Volume 6 Number 1 Article 1

12-15-1979

George MacDonald and the Lilith Legend in the XIXth Century

Roderick F. McGillis

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Recommended Citation McGillis, Roderick F. (1979) "George MacDonald and the Lilith Legend in the XIXth Century," Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature: Vol. 6 : No. 1 , Article 1. Available at: https://dc.swosu.edu/mythlore/vol6/iss1/1

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Abstract Recounts the origins of the legend of Lilith, and gives examples of the use of Lilith figures by a number of nineteenth century writers. Examines MacDonald’s interpretation of Lilith in his novel of the same name.

Additional Keywords Lilith (archetype); Lilith (archetype) in 19th century literature; MacDonald, George—Characters—Lilith; MacDonald, George. Lilith; Thadara Ottobris; John Pivovarnick

This article is available in Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature: https://dc.swosu.edu/mythlore/vol6/iss1/1 George MacDonald and the Lilith Legend in the XIXth Century

by Roderick F McGillis

In his excellent study, "The Beauty of the Medusa", Semites. The Babylonians attached great importance to dreams, Jerome J. McGann illustrates the complexity of the Medusa "as and incubi and succubi played an important role in their a key Romantic iconograph."1 However, he does not discuss superstitions. And it is reasonable to suppose that during another of the nineteenth century's popular beauties, the the Babylonian captivity the Jews first learned of this night legendary L ilith. Her beauty is not Medusan; its horrors demon. Previously Jewish beliefs gave little place to super­ appear only after seduction. But like the Medusa, she is a natural spirits and demons, and the Talmud states that the variant on the Romantic doppelganger theme since she manifests Jews brought the names of the angels from Babylon. In the the desires of those she seeks to control. Once externalized Talmud (Niddah) L ilith has wings. "If an abortion had the she becomes diabolic, and either destroys her lover or prompts likeness of L ilith its mother is unclean by reason of the him to a new awareness and a new life. To Romantic w riters birth, for it is a child, but it has wings."5 She also she represents a source of evil, a siren who destroys those appears, in the Shabbath, as a frightful succubus who seizes who fall under her spell. She represents the unknown and the those who sleep alone, terrorizes women at childbirth, and mysterious and to turn away from her enchantments is to pre­ who often selects small children as her special victims. She serve humanity. Men fear her and love her, both terrorized is noted for her long hair: the 'Erubin teaches that woman and fascinated by her power. It is logical that she should "grows long hair like L ilith, sits when making water like a achieve a considerable vogue during the nineteenth century beast, and serves as a bolster for her husband."5 Some Jews, when the artistic mind was obsessed with the figure of the in an effort to ward her off, placed "in the chamber occupied femme fa ta le , and the popular mind was adjusting to the likes by the new mother four coins with labels on which are inscribed of Mrs. Wheeler, Madame Bodichon, and Flora Tristan. But her the names of Adam and Eve accompanied by the words 'Avaunt image changes as the century progresses. Depictions of L ilith thee L ilith!"'7 grow more feeble, the enervation of the nineties overtakes her in Marie C orelli's Soul o f L ilith (1894) and in Althea Gyles's In Jewish mythology L ilith's existence is explained by portrayal of her in the Dome (1898). The potency of the myth, the two versions of creation in Genesis. The first occurs however, is preserved in George MacDonald's version of the when "God created man in his own image, in the image of God s t o r y , L ilith: A Romance (1895). Currently, MacDonald is created he him, male and female created he them" (1:27); and enjoying renewed popularity and his L i l i t h , unpopular in his the second occurs when God created Eve from Adam's rib (2:18- own day,2 is available in several recent editions.3 My con­ 23). The former account led to the tradition that God cern here is not with the aesthetic merits of MacDonald's fashioned L ilith, like Adam, from the earth. In this they romance, but rather with his use of a legend which fascinated were equals, and L ilith, as Adam's first wife and a literal­ many nineteenth century w riters—Goethe, R ossetti, Browning, minded female, demanded this equality. She took offence at Hugo, and France among others. This is the legend of L ilith. the recumbant sexual posture Adam demanded of her and she refused to lie beneath him. Her recalcitrance contrasts with L ilith, like Venus, Cleopatra, or Salome, her counter­ the passivity of Eve in St. Augustine's account of sexual ex­ parts favoured by w riters of an aesthetic temperament, indi­ ercises in Eden, and with M ilton's depiction of Adam and Eve cates the complex cultural changes at work during the nine­ in Paradise: teenth century, the disturbing reappraisal of values which produced irrational fears and disillusionm ent. She is an Straight side by side were laid, nor turned, I ween, ambiguous figure, at once reflecting radical and conservative Adam from his fair spouse, nor Eve the rites impulses. The image of the virile woman disturbed faith in Mysterious of connubial love refused. rationalism and the status quo, and exposed the lim itations (Paradise Lost, Book 4, 741-743) of Victorian domestic life where fortunate women married and bred, the less fortunate found positions as cooks, governesses Not so L ilith! Being an independent girl she abandoned Adam. or maids, and the least fortunate drifted to the streets. In She refused reconciliation and as punishment a hundred of her her reactionary aspect L ilith opposes change; she is a mani­ children were killed. Her revenge consisted of strangling in­ festation of the psyche's fear of process as she sucks vi­ fants and seducing sleeping men. Just when she was clearly tality from her children and her lovers. As vampire preying identified as a vampire is unknown, but the fourth century on children and young men she is the terrible mother preser­ commentator Hieronymous identified her with the Greek Lamia. ving her own life by siphoning off that of her children. In The Lamiae not only seduced sleeping men, but sucked their her desire to perserve herself she inhibits the future. Mario blood as well. Saint Jerome, in his commentary on Isaiah, Praz leaves her out of his vamp's gallery suggesting that it tells of the desolated Edom inhabited by "les pelicans et les is unnecessary "to go back to the myth of Lilith"^ to under­ herissons, les ibis et les corbeaus, les dragons et les stand the tradition of the femme fa ta le. But it is informa­ autruches, les onocentaures, les demons, les satyres et les tive to follow L ilith's progressive displacement from legend lamies, en hebreu LILITH (et lamiam quae Hebraiae dicitur to literature and her mutamorphosis from demon to enchantress LILITH)." In the Z o h a r L ilith is the lower Shekhinah, for this changing attitude chronicles a change in man's view opposed to the higher Shekhinah; she is the wife of Sammael of himself. (Satan), as the higher Shekhina is the wife of Adam Kadmon. She is also equated with Leviathan. She inhabits "the depth L ilith's original avatars are now lost, but the Sumerian of the great abyss," but originally she was part o-f primordial goddess Innini, who became the Babylonian Ishtar, in a w ilful man, Adam Kadmon. God "sawed the man in two and fashioned his moment sent a female demon to earth to seduce men: this was female and brought her to him like a bride to the canopy. th e a r d a t l i l i or harlot. Eventually the a r d a t l i l i becam e When Lilith saw this she fled, and she is still in the cities known as a night demon. In certain texts she is one of a of the sea coasts trying to snare mankind. And when the Al­ group of three demons, lilu , lilitu and ardat lili, who personi­ mighty w ill destroy the wicked Rome, He w ill settle L ilith fy natural disturbances such as storms and winds. Later among the ruins, since she is the ruin of the world."9 Here L ilith reappears, no longer beautiful and seductive, but L ilith's connection with the whore of Babylon is clear and her hideous and malign, one of the many Babylonian demons who association with ruins reminds us of her one appearance in the haunted the dreams and tortured the imagination of the ancient Bible where, in the Book of Isaiah (34:14), there is the scene 3 the Brocken in the Walpurgis Night scene L ilith appears, the supreme temptress who even frightens Mephistopheles. He warns Faust:

