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John Pennington"She [Christina Rossetti] was replete with the spirit of self-postponement" - W.M. Rossetti In the influential The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar begin their study with two epigraphs: one from Laura Riding's "Eve's Side of It," the other from George MacDonald's adult fantasy Lilith: The strife of thought, accusing and excusing, began afresh, and gathered fierceness. The soul of Lilith lay naked to the torture of pure interpenetrating inward light. She began to moan, and sigh deep sighs, then murmur as holding colloquy with a dividual self: her queendom was no longer whole; it was divided against itself. [. . .] At length she began what seemed a tale about herself, in a language so strange, and in forms so shadowy, that I could but here and there understand a little. (viii) Gilbert and Gubar claim that the Lilith myth: represents the price women have been told they must pay for attempting to define themselves. And it is a terrible price: cursed both because she is a character who 'got away' and because she dared to usurp the essentially literary authority implied by the act of naming, Lilith is locked into a vengeance (child-killing) which can only bring her more suffering (the killing of her own children). (35) They view Lilith as a metaphor for "the problems of female authorship and female authority" that represents the following: a life of feminine submission, of "contemplative purity," is a life of silence, a life that has no pen and no story, while a life of female rebellion, of "significant action," is a life that must be silenced, a life whose monstrous pen tells a terrible story. (36) Lilith's terrible story is given that monstrous pen by MacDonald in Lilith (1895), a novel that has created interpretative debates amongst MacDonald critics, for the myth seems too expansive for his fantastic imagination. Robert Lee Wolff in The Golden Key, for example, calls the novel "feeble, ambiguous, and inconsistent in its imagery, full of senile hatreds and resentments, and the most violent in its aggressions of all MacDonald's works" (332), concluding that "MacDonald has muddled his own symbols and clouded the entire cosmology that he has been trying to construct" (363). However, William Raeper, much more positive about the book in general, argues that MacDonald "was always dogged by this sinister figure" (366) but "was able to integrate his unconscious anger and fear into a powerful myth, for at last even Lilith, MacDonald's own image of the betraying woman, does lie down in the House of Death and seek salvation" (383). And Roderick McGillis admits: "In short, Lilith is a troubling book" (47); Lilith becomes "the woman who refuses to be written" (51). But Lilith, he suggests, is "a great book [. . .] because of the subversive power of its mysterious images" (53). Lilith is a troubling book; it is also a problematic book, one haunted by the mysterious image of that metamorphosing character, Lilith. Mr Vane, the narrator of the fantasy novel, recognises the difficulty of "reading" Lilith. When seeing Lilith as Princess of the evil city of Bulika, Vane states: "My frame quivered with conflicting consciousnesses, to analyse which I had no power. I was simultaneously attracted and repelled: each sensation seemed either" (132). Such contradictory impulses of attraction and repulsion of Lilith propel the fantasy novel and become the central metaphor for our reading response to Lilith. As Vane journeys through the magical realm, he admits that he "was lost in a space larger than imagination" (33), a space that represents the tensions of frustrate desire. In a sense, the Lilith myth is too expansive, too complex, too contradictory for MacDonald's imagination: Lilith's "dividual self"--at once repulsive yet fascinating, dangerous yet enticing, horrific yet erotic--overpowers the narrative space in such an aggressive way that MacDonald must eventually silence the temptress by imprisoning her in his Christian myth of redemption. He places her in a room of his own, but the narrative finally is unable to silence her completely, for her self is dissolved only to haunt the fringes of the novel, an absence that is always present, that is vocalised clearly in the narrative. That attempted silencing, in turn, suggests that MacDonald struggled, like Christina Rossetti in Goblin Market, with the fear and fascination of temptation and fall, finally "resolving" this tension via Christian redemption. Helena Michie argues that: absence seems to be the primary motif in fiction of the period; the Victorian novel is haunted by a series of dim shadowy figures that hover on the margins of canonical texts. They are warnings in whispers, an implied contrast to heroines; like the governess, they hint at alternate tragic endings-they partake of none of the physicality which, in turn, haunts the Victorian canon." (72) MacDonald, we shall see, engages the shadowy Lilith myth to comment upon the conflicting temptations of desire that challenge societal unity at the expense of self. Thus Lilith is condemned, like Laura and Lizzy in Goblin Market, to "self-postponement"--she must sacrifice her feminine desire for self to the Christian myth of selflessness, ultimately