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Exploring the Mind in the Novels of George Macdonald

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Exploring the Mind in the Novels of George Macdonald “Within and Without”: Exploring the Mind in the Novels of George MacDonald By Saskia Voorendt A thesis submitted to the Victoria University of Wellington in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Literature Victoria University of Wellington 2012 Acknowledgements The completion of this project would not have been possible without the unwavering support and academic guidance of my two amazing supervisors, Kathryn Walls and Heidi Thomson. Their ongoing commitment, ruthless editing, and inspired insights have proven invaluable over the last three years. I would also like to thank the staff and post-graduate community of the English Department at Victoria University of Wellington, for providing such an encouraging and supportive academic environment in which to work. In particular, I would like to thank Lilja Sautter for her assistance (and patience) in translating and discussing the work of von Schubert. Special thanks must also go to my long-suffering office companion, Lujan Herrera, not only for putting up with me and my eccentric study habits for three years, but also for accompanying me around the north of Scotland in search of people and places relating to George MacDonald. Thank you to the scholarships office of Victoria University of Wellington for providing me with the financial means of pursuing my academic goals, not only here in Wellington, but also overseas for research and conference purposes. Finally, I would like to acknowledge that tremendous source of inspiration and support that is my circle of family and friends. Their incredible understanding, encouragement, and belief in me cannot be lauded enough. i Abstract George MacDonald‟s first published novel, Phantastes, is the story of a young man who enters and must negotiate his way through a fantasy landscape. This landscape, it is suggested, is one of the mind, and Anodos‟ journey through it one of self- exploration and discovery. The sustained metaphor of the mind as a territory to be actively explored through the medium of the physical world, furthermore, is argued to be the basis of several of MacDonald‟s novels. While for Anodos the mind is all, forming as it does the basis of the entire fantasy world of Fairy Land, in the author‟s numerous realist texts the interest emerges in more varied ways, including for example, portrayals of depression, madness, and drug (ab)use. While this significant and unifying feature of MacDonald‟s novels has been at times observed by critics with regard to some individual texts, it has not been directly confronted in terms of an inclusive study of his oeuvre. What this thesis demonstrates is firstly the overwhelming significance of the mind as a focal point for MacDonald‟s novels, as represented by six central texts: Phantastes, Adela Cathcart, Wilfrid Cumbermede, Malcolm, Donal Grant, and The Flight of the Shadow. It is suggested that such a consistent prioritising of the mind over the physical body lies in the author‟s own experience of ongoing physical illness and resulting confrontation with mortality. The mind becomes, for MacDonald, a means of negotiating the relationship between the realms of the physical and the spiritual. In Phantastes, for example, Anodos‟ physical experience (achieved through the genre of fantasy) of his own mind in Fairy Land, concludes with reference to the afterlife. The mind in this (and MacDonald‟s other novels) provides the means by which transcendence is achieved. ii Table of Contents Acknowledgements i Abstract ii Introduction: “Breaking Forth from the Dream Home” 1 Chapter One: “Self will come to Life”: a landscape of the mind in Phantastes 18 Chapter Two: “Beginning from the Inside”: healing stories Adela Cathcart 50 Chapter Three: “The Course of this World”: resisting temptation in Wilfrid Cumbermede 80 Chapter Four: “A Tortured Mind”: madness in Malcolm 88 Chapter Five: “Home-born Phantoms”: the drugged mind in Donal Grant 115 Chapter Six: “Darkness that Haunts”: guilty minds in The Flight of the Shadow 138 Conclusion: “The New Childhood” 158 Works Cited 161 iii Introduction: “Breaking Forth from the Dream-Home” The texts chosen for this study have been selected to represent the scope and variation of George MacDonald‟s literary vision. MacDonald‟s writing career spans five decades, and so the selection has been made with the progression of his ideas throughout this period in mind. Each engages with a concept of the individual‟s mind – in interaction with the physical and spiritual environments. Chapter One focuses on the author‟s first novel, Phantastes (1858), in which the main character enters a fantasy world, a landscape akin to that within his own mind. Chapter Two discusses Adela Cathcart (1864), a contrastingly realist work which nevertheless highlights the roles of the mind and the imagination in constructing (and maintaining) individual health. Wilfrid Cumbermede (the subject of Chapter Three; 1872) uses the genre of the bildungsroman to depict both the search for identity and the fulfilment of