Phantastes by George MacDonald

First published: 1858

Edition(s) used:Phantastes: A Faerie Romance for Men and Women, with an introduction by Lin Carter. New York: Ballantine, 1970

Genre(s): Novel

Subgenre(s): Romance

Core issue(s): Attachment and detachment; death; hope; nature; pilgrimage; self-knowledge

Principal characters

• Anodos, the protagonist
• The white lady, object of his quest
• Sir Percival, a knight
• The Shadow, the antagonist, an alter ego of Anodos
• The wise woman, a being of comfort and advice

Overview

The tale begins as youthful Anodos, searching his father’s old desk, encounters a little creature who identifies herself as his fairy grandmother and informs him that he will visit Fairy-land. Anodos goes to sleep and, when he awakens, finds himself in an enchanted forest. He wanders east through various realms of Fairy-land in search of adventure, knowledge, and identity, yet he remains in a dream. Wandering in this dream state becomes the novel’s structural pattern: Anodos constantly wonders at his surroundings yet reports his experiences realistically. It has been noted that the protagonist’s name may come from a Greek word meaning “pathless.” Beyond the fragmented plot, however, lies the unifying factor of Anodos’s subtle moral development.

This entrance into Fairy-land and its various realms introduces the theme of entering new worlds. The new worlds symbolize mental states. The theme of yearning so pervasive in the book stems from a consciousness of other worlds. At one point a beech maiden protects, soothes, and instructs Anodos. She is a tree who longs to be a woman, and Anodos notes that, as he had longed for Fairy-land, she now yearns for the world of men. The longing to be something new stems from a consciousness of a lack and a reality beyond. As Anodos enters new worlds, in typical quest romance fashion, he encounters unexpected trials, temptations, and helps. His early encounter with the knight Percival, who saves him from a deadly foe, provides him with an ideal of manly action. Anodos’s meeting an enchanted woman provides him with an ideal of beauty and a longing that motivates all his travels. His desire for love and beauty drives him ever onward.

The dreamlike, imaginative world of Fairy-land plays against the idea of the waking world. Anodos observes that the fairy world sometimes invades the world of men, and men are astonished at its variant causality. Late in the tale, Anodos muses about whether he can transform the experiences of his journey in Fairy-land into his common life. This hope to translate and bridge is as much of a quest as any he encounters, though subtler. At one point Anodos addresses his audience and notes that Fairy-land’s abundant and incredibly outlandish oddities must be treated by the wanderer as if they were real, though the wanderer may feel foolish for doing so.

At the heart of Anodos’s restrained progression is his growing desire that another self arise within him. This yearning for a new self to surface from the remains of the crushed self of the past lies at the heart of his journeys. Anodos observes that the self must die over and over, be buried, and rise to new life from the old abyss. In his hope to renew, Anodos encounters various helps, the chief of which is the archetypal wise woman in the cottage, a leitmotif in the book. She is, in her different manifestations, a being of comfort and advice. As in other tales by George MacDonald, the wise woman of the cottage is a supernatural, godlike figure who provides knowledge and encouragement.

The plot is driven by seemingly random, if wonderfully rich, imagination; the ordering of episodes seems in most cases nonlinear, dreamlike. In this spirit the moral character development of Anodos through the novel seems minimal. At one point in the novel Anodos awakens, sees a forest stream, and follows it, confessing that his principle of movement since he entered Fairy-land has been to follow whatever has been in motion. In the course of his random wanderings, however, he confesses his yearning for the ability to act decisively. His talents are for song and sight, but not for moral deeds. Time after time he knows an action to be perilous and contrary to good sense but chooses it anyway. Anodos’s gifts are gifts of mind, but not gifts of action. Nevertheless, near the end of the tale Anodos acts heroically.

As squire to Percival, Anodos finds himself with the knight on a track in the forest leading to a place of worship. Many pilgrims clad in white robes move toward a temple. Percival feels that they are going to hear the words of a prophet, but Anodos has misgivings, qualms that are confirmed when he sees with his superior sight the subtle sacrifice of two unwilling victims. Anodos resolves upon decisive action, trades his battle-ax for a white robe, makes his way to the temple, ascends, and topples the idol there. A large, wolflike creature, the pagan heart of this worship, emerges and attacks. Anodos strangles and kills it before the worshipers in turn take his life. Finally, Anodos has acted decisively.

Though it appears that in dying Anodos has merely entered another new world, the world of death is characterized by a more fervent hope than previously seen. At the end of the story Anodos says that he has thought of the woman of the cottage often and her knowledge of something too good to be told. At the end of the book Anodos hears a tree whispering to him, “A great good is coming—is coming—is coming—to thee, Anodos,” and the protagonist states his conviction that the good is ever on its way. This book is finally about hope.

Christian Themes

A central Christian theme in Phantastes derives from the biblical idea of being strangers and pilgrims in the earth. MacDonald explores what it means to be a stranger as Anodos fluctuates in his pilgrimage between awe and dread throughout Fairy-land, the peculiar land that constitutes the setting of Phantastes. MacDonald conveys Anodos’s ambivalence by the complexity of his response to Fairy-land. Anodos does not seem intimidated either by the strangeness of the place or by his own sometimes blundering efforts to navigate through it. Though some of the forest trees seek his destruction, though the white lady is ever elusive, and though he is trailed by his ominous Shadow self, Anodos continues his pilgrimage in faith and hope.

MacDonald conveys the Christian idea of displacement by showing Anodos’s constant yearning to understand the laws that govern Fairy-land. Though the protagonist is ever the foreigner, often breaking the rules of common sense and even conscience, his quest is unified by his dogged searching, primarily for moral strength within himself. Though he wanders interminably through episode and topography, Anodos’s pursuit is unified by the quest for a better self. Being lost in Fairy-land becomes a metaphor for his being at odds with himself. His quest then for the integrated self is essentially a longing for moral improvement through noble suffering and service.

Phantastes thus illustrates the Christian longing for an integrated self in a state of communion with the deity. Although Anodos struggles throughout against the natural aversion to pain and death, when he finally encounters death it turns out to be a realm of blessed hope. Perhaps because he gives his life fighting for right, he is rewarded with continuing hope. At the end of the novel, as Anodos reflects on his Fairy-land experiences, his recollections of his anguish there are attractive, and Fairy-land’s past delights, remembered inconclusively and in terms of present sadness, are divine. Redemption is thus a central impulse of the novel. Anodos does not finally arrive at unity with God in a beatific sense, but he is no longer a stranger to himself. He concludes that he has found the deeper Fairy-land of the soul and is convinced that a great good awaits him yet.

Sources for Further Study

Gaarden, Bonnie. “Cosmic and Psychological Redemption in George MacDonald’s Lilith.” Studies in the Novel 37, no. 1 (Spring, 2005): 20-36. Gaarden applies Jungian psychology to Phantastes’ sister volume, Lilith (1895), examining Christian redemption in that novel.

Gray, William N. “George MacDonald, Julia Kristeva, and the Black Sun.” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 36, no. 4 (Autumn, 1996): 877. Gray reads Phantastes through the lens of critic Julia Kristeva, focusing on the opening of the novel and Anodos’s journey into Fairy-land.

MacDonald, Greville. George MacDonald and His Wife. 1924. Reprint. Whitehorn, Calif.: Johannesen, 1998. The essential biography by MacDonald’s son. Besides giving invaluable historical background, it traces the development and relationship of both MacDonald’s faith and his fiction.