by M. O. Grenby
‘Pooh,’ said Christopher Robin earnestly, ‘if I – if I’m not quite –’ he stopped and tried again – ‘Pooh, whatever happens, you will understand, won’t you?’
‘Understand what?’
‘Oh, nothing.’ He laughed and jumped to his feet. ‘Come on!’
So they went off together. But wherever they go, and whatever happens to them on the way, in that enchanted place on top of the Forest a little boy and his Bear will always be playing.18
Milne’s closure is elegiac, yet it involves less of a rupture than the ending of Kenneth Grahame’s The Golden Age (1895), a book originally intended for adults that also acquired a younger readership. When Edward, the oldest of the children who have shared a fantasy world, leaves for boarding school, his undisturbed siblings continue their games of make-believe; armed with bows and arrows, they remain convinced that their ‘Ulysses’ will return intact. But the narrator predicts that, once back from ‘Troy’, their former leader will ‘scornfully condemn their clumsy but laborious armory as rot and humbug and only fit for kids’.19 By way of contrast, Milne allows Christopher to remain almost as ignorant as the toys he leaves behind. The site he had animated through magical thinking need not be violated.
Still, Grahame shares Milne’s desire to prolong the habit of magical thinking. If young readers must eventually surrender one way of seeing the world, they may also recover or rediscover its contours between the covers of a book. The wistful annals of ideal boyhoods are not so much turned upside down as rejected in fantastic meta-fictions authored by girl characters who gleefully subvert adult and textual authority. In Eleanor Estes’ The Witch Family (1960), seven-year-old Amy (modelled upon Estes’ daughter Hannah) imperiously ‘banquishes’ mean Old Witch to a glass hill until she can learn to be good. Although an extremely wicked, powerful and important witch, she is nevertheless subject to the moral dictates and narrative whims of Amy and her friend Clarissa, who gradually create for her ‘a bad good witch’s paradise’ where the boundary between reality and fantasy is delightfully and unambiguously porous.20 The characters that Amy and Clarissa draw, inspired by ones that were the subject of running stories told by Amy’s mother, can move from the glass hill into the girls’ world where they all participate in nocturnal hurly-burlies, just as the girls apparently become the alter egos of their favourite witchy characters.
Wayfarers in strange lands
In Practical Education (1798), a volume published two years after her Parent’s Assistant, Maria Edgeworth acknowledged the pleasure children took in travellers’ tales, which allowed them to venture into unknown territories without leaving their chairs. But the consumption of adventure stories, where thrilling description might overwhelm thoughtful reflection, Edgeworth observed, could aggravate a restless desire to wander around the world. Here then, supposedly, was another kind of quasi-fantastic narrative that provoked a kind of wonder without offering lasting benefits for the reader. By Edgeworth’s time, not only Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), but also the first two books of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), had become canonical works with a peculiar cross-over status. That Defoe’s dogged and endlessly resourceful castaway would serve as a model for the protagonist of children’s adventure fiction would not have surprised her. But she probably could not have imagined Gulliver, that surprisingly wide-eyed ship’s surgeon stranded four times on the strangest of shores, as a forerunner of the girl heroine who travels across worlds in modern fantasy. All travellers passing through regions yet to be described are more or less naïve like Gulliver. Since their temporary ignorance can level the differences between adult and child, their unfamiliarity with the physical and social laws that govern newly discovered worlds also creates a kinship between the innocent traveller feeling his way and his readers, for whom it is as pleasurable as exciting to observe how the protagonist changes through encounters with the other. But where Gulliver’s ability to move out of himself is compromised by his peculiar child-man status, the girl traveller typically attains a kind of wise grace.