denying her power as woman to that transcendental patriarchal signifier, God. Lilith is a fascinating novel that mirrors MacDonald's own "frustrate desire" over the fleshly desires and Christian goodness, a mirror that reflects a tension indicative of the Victorian period. The binary polarities that frame the narrative are Blakeian-innocence versus experience--and these polarities represent those dichotomous feminine images that Gilbert and Gubar define as the angel and the monster--Lilith, interestingly enough, "both the first woman and the first monster" (35). Thus Lilith, one can argue, is trapped by her divided self-the pull towards angelic figures (represented by Eve, Mara and Lona) and Lilith's demand to remain her own monstrous Self (represented by shadow, worm and vampire). In Woman and the Demon, Nina Auerbach argues that the woman as demon is: that disruptive spiritual energy which also engorges the divine. The demon is first of all the woman's familiar, the source of her ambiguous holiness, but it is also the popular-and demonic-imagination that endowed her with this holiness in defiance of three cherished Victorian institutions: the family, the patriarchal state, and God the father." (1) The demon, suggests Auerbach, provides "new icons, new shapes for the self, new sources of belief" (2). Bram Dijkstra contends that "the search for woman as the lily, the paragon of virtue, had carried within itself the discovery of Lilith, of woman as snake, the inevitable dualistic opposite of the image of virginal purity" (216). Thus Lilith becomes the negative transformation of female purity. Erich Neumann finds Lilith symbolic of "spiritual-psychic death" (74) that can become one of "the forerunners of inspiration and vision and so manifest [. . .] on a road leading to salvation, through extinction of death to rebirth" (76). Lilith certainly is one such demon, for she denies family (abandoning and eventually killing her daughter, Lona), denies the patriarchal state (refusing domestic life as Adam's wife), and denies God (refusing to be controlled by her maker and His myth). Yet MacDonald suggests at the end of the fantasy that she will transform into something good. What may be the most fascinating demonic subversion in the novel, however, is Lilith's defence of the individual Self, her refusal to succumb to the power of others. Until the end of the fantasy, Lilith maintains her own identity in spite of and in defiance of patriarchal control and the submissive women who are willing to become passive angels. As a demon, Lilith thwarts angelic imprisonment for monstrous freedom. Thus Lilith becomes a contradictory figure in Lilith, a true Blakean figure that marries heaven and hell, for as Blake tells us: "Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence" (pl. 3). Early in the novel, Vane follows Mr. Raven, who is also Adam, upstairs to the room with the mirror, which becomes the portal to the alternative world. Of course, a mirror symbolises the self, but it also represents the Other, the double, and, like Alice's looking-glass, this mirror reflects an alternative world of possibility where "all was vague and uncertain" (8). Immediately after entering the mirror world, Vane writes: "I did not know myself [. . .]. As for the name I went by in my own world, I had forgotten it, and did not care to recall it, for it meant nothing" (11). Vane is willing to abandon his very essence in this new world: he represents the path MacDonald's characters generally are to take--abandonment of self for the great good of redemption through death. But Lilith veers off this path. She is Self, but she is also confined by MacDonald's world view that demands relinquishment of Self for the Spirit--which is reflected in Adam and God. Lilith is caught in the process of "feminist self-postponement," which Kathleen Blake defines as "the evasion of one pattern of self-limitation [which] involves the imposition of another" (ix). In the angel-monster opposition, Lilith is confronted with the feminist self-postponement double-bind: she refuses to lose Self and become the passive angel represented by Eve, but by not embracing the angelic, she must remain a monster if she wants to continue to live and be her own Self, thus domed to kill her daughter Lona. What compels Lilith to live in the world of Self is desire--or more precisely, frustrated desire--which ultimately fragments her Self in the fantasy. Vane's first vision of Lilith depicts the angel-monster dichotomy as Lilith transforms from "angelic" beauty to monsters before his eyes: She was beautiful but with such a pride at once and misery on her countenance that I could hardly believe what yet I saw. [. . .] Vane later finds Lilith in a trance wasting away; he warms the cold, naked body with his body; feeds her; and bathes her in the warm waters of a stream, but each night he has unsettling dreams: Every time I slept, I dreamed of finding a wounded angel, who, unable to fly, remained with me until at last she loved me and would not leave me; and every time I woke, it was to see, instead of an angel-visage with lustrous eyes, the white, motionless, wasted face upon the couch." (104) Vane desires to possess and control Lilith, the same goal Adam has for her, yet Lilith is unyielding, transforming from angel to monster in order to maintain her Self. She is ironically labelled a wounded angel, but more precisely she is a vampire, whom Vane describes as follows: "Her mouth wore a look of satisfied passion; she wiped from it a streak of red," her "thirst demoniac" (138). Thus she transforms into the white leech and sucks the blood from Vane, nourishing her Self back to strength, her vampire or succubus self-symbolic of sexual desire, but desire that is more auto-erotic-Lilith lives solely for herself, dependent upon no one. Before fleeing Vane, Lilith tells him: "We must understand each other! [. . .]