Allegory, Orthodoxy, Ambivalence: MacDonald's "The Day Boy and the Night Girl"

Abstract

Allegory, Orthodoxy, Ambivalence:MacDonald's "The Day Boy and the Night Girl" Cynthia Marshall (bio) "Since polarization dominates the child's mind," writes Bruno Bettelheim, "it also dominates fairy tales" (9). The characterization in George MacDonald's fairy tale "The Day Boy and the Night Girl" evinces such polarization: Photogen knows and loves only light, Nycteris can survive and flourish only in darkness. But the story, the last fairy tale MacDonald ever wrote,1 subverts numerous expectations a reader might bring to the genre. Not only does the split between Photogen and Nycteris lack any obvious ethical significance, but the final point of the tale is the necessary joining of the realms of darkness and light. Ordinarily in fairy tale, a plot in which the good, beautiful, and clever triumph affirms a basic antinomy, but in this case the tale confronts, questions, and ultimately destroys its own distinctions. Despite an initially apparent polarization, "The Day Boy and the Night Girl" reveals intense moral ambivalence. Uncovering this ambivalence, through consideration of the tale as allegory, helps explain the poor critical reception of the tale. More generally, it illustrates how allegory, still too often considered rigid or reductive, can live potently within another genre such as the fairy tale, blending realistic and symbolic techniques usually thought alien to the mode. Finally, such an examination shows how allegory's traditions and techniques inform and complicate an apparently naive narrative, giving it resonance. A fresh examination of these generic issues will enhance our understanding of MacDonald's work in the fairy tale mode. I MacDonald himself was careful to maintain the distinction between the two modes of allegory and fairy tale. In his essay "The Fantastic Imagination," he declares that fairy tales can, indeed must, have "some meaning" (Orts 316). However, different readers may perceive different meanings, for "a fairytale is not an [End Page 57] allegory. There may be allegory in it, but it is not an allegory" (Orts 317). In a letter written soon after the publication of Phantasies, which he calls "my fairy tale," MacDonald blusters, "I don't see what right the Athenaeum has to call it an allegory and judge or misjudge it accordingly—as if nothing but an allegory could have two meanings!" (Greville MacDonald 297).2 These remarks need to be considered in the context of nineteeth-century critical dialogue, however. Romantic critics distinguished symbol, which they saw as imaginative and organic, from allegory, considered dull, closed, and mechanical. Coleridge, like Goethe, believed allegories were translatable, while symbols were supralinguistic and "impervious to local limitations" (Fletcher 17n). This distinction, proceeding as it did from the central Romantic perception of a split between reason and imagination, hinged on a covert evaluation: allegory was bad, symbol good. MacDonald was making a generic place for his work within this Romantic framework. As Stephen Prickett observes, "What he wants to do is to differentiate between the mechanical rigidity of 'strict allegory' and what he calls a 'fairy-tale,' which uses allegory as one of a number of modes of symbolic narration" (173 -74). Twenty years ago Rosemond Tuve wondered at "the number of words spent defining and delimiting allegory in this decade," an effort which had then largely failed to clarify the matter, since "certain well-inculcated nineteenth-century assumptions about interpretation cloud the language of theory, and rebellions against them cloud the theory itself (3). "Allegory" is still widely used as a term of disapproval in critical dialogues—one indication of how much we feel the influence of the Romantic movement in literature. These debates have borne significantly upon some readings of MacDonald, for most readers quickly realize that his narratives are symbolic yet find the texture of associations far richer than that normally encountered in parable, moral exemplum, or even most allegories.3 Some oddly narrow generic assumptions have resulted. As late as 1982, one critic who speaks of allegory as "a very transparent and mechanical one-to-one relation of meaning to symbol" labels MacDonald's work "mythic" (Hein 111, xvii). Richard H. Reis maintains that "multiplicity and indefiniteness distinguish genuine symbolism from mere allegory" (78) and therefore calls MacDonald's fantasies "symbolic works" (29). C. S...