FANTASY

Fantasy provides an invaluable and accessible guide to the study of this

fascinating field. Covering literature, film, television, ballet, light opera and
visual art, and featuring a historical overview from Ovid to the Toy Story
franchise, it takes the reader through the key landmark moments in the
development of fantasy and its criticism. This comprehensive guide examines
fantasy and politics, fantasy and the erotic, quest narratives and animal
fantasy for children. The versatility and cultural significance of fantasy is
explored, alongside the important role fantasy plays in our understanding
of reality from childhood onwards.
Written in a clear, engaging style and featuring an extensive glossary of
terms, this is the essential introduction to fantasy.

Lucie Armitt is Professor of Contemporary English Literature at the

University of Lincoln, UK. She has been researching and publishing in the
field of fantasy since 1991 and is the author of several books, articles and
book chapters on the subject. She is especially interested in the influ-
ence fantasy has upon culture in general and the important role it plays
in our understanding of the real.
 THE NEW CRITICAL IDIOM
SERIES EDITOR: JOHN DRAKAKIS, UNIVERSITY OF STIRLING

The New Critical Idiom is an invaluable series of introductory guides to today’s

critical terminology. Each book:

• provides a handy, explanatory guide to the use (and abuse) of the term;
• offers an original and distinctive overview by a leading literary and cultural critic;
• relates the term to the larger field of cultural representation.

With a strong emphasis on clarity, lively debate and the widest possible breadth of
examples, The New Critical Idiom is an indispensable approach to key topics in
literary studies.

Reception
Ika Willis

The Sublime
Second edition
Philip Shaw

Satire
John T. Gilmore

Race
Martin Orkin with Alexa Alice Joubin

Trauma
Stef Craps and Lucy Bond

Children’s Literature
Carrie Hintz

Pastoral
Second edition
Terry Gifford

Fantasy
Lucie Armitt

For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/literature/

series/SE0155.
FANTASY

Lucie Armitt
First published 2020
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2020 Lucie Armitt
The right of Lucie Armitt to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by
her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act
1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized
in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or
hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information
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Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered
trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to
infringe.
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Typeset in Times New Roman

by Taylor & Francis Books
For Bethany and Rowan
 CONTENTS

List of figures ix
Acknowledgements x

1 Defining fantasy 1
What is fantasy? 4
Portals and entry-points 9
Desire and loss 17
Magic or illusion? 21
Animation: the case of Toy Story 3 24

2 A historical overview of fantasy: From Ovid to Game Boy 29

‘Orpheus and Eurydice’ 30
The One Thousand and One Nights 33
The Fairy Queen 38
Dance, music and toys 42
Early cinema and special effects 46
Fantasy television and the hand-held screen 51

3 Animal fantasy for children 57

Mickey Mouse 58
Fantasy animals as moral instructors 62
Animal tricksters 65
Fantasy bears 67
Hedgerow fantasy 70
Farmyard and field fantasy 76
viii CONTENTS

4 Fantasy quests 85
The epic quest 85
Quests for self-knowledge and social knowledge 94
Death and the shadow-self 99
Totemic objects 104
Monsters 107

5 Fantasy and politics 112

Problematic politics in classic children’s fantasy 112
Comics and global animosity 118
Political dystopias I: Nineteen Eighty-Four and ‘Escape
from Spiderhead’ 121
Political dystopias II: The Handmaid’s Tale and
Oryx and Crake 128
The feminist utopia 134

6 Fantasy and the erotic 140

Fantasy versus sexual fantasy 141
Victorian erotic fantasy 143
Twentieth-century pornotopias of death 149
Woman-centred desire 154
Carnivorous sexual fantasy 163

Conclusion 168
Glossary 173

References 180
Index 190
 FIGURES

1.1 Kate Greenaway, The Elf Ring, Art and Picture

Collection, The New York Public Library 12
6.1 Richard Doyle, ‘The Fairy Queen’s Messenger’
(c.1875), Florilegius/Alamy Stock Photo 144
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I have been in awe and admiration of John Drakakis since I first

met him in December 1992 and was extremely flattered to be
invited by him to submit a proposal for this volume on Fantasy.
His encouragement, generosity of feedback and belief in me have
meant a great deal. Similarly, I must thank Zoe Meyer, Polly
Dodson and Ruth Hildson at Routledge for their patience, sup-
port and editorial guidance throughout the writing process. I am
grateful to the College of Arts Research Leave Scheme at the
University of Lincoln for granting a semester’s leave early on in
the research stages of this volume. During the course of writing
this book I had the great fortune to make the professional
acquaintance of three colleagues from the University of Liverpool
whose own work has helped to expand the range of my own
expertise in the subject: Julian Ferraro, to whom I am especially
grateful for bringing Scott McCloud’s ground-breaking work on
comics and animation to my attention; and David Hering and
Will Slocombe, both of whom helped expand my own knowledge
of contemporary writers of fantasy, especially George Saunders’s
story ‘Escape from Spiderhead’, discussed in detail in Chapter 5.
Sometimes it takes decades for ideas to percolate properly in
one’s mind. From 1989 to 1994, I worked alongside David Rudd
at the University of Bolton and we shared many wonderful con-
versations about our respective early career research plans and
projects. In researching this book I finally found the excuse I
needed to read his impressive work on Enid Blyton. His ethno-
graphic methodology, combined with a refusal to be bamboozled
by popular or media opinion, made his ideas invaluable to my
own argument and I am grateful to him here. Equally, one’s own
students often prove invaluable guides to the next ‘new thing’ in
popular literary culture, and I have Anna Infante to thank for
introducing me to Charlotte Roche’s novel Wetlands. I owe an
especial debt of gratitude to Duncan Foster, whose encyclopaedic
mind, ready wit, endless source of anecdotes and allusions have
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS xi
prompted many splendid conversations on a range of materials
finding their way into this book, among which I single out for
mention here Diaphanous Doorscrapers, Dynamation and A
Midsummer Night’s Dream.
From the age of three to thirteen, Rowan Armitt-Brewster
watched Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings film trilogy on what
seemed to me to be an endless loop, dedicating painstakingly
detailed attention to every nuance of character, battle formation
and dialogue. By proxy, I acquired a close and familiar knowl-
edge of the films, which has proved invaluable in preparing sev-
eral sections of this book. Game of Thrones, on the other hand, is
a television series with which I had not engaged before and I am
supremely grateful to Bethany Armitt-Brewster for her extensive
knowledge of and guidance through the series, especially in
directing me towards particular episodes of significance. Scott
Brewster has, as always, been tirelessly supportive of my research
and the colossal amount of time I spend in my study. According
to him, my main role model is the fantasy sweet entrepreneur
Willy Wonka, not, it seems, because of his fabulous ingenuity, but
his words to Charlie Bucket’s grandpa towards the end of Mel
Stuart’s 1971 film starring Gene Wilder: ‘I am extraordinarily
busy, sir … Good day!’.
 1
DEFINING FANTASY

Fantasy is the ultimate guilty pleasure, something in which we all

indulge privately and often deliciously, be our daydreams of a
romantic, opportunistic, consolationist or sexual nature, but in
relation to which we are never encouraged to over-indulge. Often
seen as the enemy of hard-headed, capitalist go-getting achieve-
ment, fantasy is something we rarely feel comfortable about
sharing, even or perhaps especially with those to whom we are
closest. It may be its secretive place in our thoughts that explains
the typically polarized response aesthetic fantasy provokes in
readers and audiences, who are either drawn enthusiastically, even
fanatically towards, or repulsed utterly by it. From an academic
point of view, fantasy criticism has traditionally carried an ele-
ment of stigma, seemingly based on the assumption that the
business of fantasy cannot ever be sufficiently ‘serious’ to merit
proper scholarship. In her 1984 book, Fantasy and Mimesis,
Kathryn Hume makes two related observations about fantasy’s
place (or lack of it) in the canon of English Literature:

