Suffer the Children: The Problem of the Loving Father in At the Back of the North Wind

Nietzsche stated the essentially religious problem of the meaning of pain and gave it the only fitting answer: if pain and suffering have any meaning, it must be that they are enjoyable to someone.

(Deleuze 118)

Surely it is good to be afflicted.

(At the Back of the North Wind 223)

George MacDonald's mother-goddesses have figured so prominently in recent criticism that his commitment to patriarchy and to a Father-God have sometimes been neglected.¹ While maternal images figure prominently in MacDonald's imagination, to overlook the importance of the father in MacDonald's work is to risk misreading him. C. S. Lewis pointed out long ago that MacDonald's "almost perfect relationship with his father was the earthly root of all his wisdom. From his own father, MacDonald said, he first learned that Fatherhood must be at the core of the universe. He was thus prepared in an unusual way to teach that religion in which the relation of Father and Son is of all relations the most central" (1947, 10).

But in insisting on the "almost perfect relationship" between MacDonald and his father, Lewis overlooks MacDonald's more problematic father images. His novels for adults bristle with both positive and negative father figures: Robert Lee Wolff has noted that for every idealized image of a father, such as those found in Ranald Bannerman's Boyhood (1871) or David Elginbrod (1863), there is a corresponding image of a derelict, wastrel father or father-surrogate, such as those in Robert Falconer (1868) and Alec Forbes (1865).² In addition, while MacDonald's works for children frequently portray loving father-child relationships, these fathers are often absent, weak, or disabled when real crises occur. In the Curdie books (1870, 1882), Irene's father is absent for most of the first book and mentally and physically ill in the second, while Curdie's father simply supports his son from a distance. In At the Back of the North Wind (1871), Joseph often needs his son Diamond's help more than Diamond needs his. And even where strong father figures do occur, they are not always benevolent, for they take pleasure in arbitrary cruelty. If fatherhood is indeed "at the core of the universe," this insight is not entirely a consoling one.

Central to the idea of fatherhood in MacDonald's work and in his imagination is the problem of punishment: as most of his biographers have noted, the young MacDonald rebelled against the Father God of Calvinism by defying the doctrine of election. The challenge is repeated frequently in MacDonald's novels by young children who declare: "I dinna care for Him to love me if He doesna love ilkabody" (qtd. in Wolff 249). MacDonald stoutly affirmed that a loving God would not allow anyone to live forever out of his will; ultimately even the Devil would bow. In order to confront the ensuing difficulty of the problem of evil in the world, MacDonald imagines punishments that teach the one who is punished the lesson he or she most needs to learn. In MacDonald's theodicy, all mischance is designed specifically to bring each of God's children to repentance. In his works, all authority, whether supernatural or human, must inexorably stamp out evil. All good fathers-whether biological or surrogate-punish.

As MacDonald grew older and more pessimistic about goodness in the world, he seems to have decided that more punishment was necessary to elicit the proper repentance-Wolff comments on "the number and vividness of the whipping episodes in the later novels" (306). Further, in these novels punishment is a masculine prerogative: Wolff observes that with only one exception, the whipping in the realistic novels is done by men, who "lash the women, each other, and their children" (312). But in MacDonald's fantasies, the punishing is done by goddess grandmothers. Masochistic and sadistic images abound in MacDonald's work, centering on relationships between parents and sons. Psychoanalytic philosopher Gilles Deleuze argues that the masochistic universe is entirely separate from the sadistic one. Replacing the law...