Fantasy and the Real World in British Children's Literature

The Power of Story

Caroline Webb

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317935742
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This study examines the children's books of three extraordinary British writers—J.K. Rowling, Diana Wynne Jones, and Terry Pratchett—and investigates their sophisticated use of narrative strategies not only to engage children in reading, but to educate them into becoming mature readers and indeed individuals. The book demonstrates how in quite different ways these writers establish reader expectations by drawing on conventions in existing genres only to subvert those expectations. Their strategies lead young readers to evaluate for themselves both the power of story to shape our understanding of the world and to develop a sense of identity and agency. Rowling, Jones, and Pratchett provide their readers with fantasies that are pleasurable and imaginative, but far from encouraging escape from reality, they convey important lessons about the complexities and challenges of the real world—and how these may be faced and solved. All three writers deploy the tropes and imaginative possibilities of fantasy to disturb, challenge, and enlarge the world of their readers.

1
Harry Potter and Tiffany Aching

The 1997 publication of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone marked the beginning of a publishing phenomenon. The popular reception of Rowling’s Harry Potter books, and the Harry Potter films that followed, has been tremendous: Elizabeth E. Heilman claimed before completion of the sequence that “Harry Potter is present in most of the public and cultural spaces in which we live” (Introduction 1). A series credited, at least by its publishers, with “turn[ing] a generation into lifelong readers” (Tyler) almost by definition has no contemporary peer; passing observations of the relationship of Rowling’s school for wizards to Ursula K. Le Guin’s much earlier depiction of such a school in A Wizard of Earthsea (1968) or to the teaching of magic in Diana Wynne Jones’s Chrestomanci series (1977–2006) (for example by Pat Pinsent) mostly functioned merely as reminders that some of Rowling’s concepts were not in themselves original.

But there have been other recent “publishing phenomena” with which it is in fact useful to compare Rowling’s work. Terry Pratchett’s series of Disc-world novels (1983–present) had dominated British publishing for years prior to the arrival of Rowling’s novels. In 2003, Pratchett published his second Discworld novel for children, The Wee Free Men, which featured characters from his Discworld witches novels in cameo appearances, and focused on the experience of a child choosing to become a witch—a topic he had already glanced at in Lords and Ladies (1992). The Wee Free Men became the first of a series of four novels featuring young Tiffany Aching and her friends the Nac Mac Feegle, the clan of small blue-stained “pictsies” who had previously appeared in the witches novel Carpe Jugulum (1998). Moreover, the series became what can be described as a sequence. That is, like Rowling’s Harry Potter novels, the four Tiffany Aching books do not merely feature shared settings and characters, but represent a trajectory of development with a recognisable beginning and ending. That ending is less rigidly structured than the Harry Potter novels, with their explicit and narrow goal of Voldemort’s defeat; ending for Tiffany has more to do with attainment of maturity and stability, as we shall see later in this chapter and in Chapter 4. Like the Harry Potter sequence, Pratchett’s sequence features a child with magical talents developing to adulthood across a span of seven years. Pratchett’s Tiffany is nine when we first meet her, and “sixteen, more or less” at the conclusion of I Shall Wear Midnight (2010 [397])—exactly two years younger than Harry Potter at the beginning and ending of the Harry Potter sequence, in fact.

My argument in this chapter is that comparison of the two novels that begin the sequences, Pratchett’s The Wee Free Men and Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, foregrounds the literary strategies at work in both Rowling’s and Pratchett’s fictions. Comparison of Pratchett’s and Rowling’s novels points to the very different concerns highlighted within each sequence and thereby demonstrates the nature of their underlying strategies. In particular, I focus here on the ways in which both these first novels locate their protagonists as heroes within fairy tales. The particular fairy tales evoked here, and the resulting constraints placed on the child protagonists, produce strikingly different images of agency. These establish the nature of the protagonist’s trajectory in each sequence; they further indicate the nature of the appeals made to Rowling’s and Pratchett’s readers, with concomitant implications for character and reader development across each sequence. As we shall see, Pratchett’s novel foregrounds analytic capacity and the ability to critique cultural convention; his protagonist demonstrates maturity in her capacity for independent vision and action, if not for social engagement. By contrast, Rowling’s positioning of her reader, as well as her protagonist, as initially passive and childish prepares for a subtle development of her story even at the level of language that belies its apparent simplicity. Both writers thus demonstrate a coherent and sophisticated vision of the function of their stories and the relationship of character and reader. Pratchett’s fiction emphasises its own literary framework, inviting a comparatively sophisticated response from a reader implied to be consciously intelligent and analytical, whereas, as we shall see, Rowling’s story implicitly appeals to a range of readers who can identify or empathise with the initial passivity of a child just learning the possibility of independent action.

