), in which, upon meeting Lisa, Serebryakova claims to have seen her sing the lead role, Violetta, many years before and was a “fervent admirer of [Frau Erdman’s] voice…” (Thomas 152). Violetta is courtesan who suffers from tuberculosis, an infliction that tragically claims her life at the end of the opera. Thomas’s selection of this particular opera for Serebryakova to have seen Lisa perform

acts as a transitional link to Lisa’s illness ridden past, hearkening back to the notion that while she way have been a fallen woman in the past, she has recovered her dignity to continue living normally. In fact, after her first rehearsal as Tatiana in Onegin, Serebryakova, gushes to Lisa, “Truly, your voice is so much better than when I heard you in Vienna…” (Thomas 161), obviously highlighting her vocal improvement, but also implicitly commenting on the strides Lisa has made in her agency.
The Health Resort chapter also works to shift the focus of the narrative from post-World War I Vienna to pre-World War II Russia, a transference that is easily overlooked due to its initial subtlety, but entirely crucial to the forward movement of the plot towards Lisa’s demise at Babi Yar. The idea of Jewish identity, another driving force, also begins to come into play, and through Serebryakova and Victor Berenstein’s (Vera’s husband and the baritone who plays the title role in Eugene Onegin opposite Lisa) open admittance of their racial Jewishness, something Lisa had previously shunned due to its often volatile consequences, she comes to accept her own. With World War II seemingly looming not far in the distance and Jewishness coming to the forefront as a prominent theme, the reasoning behind the novel’s classification as a World War II memorial begins to become clearer. However, these alterations in setting and theme are not the only ways in which D.M. Thomas foreshadows the novel’s climax. Once again, there are elements inherent in the operas he chooses to feature in this fourth chapter of the novel which are subtly central to The White Hotel’s tragic finale.
First, clearly, is Eugene Onegin, the story of reserved seventeen year old Tatiana who, on a chance meeting, falls hopelessly in love with the cynical, brooding Eugene Onegin, a man nearly ten years her senior. She writes him a letter, professing this love, but is heartbroken when he somewhat callously rejects her, claiming that he can only offer friendship. Many years later Onegin attends one of St. Petersburg’s most prominent balls and there encounters a beautiful woman who seems to have captured the attention of everyone present. He is stunned to discover this woman is Tatiana, who, having made a respectable marriage to an aging prince is now the toast of Russian society. Upon this discovery, Onegin realizes that he is in love with her and begs her to run away with him, and Tatiana, though these are the words she has longed to hear for some time rejects him. Though she is still in love with him, she refuses to betray her husband and let her reputation be tainted, sacrificing her own happiness to make the moral decision. The intrinsic similarities between Tatiana and Lisa are of far lesser abundance than with Don Giovanni’s Anna, Elvira, and Zerlina. In fact, the relationships she forges with her predecessor Vera Serebryakova and her Onegin, Victor Berenstein while singing the opera are far more central to the advancement of the novel as they lead to Victor’s marrying Lisa after Vera’s sudden death and Lisa’s subsequent move to Russia to become stepmother to Victor and Vera’s young son Kolya. It isn’t until another role, Marina in Boris Godunov, that Lisa true embodiment of Tatiana comes to light.