Little Humans

The title is a hail to my friend Jonny, who has a tendency to meet his friends with the words, "Greetings, humans!"

I recently began a new job as a preschool teacher, which I love.  After my second day I felt way too sore for someone who is only twenty-one, and on my fourth the combination of a heat wave and children too bouncy to keep indoors left me dizzy as a spinning top along with a low-grade fever and bad headache.  However, after a couple ibuprofen and a few frankly miraculous cups of tea yesterday morning, I felt better than I had most of the week.  Which was awesome because, as I said, I love this job.

Children are so very honest and usually easy to get a feel for.  They will keep surprising me because people are surprising, and that's actually what this post is about: children are little humans.  We all know this, and none of what I write here is any news to anyone.

But there is a little boy I worried over, because when other children slip on the play structure or start to fuss he laughs a harsh, untruthful laugh, and says he's trying to stop but that isn't true because he is forcing a fake laugh from himself.  It was nap time and he couldn't sleep, and he sucked his thumb while I rubbed his back.  I told him he could pick our story time book and he picked the one we've already read twice.  While I sat on the floor I watched all the children sleeping, and I thought about how each one will form into some person, and while they are all so small they don't know any of that. In elementary school they will start to know things, but right now they are so young and their lives have just started.  They have so very much to learn and to suffer, and I say that in full knowledge of my own young age.  They still have to see their parents struggle and struggle with their parents, and hide inside themselves and burst into trouble so someone will see them, and cry for loving those who love them not and cry because they are loved, and because they are loved but something isn't right. Or maybe it is right, and God is good.

Later that same little boy pushed another to hurry him down the blow-up water slide.  The smaller boy wasn't hurt, but was scared and could have gotten hurt.  The first boy didn't laugh this time.  He looked terrified, and said he just wanted to hurry him down the slide, not to hurt him.  I told him all was well, but that is why he had to be careful about other people.  He said okay, and apologized, and asked me to hold him around his towel because the water made him cold.  I am not so worried about him, now.

Introduction

Introduction

If each man were, in his time, cast to the ground in the whitest of lights with the question “why are you persecuting me?” rolling in his ears, then all humanity would understand what it is to be awoken into life. Each person who does experience such an awakening, though it be far less grand in telling, understands this story of Saint Paul, and each who has not, though he believes himself to understand, is unable. When the saint dropped the name of Saul and became Paul, he demonstrated the absolute change brought about by his awakening. He was not a changed man, but rather a new man.

The Rev. George MacDonald’s stories, be they for little children or grown people, center around the awakening of a soul. His characters, besides those who begin awake, undergo a change, or a transformation, so that they end their stories not only as better selves, but also as true selves. This transformation goes beyond belief in God to true belief in God, meaning, belief in the true sense of the word: one cannot be convinced so or otherwise. One simply knows. The awoken character lives with the conviction “that good is always coming, though few have at all times the simplicity and the courage to believe it.” The awakenings of Mr. MacDonald’s characters show that “when a man throws wide his door to the Father of his spirit, when his individual being is thus supplemented--to use a poor miserable word--with the individuality that originated it, then is the man a whole, healthy, complete existence.” The awakening of the soul, the call to life of an inwardly dead individual, as a central theme of MacDonald’s writing, is the topic of this study.

Although MacDonald wrote many works, this study will primarily refer to only five stories, but these five stories represent all genres of MacDonald’s fiction: Victorian novels, children’s novels, fairy tales, and fantastic novels. Needless to say, there is great crossover between these genres. The stories referenced in this study are, respectively, Thomas Wingfold, Curate, the Curdie books (meaning, The Princess and the Goblin and The Princess and Curdie), The History of Photogen and Nycteris, and Phantastes. Though plot is an integral part of any literary analysis, this study largely focuses on character and dynamicity of character as the defining quality of MacDonald’s writing, as it is only in a character that a soul can be awoken. Referenced and quoted alongside these stories are the three volumes of MacDonald’s Unspoken Sermons, which could be called the inseparable reason to the rhyme of his stories.