The Child in Fairy Tale

Both The Wee Free Men and Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone draw on fairy tales, although the particular fairy tales that structure these stories situate their protagonists in sharply contrasting ways. In the case of Philosopher’s Stone, the hero’s first appearance as an infant being deposited on an unsuspecting foster-parent’s doorstep immediately suggests fairy tale, and this evocation is supported by the action of the immediately following chapters. Alison Lurie, among others, has remarked that Harry Potter is “in the classic Cinderlad situation” at the start of the sequence (114), ¹ and M. Katherine Grimes discusses the operation for their readers of the early Harry Potter books as fairy tales, identifying characters as fulfilling particular fairy-tale roles. Although Grimes’s analysis refers repeatedly to “Cinderella,” it could be argued that the “Cinderella” story is present as a psychological structure rather than a literary one in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone: that is, it provides not allusion to fairy tale, but an appeal to the common childish fantasy of being recognised as special—a fantasy that informs many children’s novels. As Grimes remarks, “Child readers are satisfied to affirm their perception that adults do not always treat them fairly […] These children look forward to the day when everyone notices that they are special, like Cinderella and Harry Potter” (98).

But the connection between Harry Potter and Cinderella is closer than this. Julia Eccleshare’s remark that “from the opening scene [sic] of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone where they make him cook the breakfast and treat him as an unpaid drudge, Harry fits neatly into the Cinderella tradition” (16) indicates the extent to which the details of Rowling’s portrayal, not only its psychological shape, locate Harry as Cinderella in the opening chapters. In the suburban contemporary world of Privet Drive, the kitchen is not a despised region out of the purview of its aristocratic inhabitants, as in “Cinderella,” but an ordinary part of the family’s household world generally inhabited by its mistress, Aunt Petunia. Nevertheless Harry, who like Cinderella has lost his real parents, is found in the second chapter living literally below stairs, absurdly relegated by his foster mother to the cupboard that is all that remains of the traditional servants’ domain, emerging when he is called to the kitchen to mind the frying pan. He is thus established as occupying Cinderella’s place physically as well as psychologically. In Charles Perrault’s story, Cinderella’s fairy godmother appears, announces Cinderella’s true state, transforms her clothing and provides her with transport to the ball; in Rowling’s, the giant Hagrid bursts into the house where Harry is lying miserably on the floor, tells him of his own true nature as a wizard, and takes him to Diagon Alley to buy robes, and supplies him with his ticket for the Hogwarts Express. ² Once Harry gets to Diagon Alley, he is met with the acclaim and awe that traditionally greet the revealed Cinderella, as the witches and wizards in the Leaky Cauldron come forward to shake his hand and identify him not just as magical, like the rest of his society, but as special within it, a princess among ladies as it were. When Harry leaves the Dursleys at King’s Cross he is challenged by the ticket barrier that admits only the magically gifted, acting as a kind of Cinderella slipper to exclude the unworthy, before recognition of his distinguishing scar ensures that he is not only accepted but celebrated by his schoolmates. Chapters 2–6 of the novel thus provide a complete “Cinderella” story—although already in the sixth chapter this story is modulating into a quite different narrative, as Harry makes friends with Ron Weasley and starts to engage in the social dynamics of his school.