Beware of her fair hair, for she excels All women in the magic of her locks; And when she winds them round a young man's neck, She w ill not ever set him free again^^

Faust sees L ilith at what is possibly the lowest point in his career, when he is completely given to sensuality. To give himself to her, however, would be to accept damnation, and he quickly turns away. This same scene ends with Faust's vision of Margaret whom Mephistopheles deliberately confuses with Medusa. It is interesting that Shelley's fragmentary translations from F a u s t include this scene. In keeping with his interpretation of Medusa in the lines "On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci in the Florentine Gallery", Shelley de­ tected, that Margaret-Medusa has been the "victim of the tyr­ of desolation among Edom's ruined fortresses. Here "the wild anny and cowardice of established power. Faust regards her beasts of the desert shall also meet with the wild beasts of with both "delight" and "woe"; she is his beloved but her the island, and the satyr shall cry to his fellow; the screech suffering derives from him. Faust is horrified at his power owl also shall rest there." The King James version renders over her and his remorse indicates his latent humanity. l i l i t h as "screech owl", but the revised Standard version M ephistopheles's cunning backfires. As victim Medusa stands translates the same word as "night hag", and it seems clear in opposition to L ilith who threatens man's v irility . that the reference "is not to an animal, but to a female demon Medusa's beauty and horror work redemption; L ilith 's beauty is of popular superstition, analogous to the a lu k a h or vampire of negative. No longer the hideous hag of Milton, L ilith here P ro v e rb s 30: 15. " ^ The a lu k a h is given as "horse-leech" in is alluring, but like Circe she represents destruction and the King James Bible, and this brings to mind L ilith 's mani­ degradation. festation as the white leech in MacDonald's L ilith: A Romance. The most important feature of the legend is sexual sin, but In England, L ilith first makes a brief appearance in it was left to the poets to turn this "night hag" into the C a r l y l e 's Sartor Resartus as the female who bore "the whole captivating femme fa ta le so important in the nineteenth cen­ progeny of aerial, acquatic, and terrestrial D evils."1^ She t u r y . is proof beyond question of the dangers of not wearing pants. By the time L ilith appears in D.G. R ossetti's famous painting L ilith's fascination especially appealed to the poets and (1864) she has become the epitome of "Body's Beauty", a soul­ arts as the personification of a cruel and perverse love, a less, heartless, and narcissistic lady. Rossetti described mother who w ill violate her own children. Michaelangelo de­ his painting as that of "a m o d e m Lady L ilith combing out her picts her in serpent form in his Sistine Chapel ceiling abundant golden hair and gazing on herself in the glass with tempting both Adam and Eve. Milton compares her to Sin in that self-absorption by whose strange fascination such natures Paradise Lost. In book 2 Sin with her lover-son Death guards draw others within their own circle." His Lady L ilith, like the gates of Hell: her original in the Z o h a r , is "the perilous principle in the w o r ld .S h e makes her appearance in R ossetti's work soon Before the gates there sat after Elizabeth Siddal's death, and despite the fact that On either side a formidable Shape; later w riters came to regard her as an image of art, she re­ The one seemed woman to the w aist, and fair, mains for Rossetti a fatal woman, a woman whose beauty leads But ended foul in many a scaly fold, to destruction. In the picture the voluptuous Lilith is Voluminous and vast, a serpent armed cold and languid, oblivious to anything but her own image With mortal sting. About her middle round with which she is wrapt. She gazes into a mirror and combs A cry of Hell-hounds never ceasing barked her long thick hair. Around her are roses and poppies, the With wide Cerberean mouths full loud, and rung first flower representing sexual passion and the second the A hideous peal, yet, when they list, would creep, narcotic power of her beauty. On the table, as on a small al­ If aught disturbed their noise, into her womb, tar, are placed two candles and a container for perfume or And kennel there, yet there still barked and howled possibly incense, indicating that this is the shrine of the Within unseen. Far less abhorred than these goddess of Beauty. Outside, which is visible in the mirror, Vexed Scylla, bathing in the sea that parts it is summer indicative of the ripeness of this fleshly beauty. Calabria from the hoarse Trinacrian shore, Swinburne describes her as an icon: Nor uglier follow the night hag, when, called In secret, riding through the air she comes, Of evil desire or evil impulse she has nothing; and Lured with the smell of infant blood, to dance nothing of good. She is indifferent, equable, magne­ With Lapland witches, while the labouring moon tic; outside herself she cannot live, she cannot Eclipses at their charms. even see: and because of this she attracts and sub­ (Book 2, 648-666) dues all men at once in body and spirit. Beyond the mirror she cares not look and could not.1^ As the lover of both Satan and Death Sin is guilty of incest. Unfortunately Sin is doomed to vexation and unrest girdled as Swinburne's interpretation lends itself to Frank Kermode's she is by a belt of hell hounds who often return to gnaw and discussion of R ossetti's L ilith from an "aesthetic point of howl in her womb. M ilton's tone is comic, but MacDonald's view." For Kermode, she is "the image, unimpassioned, wise in L ilith figure is also plagued by her own evil manifested in its whole body, that attracts unbounded passion."^ Certainly the dark spot on her side. But in this instance MacDonald is it is difficult to divorce R ossetti's work from biographical not as intent on allegory as Milton, and his beautiful association, but even when we do it s till seems a distortion princess's suffering is strongly felt. His Lilith is pitiable of R ossetti's conception of L ilith to equate her with art. rather than laughable. Yet despite the difference in sensi­ She seduces and "snares" youths, and leaves them bent and bility both M ilton's and MacDonald's L ilith figures have death broken. Such is not the case with the woman in Rand and Soul in the shape of a Shadow as an accomplice. And her liason who represents Rossetti's ideal of art. There are two poles with Satan also appears in both w riters. At one point in in man represented by two women, the Beatrice figure and the MacDonald's L i l i t h the temptress exclaims "Samoil! What a L ilith figure. The same is true in MacDonald's work. One is fate and in all likelihood MacDonald here gives his own ren­ man's salvation, one his damnation; one is his spiritual de­ dering of the Zo h a r 's Sammael.11 sire, one his base desire; one true art, one false art. L ilith's