THE SPECTACLES (1844)

"The Spectacles" is a moderately successful comedic romp, for all that it telegraphs its payoff. The protagonist is a young man named Simpson, who used to have a French name that somehow metamiorphosed over the years from Froissard to Voissard and so on. Simpson, extremely nearsighted but believing himself very handsome, will not wear eyeglasses that spoil his looks. Therefore, when he falls for what he believes to be a moderately aged woman, one can practically guess that she's going to be more than a little older than him. In fact, just to take the Oedipal elements to an absurd extreme, his would-be lover proves to be his own great-great-grandmother. Simple Simpson is also victimized by a prank into believing he's married the 82-year-old woman, but he gets the consolation of marrying a much younger woman for real-- apparently a cousin, to whom the grand-dame introduces him-- while vowing thereafter never to take off his new spectacles.

A SUCCESSION OF SUNDAYS (1841)

A young man, raised by his uncle after his parents pass, conceives a passion for his uncle's daughter (yes, another first cousin). The uncle, a born jokester, tells the fellow that he can get married when three consecutive Sundays transpire. The ending is clever if not actually funny, in which the young man solves his problem with the help of the International Date Line.

ELEONORA-- A FABLE (1841)

This story uses a similar approach to ISLAND OF THE FAY-- published in the same year-- in which the glories of bounteous nature give way to doleful death, ELEONORA is far more successful, in part because Poe includes one of his favorite themes: that of a beloved wife-- the narrator's cousin, once again-- who passes away early. Her passing coincides so nearly with the decline of the natural forest where she and the narrator lived that nature seems in sympathy with her spirit. Hence this one rates as "uncanny."

An odd development is that prior to the cousin's death, the narrator swears never to look at another woman. Time passes, and he re-marries, but nothing happens except that he dreams that the spirit of Eleonora forgives him his transgression. An interesting combination of motifs from both MORELLA and LIGEIA.

THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER (1839)

With USHER Poe reaches the zenith of his talent for creating bizarre buildings, inasmuch as "the House of Usher" is possibly the best known "haunted house" in literature, with the possible exception of Hawthorne's "House of the Seven Gables." Even the "Castle of Otranto," which began the Gothic genre in Europe, is not as well known to modern audiences.

In addition to the weird aspects of the house-- which the unnamed narrator sees as surrounded by unearthly vapors-- the story also deals with a "weird family" of a brother and sister who are the last of their line. It's debatable as to whether Madeleine and Usher share the incestuous heritage seen in other Poe couples, but this would IMO be an adequate explanation as to why Roderick allows his sister to be entombed, even though he knows she's a cataleptic.

I was amused by this section, in which Poe tries to invalidate Kant's theory of the Sublime:

 I know not how it was—but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. I say insufferable; for the feeling was unrelieved by any of that half-pleasurable, because poetic, sentiment, with which the mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible. I looked upon the scene before me—upon the mere house, and the simple landscape features of the domain—upon the bleak walls—upon the vacant eye-like windows—upon a few rank sedges—and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees—with an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveller upon opium—the bitter lapse into every-day life—the hideous dropping off of the veil. There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart—an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime.

All of which proves that Poe didn't read Kant's CRITIQUE OF JUDGMENT with any real attention, or he would have recalled Kant's explicit determination that the Sublime can only rise in a viewer of mysterioso phenomena if he the viewer feels safe and removed from any possible consequence. The narrator doesn't feel safe, so why should he feel sublime? But then, Poe was not exactly in Kant's class as a philosopher, so no surprise there.

POLITIAN (1835)

POLITIAN is an unfinished play by Poe, set in 16th-century Rome. Early parts of the play appeared in the Southern Literary Messenger, but it failed to garner good notices so Poe never finished it.

I'm tempted to hypothesize that this was Poe's attempt to ape Shakespeare, given that the play's main action depends upon sexual jealousy among the elite classes. Main character Castiglione has become engaged to his cousin, which is probably less reflective of Poe's own tendencies than of a contemporary scandal during Poe's era. The main character also has apparently had some romantic interaction with his father's ward-- who would be his sister in a functional though not biological sense-- and this would seem to be the only relevance of the play for modern Poe-enthusiasts, as it's pretty bereft of either comic or dramatic interest.