Provided with maps such as those which Dickens’ Nettie proposed to draw up, Gulliver’s Travels certainly promulgated the ‘taste for adventure’ that Edgeworth did not condone. Young readers could readily identify with the naïf Gulliver as a power-hungry fellow-child and exult in his acts of prowess among the Lilliputians, whether Swift’s satire hit home or went over their heads. Gulliver’s capture of the entire Blefuscan fleet is in keeping with the wildest imaginings of a boy who longs to animate his toy ships and toy soldiers. But Gulliver instead regards himself as the inferior of his royal patrons, deferring like a gigantic child to the manikins he could crush at will. He meekly tries to vindicate his character ‘in Point of Cleanliness to the World’ when he soils his prison floor at night. He likewise fails to impress his tiny masters when he voids prodigious amounts of urine to suppress the fire that had threatened the Empress’ palace. Although such scatological episodes were often omitted in juvenile abridgments, they are entirely in keeping with Gulliver’s boyish attempts to earn the respect he covets from his minuscule royal benefactors by placing his enormous body in their service. This child-man’s empowerment comes to as abrupt an end as that of a Christopher Robin, but it is debatable who takes away more from his experiences – the benign ruler of the Hundred-Acre Wood or the Man-Mountain.
Children could likewise empathise with Gulliver’s humiliating reversal of status when he finds himself a Lilliputian in the Land of Brobdingnag. He is persistently rankled by his reduction in size and the corresponding diminution of respect. Instead of capturing enemy fleets, Gulliver must now content himself with killing a rat with his rapier. He is a marvel to be gawked at, first, before the boorish spectators gathered by his greedy master; thereafter, he provides a more refined amusement for the philosopher-king who gently mocks his adult pretensions. Worst of all, a monkey mistakes him ‘for a young of his own Species, by his often stroaking my Face very gently’ and by ‘holding me like a Baby in one of his Fore-Paws, and feeding me with the other, by cramming into my Mouth some victuals’. Heroism inevitably eludes the tiny traveller in the land of giants. Indeed, it is a fitting irony that Gulliver’s best friend and protector there should be a child, the forty-foot girl, ‘my dear Glumdalclitch’, who cares for him more tenderly than her dolls and mourns bitterly the loss of her playfellow.21
The gigantic figure of Glumdalclitch caring for her ‘grildrig’ would seem the antithesis of the adventurous heroines of later fantasies. Yet it is not unusual for those girls, like her, to be capable of a selfless devotion to the boys or men that they are so willing to protect. But whereas Swift does not allow Glumdalclitch to do more than ward off threats that might endanger any miniature man in domestic circumstances, a modern fantasy writer could quite easily adopt the little giantess’ point of view and send her out into an alternative world where she would overcome apparently insuperable obstacles to rescue the beloved man-boy.
Little Gerda in Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen (1843) never asks how she will find Little Kai or what she will have to do to wrest him from her seductive elemental adversary. Gerda sets out, armed with only her faith and innocence, unaware that the latter will be the source of a mysterious power over the people and animals who gladly assist her on the journey north. As the Finnish Woman explains, if Gerda were to be told of this power, it would dissipate and void all chance of rescuing Little Kai. Immune to the Snow Queen’s terrifying advance troops of living snowflakes by virtue of her prayers, Gerda passes into the vast hall, where she finds Kai alone, her rival having dashed out to dust Etna and Vesuvius with snow. Kai is diverting himself with the Game of Reason, having been promised by the Snow Queen that he will become his own master if he can form the word ‘eternity’ with the geometric shapes of his ice tangram. When Gerda is reunited with him, she weeps on his breast, the hot tears dissolving the lump of ice in his heart. Now that he can cry again, his joyful tears wash the shard of the devil’s mirror out
of his eye. For the first time he shivers in the desolate cold of the Queen’s palace and wonders at the arid intellectualism of his pastimes. Animated by the children’s loving display of affection, the puzzle pieces form themselves into the word that will restore Kai to his true nature and set him free to return home with his girl-saviour.
