The Unicorn

by Dal Stivens

Unicorns have often been the mythical symbol of youth and freedom. Their innocence attracts innocence, their youth entices youth, and their beauty marvels those who glance. Dal Stivens uses the unicorn as a symbol in this story, to further explore the status virginity has in society, and how midlife crisis causes people to alter their choices in search of something liberating. 

‘ … what could I believe in, what should I do or was anything worthwhile,’ are often questions that plague the mind of those going through a life crisis. Under the influence of alcohol, ‘what could I believe in,’ because a pivotal point in the narrator’s inner monologue, because being ‘silly enough to believe [you’ve] seen a unicorn,’ is not something the average person would normally do sober. By agreeing to go search for this unicorn and ‘put his head in my virgin lap’, while ‘the whole business was zany,’ demonstrates how people in a questioning life phase abandon majority of reason to recover their self-identity. 

‘You’re a virgin, of course?’ An assumption made by a man in the presence of a young woman who is not accompanied by a male companion. Immoral in every sense, illustrates the importance and purity that virginity has in the eyes of society. Unicorns are attracted to purity and youth; virgins. The assumption made by Backhaus has underlying meaning that she was not yet owned by a man, and could be put to good use before she is tainted by the sin that is no longer a sin come marriage. Although the narrator humours Backhaus by lying about her being ‘virgo intacta’, uncovers, in this story, how a woman is of no use and off limits unless she is clean and pure. This goes back to the idea that a woman is a man’s property.