I am thankful to SB for pointing out the resonance at play b/w Aunts Maud and Sybil. Like Maud, Sybil is a poet and seems a bit eccentric ("poetically superstitious"). She predicts her own death, when HH is sixteen. Maud likewise dies when Hazel is sixteen, and it seems that she may have been a more maternal figure to Hazel than Hazel's own mother (Sybil) ever was. What's more, just as Aunt Sybil predicts her own death, Aunt Maud seems to have been able to predict John Shade's death. So this seems a typically Nabokovian rearrangement of details, where there is not an exact one-to-one narrative analog but the individual parts are recognizably allied. As for "fatal rigidity," I see this as HH's explanation of his own rigidity as a "parent." So fatal here means something like "fated," as HH sees in his own manner the marks of Aunt Sybil.

 

I wonder if the conflation of Maud and Sybil doesn't lend further legitimacy to Jim Twiggs's theory that Aunt Maud had a sexual relationship with young John Shade--a relationship later replaced by his relationship with Sybil.

 

Matt Roth

 

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JA: Jansy's quite right, H.H. reports, servants rumors I believe, that Sybil was in love with his father and that he "light heartedly" took advantage of this fact one rainy afternoon and forgot about it entirely by the time the weather had cleared, more or less correctly paraphrased. I've always had a slight fondness for this self sacrificing woman whose maternal dedication seems to have gone sadly unappreciated. I explained my own views of the meaning "fatal rigidity" in a previous response.