Why Women Fall in Love With Demons: What Isaac Bashevis Singer Knew About Fantasy and Desire
Tuesday, April 28, 2026. This is for Erica Jong.
On Taibele and Her Demon and the Strange Intelligence of Desire
There are stories you summarize at your peril.
This is one of them.
Because if you reduce “Taibele and Her Demon” to a lonely woman is tricked by a man pretending to be a demon, you have described the skeleton and misplaced the body.
The tale is much odder, sadder, funnier, and morally slipperier than that.
And, as with much of Isaac Bashevis Singer, the comedy comes wearing the clothes of metaphysics.
Isaac Bashevis Singer (1903–1991) was a Nobel Prize–winning writer and one of the great chroniclers of appetite—spiritual, sexual, and metaphysical.
Writing largely in Yiddish, he fused Jewish folklore, mysticism, psychological depth, and erotic mischief, populating his fiction with rabbis, fools, ghosts, demons, and lonely people trying to negotiate with God and their own desires.
His work could be tender one moment, devastating the next, always alive to longing, moral ambiguity, and the unruly supernatural.
First, the story itself.
Taibele is a woman abandoned by her husband.
Not widowed.
Not properly released.
Suspended.
Which, in Singer, is already a metaphysical condition.
She lives in a shtetl where her social life has narrowed into something nearly airless. She has become one of those women communities render invisible while pretending this is moral order.
Then a man named Alchonon enters the picture.
A trickster.
A wanderer.
A fabulist.
Possibly a scoundrel.
Possibly a mystic with bad boundaries.
Singer likes these ambiguities.
And so he does something outrageous.
He visits her secretly at night and tells her he is Hurmizah—a demon.
Not metaphorically.
An actual demon.
And this is where a lesser writer would lose control.
Singer does not.
Because the seduction unfolds not through brute eroticism but through storytelling.
The demon speaks of infernal kingdoms, strange marriages among spirits, lust in the underworld, supernatural appetites.
He woos through cosmology.
Which is so extravagantly strange it nearly becomes believable.
Or perhaps all seduction is partly that.
Someone invents a world and asks whether you’d like to live there.
And Taibele believes him.
Or half believes.
Or chooses belief.
And this distinction matters.
Readers often want to know:
Is she gullible?
But Singer is interested in a harder question:
What if she understands more than she lets on?
What if she is participating?
That possibility changes everything.
Because then this is not simply fraud.
It is collusion in enchantment.
And many adult love affairs contain more of that than anyone likes admitting.
The affair begins.
And something astonishing happens.
Taibele flourishes.
She is erotically awakened.
Emotionally animated.
Less ghostlike.
More alive.
A counterfeit demon has somehow restored vitality.
This is either absurd or profound.
With Singer it is often both.
And notice what has happened:
The lie does not merely exploit loneliness.
It reorganizes it.
This is why the story becomes morally difficult.
We want deception to produce only damage.
Singer refuses us that comfort.
But the comedy darkens.
Because enchantments, like all contraband pleasures, have a shelf life.
Alchonon ages.
Circumstances shift.
Mortality presses in.
The masquerade cannot survive forever.
And what begins as bawdy folk comedy acquires grief.
Because love, even counterfeit love, has made claims.
That is where the story becomes almost cruel.
Not because of betrayal exactly—
but because imagination has created genuine attachment.
And now reality has arrived to repossess the furniture.
Singer is very good at this.
He lets laughter curdle slowly.
But what is the story about?
That is where things get interesting.
It is about loneliness, obviously.
And erotic hunger.
And religious imagination.
And fraud.
And the human willingness to accept impossible premises when ordinary life has become unbearable.
But beneath all that—
it is about fantasy as a mode of truth.
That is a much stranger subject.
Because modern people like fantasy when labeled fiction and distrust it when it enters emotional life.
Singer has no such neatness.
He knows desire often comes in costume.
A demon.
A myth.
A dangerous stranger.
A person onto whom one projects the sacred.
Readers imagine this is archaic.
Then they fall in love.
There is tremendous humor here.
People forget Singer is hilarious.
A man appears and says, in essence:
Good evening, I am a demon.
And instead of the plot ending there, we get seduction.
That is comic genius.
It is the old Jewish joke structure at metaphysical scale.
Reality is ridiculous first.
Profound second.
Perhaps.
And there is also this wicked subtext:
If a woman can be more erotically alive with a fake demon than many are with ordinary husbands—
what exactly is Singer implying?
Well.
Quite a lot.
There is also theology hiding in the bed.
Because Hurmizah is not merely erotic fantasy.
He is the numinous intruder.
Dangerous, enchanted, transgressive.
There is old mystical material humming under the floorboards.
Read Gershom Scholem and you begin to see how porous eros and metaphysics can become.
Singer knew.
The supernatural here is not decoration.
It is the form desire borrows when ordinary language is too poor.
That is why the tale feels haunted.
And yes, it is about deception.
But not only deception.
People often read the story as male trickery victimizing female innocence.
There is some truth there.
But it is incomplete.
Because Taibele is not merely duped.
She is imaginative.
She consents to a myth because the myth enlarges life.
That is not mere naiveté.
That is existential risk.
And one suspects Singer admires her for it.
Quietly.
There is a line buried in the whole story:
What if enchantment can carry truth even when its premises are false?
That is a dangerous idea.
But it animates the tale.
The demon is invented.
The transformation is not.
And that may be Singer’s masterpiece move.
Because it leaves you unable to separate illusion neatly from revelation.
Which is, incidentally, where much love lives.
And what is one to do with a story like this?
Not moralize too quickly.
That would flatten it.
Better to let it trouble you.
A lonely woman accepts a lover disguised as a demon and discovers vitality.
Is this degradation?
Liberation?
Self-deception?
Mystical eros?
Comic blasphemy?
Yes.
Exactly.
Singer rarely gives one thing where six contradictory things can be arranged at once.
That is his abundance.
Final Thoughts
The vulgar reading of this story is:
A woman was fooled.
The serious reading is:
A woman used fantasy to recover aliveness.
Very different.
And much riskier.
People are often scandalized by the demon.
Honestly, they should be more scandalized by how much ordinary love also depends on imaginative exaggeration.
People call someone destiny after three dinners.
People project divinity onto the beloved every day.
Compared with that—
Hurmizah is merely more explicit.
And perhaps that is why the tale still feels modern.
It understands something embarrassing:
Human beings do not merely want affection.
They want enchantment and bestowed atttention.
Sometimes they will accept it in whatever costume arrives at the door.
Even if it says it came from hell itself.
From Demons to Minotaurs
Readers of Taibele and Her Demon may notice a strange kinship with the older myth of the Minotaur.
In both stories, the monstrous is not merely threat but erotic symbol.
The demon and the Minotaur function less as literal creatures than as containers for what ordinary social life cannot easily hold—danger, appetite, transgression, vitality.
This may help explain why women in literature are so often drawn not simply to ideal lovers, but to impossible beings.
The monster can represent what domesticated life excludes. It can carry rawness, instinct, forbidden admiration, even forms of aliveness polite society has difficulty naming.
In the Minotaur myth, the labyrinth can be read as the psyche itself; entering it means risking contact with something unruly and transformative.
In Singer’s story, Taibele does something similar. She enters a symbolic labyrinth through fantasy.
Neither story is finally about monsters.
Both are about what longing is willing to approach when ordinary reality feels spiritually undernourished.
Compared that way, Hurmizah and the Minotaur begin to look less like creatures—
and more like archetypes of forbidden eros.
And there’s a lovely contrarian thesis hiding here:
The monster in women’s fantasy is often less predator than a vitality figure.
Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.