George Macdonald
![Phantastes George Macdonald]( "Phantastes George Macdonald")
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Subjects -> Religion & Spirituality -> Authors, A-Z -> ( M ) -> Macdonald, George
Subjects -> Romance -> Fantasy, Futuristic & Ghost
Subjects -> Romance -> Gothic
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Total reviews: 1
Average rating: 3.0 of 5
It's All About Sex 3 out of 5 stars.
0 of 7 people found this review helpful.
While I'm not inclined to Freudian analysis, either McDonald intended this as a moral allegory to illustrate "appropriate" sexual behavior, or he thought his readers too naive to perceive some very suggestive symbolism. The book begins as the narrator, Anodos, is officially celebrating his entry into manhood on his 21st birthday. A beautiful woman magically appears and offers him a visit to Fairy Land, which he accepts. Anodos then wanders through a magical forest experiencing encounters of two kinds. The first kind are with women old enough to be his mother or grandmother. These women not only feed and lodge him, but (though perfect strangers) listen to him, dry his tears, stroke him, and generally cosset him; which he thoroughly enjoys.The mother-figures also warn Anodos against some encounters of the second kind, which is with women more or less his own age. One is a magical tree woman who rescues him from danger, holds him in her arms all night, and says she loves him. When he leaves her sorrowing in the morning he reasons that "she has all the pleasures she ever had" and "her life will perhaps be richer" for his memory, even though he did not stay. He brings a stone woman to life with poetry (the weakest aspect of this book is the abundance of second-rate poetry), but he is not supposed to touch her, and she flees from him. He encounters a second tree woman who takes him into her cave-bower. She tells him her life story, in which she continually refers to her own beauty, and "what followed I cannot clearly remember"-but when the story resumes, it's the next morning. He encounters a "little maiden . . . almost a woman" who carries a fragile globe. He keeps trying to touch it, and breaks it when he does so by force. She weeps, crying repeatedly that he has "broken her globe."
Anodos does start to feel guilty about his behavior, the guilt represented by a black shadow that follows him everywhere regardless of the sun. However, he finds a fairy palace, which is probably a Christian allegory, where he meditates, reads, and contemplates. Healed from the wrong he has done others, he generously forgives himself and returns home (alleviating the anxiety his two little sisters have felt over his disappearance for three mortal weeks). The moral conclusion is, "what we call evil is the only and best shape, which, for the person and his condition at the time, could be assumed by the best good."
Of course, there is the problem of what happened to all the women Anodos wronged . . .His only punishment is that the stone woman marries someone else--a knight he greatly admires, and he soon decides they are fully worthy of each other.