. You have done me the two worst of wrongs--compelled me to live, and put me to shame: neither of them can I pardon!" (111). Vane remarks later: "Could such beauty as I saw, and such wickedness as I suspected, exist in the same person?" (133). Lilith, caught in the throes of self-postponement, cannot be forced to live or die; she cannot be beholden to anyone but herself. And this makes her in the eyes of Adam and his philosophy a monster. She later tells Vane: "I [. . .] live to live on. Old age is to you a horror; to me it is a dear desire: the older we grow, the nearer we are to our perfection" (134). Of course, Lilith professes the opposite doctrine to that which Adam or Mr Raven preaches in the House of Death, where death is the great sleep that leads to redemption and the true beginning of life. Thus as Adam encourages Vane to die into life, Lilith desires life at the expense of death, which is a relinquishing of Self to the creator, God, who gives Life under His own terms. As self-creator, Lilith tempts Vane to embrace her desire; she now wants to "create" Vane in her image and control him: But you must satisfy my desire or set me free-prove yourself priceless or worthless! To satisfy the hunger of my love, you must follow me, looking for nothing, not gratitude, not even pity in return!--follow and find me, and be content with merest presence, with scantest forbearance! (135) "What you have made me is yours!" taunts Lilith to Vane. "I will repay you as never yet did woman! My power, my beauty, my love are your own: take them" (136). And Vane tells us that "for a moment I was tempted to love a lie" (136). Lilith's desire to live contributes to her self-postponement, for to live she must remain a passionate monster or deny desire and become a passive angel. Leo Bersani, in A Future for Astyanax: Character and Desire in Literature, argues that the nineteenth century novel is torn between two selves: the socially defined self and the free, universal transcendent self; consequently, most realistic fiction of the century tried to posit the myth of the coherent self, where "a rigidly ordered self contributes to a pervasive cultural ideology of the self which serves the established social order" (56). "Desire makes being problematic," argues Bersani. "[T]he notion of a coherent unified self is threatened by the discontinuous, logically incompatible images of a desiring imagination" (84). According to Bersani, this desire is primarily subversive in two ways: "Desire can subvert social order; it can also disrupt novelistic order. The nineteenth-century novel is haunted by the possibility of these subversive movements, and it suppresses them with a brutality both shocking and eminently logical" (66). Of course, MacDonald abandoned the realistic novel for his final book, returning to the more expansive and subversive fantastical mode that he began his career with in Phantastes. (1858). The "genre" choice is calculated. Rosemary Jackson argues that fantasy "is a literature of desire, which seeks that which is experienced as absence and loss" (3). To Jackson, fantasy can "tell of" or "expel" (3) this desire, which makes the mode or genre inherently oxymoronic: The movement from the first to the second of these functions, from expression as manifestation to expression as expulsion, is one of the recurrent features of fantasy narratives, as it tells of the impossible attempt to realise desire, to make visible the invisible and to discover absence. (4) By uncovering this absence of desire in the guise of Lilith, and by attempting to expel this very desire, MacDonald opens up a very subversive can of narrative and theological worms. (Remember, Lilith at one point in the narrative is a leech.) Even in the fantasy mode, where an author has the freedom to tell of taboo desire, Lilith seems too powerful for the narrative to control. As a character of desire, Lilith is, in a sense, coherent self-postponement, for a coherent or unified self would imprison her, as Bersani argues, "within a psychology which [the character's] creator has developed from the society being contested, a psychology of the coherently structured and significantly expressive self" (59-60). Lilith then has an "ontological slipperiness" where her being is "always somewhere else" (198). She cannot be controlled by the thematic centre (redemption by God) and the authorial creator (MacDonald); she slips around throughout the novel, transforming into various others, feeding off Vane. Or as Bersani argues: "Desire [. . .] is essentially vampiristic"; "the fate of all fascination with the self as the other-the fate of a radical open-endedness