The History of Fantasy in Children's Literature

   

The History of Fantasy in Children's Literature

    The job of the fantastic in literature is to suspend our disbelief and to make possible things that are not strictly possible in the real world.  Everything from the miracles in Bible stories to the magic of a girl pricking her finger on a spinning wheel and falling into an endless slumber to entire hidden worlds of magical people and creatures that exist just outside our normal human perceptions.  Fantasy requires the reader to give up something of the real world in order to interact with a make believe one.  “The fantastic is an area of literature that is heavily dependent on the dialectic between author and reader for the construction of a sense of wonder, that it is a fiction of consensual construction of belief” (Mendlesohn, Rhetoric, xiii).  The degree to which this sense of wonder is conveyed depends on the story; it takes much less effort on the part of the reader to believe that there is a witch’s house in the woods that has been constructed entirely of candy versus believing that there is an entire world, completely separate from our own, which contains people with magical powers who can accomplish mundane tasks with a wave of their wands.  Yet the space between these two fantastic constructions has as much to do with the intervening history—the changing needs of both the storytellers and the people listening to the stories—as with the growth of the genre itself.

    Like any genre, fantasy has been adapted over the years by the writers who produce it.  One author becomes popular and well known, and influences the next generation of writers.  “The history of the fantasy genre,” according to Brian Attebery, “may be viewed as the story of the imposition of one particular set of restrictions on the mode of the fantastic” (10).  If we consider the oral folktales recorded by the Grimm brothers, they are less complicated in structure than the literary folktales that came afterward, yet borrow the same conventions of form and mode to tell a similar style of story.  The fantastic mode is a way of telling stories that creates the sense of wonder that Mendlesohn is talking about.  Fantasy as a genre uses this mode of storytelling to create more and more numerous methods or formulas for writing fantasy.  “Paradoxically, the more restricted the genre has become, the more productive it is of new texts.  As the rules grow more definitive, the game becomes easier for the novice, and, at the same time, more challenging for the expert, the artist who wishes to redefine the game even as she plays it” (Attebery 10).  The nature of fantasy for continual adaptation and complexity—the plethora of formulas—makes it an exciting area of study when it comes to adaptations.  As our technologies have moved beyond the pen and paper into computers, handheld tech, wearable tech, virtual reality, and beyond, the ability of fantasy to adapt new forms and expand the genre has continued to progress.

    The genre of fantasy has strong connections to traditional tales such as folktales, fables, myths, and legends.  These stories often attempt to explain the world around us, from the origin stories of nearly every culture in the world to the pourquoi tales of Native Americans and African peoples, such as Why Do Mosquitos Buzz in People’s Ears?  In the earliest days of fantasy, our sense of wonder came from questioning why things should be the way they were.  Many of these stories featured heroes responsible for making life a little easier for their people, whether that meant stealing fire from the gods themselves or defeating a great monster that was threatening their wellbeing.  Bible tales like the story of David and Goliath fit this structure as well as other heroic epics like Beowulf, The Iliad, and The Odyssey.  Before the Grimm brothers began their project to collect the oral stories of German folk, the fantastic stories available were largely chivalric romances such as Le Morte d’Artur, which themselves came out of the tradition of heroic epics.  Chivalric romances fell out of popularity over time, and after Cervantes published his satirical parody, Don Quixote, in 1605, romantic forms were replaced with stories that focused more on factual accounts of life and the world rather than on fantasy texts.  This phasing out of romance set the stage for the Age of Enlightenment in the 18th century and a movement toward realistic fiction as the highest form of writing.

    During the Enlightenment, the growth of traditional tales continued with the works of Charles Perrault and Madame d’Aulnoy.  The term “fairy tale” was coined by Madame d’Aulnoy, who called her tales contes des fees.  During this Age of Reason, romantic and frivolous notions of the fantastic were set aside in favor of realism.  This was the start of the still problematic divide between the “canon” of modern realistic literature and the mere “mode” of fantasy.  Yet by dismissing the fantastic, critics miss out on the rich connections that can be seen between realistic literature and our earliest forms of storytelling; the motifs and archetypes that inform all stories, regardless of what kind of mode of storytelling they use in their construction.  Attebery discusses this problem in detail:

The outgrown realm of romance never entirely disappeared.  Instead, it was relegated…to the margins: to children’s books and Saturday matinees and, in rationalized form, to popular storytelling modes like the Western, the detective story, and the formula fantasy…[The critics] expect all romance to be escapist, all fairy tale to be arch and precious, and those expectations govern their response.  They do not realize that these negative qualities are partly the result of the division to which they have acceded, between the real and the un.  That division grants significance and substance only to historical and pseudo-historical narratives, leaving the fantastic only a certain airy sweetness, like a meringue. (xi)

Although little new fantasy was produced during the Enlightenment period aside from the “light and airy” French fairy tales of Perrault and others, ironically the strong focus on realistic fiction as a distinct genre allowed fantasy, as the virtual antithesis of all things real and reasoned, to develop into its own genre in opposition.