To many academics … ‘fantasy’ is a subliterature in lurid covers sold

in drugstores; or it is a morbid manifestation of the romantic spirit
2 DEFINING FANTASY

found in the works of Hoffmann, Poe, and less reputable gothic

writers. Or fantasy means Tolkien and his ilk – nineteenth- and
twentieth-century authors whose oeuvres are not part of traditional
literature courses.
(Hume 1984: 3)

Though Hume’s starting-point in this passage remains largely

true, there has been a degree of shift over the last 35 years and
certainly the Gothic is now taken far more seriously than Hume
implies. Her list of disparaged writers is equally outdated: E.T.A.
Hoffmann, Edgar Allan Poe and J.R.R. Tolkien are now not only
deemed ‘reputable’ but perhaps even ‘canonical’. For example,
while Brian W. Aldiss reminds us that Tolkien’s The Lord of
the Rings trilogy was ‘the cult book of the sixties’ (Aldiss 1995:
24–25, my emphasis), by 2000 Tolkien had been voted ‘Author of
the [twentieth] century’ in a series of mainstream newspaper polls
(Coren 2001). While I would hesitate to concur with Tom Ship-
pey’s claim that ‘The dominant mode of the twentieth century has
been the fantastic’ (Shippey 2001: vii), it is worth remembering
that Tolkien’s award was based solely on readers’ views of his lit-
erary output; his position can only have been consolidated by the
subsequent colossal success of Peter Jackson’s cinematic adapta-
tions of the Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001–2003), augmented by
The Hobbit films (2012–2014). This popular appetite for epic
fantasy bleeds increasingly into television drama, with series such
as Merlin (2008–2012), Once Upon a Time (2011–2018), Game of
Thrones (2011–) and Outlander (2014–) proving hugely successful.
As Michael Coren observes, however, the decision to raise Tolk-
ien above all other writers was controversial, hence the response
of an unnamed ‘English novelist … [who] said it showed why
teaching people to read was not such a good idea, and why all the
libraries should be closed down.’ Coren adds, ‘He was joking, but
only just’ (Coren 2001: 2).
What we must not miss is the versatility of fantasy and the fact
that, at its most sophisticated it is the driver not only for epic
fantasy narratives, but opera (Mozart’s The Magic Flute), paint-
ing (Marc Chagall’s The Betrothed or The Concert), ballet
(Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker Suite), or classical music (Elgar’s
 DEFINING FANTASY 3
The Dream of Gerontius). All these texts and narratives deal in
the juxtaposition of competing worlds, wherein one world, pur-
portedly representing ‘reality’, is left behind in preference for
another which is unknown and ‘foreign’ in the sense of being
strange, fabulous or grotesque. The laws of physics, logic, time,
physiognomy, life and death and/or geography are usually sub-
verted in preference for a narrative vision which is improbable,
impossible, or beyond belief. As David Butler argues, the urge for
fantasy is at the heart of all speculation as well as ‘every time we
ask the question “what if ?”, irrespective of whether the question
is followed by the statement “dragons roamed the air”, “we could
land on the moon”, “poverty was eliminated”, or “a cure for
cancer was found”’ (Butler 2009: 4). James Walters makes a
similar point when he argues that ‘fantasy is just as likely to
emerge in a crime thriller about an escaped convict as it is in a
story about a mythical kingdom in which the destinies of all
creatures are decided by the fate of a magical ring.’ Again, Wal-
ters observes, ‘To take The Wizard of Oz … as an example, we
might want to question whether it is a children’s film, fantasy film
or musical, but we must also anticipate that a reasonable answer
to such an enquiry would be “yes”’ (Walters 2011: 2, 74).
To move from scope to type, several sub-genres always coalesce
around fantasy and examples of all the following will be found in
this volume: the fairy story, quest myth, fable, epic fantasy, non-
sense narrative, sword and sorcery, talking animal fantasy, poli-
tical fantasy including the utopia and dystopia, and erotic
fantasy, upon which Chapter 6 is based. I have commented else-
where on the difficulties that arise from overly prescriptive atti-
tudes towards genre identity.1 As Andrew Rayment puts it,
‘Armitt could, perhaps, be considered a kind of spokesperson’ for
those critics for whom the ‘attempt to shoehorn a text into a
binding yet artificial category is a “travesty” of compartmentali-
zation, a “death wish” of division and sub-division’ (Rayment
2014: 10). Nevertheless, close neighbours of fantasy such as sci-
ence fiction, the ghost story, the horror story and the Gothic are
not discussed in detail in this book, except insofar as they help to
cast clearer light on what fantasy is not. Readers interested in
these undoubtedly adjacent and often overlapping genres are
4 DEFINING FANTASY

recommended to read companion volumes in the Routledge New

Critical Idiom series such as Fred Botting’s Gothic, Maggie Ann
Bowers’s Magical Realism and Adam Roberts’s Science Fiction.

WHAT IS FANTASY?
At their most conventional, at least in structural terms, fantasy
narratives such as Alice in Wonderland (1865) immerse the reader
into an alternative world with its own logic, landscape and tem-
porality and subsequently return that reader intact to the frame
world of realism, in this case the river-bank where Alice has been
sitting with her sister. The fantasy world is not usually assumed
to have collapsed when left, although Alice’s departure is cer-
tainly accompanied by chaos as the pack of courtier cards (court
guards) explodes into the air ‘and came flying down upon her: she
gave a little scream … and tried to beat them off, and found
herself lying on the bank, with her head in the lap of her sister’
(Carroll 1929: 102). It is in this type of narrative that one
experiences, most clearly, the type of ‘joyous turn’ or ‘eucatas-
trophe’ which, according to Tolkien, characterizes ‘the true form
of fairy-tale, and its highest function’ (Tolkien 2001: 68). It is
clear to see here that, for Tolkien, the term fairy tale is broadly
synonymous with fantasy, and that might surprise us. In fact,
multiple definitions of fantasy abound, often mutually contra-
dictory and occasionally pointlessly pedantic. Easily the best I
have encountered, not least for its succinct clarity, is articulated
by H. Bruce Franklin: ‘On one side lies fantasy, the realm of the
impossible. On the other side lie all forms of fiction that purport
to represent the actual, whether present or past …’ (Franklin
2009: 23).
Nevertheless, many critics on fantasy have expended serious
time and effort refining their own definitions and some of the
more influential are discussed here. For Ann Swinfen,

The essential ingredient of all fantasy is ‘the marvelous’, which will be

regarded as anything outside the normal space-time continuum of the
everyday world. Pure science fiction is excluded, since it treats essen-
tially of what does not exist now, but might perhaps exist in the
 DEFINING FANTASY 5
future. The marvelous element which lies at the heart of all fantasy is
composed of what can never exist in the world of empirical
experience.
(Swinfen 1984: 5)