first appearance in the nineteenth century is Rossetti's sonnet is explicit: in Goethe's F a u s ts Part 1. In the midst of the revelry atop 4 Of Adam's first wife, Lilith, it is told MacDonald first used L ilith in his crude but comic short (The witch he loved before the gift of Eve,) story, "The Cruel Painter", published in the novel Adela Cath- That, ere the snake's, her sweet tongue could deceive, a a r t ( 1 8 6 4 ) . The stories related by several characters in And her enchanted hair was the first gold. this novel are meant to relieve the heroine's melancholy" as And still she sits, young while the earth is old, well as give her spiritual support. The melodramatic and And, subtly of herself contemplative, gothic trappings of "The Cruel Painter" cannot be taken seri­ Draws men to watch the bright web she can weave, ously. The nefarious villain Teufelsbiirst (Devil's Brush) Till heart and body and life are in its hold. is a wierd Hoffmannesque creation, and scenes such as the one in which Teufelsbiirst encases the unconscious hero, Karl von The rose and poppy are her flower; for where W olkenlict, in a plaster mould are delightfully ridiculous. Is he not found, 0 L ilith, whom shed scent Karl awakening and breaking from his "awful white chrysalis" And soft-shed kisses and soft sleep shall snare? (p. 139) fancies himself a vampire, and, not reluctantly, Lo! as that youth's eyes burned at thine, so went since he fancies the daughter of the house, he succumbs to the Thy spell through him, and left his straight neck bent unavoidable obligation to fu lfil his doom" (p. 140). He even And round his heart one strangling golden h air.18 does his best to resemble Bela Lugosi by draping himself in a black pall. His intended victim is, of course, Lilith. Mac­ This is a close approximation of MacDonald’s L ilith: a sor­ Donald reverses the traditional situation, but only to titil­ ceress whose beauty holds man spell bound and whose beguiling late the reader. On the very point of satisfying his lust words deceive. Ageless and proud, she is a goddess whose hair K arl's spiritual nature revives and he becomes "aware that is her most alluring feature. Gold is a symbol for the liber­ his presence must be at least very undesirable to her" (p. 1 4 1 ) . ation of passion, but it also suggests money and harlotry. Both of these senses are evident in MacDonald's work. His But MacDonald's use of L ilith in this story deserves more Lilith is a harlot and a princess over a corrupt capitalist attention, for his conception of her differs somewhat from the city state. Lilith herself changed the way of life of the beautiful temptress of Goethe and Rossetti. In the story Karl simple folk of Bulika teaching them "to dig for diamonds and is in love with L ilith who is "the most celebrated beauty of opals and sell them to strangers" (p. 101). L ilith's nar­ Prague" (p. 125). There are, in one sense, two L ilith's in cissistic pose is also repeated in MacDonald's book when she this story: the helpless and fragile daughter dominated by sits in her darkened hall in front of a suspended mirror so the wicked father Teufelsbiirst, and the cold beauty portrayed arranged as to bring out to the full "the splendour of her by the painter. Teufelsbiirst's work is a compendium of sad­ beauty" (p. 254). But Rosetti's Lilith is contemplative. istic tortures: "he delighted to represent human suffering" This is not the Lilith of legend, the "night hag" with no (p. 126). In his description of Teufelsbiirst's work MacDonald time for soliloquy as she seeks out children and young men. anticipates a great deal of European symbolist painting. For Rossetti, whether through a sense of guilt after his wife's example, Henry A. Payne's The Enchanted Sea shows a sea of death or a personal enervation, reduces a traditional virago drowned and drowning women. In the centre of the picture to passivity. His godess is subtle; her gentleness suffo­ sits a woman in a shell boat looking passively beyond the cates, and her beautiful curling hair, as Swinburne noticed, frame, w istful but seemingly unconcerned with the death by im p ris o n s . water around her. Draped over the side of her boat is a cloth upon which are embroidered the faces of hideous demons. Rossetti returned to L ilith in 1869 in his poem E d en Odilon Redon's L’Ange du D estin has a sim ilar effect with the B o w e r in which Eden becomes a place of sexual sin and damna­ marked contrast between the malefic vision and the peaceful tion caused not by the snake, but by L ilith who seduces him. sky. There are two horrific visions by Jan Toorop, T h e S p h in x In this poem L ilith is more active, motivated by her desire and D isintegration of Faith, the latter with a pensive and for revenge. In both of R ossetti's poems, however, body's unconcerned beauty on the left side of the sketch. As a fi­ beauty stifles and imprisons, while the antithetical soul's nal example, there is the fin du globe painting by Leon Fred­ beauty is freer and elusive. A sim ilar distinction appears e r i c , L e T o r r e n t (part of the triptych Tout est Mort) w hich in MacDonald's works: his fatal women are nearly always shows a multitude of dead children floating in a sea of associated' with the city, while his soulful women are asso­ swans. MacDonald's cruel painter is a fine example of this ciated with nature and the country. Female beauty, in both "romantic agony". His canvasses are replete with "face after Rossetti and MacDonald, is easily turned to destructive ends face of suffering, in all varieties of expression" (p. 126), in the hands of proud or passionate women. Death or death- each face, despite the distortion of pain, revealing original in life is the price of submission to this fatal beauty. beauty. To the crowded canvasses are added "attendant demons" as ugly as imagination could conceive in order to "enhance Swinburne claims that E d e n B o w er "has all the beauty and yet further the suffering that produced the distortion" glory and force in it of the splendid creature so long wor­ (p. 127). The passions represented in these demons are hate, shipped of men as god and dreaded as devil; the voluptuous envy, lust, and a "gloating exultation over human distress" swiftness and strength, the supreme luxury of liberty in its (p. 127). The themes of the painting are most often relig­ measured grace and lithe melodious motion of rapid and re­ ious, the painter finding his inspiration in the histories of revolving harmony; the subtle action and m ajestic recoil, the the church. As Mario Praz has noted: "if the sadist refuses mysterious charm as of soundless music that hangs about a ser­ to believe in traditional religion he deprives himself of pent as it stirs or springs." The "passion of the cast-off an inexhaustible source of pleasure: the pleasure of pro­ temptress", Swinburne declare, has the "actual and instant fanation and blasphemy."22 fla m e o f w r a th .B u t here L ilith's wrath is controlled; she appears cold and hardly subtle in her approach to the serpent:

