Searching for Great-Great-Grandmother: Powerful Women in George MacDonald's Fantasies

And when she was married and had a child of her own, Sylva plucked the silver strands from her own hair and wove them into the silver ribbon, which she kept in a wooden box. When Sylva's child was old enough to understand, the box with the ribbon was put into her safekeeping, and she has kept them for her own daughter to this very day.

(Yolen 407)

When Jane Yolen published "The Moon Ribbon" in 1976, she was contributing to a world-wide search for great-great-grandmothers. Suddenly, it was not enough to know the history of men; a concerted search was begun for the history of women. Yolen's story hints at a historical sister-ship which circumvents masculine dominance by delegating both good and evil power to female characters. It suggests a secretive female bonding which is beyond the understanding of men, and hence, beyond man's power to corrupt. Mothers are tied to daughters through strands of hair and shared experiences, experiences which men can never share. The story is fantasy, but it appeals to the very heart of the feminist movement; it appeals to our desire to know our own great-great-grandmothers.

In Breaking the Angelic Image: Woman Power in Victorian Children's Fantasy, Edith Lazaros Honig suggests that the children, particularly the independent female characters found in the fantasy writings of male Victorian writers, were the forerunners of the current feminist movement. She specifically refers to the characters created by Lewis Carroll and George MacDonald (1-5). The debate concerning the independence of Alice shall be reserved for another day, but the connections between George MacDonald and Jane Yolen are obvious. Yolen acknowledges the influence of MacDonald on her writing.

However, it would be a mistake to call MacDonald a feminist; the magnificent and powerful female characters he created cannot quite escape their Victorian heritage. The value, for a feminist reader, of studying MacDonald's work, is not in his feminism (or his lack of it); rather, his work is valuable because it offers women a new perspective for their search. In MacDonald's fantasies, mothers, especially great-great-grand-mothers, are ageless, powerful, and eternal. Although these female characters infrequently step over the bounds of strict Victorian propriety, they easily become part of our fantasy search for our own forebears. The wary reader, stepping carefully between male fantasy and wish fulfillment, will find that MacDonald's fantasy grandmothers do offer us some insight into the male understanding of the female mystique. It is in his effort to understand women that MacDonald proves most valuable to our own search.

George MacDonald's mother died when he was very young, and he was raised by a powerful grandmother of his own. Various readers have found ties to MacDonald's early childhood in his works. Both biographical and psychological studies can provide links to what can only be called a mother (or more appropriately, grandmother) fixation. In his book, George MacDonald and His Wife, Greville MacDonald published a letter which his father had saved all of his life. George MacDonald's mother wrote the letter to her mother when George was just a baby. She wrote, in part:

I was almost angry on Saturday when your letter came to my dear G. about weaning our dear little Boy—for I was very unwilling to do it—and I always thought I would have been able to give him three months at least. But O! my heart [was] very sore when I saw that you, my dear husband, and Mrs. Ross—and indeed all the rest—were so earnest about it—that I was forced to begin that very morning.

(32)

Mrs. MacDonald's mother wrote not to her daughter but, rather, to George's father. And it was the father who created the rules for the family. This situation created a unique set of circumstances for a male writer. MacDonald craved a mother strong enough to remain with her child-over the objections of the father. In his fantasy the strong grandmother who raised...