For more about the thesis or to read a full copy, please contact me.

In Defense of Fantasy: Imagination and Tradition

Though heroes are not exclusive to any particular genre any more than they are exclusive to a gender, I have chosen to concentrate on young adult fantasy for a variety of reasons. Firstly, modern fantasy is in many ways the descendant of the romantic and epic traditions, in which we find the most famous and memorable examples of heroes in Western culture. Odysseus, Beowulf, King Arthur and his knights — these are the heroes who form our modern notion of what it means to be heroic. Sociologist Boris Tomashevsky explains, “The usual device for grouping and stringing together motifs is the creation of a character who is the living embodiment of a given collection of motifs” (87-88); in other words, the classic hero stories that form the basis of the heroic tradition are filled with characterizations and plot points that have become culturally familiar elements we naturally attribute with heroes and hero stories. Sir Philip Sidney recognized the power of the heroic story, looking to the Greeks and Romans for his examples. He praises the power of literary heroes:

…who doth not only teach and move to a truth, but teacheth and moveth to the most high and excellent truth; who maketh magnanimity and justice shine throughout all misty fearfulness and foggy desires. (99)

Heroes exhibit the greatnesses of their societies, showing by example an admirable way to behave and honorably act. Heroic poetry represents to Sidney “the best and most accomplished kind of Poetry” because not only does “the image of each action stirreth and instructeth the mind with desire to be worthy,” but it also “informs with counsel how to be worthy” (99, emphasis mine). Hero stories and the motifs that have evolved from them are more than simply entertaining adventures, and many modern fantasy authors are not only aware of the rich tradition into which they are entering, but often reference it directly.

Along with inheriting the tradition of the hero as a character in a narrative, modern fantasy has also inherited the world attached to that tradition. Much of the quest-oriented fantastic literature for young adults (and adults) is set in a world or worlds that resemble a European medieval or early modern setting, additionally leading to its association with the romance and epic traditions prevalent in those periods. As Northrop Frye explains, “Romance is marked by its extraordinarily persistent nostalgia, its search for some kind of imaginative golden age in time or space” (“Mythos of Summer” 109); the easily idealized worlds of kings and princesses, dragons and sorcerers offer an easily fabricated “golden age” for fantasists where one person’s actions (like a hero’s) can have far-reaching and easily recognizable effects. Not all fantasy — or all quest-fantasy — however, is set in such a world, but by setting a quest-fantasy in a medieval-like world is to invite these paradigmatic comparisons. There is a theme prevalent in almost all fantasy, though, of protagonists making consequential decisions and tangibly taking action themselves which may be attributed to the chivalrous—honest, loyal, brave — knights of legend and their fictional legacy.

As to why I chose “young adult” fantasy literature, young adult themed stories are inherently coming-of-age stories, and the coming-of-age story is analogous to the quest-myth as defined by Frye and the heroic cycle by Campbell. As Frye discusses generally, “The complete form of the romance is clearly the successful quest, and such a completed form has three main stages: the stage of the perilous journey and the preliminary minor adventures; the crucial struggle, usually some kind of battle in which either the hero or his foe, or both, must die; and the exaltation of the hero” (“Mythos of Summer” 109). There is a distinct tie between the coming-of-age story and ritual, and ritual and myth; these ties make pairing the two adventures of coming-of-age and completing a heroic quest a logical combination.

The coming-of-age story has become a universal trope in literature, especially in literature for children and young adults. Children and young adults must inevitably “come of age” and join the wider world and literature for that age range confronts that thematic issue more often than adult literature. This natural event is reflected in rituals and significant events and milestones in the lives of young people of all religions, ethnicities, and nationalities. Arnold van Gennep, a French anthropologist, first analyzed and discussed the cultural importance of rituals in his 1909 book, Les rites de passage. In it, Van Gennep explains, “Transitions from group to group and from one social situation to the next are looked on as implicit in the very fact of existence, so that a man’s life comes to be made up of a succession of stages with similar ends and beginnings…. For every one of these events there are ceremonies whose essential purpose is to enable the individual to pass from one defined position to another which is equally well-defined” (3). Often these major life events mark a change or turning point; the individual undergoes a “rite of passage” and becomes acknowledged by his or her society as more mature or more individual than before. Van Gennep defines “rites of passage” as “The ceremonial patterns which accompany a passage from one situation to another or from one cosmic or social world to another” (Van Gennep, 10). The Christian Confirmation or the Jewish Bar and Bat Mitzvah, among others, recognize adult abilities in young teenagers, while milestones like high school, college, and the first experience outside of parental jurisdiction represent other rites of passage. These modern-day rites of passage are often depicted in fiction for children and young adults, but they are not unlike the same sort of coming of age rites children and young adults underwent in other cultures in other times.