"Take me thou as X come from Adam: (Sing Eden Bower!) Once again shall my love subdue thee; The past is past and I am come to thee.20

In reviewing the past for her next victim, L ilith exults in her power over Adam: "My breath could shake his soul like a feather." And she has the temerity to suggest that she and Satan may "smite" God and thwart His w ill. She approaches ecstasy at the thought of seducing Eve with the fatal apple. As in Book 10 of Paradise Lost Sin enters the garden in the shape of a female demon, but the irony here is that the cause of man's fall has been thoroughly feminized, and the femme fa ta le assumes the power of evil and destruction pre­ viously associated with the snake. Ultimately Rossetti's attitude toward Lilith is ambivalent: he is attracted to the passive sensuality which he projects onto her, but he re­ mains fearful of her repulsive passion. 5 But most important of all, in each picture there appears evil power, and redemption comes on release from this power. "one form of placid and harmonious loveliness," the image of The femme fa ta le proves unequal to her role. The Lilith Lilith, serene and indifferent: "She did not hate, she did character is losing her power and independence. For Mac­ not love the sufferers" (p. 127), she was simply oblivious as Donald she is proof that intense evil can be overcome by w ill she floated above them or stood in their midst. This woman and love, but this very transformation renders her original "was a beauty without a heart" (p. 128). This L ilith is the evil suspect. Lilith really is good as a sprinkling of Lilith of Teufelsburst's imagination, and it is this image sorrow w ill reveal. that he attempts to reproduce in his own daughter by crushing her soul. Lilith is pale with the paleness of death; she is In 1874 another L ilith story, this one by William slave to her demon-father. But she is not the cruel, fatal Herries Pollock, appeared in the Temple Bar. 2/ This minor woman, "destroying the man whose destiny lies in her power."23 work is important for its parallels with MacDonald's L i l i t h She is a persecuted maiden saved by love. (1895). The two stories are obviously different. Pollock capitalizes on the name L ilith to present a pedestrian tale Colman 0. Parsons 24 has shown that MacDonald borrowed of two men and a woman. The two men, Cecil, thirteenth Earl m aterial "without change" from Henry More's An Antidote of Falcon and his cousin Arthur Vane, are destroyed by L ilith, Against Atheism (1665) for the vampire scare episode in "The the wife of the earl. As in MacDonald's "The Cruel Painter", Cruel Painter", but a work closer to the total conception of L ilith's father is a painter of "very imaginative pictures", MacDonald's tale is Hawthorne's "Rappaccini's Daughter" one of his greatest being the depiction of the scene in (1846)25 in which the daughter, Beatrice, is the victim of F a u s t in which L ilith appears on the Brocken. The implica­ her father's demonic pursuit of knowledge. Hawthorne's tion proves true; this L ilith delights in power. She is "Eden of the present world" (p. 98), Rappaccini's garden, is childish and "kitten-like". She has "unfathomable eyes" an inverted paradise, and MacDonald calls Teufelsburst's and this mystery is part of her appeal. Throughout she is house a "paradise of of demons" (p. 130). The heroes of both alternately petulant and appealing, a creation of little tales have a "Greek-like" beauty, and the heroines are rarely attraction, her magnetism is stated not shown. But there are seen in public. Both L ilith and Beatrice are compared to several features which MacDonald uses in his later romance. flowers, and both are unwilling fatal women, dominated by the His hero's name is Vane, and L ilith seduces him in a passage power of their fathers. They are, like Shelley's Medusa, close to the seduction scene in Pollock's story. Pollock's symbols of victim ization, cursed through no fault of their Vane has just blurted out his passionate love when own. The evil painter and the evil scientist are sickly and pale, and each in his own way is a "vile empiric". Teufels­ The clouds swept away, and the moon shone out burst actively hates mankind and enjoys experimenting with into the fulness of her cold cruel light as Lilith and observing human suffering. MacDonald even hints that turned towards him. She was pale, and her lips Teufelsburst is a ghoulish anatomist: L ilith at one point wore a strange smile. He saw with amazement her fears that her father is performing a macabre autopsy on hands stretched towards him; he felt his clasped Karl. Rappaccini is completely absorbed in his studies and in their warm grasp; a th rill of mad surprise and would sacrifice human life to satisfy his curiosity for delight shook him as she lifted her face to his, knowledge. While hidden Teufelsburst and Rappaccini watch and drew his down to h e r s .28 their respective victims and plot to use them for their own ends. Both MacDonald and Hawthorne opposed the scientific Pollock's sensationalism is banal. By the end of the story materialism of the nineteenth century, and both show the we know that L ilith has a "ruthless craving for destruc­ potential disaster when spiritual values are inverted or tion. "29 Her association with the moon and with a vicious mechanized. Hawthorne's tale, however, is more disturbing. Persian cat also appear in MacDonald's story. Pollock's Rappaccini is thwarted, but not before he has doomed both creation is, however, pallid. Lilith steadily loses her his own daughter and her lover Giovanni. In Hawthorne's tale vitality as a fictional character, until MacDonald himself Beatrice is the only pure spirit, like the broken fountain gives her renewed vigour in his last great work L i l i t h that continues to flow despite the ruins of time. The story (1895). This fin de siecle vision took MacDonald five years is an allegory of the power of nineteenth century materialism to complete. and scepticism to destroy moral idealism. MacDonald's story depicts individual salvation through self sacrifice and love. In March 1890, MacDonald began his final reworking of It lacks the complexity of Hawthorne's work and dissipates the L ilith legend. The first draft of what would be pub­ any complexity it has in its glib happy ending. lished five years later as L ilith: A Romance is remarkable, running on for one hundred and sixty-one hand w ritten pages The vampire theme in "The Cruel Painter" remains in the without a break. There are virtually no paragraphs and background; it is there for its sensational value, but it few errors or corrections. This early version, which I shall also serves a thematic purpose. It is an emblem of the refer to as L i l i t h 4,^0 resembles his earlier works for in it death-in-life existence of Teufelsburst: "a body retaining Lilith is thrall to the Devil. In tears she begs the narra­ a kind of animal life after the soul had departed: (p. 125) tor, called Fane in this version, to leave her before he is and living on the suffering of others. A concomitant theme hurt. In the final version, however, L ilith is a more power­ in MacDonald is Lycanthropy. The best example of this is ful figure. Here she claims to have "ensnared the heart of his chilling short story, "The Gray Wolf", published in the Great Shadow" so that "he became her slave" (p. 204). 