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The Goddess of George MacDonald

出版	State University of New York at Buffalo, 1995
URL	http://books.google.com.hk/books?id=yb1znQEACAAJ&hl=&source=gbs_api

註釋This dissertation examines the goddess-figures in the fantasies of George MacDonald as indicating the traditionally feminine character of his ultimate values: emotion, intuition, instinct, nurture, interdependence, family orientation, cyclic models of development, and a vision of humanity as part of nature. The primacy of these values for MacDonald arises, it is argued, from his universalism, romanticism, and mysticism. Phantastes is interpreted as a Bildungsroman structured as a spiral with four turns, each turn introduced by a goddess-figure and depicting one stage in the spiritual growth of the protagonist from narcissism to outgoing love. Lilith is read as a parable of both individual maturation and universal redemption, one of the leading symbols of integration being the conflation of its four goddess-figures. The Grandmother in "The Golden Key" is shown to resemble both the Christian God and Marija Gimbutas' postulated Neolithic Goddess of Death and Regeneration. At the Back of the North Wind is read as portraying the constant interaction of the motherly and fatherly, dark and light aspects of God in human life. "The Lost Princess" and "The Gray Wolf" are seen as descriptions of the soulmaking process, presided over by goddess figures. The witches in "The Light Princess" and "The Day Boy and the Night Girl" are read as representing MacDonald's notion of pure evil (treating the Other as a means rather than an end) and, finally, the dissertation demonstrates how this definition of evil makes possible a theodicy based on the spiritual productivity of pain.