Hawthorne, “Feathertop”; MacDonald, “The Magic Mirror”

The Mechanical Age

Were we required to characterise this age of ours by any single epithet, we should be tempted to call it, not an Heroical, Devotional, Philosophical, or Moral Age, but, above all others, the Mechanical Age.¹

• Britain industrializes earliest, and the US follows soon after.
• Industrialization creates the modern world: factories, railways, telegraphs, cities, etc.
• Everything must have a price. So everything must be measured (goods, time, work, etc.)
• Explanatory power of science grows: geology, evolution, statistics, etc.

The disenchantment of the world

…given the rationalization and intellectualization of the times, and especially given the disenchantment of the world—its loss of magic—the ultimate and most sublime values have retreated from public life, into either the otherworldly realm of mysticism or the direct brotherly communities of individuals with one another.

Increasing rationalization…means something else: the knowledge, or belief that we could find out if we wanted to; that in principle there are no mysterious incalculable forces intervening in our lives, but instead all things, in theory, can be mastered through calculation. It means the disenchanting of the world.²

How fantasy responds to disenchantment

• Fairy tales: The Grimms appear in English in 1823.
• Folklore: The term folk-lore is coined in 1846.
• Romanticizing the Middle Ages: the Pre-Raphaelite painters (1848), Tennyson’s Idylls of the King (1859–85), William Morris’s handicrafts and romances.

MacDonald and fantasy for grown-ups

• Modern speculative fiction (SF) is often ambiguous about the age of its readers. Children, young adults, and adults are all possible.
• MacDonald subtitles Phantastes (1858), the book from which “The Magic Mirror” is excerpted, “A Faerie Romance for Men and Women.”

Tolkien’s answer

Why should a man be scorned, if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home?³

• The “Escape of the Prisoner” vs. the “Flight of the Deserter”
• Tolkien’s example: He finds electric street-lamps, “so typical a product of the Robot Age,” to be elaborate, ugly, and inferior to their predecessors
• People who described electric street-lamps as inevitable or inexorable “worship” them, whereas the prisoner wishes to escape from that line of thinking entirely

Portal-quest vs. immersive fantasy

Farah Mendlesohn sorts fantasy by how stories introduce fantastic elements to the reader.⁴

• In portal fantasy, a character leaves one world (usually recognizable as the real world), and enters another (usually recognizable as fantastical).
  • Alice visits Wonderland. Harry goes to Hogwarts. Luke leaves Tatooine.
• In immersive fantasy, the reader enters directly into the fantastic world, and the characters usually do not recognize its fantastical elements as fantastic.
  • Characters in Game of Thrones think Westeros is the world.

Evidence

• “Feathertop” as immersive: Witches like Mother Rigby exist. Rigby’s magic can be perceived as magic (e.g., by Polly Gookin on seeing Feathertop in the mirror). However, the narrator expresses some skepticism about the magic (“Whence the coal came, and how brought thither by an invisible hand, I have never been able to discover.”)
• “Magic Mirror” as portal: The enchanted mirror is a “door” to another world (one where Cosmo and Princess von Hohenweiss can be together). Cosmo learns how the mirror works, which explains it to readers along the way. The destruction of the mirror closes the portal.

A few things about Hawthorne

• A major author in the traditional US literary canon.
• In the 1800s, Americans were anxious about their low literary accomplishment relative to European authors. Hawthorne was one of a few early US fiction writers (along with Irving and Poe) who were internationally successful.
• Best known for The Scarlet Letter (1850).
• He called his books romances, not novels, claiming “a certain latitude” that realism did not allow.⁵

“Allegory: a moralized legend”

Allegories symbolize moral or political ideas in narrative. Personification is a common feature of allegories.

A recent example

The Politician, blinded by the Flag, does not know that he is about to step into the unknown.

Allegories in SF

• Feathertop is a gentleman in appearance only: He has the clothes, gait, a few turns of phrase, but if you look closely, he’s not even a person.
• “Feathertop” is moralized: the meaning is stated outright. Mother Rigby says the world is full of “coxcombs and charlatans” who “never see themselves for what they are.”
• Feathertop’s story is an allegory for other such men, and the magical element makes the allegory satirical, too. Such men are really no better than gussied up scarecrows.
• Ironically, Feathertop had “too much heart” for “such an empty and heartless world.”

MacDonald in brief

• Scottish Congregationalist minister who lost his pulpit in 1853 for insufficient dogmatism.
• Read and translated the German Romantic Novalis; drew on the Bible, Celtic legend, the Grimms, and Andersen.
• A friend of John Ruskin and Lewis Carroll.
• Influenced Lewis Carroll (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland), C.S. Lewis (Chronicles of Narnia), and J.R.R. Tolkien (Lord of the Rings).
• Phantastes (1858) is his major book. “The Magic Mirror” is an inset story.

Re-enchanting the ordinary

• A mirror adds nothing to Cosmo’s room. Except a frame (and his reflection).
• With the frame, it appears to be the same “and yet not the same.”
• This is a fantasy that enchants the world. A student’s empty room becomes magical.

Mirrors are magic

Posessiveness and estrangement

• We have talked about how SF makes the familiar unfamiliar using the term estrangement.
• Tolkien, who read MacDonald closely, described this as the recovery of the world, especially the recovery of the magic of childhood.

We need, in any case, to clean our windows; so that the things seen clearly may be freed from the drab blur of triteness or familiarity—from possessiveness.⁶

Not an allegory

A fairytale is not an allegory. There may be allegory in it, but it is not an allegory.⁷

• Hawthorne tells us the moral of the story. MacDonald doesn’t.
• However, MacDonald’s story connects to commonplace ideas like, “If you love someone, you must let them go.”
• “If thou lovest me, set me free, even from thyself.”