1871.26 Like L ilith in "The Cruel Painter", the girl in this She is the embodiment of the primal sins, pride, self-love, story is a victim of her strange affliction. Both vampirism envy, lust, anger and greed, all of which Vane falls victim and lycanthropy reappear in L i l i t h , but the emphasis is no to despite the many warnings of danger. The black eagle with longer on pity for the afflicted. the golden chain and black ball hanging from its beak which is fixed on top of the mirror-entrance to the other world is In 1872 MacDonald again used L ilith, this time in his a prefiguration of L ilith's power: the golden chain repre­ n o v e l, W ilfrid Ciwibermede, in which the name is given by the sents her hair and the suspended black ball is a reminder of eponymous hero to his white mare in ironic reference to this her enslaving power. It is, of course, L ilith's mysterious book's dark lady, Clara Coningham. She is the L ilith of beauty that lures men to destruction, the beauty of the eter­ this novel. She is an inveterate flirt (we first meet her nal woman, the dream of every man. She is, as her poem re­ when she is thirteen), coy, sarcastic, patronizing, and un­ veals, actually a chimera, a figment of each man's imagina­ predictable in her moods. She encourages the three main t i o n : male characters in their love for her, and causes one suicide, the ignominy of another, and the success of a third, the In me was every woman. I had power villain. Only late in the book do we learn that she has Over the soul of every loving man, been the unwilling victim of her father's lust for money. Such as no woman ever had in dower— The tyrannical father represents money and social power. Could what no woman ever could, or can; Like the horse L ilith who is sold to the villain, Clara is All women, I, the woman, still outran, a slave to a power she detests. But suffering restores her Outsoared, outsank, outreigned, in hall or bower. dignity and independence of mind; she was really no dark lady at all. The point to be stressed in the depiction of Lilith in these works is that her w ill is dominated by an 6 For by his side I lay, a bodiless thing; eye! In those wrecks of faces, glowed or flashed or I breathed not, saw not, felt not, only thought, sparkled eyes of every colour, shape and expression. And made him love me—with a hungering (p . 116) After he knew not what—if it was aught Or but a nameless something that was wrought This dance at midnight is a dance of expiation by which each By him out of himself; for I did sing. participant w ill eventually reach, not Byzantium, but a simi­ lar state of integrated consciousness. It is a horrid spec­ A song that had no sound into his soul; tacle watched over, once again, by L ilith. The dancers, how­ I lay a heartless thing against his heart, ever, realize that someday L ilith too w ill be as weak as Giving him nothing where he gave his whole they, an indication of MacDonald's tenacious belief that Being to clothe me human, every part: "Good and not Evil is the Universe": 'The battle between That I at last into his sense might dart, them may last for countless ages, but it must end" (p. 207). Thus first into his living mind I stole. (p . 201) When Vane does meet L ilith she is near death, and in a very real sense he now gives her life, that is, he nurtures MacDonald manages to convey the idea that L ilith is a pro­ the evil principle in himself which in turn saps his own jection of the narrator Vane’s own desires and also to vitality. When he finds her, all that remains of her beauty create a character that functions in her own right. As the is her hair. Vane takes her to a cave (as in P h a n ta s t e s a form which his desire takes, L ilith dominates Vane. He symbol for the mind) and there he cares for her. In three first sees her in the Bad Burrow, that tumultuous ground of months he succeeds in restoring her to health. His wish is his own fearful imaginings. Here she is almost indistinguish­ that they stay together, but she spurns him. Robert Lee able from the surrounding mist as she takes the form of "that Wolff tells us that L ilith "is an old man's book, and Vane idea where his soul did cleave" (p. 201). As in Rosetti’s ...feels little or no desire for the women he meets."31 But poem, her hair is her most notable feature. Also like Roset- the relationship between Lilith and Vane belies this. At ti is MacDonald's combination of the sad and the cruel for first when L ilith leaves her protector, Vane feels hurt like h i s L i l i t h a father who had "borne and tended" and was now losing this "motherless child" (p. 148). He follows her "like a child was beautiful, but with such a pride at once whose mother pretends to abandon him" (p. 150). But the and misery on her countenance that I could hardly other details here, and the more graphic description in believe what yet I saw. Up and down she walked, L i l i t h A , reveal the sexual nature of the incident. There vainly endeavouring to lay hold of the mist and is little doubt that the parental images merely cloud the wrap it around her. The eyes in the beautiful issue. Lilith is a vampire: "she lives by the blood and face were dead, and on her left side was a dark spot, lives and souls of men" (p. 205), but the vampire looks for against which she would now and then press her those "towards whom it had an attraction." Here, as in Le hand, as if to stifle pain or sickness. Her hair F a n u 's C a rrm ill a , eroticism is an integral part of vampirism. hung nearly to her feet, and sometimes the wind Vane is captured by L ilith's beauty; he is reduced to a would so mix it with the mist that I could not cringing, fawning lover who begs to be the slave of his mis­ distinguish the one from the other; but when it tress. This encounter furnishes the only hint of algolagnia fell gathering together again, it shone a pale gold in MacDonald. After following her for an entire day Vane in the moonlight. kneels beside a weary L ilith as she rests on the grass when (p . 66) suddenly her arms close round his neck, This is the account of Vane's first glimpse of L ilith, and he has two more visions of her before they actually meet, rigid as those of the torture-maiden. She drew down both of which illustrate her power of destruction. At night my face to hers, and her lips clung to my cheek. A he lies beneath a tree in the Evil Wood and strange appari­ sting of pain shot somewhere through me, and pulsed. tions appear overhead among the branches; skeleton horses, a I could not stir a hair's breadth. Gradually the pack of wolves, and above these "the form of a woman, waving pain ceased. A slumbrous weariness, a dreamy her arms in imperious gesture" (p. 70). Rossetti's tree wo­ pleasure stole over me, and then I knew nothing. man—Guenevere in Launcelot at the Shrine o f the Sana (p . 151) G r a e l (c. 1857) and the temptress of The Orchard P it (pub­ lished 1911)—come to mind. Vane next sees a furious battle The eroticism is more explicit in L i l i t h A : between skeletons and phantoms and hears the "war-cry of every opinion, bad or good, that had bred strife, injustice, when I moved her, both her arms hung down as cruelty in the world. The words went with the most hating if lifeless. Suddenly she threw them both round blow. Lie distorted truths flew hurtling in the wind of my neck and drew my face towards hers. I could not javelins and bones. Every moment someone would turn against hold her up then. She fell back on the grass and his comrades, and fight more wildly than before, T h e T r u t h ! drew my face to hers. She began as I thought to T h e T r u t h ! still his cry" (p. 71). Above the tumult is a kiss my face, and clung to it kissing, and my lips woman with one hand pressed to her side urging the men to sought hers. k ill each other. Here Vane has before him a powerful example of the hypocrisy and cruelty of mankind, and a glimpse of From this point in the book until Adam explains who and what the power of evil that deforms man. L ilith encourages evil L ilith is Vane is completely under the fatal woman's spell; in others, but herself suffers the torture of her own evil he is "simultaneously attracted and repelled" (p. 176). And symbolized by the dark spot on her left side. there is a second sexual encounter in which L ilith actually assumes the man's position. Vane, while sleeping in L ilith's Vane next sees L ilith when he comes upon the castle con­ castle, wakes in the night to find L ilith fulfilling the sumed by ivy and roses. This detail confirms the illusory legend's expectations. He describes his feelings as follows: nature of L ilith's independence: she is nothing more than a parasite since her survival depends on others. Neverthe­ A delicious languor enfolded me. I seemed floating, less Vane sleeps here and wakes at midnight to the sound of far from land, upon the bosom of a tw ilight sea. revelry and the dancing of "gorgeously dressed men and Existence was in itself pleasure. I had no pain. gracefully robed women" (p. 115). The scene approaches a Surely I was dying. Bosch painting in grotesquery. Vane sees the faces of the (p . 