Actaeon's Sin: The "Previous Iconography" of Fowles's "The Ebony Tower"

Abstract

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 Magus (Salami 136), but because he did not say how it mystifies the reader. In The Ebony Tower, David Williams, a young English painter, art teacher, and critic, goes to hunt down Henry Breasley, an aging expatriate artist living at Coetminais in Brittany, on behalf of a London publisher doing a book on his work. In the end, however, it is Williams who is brought to bay, shocked from his habitual complacency by the encounter with Breasley and two young Englishwomen attending him; the assignment turns into an appalling revelation of his shortcomings as an artist and a man.