The Psychomythic Tale

BOOK REVIEWS Thackeray in The Rose and the Ring, Charles Dickens in The Magic Fishbone, and George MacDonald in The Light Princess. The anti-masculine bias which seems mainly responsible for these interpretive distortions is the most serious flaw in the general introduction as well. Throughout Forbidden Journeys, male writers of fantasy are mentioned consistently in terms of disparagement. Carroll, MacDonald , and James Barrie are introduced as "eccentric" men whose "obsessive nostalgia" caused them to write "painful" children's books (1); Carroll and Andersen are described as "sentimentally sadistic" (317). The suggestion that the folktale tradition "may well have been initiated by women" (3) becomes an assumption that folktales were "feminine material" on which male writers encroached with impunity (6). Loaded words like "appropriation" and "colonization" are attached to the work of Carroll, Grimm, and Perrault (6-7). In fact, there is no evidence that the folktale ever "belonged" to anyone, or that Victorian women writers resented men who wrote fairy tales. Libraries should certainly add Forbidden Journeys to the fairy tale anthologies of Zipes and Hearn, since there is no overlap among them. The stories in Forbidden Journeys may not be typical Victorian fairy tales (or even typical Victorian women's fairy tales), but they represent an important aspect of Victorian fantasy, a "rich, weird world" (9) which has been overlooked by critics and historians and is well worth further exploration. One may hope that the increased visibility Auerbach and Knoepflmacher have given these seven fine women writers, and their provocative discussions of them, will result not only in continued scholarly interest, but in republication of a greater selection of their work, for a wider readership of both adults and children. Suzanne Rahn Pacific Lutheran University The Psychomythic Tale Edwin F. Block, Jr. Rituals of Dis-Integration: Romance and Madness in the Victorian Psychomythic Tale. New York: Garland, 1993. xix + 243 pp. $37.00 GOTHIC FICTION, a potent force in popular and serious literature , has merited a great deal of current attention. William Patrick Day's In the Circles of Fear and Desire (1985), James B. Twitchell's Dreadful Desires: An Anatomy of Modern Horror (1985), and Elizabeth MacAndrew's The Gothic Tradition in Fiction (1979) come quickly to 569 ELT 37:4 1994 mind. The genre has been anatomized and classified to the point that little more, it would seem, really needs to be said about it. This latest study maintains there is still need "to consider the phenomenon from the dual perspective of its psychological material and its literary convention." In the main, Rituals of Dis-Integration seeks 'limited answers" to two questions: What makes the Gothic capable of perennially generating new subspecies and individual texts? And what identifies the Gothic and its various offshoots as a coherent set of conventions? Devotees of the Transition will find this volume of interest less for its limited answers" than for its provocative discussions of a selection of psychomythic tales written between 1896 and 1905. The psychomythic tale, Block readily admits, is only one species within a minor genre, but he demonstrates that it has a measure of importance because of the ways and manners in which it demonstrates the interaction of self, society, and literary convention. In short, the interactions involve romance narrative conventions and Gothic plots of internal quests transformed by a variety of personal conflicts and tensions. The symbology of evolutionist psychology and turn-of-the-century parapsychology, additionally , provide a new depth and ambiguity to images popular since the Romantic era. Evidence provided in various chapters makes clear that the psychomythic tales of the late-Victorian period were a consequence of more intense, private concerns than those expressed by Gothic practitioners of the eighteenth and earlier nineteenth centuries. To support his contentions Block utilizes two well-known tales, one of Stevenson and one of James, as well as five lesser-known narratives of Violet Paget, Pater, Stevenson, Yeats, and Symons. The leadoff chapter focuses on The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. This classic, if overused, Gothic example permits Block to arrive at a working definition of the psychomythic tale: "a peculiar literary idiom for transforming personal psychological conflict into more conventional and appealing...