183) dancers, hardly faces, but rather L ilith is lying heavily on his chest. And much later, after skull fronts—hard, gleaming bone, bare jaws, trun­ the death of L ilith's daughter, and on the way to the House cated noses, lipless teeth which could no more take of Bitterness, L ilith again assumes the dominant position on part in any smile! Of these, some flashed set and top of Vane, while he "lay as one paralysed" (p. 267). white and murderous; others were clouded with decay, broken and gapped, coloured of the earth in which Here, as in Swinburne's D o lo r e s (1866) conventional they seemed so long to have lain! Fearfuller yet, the sexual attitudes are altered; sexual roles are reversed and eyesockets were not empty; in each was a lidless living the woman is the aggressor. L ilith is the "torture-maiden" 7 and Dolores is "our lady of Torture."32 In both works there The fatal women then represents the dark side of .un­ is a suggestion of incest: the lady is the protagonists' conscious life, the blind source of passion and reproduction mother, child, or sister. Pain changes to "dreamy pleasure and death, everything that threatens a patriarchal world. in the MacDonald passage, and in Swinburne's poem "Pain And the nineteenth century is solidly patriarchal; its melted in tears, and was pleasure." MacDonald certainly leaders are absorbed in science, business, and politics. In knew Swinburne's poem. In a letter of September 1872, this masculine world the best women are those "mutes" who Ruskin asked MacDonald: make "a constant society of their pins and needles."36 But this was also an era of women's rights. MacDonald him­ Did you ever read D o lo r e s ? I used to think it self knew several leaders of the women's movement such as his finest but never thought to find this portrait Madame Bodichon, founder of Girton College, Mrs. Reid, in its first verse (I've only altered one word): founder of Bedford College, and Dr. Elizabeth G arrett. Greville MacDonald relates that "for a time, thanks to the Cold eyelids, that hide like a jewel frequent talk of women's rights, adopted even by my three Hard eyes that grow soft for an hour. elder little sisters in their white stockings, crinolines The icy white limbs and the cruel and Sunday, straw-poke bonnets with pink bows and curtains, o o Red mouth like a venomous flower. I am still crushed at times by the conviction...that I, as a male, am a worm."37 From a cultural perspective the Parallels also occur in Swinburne's Laus Veneris where the virago who refuses the suffocation of antimacassars polarizes hapless lover feels male fears. As such, the women's rights movement serves as About my neck your hands and hair enwound, an emblem of a much deeper struggle of forces within the The hands that stifle and the hair that sings, male psyche that now sought to disrupt the order of mascu­ I felt them fasten sharply without sound. line life. The obsession with the fatal woman in Swinburne, MacDonald, and many other nineteenth century w riters is a m anifestation of the struggle for freedom from conventional And I forgot fear and all weary things, standards. It is an aspect of the revolt against industrial All ended prayers and perished thanksgivings, society. The frightful female is either an embodiment of Feeling her face with all her eager hair the male's rejection of established social values and cus­ Cleave to me, clinging as a fire that clings. toms as in Swinburne, or she is a personification of the hideous power of these same values and customs as in Mac­ And the famous passage from Swinburne's "Notes on the Donald. To accept Swinburne's Dolores or Venus is to re­ Designs of the Old Masters at Florence" (1868) furnishes ject the tyranny of social conventions; to accept Mac­ other details relevant to MacDonald's L ilith. One of Donald's L ilith is to become the slave of social conven­ Michaelangelo's heads appears "pale with pride and weary tion. L ilith represents social status, hypocrisy, mammon, wrong-doing" and displays "a silent anger against God and and lust. She is princess of a city state and rules by man" on her beautiful but cruel features. Again like Mac­ fear and mystery: her Bulika is akin to Babylon. She her­ Donald's L ilith, Swinburne's lady's eyes "are full of self offers only im itation wealth as the "argentine rings" proud and passionless lust after gold and blood."34 that decorate her robe suggest. But L ilith is balanced by MacDonald does not suggest that we give ourselves to the the child-woman Lona who is associated with natural wealth fatal woman, but his L ilith does, like Swinburne's lady, and salvation. The two women bring into sharp focus our "expose the degeneracy of the love contract" and the cor­ worst and our better selves; the one terrifies by her evil responding degeneracy of "social lusts—money getting and and the other offers a means of redemption. MacDonald's exploitation."35 MacDonald's L ilith is an active version femme fa ta le lacks the iconoclastic power of Swinburne's of Swinburne's Atlanta in relation to the family: both just as MacDonald himself lacks Swinburne's exaggerated women threaten the sanctity of the Victorian "vestal unconventionality. Spiritually his L ilith represents death, temple", home and hearth, one because she avoids motherhood sexually she castrates, and socially she enslaves. She is and the other because she is the terrible mother. As such an autocrat of social hypocrisy and convention. L ilith is only one half of the decomposed mother. Vane's desire for L ilith, with its oedipal suggestions, is part of One feature of MacDonald's L ilith is the concurrent a psychological conflict between Libidinal and other aims. pity and repulsion which she attracts. L ilith has all the This conflict produces doubles: the femme fa ta le and th e ingredients of the fatal woman as outlined in Mario Praz's fair maid. The former is a focus for all the anarchic de­ The Romantic Agony: she is timeless, wise, troubled, and sires, while the latter represents responsibility and re­ pale. To love her is to follow "looking for nothing, lationship. L ilith's vampire attacks on Vane combine the not gratitude, nor even pity in return" (p. 180). But threat of sex and death. When he submits to her she un­ MacDonald's concern is not with the sexual aspects of this mans him, leaving him momentarily blind and "weak as water" figure and he himself has none of the "sexual idiosyncrasies" (p. 151). L ilith's opposite is her daughter Lona who discussed by Professor Praz. MacDonald uses the fatal wo­ represents the protective mother: Vane says that he "hardly man as a convenient emblem for evil. In L ilith we see remembered my mother, but in my mind's eye she now looked beauty destroyed by wickedness, and we see beauty itself be­ like Lona" (p. 240). Their understanding is intuitive and come destructive. But L ilith's connection with a leopard their relationship includes and transcends the physical. draws attention to the passage in the Book of Jeremiah (13:23): "Can the Ethiopian change his skin or the leo­ pard his spots? Then also you can do good who are accus­ tomed to do evil." This cat-woman differs from W ilde's S p h i n x (1894), also spotted but whose spots w ill certainly never change. Both are goddesses of Hell, but L ilith's reign is only temporary. MacDonald continued to believe with Origen that the devil himself is in for salvation.38 His fatal women are always redeemable. L ilith's inmost soul is Astarte, the good leopard that lies at her feet when she sleeps in the cosmic cemetery. Astarte represents creative beauty and fruitful increase, and it is only a matter of time before this essential part of L ilith's nature w ill replace her present evil. MacDonald manages to make L ilith frightful and yet pitiable through the sense of futility that attends her evil. She kills her daughter, Lona, because she thinks she is a threat to her immortality. Lona is proof that Lilith herself is part of the cycle of birth and death, a cycle she has no power to control, but which she defies. The dark spot on her side, the prophetic looks of the night spectres in the ruined castle, Adam's discussion of good and evil, and L ilith's own vulnerability to the power of the hot stream, all suggest her final defeat. 8 And when this comes it is in a scene of emotional intensity.