Swinfen’s definition broadly accords with Franklin’s, but narrows

his focus to something called ‘the marvellous’. The marvellous, in
this sense, is borrowed from Tzvetan Todorov, the most influential
critic of fantasy since Tolkien himself. Tolkien interests himself in
what he calls the Secondary World of fantasy, within the terms of
which a ‘green sun will be credible’ (Tolkien 2001: 49). Todorov’s
remit is wider than Tolkien’s because he is tackling a broader
umbrella term than genre fantasy: he evaluates what he calls
‘the literary fantastic’, writing which cannot be constrained by the
artificial enclosures of genre and which requires ‘a breach in
the acknowledged order, an irruption of the inadmissible within the
changeless everyday legality’ (Todorov 1975: 41). It is the same
impulse that admits magic realism; it is also the impulse that
enables the intrusion of that particular frisson we associate with
the uncanny, the ghost story or the horror narrative, when one
world bleeds into the everyday world of realism and ruptures
the membrane between the two. For Todorov, the fantastic is to be
found at every point of the literary spectrum, but depends upon a
balancing act between the uncanny and the marvellous. The
marvellous, he explains, is a fictional world requiring ‘new laws of
nature … to account for the phenomena’, in other words, what we
will call fantasy (Todorov 1975: 41). For Todorov, the fantas-tic is
a readerly concept, requiring ongoing hesitancy between these
two options, such that we are unclear whether supernatural or
psychological (hallucinatory or deluded) causes are at work.
That emphasis on the reader is shared by critics interested in
what fantasy does. In an essay titled ‘One Hump of Two’, Aldiss
argues ‘I regard fantasy, as distinct from SF, as having a spiritual,
or perhaps I mean a religious, or perhaps I mean a metaphysical
side’ (Aldiss 1995: 133). The problem here is that, precisely
because of its freedom to imagine, fantasy can actually do any-
thing. For instance, one can see clearly how Aldiss’s definition
applies to C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia, but it seems less
6 DEFINING FANTASY

true of William Thackeray’s The Rose and the Ring, discussed

below or, come to that, Alice in Wonderland. William Gray seems
to accord with Aldiss when he argues that ‘one of the great
contributions … [made by] writers of children’s fantasy literature
is to trust in the capacity of younger readers to engage with big
philosophical questions’ (Gray 2008: 7). However, any number of
literary works enable children to engage with ‘big philosophical
questions’, so this is also unsatisfactory as the determining feature
of fantasy.
Rosemary Jackson subtitles her book on fantasy ‘the literature
of subversion’, a position which leads her to emphasize the ways
in which fantasy narratives challenge the status quo, whether
through a focus on sexual taboo and other bodily transgressions,
readerly disturbance through ‘dislocated narrative form’ (Jackson
1988: 23), or ‘attempt[s] to articulate “the unnameable” …
visualize the unseen, or … play upon “thingless names”’ (Jackson
1988: 41). Jackson’s work on fantasy is darker than that of most
critics, partly because of her prioritization of psychoanalytically
informed readings, an approach that frequently moves towards
the Gothic or the surreal and that emphasizes both the impor-
tance of Sigmund Freud’s work on desire, taboo and the uncanny
and a more poststructuralist approach to the play of language,
‘opposing the novel’s closed, monological form with open, dialo-
gical structures’ (Jackson 1988: 25). One of Jackson’s most inter-
esting observations is to identify the frequency with which fantasy
focuses upon mirrors and reflection, opening up ‘spaces behind
the visible, behind the image, introducing dark areas from which
anything can emerge’ (Jackson 1988: 43). Thereby the frisson of
competing worlds imposes itself upon the reader’s psyche.
Hume’s Fantasy and Mimesis is also motivated by an interest in
what fantasy texts achieve for the reader. She refuses to segregate
fantasy literature wholly from realism, identifying mimesis (the
drive towards realism) and fantasy as twin urges in all texts. Thus
verisimilitude, or life-likeness, becomes as much the aim of fan-
tasy as realism, but manifests itself differently. That approach
enables Hume to include, within the category ‘escapism, the litera-
ture of illusion’, not only L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard
of Oz (1900), but a realist traveller’s tale such as Daniel Defoe’s
 DEFINING FANTASY 7
Robinson Crusoe (1719), a reach I would consider too inclusive to
be helpful. As Tolkien observes, ‘Such tales [as Defoe’s] report
many marvels, but they are marvels to be seen in this mortal
world … distance alone conceals them’ (Tolkien 2001: 12). Cer-
tainly there is a place for travel in fantasy, but it is travel to an
impossible world. As I have observed elsewhere: ‘A reader of
Doris Lessing’s realist first novel, The Grass is Singing (1950),
may find she can relive at least an element of that literary
experience by reading up on or even visiting present-day Zim-
babwe, but none of us can holiday in the Garden of Eden’
(Armitt 2005: 8).
Historically, some of the most interesting theoretically engaged
critics have found metaphors of fantasy foundational to their
ideas. Much of Freud’s literary-based work oscillates around
questions of fantasy, not least his often overlooked essay ‘Creative
Writers and Daydreaming’ (1907), in which he roots all imagina-
tive writing in play, a concept we will come to regard as central to
fantasy:

Might we not say that every child at play behaves like a creative writer,
in that he creates a world of his own, or, rather, re-arranges the things
of his world in a new way which pleases him? It would be wrong to
think he does not take that world seriously; on the contrary, he takes
his play very seriously and he expends large amounts of his emotion
on it. The opposite of play is not what is serious but what is real.
(Freud 1990: 131–132)

In his essay ‘Fantasy as a Political Category’, Slavoj Žižek also

explores the ideological foundations of fantasy. The reading of
Žižek’s essay offered by Elizabeth Wright and Edmond Wright
situates it analogously with my competing-worlds approach to
fantasy, arguing that ‘for fantasy to work, the everyday world
has to be kept separate from the fantasy that upholds it’
(Wright and Wright 1999: 88). This is absolutely not to suggest
that fantasy is disengaged from reality, for the two are mutually
dependent. Instead, an interpretative space opens up between
the narrative boundaries containing the respective worlds of
fantasy and ‘the real’, within which ideological play makes
8 DEFINING FANTASY

merry. Žižek’s most resonant example of this dynamic coheres

around the on-board evacuation drill performed for air passen-
gers. As he observes, the effectiveness of that performance relies
on a shared sense of fantasy between crew and passengers:
‘After a gentle landing on water … as on a beach toboggan,
[each passenger] slides into the water … like a nice collective
lagoon holiday experience’ (Wright and Wright 1999: 91). Žižek
continues, not dissimilarly to Jackson, by suggesting that the
underside of that world of inverted logic manifests itself, most
frequently, in repressed fantasy tropes: ‘Are not the images of
the ultimate horrible Thing, from the deep-sea gigantic squid to
the ravaging twister, fantasmatic creations par excellence?’
(Wright and Wright 1999: 92).
Donna J. Haraway, in her essay ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ (1985),
writes another politicized monster narrative. Adopting the meta-
phor of the cyborg as ‘a hybrid of machine and organism, a
creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction’, she goes
on to re-think women’s relationship to gender, technology and
mythology (Haraway 1991: 149). In tracing how women have
come to acquire that hybridized identity, she returns to the ques-
tion of origins and interrogates our cultural assumptions about
how ‘shared’ such originary mythologies actually are, especially
when they subordinate women to men. So, in answer to the Bib-
lical Genesis myth in which ‘the Lord God formed man of the
dust of the ground’ (Genesis 2:7) and later ‘caused a deep sleep to
fall upon Adam … and he took one of his ribs … And the rib,
which the Lord God had taken from man, made he a woman’
(Genesis 2:21–22), Haraway simply observes: ‘The cyborg would
not recognize the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and
cannot dream of returning to dust’ (Haraway 1991: 151).
Mythology, as we will see throughout this book, plays a key role
in driving fantasy quest narratives, not least the gender politics
within them. Myths also question the boundaries between possi-
bilities and impossibilities. For Haraway, ‘The cyborg appears in
myth precisely where the boundary between human and animal is
transgressed’ (Haraway 1991: 152). Such boundary negotiations
are intrinsic to all fantasy, as are the means by which we move
between competing worlds.
 DEFINING FANTASY 9
PORTALS AND ENTRY-POINTS
Arguably the key aspect of any fantasy narrative is the mechan-
ism whereby the reader is permitted entry into another world. In
a conventional fairy story, this entry occurs linguistically: as soon
as we read ‘Once upon a time’ we know we are entering the world
of the fairy story which, as we shall see, is wholly different from
entering the world of traditional fairy-lore. In other narratives, a
journey needs to be undertaken, away from the world of realism
and into the unfathomable. Ancient sea charts played wholly
upon the perceived relationship between the unknown and the
unknowable when, in the centuries before Western colonial
expansion, areas of the world not reached by European sailors
were marked on the map ‘Here be dragons’. Sometimes, however,
a world of magic can be conjured up before one’s own fireside,
such as in The Rose and the Ring (1855), a fairy story written by
Thackeray under the pseudonym M.A. Titmarsh, originally for
his own children. The narrative opens: ‘My friend, Miss Bunch,
who was governess of a large family, that lived in the Piano
Nobile of the house inhabited by myself and my young charges …
begged me to draw a set of Twelfth-Night characters for the
amusement of our young people’ (Titmarsh 1855: iii). Thackeray
supplements his tale with illustrations, showing the children in
question gathering around a blazing hearth. In naming their
governess Miss Bunch, Thackeray evokes echoes of ‘Mother
Bunch’, another name for Mother Goose, one putative origi-
nator of fairy tales. As readers, this combination of domestic
cosiness and a shared cultural storyteller allows us to feel entitled
to draw up our own seats: we all become part of Miss Bunch’s
‘large family’.
At the other end of the spatial scale, when the fantasy realm
covers complex or panoramic terrain, cartography is often used to
familiarize the reader with this imagined realm. The best-known
example of cartographic fantasy is Tolkien’s The Lord of the
Rings trilogy, discussed in detail later, but even a comparatively
circumscribed world such as J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan in Kensing-
ton Gardens (1906; hereafter Kensington Gardens), opens with a
map, accompanied by the cautionary note to the reader that ‘You
10 DEFINING FANTASY

