Yet again, I find that another one of my favorite childhood series have been inspired in some way by works we've read in Humanities. This time it's Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events.
Beatrice Baudelaire is the mother of the three main characters Violet, Klaus, and Sunny. Lemony met Beatrice when he was 11 and she was 10. She was engaged to Lemony Snicket. However, she broke off the engagement to marry Violet, Klaus, and Sunny's father instead. She and her husband die young, making Count Olaf their children's guardian. Lemony Snicket narrates the entire series and often talks about his love, Beatrice Baudelaire.
TURNS OUT LEMONY'S BEATRICE BAUDELAIRE WAS INSPIRED BY DANTE'S BEATRICE PORTINARI. This makes so much sense. As I mentioned, Beatrice B. and Lemony met when they were children. Lemony was madly in love with her, but she chose another man over him. Then she dies young. This is exactly like Beatrice and Dante.
Finding allusions to pieces of literature in other pieces of literature honestly never gets old.
3 comments:
I love that series! I think it would be more accurate to say that the author is making fun of Dante, since Lemony Snicket is constantly whining and making absurdly pessimistic remarks, as well as telling a story that's so depressing it's funny. I definitely get the sense that he thinks that Dante was a bit of a whiner. The more literature I read the more I realize was in the books--there are tons of literary references that I didn't understand at all as a child, like the caricatures of Dickens novels that pretty much define the entire series. Also, there are eyes, glasses, and sight in abundance throughout the series, which we've also seen in Oedipus Rex and Dante's Inferno.
I read a few of those books when I was in middle school. The fact that we read them and didn't know they were inspired by Dante until this point is crazy! So much is inspired by Dante's Divine Comedy... it amazes me. From books to art to building, Dante's Divine Comedy hugely impacted society after it was written and still influences society today. Why though? Why do certain poems/novels so greatly impact society where as other don't?
And here's another interesting tidbit--Charles Baudelaire is a 19th-century French poet whose poems we'll also be reading this year.
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