All of these rites of passage take the same form, from start to finish, regardless of culture or time: separation, transition, and incorporation; each rite of passage, in a way, forms a natural linear narrative. Northrop Frye explains that narratives originate from rituals, that “rituals cover the entire range of potentially significant actions in human life” (“Archetypes of Literature” 428-29). In many ways the coming-of-age story associated with these rituals is inherently an adventure; it may take place over a series of weeks, months, years or through a series of landmark life experiences. In all of the stories I discuss, the hero is on the brink of a social or physiological change, one that will mark her maturity and acceptance into her society as a full member. Sabriel is about to graduate from school with high marks; Harry is courted with the vague notion of marriage as a near-future expectation; Alanna is growing into a woman but has the spirit of a knight; while Lyra runs the streets as a half-wild child, poised on the brink of consequential adolescence. Rituals of maturity are an integral part of every society, as discussed by Van Gennep, and the coming-of-age testing of the hero’s quest falls at a crucially important point for each of these female heroes, whether it be like the young Alanna and Lyra, growing from childhood into adolescence, or like Harry and Sabriel, already recognized adults by the standards of age, but not yet ready to move beyond the dependency of adolescence into independent adulthood. Before the female hero can fully grow into her own, she must be challenged away from the comforts of childhood and naïve youth and be forced to grapple with dangers that challenge everything she has learned over the course of her life, and even that which she will learn as her journey progresses. Through the testing and proof of their quest, these heroes may re-enter their home society with a newly-gained maturity with which they can become actively independent. The World Navel is representative of the hero’s innocence and immaturity; she must return to it with the power and grace of a fully mature and capable hero in order for her to reach her full potential within her society as an adult.

Additionally, children’s and young adult literature is to some degree mimetic, reflexive of its tradition, and sometimes either overtly or covertly didactic. The ethical tradition of fantasy literature dates back as far as the traditions of the romance and the epic, which were also, to some extent, mimetic or didactic to their noble and common audiences. It must be stated, however, that simply because the books I will discuss are classified as “children’s” or “young adult” literature does not meant their themes and content are not applicable to or enjoyable by adult readers. “If fairy-story as a kind is worth reading at all,” fantasy writer and literary critic J. R. R. Tolkien writes, “it is worthy to be written for and read by adults” (137).

But if a “fairy-story” is “worth reading at all” by all audiences, by what criteria do we define fantasy? Fantasy is — and has been for more than a century — one of the most difficult to define genres in literature. Broadly considered, it is all imaginative literature, but in its modern sense, as Colin Manlove wrote in 1975, it is “A fiction evoking wonder and containing a substantial and irreducible element of supernatural or impossible worlds, beings or objects with which the reader or the characters within the story become on at least partly familiar terms” (157). Fantasy has the unique position of being able to create worlds entirely alien with the sense of being completely familiar. Yet simply creating a world is not enough. Fantasy must not only “[manage] to sustain our interest in impossible worlds simply by making these worlds emotionally meaningful to us” (Wolfe, 229) but also be powered by the strength of what J. R. R. Tolkien calls “Secondary Belief” (132) — the author’s ability to convey through style, affect, and tone an arousal of “genuine emotions…from impossible circumstances” (Wolfe, 231). Fantasy is more than imaginative literature; it is, as Tolkien described, “not a lower but a higher form of Art, indeed the most nearly pure form, and so (when achieved) the most potent” (139).

