Death’s Ecstasies: Transformation and Rebirth in George Macdonald’s Phantastes

Abstract

D E A T H 'S E C S T A S IE S : T R A N SF O R M A T IO N AN D R E B IR T H IN G E O R G E M A C D O N A L D 'S PHANTASTES JOSEPH SIGMAN McMaster University (je o r g e MacDonald, one of the most hauntingly imaginative of Victorian writers, published Phantastes, A Faerie Romance For Men and Women in 1858. His first prose work, it seems to have attracted little attention except for a review in The Athenaeum, which dismissed it as a "second-hand symbol shop" whose author had "lost all hold on reality." However the fact that MacDonald's fantasy has never been long out of print indicates that through the years it has cast its spell over more than a few readers. Four further editions of Phantastes appeared in the nineteenth century and two more in the early twentieth. In 19 15 it became a title in Everyman's Library, and in recent years two paperback editions have been available. In spite of this limited but enduring popularity and, perhaps, some literary influence as well,1 this strange and complex work has attracted little critical attention. The only serious study of it is a chapter in Robert Lee Wolff's The Golden Key, a book that surveys all of MacDonald's fiction.2 In Wolff's judgment Phantastes is an "entirely episodic" work, whose only structure is provided by recurring Oedipal fantasies and by some allegorizations of events in MacDonald's life.3 In this essay I shall take issue with this concept of Phantastes and argue instead that its unity and coherence become apparent if it is seen as a depiction of a psychological crisis and the resulting process of transformation and rebirth. As the basis for this discussion I shall use the work of C.G. Jung and his disciple Erich Neumann, a choice governed by pragmatic rather than ideological considerations. The case simply seems to be that Jungian ideas "fit" MacDonald's fantasy. One possible reason for this may be that the roots of Jung's work, like those of MacDonald's, lie deep in German Romanticism. The psychology of MacDonald's young narrator (who, for reasons that will be explained shortly, is called "Anodos") is described through curiously illogi­ cal metaphors of inheritance and family history. The basic situation is this: Anodos's parents are dead, and he seems oddly uninformed about them and about his family's history generally. To begin with, his father's "personal history" is "unknown" to him,4 and he appears to be unable to remember anything about his mother, who died when he was a baby. This is clear enough and not necessarily unbelievable, but when MacDonald turns from the parents E n g l is h S t u d ie s in C a n a d a , i i , 2, Summer 1976 204 English Studies in Canada to the more distant ancestors, he does a strange and significant thing. Instead of discussing them in terms of different family lines, as would be most natural, he simply categorizes them according to whether they are male or female. This tends to assimilate the mother and father into a general division between male and female predecessors, and we find that Anodos has the same relative lack of knowledge about these two groups as he does about his parents. His male ancestors, he tells us, are "strange men" about whom he knows "little or nothing" (16), but we later learn that, in fact, he knows more about these male ancestors, his "great-grandfathers," than he does about his female ancestors, his "great-grandmothers on either side" (18). One important thing he does not know about his great-grandmothers is that they came from Fairy Land (23). Because of these fairy great-grandmothers the two groups - the male ancestors and the female ancestors - are very different, and Anodos appears to have received a different inheritance from each of them. The patriarchal inheritance consists of "lands and moneys" (16), and Anodos seems to take little interest in it...