The tome I'm using, Running Press' UNABRIDGED EDGAR ALLAN POE, next prints three Poe efforts that I consider to be more in the vein of "essays." I assume they were included because they bear on the way the author composed some of his hoax-stories, like HANS PFALL. I don't consider the three essays relevant to my project and so I'm skipping them.

MORELLA (1835)

"Morella," like "Berenice," partakes in Poe's creative break-though, as he began to articulate the very personal underpinnings of his dark genius. And yet, "Morella" is not quite as personal and daemonic as the earlier tale.

The story has been adapted to the cinema much more often than "Berenice," but to make the narrative work in a film, it's usually dumbed down into a story of a dead mother's spirit possessing the living body of her daughter, which isn't even close to what happens.

Whereas "Berenice" concerns a desired woman who seems to perish of a literal illness, "Morella" is about a woman who passes away because the unnamed narrator, her husband, mysteriously ceases to feel affection for her. Also in contrast to "Berenice," both the narrator and Morella seem to be ardent bookworms, schooled in abstruse philosophies like Fichte and Schelling. There may an element of envy in the narrator's indifference; perhaps he feels inferior to Morella's oft-described learning? In any case, though once again Poe's narrator disavows erotic feeling toward his beloved, this time he's somehow managed to father a child on Morella. A girl child is born just as Morella perishes, roughly repeating the trope in "Berenice" wherein narrator Egaeus is born when his mother dies.

The daughter grows to womanhood, and the narrator somehow manages to avoid giving her a name until she shows an almost identical resemblance to Morella. A christening-ritual requires the husband to name his daughter. He gives her the name "Morella" and she, like her mother. drops dead.

The story is preceded by a Platonic quote on the uniqueness of identity. Poe may be burlesquing this high-flown philosophy by showing the horror resulting when two entities share the same basic identity.

BERENICE (1835)

As I think I've said, I'm no expert on Poe's career, so I have no encyclopedic knowledge of what stories, poems, and essays the author wrote first, as opposed to their order of publication, for which my only source is THE UNABRIDGED EDGAR ALLAN POE.

All that said, "Berenice" is a quantum leap past all of the other stories, including the one to which I gave the greatest praise, "Ms. Found in a Bottle." It's as if in all of his earlier stories, Poe was dimly imitating some admired model who specialized in both burlesque and insufferable erudition. (Voltaire maybe? A lot of people think ZADIG could've influenced the Dupin stories...)

With Berenice, though, Poe is finally drawing upon themes and symbols that have some intense, however mystifying, personal significance for himself. 

"Berenice" is nearly a catalogue of story-tropes that Poe would use again and again. There's a strangely obsessed narrator-- for once given an actual name, "Egaeus"-- who also suffers from a strange malady. He dwells in a secluded mansion and interacts with almost no one except his female cousin (note: Poe married his 13-year-old cousin the next year). Because of his malady, which causes Egaeus to focus his attention irresistibly on mundane things, he forms a bizarre fixation on Berenice's teeth, though he claims that he has no romantic interest in her (though she has some sort of feeling for him). She has her own malady, a catalepsy that can mistaken for death, but somehow when she apparently dies, no one bothers to check closely to make sure she's really dead (perhaps "Loss of Breath" prefigures this obsession with "living death" scenarios). Though Egaeus sees his cousin buried, he can't get over his obsession with her teeth, and so robs her grave so that he can pry all 32 teeth out of her mouth. To be sure, he performs this act in a trance, and only becomes aware of what he's done shortly before learning that the poor girl, surprise, isn't really, merely, or sincerely dead.

This is an amazingly perverse story for 1835, and it duly shocked the readers of the magazine where it appeared. Poe pleaded that he was just trying to garner readers, but since he kept coming back to these themes, plainly there was some personal interest in them; an exorcism of his personal demons, so to speak.

It's also pleasing that since I consider Poe one of the foremost innovators in crafting stories of "the Uncanny"-- a phenomenological term I explained here and in many other ARCHETYPAL essays-- that what appears to be his first venture into this territory is so much more complex than all the naturalistic and marvelous prose works that preceded BERENICE.

WOMAN IN WHITE: THE ANTI-DETECTIVE STORY

I've recently finished Wilkie Collins' THE WOMAN IN WHITE, often cited as one of the first novels that cemented the European mystery-detective genre. I didn't find it nearly as salutary an experience as his arguably more famous novel THE MOONSTONE, which boasts not only a better plot but an exciting pace and more rounded characters.

