Searching for Grace in Children's Fantasy

Abstract

Searching for Grace in Children’s Fantasy Donna R. White (bio) John Goldthwaite. The Natural History of Make-Believe: A Guide to the Principal Works of Britain, Europe, and America. New York: Oxford UP, 1996. The words “Oxford University Press” on the title page of a book promise quality, depth, and insight in the work attached to that page. Oxford’s recent publications in children’s literature have lived up to the promise: the 3rd edition of Only Connect (with all new essays), Peter Hunt’s Children’s Literature: An Illustrated History, and Jill May’s Children’s Literature and Critical Theory: Reading and Writing for Understanding. Now Oxford has published John Goldthwaite’s literary history, The Natural History of Make-Believe: A Guide to the Principal Works of Britain, Europe, and America. This book compromises the Oxford promise in a small way. Goldthwaite is like the little girl with the little curl on her forehead: when he is good he is very very good, but when he is bad he is horrid. When he builds his arguments on solid evidence, his analysis is sharp and insightful, but too often he veers off into baseless speculation and ad hominem attacks on canonical authors. In his introduction Goldthwaite explains that he is writing a literary history of make-believe, which for his purposes consists of nursery rhyme, fairy tale, beast fable, and the modern literature descended from those three genres. He defines make-believe as “miracle stories.” For Goldthwaite, the goal of make-believe is to demonstrate the workings of grace in the world. The book of Proverbs, he claims, is the world’s oldest surviving children’s book—a Hebrew version of Aesop’s Fables that leaves out the stories but retains the morals. The presumed audience of Proverbs is a person addressed as “my son,” which to Goldthwaite suggests a young adult audience being instructed in right behavior. All make-believe descends from Proverbs, thus it is by nature didactic at some level. Children’s literature that comes closest to capturing a kind of numinous harmony, which Goldthwaite terms “allsense,” is the best kind of make-believe. [End Page 288] All three classes of make-believe involve fantasy. Goldthwaite posits four narrative strategems of fantasy that have developed in a loosely chronological manner: open fantasy, in which magic is a natural part of the world, as in fairy tales; circular fantasy, a kind of there-and-back-again narrative that is framed in our natural world but locates the fantastic in a realm beyond; closed fantasy, which is set completely in a Secondary World; and broken fantasy, a postmodern metafictional kind of fantasy that calls attention to its own fictionality. Because of his conviction that the true purpose of make-believe is to exhibit grace at work in the world, Goldthwaite disapproves of closed fantasies such as Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings; only a fool or an apostate sets up his or her own creation in competition with God’s. Closed fantasies are merely escapist and cannot project “allsense.” Goldthwaite presents accurate historical facts in his discussions of the literary development of nursery rhymes, fairy tales, and beast fables, and he offers intriguing theses about literary influences and connections. For instance, he traces the figure of the feminized Wisdom in the book of Proverbs through Perrault’s fairy godmother to the Blue Fairy in Pinocchio and George MacDonald’s North Wind, arguing that these and similar female characters represent the Holy Spirit. His most persuasive thesis is that all animal fantasy is descended from the Uncle Remus tales; he marshalls a host of credible witnesses to prove this argument. The books discussed in this literary history include both classics and works of popular literature, but the list reflects a Eurocentric and, more specifically, Anglocentric bias. The “Principal Works of Britain, Europe, and America” mentioned in the subtitle comprise one title each from Italy, Finland, Denmark, and Germany; four titles from France; twelve titles from the United States; and thirty-six titles from Britain. (Apparently the only principle work of children’s fantasy published in Germany was the folk-tale collection of the Grimm brothers.) Of course, no single...