must see for yourselves that it will be difficult to follow Peter

Pan’s adventures unless you are familiar with the Kensington
Gardens’ (Barrie 1999: 3). Thence are we escorted along the
‘Broad Walk’, beside the ‘Round Pond’, ‘the Hump, which is the
part of the Broad Walk where all the big races are run’ and on
towards ‘the gate that is called after Miss Mabel Grey’ (Barrie
1999: 4–5). On one level, the Gardens are established as a single,
manageable site, as indicated by the map and its mimetic rela-
tionship to the actual Kensington Gardens in London. Experien-
tially, however, the narrator reminds us that a small child is
unlikely to be able to travel right across it in one visit:

No child has ever been in the whole of the Gardens, because it is so

soon time to turn back … if you are [a small child], you sleep from
twelve to one. If your mother was not so sure that you sleep from
twelve to one, you could most likely see the whole of them.
(Barrie 1999: 3)

Throughout Barrie’s narrative, the language used belongs to a

small child’s sense of pretend play. As Roger Abrahams argues,
‘In all kinds of play, we are engaged with those special set-aside
worlds in which rules and systems operate energetically yet
effortlessly’, a point that makes play almost analogous with fan-
tasy (Abrahams 1980: 119). W.R. Irwin also emphasizes the fact
that play constructs ‘worlds ordered by internal logic … [which]
maintain temporarily an identity that is sufficient and plau-
sible … but … even when the activities of the play … absorb the
player, he still knows that he is playing by choice, that his game is
factitious, and that he cannot avoid returning to the ordinary’
(Irwin 1976: 23). Thus is the connection between child’s play and
the circumscribed world of fantasy secured. Kensington Gardens is
a novel in which fairies feature centrally as characters, although
they shun contact with the children who play in the park and
Peter has to go to some lengths to prove to the fairies that ‘he was
not an ordinary human and had no desire to do them displeasure’
(Barrie 1999: 27). In that sense this novel forms a much more
effective bridge between the sanitized nursery-world of post-
Victorian fairy stories and the much more brutal tales of
 DEFINING FANTASY 11
traditional fairy-lore. Fairies are, in rural fairy-lore, associated
with the dead, with those who live underground, with impish
beings who steal children and replace them with ‘changelings’,
who blind humans who spy them out, who wreak death and tyr-
anny upon (usually) rural communities. As Edwin Sidney Hart-
land observed in 1891: ‘supernatural personages, without
distinction, dislike not merely being recognized and addressed,
but even being seen, or at all events being watched, and are only
willing to be manifested to humanity at their own pleasure and
for their own purposes’ (Hartland 1891: 69).
In Kate Greenaway’s watercolour painting The Elf Ring (1905;
Figure 1.1), we see a child entering a fairy ring, trampling over its
circumference as she goes. According to Jane Laing, the painting
shows how the child’s credibility and simple belief in fairies
allows her to ‘become part of their moonlit circle in the depths of
the forest of the subconscious’ (Laing 1995: 33). Laing’s idealized
reading of the painting is perhaps overly influenced by post-
Victorian sanitization and is insufficiently attentive to the violent
repercussions inflicted on humans interfering with this secret world,
as explained above. Looking again at Greenaway’s painting, we
see that not only is the child’s entry disruptive, it is violent: she
has stepped on at least one fairy (there may be another under her
rather ogre-ish boots) and is clutching another by the head: cruel
retribution almost certainly awaits her. The look on her face
seems crafty rather than unwitting and her entire demeanour is
that of the precocious transgressor.
Even when accidental, Hartland provides many instances of
humans stumbling across or into fairy rings who then ‘disappear’,
such as in the case of two men from Pwllheli, North Wales, who
‘went out to fetch cattle and came at dusk upon a party of fairies
dancing’ (Hartland 1891: 163). One man is captured and forced
to dance incessantly inside the ring. His rescue is only attained
when his friend returns for him a year and a day later, this being
the usual prescribed period, finding him ‘reduced to a mere ske-
leton’ by the incessant dancing (Hartland 1891: 163). As so often
in portal fantasy narratives, however, for the unwitting interloper
time has stood still. In a similar story from Trefiw, again in North
Wales, a man fell into a fairy ring wearing new shoes. When he
Figure 1.1 Kate Greenaway, The Elf Ring, Art and Picture Collection, The New
York Public Library
Source: New York Public Library Digital Collections.
 DEFINING FANTASY 13
was retrieved a year and a day later, ‘he could not be made to
understand that he had been there more than five minutes until
he was asked to look at his new shoes, which were by that time in
pieces’ (Hartland 1891: 164).
Irrespective of whether it is aimed at children or adults, while
the plot details of the portal fantasy change, the narrative
dynamics do not. So, an adult horror novel such as Clive Barker’s
The Hellbound Heart (1986), though dealing in graphic sex-
ualized horror content, in narrative structure works identically to
C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950). Both
books depict protagonists who find themselves propelled into
worlds they did not expect to find. Both narratives find those
protagonists engaged in frightening and unanticipated scenarios
which threaten to destroy them or their relatives. In structural
terms, the only difference is that one portal is entered when the
protagonist starts fiddling with a wooden box, and the other when
a child starts fiddling with a wooden wardrobe.
Not all branches of fantasy work that simply, however. For
Farah Mendlesohn, the portal fantasy is best understood as a
version of quest narrative, ‘because each assume[s] the same two
movements: transition and exploration’ (Mendlesohn 2008: 2).
Portal fantasies, Mendlesohn argues, tend to require the reader to
‘learn from a point of entry’ (Mendlesohn 2008: xix), an obser-
vation that is certainly true of the horrors of The Hellbound
Heart, though I remain unconvinced that it applies to Alice in
Wonderland. Mendlesohn adopts the rather traditional view that
fantasy is a morally coherent vision of ‘world-building’ (Mendle-
sohn 2008: 13), a perspective that leads her to the interesting
recognition that portal fantasies originate in the Christian New
Testament, for ‘what else is a posthumous heaven … other than
the ultimate in portals?’ (Mendlesohn 2008: 3–4). Nevertheless,
not all doorways are portals in fantasy narratives. In The Rose
and the Ring, for example, a wonderfully comedic moment of
fairy punishment results when Fairy Blackstick is prevented from
attending the christening of the Princess Angelica by the haughty
and dislikeable porter, Gruffanuff. Better still for the assembled
child audience, ‘Gruffanuff … made the most odious vulgar sign
as he was going to slam the door’ (Titmarsh 1855: 16), at which
14 DEFINING FANTASY

point the children’s imagined giggling resonates clearly in the

adult reader’s head. Undeterred, Fairy Blackstick stops the door
with her wand and punishes Gruffanuff by turning him into a
door-knocker:

he felt himself rising off the ground, and fluttering up against the
door, and then, as if a screw ran into his stomach, he felt a dreadful
pain there, and was pinned to the door; and then his arms flew up
over his head; and his legs, after writhing about wildly, twisted under
his body; and he felt cold, cold, growing over him, as if he was turning
into metal, and he said ‘O-o-H’m!’ and could say no more, because
he was dumb.
(Titmarsh 1855: 17–18)

