Time-Travel and Mystical Magic in Edith Nesbit's Later Fantasies
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Corso di Laurea in Lingue e Letterature Straniere Tesi di Laurea Time-travel and Mystical Magic in Edith Nesbit’s Later Fantasies Relatore Ch.ma Prof.ssa Laura Tosi Correlatore Ch.ma Prof.ssa Loretta Innocenti Laureanda Erica Bottega Matricola 779876 Anno Accademico 2012 / 2013 Time-travel and Mystical Magic in Edith Nesbit’s Later Fantasies “There is a curtain, thin as gossamer, clear as glass, strong as iron, that hangs for ever between the world of magic and the world that seems to us to be real. And when once people have found one of the little weak spots in that curtain which are marked by magic rings, and amulets, and the like, almost anything may happen” (Edith Nesbit, The Enchanted Castle) Portrait of Edith Nesbit, from Julia Briggs, Edith Nesbit: A Woman of Passion, Tempus, Gloucestershire, 2006. 2 Time-travel and Mystical Magic in Edith Nesbit’s Later Fantasies Table of Contents Introduction 1. Nesbit’s Fantasy: an Introduction 1.1. Fantasy: Definition and Main Features 1.1.1. For a Definition of “Fantasy” 1.1.2. Fantasy vs. Fantastic 1.1.3. From the Origins of Fantasy Tradition to Victorian Fantasy 1.1.4. Forms of Fantasy Literature 1.2. Edith Nesbit: a Short Biography 1.2.1. Childhood 1.2.2. Marriage to Hubert Bland and the Foundation of the Fabian Society 1.2.3. Main works 1.2.4. Last years 1.3. Main Narrative Features in Edith Nesbit’s Fantasy 2. Time-travel in Edith Nesbit’s Time-travel Fantasies 2.1. Time and Time-travel 2.1.1. The Concept of “Time” in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century 2.1.2. Main Features of Time-travel as Literary Subgenre 3 Time-travel and Mystical Magic in Edith Nesbit’s Later Fantasies 2.2. Time-travel in Science Fiction: H. G. Wells and his Influence on Edith Nesbit’s Time-travel Fantasy 2.2.1. A Brief History of Time-travel in Literature 2.2.2. H.G. Wells and The Time Machine 2.2.3. Wells vs. Nesbit: Time-travel in Science Fiction vs. Time-Travel in Fantasy 2.3. Time-travel in Nesbit’s Time-travel Fantasies 2.3.1. The Story of the Amulet 2.3.2. The House of Arden and its Sequel Harding’s Luck 3. Mystical Magic in Edith Nesbit’s The Enchanted Castle and The Magic City 3.1. The Rules of Magic in Children’s Fantasy and in Nesbit’s Magic Books 3.2. Edith Nesbit’s Later Magic Books: The Enchanted Castle and The Magic City 3.2.1. The Enchanted Castle 3.2.2. The Magic City Conclusion Bibliography 4 Time-travel and Mystical Magic in Edith Nesbit’s Later Fantasies Introduction The aim of this dissertation is to prove that Edith Nesbit’s crucially contributed to the development of Victorian children’s fantasy, through her time-travel stories and magic novels. The first chapter analyses the most significant features of the fantasy genre and its centrality in children’s literature, introducing the figure of Edith Nesbit as one of the most innovative writers in the background of “modern” fantasy, and focusing on the impact her life had on her literary production. Some critics, like R. Jackson and C. Manlove, describe fantasy as a genre which does not have to undergo the restrictions of literary conventions, which often rejects the rules of “time-space” and which uses magic as a crucial element in order to free children’s imagination. The origins of fantasy date back to myth and folklore and until the eighteenth century critical terms still had to be created to distinguish between fantasy stories and folk and fairy tales. In the critical contribution of V. Propp, who analysed the structure of folk tales in his Morphology of the Folktale1, the fantasy genre could be regarded as an independent literary category with peculiar traits, although it showed some similar features to other genres (to the chivalry romance or to the Gothic, for instance). Through the centuries, the idea of “childhood” deeply changed: the “classic” notion of the child as a passive human being who depends on his/her parents’ authority was replaced by the “more modern” idea that a child was a distinct being with his/her thoughts and feelings. Because of the evolution of the concepts of childhood and imagination due to the cultural and social transformation brought by Romanticism and by the Industrial Revolution, the fantasy genre underwent crucial changes. As a consequence, Victorian fantasy writers looked for a new language which could satisfy the need to address a different reading audience, and writers like C. Kingsley, G. MacDonald and L. Carroll prepared the ground for modern fantasy; however, it is Nesbit who is widely considered the modern creator of this genre between the Victorian and the Edwardian age. 1 Propp’s study of the narrative structure of folk tales is mentioned in section 1.1.3. 