Lois & Clark Forums Forums Fan Fiction Fanfic Related "The Dying Dandy" and the LnC deathfic

Just recently I saw a reproduction of a famous Swedish early 20th century painting, "The Dying Dandy" by Nils von Dardel. The painting is here:



At the center of the painting there is a slender young man with spiky black bangs, elegantly dressed in green, holding a mirror in his right hand and resting his left hand over his heart. His face is pale, but his features are almost angelic. His eyes are closed and his expression is dreamy.

He is dying, and he is beautiful.

Three young women tend to him. They look calm and solemn, almost as if they were officiants at a religious ceremony. The smallest of the women holds a pillow under the dying dandy's head, so that he will die comfortably. One woman is preparing to cover the dandy with an opulent blanket of some kind. She has a ghost of a smile on her face, like a mother tucking her little boy in for the night. The middle woman is looking straight down on the dandy's face, untroubled, calmly tender and almost smiling.

These women aren't feeling too bad at the dandy's passing, but they enjoy officiating at his demise. In the left hand corner of the painting, on the other hand, is a young man who is putting on a very exaggerated show of grief at the other man's death.

Interestingly, there exists another version of Dardel's painting:



Here the three women who tend to the dying dandy have been replaced by two young men and a young boy. The grieving man in the left hand corner is gone. The dandy has a fan in his hand instead of a mirror, and he is even more physically beautiful here; interestingly, we see more of his legs here than we did in the other picture. One of the young men who tend to him tenderly touches the dandy's face and smiles down at him.

What do these pictures tell us about death and grieving? First of all, who is the dying man, and what does his death symbolize? Is it Dardel himself who is dying in these pictures? No, I don't think so, because the dandy's hair is too black to be Dardel's. This is how Nils Dardel painted his own self portrait:



No, I don't think that the dandy is Dardel himself. On the other hand, the dandy could represent certain aspects of Dardel. For example, Dardel was clearly bisexual, but after these two paintings were completed Dardel had relationships with three women. It could be that Dardel "was saying good-bye" to the homosexual aspect of himself, as it were. If so, the three male figures tending to the dandy could be three different versions of himself "putting the homosexual dandy away", as it were. Or at least, they are "covering him up", and it is the sternest one of them who is in charge of the cover-up.

In his lifetime, Dardel was criticized for being too much of an aesthete, of caring too much about the exaggerated beauty and elegance of certain things. In the picture where a man is crying for the dying dandy, it could be that Dardel is grieving for his own inner aesthete who couldn't find acceptance anywhere, and the three women who tend to him could represent the surrounding society whose dismissal of Dardel was somewhat similar to the way a mother is "dismissing" her son when she sends him to bed.

In any case, the pictures represent the death of a male character, and the only person who is really grieving for him is also male. This is an all-male tragedy.

By contrast, most LnC deathfics are Lois deathfics, where the person who dies is therefore Lois. But while the dying dandy himself is at the center of the pictures carrying his name, Lois herself is rarely at the center of Lois deathfics. Instead, it is the man in the left hand corner who is at the center of the Lois deathfics - that is, it is Clark and his grief that are square in the middle of the Lois deathfics. As for the people tending to the dying dandy in the paintings here, no such people are usually to be found in Lois deathfics. In other words, no other people pay much attention to Lois's death. Lois, in other words, is not an important player in the Lois deathfics. Instead, the Lois deathfics are extremely Clark-centered fics. And in that respect the Lois deathfics are very similar to the tableaux described in Dardel's paintings: they are extremely male tragedies.

There are two versions of the Lois deathfic. The most common one is the relentless tragedy. This is the kind of story where Clark can't stop grieving for Lois. The tragedy is not that Lois is dead but that Clark can't stop grieving.

The other kind of Lois deathfic is the "sort-of-happy-ending" deathfic. Here Clark is able to stop grieving for Lois and turn his attention back to the world again. Clark is feeling better again, and since the tragedy was always about his feelings and not really about Lois's death, things are looking up again.

In any case, I think it is revealing to look at Dardel's paintings to see what the LnC deathfics are and what they aren't.

Ann