That said, THE WOMAN IN WHITE has one thing going for it that MOONSTONE did not: a story that totally invalidates one of the major tropes of the detective genre, so much so that I view it as being "anti-detective," at least in theme.

One of the most enduring themes of the straightforward detective story is the reader's experience of salvation when the clever detective sees the solution to some puzzle that has confounded all others. I don't know whether literary pundits still deem Edgar Allan Poe to be the creator of the detective story, but in at least two of his Dupin stories, Poe concretized the idea of the detective as the solver of great puzzles, both in "Murders in the Rue Morgue" and "The Purloined Letter."

As in many such detective stories, the 1860 novel WOMAN IN WHITE does present the audience with a very convoluted scheme involving certain villains' attempts to despoil an heiress of her inheritance, And two of the principal witnesses to the scheme-- main characters Walter Hartright and Marian Halcombe-- become amateur detectives in order to figure out what has been done and what they can do about it.

Without detailing that scheme, though, I will say that Collins structures the novel so that even when the heroes find out the truth, the villains have arranged things so thoroughly to their advantage that the detectives can't DO anything with their knowledge. At the very time when a Dupin or Holmes would unveil the secret that solves the whole difficulty, Walter and Marian find themselves helpless to make that revelation, because they know that no one will believe them.

Collins, in other words, has no faith that society will listen to the detective once he reveals the truth.  Early in the novel the main villain Count Fosco pokes fun at one character's belief that "murder will out," claiming that only stupid criminals are easily found out, and he does arrange things so that it takes advantage of both the inertia of society and the straightjacketing effects of the legal system. On a side-note Collins' father nagged the author into studying law, so that Collins might have some more profitable employment than being a writer. Collins, in showing in his novel that the law hampers more than it helps, may be demonstrating his extreme dislike for the legal profession in THE WOMAN IN WHITE-- though to be sure, Collins' friend and collaborator Charles Dickens had provided an even greater excoriation of the law in 1852's BLEAK HOUSE.

The undoing of the novel's villains takes place not because of any great revelation, but simply because Walter, by sheer coincidence, lucks into making contact with an enemy of Fosco, and that enemy is key to tearing down Fosco's tapestry of deception.  And thus, though THE WOMAN IN WHITE still qualifies as a "detective novel" in terms of content, in terms of theme it rejects one of the main emotional satisfactions of the genre.

THE MURK OF AVALON

I'm usually a sucker for fiction about Arthurian Britain, particularly when they delve into the conflicts between pagan lore and Christian doctrine during that not-strictly-historical period. I'd heard nothing but good things about Marion Zimmer Bradley's 1982 novel, THE MISTS OF AVALON, and finally chose to crack this massive 800-page tome.

I knew before reading that MISTS was a feminist rendition of the Arthurian tradition, which emphasized the male agency of King Arthur and his knights, but did, in contrast to some comparable traditions of other cultures, allow for some agency on the part of female characters. The most famous of these are generally Guinevere, queen to Arthur and lover to Lancelot, and Morgan LeFay, sometimes represented as half-sister to Arthur, and the mother to Modred, the child of their mutual incestuous encounter. I also knew in advance that MISTS' focus was the character Morgaine, Bradley's take on the evil, magic-wielding sorceress LeFay. The traditional Morgan was not invariably associated with the magical isle of Avalon, but in MISTS Morgaine is not just a sorceress, but an iniatiate into the mysteries of matrifocal British paganism. Avalon, a domain perpetually shrouded in mists, is in some ways a perfect visual symbol for what some have called "the mystery of womanhood," at least as compared to the blunt, obvious preoccupations of the male gender-- few of whom, in Bradley's cosmos, are particularly sharp blades.

Unfortunately, Bradley reveals more than she conceals through having most of her characters chew the fat endlessly about who's sleeping with whom and whose parents brought about what psychological traumas. I have no objection to a latter-day author transporting some modern-day psychological observations into the matrix of Arthurian myth; indeed, as every writer is a child of his or her time, it's well nigh impossible not to do so. What I found egregious in Bradley's MISTS is the repetitiveness of many of her tropes regarding character makeup and ongoing plot-conflicts. This authorial inability to know when "less would be more" may have come about simply because during the majority of her career Bradley did not work in such lengths.

