In Other Worlds - Margaret Eleanor Atwood [32]
Being a confirmed rummager, I enjoyed all of this meandering around in the sidebars of literary history, even though I was not allowed into the Lamont Library, where all the modern poetry was kept, on account of being a girl; but I compensated in the stacks of the Widener, which had everything you might want to know about demonology. In those stacks there were more obscure books than you could ever hope to find elsewhere, even on the Internet today, and I whiled away many a misspent hour reading about things that were none of my business—the Widener stacks being a much bigger version of the book-filled cellar of my parents’ house where I used to avoid doing my homework.
Having duly passed my Orals, I had to decide on a thesis topic. Dreaded quest! Your thesis was supposed to be about something that hadn’t yet been, as they say, done, and when it came to the major writers, such topics seemed few and far between.
It was now that my earlier reading in non-canonical literature came to my aid. At first I thought I would write about W. H. Hudson, whose lyrical novel, Green Mansions, seemed worthy of investigation. In it there is an otherworldly girl called Rima who belongs to an anthropological group of one, and can talk to birds and animals, and gets burnt up in a giant Tree-of-Life by hostile Indians. But I soon expanded my scope to include a line of literary descent that led from the earlier Scottish writer George MacDonald—author of, among other things, At the Back of the North Wind, which had captivated me as a child—through H. Rider Haggard’s highly influential book She, all the way to the non-realistic prose fictions of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. I should point out that at that time no one of any academic respectability was paying any attention to this kind of writing, or to “science fiction” and its related forms or subforms, such as fantasy and ustopias. Lewis and Tolkien had come out of academia, but they had not yet been accepted back into it as writers, so I was on my own. However, Marshall McLuhan’s famous dictum “Art is what you can get away with” hadn’t been lost on me, and I saw no reason why it shouldn’t apply to Ph.D. theses as well.
I called my thesis “The English Metaphysical Romance” because the books I was studying included other-than-human beings and treated themes that were, in origin and in subtext, theological in nature. Someone once said that such works could only have been produced by Anglicans, no longer Catholic but not exactly Protestant either: the metaphysical romance was where the “real presence” went—the magic, transformational part of the Eucharist changed bread and wine into flesh and blood—once the Anglicans had renounced its factuality and turned it into a symbol.
Others considered this type of fantasy writing the result of repression in an age that censored any overt mention of sexuality. One related by-product of this repression was the unhealthy Victorian obsession with fairy paintings, showing Titania and her train, revels near giant mushrooms, and related scenes—basically a method of slipping past Mrs. Grundy in order to paint naked people having orgies. Orgies were apparently acceptable if you made the naked or semi-clad people very small and put butterfly wings on them. “I hate fairies,” one of my English friends said to me recently. “Nasty little pink wriggly things!” It’s true, many of the painted Victorian fairies were little and wriggly, though some of them were blue rather than pink. Others, however, were more goddesslike; one could see the connection between Fairy Queens—long lustrous hair, diaphanous draperies and all, and hardly ever a Fairy King in sight—and the kinds of larger-than-life Queen Bee female figures that were rapidly taking centre stage in my thesis.
These powerful female figures in the “metaphysical romances” I was studying were not goddesses, but they were not normal human women either. What then were they, besides being the great-grannies of Wonder Woman? To this question I now consecrated my waking