This is the point in the book at which a burning worm is introduced into the black spot in L ilith's side as she lies in the House of Bitterness. This is the "central fire of the universe" that brings L ilith to the "knowledge of what she is" (p. 280). The internal struggle is fierce until a "horrible Nothingness, a negation positive enfolded her" (285). At the last, however, the source of life withdraws revealing an even more terrible nothingness, and it is at this point that what MacDonald elsewhere calls the "deeper stratum of the soul" is heaved to the surface. It is at this point that life begins. It is a pattern repeated throughout MacDonald's works; man is reduced to complete despair and then turns to the Father for succour. L ilith's final awareness of her own evil and revulsion from it is a powerful moment in the book. L ilith is imperious, frightful, delicately curved, how coral-red they were, and and yet pitiable; she is a character of considerable com­ what a soft rose-tint, like the flush of a pink plexity, a symbol meant to rouse any reader's sense of evil, sunrise on white flowers, was the hue which spread its ugliness, and its futility. itself waveringly over her cheeks,—till there,— there where the long eye-lashes curled upwards, The success of MacDonald's portrayal of L ilith can be there were fine shadows,—shadows which suggested established by a glance at two other contemporary works, light,—such light as must be burning in those Marie C orelli's The Soul o f L ilith (1894) and Althea Gyles's sweetly closed eyes. Then there was the pure, drawing "L ilith" which appeared in T h e Dome in 1898. Marie smoothe brow, over which little vine-like ten­ C orelli's romance is an example of the popular best seller, drils of hair caught and clung amorously,—and those works read for relaxation and the quieting of the then—that wondrous wealth of the hair itself mind. It went through nine editions in the first three which, like twin showers of gold, shed light on years after publication and by 1920 it had reached its either side.41 twenty-first edition. This book is a mixture of marvellous inventions, incredible incidents, and exotic characters. Throughout the book El Rami is on the verge of necrophilia. Its values are intended to please everyone. The story re­ Whereas we come to accept MacDonald's L ilith as a figure of lates the downfall of the Egyptian mesmerist, seer, and peculiar fascination and beauty with a minimum of descrip­ medical genius El Rami who has the arrogance to attempt to tion, Marie Corelli must emphasize L ilith 's heaving bosom, answer the meaning of life, to discover the secret at the her ruby-red lips, her white satiny skin, her azure veins heart of the universe through science. The problem is that and so on in order to entice the reader with the hint of a for Marie Corelli the secret of life is death and the sooner sexual outburst on the part of the enraptured El Rami. In you manage to die the better. First she states that love is this book L ilith loses her vitality; she is no longer the what is most important in life, then she goes on to show embodiment of evil; she is no longer even the phantasy woman its impossibility; she tells us that the proper work for of any man. She is merely an object around which Marie man is to help man-kind, then she calls the ideal existence Corelli can build exciting events and through which she can that of the poet or monk separate from life and ensconced make vapid moral statements. in a private world. At one moment she condemns El Rami's Faustian defiance of the laws of nature; the next she shows Althea Gyles's drawing of L ilith was reviewed by W.B. him to be far superior to all the contemptible denizens of Y e a ts in T h e D om e. Yeats described the picture from memory. London. The book moves at a dazzling pace in a highly de­ clamatory style, a style which the Q uarterly Review c a l l s The ever changing phantasy of passion, rooted the "Turkey-carpet style." The reviewer remarks that Marie neither in good nor evil, half crawls upon the Corelli is "loth to employ one word where three w ill suf­ ground, like a serpent before the great serpent fice. "39 There are wonderful machines, sparkling electric of the world, her guardian and her shadow; and fluids, and strange visions meant to keep the excitement Miss Gyles reminds me that Adam, and things to of the reader continually active. L ilith's part in all this come, are reflected on the wings of the serpent; is as the most titillatin g of the book's many devices to and that beyond, a place shaped like a heart is capture the reader's attention. She is, in essence, a ro­ full of thorns and roses. I remember that the bot; she has no life or personality of her own. El Rami serpent was a little confused, and that the com­ found her in the Arabian desert when she was just a child, position was a little lacking in rhythm, and upon and on the point of death from a mysterious disease. With the whole caring less for this drawing than for his knowledge of the life force he managed to keep her the others, but it has an energy and beauty of its body alive, but her mind now inhabits a region between this o w n .42 life and the next. Her body has continued to grow over the years, fostered by El Rami's power, but she herself a- The serpent is confused, and the wings look anything but waits her freedom in happy death. The book sets out to wings. The flowers which spread profusely about her appear chronicle the gradual growth of passion in El Rami for his to be poppies, and the rose and the poppy are L ilith's prize possession, L ilith. This love ultimately frees her flowers in Rosetti. The very thickness of the woven flowers and leaves him mentally desolated, but whether this is his and the twisting serpent appear to hold L ilith. The density retribution for loving her body and not her soul or for his of the whole may suggest her imprisoning power; and the audacious attempt to play God is never made clear, nor does "things to come" are suggestive of cosmic disturbances, a it really matter. All that counts is the excitement Miss t y p i c a l l y fin du globe vision. By L ilith's left hand there Corelli can generate through her "degenerate emotion" and appears to be a wedding ring or maybe a small crown. The her "erotic mysticism."40 head of Adam, which differs only slightly from that of L ilith is visible through a haze and this could suggest that L ilith, having no life, is described entirely in terms this Lilith is an imaginary projection. Whether or not this of her physical appearance. One example is sufficient to is the case, and despite the thickness of L ilith's body, give the general tenor of the book: there is an insubstantial quality about the whole and L ilith's facial experssion is moronic. Yeats remarked ...the soft scarcely perceptable breath from earlier in the same article that "interest in life was being L ilith's lips touched his cheek warmly like a replaced by interest in symbol" (p. 235) and here the symbo­ caress. Observantly, as one might study the parts lic detail relates to nothing beyond itself. John Dixon of a bird or a flower, he noted those lips, how Hunt says of this Lilith: 9 No longer used as a tangible equivalent for 5. Talmud, edited by I. Epstein (London, 1935-1952), inarticulate spiritual realities or as a private 35 volumes. Niddah (London, 1948), p. 166. myth often conjoined with public myth as in Ros­ s e t t i ' s L i l i t h , she comes to exist, hackneyed 6. 'Erubin (London, 1938), p. 698. and reduced to a few token features, an end in herself and no longer a means of revelation.43 7. See M. Rudwin, The D evil in Legend and Literature (Chicago, 1931), Chapter 9, "The Legend of L ilith", pp. 94- This L ilith lacks the mysterious quality of the Sphinx or 104. See also R.P. Dow, "Studies in the Old Testaments", La Giaconda; her expression is vacant rather than inscrutable. B ulletin o f the Brooklyn Entomological Society, 12 (1917), Nor is there any sympathy for L ilith in this drawing, sympa­ p p . 1 -9 . thy that is conveyed by the accompanying legend: "0 most sorrowful L ilith, in whose heart was played Earth's first 8. A.M. Killen, "La Legend de L ilith et Quelque Inter­ great tragedy, still for thy sake does Hatred hold Love's pretations Modernes de C e tte Figure Legendaire", R e v u e d e hand." L ilith has lost her complexity, her many dimensions. L iterature Compar&e, 12 (1932), p. 288. See also Robert Narcissism and destruction, love and sexuality, pity and re­ Graves and Raphael Patai, Hebrew Myths: The Book o f Genesis pulsion are essential to the Lilith character. Without (London, 1963), p. 68. these, without the moral dilemma she is reduced to a mere o b j e c t . 9 . T h e Z o h a r , translated by Sperling and Simon (Lon­ don, 1931). See volume 1, pp. 129-130; and also volume 4, The changing emphasis on the L ilith legend culminates pp. 359-360. in S h aw 's Back to M ethuselah (1921). Shaw's iconoclasm turns Lilith into a personification of the Life Force. 10. J. Hastings, A Dictionary o f the Bible, 3 (E d in ­ Harry M. Geduld points out Shaw's relationship to the "Blake- burg, 1900), p. 122. Shelley 'diabolism ' which bestows upon beneficent forces or qualities the names traditionally associated with evil prin­ 11. George MacDonald, L ilith : A Romance (London, 1895), ciples or evil spirits."44 gut it is more than this. For p. 146. All future feference to MacDonald's book w ill be to Shaw, who noted that "L ilith wasn't anybody, and there was this first edition and pagination w ill be incorporated into no character to express,"45 she represents a liberated mind, th e t e x t . one who creates her own values and her own universe rather than be enslaved by another's. She is the force of creati­ 12. Translation by P.B. Shelley, Poems o f Shelley, vity, of liberation in each man and woman. And her creative edited by Thomas Hutchinson (London, 1965), p. 759. D.G. power is imagination, that faculty exalted by all Romanti­ Rossetti also translated this passage. See The Works o f cists. In the play, Lilith set Adam and Eve free and now it Dante Gabriel R ossetti, edited by W.M. Rossetti (London, is up to them to evolve, to begin the creative process which 1911), p. 541. See F a u s t , Part 1, lines 4120-4123. w ill culminate in the Superman who w ill supersede L ilith. Shaw's inversion of the traditional associations surrounding 13. McGann, p. 7. Lilith are blunt; he is not subtle. His choice of Lilith is historically logical: the women's suffrage movement was in 14. Sartor Resartus and Heroes and Hero Worship (Lon­ full swing in the decade after 1910 and closing in on victory don, 1901), p. 32. established by the General Election of 1918. But the very fact that Shaw can use L ilith in this way indicates just how 15. Quoted in William Gaunt, The Pre-Raphaelite Tra­ far we have travelled from the Renaissance vision of Sin. g e d y (London, 1965), p. 128. Rossetti's italics. The serpent woman of M ichaelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling and the demon hag of Paradise Lost have been redeemed with 1 6. The Complete Works o f Algernon Charles Swinburne, a vengeance. The nineteenth century slowly turned L ilith edited by Sir Edmund Gosse and Thomas James Wise (New York, into a sympathetic figure; Shaw completed the process. 1968), volume 5, p. 212.

