The Spatiality of Children's Fantasy Fiction Anthony Pavlik

301 Pages·2011·1.23 MB·English

A View from Elsewhere:
The Spatiality of Children’s Fantasy Fiction

Anthony Pavlik

A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements
for the degree of PhD

School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences

Newcastle University

April 2011
i
Abstract

Fantasy other worlds are often seen as alternatives with which to critique
the ‘real’ world, or as offering spaces where child protagonists can take
advantage of the otherness they encounter in their own process of maturation.
However, such readings of fantasy other worlds, rather than celebrating
heterogeneity, implicitly see ‘other’ spaces as ‘unreal’ and there either to support
the real in some way, as being in some way inferior to the real, or in need of
salvation by protagonists from the real world. This thesis proposes a reading of
such texts that draws on social theories of constructed spatiality in order to
examine first how, to varying degrees, and depending upon the attitude of
authors towards the figure of the child, such ‘fantasy’ places can be seen as
potentially real “thirdspaces” of performance and agency for protagonists, and
thus as neutral spaces of activity rather than confrontation or growth and, second,
how such presentations may be seen as reflecting back into the potential for the
spatial activity of readers.
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Acknowledgements

When I started on the PhD process, the road I travelled along was by no
means a straight one. Confident, arrogantly so perhaps, in my abilities, I took
many wrong turns. Had I continued along that road, I would never have
completed this thesis, and so I wish to thank those who have helped to keep me
broadly on the straight and narrow.
First, and foremost, my special thanks go to Professor Kimberly
Reynolds, who was willing to take me on as a doctoral student in the first place.
Had she not believed in me and agreed to accept me, when others did not, my
journey may well have stopped right there and then. She guided me through the
initial stages, and she provided a constant and much valued point of contact with
the world of children’s literature throughout my meanderings.
My thanks also go to Professor Kate Chedzgoy, who took over as my
supervisor half way through the process and provided valuable critical feedback
on my writing and my ideas, and who got me to the final torturous stages of the
journey to completion, even though I rarely managed to stay on schedule.
Finally, I would also like to offer my special thanks to Hazel Sheeky and
Dr. Madelyn Travis, fellow travellers on the PhD path, who gave me invaluable
moral support, encouragement and assistance when I most needed it, and helped
me to feel that I was not a lone traveller.
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Table of Contents

ABSTRACT....................................................................................................................................i
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS..........................................................................................................ii
INTRODUCTION.........................................................................................................................1
CHAPTER ONE: A THIRD WAY............................................................................................33
REAL AND/OR UNREAL..............................................................................................................34
THIRDSPACE.............................................................................................................................37
SPATIAL PRACTICE AND SPATIAL PRESENCE............................................................................42
LITERARY THIRDSPACE............................................................................................................47
EXITS AND ENTRANCES............................................................................................................60
A SPACE OF PLAY.....................................................................................................................71
CONCLUDING REMARKS............................................................................................................81
CHAPTER TWO: NO PLACE LIKE HOME.........................................................................86
CONTROLLED SPACES IN MRS MOLESWORTH’S THE CUCKOO CLOCK.....................................88
THE CONFUSED SPATIALITY OF C. S. LEWIS’S THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA.......................100
CASTLES IN THE AIR: PHILIP PULLMAN’S HIS DARK MATERIALS.........................................115
CLOSING DOORS IN NEIL GAIMAN’S CORALINE.....................................................................128
CONCLUDING REMARKS..........................................................................................................137
CHAPTER THREE: BEING THERE....................................................................................140
WORLD-BUILDING IN EDITH NESBIT’S THE MAGIC CITY......................................................141
PICTURING THIRDSPACE: SENDAK’S WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE...................................155
THE SPATIAL PRESENCE OF WILLIAM MAYNE’S A GAME OF DARK......................................164
SPATIAL NOMADISM: DIANA WYNNE JONES’S THE HOMEWARD BOUNDERS........................171
MAPPING IMAGINED OTHER WORLDS IN N. E. BODE’S THE SLIPPERY MAP.........................182
CONCLUDING REMARKS..........................................................................................................191
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CHAPTER FOUR: WHERE ARE WE NOW?.....................................................................194
VISUALISING THIRDSPACE......................................................................................................197
THE TEXT IN PLAY..................................................................................................................213
TRAVERSING WORLDS—FAMILIAR OR STRANGE...................................................................217
SPACES OF LIVED LIVES.........................................................................................................226
BUILDING BRIDGES IN KATHERINE PATERSON’S BRIDGE TO TERABITHIA............................230
CONCLUDING REMARKS..........................................................................................................239
CONCLUSION..........................................................................................................................248
ENDNOTES...............................................................................................................................260
WORKS CITED........................................................................................................................269
PRIMARY TEXTS......................................................................................................................269
SECONDARY TEXTS.................................................................................................................270
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Introduction