Doorways, then, can prevent as much as facilitate access to the

fantasy world, but what of narrative returns? Edward Lear’s non-
sense sea-voyage narrative ‘The Story of the Four Children who
Went Round the World’ (1867) opens with the traditional ‘Once
upon a time, a long while ago’, but the place of embarkation is
considered of no consequence, Lear being far more interested in the
boat, which is ‘painted blue with green spots, and the sail was
yellow with red stripes’ (Lear 2001: 220). Their return, however, is
markedly more important. Through Lear’s typical combination of
logic and illogicality, the children ‘sail quite round the world by
sea’, but ‘come back on the other side by land’ (Lear 2001: 220). En
route, they find ‘some land at a distance; and when they came to it,
they found it was an island made of water quite surrounded by
earth’ (Lear 2001: 221). The final leg of their travels becomes four-
legged, as they take a ride on the back of ‘an elderly Rhinoceros’
and, ungratefully, reward its pains by having it ‘killed and stuffed
directly, and then set him up outside the door of their father’s house
as a Diaphonous Doorscraper’ (Lear 2001: 231–232). Lear’s pro-
clivity for alliterative nonsense may delight us, but we cannot miss
the fact that, unlike in Thackeray’s text, where the bad-tempered
Gruffanuff is unlikely to elicit too much sympathy, this rhinoceros
has been highly ill-used.
One of the freshest recent examples of portal fantasy is
Ransom Riggs’s Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children
 DEFINING FANTASY 15
(2011). In this novel, the first of a trilogy, the protagonist is
Jacob/Jake Portman (note the port-al stem of his name), whose
travels take him and his father to a remote Welsh island on which
is located the ruin of an old children’s home, wrongly believed to
have been bombed during a World War II air raid. On first
approach, Jake sees a wreck: ‘What stood before me now was no
refuge from monsters but a monster itself ’ (Riggs 2013: 83). The
‘truth’ of this house, however, lies within the mysteries of fantasy,
in a temporal loop constructed by the Headmistress, Miss Pere-
grine, ‘in which peculiar folk can live indefinitely’ (Riggs 2013:
155).2 Miss Peregrine is an ‘ymbryne’ or manipulator of time and
the aforementioned ‘loop’ acts as a two-way membrane enabling
characters to move back and forth into and from the ‘ordinary’
world.
What makes Riggs’s portal distinct from Carroll’s rabbit-hole
or Lewis’s wardrobe, is that the properties of the portal itself are
innately intriguing; it is not a simple means of entry and egress.
Before Jake finds his way inside it, he takes a trip to the local
museum and views a ‘bog body’ of the kind Seamus Heaney
writes about in his poetry of Northern Ireland.3 Here is a truth
that is stranger than fantasy, for the preservative qualities of the
bog, ‘where oxygen and bacteria can’t exist’, allow the corpse to
be perfectly preserved over centuries. The museum curator
informs Jake: ‘His people believed that bogs – and our bog in
particular – were entrances to the world of the gods, and so the
perfect place to offer up their most precious gift: themselves’
(Riggs 2013: 94). Thus, he continues, ‘as doors to the next
world go, a bog ain’t a bad choice. It’s not quite water and it’s
not quite land – it’s an in-between place’ (Riggs 2013: 94). This
portal, then, is partly scientific and partly fantasy in structure.
The fantasy aspect requires its consistency to be maintained by
regular use. As Miss Peregrine tells Jake, ‘One of us [ymbrynes]
must cross through the entryway every so often. This keeps it
pliable, you see. The ingress point is a bit like a hole in fresh
dough; if you don’t poke a finger into it now and then the thing
may just close up on its own’ (Riggs 2013: 160). It is this ‘pli-
able’ aspect of the portal in Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar
Children that complicates Mendlesohn’s view that portal
16 DEFINING FANTASY

fantasies render history ‘inarguable’, a claim she bases on the

typical fictive idea that the two worlds within and beyond the
portal are separated unassailably in time, thus making the past-
ness of ‘reality’ unalterable (Mendlesohn 2008: 14). In Riggs’s
novel, Jake is required to enter through the portal precisely in
order to question the realist version of history attached to the
children’s home. The reality he discovers is one we would expect
to connect with fantasy: the children were attacked and
destroyed by monsters.
That emphasis on time differentials is common to many fan-
tasy narratives, as we saw in relation to fairy-lore. When Lewis’s
Lucy returns to her siblings, telling them tales of her travels, one
of the reasons they do not believe her is that, as far as they are
concerned, she was gone ‘less than a minute, and she pretended to
have been away for hours’ (Lewis 1972: 48). Ironically, it is the
old Professor, whom they assume to be the embodiment of reason
and who cherishes logic, who counters their disbelief: ‘if, I say,
she had gone into another world, I should not be at all surprised
to find that the other world had a separate time of its own; so
that however long you stayed there it would never take up any of
our time’ (Lewis 1972: 48). Lewis repeatedly engages directly with
his child reader in the narrative, albeit sometimes rather heavy-
handedly, such as when he repeatedly warns her/him that ‘it is
very foolish to shut oneself into any wardrobe’ (Lewis 1972: 12).
Having praised Lucy once for knowing ‘that it is a very silly thing
to shut oneself in a wardrobe’ (Lewis 1972: 13), he repeats himself
on her second visit, noting that ‘She did not shut [the door]
properly because she knew that it is very silly to shut oneself into
a wardrobe, even if it is not a magic one’ (Lewis 1972: 29–30).
Conversely, he casts judgment on Edmund, when he pushes
through behind Lucy, ‘and shut the door, forgetting what a very
foolish thing this is to do’ (Lewis 1972: 30). Finally, when Peter
enters the wardrobe later on, and ‘held the door closed but did
not shut it; for, of course, he remembered, as every sensible
person does, that you should never never shut yourself up in a
wardrobe’ (Lewis 1972: 52), we correctly interpret Peter’s caution
as evidence that he will later prove himself responsible in more
heroic ways.
 DEFINING FANTASY 17
DESIRE AND LOSS
Lewis’s benign but admonishing voice in The Lion, the Witch and
the Wardrobe positions him as a kind of surrogate parent. Fathers
are often absent in fantasy narratives, from fairy tales onwards,
but surrogates for them usually appear, not least grandfatherly
figures such as Lewis’s Professor, Tolkien’s Gandalf and J.K.
Rowling’s Dumbledore. This surrogacy partly explains the
attraction of the eponymous Mr Magorium in the fantasy film
Mr Magorium’s Wonder Emporium (dir. Zach Helm, 2007), star-
ring Dustin Hoffman and Natalie Portman, a film partly about
transition and death, but also partly about desire and loss. The
opening scene of the film depicts an encounter on the street out-
side the shop, between Portman’s character, Molly Mahoney, and
Eric, a nine-year-old boy who is a friendless devotee of the toy-
shop. An equally avid collector of hats, this initial scene shows
Eric’s hat stuck on a flagpole above the shop door. Eric asks
Mahoney how he can retrieve it and, when she suggests that he
finds a ladder, replies ‘Naah! I just need to jump higher.’ Maho-
ney retorts: ‘Eric, that’s seven feet at least!’ to which his final
response is ‘Do you think I should get a running start?’ The
comedy mismatch between aspiration and possibility is measured
out in terms of overreaching the limits of the human, the same
dynamic that determines the scale of the magic in the shop.
Nevertheless, when Mahoney enters and ‘wakes up’ the toys, we
can see behind her, through the window, that Eric has indeed
grasped the flagpole and is swinging backwards and forwards on
it. Similarly elongating the human scale, Mr Magorium claims to
have been alive for 243 years and the shop-owner for 113 and the
film details what happens on the day he ‘departs’, handing over
the reins to Mahoney, an opening obviously echoing Tolkien’s
Lord of the Rings Vol. I: The Fellowship of the Ring (1954), in
which Bilbo Baggins disappears, aged ‘eleventy-one, 111’ at his
birthday party, handing on his quest to his nephew, Frodo
(Tolkien 1999a: 28).
While absent fathers/father surrogates can therefore operate as
the explicit or implicit catalyst for action in children’s fantasy, the
loss of a mother deserves especial attention. Rowling’s entire
18 DEFINING FANTASY

