The basic thesis of Duffy's erudite stroll through Western cultural history is that, whenever fairies, or the faery world generally, appear, it's all down to repressed sexuality. In essence, then, we have two strands here: a history of Faery in art and literature, and an attempt to prove it all comes down to sexual repression. The former strand I enjoyed -- and thankfully it is by far the bulkier part of the book. The latter, as Duffy becomes more and more offhand issuing extreme interpretations, was, far from being convincing, more and more irritating.
It can't be denied that there's a sexual element in faery fantasy. You just have to look at all those naked, butterfly-winged damsels the Victorians painted. But I can't believe that's all there is to it, which is what Duffy seems to be claiming. The banshee, for instance, is surely more about death than it could ever be about sex? Even Freud, whose stiff revenant seems to be looming behind Duffy's shoulder, had to bolt Thanatos, the "Death Principle" onto his formerly entirely sexual interpretation of the irrational. Duffy doesn't seem to suffer this qualm. Every relation between human beings, or humans and faeries, is instantly resolved into its most taboo-laden sexual interpretation. So, for instance, in The Tempest, Prospero's testing of Ferdinand is all about the old mage's incestuous desires for Miranda, and not at all about his hope to match her with a fitting husband. Peter Pan, meanwhile, is a "free-flying phallus", whatever that may be. Published as it was in 1972, at a time when surely Dr Freud's influence was waning, it nevertheless takes a strictly Freudian viewpoint, as evident when Duffy speaks of the "perversion of the observed, clinical insights of Freud into the neo-mysticism of Jungian pseudo-psychology". Perhaps people can be divided into Freudians and Jungians, just as you can divide them into dog lovers and cat lovers; if so, I'm of the Jungian crowd, and can't help feeling that any attempt to Freudianise everything is a step backwards. Duffy does not share this view. "Most readers and writers," she says, "have enough knowledge of psychoanalytic theory to be unconsciously suspicious of their preoccupations and symbols", implying that all well-cultured people ought to treat their imaginations with nothing but suspicion, rather than what (I can't help feeling) Faery itself demands, which is wonder.
Duffy's treatment of the history of art & literature is uneven -- she admits, in her preface, that a book of this size can only ever be an introduction to the subject -- but it allows her to linger over subjects she has a genuine feeling for. The chapter on Keats' relation to Faery seems particularly heartfelt, as it deals with his development as a poet as much as it does with accusations of sexual immaturity. The final chapter addresses science fiction as "old wine in new bottles", and pretty much damns the whole field, apart from Isaac Asimov. After expressing mild surprise that SF goes through trends, she says, "Currently... the control of mind over matter is in" and goes on to prove it via A E Van Vogt's Voyage of the Space Beagle -- which was first published in 1950 -- and so seems to have missed the fact that SF had just gone through a decade of self-examination and reinvention in the 60s, and that the genre was perfectly aware of its own sexual preoccupations.
It can't be denied that there's a sexual element in faery fantasy. You just have to look at all those naked, butterfly-winged damsels the Victorians painted. But I can't believe that's all there is to it, which is what Duffy seems to be claiming. The banshee, for instance, is surely more about death than it could ever be about sex? Even Freud, whose stiff revenant seems to be looming behind Duffy's shoulder, had to bolt Thanatos, the "Death Principle" onto his formerly entirely sexual interpretation of the irrational. Duffy doesn't seem to suffer this qualm. Every relation between human beings, or humans and faeries, is instantly resolved into its most taboo-laden sexual interpretation. So, for instance, in The Tempest, Prospero's testing of Ferdinand is all about the old mage's incestuous desires for Miranda, and not at all about his hope to match her with a fitting husband. Peter Pan, meanwhile, is a "free-flying phallus", whatever that may be. Published as it was in 1972, at a time when surely Dr Freud's influence was waning, it nevertheless takes a strictly Freudian viewpoint, as evident when Duffy speaks of the "perversion of the observed, clinical insights of Freud into the neo-mysticism of Jungian pseudo-psychology". Perhaps people can be divided into Freudians and Jungians, just as you can divide them into dog lovers and cat lovers; if so, I'm of the Jungian crowd, and can't help feeling that any attempt to Freudianise everything is a step backwards. Duffy does not share this view. "Most readers and writers," she says, "have enough knowledge of psychoanalytic theory to be unconsciously suspicious of their preoccupations and symbols", implying that all well-cultured people ought to treat their imaginations with nothing but suspicion, rather than what (I can't help feeling) Faery itself demands, which is wonder.
Duffy's treatment of the history of art & literature is uneven -- she admits, in her preface, that a book of this size can only ever be an introduction to the subject -- but it allows her to linger over subjects she has a genuine feeling for. The chapter on Keats' relation to Faery seems particularly heartfelt, as it deals with his development as a poet as much as it does with accusations of sexual immaturity. The final chapter addresses science fiction as "old wine in new bottles", and pretty much damns the whole field, apart from Isaac Asimov. After expressing mild surprise that SF goes through trends, she says, "Currently... the control of mind over matter is in" and goes on to prove it via A E Van Vogt's Voyage of the Space Beagle -- which was first published in 1950 -- and so seems to have missed the fact that SF had just gone through a decade of self-examination and reinvention in the 60s, and that the genre was perfectly aware of its own sexual preoccupations.
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