5 Time-travel and Mystical Magic in Edith Nesbit’s Later Fantasies Born in 1858, since she was a child Edith Nesbit showed a great talent for writing, which increasingly grew in the years of her marriage to the socialist Hubert Bland and of her entrance into the Fabian Society. Besides, she revealed her great ability to move between different literary genres, by writing poems and ghost stories as well as realistic novels and time-travel fantasies, which enabled her to gain a great popularity among the most celebrated twentieth-century fantasy writers. Chapter two and three of this thesis are devoted to Nesbit’s time-travel fantasies and her later magic novels. The second chapter opens with some considerations about how the concept of “time” changed in the twentieth century, in order to better contextualise the contribution Nesbit gave to time-travel fantasy with the novels herein analysed. The birth of new sciences (like paleontology in the nineteenth century for instance), the development of new scientific theories (such as Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution) and the improvements in trade and communication, put the previous worldview in a difficult position; it was indeed based on the Newtonian physics and underwent important changes relating to the notion of “time” and “space”. Philosophers and scientists like Henry Bergson and Albert Einstein analysed “time” from a different point of view: the former distinguished the time of consciousness from the time of science, whereas the latter recognized the validity of “time” only as a subjective perception. Whereas in some novels primary time stands still while the characters visit ancient ages and magic worlds, in other time-travel fantasies time passes and adults notice the disappearance of the children while they are in a secondary world (as in J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, for example). After a brief hint to the history of time-travel in literature with a reference to Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, as the first most important novel regarding time-travelling, Chapter Two explores H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895), highlighting the influence the writer had on Edith Nesbit’s writing, although his novel may be considered to belong to the science fiction genre (besides being both members of the Fabian Society, Wells and Nesbit were close friends). In his novel, Wells tells us the story of the Time Traveller, a man who travels into the future by means of a time machine he himself has built. The novel is extremely symbolic, as it enables the writer to express his social criticism about Victorian age and his attitude towards progress: the two social classes into which human beings have evolved in this 6 Time-travel and Mystical Magic in Edith Nesbit’s Later Fantasies distant future are the result of the destruction and the involution to which communism and capitalism have contributed. In spite of the inspiration Nesbit drew from Wells’s science fiction in writing her Arden books, many significant differences regarding time-travel in adult literature and in children’s literature can be noticed. Unlike in adult literature, where the journeys of an adult traveller generally occur into the future and they are scientifically explained as they are taken by means of a time machine, in children’s literature a child (or a group of children, as in Nesbit’s Psammead Trilogy) travels into ancient ages and it is only magic which allows time-travelling to happen. The last part of Chapter Two analyses Nesbit’s time-travel fantasies: The Story of the Amulet (1906), The House of Arden (1908) and Harding’s Luck (1909). The Story of the Amulet belongs to Nesbit’s Psammead Trilogy (the other two novels are Five Children and It, published in 1902, and The Phoenix and the Carpet, in 1904) and tells the story of four brothers who, thanks to a magical half amulet (bought in the same shop where they met for the second time the Psammead, the sand fairy that had fulfilled their wishes in Five Children and It), visit different historical ages (such as Ancient Egypt in the year 6000 B.C., Ancient Babylon, Atlantis and Britain of 55 B.C), in order to find the missing half of the amulet and reunite their family. Besides showing Nesbit’s harsh social criticism towards her society and inducing the reader to long for a socialist utopia (Wells’s The Modern Utopia certainly inspired Nesbit), in this novel, just as in the following Arden books, time-travel achieves a further didactic function: during their visits into the past the children, who magically do not have problems in communicating with people of different historical ages (unlike in Wells’s The Time Machine, where at the beginning the Time Traveller does not understand the language of the Eloi), learn something new and reach a personal growth.