Lyra Belacqua in His Dark Materials

REWRITING THE FALL: LYRA BELACQUA IN HIS DARK MATERIALS REWRITING THE FALL: LYRA BELACQUA’S RESISTANCE TO ADULT IDEOLOGY IN HIS DARK MATERIALS By DANIEL T. MOORE, B.A. A Thesis Submitted to the School of Graduate Studies in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts McMaster University © Copyright by Daniel T. Moore, September 2014 ii McMaster University MASTER OF ARTS (2014) Hamilton, Ontario (English) TITLE: Rewriting the Fall: Lyra Belacqua’s Resistance to Adult Ideology in His Dark Materials AUTHOR: Daniel T. Moore, B.A. (McMaster University) SUPERVISOR: Professor Iris Bruce NUMBER OF PAGES: v, 100 iii ABSTRACT This thesis examines resistance to adult ideology by child/adolescent characters in Philip Pullmans’ His Dark Materials. Drawing on terminology provided by Maria Nikolajeva (aetonormativity) and Roberta Trites (power within repression) this paper describes the development of Lyra Belacqua, the protagonist of The Golden Compass. It identifies in Pullman’s text a particular emphasis on allowing children to develop into adolescents before subjecting them to religious or secular ideologies. This thesis works with the terms Entwicklungsroman and Bildungsroman in order to illuminate and complicate the subject- positions: adolescent, child and adult. This thesis demonstrates the particular attention to qualities of adolescence and childhood in Pullman’s works, and the effect that reconstructing adolescence as an end-point for child characters has on child protagonists, by contrast to adulthood as a destination. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my mother and father, without whom I would not have been able to pursue my degree, and who have encouraged me and supported me every step of the way. I would like to thank my brother and sister for providing hugs, and couches to crash on during the thesis-writing process. I would like to thank my grandmother for telling me stories as a child, and encouraging my desire to write and learn. Finally, I would like to thank my supervisor, Dr. Bruce, who helped me put together a thesis which I am proud of. v TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ........................................................................................................................ IV TABLE OF CONTENTS ............................................................................................................................. V INTRODUCTION: CROSSING OVER ..................................................................................................... 1 LYRA IN THE GOLDEN COMPASS .......................................................................................................... 9 TRANSGRESSION ..................................................................................................................................................... 10 TRANSITION ............................................................................................................................................................ 19 DUST AS WISDOM ................................................................................................................................................... 26 RESISTANCE ............................................................................................................................................................ 32 INHERITING A REBELLION: MILTON AND BLAKE’S DIABOLICAL SPIRIT IN PULLMAN’S CHARACTERS .......................................................................................................................................... 44 RESISTANCE OR CONFORMITY: A THIRD PATH ................................................................................................. 51 EMPOWERED TO SEEK TRUTH: THE DEVICES OF HIS DARK MATERIALS .................................................... 72 CONCLUSION: “THESE WERE THEIR SHAPES FOR LIFE: THEY WOULD WANT NO OTHER.” ..................................................................................................................................................................... 86 BIBLIOGRAPHY ...................................................................................................................................... 94 1 M.A. Thesis – Daniel Moore; McMaster University – English. Introduction: Crossing Over The phrase ‘Crossing Over’ implies movement across a line which divides and stands separate from two distinct positions. Crossing over into adulthood is the defining aspect of the Bildungsroman, from which Young Adult Literature (YAL) has historically evolved, and which is used as an archetype frequently within YA theory as a premise for analysis (Disturbing the Universe, Trites 10). In YAL special emphasis is placed on what changes in the protagonist as he/she ages, and on developments in adolescence or childhood which are maintained or reproduced in adulthood. Despite the importance of this literary tradition, analysis of YAL based on the Bildungsroman archetype does not inherently address the parallel development of the protagonist’s ideological and social-hierarchical position. The Bildungsroman provides an archetype which assists discussion of YAL but which was never meant to address what Roberta Trites calls the relationship between “power and growth that shapes adolescent literature” (13). A Bildungsroman describes the movement of a protagonist from “innocence to experience” rather than the formation or use of power, and thus new modes of YA theory have sought to address the relationships and negotiations of power in YAL (Brown and St. Clair 26). Defining works as ‘Bildungsroman’ or more generally ‘Entwicklungsroman’ offers the possibility for analysis based on the protagonist’s maturity, but a parallel discussion is necessary to describe the formation of power during the maturation process. Trites claims that “the Young Adult novel may well be the specific sub-genre of the Entwicklungsroman – the novel of development – that has emerged from postmodern thinking” (13, 18). Entwicklungsroman is a term used to differentiate between novels in which “the protagonist has grown” and the Bildungsroman in which “the protagonist reaches adulthood by the novel’s end” (16). Trites goes on to claim that the differentiation between these two archetypes allows the theorist to “pay more attention” (13) to shifts in power 2 M.A. Thesis – Daniel Moore; McMaster University – English. and agency: “Although the primary purpose of the adolescent novel may appear to be a depiction of growth, growth in this genre is inevitably represented as being linked to what the adolescent has learned about power” (x). The implication of this claim – as Trites discusses at length – is that rather than address moments of romanticized maturation during which a subject has clearly and significantly altered his or her subject position, the primary lens for analysis of this literature should focus on power relations between subject-positions. It is at the moment of crossing over that we can best judge the success of the protagonists’ resistance to adult normativity, and thus the extent of their empowerment within the work. The particular resistance of Lyra Belacqua, the protagonist of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, demonstrates the necessity of resistance to adult influence in order to forge new modes of normative thought. If childhood is an individual’s current location (point A) and adulthood is an individual’s inevitable destination (Point B), then adolescence marks the space between and is either a threshold defining entrance into adulthood, or else a space through which one travels in order to reach adulthood. Whether adolescence is a line which is crossed by the protagonist or a space the protagonist occupies is of considerable concern. In His Dark Materials, adolescence is the final subject-position of the child protagonist. It is given symbolic value which closely parallels adulthood within a Bildungsroman archetype. Rather than a growth from childhood to adulthood, Pullman’s narrative expresses development from childhood into adolescence, representing a transition from innocence to experience which subverts the Bildungsroman archetype. Despite this close attention to adolescence as an end point, an adult/child binary persists throughout the work which contributes to the formation of Bildungsroman themes despite an essentially Entwicklungsroman narrative. This binary seems inspired by the innocence and experience dichotomy developed in William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. The 3 M.A. Thesis – Daniel Moore; McMaster University – English. result of this lingering adult/child binary is that instead of embracing an Entwicklungsroman archetype, Pullman’s work depicts a transition from childhood to adolescence, but does little to distinguish adolescence from early adulthood. This transition comes despite his protagonists’ sometimes obvious occupation of a liminal space resembling adolescence. Adolescence is an implied identity of the works but is never fully realized in the trilogy as a whole – it is recognized only as the trilogy concludes. Though His Dark Materials mimics the child-to-adult transition of the Bildungsroman, Pullman substitutes adolescence for adulthood at the conclusion of the trilogy and thus describes an Entwicklungsroman-like age-as-spectrum narrative. This means that though Pullman’s work functions as an Entwicklungsroman, demonstrating many and varied moments of increasing maturity, and though the children have only reached adolescence by the conclusion of

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