St. George by Gail Godwin

 The story is about a lonely PhD student named Gwen, when she unexpectedly starts to keep a dragon in her house. The dragon eats jewelry, and makes the house into a mess. But in the other hand, the dragon makes Gwen happy since he gives some happiness and makes her busy in a good way. But, the dragon becomes too big, and Gwen decides to kill him, but she fails. Her boyfriend(?) comes by and takes the dragon for fresh air, but the St. George escapes to the river and swims away.

I think it’s a bit ironic about the dragon’s name, St. George, because originally St. George is the man who killed the dragon. Maybe Gwen was a bit tired of her English PhD thing and named the dragon like it. 


 This story is magical realism, which Gwen’s ordinary life and the magical dragon co-exists and makes a story. The city’s status is magical too, since Gwen says that she don’t know nothing about the people in the city (which can’t be possible). This magical aspect emphasizes Gwen’s loneliness and makes her to pay more attention to St. George. 


 As I searched the internet, I found an interesting information that the author, Gail Godwin, was actually a graduate student who was divorced. Gwen in ‘St. George’ is a lonely graduate student, and things do not go very well to her. I think Gail Godwin reconciled her actual life with her fictional story to write St. George. Maybe she hoped something interesting (and something which will entertain her) to happen in her life, since she was supposedly lonely when she wrote St. George. 


 St. George is certainly very expensive to keep, and craves even more when Gwen feeds him jewelries. I think this is somehow similar with the ‘pleasure’ in Buddhism. Buddhism tells people that when they crave for pleasure, the instant the individual succeeds one pleasure, new desire for new pleasure emerges, which makes one individual crave for more and more. This somewhat reminds me of ‘fame’; if I gain popularity, I’ll be wanting for more popularity therefore there is no down-grade on this.


 So, I think St. George depicts the author’s sense of duty for the fame. Artists and Authors have to make their creations popular to gain money. But for them, if they make their new creation less perfect then their last creation, they usually get criticized for getting immature. They are expected to make their new creations better than their latest one, and this can cause stress to them. This is similar to the dragon which have to be fed with more and more jewelries, and causes more trouble as it grows.