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Sep. 12th, 2015 10:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pedantherI've just finished reading an omnibus of George MacDonald's novels The Princess and the Goblin and The Princess and Curdie. I was reading them mainly out of a kind of historical interest, since The Princess and the Goblin was pretty famous and MacDonald was a pioneer of the kind of allegorical children's fantasy that inspired Narnia. And, to jump straight to the conclusion, it's a good thing I wasn't reading them for fun, because they weren't much.
The best writers for children remember what it was like to be a child and can speak to their audience on their own level. George MacDonald is not one of those writers. He's relentlessly patronising, and the story is subservient to the lessons he wishes to impart; every character is standing in for something and things often happen that don't quite make sense on their own terms, only in terms of the thing they're standing in for. (And, to make it worse, I often disagree with the lessons.) It's exacerbated by the fact that one of the things one of the characters stands for is Divine Providence, which apparently frees MacDonald from any sense of obligation to proper plot construction: there are places where the narration is literally going "I can't think of a good reason why that happened so conveniently, so I guess it was Divine Providence, right guys? :) :) :)" in almost exactly those words.
It almost makes me want to do worldbuilding and construct a backstory and context in which everything does make sense on its own terms, and those terms nothing to do with the allegory MacDonald intended, just to spite him. But then I'd have to read the novels again.
He's also got a bit of a problem where his allegory equates spiritual nobility with worldly royalty - for instance, we're told often that Princess Irene is a "real princess", which doesn't just mean that her father's really a king but that she's honest, and brave, and polite, and all the things a girl should be, are you taking notes girls in the audience? - and this results in a lot of classist tangles. This is especially the case in Curdie, which starts in early with a revelation that our working-class hero (who is likewise honest and brave and so on) has the blood of kings, and culminates in an extremely disquieting sequence in which the triumph of righteousness is depicted in the form of a king riding out in full battle array against his own subjects. Which is of course followed by the hero marrying the king's daughter and ruling wisely for many years and all that stuff, hooray. (And then, because MacDonald apparently doesn't know when to leave off, the actual end of the story is that after Curdie and Irene die the kingdom, lacking their noble influence, succumbs within a generation to such wickedness that a catastrophe wipes it from the face of the earth. There's nothing like a happy ending.)
But I should also acknowledge that, at the point in reading Curdie where I was most angry with it, and was mentally drafting a much more vicious version of this post, Ana Mardoll posted the next chapter of her Narnia Deconstructions, and I was reminded that it could have been worse.
MacDonald's allegorical-God-figure, the princess in the tower, is as prone as most allegorical-God-figures to behaving in an arbitrary fashion and refusing to explain things clearly - the skin of Story over the skeleton of Message is at its thinnest whenever she's around - but he does at least manage to attach the "God moves in mysterious ways, but always for the best; trust, even when you don't understand" message to someone of whom this could plausibly be true. There's a genuine sense that she cares about her people, even if her methods are opaque, and she inspires people to do good because they want to be worthy of her, which is a lot easier to take than an allegorical-God-figure who is obeyed because he's an apex predator with teeth as long as your hand. Also, she's depicted as a woman, which is an interesting choice; there's an obvious "nurturing = maternal" element to it, but it's still an interesting choice considering she's standing in for a God who's traditionally regarded as three times as manly as anybody else.
(Speaking of allegorical God figures, there's a bit in The Princess and Curdie where the king's wicked servants suffer a miniature version of Old Testament God smiting a town full of sinners, with Curdie temporarily stepping into the God role and orchestrating the smiting, and recruiting one of the few clean-living servants to go before him and prophesy doom to those who don't mend their ways. It's subsequently revealed that this chambermaid is actually the princess in the tower in another guise - which means that we briefly have the allegorical-God-figure acting as prophet to her own prophet, a fascinating inversion that MacDonald does nothing with nor even shows any sign of having noticed. Before the reveal, I was annoyed at him for not developing the chambermaid more as a character, since she's blatantly sidelined after the smiting is done, or even giving her a name; on reflection, I'm still annoyed at him, even though it turned out he was deliberately concealing her name and she was deliberately staying on the sidelines, because I don't believe he'd have written her any differently if she had just been a chambermaid.)
Another point where these novels show up well compared to Narnia is that they have a self-contained setting: no characters being parachuted in from the reader's own world. That avoids all kinds of complications involving Native Self-Determination vs Manifest Destiny Of English Schoolchildren, and dodges the mess Lewis got into when he put his allegorical-God-figure in the same story as subjects of his actual God.
So, in some respects, I want to be charitable toward MacDonald. And I might well have liked these books if I'd come to them as a child. After all, I loved Narnia. And I loved other things that turned out, when I revisited them as an adult, to have terribly patronising narration. (MacDonald's narration really is astonishingly patronising.) But I don't like them now.
The best writers for children remember what it was like to be a child and can speak to their audience on their own level. George MacDonald is not one of those writers. He's relentlessly patronising, and the story is subservient to the lessons he wishes to impart; every character is standing in for something and things often happen that don't quite make sense on their own terms, only in terms of the thing they're standing in for. (And, to make it worse, I often disagree with the lessons.) It's exacerbated by the fact that one of the things one of the characters stands for is Divine Providence, which apparently frees MacDonald from any sense of obligation to proper plot construction: there are places where the narration is literally going "I can't think of a good reason why that happened so conveniently, so I guess it was Divine Providence, right guys? :) :) :)" in almost exactly those words.
It almost makes me want to do worldbuilding and construct a backstory and context in which everything does make sense on its own terms, and those terms nothing to do with the allegory MacDonald intended, just to spite him. But then I'd have to read the novels again.
