53 pages • 1 hour read
The Deer and the Dragon
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Impact of Childhood and Religious Trauma
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of child abuse and substance use.
Marlow suffered as a child and even into her adulthood due to her mother Lisbeth’s religious fervor, emotional abuse, and neglect. Raised in a strictly religious home, Marlow came to associate beliefs in the supernatural with oppression and believed that her mother must have a mental illness because she saw things that no one else could see. As Marlow wrestles with her new understanding of otherworldly realms in the novel, she must confront the impact of childhood and religious trauma.
As a child, Marlow often could not know whether her mother would treat her kindly or cruelly, and this uncertainty led her to become anxious and uncertain about herself. Marlow explains, “Everything I did was disappointing to [my mother]” (116). When Lisbeth overheard four-year-old Marlow talking to a so-called imaginary friend (Caliban), she immediately distrusted the entity, and she cautioned Marlow to stay away. By the time Marlow was 16, she felt that she could no longer tell Lisbeth the truth about her experiences because her mother would become so enraged when she did. However, at times, Lisbeth would show Marlow kindness and love, making the child constantly yearn for love and strive to understand how best to get it. Marlow says, “Her praise was like the sun after winter, cutting through the freeze-outs, the silent treatments, the punishments that frosted my misdeeds” (177).
As an adult, Marlow has rejected everything she associated with Lisbeth, including her mother’s religious faith and interpretation of the world, believing that the white fox—and, later, Caliban—to be figments of her overactive imagination. When she found success as an author, she hoped, “Maybe I’d healed from whatever had cracked within me when I was so young that I’d needed to create an imaginary friend in order to survive” (48). Marlow connects her childhood abuse to her perceived inability to function normally in the world. Her experience of emotional abuse makes it difficult for her to recognize and accept Caliban’s real love as an adult, just as her religious trauma makes her initially mistrustful of her ability to perceive otherworldly beings.
Even when Marlow faces her mother as an adult, she is hugely intimidated and hardly able to function, another sign of her trauma. She says, “I […] became a child once more. My heart bled against years of buried terror as, small and helpless, I shattered into a powder of nothingness before her” (225). Thus, the effects of her religious and childhood trauma are wide-ranging and reach even into her adulthood.
The Complexities of Identity and Self-Acceptance
Even before she meets the fae, Marlow has balanced various identities throughout her life. As a young child, she was forced to conform to a religious identity that repelled her. As a young woman in her early twenties, she became a sex worker under the pseudonym “Maribelle,” while as an author, she uses a pen name, “Merit Finnegan.” As the novel’s action begins, Marlow must confront who she really is and what she really wants in her private life, leading her to explore the complexities of identity and self-acceptance.
At the start of the novel, Marlow struggles with self-acceptance and believes that there must be something wrong with her. She fears that she may have a mental illness—as she presumes her mother does—because she can see otherworldly figures like Caliban. Although she is rich and successful, she describes herself as wanting to escape from her life and admits to engaging in excessive alcohol consumption and drug usage to numb herself. Her love life is a further reflection of her conflicted feelings and sense of unworthiness: While she longs for love and knows that she is truly attracted to Caliban, she does not trust herself enough to commit to what she wants.
As the novel progresses, however, Marlow gradually begins to accept herself for who she really is. While she initially responds to much of what Fauna teaches her with resistance or skepticism, she becomes more curious about and accepting of her fae blood and the possibilities offered by her connection to the supernatural realm. Her changing attitude toward religious beliefs reflects a key part of this self-acceptance: While she has spent years of her life resisting her powers of sight and rejecting all forms of religious belief due to childhood trauma, she now begins to realize that embracing the supernatural does not mean having to conform to her mother’s conception of religion. Instead, Marlow can form spiritual connections and beliefs on her own terms, which she begins to do as she explores the otherworldly realms.
While the novel ends on a cliffhanger, Marlow has already made significant progress in taking control over her own identity and accepting who she is. In declaring her love for Caliban, she finally believes herself worthy of his love and is ready to act on her own authentic feelings. Likewise, her close friendship with Fauna and willingness to navigate the supernatural realms show that she no longer allows her mother’s beliefs to shape her own spiritual identity. Instead, Marlow is now ready to embrace her fae blood and continue her love affair with Caliban, free to be herself at last.
The Limits of Human Life and Logic
In The Deer and the Dragon, human logic cannot support the truth about the world and the myriad fae realms. Silas suggests, initially, that lifting Marlow’s veil will drive her “mad,” and even Marlow worries at the start of the novel that her gift of sight might be a sign of illness. She soon discovers, however, that there is much more to reality than first meets the eye, exposing the limits of human life and logic.
When Marlow first learns of the existence and scope of the fae realms, she struggles to fit them into any easily understandable framework of her reality. She repeatedly compares her experiences to those of Alice in Lewis Carroll’s novels. Even Fauna compares most humans’ lives to a somnambulist state when she asks, “Most humans spend their lives asleep to reality. What do you say, Marlow? Are you ready to wake up?” (119). Although Fauna is often alienated or even angered by Marlow’s questions, she understands the mortal woman’s need to ask them. Marlow compares knowledge of the fae realms to dreams because they seem unreal, while Fauna insists that having this knowledge, which is usually kept from humans, is tantamount to being fully awake.
Likewise, humanity’s tendency to attribute a belief in angels and demons to religious zealotry or mental illness exists, in the novel, because the knowledge is too strange and surreal for human logic to incorporate into an otherwise typical, mundane human existence. As Fauna asks Marlow, “Are you fighting this because you genuinely think you’re crazy? Or are you pushing back because you don’t want to deal with the consequences of accepting that there is so much more to life than you knew?” (140). Marlow doesn’t answer these questions directly because she knows that she doesn’t want to be regarded as having a mental illness but also doesn’t want to accept the “consequences” of acknowledging the truth. She finds Fauna’s revelations both shocking and overwhelming.
Betty, another mortal who can remember her past lives, puts it differently. She says that names, commands, and promises in the otherworldly realms “have power that those of us having a mortal experience don’t understand. Humans aren’t like fae […] We can lie. We can break our word […] Some suggest that the human kingdom is the true hell, and [she] often wonder[s] if they’re right” (153). Ultimately, the mortal experience is so different from the fae experience that humans cannot possibly hope to fully understand it, with the novel suggesting that there are things that exist beyond ordinary human understanding.
Even as Marlow attempts to comprehend Fauna’s explanation of the town of Bellfield and the gods trapped there, she understands how unnecessary (and unlikely) her ability to comprehend is. She admits, “I believed her, or I didn’t. I would follow her, or I wouldn’t […] I numbed any questions that would be answered with nonhuman logic” (312). Thus, human logic, shaped by the knowledge that mortal lives and loves are necessarily finite, simply cannot fully fathom immortality or immortal realms.
Unlock all 53 pages of this Study GuidePlus, gain access to 9,100+ more expert-written Study Guides.
Including features: