The Ebony Tower Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Richard Bevis

Critical Essay by Richard Bevis

SOURCE: "Actaeon's Sin: The 'Previous Iconography' of Fowles's 'The Ebony Tower'," in Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 42, No. 1, Spring, 1996, pp. 114-23.

In the following essay, Bevis explicates the function and purpose of Fowles's allusions to the Greek myth of Artemis and Actaeon in The Ebony Tower.

The Ebony Tower (1974) has not exactly bowled over commentators on John Fowles. Katherine Tarbox found the book "so similar to The Magus" that she did not give it a chapter in The Art of John Fowles (2). Linda Hutcheon views the volume as Fowles's failed chance to break through the limitations of his treatment of women (Cooper viii). However, I find the title story more interesting than most critiques have, not because Fowles said that it demystified The Magus (Salami 136), but because he did not say how it mystifies the reader.

In The Ebony Tower, David Williams, a young English...
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