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Transfiguring Fantasy Spiritual Development in the Work of George Macdonald

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Transfiguring Fantasy Spiritual Development in the Work of George Macdonald Transfiguring Fantasy Spiritual Development in the Work of George MacDonald John Stuart Pridmore PhD Thesis Institute of Education University of London This thesis is dedicated to the children of Hackney GEORGE MACDONALD 1824 - 1905 by John Heath-Stubbs When the water in the basin overflows, becoming A stream that runs through a wood: when the flowers on the carpet Are turned into real blossoms and the trees Are human - some seductresses and dangerous, Some maternal and protective: when you sleep in an arbour Observed by the bright eyes of birds, till, at midnight, They come without faces, the dancers - Those who in life wore masks, and now Are condemned to be featureless; when a book in the library Is partly in our world, and part in another; When the librarian's ghost is a raven is Adam; When innocence is under threat from goblin troglodytes, From corrupt courts, from hunting white panthers; Maternal presences are concealed In secret drawers in unvisited turrets, At the back of the North Wind; when a fire of roses Purges pereeption, and you hold, Among those images, an unbroken thread, And goodness is as ordinary as having your breakfast, As being fed a spoonful of porridge By a woman both old and young - she is that Wisdom Boethius knew, and Hermas. This poenz, a gift by Jo/zn Heath-Stubbs to the George MacDonald Society, was read by the poet at the 1991 Annual General Meeting of the Society. 'U ABSTRACT This study addresses two questions. What light does the work of George MacDonald shed on the concept of 'spiritual development' and what is the pedagogical function of his fantasy? The thesis is largely concerned to clarify these conceptual issues but the reason for raising them is practical. The promotion of spiritual development in schools is a statutory requirement. The conclusions of this thesis contain implications for curricular strategies for meeting that requirement and attention will be drawn to them. Two major claims are made. The first concerns the issue of whether a coherent spirituality necessarily depends on - and thus must be promoted within - a religious framework. The implication of MacDonald's recourse to fantasy, a discourse dispensing with traditional religious categories, to explore the theme of spiritual development is that a spiritual pedagogy does not need to be rooted in traditional religious concepts and truth-claims. The two discourses, the 'theistic' and the 'non-theistic', are compatible and complementary. Secondly, the concept of 'transfiguring fantasy' is introduced and commended. MacDonald's transfiguring fantasy functions pedagogically, as potentially does all such unclosed flmtasy, by calling in question the distinction between the narrative one reads and one's own life-story. The two realms, those of the text in one's hands and the life one is leading, elide and the task of resolving the enigmas of the fantasy becomes one with the unfinished business of making sense of one's own story. This thesis also considers the familiar Romantic themes of nature, childhood and the imagination, which MacDonald treats with original insight. Nature is akin to fantasy in its capacity to engage and direct the attentive spirit. Childhood is the pattern of what we must become. The imagination's role is to summon us to press beyond the borders of what may be scientifically proven or rationally articulated. Key words: spiritual development; George MacDonald; nature; childhood; imagination. iv CONTENTS Acknowledgements vifi Abbreviations ix Introduction I PART ONE 15 Chapter 1 Spiritual Development 16 The legislation, the National Curriculum and the National Forum 17 The legislation 17 The National Curriculum 18 The National Forum 20 21 The literature Spirituality and religion 22 Self and society 27 Transcendence and the hidden future 30 Spfritual dewlopment - cm el/ilcal process 32 Spiritual health 33 Towards an analytical framework 34 Chapter 2 Locating MacDonald 41 42 The Scottish inheritance Home 42 Church 43 School 44 University 45 46 German influences Boehme 46 47 Jean-Paul Nova/is 51 The English Romantics 53 54 Mentors F. D. Maurice 54 A.J. Scott 57 Summary 60 Chapter 3 Approaching MacDonald 66 The major commentators 67 MacDonald's fantasy - the quest for an interpretative framework 72 The psycho..cmaiytica/framework 72 The theologicalfranework 75 V The social-criticalframework 76 The feminist framework 76 The thnctio and the discourse of fantasy 77 Miscellaneous studies 78 Biographical studies 78 Sources and influences 78 Comparative studies 79 Themes and texts 80 Sunimary 82 PART TWO 85 Chapter 4 Nature 86 Nature rediscovered 86 'Wordsworth's Poetiy' 87 Nature in MacDonald's novels and poetry 90 Nature and