Classic Fantasy Novel as Didactic Victorian Bildunsroman: The Cuckoo Clock

Novels for children often partake of general trends in the mainstream, and The Cuckoo Clock (1877), the first and best-known classic fantasy novel for children by the prolific Mary Louisa Molesworth (1839–1921), may fruitfully be read as a nineteenth-century Bildungsroman. It tells the story of a little girl, Griselda, who comes to live with her two great-aunts. For one crucial year she is befriended by a wooden cuckoo from an old clock who takes her on fantasy journeys to nodding mandarin dolls, to butterflies, to the past as an onlooker and to the moon.

Like similar work for adults, that portion of children’s literature which is “popular literature” often presents “timeless” child characters who remain the same age and do similar things over many volumes as the depicted world changes around them (e.g., Frank Richards’ Billy Bunter, Richmal Crompton’s William, Malcolm Saville’s Lone Pine Five), but novels about growing up counterpoint them and constitute a juvenile Bildungsroman tradition. The Bildungsroman, the novel of youth and moral education, conceives of youth as a process of movement to maturity, and of education as a gradual realisation of the lessons of experience (Buckley viii). The Cuckoo Clock has the same characteristic structure and motifs as the great adult Bildungsromane: “childhood, the conflict of generations, provinciality, the larger society, self-education, alienation, ordeal by love, the search for a vocation, and a working philosophy” (Buckley 18). But it deploys a skill different in scale, as it transposes and diminishes the normative pattern (movement from infancy to childhood and then more importantly through adolescence to adulthood) to one stage of naive childhood through suffering to another, more mature one. It also uses its Bildungsroman structure and motifs to overtly didactic ends, as a chatty narrator presents a hierarchical benignly just social and moral order in which an exemplary child displays and learns such virtues as submission, patience, love, restraint of temper, obedience, industriousness, mental self-discipline, and spiritual awareness.

This article does not look for subversive liberating undercurrents to recoup a didactic Victorian text (e.g., Moss, “Mrs. Molesworth,” “Mothers”), but examines how the Bildungsroman features of The Cuckoo Clock go in tandem with its didactic intentions and are intertextually grounded in inherited culturally potent material (“Patient Griselda” and “Cupid and Psyche”). Because The Cuckoo Clock depicts the growth of an exemplary fictive child for didactic purposes, it has the characteristic Bildungsroman tension between character as a set of given, fixed, and exemplary qualities, influenced by the medieval allegory and exemplum (see Buckley 36, 13), and character as formed by a process of development, partly the result of the Romantic image of childhood as Wordsworth’s “fair seed time of the soul,” involving specific experiences which mould or determine an adult personality. The Cuckoo Clock reconciles the two aspects of Griselda as both a virtuous figure and a developing character by presenting her not as the perfect ideal child (who by definition cannot develop), but as the model child who learns moral lessons which enhance virtues already inherent during her Bildungsroman Lehrjahre.

The Social World of This Bildungsroman

All Bildungsroman protagonists rebel against and accommodate themselves to the social world of their elders in authority. Because much Victorian and Edwardian imaginative literature “reflected the fears and prejudices of the essentially middle-class audience literate and leisured—for which it was written,” “the sympathies of the reader are [often] enlisted absolutely on the side of a traditional, pastoral world whose establishment is aristocratic, benign, and supernaturally supported” (Zanger 161; see also Attebery 6, 14). Hence such conservative, past-oriented classic non-realist fictions as George MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin (1872), H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine (1895), and Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (1908) written at a time of “unrest, apprehension and of guilt” when forces such as industrial riots and unemployment were threatening social stability, “appeared to offer to the imaginative reader alternatives to the solid Victorian pieties.” The innocent surfaces of these fictions can be interpreted as concealing “the private nightmares of an England...