Thematic and Structural Subversion in the Fairy Tales and Fantasies of George MacDonald

This study attempts to distinguish between the fairy tales and fantasies of George MacDonald. The argument is that fairy tales and fantasies provided MacDonald a form that allowed him to escape the confines of the realistic novel that dominated the Victorian period. His fairy tales mirror the classical fairy-tale conventions found in such writers as Perrault, the Grimms, and Anderson. Since fairy-tale stucture is a given, MacDonald can focus his attention on thematic issues; child rearing, education, religion, and sex-role conditioning are a few of his dominant themes. MacDonald\u27s views on these issues were quite radical for his day, and his fairy tales are thematically subversive. His fantasies, on the other hand, have no ordered structure as found in the fairy tale; his fantasies are in a sense structurally original. Consequently, MacDonald creates a new structure which is at odds with realistic conventions; structure undermines narrative stability and opens up to the uncanny, the strange, and the forbidden. Thematic concerns meld with structural equivocation and create a narrative that is ambiguous and uncertain--and highly anti-realistic. In his fantasies MacDonald explores sexual and spiritual desire and the longing for death, and the fantasy mode allows him to find a space where he can display desire and death. His fantasies, in their atypical structure and thematic emphasis, can be considered structurally subversive. The rest of the study analyzes in depth MacDonald\u27s shorter fairy tales in terms of their thematic clusters--themes of education, themes of equality, and the theme of self-reflexivity. The Curdie books are discussed in relationship to their political, social, religious, economic, and scientific dimensions. The short fantasy stories show MacDonald\u27s experimentation with structure, a structure fully realized in Phantastes and Lilith