The Magic Barrel

Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 1958

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“The Lady of the Lake”Chapter Summaries & Analyses

“The Lady of the Lake” Summary

Henry Levin, a dandyish, “handsome thirty,” leaves New York City for Europe in search of romance, adventure, and beauty. To multiply his “possibilities,” he begins calling himself by the non-Jewish name of Henry Freeman. Bored by Paris and its women, he boards the Milan Express but impulsively gets off at Stresa upon glimpsing the majestic Lake Maggiore. Urged by the padrona of his hotel to visit the lake’s most verdant island, Isola del Dongo, he rents a rowboat and reaches the island in the misty early evening. In the lush gardens near the water’s edge, he has a beatific vision of a statue coming to life: a shapely young woman in a white dress moving among the flowers. Forced by a sudden change in the weather to row back to Stresa, he returns the next day by vaporetto and joins a guided tour of the lavish del Dongo estate. The tour guide is an aging, petulant, “sad-faced clown” named Ernesto who screams at Henry for touching the coverlet of a bed that Napoleon supposedly slept in.

In the dizzying fragrance of the del Dongo gardens, Henry slips away from the tour and follows the sounds of lapping water. On a small beach, he comes across a young woman in a white bathing suit who has just emerged from the water. Henry is stunned by the dewy perfection of her lithe body and classic Italian features. To his delight, she speaks English, and he introduces himself as Henry Freeman. She says she is Isabella del Dongo, a member of the island’s ruling family. She then startles him by asking if he is Jewish, which he quickly denies. He returns to Stresa, but, intoxicated by thoughts of Isabella, he writes to her to arrange a rendezvous. Still bemused by her apparent prejudice against Jews, he consoles himself that he does not look Jewish at all.

Isabella agrees to meet him, and sends Ernesto and a young boy to escort him to the island via rowboat. During the trip, Ernesto questions Henry at length about his income and status, presumably on Isabella’s behalf. Isabella seems happy to see him but also slightly uneasy, and she shyly gives him a tour of the del Dongo estate and palazzo. She confesses to him that the bed he touched during the official tour was not Napoleon’s, and that most of the beautiful paintings and statues on the estate are fakes. Henry is dismayed that he could not tell the difference. Afterward, they go swimming, and Henry gets a tantalizingly brief glimpse of Isabella’s exquisite nakedness. She then brings him delicious food and wine and kisses him tenderly. In the heady days that follow, Henry makes feverish plans to marry Isabella under his assumed name (Freeman) and settle with her far away from his native New York, keeping his Jewishness a secret from her forever.

On his next rendezvous with Isabella, she shocks him by confessing that her last name is not actually del Dongo but della Seta, and that she is one of the caretakers of the estate, not a member of the family. The shabby guide Ernesto is her father, and the ragamuffin boy who helped row Henry to the island is her brother. She then hints that Henry has not been quite honest with her, either, but he denies this. Mysteriously, she sighs that she was “afraid” of that. Back in Stresa, Henry feels like a fool for his “fairytale” dreams of marrying into aristocracy. All the same, he realizes that he loves Isabella and must have her. She may have lied to him, but he did the same to her; he feels as if her confession has “cleared” the air between them. On the island, he finds Isabella in the moonlit garden and asks to marry her. She asks him again if he is Jewish, and he indignantly denies it, calling it a “foolish” question. She replies, achingly, that she had hoped he was; and then bares her breast, showing him a tattoo she was given at Buchenwald. The Italian Fascists, she says, sent her whole family there. She cannot marry outside her religion, she tells him, after all she has suffered for it. In a fit of remorse, Henry tries to embrace her, but she slips away, leaving him hugging “moonlit stone.”

“The Lady of the Lake” Analysis

Like “Take Pity,” the story of Henry Freeman, or more accurately, Henry Levin, chronicles a doomed pairing and a critical moral failure. As satire, however, “The Lady of the Lake” strikes a tone at once lighter and more scathing, mainly because its affluent young antihero comes from a very different world than either Rosa or Eva: one untainted by poverty, the Holocaust, or personal suffering. On a European trip, Henry discards his birth name on a whim in order to free himself from the “limitations” of his Jewish heritage, and his new chosen surname of “Freeman” is meant to reflect this sentiment. In a story that references Greek myth as well as the magical fables of Hawthorne and others, Henry’s blithe self-amnesia foreshadows a devastating comeuppance, for mythic heroes who begin their adventures with lies and false pretenses do not end well. The ancient Greek maxim “Know thyself” particularly applies to this scenario, and Henry’s resistance to fully knowing or accepting himself destroys his capacity to truly know others.

In further oblique references to Greek mythology, Henry’s first sighting of Isabella alludes to the Greek myth of Pygmalion, a sculptor whose ivory statue of his feminine ideal magically came to life. Isabella’s association with gardens and exotic flowers also recalls “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” Hawthorne’s magical story of an Italian girl who conceals a poisonous secret behind her flowerlike beauty. Most notably, however, the title of Malamud’s story alludes to the water-dwelling sorceress of Arthurian legend who bestows the sword Excalibur on the worthy King Arthur. In each of these tales, a hero is either rewarded or punished for following his quest at any cost. “Rappaccini’s Daughter” ends unhappily for its headstrong hero; likewise, Henry, stubbornly clinging to his lie, poisons his chances for love with Isabella, his ideal woman. In a climactic scene that also references the myth of Orpheus, who loses Eurydice forever through his weakness and insecurity, the heartbroken Isabella turns back into “moonlit stone” and leaves Henry alone to regret his willful deception.

Malamud’s allusions to myth and fable are an appropriate lens for Henry’s downfall, since his expectations for his future romance with Isabella are derived largely from illusory sources: the European art, literature, and myth that he has copiously imbibed. Surrounded by these storied Christian palazzos, gardens, and museums that are presided over by an aristocracy that he dreams of marrying into, he believes that his Jewishness marks him as an outsider, as though he were a ragamuffin Alladin vying for the Sultan’s daughter. In an early scene brimming with sexual overtones, Henry furtively touches the sacred Del Dongo bed that Napoleon supposedly slept in, and it is symbolically significant that of all people, Isabella’s father is the one to savagely rebuke him. How much worse it would be, Henry must think, if a Jewish man took Ernesto’s daughter to bed. Like Romeo dismissing his “hateful” name as a mere accident of birth, Henry plots to forever bury a religion and history that have little meaning for him, aside from its threat to his storybook romance. Not having suffered in life, least of all for his religious faith, Henry cannot see the marks of suffering in another—not until Isabella bares her heart and her breast to him, displaying the tattoo from the Buchenwald concentration camp. Isabella’s Jewishness and her suffering, which were fused in the crucible of the Holocaust, are the pillar of her being and have lent her a sharp and hopeful insight into Henry’s true identity, which he indignantly denies to the last. In “The Lady of the Lake,” insight and empathy come too late for Henry, and the enchantress vanishes forever into her watery prison, emphasizing the fact that denying one’s true identity is a prison all its own.