17. Romantic Image (London, 1966), pp. 61-62.

F o o tn o te s 18. D.G. Rossetti, C ollected Poems, e d ite d by W.M. Rossetti (London, 1906), volume 1, p. 216. 1. Jerome J. McGann, "The Beauty of the Medusa:, A Study in Romantic Literary Iconology", Studies in Romanti­ 1 9. S wi n b u r n e , op. cit., p. 39. c is m , 2 (1972), p. 3. 20. Rossetti, C ollected Poems, volume 1, p. 308. 2. MacDonald's book was, in general, not well received; it baffled, infuriated, and saddened reviewers. A family 21. Published in three volumes by Hurst & Blackett. friend and admirer, W. Robertson-Nicoll, w riting as Claudius The edition used here is the recent collection, T h e G i f t s Clear in the B ritish Weekly found L i l i t h "obscure" and "un­ of the Child C hrist, edited by Glenn Edward Sadler (Grand pleasant and he complained that it was not "satisfying or Rapids, 1973), volume 2, pp. 121-152. Page references restful." The Saturday Review "humbly" suggested that w ill be incorporated into the text. L ilith "had no business" in the book at all; the A th e n a e u m used words like "incoherent" and "grotesque" to describe the 22. Praz, p. 107. book; and the Pall Mall Gazette styled it "a wild phantasma­ goria of nonsense." At least one writer felt a sense of 23. I b i d . , p . 218. guilt in writing about the book in the first place: T h e C r i t i c ' s reviewer finished L i l i t h "with a sigh that proclaims 24. "George MacDonald and Henry More", N&Q, 188 (1945), at the same time our allegiance and our disinclination to pp. 180-183. write precisely what we think.” See B ritish Weekly (Oct. 10, 1895), p. 395; Saturday Review (Oct. 19, 1895), pp. 513-514; 2 5 . See Moses From an Old Manse (London, n.d.), pp. A th e n a e u m (Nov. 9, 1895), p. 639; P all Mall Gazette,"Jim -Jams" 93-130. Page references w ill be incorporated in the text. (Oct. 18, 1895), p. 9; The C ritic, 25 (1896), p. 58. 2 6 . I n Works o f Fancy and Im agination (London, 1871), 3 . Phontastes and L ilith , with an introduction by C.S. volume 10, pp. 229-244. Reprinted in The G ifts o f the Lewis, Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1971. Reissue of 1962 edition. Child C hrist, volume 2, pp. 113-120. L i l i t h , with an introduction by Lin Carter. Ballantine, 1970. 27. "Lilith", Temple Bar, 43 (1874), pp. 43-67, 181- The Visionary Novels o f George MacDonald, ed. by Anne Fre­ 201, 325-344. mantle and with an introduction by U.H. Auden. The Noonday Press, 1954. 2 8 . I b i d . , p . 201.

4. Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony (London, 1951, p. 189. 2 9 . I b i d . , p . 341. 10 30. There are eight pre-publication versions of L i l i t h 37. Greville MacDonald, George MacDonald and His W ife in the B ritish Museum lettered A through H. BM Add. Mss. (London, 1924), p. 300. 46187. Robert Lee Wolff is wrong when he claims there are only six pre-publications versions. For W olff's brief dis­ 38. MacDonald makes one passing reference in his en­ cussion of the L i l i t h M ss. s e e The Golden Key (New Haven, tire work to Origen (c. 185-253) who also believe.d that the 1961), pp. 329-331. devil would be saved. See The Seaboard Parish (L ondon, n.d.), p. 314. 3 1. The Golden Key, p . 346. 3 9. Q uarterly Review, 188 (1898), p. 318. 32. The following quotations from Swinburne's poetry are taken from Selected Poetry and Prose, e d ite d by Jo h n D. 40. I b i d . , p . 322. Rosenberg (New York, 1968), pp. 149, 151, 95, and 98. 41. The Soul o f L ilith (London, 1924), p. 129. 33. Quoted in Derrick Leon, Ruskin: The Great Vic­ t o r i a n (London, 1949), p. 497. In reply to a criticism of 42. W.B. Yeats "A Symbolic A rtist and the Coming of Swinburne MacDonald reportedly observed: "You must remember Symbolic A rt", T h e D om e, n.s. 1 (1898), pp. 236-237. some of his best songs were "before sunrise.' Think what a singer he w ill be when for him the 'Sun of Righteousness 4 3. The Pre-Raphaelite Imagination: 1848-1900 shall arise with healing in his wings.'" Quoted in (London, 1968), p. 200. Joseph Johnson, George MacDonald (London, 1906), p. 63. 44. "The Lineage of L ilith", Shaw Review, 7 (1964), p. 34. The Complete Works, 5, pp. 159-160. 61.

35. McGann, p. 16. 45. Quoted in Hesketh Pearson, Bernard Shaw (L ondon, 1948), p. 440. 36. George Meredith, Diana o f the Crossways (L ondon, 1914), p. 11.

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