He's also got a bit of a problem where his allegory equates spiritual nobility with worldly royalty - for instance, we're told often that Princess Irene is a "real princess", which doesn't just mean that her father's really a king but that she's honest, and brave, and polite, and all the things a girl should be, are you taking notes girls in the audience? - and this results in a lot of classist tangles. This is especially the case in Curdie, which starts in early with a revelation that our working-class hero (who is likewise honest and brave and so on) has the blood of kings, and culminates in an extremely disquieting sequence in which the triumph of righteousness is depicted in the form of a king riding out in full battle array against his own subjects. Which is of course followed by the hero marrying the king's daughter and ruling wisely for many years and all that stuff, hooray. (And then, because MacDonald apparently doesn't know when to leave off, the actual end of the story is that after Curdie and Irene die the kingdom, lacking their noble influence, succumbs within a generation to such wickedness that a catastrophe wipes it from the face of the earth. There's nothing like a happy ending.)
But I should also acknowledge that, at the point in reading Curdie where I was most angry with it, and was mentally drafting a much more vicious version of this post, Ana Mardoll posted the next chapter of her Narnia Deconstructions, and I was reminded that it could have been worse.
MacDonald's allegorical-God-figure, the princess in the tower, is as prone as most allegorical-God-figures to behaving in an arbitrary fashion and refusing to explain things clearly - the skin of Story over the skeleton of Message is at its thinnest whenever she's around - but he does at least manage to attach the "God moves in mysterious ways, but always for the best; trust, even when you don't understand" message to someone of whom this could plausibly be true. There's a genuine sense that she cares about her people, even if her methods are opaque, and she inspires people to do good because they want to be worthy of her, which is a lot easier to take than an allegorical-God-figure who is obeyed because he's an apex predator with teeth as long as your hand. Also, she's depicted as a woman, which is an interesting choice; there's an obvious "nurturing = maternal" element to it, but it's still an interesting choice considering she's standing in for a God who's traditionally regarded as three times as manly as anybody else.
(Speaking of allegorical God figures, there's a bit in The Princess and Curdie where the king's wicked servants suffer a miniature version of Old Testament God smiting a town full of sinners, with Curdie temporarily stepping into the God role and orchestrating the smiting, and recruiting one of the few clean-living servants to go before him and prophesy doom to those who don't mend their ways. It's subsequently revealed that this chambermaid is actually the princess in the tower in another guise - which means that we briefly have the allegorical-God-figure acting as prophet to her own prophet, a fascinating inversion that MacDonald does nothing with nor even shows any sign of having noticed. Before the reveal, I was annoyed at him for not developing the chambermaid more as a character, since she's blatantly sidelined after the smiting is done, or even giving her a name; on reflection, I'm still annoyed at him, even though it turned out he was deliberately concealing her name and she was deliberately staying on the sidelines, because I don't believe he'd have written her any differently if she had just been a chambermaid.)
Another point where these novels show up well compared to Narnia is that they have a self-contained setting: no characters being parachuted in from the reader's own world. That avoids all kinds of complications involving Native Self-Determination vs Manifest Destiny Of English Schoolchildren, and dodges the mess Lewis got into when he put his allegorical-God-figure in the same story as subjects of his actual God.
So, in some respects, I want to be charitable toward MacDonald. And I might well have liked these books if I'd come to them as a child. After all, I loved Narnia. And I loved other things that turned out, when I revisited them as an adult, to have terribly patronising narration. (MacDonald's narration really is astonishingly patronising.) But I don't like them now.
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Date: 2015-09-12 03:27 am (UTC)But, yeah, even when I'm rewriting MacDonald for Yuletide (I never did finish that story - it was a retelling of The Light Princess, sympathetic to the witch, because I felt like the king in that story is a total asshole and it wouldn't take much tweaking - maybe I will finish it someday), he never gives me the screeching and hair-tearing WHY ARE YOU SO WRONG fits that Lewis regularly does. Like, MacDonald can be wrong but he's always, that I've seen, good-hearted about it? Lewis reminds me of my sperm donor, in that he seems to enjoy nothing more than a nice bout of nonconsensual sadism at everybody who isn't him, with a side of preening about how morally superior that makes him. *ahem* I might have Feelings about CS Lewis. ;P
(I have not actually read Lewis's The Great Divorce, nor do I intend to, but I did once read an excerpt from it in which -- so apparently George MacDonald was a Universalist, that is, he believed everybody would go to heaven and nobody to hell. And in this excerpt I read, Lewis had his fictional version of George MacDonald explain at length and in detail how Universalism was TOTALLY WRONG and being a Lewisian asshole was TOTALLY RIGHT. And that... those two facts, that MacDonald was a Universalist and that Lewis would write that excerpt, pretty much sum up what I see as the difference between the two. O_O)
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Date: 2015-09-12 05:14 am (UTC)This doesn't really directly connect with your comment, but you mentioning your family brought to mind that families are another thing in MacDonald's favour. Curdie and Irene, and Diamond in At the Back of the North Wind, have loving and supportive families who we get to see being loving and supportive on the page. (Unlike, to pick an entirely random example, the Pevensies, who we never see interact with their parents, and whose interactions with their siblings can sometimes give the impression that they don't actually like each other all that much.)
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Date: 2015-09-12 07:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-09-13 09:16 am (UTC)Dammit. This is going to keep me up at night.
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Date: 2015-09-13 10:08 pm (UTC)(I'm grateful to them, actually, for reminding me of Goblin's good points, which are rather underrepresented in my post above because I'd lost sight of them while slogging through Curdie. And also for agreeing with me about how terrible MacDonald's poetry is.)