Two Very Different Portal Fantasies
“The Aunt and Amabel” (1909) · “Through the Dragon Glass” (1917)
Today’s authors
- Edith Nesbit (1858–1924)
- A. Merritt (1884–1943)
Both write portal-quest fantasy in Mendlesohn’s sense.1 Almost nothing else about them matches.
Edith Nesbit
Nesbit before Amabel
The Railway Children (1906) is the book she is still known for — realist children’s fiction, no magic at all.
She was also a founding member of the Fabian Society, and supported her family by writing at volume.
Reading notes: “The Aunt and Amabel”
- Nesbit was among the most popular and successful British children’s authors of her era — yet she had no children of her own and apparently did not much like them.
- Nevertheless — or perhaps precisely because she could see both parents and children objectively — her stories show a remarkably keen understanding of child psychology, and never condescend to their young protagonists.
- Like many children’s stories, this one is essentially about the protagonist’s emotional and moral education through unusual adventure: a pattern set in the nineteenth century by writers like George MacDonald and Lewis Carroll.
- Like Dorothy in Baum’s The Wizard of Oz, Amabel cannot be sure at the end whether she truly visited a secondary world or dreamed it. Also as in Oz, characters from her real life appear in the fantasy in transformed guises.
- Nesbit’s use of a wardrobe as a portal likely influenced C. S. Lewis’s later use of the same in The Chronicles of Narnia.
A. Merritt
Varieties of the nineteenth-century adventure novel
The nineteenth century produced several new fantastic subgenres:
- The historical novel — Scott, Ivanhoe
- The sensation novel — Collins, The Woman in White
- The imperial adventure novel — Haggard, King Solomon’s Mines
- The reverse-invasion novel, Gothic (Stoker, Dracula) and science-fictional (Wells, The War of the Worlds)
A silent influence: Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” (1816)
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round;
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.
But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round;
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.
But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!
The looted object
The story is set in the aftermath of a real event: the 1899 Boxer Rebellion in China and its savage suppression by occupying forces. Herndon took part in the Allied looting of the Imperial Palace, and came away with the Dragon Glass.
Reading notes: “Through the Dragon Glass”
- Set in the aftermath of the Boxer Rebellion. The plot concerns the narrator’s wealthy friend Herndon, who participated in the looting of the Imperial Palace and took the titular Dragon Glass.
- The Glass is a portal to another world — an exotic, Orientalized lost world bearing hallmarks of multiple mythologies and religions: Aztec, Norse, Hindu, Christian. Oddly, the one major tradition never referenced is Confucianism.
- Waiting on the other side is a beautiful young woman named Santhu, who immediately becomes Herndon’s muse and consort, and whom he decides needs rescuing from Rak, the creator of that world.
- The story thus manages to combine several forms of racism (Orientalism, the white savior complex) with sexism — Santhu never speaks, only sings — and yet the result is undeniably entertaining, paving the way for the exotic adventures of more familiar characters like Indiana Jones.
Two portals
| portal | Nesbit | Merritt |
|---|---|---|
| the portal is | a wardrobe in a spare room | an object taken in a sack of a palace |
| the traveler is | a punished child | an armed adult |
| the other world | teaches her to see home | supplies him a consort |
For Tuesday
- “The Shadow Kingdom” by Robert E. Howard (BBCF 675)
- “The Spirit Chief Names the Animal People” and “Coyote Juggles His Eyes” by Mourning Dove (BBCF 719)
- “Uncle Monday” by Zora Neale Hurston (BBCF 724)
Farah Mendlesohn, Rhetorics of Fantasy (Wesleyan University Press, 2008).↩︎