No story, irrespective of type or genre, is ever really placeless. Whilst the
time of a story may be unclear or ambiguous (as is the case with those fairy tales
that start with “once upon a time”, or with the non-linear texts in what might be
termed postmodern fiction), place will always have a specific presence of some
kind (even if it is the space of the human mind). In fantasy novels in particular,
there is “a very strong sense of landscape” (Manlove, Fantasy 1) and, here, I will
be examining a very particular type of fantasy narrative landscape: the ‘other
worlds’ in fantasy fiction for children. More specifically, this type of fiction
presents worlds that are, in theory, “outside the realm of the possible” (Doležel,
Heterocosmica 165), worlds that are different from the represented world of
quotidian consensus reality, but which connect to that consensus reality in some
way (which includes those instances where the ‘other’ realm erupts into
consensus reality). To a large degree, the spatial nature of such fantasy texts
remains largely unexplored. It is true that attention has been given to questions of
place and space in individual texts.1 However, it remains the case that children’s
literature criticism generally “has not paid enough attention to questions of
spatiality [...] and has rarely attempted to theorise the nature of place and space
in children’s literature” (Bavidge 323).2 My aim in this thesis is to redress this
general lack.
As Franco Moretti observes, “each space determines, or at least
encourages, its own kind of story,” such that “what happens depends a lot on
where it happens (70, original emphasis). Moretti’s observation argues for an
importance for space in the novel that is not always matched by the attention
given to it. Clearly, writers make conscious choices about situating narratives
2
within these multiple world contexts, which inevitably places an additional
emphasis on their spatial nature beyond their being merely “the theatre, the
disinterested stage or setting, of action” (Lefebvre 410), as simply back-drops for
the adventures of the child protagonists. This way of thinking about the spatiality
of fiction argues for the spatial in fantasy ‘other world’ fiction as being an
important textual element in the communication and reception of meaning for, in
fantasy fiction, “it is the spatial that determines the realm of textual dynamics”
(Armitt, Theorising 5). Indeed, in some fantasy novels, “the fantastic worlds
generate the action,” whilst in others, “[t]he world is the action, and, therefore,
the fantasy” (Hume 160, original emphasis). As such, these worlds demand
considered attention because, clearly, they have a significant function in the
texts.
Understanding fantasy ‘other world’ fiction’s places (as fixed, physical
locations) and spaces (as constructed and used sites of activity) is important
because, as Jenny Bavidge notes, studying the spatiality of children’s literature
can reveal “the discourses by which places are made visible in children’s
literature,” and how “narrative logics and representative strategies of children’s
literature have their own spatial politics” (323).3 Thus, the spatial analysis I set
out will examine both how, to very varying degrees, the spatial may (or may not)
be generated by protagonists, and how protagonists negotiate and use, manipulate
and transgress places and spaces, whether that is to offer ways to evade efforts to
discipline and regulate them, or as a more subtle expression of control.
Taking Roger Schlobin’s point that “the key to the fantastic is how its
universes work, which is sometimes what they are, but is always why and how
they are” (para. 16), this thesis examines how and why spatiality is represented,
3
how it functions and is used in fantasy ‘other world’ novels for children, and how
that spatiality operates both for and against child protagonists in differing ways.
To undertake this examination, I have avoided categories such as parallel,
alternate, mirror, or secondary worlds because often these can be synonymous in
practice and function, if not in design. Instead, I will approach this narrative
spatiality in terms of the degree to which an entirely separate thirdspace of action
and activity is opened up, a type of space that can be actualised (or not) by child
protagonists in different ways, including as a performance of play.4
In addition, the degree of child protagonists’ involvement in the
construction of spaces within such fantasy novels can also reveal a number of
things. These include the extent to which the texts embed and manifest shifting
and various views of adult-child power relationships on a spatial level, what is
made available to the protagonists (and, in turn, readers), and how they operate