of being--is a kind of restless immortality" (212). This restless immortality is what Lilith craves but cannot have, for she must be silenced and made to sleep and rise again, ultimately imprisoned by her creator. She is trapped in MacDonald's patriarchal Christian universe. The fascination with Lilith, then, is with the ending-or the supposed closure to Lilith's character-which forces MacDonald to "tame" the monster thematically and structurally in the fantasy. Two key scenes reflect this tension that MacDonald is unable (and maybe unwilling) to resolve. The first scene concerns Adam and Lilith when they "meet" in Vane's house after he climbs a tree back into the "real" narrative world. Adam reads from a fragmented manuscript which is Lilith's story in her own words. McGillis points out that "Adam reads this book in order to reassume control over his first wife Lilith, to put an end to her protean behaviour [. . .] The book which contains her words is used to control her" (46). Adam tells Vane of Lilith's history: God "brought me an angelic splendour to be my wife: there she lies! For her first thought was power; she counted it slavery to be one with me, and bear children for Him who gave her being" (154). Lilith's designated role is to be an angelic mother-figure. But Lilith rebels and is sent off into the night world. Adam gets a new wife, Eve, whom Adam describes as follows: "but my Eve repented, and is now beautiful as never was woman or angel, while her groaning, travailing world is the nursery of our Father's children" (155). Eve is reduced to a beautiful object-an angel-whose primary function is as child bearer. Adam even tells Vane: "for even Lilith shall be saved by her childbearing" (154). Upon hearing Adam, Lilith, who has been hearing all this as a Persian cat, transforms into "a woman once more" and says, "I will not repent. I will drink the blood of thy child" (156). In this scene the self-postponement that Lilith finds herself facing is clear: to remain her own Self, or repent and become a wife/mother/angel in the service of Adam and God. The other central scene entails Mara, Adam and Eve's daughter and "double" of Lona, Lilith's daughter whom Lilith has killed. Mara attempts to get Lilith to repent. Mara, however, represents bitterness and lives in the House of Sorrow, which may represent the loss of female identity--it is bitter and sad, as Rossetti's Laura can attest to. Mara tells Lilith that if she will repent and give herself over to Adam, she will be "remade" into her proper image as woman. Again, Lilith rebels. Lilith's desire for Self is seen in her challenge to Mara as she catalogues her defiance in a series of epitaphs: "I will be myself and not another!" "I will be what I mean myself now." "I would do after my nature." "I will do as my Self pleases--as my Self desires." "I will do what I will to do." "I am what I am; no one can take from me myself!" "Another shall not make me!" "No one ever made me. I defy that Power to unmake me from a free woman!" (208-09). When Mara tells Lilith that if she does not repent she will suffer, Lilith answers: "But be free!" (209). Lilith's defiance is centred around her desire for the power of Self. Even when Mara has her look into a mirror to see her Self, Lilith states: "I will not be remade! [. . .] I will not be aught of his making" (211-12); "I will yet be mistress of myself! I am still what I have always known myself--queen of Hell, and mistress of the worlds! (215). Thus we face the crux of the narrative problem: what can be done with Lilith in the narrative? Should she remain free? Or should she be subdued? Should she become fulfilled? Or should she remain in a lack? MacDonald, it seems, writes himself into an impasse, for at the end of the fantasy he unconvincingly (in the narrative sense, not necessarily in terms of MacDonald's Christian world view) "converts" Lilith, domesticates her so she can be like the other women in the fantasy--Eve, Mara, and Lona, all angels, all Great Mothers. But Lilith has continually rejected these roles; thematically and aesthetically she should remain a monster. After all, she has just killed her own daughter. Nina Auerbach recognises MacDonald's fictional problem: Lilith seems too large and suggestive a figure for MacDonald's religious allegory to encompass; his declamatory female overreacher stalks about without being given much to do until she is chastened by an abruptly introduced and not very convincing male, Adam. MacDonald further dilutes his queen by counterbalancing her ambition against the benevolent wisdom of Eve, Mara, and Lona, three "good" ruling women who preside over the House of Death, soothing its inhabitants into a mesmeric trance to await a vague universal awakening. (38) Thus after seeing her Self in the mirror, Vane tells us that: "She was what God could not have created. She had usurped beyond her share in self-creation, and her part had undone His! She saw now what she had made, and behold, it was not good!" (216). And Lilith conveniently repents. She states: "I yield. I cannot hold out. I am defeated.