Indeed, Williams’s inability to express his innermost thoughts and feelings in a personal, truthful fashion also characterizes his critical writing, in which he succumbs to recent aesthetic fads and squanders his original artistic talent. eNotes - The Ebony Tower Detailed study guides typically feature a comprehensive analysis of the work, including an introduction, plot summary, character analysis, discussion of themes, excerpts of published criticism. He is intrigued by the complicated erotic. Also includes sites with a short overview, synopsis, book report, or summary of John Fowles’s The Ebony Tower. Drawn between his unexciting marriage and the temptations that the highly intelligent, artistic, emotional, and sexually uninhibited Mouse represents, he chooses to honor his marital vows and thereby betrays his emotional self. In the title story in this collection of five novellas, a journalist visits a celebrated but reclusive painter. Williams, however, proves to have an immature, or at least conventional, personality, being driven by the rules and regulations of British bourgeois life. Both narratives investigate the trials of romantic love, the conventions of society, and the necessity to stay true to personal feelings. The theme of mystery and romance introduced through the almost magical quality of its location finds reinforcement through the story’s intertextual links to Marie de France’s medieval lai “Eliduc,” a translation of which Fowles included with his short stories. In this short story, the artist and art critic David Williams travels to France to interview fellow painter Henry Breasley, an old man who lives with Diana (the Mouse) and Anne (the Freak), his two beautiful young muses, in an enchanted forest, “the sacred wood of the mythical quest” (Barnum 134). Both narratives present a young man who, guided by an older mentor figure, has to make life-determining decisions while being tempted by an artistic young woman. Item 44853 ISBN: 0316290939 Very Good in a Very Good dust jacket. In “The Ebony Tower,” John Fowles wrote a variation on his novel The Magus (1965).

Analysis of John Fowles’s The Ebony Tower

The Ebony Tower by John Fowles