But how is it achieved? The modern fantasy author can create a world and draw in its readers with the promise of limitless imaginative possibility, yet, though the possibilities are limitless, the story itself and the “Secondary World” (Tolkien, 132) — or worlds — it weaves still must be governed by rules similar to those that govern our world. In 1890, fairy tale author, adapter, and critic George MacDonald wrote that an author’s fantasy world,

once invented, the highest law that comes next into play is, that there shall be harmony between the laws by which the new world has begun to exist; and in the process of his creation, the inventor must hold by those laws. The moment he forgets one of them, he makes the story, by its own postulates, incredible. To be able to live in a moment in an imagined world, we must see the laws of its existence obeyed. Those broken, we fall out of it. (65)

Consistency in fantasy is as important as it is in any other genre. Tolkien believes this “inner consistency of reality” is even more necessary in fantasy than in other genres. Ursula K. Le Guin further discussed this principle by saying that “In fantasy, there is nothing but the writer’s vision of the world…. There is no comfortable matrix of the commonplace to substitute for the imagination, to provide ready-made emotional response, and to disguise flaws and failures of creation. There is only a construct built in a void, with every joint and seam and nail exposed…. The only voice that speaks there is the creator’s voice” (“Elfland to Poughkeepsie” [1973] 154). This is no easy task for a fantasy author, but if achieved, such literature has the power to show by vivid example and allusive image that which historical fiction struggles to find examples to demonstrate and the approach of realism might be too narrow to define through image. Fantasy, while freer in the limits of its scope, must “work harder” in a sense than realism because not only is the author attempting to craft a compelling story with empathetic characters, but he or she is also crafting an entire world.

Modern fantasy integrates both psychological realism with its tremendous imaginative potential. Young readers (not to mention adults) are much more skeptical, intelligent, and demanding of exciting fiction in the twenty-first century than they were a century ago. To tell a simple fairy tale or fable to older children is to give them a formula from which they have been trained to educe a moral or discover the simple allegory underneath the tale. Many classic fairy tales (like those of Grimm and Perrault) are, as Frederic Jameson describes, “preindividualistic narratives” (197), or stories where the protagonists are little more than archetypal stand-ins that were developed before the widespread influence of psychoanalysis and the emergence of the concept of the motivated individual. Teenage readers are in many ways experienced in the nature of narrative and, as Tomashevsky describes, “Although firmly aware of the fictitious nature of the work, the experienced reader nevertheless demands some kind of conformity to reality, and finds the value of the work in this conformity” (81). Fantasy literature must, like any other literature, remain grounded in the world in which its readers reside, on some level, or they will reject it. Grounding the characters through psychological realism allows the author freedom to create a fantastic world while keeping a firm, realistic connection to the real world.

The flexibility of such a genre allows for polarization of issues facing readers in the real world by placing such issues against a fantastical backdrop. In what is termed “ethical fantasy,” writes Molson, the author “takes for granted that good and evil exist and that there are substantive, discernible differences between them. At the same time it concedes that the differences are not easily discernible” (86). These authors avoid condescending or insulting older children and adolescents by presuming to tell its readers it has answers to real life’s complicated problems. By presenting fantastical obstacles and issues with heroes who overcome them with human characteristics and a little supernatural assistance, the genre refrains from condescending to an intelligent readership aware that our world is “increasingly complex and its difficulties relatively immune to the mere application of intelligence” (Molson, 85). The fantastical nature of the genre allows it to allegorically provide solutions to problems we all face without espousing those solutions as refutable “truths.” The genre of fantasy allows authors to show good and evil — and the shades of gray in between — in different, inventive, and engaging ways, rather than attempting to solve the often unsolvable problems presented in reality. The decisions of these stories’ young heroes can have world-changing consequences; by demonstrating “that choosing between right and wrong and accepting the consequences of that choice are marks of maturity,” (Molson, 86), these books imply that their readers’ decisions are also important. In a world where young people are being faced with adult decisions earlier and earlier, a genre that broaches serious themes and allegorical elements in a straightforward way — while remaining engaging and potentially escapist in nature — is important.

The hero faces problems with a realistic, psychologically accurate attitude, often suffering on her path, but the device of the “other world” setting of many of these fantasies allows for creative optimism in the story’s conclusion, an often necessary assurance for an adolescent reader. Therefore, this element of setting is crucial to the lasting value of the genre. Besides often being inherently adventurous and interesting because of its simple foreignness, the “other world” setting serves three important functions: it serves to reduce the banality and over-familiarity a more traditional, modern setting might evoke; it polarizes and highlights the important elements of the story because they can often be more easily recognizable in a foreign world than in our own; and it allows for creative alteration that enables the author to contrive an ending that is possibly more satisfying because of its scope, depth, or simple levity. Evil, for example, is often more easily characterized in fantasy because of the surrealistic freedom the genre may create; demonstrating evil in a more clearly vivified form through the medium of fantasy does not reduce its substance, only changes its form to be more recognizable or possibly more overtly frightening than its counterpart in reality.

