George MacDonald: Divine Carelessness and Fairytale Levity by Daniel Gabelman (review)

For a book with “fairytale” in the title, Daniel Gabelman’s George MacDonald: Divine Carelessness and Fairytale Levity spends surprisingly little time discussing the genre. The series introduction, written by Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, provides a clear context and sets the tone for the book when he writes that the series’ purpose is to “look at creative minds that have a good claim to represent some of the most decisive and innovative cultural currents of the history of the West (and not only the West), in order to track the ways in which a distinctively Christian imagination makes possible their imaginative achievement” (vii). It is Christian theological criticism that underpins Williams’s introduction and ultimately much of Gabelman’s text.

Gabelman begins with a useful introduction in which he clearly lays out his main argument; he identifies the historical perception of MacDonald as “a pious, ascetic Victorian teacher . . . in a mantle of heavy seriousness” and aims to dismantle it “by investigating MacDonald’s fairytale levity” (2). Through this exploration of levity, he hopes to “dispel the aura of solemnity surrounding the Victorian writer, bring balance to a reading of MacDonald’s works, and open new vistas into his thought and artistic lightness” (4), an important and overdue revitalization of a frequently oversimplified figure. MacDonald’s fairy tales, Gabelman contends, are the key to this revised perception, as their tone and content most directly explore levity and lightness. However, Gabelman extends his critique of MacDonald’s theology to comment on contemporary attitudes toward faith and rationality; he hopes also to “illuminate Christianity’s traditional love of lightness and show the dangers of the modern tendency to put playfulness and whimsicality in a ghetto far from the centers of seriousness” (4). Through MacDonald, Gabelman aims to recuperate a particular, premodern incarnation of Christianity.

The prioritization of theological criticism is reinforced through the structure of the book and through its contents and source materials. The book is divided into two main parts, each composed of four chapters. “Part I: Modalities of Levity” chiefly addresses theological concepts, and “Part II: MacDonald’s Fairytale Levity” applies these concepts to the tales themselves. Gabelman’s bibliography contains primarily theological texts as well as primary and secondary texts addressing MacDonald and his Victorian contemporaries. Texts addressing the fairy tale or fairy-tale scholarship are few and far between; the only Jack Zipes work that is cited is The Art of Subversion (1983), and although Gabelman does draw on the work of Max Lüthi, most major scholars in the field are omitted. The first three chapters do not directly engage with the fairy tale or George MacDonald but rather explore the historical perceptions and potential revitalizations of three theological concepts: levity, ecstasy, and vanity. In Chapter 4, “Carnival and Sabbath,” Gabelman begins to attend to the fairy tale, though only indirectly. Gabelman uses Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream to explore the carnivalesque and the disruption of societal order, referring to Puck as a “fairy trickster” and noting the reversals and inversions that shape the text (57).

Chapter 5, “Never so Real as When They Are Solemn,” the first chapter in Part II, situates MacDonald in the context of Victorian preoccupations with seriousness, or gravity, and Gabelman comments, “How remarkable his fairytale levity was in contrast to the heavy earnestness of his contemporaries” (73). Acknowledging the limitations of cultural generalizations, Gabelman provides a nuanced discussion of Victorian seriousness and playfulness focalized through literary icons including Eliot, Ruskin, and Wilde. However, this chapter also provides Gabelman’s most direct engagement with the field of fairy-tale scholarship, which is oversimplified. Fairy-tale lightness and playfulness, he writes, highlights “one of the underlying problems with many approaches to the genre. Any method that reduces the fairytale to its sociological, psychological, or ideological content—what the story is ‘about’ or what it ‘means’—is in a crucial sense missing the point. . . . All of the five major schools of fairytale scholarship . . . have...