Harry Potter series operates on the principle that nothing is more

powerful than a mother’s love for her child. Towards the end of
volume 5, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2003),
Dumbledore explains to Harry his rationale for placing him
under the care of the unsuitable and unsympathetic Dursley
family, following his parents’ deaths:

I knew that Voldemort’s knowledge of magic is perhaps more extensive

than any wizard alive …
But I knew, too, where Voldemort was weak … You would be pro-
tected by an ancient magic of which he knows, which he despises,
and which he has always, therefore, underestimated – to his cost. I
am speaking, of course, of the fact that your mother died to save you.
She gave you a lingering protection he never expected, a protection
that flows in your veins to this day. I put my trust, therefore, in your
mother’s blood. I delivered you to her sister …
(Rowling 2003: 736)

On the face of it, Petunia Dursley has no sisterly affinity with the
dead Lily, but in the opening pages of the final volume, Harry
Potter and the Deathly Hallows (2007), as Harry persuades the
Dursleys to leave their house for their own protection, Petunia
‘stopped and looked back … [as if] she wanted to say something
to him: she gave him an odd, tremulous look and seemed to
teeter on the edge of speech’ (Rowling 2007: 40–41). That
unspoken ‘teeter[ing]’, located ‘on the edge of speech’, seems to
offer up a bridging point between the realm of the unspeakable
and the realm of decoy narratives. As a small child Harry was
told, by the Dursleys, that his parents died in a car accident, but
‘His aunt and uncle never spoke about them, and of course he
was forbidden to ask questions’ (Rowling 1997: 27). Again, a type
of ‘unspeaking’ exists here, in the awareness of an enforced
silence. Counteracting that unspoken presence, Harry carries with
him a kind of trace memory: ‘a strange vision: a blinding flash of
green light and a burning pain on his forehead. This, he sup-
posed, was the crash’ (Rowling 1997: 27). No crash at all, what
erupts from Harry’s unconscious are fragments, traces, the rem-
nants of Voldemort’s murder of his parents and attempted murder
 DEFINING FANTASY 19
of him. As Jackson observes, ‘The fantastic is a literature which
attempts to create a space for a discourse other than a conscious
one’ (Jackson 1988: 62) and it is from within this space for a
discourse where none exists that Harry’s wizarding education
gradually fills the void with an explanation. No wonder Harry
refuses to substitute the common euphemism ‘He Who Cannot
Be Named’ for ‘Voldemort’; the refusal to name has threatened to
deny Harry a life narrative.
In her essay ‘Revolution in Poetic Language’ (1974), Julia
Kristeva identifies the existence in infants of a pre-linguistic state,
whereby ‘Drives involve pre-Oedipal semiotic functions and energy
discharges that connect and orient the body to the mother’ (Moi
1986: 95). Harry’s experience works as a perfect fictional illustra-
tion of Kristeva’s ideas. Lily, even in her absence, roots Harry
within a framework of belonging (Hogwarts, its staff and pupils)
that even his abuse at the hands of the Dursleys cannot undermine.
Thus Harry’s eventual empowerment emerges from a pre-linguistic,
originary ‘unremembered’ realm of jouissance: intra-uterine self-
sufficiency, but here expressed through magic rather than psycho-
analysis. Nor is the Harry Potter series the only fantasy narrative
that works in this way. A similar recognition of unconscious
desires linked to the lost mother leads Gray to identify the
maternal drive as the biographical impetus underlying George
MacDonald’s Phantastes: A Faerie Romance (1905).
Twenty-one-year-old Anodos, MacDonald’s protagonist, wakes
to find a tiny woman in his room, ‘as perfect in shape as if she
had been a small Greek statuette’ (MacDonald 2005: 3). She
escorts him to fairyland, where an array of encounters awaits
him. On looking into her eyes, Anodos’s thoughts turn to that
intra-uterine realm: ‘They filled me with an unknown longing. I
remembered somehow that my mother died when I was a baby. I
looked deeper and deeper, till they spread around me like seas,
and I sank in their waters’ (MacDonald 2005: 4). According to
Gray, MacDonald’s entire creative impulse can be traced to
mementos he kept of his mother:

In a secret drawer in MacDonald’s desk were found, after his death, a

lock of his mother’s hair and a letter by her containing the following
20 DEFINING FANTASY

reference to his premature weaning: ‘I cannot help in my heart being

very much grieved for him yet, for he has not forgot it … he cryed
desperate for a while in the first night, but he has cryed very little
since and I hope the worst is over now.’
(Gray 2008: 10)

Gray surely misses the point, here, as seems obvious to any

woman who has breast-fed a child: one who remembers being
weaned cannot have been ‘prematurely’ so, quite the opposite.
The discovery of the letter surely says more about universal
maternal anxiety than it does about childhood loss. A similar
over-reaction involving weaning seems evident in Philip Pullman’s
response to Lewis’s decision to kill off his protagonists at the end
of the seven-volume Chronicles of Narnia rather than ‘wean him-
self off them’ more gently. Pullman exclaims: ‘For the sake of
taking them off to a perpetual school holiday or something, he
kills them all in a train crash. I think that’s ghastly. It’s a horrible
message’ (Susan Roberts, cited in Rayment-Pickard 2004: 45).
Here, Pullman seems to be conflating fictional characterization
with actual childhood death. In narrative terms, all authors ‘kill
off’ their characters when they stop writing about them and, in
that sense, Lewis’s child characters are not ‘prematurely’ killed at
all. What Lewis does is strikingly similar to what the letter sug-
gests MacDonald’s mother did: he provides a sudden point of no
return, to guard against the temptation to re-enter a phase that
must end.
Mother loss is equally the driver in Barrie’s Kensington Gar-
dens. Peter first arrives in the Gardens by flying out of his nursery
window and, as Barrie informs his young reader, ‘It was wonder-
ful that he could fly without wings, but the place itched tre-
mendously, and – and – perhaps we could all fly if we were as
dead-confident sure of our capacity to do it as was bold Peter’
(Barrie 1999: 13). While flight meets flight of fancy, for Peter this
is simply an excursion, not an escape: he always meant to return
to his mother. Nevertheless, he keeps delaying doing so and other
characters keep finding reasons to prevent him. When finally he
does return, ‘the window was closed, and there were iron bars on
it, and peering inside he saw his mother sleeping peacefully with
 DEFINING FANTASY 21
her arm round another little boy’ (Barrie 1999: 40). Arguably, the
Peter Pan narratives can be read as decoy dream-world narratives
about death, loss and maternal desire. In this context, maternal
grief over the loss of a child is re-written from Peter’s point of
view as the child’s grieving loss for its mother.