--Not the less, I cannot open my hand" (216). This scene seems unsatisfactory, for what she sees in the mirror is exactly what she wants to see: a Self-creation not at the mercy of any maker. Why she gives up, then, makes little narrative sense, except that MacDonald needs her to repent so that his story can move towards closure. Thus Lilith's character seems inconsistent. Lilith's sudden surrender can be explained simply if we acknowledge that MacDonald believed that evil is only a stage in the continual progress toward goodness. At the end of Phantastes, the narrator Anodos, writes: yet I know that good is coming to me-that good is always coming; though few have at all times the simplicity and the courage to believe it. 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. And so Farewell." But the Phantastes solution is more a problem in Lilith, for Lilith's transformation is problematic. In Idols of Perversity, Dijkstra catalogues the images of woman in nineteenth-century visual art (which correspond closely to Gilbert and Gubar's angel-monster dichotomy). He writes: This is a book filled with the dangerous fantasies of the Beautiful People of a century ago. It contains a few scenes of exemplary virtue and many more of lurid sin. Much of it deals with magnificent dreams of intellectual achievement doomed to wither before the tempting presence of woman, who [. . .] is to be found dragging man into a grim trough of perversion. (vii) He continues: Around the middle of the nineteenth century, [. . .] the promise of material progress and the cultural success of the functional marginalization of women, had made males heady with confidence that they might actually succeed in changing "earthly woman, with a woman's weakness, a woman's faults" back into "the unforgotten Eve of Paradise." (4-5) Thus MacDonald's basic tenet that all evil is in the process of becoming good gets tangled into gender, for Lilith's defiance and eventual submission seems part of the nineteenth century's gender politics. Lilith's apparent defeat as she collapses and eventually goes off to sleep can be viewed as MacDonald's attempt to "tame" the passionate character into his religious mythology of redemption. Dijkstra argues that one significant image of woman in the later half of the nineteenth century was "the collapsing woman" (64), who must collapse or sleep as a consequence her overabundant desire, which manifested "in the throes of overindulgence in autoerotic pleasures" (79). Paintings of the sleeping or collapsed woman depict her to be "at once the object of erotic desire and a creature of peculiar self-containment, not really interested in, and hence not making any demands upon, the viewers participation in her personal erotic gratification" (69-70). Since Lilith is a creature of pure Self and desire, she should continue to roam the narrative like Keat's femme fatale in "La Belle Dame Sans Merci." But MacDonald feels compelled to silence her and make her a passive, submissive object, a static being designed to be gazed at. Ironically, this turns Lilith into an object of desire. As Dijkstra suggests about the sleeping woman: this pose allows the male "once more to enter into a voyeuristic, passive erotic titillation within a soothing, undemanding context conducive to a state of restful detumescence" (78). Thus Lilith remains a dividual self: though controlled, she still reflects the tension between Adam's desired angelic innocence and Lilith's self-desire, remaining in a state of self-postponement, waiting to be born. The ambiguous ending of the fantasy supports this contention, for Lilith's transformation from monster to angel is not complete at the end of the fantasy--she remains in transformative process. And there are hints at the end that MacDonald is torn over Lilith's female power and her relinquishing of it to patriarchal control. A key symbol is her clenched hand that seems to represent all the evil of her Self. Try as she might, Lilith cannot open that hand, and in a way remains symbolically defiant; she yields, but not completely. Lilith is brought to the House of Death where she meets Eve--the symbolic intersection of the great archetypes in the work: Angel (repentant Eve) and Monster (Lilith). In a final act of unmaking Lilith's Self, Adam cuts off her defiant hand, and in its place begins growing a beautiful hand. All Lilith can say at the end seems mere defeatism: "Show me then to my grave; I am so weary I can live no longer" (225). Lilith's Self is castrated by Adam, the great father, and as McGillis argues, "In Lilith little pleasure derives from the text: the imagination is castrated" (53). That castrated imaginative force is Lilith, who has provided the desire for Self and life that makes the work fascinating. This castration can also be seen as a form of "therapeutic rape," to use Dijkstra's term (83). Adam--a representative of patriarchal, religious power--must therapeutically rape Lilith--representative of monstrous female power--so that Lilith can transform into the passive, angelic, Eve figure. The castration scene, consequently, fuses the erotic and the religious, for Lilith's powerful desire is attractive (remember Vane's attempt to heal the naked Lilith earlier in the novel), yet repulsive, and the hand is chopped off finally in the name of religion. "MacDonald was of the Devil's party without knowing it," quips McGillis (53), for he recognises the attractive power Lilith holds over