Women in Victorian Fantasy

In Breaking the Angelic Image, Edith Lazaros Honig explores the "notions of femaleness that Victorian children acquired from their fantastic readings," and posits that Victorian fantasy provides a literary link between Victorian and modern fictional women. Her study is structured around four types of recurrent female characters in Victorian children's fantasy: mothers, single women (spinsters), girls, and "magical women" who combine "almost godlike power with feminine grace." Taking Alice's Adventures in Wonderland as a touchstone, Honig also focuses upon fantasies by George MacDonald, Mrs. Molesworth, E. Nesbit, James Barrie, and Ford Madox Ford. Additional works are discussed less extensively, including Ruskin's The King of the Golden River, Dickens's Christmas Carol and The Magic Fishbone, Thackeray's The Rose and the Ring, Grahame's The Wind in the Willows, two tales by Frances Hodgson Burnett, and two Alice imitations, Wanted—A King, by Maggie Browne, and The Wallypug of Why, by George Edward Farrow. Honig's list of selected works is fairly predictable, since she chose to concentrate on "a small number of popular, well written, truly memorable fantasies." Although this is a reasonable approach, it would be interesting to see how Honig's analysis of female characters might apply to second-rate Victorian fantasy literature. Restricting the list to book-length fantasies also eliminates some briefer literary fairy tales with significant female characters, such as Margaret Gatty's The Fairy Godmothers and Lucy Clifford's "The New Mother."

Honig draws upon Gilbert and Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic and Nina Auerbach's Woman and the Demon, among others, in arguing that Victorian fantasy constituted "a subversive element, a . . . quiet rebellion," in its portrayal of non-stereotypical female characters of all ages. Mothers, frequently idealized in Victorian children's fiction, were often rather distant figures in children's fantasy; this enabled authors to grant a degree of independence to their juvenile characters and to avoid the idealized maternal image without defying it overtly. As Honig points out, the distancing of mothers in fantasy literature did not necessarily render them inconsequential or weak characters. The mother in E. Nesbit's Five Children and It plays a minor role but is strong and capable when a crisis arises—hence her nickname, "The General." Even the comically vicious Duchess in Alice in Wonderland counteracts the maternal "Angel in the House" stereotype by going to the opposite extreme. The portrayal of spinsters divides along gender lines. Female authors were more likely to acknowledge the achievement and satisfaction that unmarried women could find in work, generally as teachers or governesses. Male writers usually depicted "beautiful, young, nonworking spinsters who end up happily married." A notable exception is George MacDonald's complex and sympathetic portrait of Lilith, who achieves some control over her life without rebelling overtly against male authority figures.

More numerous and significant were portrayals of girls and "magical women" in Victorian fantasy. Honig regards the latter as the first positive depiction of powerful women in Victorian fiction. For a writer like Mrs. Molesworth, who wrote over one hundred books while raising seven children, and who eventually separated from her husband after years of a difficult marriage, "the magical woman afforded . . . an opportunity to show the real power of women like herself." More well developed and intriguing, however, were the magical women in George MacDonald's fantasies: the North Wind, the grandmother in The Golden Key, old Irene in The Princess and the Goblin and The Princess and Curdie, and Watho in The Day Boy and the Night Girl. The North Wind's relationship with Diamond shows that power and maternal love are not incompatible; in fact, as Honig observes, the North Wind enhances the maternal image in ways that Diamond's sweet and sentimental mother cannot. The grandmothers combine qualities of power and beauty with the wisdom of old age, providing role models for young girls like Tangle in The Golden Key who "need not wither into submissive adulthood" but instead can mature into women of strength as well as beauty. Watho, whose...