New Hero: Metafictive Female Heroism in Fire and Hemlock
2011; Volume: 22; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0897-0521
Autores Tópico(s)Literary Theory and Cultural Hermeneutics
ResumoTake care, she said. if a book set you off, a book may help again when you've fetched it out of you. Try it. Goodbye. And don't forget to write. --Diana Wynne Jones, Fire and Hemlock IN THE YOUNG ADULT FANTASY NOVEL FIRE AND HEMLOCK (1985), DIANA Wynne Jones offers an example of a true female literary hero, one with whom all girls could identify and through that, all persons (Heroic 134), and thus provides young readers with a blueprint for becoming voiced and active subjects rather than objects of their own narratives. novel's protagonist is Polly Whittacker, a young hero-in-training who must save the life of her friend Tom Lynn. Through Polly and the hero-narrative that Polly and Tom invent, Jones demonstrates the way language creates reality through its power of generating referents and incorporating them into stories. Polly can become a hero because that is how she narrates herself; Fire and Hemlock suggests the same is possible for its readers. Even for a writer known for complex novels, Fire and Hemlock is unusually multifaceted. book's structure is described by Martha P. Hixon: Analysis of the novel's intricate narrative structure reveals that Fire and Hemlock is a complexly woven novel built on a of shifting layers and surprising spirals. Not only does the narrative repeatedly circle between past, present, and future as Jones plays with the idea of the linearity of time and reality, but also the narrative is multilayered, with these layers connected through repeated motifs drawn from music, folklore and folktale, and literature. (96) One of the most important motifs providing structure for the novel is the ancient Scottish ballad of Lin. ballad tells the story of Tam Lin, a human knight who is to be given as tithe by the Queen of Fairies, and of his rescue by Janet. In Fire and Hemlock, Polly plays (among other roles) the part of Janet, and Tom that of Tam Lin, while Tom's ex-wife Laurel is the Queen. Polly and Tom first meet when Polly stumbles into a funeral at Laurel's home Hunsdon House. They instigate a game of being things, in which they create a story featuring themselves as heroes-in-training. Later, Tom sends numerous books for Polly to read, including Golden Bough, Five Children and It, Treasure Seekers, and Tom's Midnight Garden, all texts that have some bearing on the situation of Tom and Polly themselves. As their friendship deepens, her copious reading begins to inform her own hero-narrative and her sense of self. Jones demonstrates, throughout the novel, the progressive improvement of both Polly's reading and writing skills, and the ways in which these inform her increasing control over her own character and actions. Thus, metafiction, which in Fire and Hemlock includes depictions of both reading and writing and a demonstration of the role of narrative in shaping reality, is essential as Polly learns to write her own story. But Jones goes further than just showing her protagonist becoming the subject of her own narrative; Jones provides a path to negotiate adolescence that leads not to limited, socially prescriptive but to wherever the reader cares to narrate him- or herself. Jones explicitly demonstrates her investment in Polly as a female hero in her article The Heroic Ideal--A Personal Odyssey (1989), in which she explores the classic hero character. She also offers a critical assessment of the process by which both the novel Fire and Hemlock and the character Polly developed. In the novel, Polly plays many roles: dutiful daughter, hero at school when she defends a friend from the school bully, mother to her mother Ivy (at times their relationship is inverted), granddaughter, tomboy, hero-intraining, actor, student, friend, and ultimately Tom's real hero. Jones describes the series of heroic roles from classic and folk literature that Polly takes on: she is Gerda in Snow Queen, Snow White, Britomart, St. …
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