    When Romanticism, with its focus on medievalism, took over from the Enlightenment in the early to mid 1800s, many of the elements of the fantastic that had their roots in chivalric romances came back with a vengeance.  This was the age of the Brothers Grimm, recording their German folktales and establishing a sort of canon of traditional texts from which a dozen generations have drawn for inspiration.  Hans Christian Andersen began writing his literary fairy tales; longer stories which drew on the motifs and archetypes of other folktales to form new fantastic works.  Gothic horror got its start and some of the modern classics of fantastic fiction such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) or the works of Edgar Allen Poe (1809-1849) were produced.  This was also the time period when the field of children’s literature began to expand astronomically.  With the work done by John Newbery in the 18th century to publish more books for children, the 19th century quickly set up the field to usher in a golden age of children’s literature.  Also during this time, a great deal of fantastic works for children were being published, from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (1865) and Carlo Collodi’s The Adventures of Pinocchio (1883), to Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book (1893) and L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900).  The turn of the 20th century gave rise to the modern fantasy genre, and some of the great writers who helped to shape our modern notions of what fantasy is.

    One of the most influential writers of modern fantasy was George MacDonald, who wrote the beloved classic The Princess and the Goblin, published in 1872.  Numerous authors have touted MacDonald as a source of inspiration for their own work.  He was Lewis Carroll’s mentor, and influenced other writers of the next generation such as Edith Nesbit.  More modern authors such as Madeline L’Engle, C. S. Lewis, and J. R. R. Tolkien also give a nod to MacDonald for his influence on their fantastic writing (Mendlesohn and James, History, 2012; Dickerson and O’Hara 2006).  Of all these authors, the one who has arguably done the most to further the genre of fantasy is Tolkien.  “…With the publication and popular acceptance of Tolkien’s version of the fantastic, a new coherence was given to the genre…Tolkien is most typical [of fantasy] not just because of the imaginative scope and commitment with which he invested his tale, but also, and chiefly, because of the immense popularity that resulted” (Attebery 14).  The separation between the realistic and the unrealistic, first propagated during the Enlightenment, has continued into the modern age.  In achieving such enormous popularity—Tolkien is a household name in discussions of fantasy novels in general—Tolkien ushered in a new age of fantastic storytelling.  

    The Lord of the Rings trilogy (and its precursor The Hobbit) seems in its complexity of world building to be an entirely new form of fantasy.  But the basic structure of the text is the familiar fairy tale format, and the characters are the same typecast roles that fill a certain function within the story.  The Lord of the Rings “conforms to the morphology described by Vladimir Propp; a round-trip journey to the marvelous, complete with testing of the hero, crossing of a threshold, supernatural assistance, confrontation, flight, and establishment of a new order at home” (Attebery 15).  Propp’s formula for a fantastic story is similar to Joseph Campbell’s Hero With a Thousand Faces, which describes the hero’s journey as one of departure, initiation, and return.  Both Propp and Campbell were focused on the structure of stories and the breakdown of that structure into the smallest basic pieces.  These tiny facets are the archetypes of storytelling: the hero, the villain, the helper, the reward, and many others.  Campbell especially was concerned with the thread that runs through all stories: “It is the prime function of mythology and rite to supply the symbols that carry the human spirit forward, in counteraction to those other constant human fantasies that tend to tie it back” (Campbell 11).  The common theme of story is a sense of humanity; when humans overcome obstacles and fight back their fears and their shortcomings to achieve a goal or dream, the story becomes universal.  When combined with a sense of wonder, once human characters take on otherworldly greatness that writes them into our hearts and minds.  There need not be any true magic involved; when a real-life hero does something beyond the ability of the majority, they achieve the same greatness and instill awe in others.  “The wonder [of myth] is that the characteristic efficacy to touch and inspire deep creative centers dwells in the smallest nursery fairy tale…[the symbols of myth] are spontaneous productions of the psyche, and each bears within it, undamaged, the germ power of its source” (Campbell 4).  All fantasy contains the seed of the mythic, and Tolkien’s sprawling, detailed, and beloved world of Middle Earth has inspired an endless stream of new fantasy that has cemented fantasy as a genre in our modern times.

    The history of fantasy is one of adaptation.  The form of the genre changes and shifts with each new work that is created; an endless cascade of influence flows through all fantasy stories, shaping each generation as it goes.  In a way, all works of fantasy are adaptations. Adaptations continue the fantastic tradition by borrowing the forms of the past to recreate the genre of the present and influence where fantasy will grow in the future.  “[Adaptations] use the same tools that storytellers have always used: they actualize or concretize ideas; they make simplifying selections, but also amplify and extrapolate; they make analogies; they critique or show their respect, and so on.  But the stories they relate are taken from elsewhere, not invented new” (Hutcheon 3).  Incredibly popular stories, like Tolkien’s Middle Earth, Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, or myths like King Arthur and Merlin are lasting enough to be rewritten and retold over and over again.  Other works of fantasy borrow only the motifs and archetypes of the fantastic mode of storytelling to create more organic adaptations.  You may have heard before that "there are no new stories."  This is because the archetypes of storytelling, whether they have their roots in the fantastic tradition or not, are universal themes that help a story remain familiar to us even when it is ostensibly "new."

Works Cited

Attebery, Brian. Strategies of Fantasy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992. Print.
Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1972. Print.
Dickerson, Matthew T, and David O'Hara. From Homer to Harry Potter: A Handbook on Myth and Fantasy. Grand Rapids, Mich: Brazos Press, 2006. Print.
Hutcheon, Linda, and Siobhan O'Flynn. A Theory of Adaptation. London: Routledge, 2013. Print.
Mendlesohn, Farah. Rhetorics of Fantasy. Middletown, Conn: Wesleyan University Press, 2008. Print.
Mendlesohn, Farah, and Edward James. A Short History of Fantasy. Chicago: Libri Publishing, 2012. Internet resource.