Growing With My Garden

  As the chapter head tells us, the narrative begins to focus its attention upon Damaris’s conversion.  We are shown hr mental absorption with a completely abstract understanding of human experience–she is preoccupied with composing a graph of human thought.  As a  result she has a thorough-going contempt for the actual experience of people, and even wants to rid herself of her father when he seems to be ailing. Suddenly the archetypal Strength or Energy that gives things form and structure withdraws from the neighboring buildings, causing them to collapse.  Damaris reacts not with alarm but complacency; then a stench arises, driving her to a downstairs window where she is confronted with an appallingly huge and terrible flying creature.  For the first time in her life she feels the need for somebody to be with her, and she cries out for Anthony and her father. Her father appears but he, absorbed in his vision of beauty, calmly spurns her.  Then th...

  These chapters show wrong attitudes towards the nature of reality, and culminate with Anthony coming into the right attitude and achieving the correct relationship. Anthony visits Richardson, and learns that when the arrogant people seek to command and control the  celestial powers, they become hostile beasts, so that the lion becomes a dragon when people like Berringer and Foster seek to command it for their own self-centered purposes. Chapter Nine begins with a description of how Damaris’s state of mind prevents her from experiencing the peace of mind that can come from a right relation to nature.  Her mental preoccupation with “the relation of the Divine Perfection with creation” ironically prevents her from the sort of actually experiencing it which her father and Anthony are receiving. Her intellectual world was all that mattered to her, and getting her articles published only nourished her egotism.  When she encounters the deeply frightened Quentin an...

In Chapter Four, when Mr. Foster visits Anthony and Quentin, the mystery of the lion and the snake begins to unfold.  Williams is drawing upon Platonic metaphysics.  Plato taught that every object in this created world is derived from an archetypal idea.  For instance, behind all the trees in this world is the idea of Tree.  The infinite variety of individual trees is the result of a creating demigod trying to copy the idea and never getting it quite right; hence, all the incredible varieties of trees.  Because all individual trees are imitations of the idea of Tree, they are inferior to the idea.    In our novel, Williams is asking, what idea or principle makes all things hold together; that is, makes things cohere?  Is there not a principle of Strength? And is there not a principle of Beauty, that makes some things, such as butterflies, beautiful?  What if these Ideas could be summoned by someone who concentrates on them?  Foster’s...

In all his novels Williams explores the nature of reality–of the world our senses perceive and our minds try to understand–and the array of possible attitudes towards it.  Our spiritual health depends upon our exercising the right attitudes towards the life we encounter.  In The Place of the Lion, Anthony depicts the ideal set of mind; many of the other characters depict seriously wrong approaches.  As you read, carefully note the attitudes of each.    Anthony has jovial, confident, and expectant attitudes towards whatever may occur, convinced that ideas are “more dangerous than material things.”  Thus the main theme of the novel is introduced: what reality do ideas have, and what is their relation to the material world?  Meeting those who are on the lookout for a lion, he volunteers to help them.  He sees the quest as “enormous fun.”  Quentin, on the other hand, wants to “bolt.”  When they see Berringer, who has been overcome by the...