MAGIC OR ILLUSION?
Overall, the relationship between children and fantasy is a com-
plex one. Usually, most of us encounter fantasy narratives as
children and these children’s fantasies generally emphasize the
satisfaction of wish-fulfilment desires. Enid Blyton’s The Faraway
Tree Stories (1939–1946) were the first books I remember self-
reflectively reading as fantasy narratives and perhaps we should
not overlook the fact that Blyton wrote them during World War
II when, for a number of children evacuated from their homes
and families, their daydreams and fantasies of home might feel
very ‘far away’ indeed. In volume 1, The Enchanted Wood, three
children, Joe, Beth and Frannie, move to the countryside as so
many evacuated children did, setting in train the possibility of a
magical encounter. Almost instantaneously, the lure of the coun-
tryside becomes imbued with fantasy: ‘We might see fairies there!’
(Blyton 2002: 1). Even father, returning from work, arrives with
news that the nearby wood is ‘called the Enchanted Wood’
(Blyton 2002: 5). Managing possible parental scepticism early on,
he adds, ‘It’s funny to hear things like this nowadays, and I don’t
expect there is really anything strange about the wood. But just
be careful not to go too far into it, in case you get lost’ (Blyton
2002: 5–6). Thus is the child reader hooked.
Once inside the wood the children encounter, as they hoped,
elves, a gnome, a pixie and a small fairy called Silky, but they also
encounter some intensely Lear-like characters, such as Moon-
Face, a toffee-eating character who lives in the top of the Far-
away Tree, and whose house is left via a ‘slippery-slip that ran
down the whole trunk … winding round and round like a spiral
staircase’, and Saucepan Man, who ‘had saucepans and kettles
hung all over him’ and ‘danc[ed] away, crashing his saucepans
together’ (Blyton 2002: 33, 78–79). For Blyton, as we shall later
22 DEFINING FANTASY

see in relation to her Noddy books, there is no incongruity in

combining the world of fairy-lore with the world of toys, a point
that reinforces the realization that, unlike so many of their adult
counterparts, child readers waste no energy arguing over the
‘proper’ definition of fantasy, its sub-genres and/or the type of
characters or scenarios it involves.
Certainly, magic plays an important role in many fantasy nar-
ratives and Tolkien goes so far as to assert that ‘Faërie itself may
perhaps most nearly be translated by Magic’ (Tolkien 2001: 10).
However, what actually constitutes magic is harder to define. For
example, when David Rudd observes that he ‘found magic’ in
Blyton’s books (Rudd 2000: 2) we recognize that he is using the
term in its more colloquial sense of ‘wonder’ or ‘imaginative joy’,
despite the fact that some of her books depict enchanted objects
and landscapes. What, then, is magic and is it enough for a fan-
tasy narrative to contain a magician or a witch to make it so?
Surely the answer to the last part of that question is ‘No’, at least
in mature works of fantasy. Rowling’s Harry Potter series and
Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series are arguably two of the most
accomplished comparatively recent examples of magic-based
fantasy and props such as wands, broomsticks, walking trunks
and potions function centrally in them. Nevertheless, their
achievement, in each case, relies on the narrative construction of
competing worlds, not the existence of the paraphernalia of magic
per se. The Harry Potter series is a portal fantasy, accessed from
the ‘real’ world of modern transportation, namely Platform 9¾ of
King’s Cross railway station in London. Discworld, on the other
hand, constitutes a separate world of its own, located on the back
of ‘Great A’Tuin the Turtle … swimming slowly through the
interstellar gulf, hydrogen frost on his ponderous limbs’ (Pratchett
1985: 11). Certainly Gandalf, in The Lord of the Rings, is a grand
wizard in the epic fantasy tradition, capable both of great fun and
great terror. At the start of The Fellowship of the Ring, he delights
in his reputation with the children of the Shire as one ‘skill[ed]
with fires, smokes, and lights’, but when his anger grows with
Bilbo at the hobbit’s reluctance to give up the ring, he warns him
that he risks ‘see[ing] Gandalf the Grey uncloaked’ and, as he
approaches him, Bilbo reflects that ‘he seemed to grow tall and
 DEFINING FANTASY 23
menacing; his shadow filled the little room’ (Tolkien 1999a: 32, 44).
Nevertheless, even here it is not Gandalf ’s magic alone that
makes Lord of the Rings a fantasy trilogy; rather it is Tolkien’s
inventive creation of impossible species such as hobbits and orcs,
the setting of the action in the carefully mapped-out inventive
geography of Middle Earth and, in combination with both, the epic
quest to Mount Doom with the totemic object of the One Ring.
Indeed, no work of fantasy confounds further the often per-
ceived requirement for magic to be present than Mervyn Peake’s
Gormenghast (1946), which contains no magic at all. In adapting
the first two volumes of Peake’s trilogy for television in 2000,
Estelle Daniel described the aim of the production team being to
show that fantasy can exist even when the characters ‘don’t fly
around on wings [and] there are no trolls and dragons’ (Daniel
2000: 61). What remains, again, is a vision of competing worlds,
one existing in parallel to our own but characterized by the type
of Medieval feudalism one also finds in Lord of the Rings, Merlin
and Game of Thrones. The conclusion is clear: witches and
wizards alone do not make fantasy.
Tolkien’s view of the magic of faërie places it ‘at the furthest pole
from the vulgar devices of the laborious, scientific, magician’
(Tolkien 2001: 10). Nevertheless, I would argue that a more useful
way of conceptualizing the properties of fantasy, is to think less of
magic per se and more of the stage magician. Few of us, when
watching so-called ‘magic shows’ think that we are actually wit-
nessing magic: we know we are witnessing an illusion created by a
supreme inventor of imaginative trickery and play. This illusion is a
much better way of conceptualizing fantasy: thus a (screen) writer
or artist constructs a series of competing worlds in which the
impossible becomes real or can be ‘conjured up’, as in music. As
Tony Hassini of the International Magician’s Society puts it, ‘Long
before advanced science and medicine, magicians created illusions,
influencing the future scientists to turn those illusions into reality’
(Hassini 2018: np). Thus, in both stage magic and fantasy writing,
film or art, we sign up to what Samuel Taylor Coleridge described
in Biographia Literaria (1817) as a ‘willing suspension of disbelief ’
(Coleridge 1978: 518): namely that fairies, magicians, hobbits,
talking animals, nymphs and jumblies really exist.
24 DEFINING FANTASY