fantasy 94 The animal kingdom 100 Summary 100 Chapter 5 Becoming a Child 104 'A Sketch of Individual Development' 105 The image of childhood 107 The Romantic image of childhood 107 The child Christ and the Christlike child 114 'The Child in the Midst' 116 The language of childhood 119 Summary 121 Chapter 6 The Imagination 125 'The Imagination: its Function and its Culture' 126 Summary 134 PART THREE 138 Chapter 7 Transfiguring Fantasy 139 Realism and Fantasy 139 The forms of fantasy 142 The function of fantasy 144 Didactic fantasy 144 Therapeutic fantasy 146 Utopian fantasy 150 Trans-figuringfantasy 153 'The Fantastic Imagination' 158 Summary 159 v Chapter 8 The 'Endless Ending' 164 Phantastes 165 The process of spiritual development in Phantastes 165 Phantastes as' transfiguringfantasy 174 The Golden Key 177 Lilith 179 The process of spiritual development in Lilith 180 Lilith as transfiguringfantasy 184 Other faiiy tales 186 Cross Purposes 186 The Shadows 188 Little Daylight 189 The Day Boy and the Night Girl 190 Summary 190 Chapter 9 The Wise Woman 196 Sources 198 Who is the Wise Woman? 199 The Wise Woman and the development of the spirit 200 The suirounding mystery 201 Truth 's 'ten thousand changes of raiment' 202 The acceptance of uncertainty 205 Spirituality andpain 207 The mist of unfulfilment 210 Spirituality and the discourse ofparable 211 Summary 212 Conclusion 219 The process of spiritual development 220 The discourses of spiritual development 224 Nature, the child and the imagination 226 Transfiguring fantasy 230 Bibliography 235 Appendices 1. Extract from a letter of MacDonald to Louisa Powell 257 2. The National Curriculum - the consultative process 258 3. Official and semi-official documents 260 4. A. J. Scott 264 5. The fear of fantasy 265 6. 'The Singer' - An overture to Phantastes? 267 7. A chronology of George MacDonald's life 269 8. A list of George MacDonald's published works 270 VII ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This study moves to and fro between 'spiritual development' and George MacDonald. My understanding both of the concept and of the writer and his work has been much enriched by others. My first acknowledgement must be to the many whose names appear in these pages and are listed in the Bibliography. Most of them, apart from their publications, are unknown to me. But behind those publications are people and I want to thank them. I have more personal acknowledgements. Glenn Sadler's beautifl.il study of MacDonald's poetry, The Cosmic Vision was the first academic work on MacDonald I read. I am deeply grateflul for Glenn's friendship over many years and, more recently, for his encouragement and incisive criticism as I have been writing this thesis. I record my thanks to Basil Brown whose uncanny ability to locate even the most exquisitely scarce books is matched only by his generosity in giving them away. (Basil gave me a first edition of the first volume of The Unspoken Sermons, inscribed by MacDonald to Noel Paton who painted fairies like no other mortal.) I must add my thanks to Basil's daughter, Mrs Rachel Johnson, for supplying me with back copies of North Wind, the Journal of the George MacDonald Society, and for helping me to hunt down other elusive material. I wish also to thank the Ri. Revd Clive Young, Bishop of Dunwich, who was Archdeacon of Hackney for most of the time I was working on this thesis. I am grateflul to him for securing for me study-leave during which I was able to give less interrupted time to my research and for his personal interest and encouragement in what I was doing. I am grateful to the Academic Trust Funds Committee of the University of London for awarding me a grant from the university's Scholarship Fund enabling me to spend some time in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale where the great mass of the MacDonald papers are housed. I wish to thank the staff of that marvellous library for their great kindness and helpfulness. vul It is has been a great privilege to have been guided at every stage of this project by Dr. Tony Burgess and Dr. Janet Harland, my shrewd and kindly supervisors, as it has been to have had access to the superb resources and !cilities of the London Institute of Education. My debt of love and gratitude to my wife Pat is immeasurable. I have to thank Pat for first suggesting that I embarked on this study, still more for encouraging me to keep going when the prospect of bringing it to any kind of conclusion seemed remote. As I have to say to her about so much else, 'I could not have managed on my own'. The debt which is hardest to quantifr is to the children, to the children I came to know in my years as a schoolteacher and as a school chaplain and now to my daughter Rebecca. If the truth is that in the end the best we can do for children is to tell them stories then that is a truth those children have taught me.
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