The puzzle pieces that Meg Murry must reassemble in Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time (1962) demand that she journey to an alternative reality controlled by It, from which she will wrest not one, but two, beloved male figures, her physicist father and her younger brother Charles Wallace. Unlike Gerda, Meg must actually face down her adversary in a mental contest where her rational mind is of little assistance. Meg’s greatest test comes when she resists the appeal of a boy who looks and dresses like Charles Wallace yet is a delusive substitute, a doll foisted on her by the antagonists of the unearthly figures who have been her steadfast allies. It is when this false brother asks her to hate these allies, however, that Meg summons the overpowering love that now restores ‘the baby who was so much more to her than she was, and yet was so utterly vulnerable’. When ‘the real Charles Wallace, the child for whom she had come back’ to a dangerous world, embraces her, Meg feels an ‘icy cold blast’ and hears an ‘angry, resentful howl’, before she and her father are reunited in the family’s vegetable garden on a ‘sweet smelling autumnal earth’.22 And unlike Gerda, Meg will be called upon again in A Wind in the Door (1973) to develop psychic and spiritual powers of which she was unaware, to combat the spirits called the Echthroi, demonic unnamers that threaten the life of her precious Charles Wallace.
A determined innocence is sufficient to safeguard Gerda on her journey. The profound capacity for love is Meg’s greatest weapon against It and the Echthroi. But in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials (1995–2000), Lyra Belaqua will be set against enemies more duplicitous, ambitious and powerful than Lilliputian courtiers, the Snow Queen or It. But the question of the heroine’s education is central to the first book in the trilogy, Northern Lights or (in America) The Golden Compass (1995), in a way it is not in the other two fantasies. The prophecy about Lyra is quite clear that, in fulfilling a destiny as cosmic in magnitude as that of Meg, she ‘must do it all without realizing what she’s doing’.23 In other words, she must be kept ignorant of the prophecy and left free to decide for herself what must be done. She therefore goes north to rescue Roger, who is among the children kidnapped by the Oblation Board for experimental purposes, but also to set her father free from Svalbard by restoring the alethiometer to him. She has little true notion of what hangs in the balance.
The question of Lyra’s education weighs oppressively on her guardian, the Master of Jordan College, when he sends her off with Mrs Coulter to London on the first stage of her travels, apparently as unprepared as Gerda upon her departure. But by having allowed the young aristocrat in his charge to run like a ‘half-wild cat’ with the town urchins and college servants’ children, the Master provided Lyra with the best education she could have received in the great university centre of Oxford. Like explorers of uncharted territories, Lyra and her companion Roger, the kitchen boy, have scrambled over ‘the irregular Alps of the college roofs’ or braved the ‘netherworld’ of Jordan’s crypts and catacombs.24 Proud of calling the historically rich and powerful Jordan College her home, Lyra also senses that, through that community of scholars, she is connected to politics at the highest levels, even before learning that Lord Asriel and Mrs Coulter are her parents. While apparently doing ‘nothing’, Lyra learned the arts of war and politics of forming alliances in its streets and clay beds, as well as developing her considerable powers of leadership, all without sacrificing her innate sense of loyalty and of justice. She learns to lie convincingly in tight spots, unaware that she is the child of god-like liars. Only Lyra the barbarian, armed with the alethiometer, could have rallied Roger and the other dispirited, frightened children kidnapped by the Oblation Board, to execute her plan for breaking out of Bolvangar.
In Svalbard, however, the nature of the challenges she faces are more demanding. To overcome her enemies, Lyra depends upon her intuitive ability to synthesise her interpretations of the alethiometer, her readings of character and her knowledge about the nature of dust, the connection between humans and their dæmons. This is a tall order for a twelve-year-old girl, even one with the potential to become a scholar-adventurer like her parents or John Parry, all of whom are expert at grasping the implications of an apparently haphazard collection of data in order to devise a plan for action. She devises a brilliant plan to engineer the downfall of the usurper Iokur Rakinson by exploiting his fatal flaw, the desire to be human, by pretending to be the dæmon of the deposed bear king Iorek Byrnison. But her father Lord Asriel is a much more difficult subject to read than the foolish bear king. Blinded by her pride in being the daughter of such a man, but with the vaguest of conceptions of his dream for the rebellion to end all rebellions, she hopes that the presentation of the alethiometer will establish her worthiness to walk beside him across the bridge between worlds. Instead, she unwittingly delivers Roger to Lord Asriel, who coolly sacrifices the boy to breach universes. In spite of her innocent but catastrophic betrayal of Roger, the rueful Lyra refuses to abandon the journey. ‘I reckon we’ve got to do it, Pan’, she muses; ‘We’ll go up there and we’ll search for Dust, and when we’ve found it we’ll know what to do.’25 As she walks into the sky undeterred by the possible consequences of Roger’s death or by fears of her parents’ future machinations, she has achieved a formidable grandeur that belies her filthy furs and substandard English. Instead, little by little, the new Eve is learning how to transcend the contrarieties of innocence and experience, of intuition and education, of the material and spiritual, and of good and evil.
