Escape

As I said before, from the beginning, fantasy has served three basic purposes: the production of pleasure (escape), the satisfaction of certain (usually suppressed) desires (wish-fulfillment), and the examination of truth (especially about the human condition) through myth-making (mythopoeia).

Let us begin by discussing the most touted and most abused facet of fantasy's multi-sided purpose: pleasure-or escape. "The use of it [fantasy] is to give you pleasure and delight" (LeGuin "Why" 43-44). This is the simplest (and yet also one of the most profound) purposes of fantasy. Why has the establishment clung so tightly to the puritanical notion of pleasure as sin when it has thrown off all other remnants of puritan heritage. The pleasure inherent in fantasy, even in what we blithely term 'bad' (i.e., not fulfilling the purpose of self-examination) fantasy, is identified and categorized by Anthony Easthope, in his book Poetry and Phantasy:

Phantasy in art provides two distinct pleasures that daydreams do not: that produced by 'the purely formal' and that made available by the phantasy itself now that its quality of self-concerned wish-fulfillment has been disguised. The distinction between pleasure in the formal and pleasure in the phantasy we would now understand as corresponding to the distinction between the signifier and the signified. It is not the case-as is often supposed-that the work/play of the signifier helps to disguise the phantasy; rather, the signifier in art yields fore-pleasure that leads to a separate source of pleasure in the signified phantasy. (20)

As can be seen, the Fantasy's purpose in giving pleasure or escape is closely tied to its purpose of the satisfaction of repressed desire, or wish-fulfillment.