Eros in fantasy

Résumé du document

Our study of Eros in fantasy will be based on seven short stories (A. Bierce's The Death of Halpin Frayser, Ch. Dickens's The Signalman, Hawthorne's The Minister's Black Veil, P. Highsmith's The Snail-Watcher, H. P. Lovecraft's The Festival, R. Matheson's Born of Man and Woman, E. A. Poe's The Black Cat) and two short excerpts from Gothic novels (M. G. Lewis's The Monk and A. Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho) but occasional reference will be made to other works by these authors and also to Henry James, the Brontë sisters and Le Fanu. We will begin with a brief presentation of the Greek myth of Eros. The second part of this study will consider the problem of knowledge in relation to the erotic dimension of literary fantasies. We will turn to the different manifestations of Eros in fantasy and the process of attraction-repulsion in the third part of this study before examining, in our fourth and final part, two erotic motifs which, latently or overtly, introduce and erotic dimension. They have been used in a variety of texts and we will try to find them in the ones we have selected.

Extraits

[...] Eros in Fantasy (HANDOUT 1 Who/What is Eros? 2 The Symbollic Dimention Mars Disarmed by Venus (1824), J-L. David Adam and Eve with the Tree of Knowledge as Death (1587 ) Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels From Jacob Ruegg's De conceptu et generatione hominis 3 Attraction Repulsion 4 Two Reccurent Motifs Monk and Sleeping Figure (1927), Allen Lewis Medusa (c. 1598), Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio Illustration for W. Whitman's The Half Breed and Other Stories 1 ANNABEL LEE 2 (HANDOUT II) by Edgar Allan Poe (1849) It was many and many a year ago, In a kingdom by the sea, That a maiden there lived whom you may know By the name of ANNABEL And this maiden she lived with no other thought Than to love and be loved by me. [...]

[...] Man knew Eros and was made a mortal. Thus, the desires to eat the forbidden fruit, to penetrate the mystery and to know are all intimately connected with the figure of Eros. Reminiscences of the Judaeo-Christian sin of knowledge are very present in The Minister's Black Veil and The Death of Halpin Frayser. The burden of “secret Mr. Hooper carries recalls the Puritan burden of original sin, a burden of which one is never relieved. On the other hand, seemed” to Halpin Frayser “that it was all in expiation of some crime which, though conscious of his guilt, he could not rightly remember.” In both texts, sin seems very much related to the figure of the woman or the mother and to sexuality. [...]

[...] In this sense, the phallus is an ambiguous motif. Sometimes, it is a positive symbol of desire and fertility and this is the case in James's The Turn of the Screw where the phallic towers the governess looks at suggest that madness lurks around because she is deprived of beneficent male presence. The phallus can also become a negatively charged symbol. In the “awful obscurity” of Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho, Emily, the incarnation of the female fear of rape, “continued to gaze, till its [the castle's] clustering towers were alone seen, rising over the tops of the woods . [...]

[...] Love, or the honourable desire to possess and cherish the good and the beautiful in both sexes, is rarely present in those texts and if it is there, its power is lessened and its essence is loosely moulded into a monstrous caricature of Eros where twisted erotomaniacal impulses (as in A. Radcliffe's works), incest (as in Bierce's The Death of Halpin Frayser), rape (as in M. G. Lewis's The Monk) and voyeurism (as in Patricia Highsmith's The Snail-Watcher) are only the top of the iceberg. [...]

[...] From secret- hunter he has become the prey of a secret monster. His desire to know more has not been assuaged and he is subjected to the newly found desire to communicate and share his monstrous secret. We could say that the fantastic experience of those texts consists in the rape of a character-subject who has been placed within a reality he perceives as unacceptable on account of the mystery of his beginnings. He wants to know and yet, he must not. [...]