Many modern readers (especially very young readers), while willing to experience classics and enjoy them on their own terms, still seek books that speak to the present culture with familiar language or themes. Additionally, not all “classics” of fantasy, many even written in the twentieth century, can be taken directly as written. Jane Yolen points out that many beloved fantasy authors of the past century have written books that involve racist, misogynist, or other offensive themes that must be taken with a grain of salt in today’s culture. “Fantasy tales are as much of their time as beyond it” (328) Yolen writes, though this sentiment may apply in both the positive and negative senses. Tomashevsky points out that even if works have themes that speak to humanity in general, those “human interests must be developed through some kind of specific material, and if that material is not relevant to reality, the formulation of the problem may prove ‘uninteresting’,” though he specifies, saying, “Reality in literature need not be thought of as the representation of contemporary conditions” (64, emphasis mine). Tamora Pierce’s Song of the Lioness quartet was written in the early 1980s and though it is set in a fictitious medieval world, it is full of modern dialogue and character motivations more suited to girls in the 1980s questioning gender roles in America. However, her tone and characters remain consistent and clear; Pierce follows the rules she set out in her world: there have been female heroes before, and there can be again. A fantasy may, “At best … lead us to a further recognition that these surface impossibilities constitute a necessary strategy for approaching some profound and intense reality. For such worlds, ‘the impossible’ may be little more than a surface structure; the works themselves concern things that could not be more real” (Wolfe, 234). Fantasy stories and their authors must be able to speak to its readers’ current concerns—either as openly as in Pierce’s or Philip Pullman’s books, or as subtly as in Robin McKinley’s—as well as be able to tell a compelling tale. The staying power “universal” thematic elements grant a story are still dependent on the audience’s ability to tangibly grasp them.

Crucial to this end are the story’s language, style, tone, and, possibly more than any other element, its characters. Dimensional, realistic, and motivated characters are necessary in today’s fantasy, as much as in any other fiction. Literature is born of a time and culture and twentieth and twenty-first century fantasy is inevitably a product of those cultures, not of the twelfth century in which it may be set fictitiously. Le Guin reminds us of this in her essay, “From Elfland to Poughkeepsie,” where she distinguishes between good fantasy and that which merely claims to be a part of the genre. Modern writers cannot write ancient epics any more than Homer could write a modern novel. This is not to say that a modern author cannot write in the style of a given work or tradition, but to that author falls the responsibility of being consistent with that tone and style, as well as mindful of his or her present-day audience. “Consider: Did Henry the Fifth of England really talk like Shakespeare’s Henry? Did the real Achilles use hexameters? Would the real Beowulf please stand up and alliterate? We are not discussing history, but heroic fantasy. We are discussing a modern descendant of the epic” (“Elfland to Poughkeepsie” 152, emphasis mine); a descendant, not a facsimile. Consistent, creative, and artistic style and language, to Le Guin, are essential to world-creation and character development in the genre: “Many readers, many critics, and most editors speak of style as if it were an ingredient of a book, like the sugar in a cake, or something added onto the book, like the frosting on the cake. The style, of course, is the book. If you remove the cake, all you have left is a recipe. If you remove the style, all you have left is a synopsis of the plot” (“Elfland to Poughkeepsie” 154). The style of the books I will discuss has played a tremendous role in their reception and remains a part of their staying power.

Young adult fantasy must both be mimetic and marvelous, holding a mirror to present-day society while it imagines the impossible. It must be consistent, realistic — either clearly or allegorically — and linguistically believable. While these same guidelines may apply to any other genre for it to be successful with readers, they are indispensable to fantasy. Ultimately, fantasy deals “with simple or fundamental things, untouched by Fantasy, but these simplicities are made all the more luminous by their setting” (Tolkien, 147).

Citations reference the bibliography.