The complete fairy tales, p.1
The Complete Fairy Tales, page 1
PENGUIN CLASSICS
THE COMPLETE FAIRY TALES
George MacDonald was born in 1824 in Aberdeenshire, Scotland. He studied at King’s College, Aberdeen, and at Highbury Theological College in London. He served as a congregationalist minister for two years but resigned the pulpit because of his controversial views. As a professor of English literature at Bedford and King’s College in London, he was a popular lecturer with both students and the public. In 1877 he was awarded a Civil List Pension by Queen Victoria. MacDonald wrote poetry, stories, and several best-selling novels for adults, including David Elginbrod (1863) and Malcolm (1875). But he is best remembered for book-length fantasies, such as Phantastes (1858), At the Back of the North Wind (1871), The Princess and the Goblin (1872), The Princess and Curdie (1883), and Lilith (1895); as well as for his shorter fairy tales and fantasies, notably, “The Light Princess,” “The Golden Key,” and “The History of Photogen and Nycteris.” He died in 1905.
U. C. Knoepflmacher is professor of English and Paton Foundation Professor of Ancient and Modern Literature at Princeton University. He is the author of Ventures into Childland: Victorians, Fairy Tales, and Femininity and Wuthering Heights: A Study and co-editor of Forbidden Journeys: Fairy Tales and Fantasies by Victorian Women Writers.
THE COMPLETE
FAIRY TALES
GEORGE MACDONALD
EDITED WITH AN
INTRODUCTION AND NOTES BY
U. C. KNOEPFLMACHER
PENGUIN BOOKS
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First published in Penguin Books 1999
20 19
Introduction and notes copyright © U. C. Knoepflmacher, 1999
All rights reserved
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
MacDonald, George, 1824-1905.
The light princess and other fairy tales / George MacDonald;
edited with an introduction and notes by U.C. Knoepflmacher.
p. cm.—(Penguin classics)
ISBN: 978-1-101-65137-7
1. Fantasy fiction, Scottish. 2. Fairy tales—Scotland.
I. Knoepflmacher, U.C. II. Title. III. Series.
PR4966.K58 1999
823’.8—dc21 98-55673
Printed in the United States of America
Set in Stempel Garamond
Designed by Alice Sorensen
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CONTENTS
Introduction
Suggestions for Further Reading
A Note on the Texts
The Fantastic Imagination
FROM ADELA CATHCART
The Light Princess
The Shadows
The Giant’s Heart
FROM DEALINGS WITH THE FAIRIES
Cross Purposes
The Golden Key
FROM AT THE BACK OF THE NORTH WIND
Little Daylight
Nanny’s Dream
Diamond’s Dream
LATER TALES
The Carasoyn
The Wise Woman, or The Lost Princess: A Double Story
The History of Photogen and Nycteris: A Day and Night Mährchen
Explanatory Notes
INTRODUCTION
Valued in his own time as an original thinker and spiritual guide, George MacDonald (1824-1905) continues to command the attention of today’s readers. But whereas the allure of his poems, sermons, novels, and essays has considerably faded, his fairy tales and longer fantasies such as At the Back of the North Wind and The Princess and the Goblin still fascinate. These fictions best dramatize MacDonald’s life-long distrust of ready-made systems and conventional assumptions—“adventitious wrappings” that he, like Thomas Carlyle, his fellow-Scot and mentor, set out to “re-tailorize.” Addressed to both children and adults, MacDonald’s fairy tales enlist paradox, play, and nonsense in a relentless process of destabilizing priorities he wants his readers to question and rethink. The possibilities offered by an elusive yet meaningful alternative order thus replace the dubious certitudes of everyday life.
Like Carlyle, or like his friends John Ruskin and Lewis Carroll, with whom he shared the manuscript of “The Light Princess,” his first fairy tale for children and adults, MacDonald assumed the role of eccentric centrist or unconventional traditionalist so important in Victorian culture. Although his unorthodoxy repelled straight-laced parishioners and forced him to resign his pastorate before his thirtieth birthday, he soon attracted students at Bedford and King’s College in London and gradually gained a loyal reading public for his variegated writings. By the time of his 1872 lecture tour of the United States and Canada, he had acquired an international reputation. Invited to head a Boston congregation, MacDonald declined the highly lucrative offer, accepting instead, some years later, a modest pension granted by Queen Victoria to help the tubercular writer and his large family resettle in the healthier climate of Italy. Nonetheless several of his eleven children would die there, among them his gifted first-born and favorite, Lilia Scott MacDonald. Yet this latter-day Romantic seemed to thrive in his new surroundings: he continued to be sought out, as much as he had been in London, by a host of correspondents, friends and strangers, eager for advice, support, and emotional comfort. Only after the death of his wife and coworker, Louisa MacDonald, in 1902, three years before his own, did his intense literary productivity finally come to a halt.
