Animals and Monsters in MadDonald's Fantasy Stories

In some (if not all) of MacDonald's fantastic secondary worlds, animals play a prominent role. To see MacDonald's use of animals and monsters in a proper perspective, we need to remember our vast cultural heritage of mythical and literary beasts and to consider the changing and contradictory attitudes of the Victorians towards animals. In the nineteenth century, the romantic view of animals (and children) as emblems of natural innocence is counterpoised by an increasing scientific interest in animals - which latter contributes to the famous 'Victorian despair' by revealing man as part of the animal kingdom, and both as part of (in Tennyson's phrase) "Nature red in tooth and claw." This despair is a sinister undercurrent in MacDonald’s early fairy tale, The Giant's Heart, which deals with the universal principle of "eat or be eaten". MacDonald's personal way out of this dilemma can be found in The Golden Key, where the Grandmother's feathered fishes actually want to be eaten, since death moves them up to a higher plane of existence. The miniature animals in Lilith represent another kind of symbiosis: the "Little Ones" are close to the animals because they, too, are innocent natural creatures. (To survive in a fallen world, though, both Little Ones and animals have to give up their innocence in order to fight the forces of evil.) The most striking among the non-human creatures in the Princess books (apart from the Goblins) are the Goblins' monstrous domestic animals. As with their masters, MacDonald uses Darwinian ideas to explain their existence; but what is striking is their un-naturalness: their grotesque combination of features defies both description and classification. Though introduced in The Princess and the Goblin, they become prominent only in its sequel. Surprisingly, they are now found to act on the "good" side: they are, as it were, the objective correlative for MacDonald’s monstrous day-dream of revenge. Similar monsters make their appearance from the "Bad Burrow" in Lilith, but here they retain their negative connotations. Within an allegorical framework, they might be interpreted as symbols of Vane's despair; at the end of the novel, however, an auctorial aside suggests that they represent the product of men's "unwholesome minds". It seems that MacDonald finds no way to accept the negative aspects of the human mind - unlike Coleridge, whose Ancient Mariner is given the ability to see the beauty of similar sea monsters and to "bless them unaware". Yet another cluster of motifs is built around the idea of a hidden, or partial, identity of man and animal. The ‘animal-within-man’ metaphor seems to have been one of the chief preoccupations of the late Victorian mind. MacDonald makes use of the two classical expressions of the idea: the werewolf and the vampire. Like many of his contemporaries, he gives them a misogynistic twist. That sexual anxieties are at the heart of this motif is evident in his Gothic short story, "The Gray Wolf"; however, the sexual meaning is almost totally suppressed when it reappears in The Day Boy and the Night Girl. There, the wicked witch Watho’s Faustian desire for knowledge is metaphorically described as "a wolf in her mind". Subsequently, the metaphor becomes prominent in The Princess and Curdie, where Curdie receives the gift of being able to feel what animal a person is „going to be” by pressing his or her hand. What MacDonald has in mind here is only at first sight something like Kingsley’s idea of moral degeneration; in effect it amounts to little more than the familiar use of beast imagery for the purpose of abuse. When he takes up the idea again in Lilith, however, it is considerably more complex: men are credited with a whole array of "animal selves", which need either to be integrated or to be "crushed". MacDonald apparently anticipated a Jungian idea here, but, unlike Jung, he draws the line when it comes to the necessity of integrating the negative aspects of the self. Finally, cases are examined in which non-human, mythical characters continuously fluctuate between human shapes and animal shapes. This motif is most prominent in Lilith, although North Wind is an earlier example. While in the case of Adam MacDonald can hardly be said to make adequate use of the emotional potentials this motif offers, his cat-women, Lilith and Mara, are powerfully drawn - possibly because MacDonald drew on a well-established symbolism that he also felt very strongly about. The fact that here again a character on the "good" side is given a shape which is both terrible and fascinating seems to point at a fundamental ambivalence about animals and the moral aspects they symbolize - an ambivalence which exists not only in MacDonald’s mind, but is part of our cultural heritage. It is most strikingly expressed, perhaps, in Blake's famous lines to the "Tyger": "Did he who made the Lamb make thee?"