As I commented in my only other blog-comments on a Bradley book here, I've read twenty or more of Bradley's SF-fantasy works. She came to prominence in a period when almost the only publishing outlet for SF-fantasy was in the format of the paperback novel, usually not much beyond 100,000 words in length. I've rarely retained strong memories of those Bradley novels that I've read: whether written in the 1960s or the 1980s, I've found them to be efficiently plotted stories told in a simple "meat-and-potatoes" style. Obviously, given the strong popularity of her ongoing "Darkover" series and MISTS itself, it's possible that I'm simply not destined to be one of Bradley's bigger fans.

Nevertheless, even though MISTS by design is meant to be a long, generation-spanning work, the book's substance could have been boiled down to a more comfortable 500 pages without losing anything but repetitious character-and-plot tropes. Another culprit may be the fact that any author attempting to do a "big novel" on the Arthurian theme has a prodigious number of stories from which to choose. Naturally, Bradley gives preference to stories focused on the Morgan character, providing quasi-realistic takes on stories  like this one from Thomas Malory in which Morgan forces Arthur to fight a warrior named Accolon.  A minor consequence of this focus as that male-focused tropes, such as Arthur drawing the sword Excalibur from a stone or a tree, are substantially altered, and downplayed save when they are relevant to the novel's main conflict: the fading of the pagan and matrifocal way of life before that of all conquering Christianity.

I fully understand why Bradley chose to focus on the domestic world of women in her feminist re-writing of Arthurian themes. Although Arthur's Camelot did not exist as such in recorded history, Bradley must model her version of that world upon the medieval society of the time, with its extremely bifurcated gender-roles (though she does mention in passing that the older Celtic tribes harbored women who took up arms upon the battlefield). Yet for all the talk of rival religious traditions, Bradley's world is one in which both God and the gods are silent.  Any fans of Arthurian fantasy will find that the only magic in MISTS can be explained by the evocation of various psychic powers that have simply been interpreted as magic. Oh, and there's one "dragon," never seen "on-camera" as it were, but Bradley implies that it's nothing more than some prehistoric venom-spitting worm.

These rationalizations of mythic material are standard enough in what I tend to deem "bestseller fiction," and indeed Bradley's MISTS may have been successful with audiences precisely because it did not require those readers to believe in dragons and enchanted swords.  Still, bestseller fiction is capable of providing some philosophical discourse on certain topics, like what makes one religion different from one another. Bradley, no philosopher, placates possible Christian readers by having many of her pagans assure the Christians that "all gods are one." Yet clearly all religions are not one, given that so much of the novel is devoted to showing how feminine agency is reduced and downgraded with the encroachment of patrifocal Christian beliefs.  But I will admit that since most of Bradley's characters don't have the intellectual background conducive to long religious debates, such discourse would have been difficult to render credible.

Morgaine, the center of the novel, is fascinating in the novel's first half, as we see her caught in the machinations of the king-making pagan priests who plot to bring about the birth of Arthur. Yet while I admire the complexity with which Bradley lays out her vision of familial relations between dozens of Arthurian figures, some of them result in the aforementioned repetitiveness. As a young woman Morgaine falls in love with Lancelet (the novel's version of Lancelot), with the result that she and the novel's version of Guinevere are rivals for the knight's charms. This could have been a sound plot-idea, but Bradley returns to it again and again, rarely saying anything new beyond another chorus of Morgaine singing "Poor Poor Pitiful Me."

I'll note in conclusion that just as the Morgan-Arthur relationship is sometimes incestuous in certain stories, Bradley uses incest-motifs frequently throughout MISTS: for instance, Lancelet is Morgaine's cousin, the son of the woman who initiates Morgaine into the mysteries and who is more of a mother to Morgaine that the woman who births her.  In my other essay I commented that THE DOOR THROUGH SPACE is replete with such motifs, though only a more thorough reading of her corpus of works would reveal whether or not it's a repeated theme.

SUMMATION: THE DOOR THROUGH SPACE (1961)

I recently reread the obscure Marion Zimmer Bradley book, THE DOOR THROUGH SPACE, which originally appeared as one of the famous "Ace Doubles," paired with an A. Bertram Chandler novel.

This is not a review as such, but rather a summation of the unusual incest-themes in the book, which I have not noted in the majority of the Bradley books I've read-- and I've probably read a little over twenty of them. I've capitalized most of the names just because I felt like it.

