Lilith’s Clenched Hand
Essays and Creative Writing Inspired by George MacDonald’s Epic Fantasy, Lilith
Both George MacDonald and C.S. Lewis have, in their explicitly theological fiction, explored the dark margins of personality, the question of what happens when a created being so thoroughly sets its will to serve no one but Self that it verges on the annihilation of its own personhood. Can a created being progress so far down this road that it becomes irrecoverable?
In previous essays, I have argued that two sources resided in MacDonald’s imagination when writing Lilith (in addition to many others such as Dante or Holy Scripture) that add layers of meaning. The first source is Nathanial Hawthorn’s novel The Blithdale Romance and the second source is the historical seventeenth-century figure of Sir Henry Vane. In both instances, there is hand/fist symbolism that compliments similar ideas in MacDonald’s story.