Four chapters follow this introduction. The first chapter details what exactly, for MacDonald, constitutes an awakening. This chapter works through definitions of an awakening as detailed by other scholars, followed by my own definition of an awakening. Although, in this and all following chapters, I draw from several of MacDonald’s works, Thomas Wingfold, Curate will primarily serve in this chapter both for clarification and textual support of my definition. The second chapter organizes the awakenings of several characters into unique theoretical categories, each category exemplified by the experience of a character. Granted, these categories are indeed theoretical, as is apparent in the final character discussed. This chapter considers the necessity of various events and emotions for the redemption of each character, debunking theories of authorial favoritism. The characters in this chapter are drawn from the Curdie books and The History of Photogen and Nycteris. The third chapter explores the importance of journey to the awakening of MacDonald’s characters. Pieces of MacDonald’s work, especially his adult fantasy novels, are sometimes criticized as chaotic in plot and lacking in direction. However, in this chapter it is shown that MacDonald’s characters, while their physical locations or directions are often of little consequence, travel roads of absolute importance. The particular journey followed in this chapter is that of Anodos in Phantastes, the reading of which, many may remember, C. S. Lewis described as “cross[ing] a great frontier.” The final chapter, which heavily relies on the Unspoken Sermons, explores MacDonald’s concept of dying into life, and how his stories serve to open eyes to the absolute beauty of the words, “I will arise and go to my Father.” The sermons are integral to understanding the theme of awakening in MacDonald’s fiction, and they offer a robust theological framework for the types of awakening explored in the prior chapters.

Preface

Preface

Sulking was not something I often did as a child, but that day I sulked, lying on my bunk in the little room my brother and I shared, pushing the mattress above me up and down with my feet. I rolled over and looked at the bookshelf, where I noticed the green and gold spine of a book I had never yet read. One of my mother’s students gave it to me, as it had been her favorite book as a child. After admiring the beautiful cover illustration, I started in on the story. Not until I finished the book, The Princess and Curdie, did I put it down.

The next day I scoured our family bookshelf for anything by George MacDonald, coming across The Golden Key and reading it before the day was out. At age fourteen I named my puppy Curdie, and, though drawing never came to me easily, scribbled little mattocks and imaginings of the creature Lina in all my school notebooks. I also began writing stories, something I had not done since preschool. Soon a family friend gave me A George MacDonald Treasury, where I first read The Giant’s Heart, The Light Princess, and Lilith. During my first week at Junior College, I searched the school library for any of MacDonald’s writing which I had not read, coming across The History of Photogen and Nycteris. The list of stories goes on, and when it came time for me to write something, that something simply had to be about the stories of George MacDonald.

Honestly, I cannot take credit for the topic of this study. Only through writing it have I discovered how much of a fiction writer, as opposed to a nonfiction writer, I truly am. For hours I ambled about with thoughts in my head, trying and failing to put into words what it is about MacDonald’s stories which affected me so very much like a walk through a beautiful landscape, where one cannot help but know that there is a God and He is good. Eventually I gave up with my own grasp of language and called the friend to whom this study is dedicated. After hearing my dilemma he said, “All of MacDonald’s stories are about an awakening, where a character says, ‘I will arise and go to my Father.’”

  So here I sit at my desk, with a painting of Lina in the rosefire, a gift from another friend, on the wall behind me, and George MacDonald’s writings stacked high beside a cup of tea.  Of his stories, MacDonald wrote, “So long as I think my dog can bark, I will not sit up to bark for him.”  I fear that Mr. MacDonald would be rather annoyed with me for attempting to clarify how exactly his dog barks.  If any of my readers have not read MacDonald’s stories, I entreat them to do so at once.  Of any bit of this little study which leads to fuller understanding or enjoyment of MacDonald’s stories, or gives a knowing smile to like-minded readers, I am glad.