MacDonald's imagination. Lilith's hand, we may speculate, represents creative feminist power at odds with patriarchal power; thus the hand as power must be castrated, silencing the female creator. The monstrous hand can no longer hold the monstrous pen. After the symbolic castration, Lilith speaks no more, yet the fantasy continues for seven more chapters. Lilith dissolves in the work, her identity gone. But to MacDonald's credit, he does not have Lilith rise immediately to a new life. At the end of the novel she is in process, so the haunting image we are left with is as follows: Lilith, asleep on the death-couch, awaits to be born. But since we do not have any image of a transformed Lilith, we are still left with her monstrous Self--with the Lilith myth in general--hovering over the fringes of the narrative. Her self is still postponed. And MacDonald balances this postponement with Vane's postponement into Heaven, for he is returned back into his library, the fantasy-world narrative never closed, the final chapter entitled "The 'Endless Ending.'" This endless ending seems entropic, as if the narrative about Lilith fizzles out, returning to Vane, who is pushed back into his library to wait for death. "I wait, asleep or awake, I wait" says Vane (264). For MacDonald death is life, or more life. MacDonald's focus on death as redeeming life creates the impasse in Lilith and is in itself fascinating, for MacDonald as writer has death serve as a new beginning, but to Lilith death is an end to Self and enslavement to a self created by others. Thus Lilith, to a degree, does not fit into the fantasy's theme. Bersani argues that "only death can provide us with a myth of uninterrupted life" (213); death is "the most appropriate metaphor for that radical transference of the self to another" (211). But such an uninterrupted life to Lilith is perpetual enslavement as an angel figure, so she does not go gentle into that good night. For MacDonald, however, whose life is in its waning years, death as more life is an enticing prospect. George Bataille in Death and Sensuality contends that "discontinuous beings that we are, death means continuity of being " as we "yearn for our lost continuity" (16). Death as continuation of life-only better life-is what Bataille labels "religious eroticism" that is "concerned with the fusion of beings in a world beyond everyday reality" (16). Lilith's seemingly inconsistent ending in the service of MacDonald's religious eroticism cannot be ignored, but the ending's failure may be part of the book's success. Lilith, concludes McGillis, survives as a great book not because of its emasculating strictures against changing sex roles, social dislocation and individual identity, not because of its eschatological vision, but because of the subversive power of its mysterious images. The book resists systematisation; it delights in paradox, in synecdoche, in riddle, in metaphor, in pleonasm, in oxymoron, in change." (53-54) But Wolff states: "As we near the end, the imagery of Lilith breaks down completely. On the one hand MacDonald paints the picture of a triumphant resurrection. On the other, evil is all about, even on the 'frontiers' of heaven itself" (369). Both McGillis and Wolff are accurate in their assessments. MacDonald's religious eroticism may be at odds with Lilith, for MacDonald wants to want death to be a continuation of life; Lilith does not. And though the literary creator--MacDonald--tames Lilith and has her lie down in the House of Death so that she can live in eternity, the Lilith myth refuses to be so accommodating. Lilith is subdued but not silenced; she haunts the fringes of MacDonald's fantasy. She continues to haunt Vane's dreams: "Her words were terrible with temptation" (233).
Works citedAuerbach, Nina. Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1982. Bataille, Georges. Death and Sensuality: A Study of Eroticism and the Taboo. New York: Walker, 1962. Bersani, Leo. A Future for Astynax: Character and Desire in Literature. New York: Columbia UP, 1984. Blake, Kathleen. Love and the Woman Question in Victorian Literature: The Art of Self-Postponement. Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1983. Blake, William. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. [1790]. London: Oxford UP, 1975. Dijkstra, Bram. Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture. New York: Oxford UP, 1986. Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979. Jackson Rosemary. Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion. New York: Methuen, 1981. MacDonald, George. Phantastes. 1858. Whitethorn CA: Johannesen, 1994. McGillis, Roderick. "Phantastes and Lilith: Femininity and Freedom." The Gold Thread: Essays on George MacDonald. Ed. William Raeper. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1990, 31-55. Miche, Helena. The Flesh Made Word: Female Figures and Women's Bodies. New York: Oxford UP, 1987. Neumann, Erich. The Great Mother. Trans. Ralph Manheim. Princetown: Princetown UP, 1972. Rossetti, William Michael, ed. The Poetical Works of Christina Georgiana Rossetti. London: Macmillan, 1904. Wolff, Robert Lee. The Golden Key: A Study of the Fiction of George MacDonald. New Haven: Yale UP, 1961
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