Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Remodeling Home in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials

2018; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 42; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/uni.2018.0002

1080-6563

Amanda M. Greenwell,

Contemporary Literature and Criticism

Remodeling Home in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials Amanda M. Greenwell (bio) Lyra felt something strange happen to her body. She felt as if she had been handed the key to a giant house she hadn’t known was there, a house that was somehow inside her, and as she turned the key, she felt other doors opening deep in the darkness, and lights coming on. — Philip Pullman, The Amber Spyglass (2000) Our soul is an abode. And by remembering “houses” and “rooms,” we learn to abide” within ourselves . . . the house images move in both directions: they are in us as much as we are in them . . . — Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (1958), translated by Maria Jolas (1964) The scene in which the first passage above occurs is one of benevolent temptation. Late in the final volume of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, Mary Malone, a nun-turned-scientist and helper figure to co-protagonists Lyra and Will, has just told them a story about her first sensual encounter as a young person. That story precipitates Lyra’s burgeoning sexual awareness, and upon initiating a romantic relationship with Will, Lyra fulfills her destiny as a new Eve whose “fall” saves conscious life from oblivion. The few critics who cite this passage about Lyra’s internal “giant house” do so to demonstrate Lyra’s reaction to the story; Tommy Halsdorf, for instance, mentions the “bodily epiphany” (176) Lyra experiences. Rarely, however, have scholars dwelt on the curious imagery that figures this epiphany as a “waiting, quiet, expectant” (Pullman, Amber 444) house. As demonstrated by the second passage above from Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space, houses and selves are linked in extraordinarily intimate ways, ways that indulge the definition of “intimate” far beyond the narrowness of sexual [End Page 20] encounter. The image of Lyra’s internal house literalizes this concept, conjuring questions about selfhood and growth that may be examined by way of an investigation into the imagery of the home that, surprisingly, pervades much of a trilogy focused on journey, adventure, and metaphysical questions of human consciousness. The dichotomy of “home” and “not home” is a common structuring element in many stories for children, and according to critics such as Jon C. Stott and Christine Doyle Francis, it applies to both circular journeys (home → adventure/not home → home) and linear journeys (not home → home). Latent in this home/not home binary is an innocence/experience dichotomy, which Peter Hunt reads as crucial to the role of the journey in children’s literature: “the journey is a central, vital element of children’s literature . . . readers go . . . in a circle that enables them to gain knowledge—possibly to be stabbed by experience—and to return to home and security” (11). Knowledge and experience are here juxtaposed with home and security, and the violence of the word “stabbed” conjures fear of the “not home” environment. According to Perry Nodelman, “home represents above all a place where change is unlikely or even impossible, a safely static enclosure designed to keep uncertainty and flux outside” (66). As such, home is a space often tied metaphorically to an innocence easily mapped onto the child.1 Pullman, however, is well known among critics for his complication and inversion of the innocence/experience hierarchy, and has himself spoken of his preference to replace “experience” with “wisdom”: “These are the two ends of the spectrum of human experience. Blake called them innocence and experience. I call them innocence and wisdom. Experience is what you need to get through in order to get to wisdom” (Watkins).2 What makes Pullman’s remodeling of “home” in the trilogy so poignant is that rather than existing in opposition to experience, it rather celebrates it. That is, the key to Pullman’s remodeling of home is that it makes room for movement away from the innocence conventionally associated with childhood and fosters opportunities more often associated with experience. True home is not simply the protective and often limiting place to which one might return after an adventure, but a vibrant, dynamic space that functions as an integral component to thoughtful and active participation in the world. Because the trilogy...