The Complete Fairy Tales by U. C. Knoepflmacher George Macdonald

Author:U. C. Knoepflmacher, George Macdonald
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-11-23T16:00:00+00:00

This, however, was so near sense that he thought it could not be really what they did sing.

LATER TALES

The three tales in this final section are darker-hued, less relieved by the humor that had both lightened and complicated MacDonald’s earlier fairy tales. The second half of “The Carasoyn” (1871) is far more somber than the story’s first half, written seven years earlier. Flashes of exuberance still erupt in “The Wise Woman” (1874) and “The History of Photogen and Nycteris” (1879)—the former, for example, starts with a never-ending sentence through which MacDonald mocks our expectations of a straightforward, progressive narrative. But the ironies are grimmer now, in keeping with MacDonald’s new emphasis on the precariousness of lives too easily derailed by external and internal evil.

Villains are no longer dismissible as ironized stereotypes. The fairy queen who had simply wanted Richard and Alice as playmates in “Cross Purposes” has become a treacherous and dangerous abductress of children in “The Carasoyn”; her victims can only be rescued by someone who must twice undergo near-impossible rites of initiation. The cackling bad fairy of “Little Daylight” has become the witch Watho in MacDonald’s richly textured, but much harsher, expansion of his earlier “Day and Night” parable. Unlike her predecessors, this werewolf needs no motivation for her nefarious practices; she is not avenging some real or imagined slight on the infants she imprints with her design. Earlier malefactors could go unpunished, since their anarchism only furthered the emotional growth of those on whom they had cast their spells. Watho, however, must be killed by one of her adopted children. The cruelty of “The Giant’s Heart” is now out in the open.

This cruelty also shapes the relentless assault on the ugly shapes assumed by egotism in the most drawn out and didactic of these tales, “The Wise Woman, or, The Lost Princess.” MacDonald repeatedly insists on the kindness of the stern reformer called upon to discharge the classical role of magical godmother. But the Wise Woman is, like the fairy queen in “The Carasoyn,” an abductress of children not her own, and the painful deprivations she inflicts on Rosamond and Agnes make her a distinct cousin of the cruel Watho. Rosamond and Agnes, wracked by what MacDonald now condemns as “the disease of self-conceit,” are uglier than earlier solipsists such as the floating Light Princess—or Alice, Tangle, and Princess Daylight. Redemption has become harder to attain. The story’s punitive ending is not only visited on the parents and children in the story, but also inflicted on readers whom MacDonald wants to “look a little solemn, and sigh as they close the book.”

The solemnity of “The Wise Woman” and “The History of Photogen and Nycteris” is undeniably powerful. Yet both parables are more disciplined, symmetrical, and monochromatic than MacDonald’s earlier open-ended experimentations with fairy-tale forms. Indeed, their insistence on stricter limits may help explain why, after 1879, MacDonald should have stopped writing fairy tales altogether. His new emphasis on restraint demanded a repulsion of the imaginative free-play he had once so greatly cherished.

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