Fantasy needs the child as mediator. Given the child’s ability to move between contradictory realities and mental states, its prominence in texts that appeal to both young and mature readers calls for a refinement of the topographical models that we questioned at the outset of this chapter. Whether strange or familiar, the landscapes in which fantasy operates are most fully realised by the perceptive eye of innocence. The suspension of disbelief brought about by our earlier, more fluid, negotiations between the real and fantastic provides the foundation for mastery of reality that Maria Edgeworth wanted child-readers to acquire. Madeleine L’Engle suggested that such a continuity between our child and adult perspectives exists, when she stated in 1982 that ‘A child denied imaginative literature is likely to have more difficulty understanding cellular biology or post-Newtonian physics than the child whose imagination has been stretched by fantasy and science fiction.’26 More than twenty years later, Philip Pullman makes a similar case for a unitary self in the hints about Lyra’s future beyond the three volumes of His Dark Materials. Early in The Golden Compass, the narrator confides that Lyra would eventually ‘know more about Dust than anyone in the world’.27 This aside suggests that, even after reaching puberty at the end of The Amber Spyglass, Lyra’s maturation will continue. It is significant that the letters following the narrative of Pullman’s prequel Once Upon a Time in the North (2008) should come from the pen of Lyra Silvertongue, M. Phil. candidate in history at St Sophia’s College, Oxford.
Notes
* Professor Briggs expanded ideas she had set out at the ‘Sharpening the Subtle Knife’ conference at Princeton University in November 2006, but, tragically, died in August of 2007 before she could develop them any further. As it now stands, this chapter is by Andrea Immel and U. C. Knoepflmacher, but Julia’s notes, which Robin Briggs generously allowed them to consult, greatly helped them in formulating their approach to this topic.
1. C. N. Manlove, The Impulse of Fantasy Literature (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1983), p. 45.
2. Maria Edgeworth, The Parent’s Assistant: or Stories for Children, 2nd edn (London: J. Johnson, 1796), p. xi.
3. Mitzi Myers, ‘Wise Child, Wise Peasant, Wise Guy: Geoffrey Sum
merfield’s Case Against the Eighteenth Century’, Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, 12 (1987), 107–11.
4. Mitzi Myers, ‘Socializing Rosamond: Educational Ideology and Fictional Form’, Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, 14 (1989), 52–8 (p. 55).
5. Russell Hoban, The Mouse and His Child (1967; New York: Avon Books, 1974), p. 143.
6. John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress from this World to That Which Is to Come, Delivered under the Similitude of a Dream, Part 2 (London: Nathaniel Ponder, 1684), pp. [vi–vii].
7. Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress from this World to That Which Is to Come, Delivered under the Similitude of a Dream [Part 1] (London: Nathaniel Ponder, 1678), pp. [vi], [vii] and 219; p. [viii].
8. U. C. Knoepflmacher, ‘Erasing Borders’, in Ventures into Childland: Victorians, Fairy Tales, and Femininity (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 251.
9. Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (London: Methuen, 1981), p. 36.
10. George MacDonald, ‘The Fantastic Imagination’, in The Complete Fairy Tales, ed. U. C. Knoepflmacher (London: Penguin Books, 1999), p. 7.