______________________

RACE CARGILL is a Terran Intelligence agent on Wolf, a planet of aliens who look human but are not genetically related to earthpeople. Prior to the novel’s beginning RACE has suffered facial injuries from a duel he fought against his best friend RAKHA, said to have suffered even worse injuries of the same kind. Both men are described as nearly identical in many ways—though the similarity of their names is not mentioned--, but RAKHAL can do one thing RACE can’t:  marry RACE’s sister JULI. 

The quarrel is later explained as one between RACE’s loyalty to the Terran Empire and RAKHAL’s advocacy of the rights of Wolf against Terran influence. However, in the opening chapters it seems more like RACE being possessive of JULI. In the present day JULI comes to him, asking him to play “rescuer,” because RAKHAL has run away with their little daughter RINDY. RACE consents to investigate, partly because RAKHAL is rumored to be allied to a weapons-smuggler, “the Toymaker,” who may be an ally to Earth’s enemies. However, in the final scene between RACE and JULI, she embraces him and accidentally hurts him, and he reacts by snapping the ritual chains she wears; the symbol of JULI’s marriage to RAKHAL. In so doing he accidentally wounds her slightly, a “mutual wounding” that mirrors the duel of RACE and RAKHAL. 

RACE begins his investigation by journeying to a town off-limits to Earth-people, and he tries to gain information from KYRAL, one of Wolf’s nonhumans and an enemy to Terran interests. KYRAL mistakes RACE for RAKHAL but refuses to help the Earthman once he knows the truth. KYRAL is, however, married to his two half-sisters, DALISSA and MIELLYN, both desirable women RACE meets during his investigations. There’s no clarity about whether or not KYRAL has had intercourse with either sibling, as RACE remembers that most if not all “brother-sister marriages” on Wolf are “loveless.” Aggressive DALISSA gives RACE the opportunity to win information if he endures ritual torture; he does so and DALISSA ends up not only giving RACE intel but also making love to him.  She asks him to take her away from KYRAL but RACE senses that she’s too bound to Wolifan customs and never sees her again.

 This clears the path for RACE’s union with MIELLYN, a sort of child-woman who can look like an underaged “pixie” without her makeup, but can metamorphose into a more mature figure when she chooses. Through the complicated web of connections between MIELLYN, the Toymaker, and RAKHAL, RACE eventually encounters his rival, but ends up saving his rival’s life rather than taking it. The novel ends with the implication that RAKHAL will be able to return to a normal family life with JULI and RINDY, while RACE’s incest-demons have been exorcised by his alliance to the child-woman MIELYNN, implicitly “stolen” from KYRAL as RAKHAL “stole” JULI. 

THE 100 GREATEST CROSSOVERS OF ALL TIME #15

Like a few other crossovers mentioned here, the two long stories in which the cast of the SIMPSONS meets the crew of FUTURAMA are not the greatest stories in either mythos. For that matter, I've never thought the humor of these Matt Groening concepts translated well to the comics page.  In the animated TV shows, if a joke doesn't work, you just move on to the next one, a la the example of vaudeville. If a joke doesn't work on the comics page, it just there, silently reminding the reader of its failure.

Still, the first of the two Simpsons- Futurama crossovers, written by Ian Boothby and drawn in the Groening style, has some decent SF/comics-related in-jokes, like the one above, in which SIMPSONS character Waylon Smithers dons the outfit of classic anime character Captain Harlock. Similarly, the planet Nerdicus looks like Jack Kirby's "living planet" Ego crossed with the face of Jerry Lewis. Most of the interactions of the protagonists from the respective series are at best fair: Lisa gets along well with Leela, but nothing catches fire between Homer and Bender, Bart and Fry, or Marge and Maggie with Nibbler. The best joke appears when the universes of the respective characters are interconnected by a cosmic rift that looks just like a tear in a comic book page.

But though the first Groening-fest is reasonably enjoyable, Boothby's second trip to the well comes up with an empty bucket.  The Simpsons cast-members, who are fictional characters to the world of Futurama, accidentally plunge into the "real" world. Because they have no legal status, the evil tyrant "Mom" subjects them to slavery-- an idea which sounds promising but doesn't go anywhere. All things considered, it's not the "worst crossover ever," but even the good jokes would have worked better had the same project been undertaken in the form of an animated special.

SHIKI TSUKAI VOL. 1: REVIEW

While I plan to read further in the series simply because the art is pleasing, there's nothing original in this manga.  There's an "everyman" young hero who's being trained in an arcane mystical discipline, and there's a beautiful young comrade who helps him while not being very shy about taking off her clothes at embarrassing moments.  There are scheming villains and an overbearing, comedy-relief instructor (the brunette at the far left, above). 

