D.M. Thomas employs protagonist Lisa Erdman’s career as an opera singer for a twofold purpose: first as an extended metaphor for the fluctuations in the levels of her personal agency over the course of the novel, and second as an additional means of tracing Lisa’s journey and foreshadowing her demise in the Babi Yar massacre. The operas and musical works Thomas elects to feature in his novel, namely Don Giovanni, Eugene Onegin, and Boris Godunov (and to a lesser extent A Masked Ball, La Traviata, Liebestod, and Oedipus rex) were deliberately chosen not only to echo The White Hotel’s overarching themes of sex, violence, sacrifice, and tragic demise, but also for their soprano characters, the roles Lisa would have embodied, whose arcs and actions …show more content…
Though not outwardly stated until the third chapter, Frau Anna G., these are the writings of main character Lisa Erdman, scrawled down frantically between the staves of a copy of Don Giovanni during a hysterical, psychosexual episode. The poem tells the story of an encounter between the narrator (who is assumed to be a projection of Lisa) and a man she meets on a train ride back to her home. The pair quickly become lovers and resolve to pause their journeys to take a holiday at a remote, literarily liminal mountain resort known only as the white hotel. Here a series of bizarre, entirely delusional events occur, intertwining the relentless, unabashed lovemaking of the lovers with a string of catastrophic disasters leading to the demise of the majority of the other hotel guests – first introducing the theme of and critical link between sex and violence. The Don Giovanni chapter is followed by a prosaic retelling of the vacation known as The Gastein Journal, and a Freudian case study on both texts and their author, known first under the pseudonym Anna G., a cellist, and later as Lisa Erdman, a