The “Cinderella” story is noteworthy for the lack of agency required of its hero. The displaced child is restored not through his or her own activity but through that of guardians and through the recognition of those in high places of the rightness of his or her actual status. Indeed, Harry arguably has even less agency than Cinderella, who manifests her true condition bodily when she outshines other women at the ball and bedazzles her prince. Harry, by contrast, is already known to be a wizard’s child not only by Dumbledore and Hagrid but by the entire magical world, and Hagrid claims that “[h]is name’s been down [for Hogwarts] ever since he was born” (Rowling, Philosopher’s 68). Although we later discover from Neville Longbottom that even wizards’ children cannot attend Hogwarts if they lack magic, Harry’s own magical acts in childhood—growing his hair, jumping onto a roof, freeing a snake—are inadvertent and are represented as confirmation of what is already known rather than providing a necessary moment of recognition: “Harry looked back at Hagrid, smiling, and saw that Hagrid was positively beaming at him. ‘See?’ said Hagrid. ‘Harry Potter, not a wizard— you wait, you’ll be right famous at Hogwarts’” (68). The agency here is that of the fairy godmother asserting “You shall go to the ball,” not of the nascent hero. Despite his struggles with his Uncle Vernon to get one of the many letters sent to him by the magical authorities, Harry has no agency in his own eventual rescue: Uncle Vernon successfully carries him off to a remote island—itself a classic villain ruse—from which he can be rescued only because the good guys have magical powers. Indeed, prior to his arrival at Hogwarts Harry’s own magical interventions are accidental and often self-destructive.

The implications of Rowling’s choice of this particular fairy-tale structure to engage readers in her sequence go beyond the rapid movement from neglect to centrality experienced by Harry in what is after all a few short chapters of his seven-book maturation. In exploring these implications, it is instructive to turn to Pratchett’s Tiffany, who lives through a complete fairy tale in the first novel of her four-book sequence—but one of a very different kind from “Cinderella.” In The Wee Free Men, young Tiffany, a child living on the Chalk or downland of Pratchett’s Discworld, discovers a fairy-tale monster in the stream by her parents’ farm. After attacking it, she seeks information about it, encountering the witch Miss Tick, who tells her that Tiffany’s world is being invaded by the parasitic Fairyland. In the course of their conversation Tiffany reveals that she wants to be a witch herself. Spurred on by the disappearance of her little brother, Tiffany sets out to invade Fairyland and get him back. She is aided in her quest by Miss Tick’s familiar, a toad, and by a rowdy gang of small blue men, the magical Nac Mac Feegle, who declare her to be the witch of her district and whose matriarch offers her advice. Tiffany seeks out the entry to the fairy realm and invades it armed only with an iron frying-pan; she negotiates its hazards, which include razor-toothed hellhounds and, more insidiously, dreamscapes generated by creatures called “dromes” kept by the Queen of Fairyland (Pratchett, Wee 192), and discovers Roland, the twelve-year-old son of the local Baron, who has been lost for a year. Helping rather than helped by Roland, Tiffany locates her little brother Wentworth. She confronts the Queen, who attempts to break her will by pointing out her character flaws, but Tiffany reassesses these and takes ownership of them. She identifies the Queen’s weakness in her turn and engineers what she hopes will be an escape from Fairyland based on a dream of her own, but in the process mislays Wentworth and the Feegles, and is brought back to face the Queen again. This time Tiffany draws on the strength of the land itself, and expels the Queen from her world. Although the adults decide that the older and presumably more competent Roland must have saved Tiffany, Roland and Tiffany know the truth—and Tiffany’s status as a witch is confirmed by Miss Tick and two senior witches.

This is a very different story from Philosopher’s Stone, and the fairy tale implicit in the first section of the latter is thrown into sharp contrast by consideration of the fairy tale structuring The Wee Free Men. The rescue of a person who has been stolen by the fairies is a plot that, though less individually famous than “Cinderella,” appears in various forms in European fairy tale including the Grimms’ “The Worn-Out Dancing Shoes,” the well-known Scots ballad “Tam Lin,” the tale “Kate Crackernuts,” also originally Scottish but widely disseminated in England following the publication of Joseph Jacobs’s English Fairy Tales (1890), and the English tale of “Childe Rowland,” likewise included in Jacobs’s collection. In such stories a person has been abducted or seduced to Fairyland and must be retrieved, sometimes against his or her own will, by the rescuer protagonist. The rescuer must be determined, like Tam Lin’s Janet, who must hold onto him even when he is in the shape of a snake, a bear, or an ember; she must also be clever, like Kate Crackernuts, who adds the right words to the prince’s cry in order to be admitted to the fairy mound, delays reporting on his situation in order to get what she wants, successfully eavesdrops, and uses her nuts to lure the fairy baby away from the items she needs to cure both the prince and her own sick sister. Pratchett’s Tiffany Aching is both determined and clever.

