"The Haunted Woman:
Abstract
The Haunted Woman: Female Characters in the Work of David Lindsay David Lindsays works concentrate on one topic: the labyrinthine structure of the world, in which what Lindsay sometimes calls “heaven” is both manifest and concealed. Material reality is an illusion; it may give pleasure, but this very pleasure-giving quality leads men deeper into the labyrinths of matter. Some phenomena, though, may - in addition to giving pleasure - have a haunting, mysterious quality. It is by such mysterious phenomena that man is led beyond the conditions he is used to call real. Yet this quality of hauntedness does not quite lead him to the aspired goal. What has to be attained is so deeply hidden and of such an overpowering otherness that it eludes all that points to it. Again and again Lindsay shows by the destinies of his protagonists that all attempts to reach that highest goal are as futile as trying to “ climb to lightning.” By the example of his female heroines, who - according to Lindsay - are especially akin to pleasure and deceit, he shows what it means to be drawn from a world of superficial pleasure towards the unknown centre, which in the end means being annihilated. A symbolic expression of this pattern is the haunted house whose staircases lead up higher and higher. At the same time the house is an image of the haunted soul in which the self cannot be at home for it has to die in order to reach a higher level of being. Music and phantastic literature are forms of art which lead the imagination along that heroic way.