Inspiring Older Readers
The Erotic World of Faery by Maureen Duffy
Published in 1972, I’m not sure whether it was the author, her editor or the publisher who decided on this title but if it has had the effect of making anyone buy it in search of sexual titillation they are going to find it pretty hard going. What this is however is an academic dive into the folklore of faery world, primarily through the lens of literature.
Duffy, novelist and literary critic, sees faeries everywhere. And that’s part of the problem for me with this book. Her definition of what constitutes the literary world of faery seems to encompass every being who could be construed as ‘supernatural’ – with the exception of the undead or ghostly – and this does at times seem to be stretching a point. Anything claiming Jonathan Swift’s Lilliput has anything to do with faery folklore makes me nervous about the monomania the author has slipped into.
That’s not to say that there aren’t some cracking sections in this book. Her view that fairyland isn’t a leftover from past paganism is, I think, convincingly argued and her insights into the cultural impact of Christian monothesism in forcing this mythmaking underground is excellent.
There’s plenty here to substantiate the view that faeries and their like provide a satisfying, coded way of discussing and even revelling in otherwise forbidden sexuality and Duffy traces the chronological developments of this central idea in a pretty dogged and thoroughgoing fashion. Writer and critic, Kate McDonald notes in her blog review of this book that:
“Duffy is very good on human sexuality as reflected through fairy-tales, and the displacement activities that creating fairy mythologies can resolve.”
McDonald also notes that the book is very long and I’d perhaps add, over-long. And it feels to me that the reason for this unnecessary length comes down to two things – the urge, as noted above with Swift, to include just about every ‘fantastical’ text if at all possible and a tiresome obsession with a sort of amateur Freudianism that wants to see penises and penis envy in just about every symbol.
I think that this is a shame because when she gets into the good stuff – the Arthur myths, Spencer’s Faery Queen, Pope’s Rape of the Lock and some of the Victorian poetry, she’s very persuasive and authoritative. I think she is also informative about the changes in literary and social thinking that resulted in changes to the material world of fairyland – explaining, for example, when and why the fairy become a winged creature.
I came to the end of this book and felt really ambivalent. I wanted to like it far more than I actually did but I also felt myself full of admiration for an academic study that was still imbued with a real sense of passion in its subject matter.
Since its publication the best part of 50 years ago, as you might expect, other studies of the topic have come and gone but the reputation of Duffy’s work remains largely intact amongst English literary scholars. Writing in 2018 in Literary Review, Kevin Jackson reviewed a more contemporary publication that attempted to cover similar territory and concluded:
“Anyone who wishes for some bold explorations of these mysteries should consult Maureen Duffy’s scandalously underrated study The Erotic World of Faery, which, forty-five years after its first publication, is still wonderfully thought-provoking as well as erudite.”
That seems as good a point as any to let you make your decision on whether it’s a book for you or not. There is a Penguin paperback from 1989 that is readily available online as are hardbacks at very accessible prices.
Terry Potter
July 2020