{
  "export": {
    "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/3766",
    "note": "Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright in each message remains with the person who wrote it.  Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact.",
    "addresses": "obscured as 'user at host'"
  },
  "archive": "urth",
  "thread": {
    "id": 3766,
    "subject": "Doors:the Goddess",
    "messages": 1,
    "voices": 1,
    "first": "2003-01-16T18:43:34+00:00",
    "last": "2003-01-16T18:43:34+00:00"
  },
  "messages": [
    {
      "message_id": "<urth-v0301-2677@digest.urth.net>",
      "from": {
        "name": "James Wynn",
        "address": "crushtv at hotpop.com"
      },
      "date": "2003-01-16T18:43:34+00:00",
      "subject": "RE: (urth) Doors:the Goddess",
      "in_reply_to": null,
      "reply_link": null,
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "Two responses.....\n\nMarc says:\nI have a hard time accepting that Wolfe would ever be sympathetic to a\nfeminine point of view, especially when attempting to equate the moral\nstance\nof the novel There Are Doors with a perspective analogous to Graves.\n\nThe very premise of the novel is that sex with a woman can kill you dead,\ndead, dead.  Is reproduction worth it?  Of course Mr. Green wants the\ngoddess.\n Perhaps choosing earthly love is bad if it could kill you.  He is an\nordinary\nman who cannot free himself from the ordinary entrapment - the flowering\nstigma of the goddess, which exists only to trap his pollen.  I see the\nnovel\nas the failure of ordinary men to overcome the sexual drive.  While love\nmight\nbe worth it, the love Wolfe talks about is not necessarily sexual in nature.\nI think.\n\nMr. Green is just kind of dumb.\nCrush responds:\nIn the Wolfe interview with James Jordan that Mantis referenced\n(http://www.op.net/~pduggan/wolfejbj.html) Wolfe says the following...\n\n\"People always fault me on it by saying I did not work out what a world\nwould be like in which men died after intercourse, but I feel that I did.\"\n\n\"In There Are Doors I wanted to do something that I think has only rarely\nbeen done. It certainly has been done, but it isn't done very often. I\nwanted to present a protagonist who isn't very intelligent. Green isn't. He\nhas almost no virtues. By that I don't mean that he has many vices, but he\nis not outstanding in any good way. He is a man of very limited\nintelligence, not terribly courageous, not terribly energetic or\nenterprising or any of those other things. He is the sort of man who would\nbe quite content to work all his life in a dead end job and never try to get\nvery far outside of that---except that he meets Laura. That is what changes\nhim.\"\n\nThis was sent yesterday (but seems to have been lost in the ether:\nRoy responding to Mantis:\nYou have noted Graves' position vis-a-vis earth and sky; needless to say,\nGraves' sympathies were with the goddess. Wolfe's, needless to say, are with\nthe other side. That being so, North, the wannabe goddess-killer, would be,\nin effect, in the service of the God of the Bible. Green, following the\ngoddess, would be lusting after the very sort of figure that the Old\nTestament prophets were forever railing against.\n\nThat would make North a good guy, Green a bad guy, in Wolfe's cosmology,\nwouldn't it? How can this reading square with Wolfe's known religious views,\nand his own opinion that THERE ARE DOORS is his best book?\n\n\nCrush butts in:\nIMO, Wolfe enamorement with Graves' White Goddess is a foregone\nconclusion -- trackable over several novels and series. So the question is\n\"What does Graves' White Goddess mean to Wolfe considering his\nChristianity\".\n\nSoooo, here I go:\n\nWolfe almost always presents the Goddess stand-ins as generally in league\nwith his protagonists (in the Soldier series there's some ambiguity here).\nIn the Long Sun, the Goddess' aspect as Love (Kypris/Aphrodite) is the\nVironese/Pagan image of the Outsider/Christian God --- the image selected by\nthe Outsider for himself.\n\nNow, consider that Wolfe himself came to his conversion by **first** falling\nin love with his eventual wife, Rosemary.\n\nPerhaps Wolfe believes that God drew him to Himself through something so\nsublunary (pun intended) as romantic love. Perhaps that is the story he is\ntelling over and over through Graves' White Goddess.\n\n-- Crush"
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}