Popular Culture Review Vol. 1, December 1989 | Page 29

their lovers are as strong as those between Beauty and her Beast,
and Psyche and Cupid. The contemporary conflict arises not from
anyone’s envy of these bonds, but from the question o f personal
versus social acceptance with regard to a relationship. This passion
is considered abnormal in modern culture. The dilemma that each
of the heroines must resolve is whether or not to accept her feelings
for her partner, or to adhere to the dictates o f society, thus refusing
the Beast and denying her love.
The protagonists o f these modem tales vary from strongwilled, independent women, to the meek, insecure wife o f a
philandering husband. In R. A. MacAvoy’s Tea With The Black
Dragon, we discover the beautiful but eccentric Martha Macnamara,
a fifty year old fiddle player who travels from New York to San
Francisco after an urgent phone call from her daughter.
In the lounge o f her hotel, Martha encounters the enchanting
and equally eccentric Mayland Long, who speaks cryptically of
having known the son of Thomas Rhymer as well as Bodhidharma,
an ancient mystic who sat, yoga style, for nine years facing a wall,
attempting to find the meaning of truth.
Mayland Long is a slight man, seemingly of Oriental descent
(“At least his eyes are,” muses Martha, trying to determine his.
nationality), with long, tapering fingertips and unusually dark skin.
His age is indeterminate as well and he is unwilling to reveal it when
Martha bluntly asks (MacAvoy, 4,19).
He has knowledge of an uncanny number of languages, even,
to M artha’s surprise, newly-created ones. When she tells him of her
daughter’s mysterious phone call, and her subsequent inability to
contact the younger woman since her arrival in San Francisco, Mr.
Long offers his assistance in escorting Martha to various computer
corporations where her daughter has been working for the past few
years: “Help me find Elizabeth?”, Martha repeats his offer, “ . . . Do
you mean that you know about computers, too, as well as Ireland

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