Only two things make SHIKI TSUKAI moderately interesting.  First, the author builds his system of  magic around the Japanese seasonal system, resulting in panels like this one:

Although Japan has no shortage of routine space operas and martial arts epics, SHIKI is noteworthy for elucidating the differences between Japan's traditional calendar and the adoption of the Gregorian standard.  It's too early to tell if manga-creator To-Ru Zekuu will develop this into a consistent fantasy-mythology or not.

The other point of interest is that SHIKI TSUKAI is one of many manga that flirts with Oedipal issues, albeit in a very distanced manner. Hero Akira Kizuki lives with his mother and father, but his father's gone part of the time and the first thing we learn of his mother is that she looks too young to have a high-school age child.  In addition, the aforementioned comedy-relief instructor flirts with Akira outrageously, probably with no serious intent.  But it caused me to wonder about the etiology of the manga fascination with the "older-woman/younger-man" trope.  While I'm not an expert regarding manga, it seems to me that it's been on the rise in the past two decades.  It doesn't always eventuate in a romance as such, as seen in HAPPY LESSON (1999-2002), and I suspect that the trope's role in SHIKI TSUKAI is incidental in nature.  In comparison I've only rarely observed the trope in American comic books belonging to the adventure-genre, or even in works of comedy.  Film and television media have used the trope much more in respect to comedy, but in American adventure-stories overall, the most popular trope might be "older-man/younger-woman."

THE ILLEARTH WAR: THOUGHTS

I had read the first six books in the CHRONICLES OF THOMAS COVENANT some time ago, and recently considered trying to work through the last four books in the series.  To refamiliarize myself with the series, I reread the first two books in the series, LORD FOUL'S BANE and THE ILLEARTH WAR, but then got distracted by other reading-demands and tabled that idea.

What still impresses me about Donaldson's epic-- spoilers ahead for anyone who doesn't want to see endings discussed-- is that both his central character and his story have something of an "anti-Tolkien" tone to them. 

To be sure, Tolkien's "Middle-Earth" is almost completely cut off from anything resembling the modern world, while the Covenant books involve a modern Earthman voyaging to a magical land.  In this the CHRONICLES show a greater resemblance to C.S. Lewis' Narnia book than to LORD OF THE RINGERS, or even to Joy Chant's RED MOON AND BLACK MOUNTAIN.  At a convention I happened to ask Donaldson if he'd read RED MOON, and he said that he had.

But to pursue the RINGS connection anyway-- Tolkien's cosmos, far more than Narnia, appeals because it transmits the view of a pristine pre-industrial world.  Donaldson also gives the reader such a world, called simply "the Land."   However, the presence of outsider Thomas Covenant immediately calls its perfection into question by introducing an outsider who doubts the Land's veracity, because Covenant is a leper who constantly fears losing control of his own senses and/or sanity.

Book 2, THE ILLEARTH WAR, is particularly interesting with respect to one of the Land's characters, High Lord Elena.  Her magic nominally protects the Land from the satanic influence of the story's villain Lord Foul, but she has a psychological weakness one won't find in Tolkien and Lewis.  Without going into too many details, Elena was the offspring of Covenant, who united-- under less than ideal circumstances-- with Lena, a woman of the Land.  The long absence of her father results in what a psychologist might call an "overvaluation" of the father, so that when Covenant returns, she falls in love with him.  Happily, Covenant does not reciprocate, but Elena's father-complex crops up at the climax.  She uses her vast magical powers to revive the spirit of one of the Land's foremost defenders, Lord Kevin, intending to pit against Lord Foul's forces.  Instead, this "father-spirit" proves utterly unable to overcome the evildoers, and instead is turned against Elena, killing her.

I try to avoid analyzing characters too much in terms of sociological developments of the period, since I believe that it's generally wrong to see fiction as a direct representation of those developments.  But I do think that the 1970s, when Donaldson wrote and published these books, was dominantly a time when many of the cultural narratives had broken down, whether as a result of the counterculture or the Vietnam War or what have you.  This concluding scene in ILLEARTH WAR, whatever it meant to Donaldson in terms of his overarching theme, suggests to me an eroison of the idea of a stable savior-figure-- specifically, that of a benign father-figure who rides in and conquers the bad guys.   However, without my having read the entire ten-book series, this is at best a rough hypothesis.