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George MacDonald's Children's Fantasies and the Divine Imagination by Colin Manlove (review)

2023; Wayne State University Press; Volume: 37; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/mat.2023.a923691

1536-1802

Laurel Samuelson,

Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies

Reviewed by: George MacDonald's Children's Fantasies and the Divine Imagination by Colin Manlove Laurel Samuelson (bio) George MacDonald's Children's Fantasies and the Divine Imagination. By Colin Manlove, Lutterworth Press, 2020, 140 pp. All one can say is that there is ultimately no reconciliation between the reader who puts the mystery of the fairy tale first and the reader who tries to understand it. For the one is looking into the deeps, and the other is trying to bring something up from the depths to the light; the second is valuing man's understanding, where the first is leaving man behind. (14) Although the significance and nature of the imagination had already been a major conversation among the Romantics preceding Victorian fairy tales, MacDonald's stories move away from the humanistic models to illustrate an imagination rooted in divinity. Colin Manlove describes this as the Judeo-Christian God being at the root of human thought, so that it is only through accessing the imagination that one can begin to experience God. In [End Page 336] keeping with MacDonald's more mysterious comprehension of divinity, however, the actual means of doing so elude singular instruction. Manlove argues that MacDonald's fairy tales function as a descriptive model of the imagination, a measure of truth that detects and mediates proximity with God's person. Manlove sets MacDonald apart from his predecessors and contemporaries by establishing his immediately more ambiguous structuring of a socially moralizing genre. Although Manlove's main argument prioritizes MacDonald's longer works, he first acknowledges the many ways in which the imagination appears and functions in the shorter tales. These short stories are characterized by a breaching of boundaries, often crossing borders, inverting rules, or placing imperative reliance on arbitrary or whimsical laws. The crossing into fairy land, however, does not resolve through reinforcements of moral proverbs, but instead they often bury the truth of the tale to impress directly on the intuition. MacDonald's work stands out in that it remains instructive without defaulting to clear or easy answers in its outcomes—rather, it beckons the reader outside of articulable understanding into a higher, more fantastical realm. The difficulty in this analysis lies in the point of its argument: Manlove himself acknowledges that he cannot point to a clear or stable outcome without reducing the actual power of MacDonald's work. This initial chapter, then, serves more as a map describing where the imagination might go in MacDonald's work rather than to strictly define the trend of how it manifests. Among the longer tales, however, Manlove focuses on more consistent parallels regarding the imagination's relation to reality, starting with the imagination in the world in At the Back of the North Wind (1870). This story is unique in that its central imaginative figure, North Wind, though pervasive in her influence, is imperceptible to all but the protagonist, Diamond, so that the novel is split between transcendent fantastical journeys and mundane stretches of realism. Manlove argues that the book is ultimately rooted in uncertainties and requires that the nature of reality, North Wind's morally contradictory actions, and even the truth of Diamond's experience remain in question as part of a complex reality beyond mortal comprehension. The mind itself presents an imaginative mystery as Manlove goes on to explore the imagination in the self in The Princess and the Goblin (1872). Here he uses a more fairy-tale adjacent narrative to psychologically map the imaginative layers of the self. Manlove identifies each character as a representative part of the protagonist Princess Irene's mind. From the subterranean Goblin tunnels to the Queen Mother's attic, he argues that the story explores the self as it is disrupted by the dark subconscious and restabilized through the divine imagination. This chapter experiences some weakness of purpose, but it serves as a helpful guide in navigating how the imagination functions when it comes into conflict with the self. [End Page 337] Manlove posits The Wise Woman (1875) as an example of the imagination against the self. While The Princess and the Goblin was an allegorical mental battle to return to a prior state, The Wise Woman...