Principled pleasure : reading the fantastic in Victorian children's fiction

Abstract

This thesis looks in two directions. As a re-examination of central texts in the nineteenth-century tradition of children’s fantasy-writing, it argues the value of a theoretical position commonly identified with Tzvetan Todorov that, in differentiating between modes of fantasy, concentrates on what he calls the fantastic. The peculiar interest of children’s literature in the history of this mode has largely been ignored by scholars, including Todorov himself, even though one might well argue that it served as the most widely accredited site of the literary fantastic throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. If this thesis especially seeks to contribute to critical understanding of children’s fantasy, it also offers some correction to the theoretical understanding of the fantastic. My claim is that the survival of the fantastic in children’s fiction was made possible firstly by the development of a notion of children’s literature as a mode of playing, which makes fiction for children inherently doubled. My discussion really gets underway with reconsideration of the revolutionary impact of European fairy and folk tale in the earlier nineteenth century on the creation of fiction for children, but also on children’s culture more largely. In so far as the fairy tale is closely related to what Todorov termed the marvellous, its relation to the fantastic in this period is not so much generic as functional: it served as a signifier, available to the fantastic writer for the creation of the other place that ordinary reality cannot accommodate. Fairy tales, then, and other works of fantasy by Ruskin, Thackeray and Wilde provide the textual objects of this discussion, alongside ground-fixing pieces by Kingsley and MacDonald. A key text is MacDonald’s At the Back of the North Wind, not just for its flagrant but masterly articulation of adult desire for the unformed child, but also, as a work of late Victorian realism, with its exemplary in-mixing of fantasy. This in mixing that gives extension to a fictive history—making it novel rather than short story—is at the centre of my interest not just in discussing At the Back of the North Wind, but also MacDonald’s other major fairy stories, The Princess and the Goblins and The Princess and Curdie and the closely connected, but very different and much more popular fantasy by Charles Kingsley, The Water Babies. Edith Nesbit and Francis Hodgson Burnett provide examples of a different order of the fantastic, where the supernatural in appropriately manageable forms takes over the lives of the texts’ young heroes and heroines, however temporarily. In these novels, the differentiation of the fantastic from the rational sphere of the adult is unquestionably central to the attractive power of the text, even as it is also observed and allotted to children. A kind of bricolage is the result, in which the fantastic is held in quotation, as it were, but also explicitly placed beyond the control of adult vision. The thesis concludes with a chapter that carries this exploration to very different moments, although the later could scarcely have occurred without the former: time travel fictions by Philippa Pearce and Ruth Park and psychological thrillers by William Mayne and Margaret Mahy. This Iine of novels from the second major phase in the history of the children’s fantastic begins in the 1950s and reaches across the decades and the oceans to Australasia. Most important here is Mahy’s The Tricksters, which demonstrates the peculiar attraction of the fantastic for an audience in adolescence and near adolescence. It projects in intensified form the complex of half choices that get made in passing to adulthood, generating sensational accounts of adult impulses and drives; it even fences off a realm that characterises adulthood quite precisely by denying its authority. In taking up this problematic structure, I find significant support in D. W. Winnicott’s clinical analysis of children’s play. Winnicott connects the advanced play of culture—including literature—to the structured, purposeful inventions of the child as it seeks to establish some independence from its mother, by appropriating or redesigning objects offered by the adult, ‘transitional objects’. The child’s book seems to me just such an object. More particularly, the child’s fantastic text—my special concern—moving indeterminately between rational and irrational constructions of reality, seems to me most productively analysed and understood in these terms.