We wonder as they wander

“[George] MacDonald’s fairytales divide into two groups with regard to fairyland: those which begin in something akin to our everyday world and then journey into fairyland (‘The Giant’s Heart,’ ‘The Shadows,’ ‘Cross Purposes,’ ‘The Golden Key,’ and ‘The Carasoyn’) and those which are set and take place entirely in a localized fairyland (‘The Light Princess,’ ‘Little Daylight,’ ‘The Wise Woman,’ and ‘The History of Photogen and Nycteris’). All, however, have an element of wandering in an unknown land. The prince in ‘The Light Princess,’ for example, before he finds and courts the princess begins ‘his wanderings’ by ‘setting out to look for the daughter of a queen’ and then loses sight of his retinue and becomes lost in a great forest. MacDonald wryly comments: ‘these forests are very useful in delivering princes from their courtiers, like a sieve that keeps back the bran. In this they have the advantage of the princesses, who are forced to marry before they have had a bit of fun. I wish our princesses got lost in a forest sometimes.’ The prince in ‘Little Daylight,’ meanwhile, is ‘compelled to flee for his life’ because of a rebellion in his country and also ends up wandering in a fairy wood.’ Watho steals Photogen and Nycteris from their mothers and traps them in their respective worlds of day and night. Both then must journey into their opposites in order to be completed. The title character in ‘The Wise Woman’ similarly abducts Rosamond and Agnes from their natural homes, but unlike Watho the wise woman has benevolent intentions, only hoping to create within the girls a desire for their true home.

For those stories which begin in the everyday world, however, the journey into fairyland is even more explicitly a ‘quest for the home-centre.’ Colin in ‘The Carasoyn’ must enter into fairyland in order to retrieve the abducted human girl ‘Fairy’ from the cruel fairy queen (and later to regain his son). ‘Fairy’ then becomes his wife, so in essence Colin sets out to establish a home for himself (and later to make it whole again). Alice [in “Cross Purposes”], as we have already seen, enters fairyland longing to be ‘where the sun is always setting,’ though upon entering the unknown of fairyland she immediately declares that she wants ‘to go home.’ After journeying a bit farther, she again asks Peaseblossom, ‘How far am I from home?’ To which the fairy answers mystically, ‘The farther you go, the nearer home you are.’ This seems to be one of the laws of MacDonald’s fairyland — there is no turning back; to get home you must journey farther away. Richard, in the same story, following the grotesque Toadstool in order to get an umbrella for his mother, also becomes homesick and declares, ‘I will go home again,’ but he finds that he must go deeper into fairyland before he can return. When the two children lose their fairy guides, they must continue this logic of journeying away, as they learn that ‘any honest plan will do in Fairyland, if you only stick to it.’ Much like MacDonald’s belief that there is no return to the Eden of childhood except by pressing on to the eternity of the childlike, Alice and Richard learn the paradoxical rule that the only way to return home is to press relentlessly forward.

“Even more puzzling, however, is the border crossing in ‘The Giant’s Heart’:

One day Tricksey-Wee, as they called her, teased her brother Buffy-Bob, till he could not bear it any longer, and gave her a box on the ear. Tricksey-Wee cried; and Buffy-Bob was so sorry and so ashamed of himself that he cried too, and ran off into the wood. He was so long gone that Tricksey-Wee began to be frightened, for she was very fond of her brother; and she was so distressed that she had first teased him and then cried, that at last she ran into the wood to look for him, though there was more chance of losing herself than of finding him. And, indeed, so it seemed likely to turn out; for, running on without looking, she at length found herself in a valley she knew nothing about.

“‘The Giant’s Heart’ is undoubtedly McDonald’s most disliked fairytale, having been called ‘repellent,’ ‘nauseous,’ and ‘sadistic.’ The children — whose comical names echo their maladies in a Dickensian fashion (Tricksey-Wee is clever and cunning while Buffy-Bob is something of a brute) — do not, like every other fairytale, enter ‘Fairyland’ but ‘Giantland.’ Given the Rabelaisian landscape and creatures of Giantland (huge birds and Murkwood-like spiders) as opposed to MacDonald’s usual fairyland, it seems that Giantland represents something distinct, probably related to the ‘monstrous’ behavior of both children just before their entrance. In order to escape the selfish giant, the children must journey through Giantland by working together and learning to use their personal proclivities for good and not for evil. Thus, in the end, Tricksey-Wee uses her knowledge of tricks to keep the giant from snaring them by deceit, and Buffy-Bob uses his physical strength to stab the giant’s heart before the treacherous giant can kill them. The story is oddly at one and the same time MacDonald’s most moralistic and his most grotesque, but the carnivalesque play obscures the moral and seems to mock Victorian conventionality. Giantland may not be as subtle a place as fairyland, but it is still thoroughly polyvalent. Even so, MacDonald does make one thing clear in the frame of Adela Cathcart when a little girl comes up to Smith after his tale:

‘Thank you, dear Mr. Smith. I will be good. It was a very nice story. If I was a man, I would kill all the wicked people in the world. But I am only a little girl, you know; so I can only be good.’
     The darling did not know how much more one good woman can do to kill evil than all the swords of the world in the hands of righteous heroes.

MacDonald here subverts the apparent moral of his story (as interpreted by the girl that physical strength overcomes evil by asserting the superior power of apparently subservient women. Paralleling the logic of I Corinthians 1:25, in which ‘the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men,’ MacDonald asserts the Christian principle that humility and apparent weakness are true power in the kingdom of God. Yet however one goes about it, the real moral is still to fight passionately for goodness and to strive ceaselessly against evil, to ‘quest for the home-centre.’”

— from Daniel Gabelman, George MacDonald: Divine Carelessness and Fairytale Levity (Baylor University Press, 2013)