Given the major position he occupied in the intellectual life of the Victorians, and given, too, the rhetorical sophistication of his best work, it seems strange that George MacDonald should have been denied a place in the canon of “sages” or “prophets” whose works are still taught in surveys of nineteenth-century literature. MacDonald moved in intellectual circles rather different from those occupied by Oxonians such as Matthew Arnold or John Henry Newman (or, for that matter, by his friends Ruskin and Carroll). Still, the man who began his literary career with a long philosophical poem called Within and Without had learned from Carlyle how to reach a great variety of constituents from his marginal position. Even though he remained unaffiliated with any one of the many sects and denominations “within and without” the Church of England, MacDonald’s “unspoken sermons” were as influential as if they had been delivered from an actual pulpit. His title for that series of scriptural commentaries and spiritual exhortations can, in a way, also act as a rubric for his many other forms of writing.
Ironically enough, however, the indifference shown by literary and intellectual historians may well be due to the endorsement of one of MacDonald’s staunchest twentieth-century disciples, C. S. Lewis. Lewis rightly hailed MacDonald as a master in the “art of mythmaking,” whose best work was done in a fantastical mode “that hovers between the allegorical and the mythopoeic.” Yet Lewis also acknowledged his own investment in MacDonald as “a Christian teacher” and “not as a writer”: the “wisdom” and “holiness” of his thought could be preserved through extracts distilled, not from “great works” of fantasy that stood on their own, but rather from MacDonald’s sermons and minor novels. As a result, the “great works” remained just as unanalyzed as those lesser ones whose “means of communication” Lewis dismissed; indeed, MacDonald’s profoundly experimental and intertextual fairy tales and fantasies, his subversive incursions into so many different nineteenth-century literary forms, and his delight in the frictions and contradictions he could produce through his generic crisscrossings, went unnoted.
The approach towards “fairy-stories” taken by J.R.R. Tolkien, Lewis’s contemporary and associate, gives greater credit to Mac-Donald’s craftsmanship. Tolkien contends that all successful tellers of fantasies rely on what he calls the “three faces” of “Faërie.” Of these three, the “Magical” face which confronts a primordi
When Tolkien questions, in his essay “On Fairy-Stories,” whether it is true “that children are the natural or the specially appropriate audience for fairy-stories,” he returns to a subject that MacDonald had fully broached in his important 1893 essay “The Fantastic Imagination” (reprinted below as a prelude to the fairy tales collected in this edition). The stance taken by the two writers is remarkably similar. Both rather sardonically denounce the notion, still prevalent in our own times, that a childhood associated with purity, innocence, and fairy-tale “wonder” ought to be segregated from adult skepticism and disbelief. Such an arbitrary division, for both men, is condescending to child and grownup alike.
In his essay “The Fantastic Imagination,” MacDonald exploits the unease of a putative reader who confesses his inability to come up with the “meaning” of fairy tales like “The Light Princess” and “The Golden Key.” When such a reader worries that he might pass on his own confusion to the child he is expected to guide, MacDonald coyly suggests that this insecurity may itself be instructive: “If you do not know what it means, what is easier than to say so?…A genuine work of art must mean many things; the truer its art, the more things it will mean…. It is there not so much to convey a meaning as to wake a meaning.” Indeed, MacDonald proposes that children are far more comfortable with unsettled meanings than their adult counterparts; they possess something like a Keatsian “negative capability” that allows them to keep contraries in suspension without feeling compelled to come up with a singular “right” answer. Instead of demanding hierarchies of meaning, children not only are willing to entertain multiple perspectives, but actually can find great delight in the yoking of irreconcilables. They are therefore attracted to puns and homonyms, and to the instability of representations of the porous “borders” which MacDonald uses as a setting for so many of his fairy tales—narratives that are at once serious and playful, grave and light.
MacDonald therefore invites his adult readers to adopt the same elasticity and open-mindedness that come so naturally to the child: “But indeed your children are not likely to trouble you about the meaning. They find what they are capable of finding, and more would be too much. For my part, I do not write for children, but for the childlike, whether of five, or fifty, or seventy-five.” MacDonald here insists on something that Tolkien—equally outraged at late-Victorian transformations of stark and unsentimental myths into prettified tales—would forcefully reiterate, in the wake of yet more texts featuring miniature flower-fairies and ever-boyish Peter Pans. Fairy tales, both men insist, should not be relegated to the nursery; they are intended for adults as much as for children, whose fully active imaginations require less “waking” of dormant meanings.