Pratchett is an enthusiastic student of folklore (see “Imaginary Worlds”), and The Wee Free Men makes visible his debt to the folktale tradition. Tiffany’s adversary, like Janet’s, is the Queen of Fairyland; when Tiffany is attempting to escape from Fairyland she cries to Roland that he must “Crack … the … nut” (Pratchett, Wee 244), evoking Kate; Roland’s name evokes Childe Rowland, who like Tiffany, is in search of a sibling rather than like Janet or Kate an actual or potential lover. ³ Also stressed here is the difficulty in entering the dangerous realm—in Childe Rowland’s and Kate’s cases, a green mound where the prisoners are held—and the injunction against eating fairy food within the mound, which both Tiffany and Childe Rowland almost break. Unsurprisingly, Pratchett also emphasises the deceptive nature of the fairies, traditionally known for their guile, as the Queen uses creatures called dromes to generate dreams in which trespassers will fall. Tiffany, using a dream sword based on her actual iron frying pan, cuts off the head of a drome that is pretending to be Roland and has disguised Roland as itself. Her gesture recalls both Janet’s persistence in identifying Tam Lin in his changed forms and the injunction on Childe Rowland to “out with your father’s brand [sword] and off with [the] head” of everyone who speaks to him in Elfland before he finds his sister. ⁴

But Pratchett also rewrites details, supplying Tiffany with an army of rebel fairies in the form of the Nac Mac Feegle as her Proppian magic helpers, and it is the Feegles who live in a mound in the “ordinary” Discworld of the novel. The Feegles not only assist Tiffany to enter Fairyland by explaining its rules, but also warn her how to deal with at least some of the fairy dangers and emerge, if a little belatedly, to prevent her eating during the fairy ball and, from the nut, in time to distract the Queen and fight her supporters. In return for their aid, as in many fairy tales, Tiffany finds herself, even before her quest begins, promised in marriage to the Feegles’ leader, Rob Anybody Feegle; she gets out of the problem of marrying, at age nine, someone six inches high by “naming the day” as an impossible one whose details themselves recall fairy tales, demonstrating characteristic folktale agility.

Pratchett’s choice of such a tale to provide the plot of his novel highlights the activity and competence of his child protagonist. Where, as Ximena Gallardo-C. and C. Jason Smith have observed, Rowling genders male the subject of what they call a “girl tale”—indeed, a tale often taken to underscore the passivity expected of women in the Western European fairy tale tradition—Pratchett’s nine-year-old Tiffany recalls two of the most active female characters in European folk tale in her heroic quest to rescue her brother from the Queen of Fairyland. Pratchett’s construction of Tiffany as a modern Kate Crackernuts proffers a model of independent agency for the child reader—especially, but not only, the female child reader. Following her conversation with Miss Tick, Tiffany learns to negotiate with and even command the unruly Feegles, successfully enters the elusive Fairyland and learns to manipulate its rules, and defies the Queen of the Fairies, turning the tables on her by naming the Queen’s weaknesses even as the Queen had sought to demean Tiffany.

Reading Pratchett’s story here involves engaging with the activities of an intelligent, stubborn child who refuses to accept that she must be sentimental about her little brother any more than that she herself is, like Harry in Privet Drive, a helpless child. Fairy tales traditionally take small account of human emotions beyond the most basic ones of love, hate, jealousy, and fear. Pratchett foregrounds the sense of duty that implicitly inspires Kate Crackernuts to leave home with her transformed and helpless stepsister and Childe Rowland to seek out and rescue h...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Harry Potter and Tiffany Aching
• 2 The Case of Heroic Fantasy
• 3 Ontologies of the Wainscot
• 4 Representing the Witch
• 5 Resisting “Destinarianism”
• Conclusion
• Works Cited
• Index