SOURCE: “The Demon Lover: Lilith and the Hero in Modern Fantasy,” in Extrapolation, Vol. 28, No. 1, Spring 1987, pp. 52-61.

In the following essay, Schaafsma includes MacDonald's fiction in a discussion of the role of the archetypical Lilith character in fantasy literature.

In The Great Mother, Erich Neumann asserts that “the peril of present-day mankind springs in large part from the one-sidedly patriarchal development of the male intellectual consciousness, which is no longer kept in balance by the matriarchal world of the psyche.” He warns, “Western mankind must arrive at a synthesis that includes the feminine world—which is also one-sided in its isolation. Only then will the individual human being be able to develop the pyschic wholeness that is urgently needed if Western man is to face the dangers that threaten him from within and without” (xlii).

Modern fantasy of the last two centuries has traditionally been a subversive...