Although MacDonald wanted all of the fairy tales he published from 1864 to 1879 to reach a dual readership, it seems significant that his very first incursion into the realm of “Faërie” should have been undertaken in a romance he had exclusively designed for adults. The 1858 Phantastes, which bore the subtitle, A Faerie Romance for Men and Women, follows the precedent of the kunstmärchen written by German Romantics such as Novalis, Tieck, and Hoffmann (as well as of Spenser’s Faerie Queene or Shelley’s Alastor), in presenting a hazy dreamworld as an alternative to everyday reality. The questing herodreamer, a young man called Anodos, must quickly forsake the limited constructions of reality he has inherited from his dead father or from the uncle who has raised him. Like the male reader of “The Fantastic Imagination,” he must be “wakened” into a new awareness.
Taking possession of his father’s keys on his twenty-first birthday, Anodos unlocks a desk which contains, not the expected “records of lands and money” passed on by generations of men, but a tiny “woman-form” whom he patronizes by treating her as if she were a child. Yet when she abruptly changes her size and stands before him as “a tall, gracious lady,” he finds her beauty so “irresistible” that he steps forward to embrace her, only to be sharply rebuked: “Foolish boy, if you could touch me, I should hurt you. Besides, I was two hundred-thirty-seven years old last Midsummer-eve; and a man must not fall in love with his grandmother, you know.” When Anodos protests that this youthful charmer could hardly be so ancient, she archly mocks his ignorance about a matrilineal past that MacDonald links here, as elsewhere, to a higher imagination: “I dare say you know something of your greatgrandfathers a good deal further back than that; but you know very little about your greatgrandmothers on either side.” He needs, moreover, to become acquainted with a “fairy-country” his little sister still cherishes. It is into the often confusing topography of that feminine region that the clueless Anodos (whose name means “pathless”) will now be carried in order to become reschooled.
The opening scene of Phantastes reads like a blueprint for materials that MacDonald would refine in the fairy tales he soon began to test out on his own growing children as well as on his students and acquaintances. Magical women such as Anodos’s guide predominate in these tales (as well as in longer fantasy-novels such as At the Back of the North Wind or the The Princess and the Goblin and The Princess and Curdie). Whether mortal or immortal, fairies or sorceresses, these figures are endowed with extraordinary powers. They can be nurturant, like the mysterious lady whom the girl Tangle fondly addresses as “my grandmother” in “The Golden Key,” or harsh and punitive, like the stern justicer who supervises the painful schooling of Princess Rosamond in “The Wise Woman, or the Lost Princess.” They can even be demonic, like the wolfish witch Watho in “The History of Photogen and Nycteris,” or vindictive, like Princess Makemnoit in “The Light Princess.” But even in her most unsavory incarnations, this potent figure is enlisted to reshape youngsters who might otherwise grow up into adults as bland and incomplete as their satirized elders. And her magical powers, though willingly or unwillingly placed in the service of an esoteric order ruled by a divine Christ-child, are essentially pagan, harking back to traditions of nature-myths and folklore rather than relying on the formulations of organized religion.
The character of Anodos, too, would soon be replicated in the fairy tales that MacDonald composed in the 1860s and 1870s. But whereas the hero of Phantastes was treated as a “boy” by his fairy grandmother and had to be reminded of his inferiority to an imaginative little sister, the child-protagonists whom MacDonald features in his fairy tales are interdependent boys and girls who jointly travel into the unknown (as do Tricksie Wee and Buffy Bob in “The Giant’s Heart,” for example, or Richard and Alice in “Cross Purposes”). Though separated, children who develop into adults over the course of such stories as “The Golden Key” or “Photogen and Nycteris,” continue to be steadily juxtaposed, treated as incomplete halves of a single, bi-gendered psyche that requires their eventual integration. Like the childish princes and princesses in “The Light Princess” and “Little Daylight,” these male and female figures must rely on each other’s support in overcoming whatever impedes their development into mature men and women. Even Diamond in At the Back of the North Wind, an androgynous boy who will never grow up into a man, is presented as a self-sufficient foil for his abused counterpart, the street-sweeper Nanny.
MacDonald’s conviction that childhood could act as a conduit for the same sort of metaphysical quest he had undertaken in adult romances such as Phantastes stemmed from his firm belief in a trans-generational audience of “the childlike.” By relying on child-protagonists and child-readers, he felt, he might help grownup readers shed their acquired dependence on linear time and dissolve their sense of spatial constraints. Since books for middle-class children were read as much by an adult as by a juvenile audience, MacDonald hoped that the burgeoning market for children’s books would enable him to carry out his agenda. Just as he tried to create coexistent temporal orders and to blur sexual binaries, so did he endeavor to reach and “retailor” a composite reader who was simultaneously young and old. But this ambitious program was not easy to execute. For the divisions MacDonald tried to erase were, of course, already firmly implanted in the literary marketplace.