spiritual enlightenment. Chapters Four and Five explore differing states of consciousness (achieved through madness and drugs, respectively) with reference to Malcolm (1875) and Donal Grant (1883). Finally, Chapter Six focuses on one of MacDonald‟s later novels, The Flight of the Shadow (1891), which engages more directly with the fantastic in a realist context. For MacDonald, the human mind was a site of potential trauma: trauma brought about by the mind‟s precarious existence on the border between a physical reality and a spiritual ideality. A strong influence on such a conception of the mind, I will argue, was the author‟s own early life experience. “A feverish urge”: physical illness and the imagination Writing to the The Spectator in July 1867, MacDonald declares, “[s]urely it is one of the worst signs of a man to turn his back upon the rock whence he was hewn” (Greville MacDonald 38). MacDonald‟s personal history, including his own childhood experiences, proved a powerful influence on his writing, and evidence of its significance in relation to his imaginative vision can be found throughout his oeuvre. It appears in his realistic novels and his fantasies, and affects action, - 1 - character, and setting. As William Raeper notes, “The Farm [his childhood home] features largely in MacDonald‟s writing. It was an important reference point for his imagination. It was where his childhood was played out and his memories return to it again and again” (George MacDonald 23). A persistent presence in MacDonald‟s childhood was physical illness, and in particular tuberculosis, from which MacDonald was to suffer not only in childhood but throughout his life. One might expect then that the illness would make an appearance in MacDonald‟s own writing. After all, tuberculosis as a literary subject was increasingly popular in novels of the nineteenth century. Writers tuberculous themselves, or otherwise surrounded by it, employed the disease in abundance in their plots (Dormandy, The White Death 92). But despite MacDonald‟s personal experience of tuberculosis, it is ‒ on the face of it ‒ strikingly absent from his novels.1 A closer examination of MacDonald‟s novels, however, reveals its subtle influence. As is well-recognised, MacDonald treats his subjects symbolically, and tuberculosis, in so far as it makes an appearance in his novels, is a case in point. Instead of making explicit use of the disease as a device, or instrument of plot or character development, MacDonald uses it as a metaphor. As we shall see, the symbolic value of the disease allows the author to explore broader issues of identity and its impact on the individual. It also draws attention to the relationship between the physical and the spiritual. Before elaborating on this point, however, I need to dwell at greater length on the status of tuberculosis in MacDonald‟s life-time. As the literary scholar Katherine Byrne has demonstrated, tuberculosis (otherwise known at the time as “phthisis,” “consumption” or “decline”) killed more people than cholera and smallpox combined during the Victorian era (1). At its height early in the nineteenth century, a fifth of all deaths in England could be attributed to it, and (while numbers declined from around 1830) it remained throughout the Victorian period as (according to Byrne) “the biggest single killer of men and women in their physical and productive prime” (12). In 1825, when George MacDonald was just a year old, his father‟s left leg was amputated above the knee for tuberculous disease of the joint, after two years of unsuccessful treatment (Greville MacDonald 34). His mother had been suffering from the disease for many 1 An online search of MacDonald‟s novels on Project Gutenberg shows “consumption” employed occasionally as a term denoting general illness in predominantly secondary characters. There is no mention of “tuberculosis” or “phthisis.” - 2 - years, before dying from it in 1832, when George was only eight (Greville MacDonald 31). James, the third child and next in age to George, died in 1834, when he was just eight and George ten, and John McKay, born in 1829, died in infancy. As for George himself, he was, in Greville‟s words, “a delicate boy” despite his robust enthusiasm for the outdoors (58). He was often kept from school (once confined to his bed for four months), and “play was often mixed with illness” (29). He was apparently susceptible to pleurisy, a disease often associated with tuberculosis.2 Writing to his father from Portsoy on 15 August, 1833, the young George MacDonald recorded that he had been “unwell for two or three days, my throat […] a little sore and my head very painful but I […] have been in the sea today and like it very much.”3 Sea bathing and even the drinking of sea water having been regarded as therapeutic at the time, it is significant that he wrote, also, that his aunt had made him drink the water despite his reluctance, and (in the following year from Portsoy): “I have bathed every day since I came and I drink the salt water every two days” (Sadler 6).4 George MacDonald‟s own ill health continued to influence his life once he left Huntly to attend university in Aberdeen.
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