ABSTRACT
The desire for an ‘educational’ process that leads to personal, spiritual, and artistic development is one of the obsessive concerns of Lucas Malet’s The Far Horizon. Both literally and metaphorically, Dominic’s loss of bearings forces him down a stilted path that confounds the edifying trajectory he hoped to take, miring him in ideological, artistic, and amorous conflicts. Malet’s ideological, spiritual, and physical distance from paternal authoritarian models freed her to explore new religious telos—or, per Ford, a “spiritual or evolutionary telos”. Certainly, by following a narrative arc that showcases professional and social shortcomings along with frustrated attempts at integration and positive development, Malet offers perspicacious yet acerbic critique of society’s hostility and empirical and didactic failures that Dominic consequently experiences. As certain critics have identified certain fractious quality to The Far Horizon, reading the novel in light of the bildungsroman genre helps elucidate changes that Dominic undergoes in regard to his unexpected maturation—specifically, his spiritual, romantic, and personal development.
