Daniel Williams: George MacDonald's "Phantastes"; 2/19/12

I recently completed reading a work by author George MacDonald called Phantastes. MacDonald was an author with whose works C.S. Lewis was well acquainted, as evidenced by his composing of an anthology of MacDonald's works, as well as including him as a central character in his short fiction The Great Divorce. Phantastes is a fairy-story, and it concerns the travels of a young man named Anodos, who wakes to find himself in Fairy Land. At the end of the story he awakens back home in his own world, and muses over his time spent in Fairy Land. He wonders, "Could I translate the experience of my travels there, into common life? This was the question" (MacDonald 231). Through the character of Anodos I think that MacDonald proposes an interesting question to consider: why are fairy-stories valuable?

Although we ourselves are unable to actually step into Fairy Land, we nevertheless enter it figuratively when we read fairy-stories. By doing so we can learn and experience a reality very similar to our own world and, once we step away from the story, we may very well be able to "translate" our experiences in this secondary world into experience and action in the primary world. I think that MacDonald implies through this work that it is indeed possible to benefit from fairy-stories in this way. In the thoughts following the aforementioned quote, MacDonald notes that mankind's "experience yet runs parallel to that of Fairy Land" (MacDonald 231), which implicitly conveys that MacDonald believed that fairy-stories were directly relatable to the readers' lives.

This theme is evident in Lewis' works, especially in his essay "Myth Became Fact" in which he discusses how we can derive reality from stories; it is also evident in G.K. Chesterton's "Ethics of Elfland" in which he discusses the moral lessons he himself learned from fairy-stories. Each of these authors believed that there were experiences that could be communicated through the secondary world of story, especially in fairy-tales, which appealed especially to the imagination and, therefore, the creative part of humanity. MacDonald's Phantastes serves both to share experiences with readers and to remind them why and how fairy-stories are valuable to read.

Work Cited:

MacDonald, George. Phantastes. Peabody: Hendrickson Publishers. 2011.