both for or against the child protagonists, and for and against readers (both child
and adult). On a simple level, these possibilities can be seen when comparing the
spaces of ‘other world’ fantasy fiction to that of fairy tales since ‘fairyland’ is a
“space where things happen, not a place of itself” (Hunt, “Introduction” 12). A
fairy tale setting is more often than not undefined, but singular, and “fairy tales
take place in one magical world, detached from our own both in space and in
time,” observes Maria Nikolajeva, placed in an “imaginary world, which does
not have any connection with reality, at least not the reader/listener’s reality”
(“Fairy Tale” 141, 142). This separateness is not the case with fantasy ‘other
worlds’ at all, where some kind of connection, however tenuous is generally
present.
4
This spatial approach will also work very broadly within David Rudd’s
suggestion that the “problematic of children’s literature lies in the gap between
the ‘constructed’ and the ‘constructive’ child” (30) on the basis that child
protagonists can have, as Rudd says, “subject positions available to them” (31),
positions that can operate outside traditionally conceived power structures. This
analysis of the spatial dynamics in fiction will show, sometimes in contrast to
accepted readings, that a spatial approach to children’s fantasy fiction reveals
much in terms of the degree to which it provides the potential for autonomous
action (and the nature of that action), and the opportunity for agency on the part
of child protagonists.
The need to attend, as Mavis Reimer and Clare Bradford point out of
texts generally, to “how texts work, to the discourses circulating within texts and
to the ways in which such discourses produce meanings” (215, original
emphasis) begs the question of how to discuss this spatial element and how it
operates in ways that offer most potential for approaching children’s fantasy
other world fiction. As Lucie Armitt suggests of fantasy, “while it projects us
beyond the horizon on the level of content,” at the same time it “harnesses us
within clearly defined constraints on the level of narrative structure” (Fantasy 7).
The first problem, then, is how to approach the spatiality of ‘other world’ fantasy
novels for children through the narrative structure and in more than just a
descriptive fashion; what means are available to afford due attention to these
narrative representations of spatiality?
Traditionally, narrative theory has argued that a work of fiction need only
really be analysed in terms of its plot events and, to a lesser extent,
characterisation: “[t]he setting ‘sets the character off’ in the usual figurative
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sense of the expression; it is the place and collection of objects ‘against which’
his actions and passions appropriately emerge” (Chatman 138–9). In effect, the
predominant narratological perspective, as Susan Stanford Friedman points out,
is that “[w]hat happens to characters in time is the ‘figure’ we pay attention to;
where the plot happens in space is the ‘ground’ we can ignore at will” (194).5
This somewhat dismissive narratological approach to the spatiality of fiction is
no less true in children’s literature, where a common perspective is that, “while
children’s stories contain descriptions of setting and character, they concentrate
on action—on what happens next. Their main focus is always,” says Perry
Nodelman, “on the events of the plot” (Pleasure 160–1), and the places and
spaces where those plot events take place are of minimal concern.
Even Nikolajeva, whilst arguing the case for narratology’s benefits in the
study of children’s literature, and despite asserting that narrative theory “is
particularly applicable in children’s literature scholarship” (“Beyond” 5), does
not consider the spatial at all. As a result, although Mieke Bal does observe that
“few concepts deriving from the theory of narrative text are as self-evident” as
the spatial (Narratology 132), the spatial has often been regarded as a part of
description in general and, therefore, as “quite naturally the ancilla narrationis,
the ever-necessary, ever-submissive, never emancipated slave” (Genette,
“Frontiers” 848). Narratological theories, at least in the past, have largely ignored
it, seeing it as being a descriptive, rather than a discursive, element of texts, “a
fixed element of the text, added to provide emotional coloring or decor, and thus
of secondary importance” (Martin 122).6 This approach to the spatiality of
narrative has been the case even though it would seem axiomatic that “spatial
reference [is] not an optional or peripheral feature of stories, but rather a core