ANIMATION: THE CASE OF TOY STORY 3

Often, fantasy has suffered from a misconception that its
importance lies in simply being a panacea to material reality, a
charge that has also been levied at comic books. However, in his
pioneering study of comics, Scott McCloud muses over the
varying degrees of fantasy and realism that the graphic form uses.
One might argue that his approach is similar to Hume’s in that he
sees fantasy and realism working together to produce animations
which, depending on the balance between the two, will be more
or less fantasy, more or less mimetic in form. He begins by
contrasting comics with photographs, arguing that photographs
are ‘smaller, flatter, less detailed, they don’t move, they lack
color – but as pictorial icons go, they are pretty realistic’
(McCloud 1994: 28). Similarly, of course, realist writing is ‘smal-
ler, flatter, less detailed’ than reality. In that sense, all imaginative
work is fantas-tic: creativity put through a filter of everyday
experience. What differentiates fantasy from realism are the
assumptions made about the fictional world portrayed. Too much
distance between the fantasy creation and reality and the reader
will find the connection too arduous to make; too little and it will
fail to work as fantasy at all.
That balancing act is scrutinized continually in Disney Pixar’s
Toy Story series of animated films (1995–2019)4 and tends to gain
traction around the depiction of Andy, the human child/teenage
protagonist. In animated images, something happens in the gaps
between the realism and the non-realism of the pictorial representa-
tion of the cartoon image (a slashed line for a mouth, for instance)
that enables the reader or viewer to interpret that over-simplified
image as a human feature. This connection is essential for the
viewer to identify with the animated character and, according to
McCloud, ‘viewer-identification is a specialty of cartooning’
(McCloud 1994: 42). Careful attention to the opening sequences
of Toy Story 3 (2010) shows the interface between fantasy and
realist animation working in a particularly fluid manner. The film
opens with an embedded animated action sequence, involving a
Western genre setting, in which a train is being robbed and a
bridge crossing a gorge is blown up with dynamite. The train
 DEFINING FANTASY 25
crashes into the gorge, leaving only a stricken Jessie on the brink
of a precipice, mounted on Bullseye the horse. This sequence is
then revealed to be a wholly enclosed fantasy play world as the
animated setting shifts to Andy’s room and we realize that what
we have been watching is a game played by Andy, as he runs
around the room, holding his toys. As the animation moves out
again, taking in more of the room, we now realize we are watch-
ing a home-movie his mother has filmed of young Andy at play:
time has moved on. The moment those enclosed boundaries of
the original fantasy sequence are breached, so is the magic. Sev-
eral home-movie scenes follow, with Andy progressively ageing
until we reach the fictive present: seventeen-year-old Andy is on
the brink of his own precipice, leaving home to go off to college.
That gradual ageing of Andy requires a shift in the relationship
between animation, fantasy and realism. As a young boy subject
of the home movie, his face is less naturalistically animated. His
eyes are round like Woody’s and, in a scene showing him hugging
Woody in bed, their two faces alongside each other are mirrored
by a lack of naturalistic detail. As he ages, Andy’s eyes become
increasingly elliptical, as human eyes are, and his facial features
become increasingly naturalistic. The message is clear and con-
sistent throughout the whole Toy Story series: fantasy belongs
with play; and play belongs to the young. Thus, in the first three
Toy Story movies Andy acts as the integer for mimesis through-
out (he no longer appears in Toy Story 4 (2019), except via a
couple of fleeting flashbacks). Although those early scenes of Toy
Story 3 reveal a progression from fantasy to naturalistic anima-
tion, what remains constant throughout the first three films is the
fact that, as soon as Andy picks up Buzz Lightyear, or any other
toy, Buzz metamorphoses from being a fantasy hero to an ani-
mated plastic toy. Only when Andy puts him down again can
Buzz aim for ‘infinity and beyond’. There is a paradox here in
which we all collude as viewers while knowing it to be impossible:
the toys are ‘really’ alive, but pretend not to be, so that chil-
dren’s play can will them into a facsimile of life. Without children’s
attention they cannot be toys, instead they would be trapped as
living but functionless figures. For an adult viewer of Toy Story,
there is a trenchant self-recognition of loss in the need to identify
26 DEFINING FANTASY

with Andy, for he is the figure who moves inexorably from being
a child who gives toys a reason to exist, to an adult whose
maturity irreversibly renders his own existence futile, at least as
far as his toys are concerned.
Perhaps this dual audience identification complicates the child-
based status of the Toy Story franchise. For example, it may sur-
prise us to discover that the first Toy Story film received a PG
(Parental Guidance) rather than a U (for Universal) rating from
the British Board of Film Classification, cautioning that it con-
tains ‘mild violence, scary scenes, dangerous behaviour’. However,
perhaps following the extensive merchandising opportunities and
clamour for a wider sales audience, supplemented by small-screen
broadcasts which had already expanded the age-range of that
original viewing audience, fears of harm to small children seem to
have been tempered, Toy Story 2 (1999), Toy Story 3 and Toy
Story 4 all carrying U certificates, the British Board of Film
Classification still cautioning that Toy Story 3 ‘contains mild
violence and scary scenes’ and Toy Story 4 contains ‘very mild
violence, scary scenes’.5 Alongside the child-adult dynamic of the
films, however, there is another way in which the Toy Story narra-
tives attain greater sophistication than might be expected in chil-
dren’s animation fantasy and that is in their innately postmodern
treatment of subjectivity.
Despite Andy being the human protagonist and toy-owner in
all the films, the question of which character constitutes the point
of view protagonist for a child viewer is less obvious. Woody the
cowboy doll is Andy’s favourite toy, but do children identify with
Woody when Andy is holding him? In Toy Story 3, Woody
becomes separated from the rest of the toys, thereby allowing
narrative point of view to pass from one toy to another. In fact,
one of the most intriguing scenes in the film occurs when Mrs
Potato Head, having left an eye under the bed in Woody’s room
after they have been sent off as a ‘job lot’ to the local day-nursery,
is able to use that lost organ as a visual portal into Andy’s room
and can thereby console her toy friends that Andy is looking for
them, thinking that they had been stored safely in the attic, when
the toys had otherwise assumed that he had thrown them out.
This variable identification between child viewer and Andy and/or
 DEFINING FANTASY 27
Woody and the other toys requires a much more interrogatory
approach to viewing on the part of the audience and, along with
it, an awareness of split subjectivity, a self-conscious portrayal of
play as fantasy and a final sequence which is heart-rending for
viewers of all ages.
Toy Story 3 leaves Andy at a pivotal moment in human exis-
tence: the point of no return when childhood is left behind and he
drives away, over the horizon. In Fantasy Fiction, I identified the
horizon as ‘a symbol of simultaneous limit and infinity’ (Armitt
2005: 4), a phrase that resonates with Buzz Lightyear’s clarion
call. What makes the horizon such a perfect metaphor for fantasy
is that it is simultaneously absolutely ‘there’ and yet nowhere: our
goal, although one that it is impossible to real-ize. That idea of
moving beyond, as expressed in ballads such as ‘Over the Rain-
bow’ (Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg, 1939), written for Metro-
Goldwyn-Mayer’s musical The Wizard of Oz (dir. Fleming, 1939),
engages directly with dreamscapes combined with flights of fancy:
‘Somewhere over the rainbow skies are blue and the dreams that
you dare to dream really do come true’. Similarly, the sub-
terranean possibilities afforded by Jules Verne’s Twenty-Thousand
Leagues Under the Sea (1870) or circumnavigation possibilities
afforded by his Around the World in Eighty Days (1873), capture
perfectly the realist desire for travel to exotic lands, coupled with
the impossible fantasies of what unearthly creatures and land-
scapes one might find there. That elongation of distance into the
unknown takes our everyday world and transforms it into a geo-
graphy of dreams and hyperbole, as in Lear’s ‘bong trees’ or
Carroll’s ‘bread-and-butter flies’.
Such elongations also apply themselves to the human scale.
Once Alice finds herself in Wonderland, she contemplates: ‘I seem
to be shutting up like a telescope’ (Carroll 1929: 7) or, later, ‘It
was much pleasanter at home … when one wasn’t always growing
larger and smaller, and being ordered about by mice and rabbits’
(Carroll 1929: 28). Such elongations are not simply for effect;
Alice’s characterization as a young girl is both maintained and
challenged through them: maintained in the sense that children’s
delight in pretend play is partly about wishing they were older,
taller, stronger and more adept than they are, challenged in the
28 DEFINING FANTASY

sense that Alice’s physical instability threatens her core identity.

When her neck elongates so rapidly that she finds her head in the
trees, a pigeon attacks her, mistaking her for a serpent. Alice’s
response is increasingly uncertain:

‘But I’m not a serpent, I tell you!’ … I’m a – I’m a –’

‘Well! What are you?’ said the Pigeon. ‘I can see you’re trying to invent
something!’
‘I – I’m a little girl,’ said Alice, rather doubtfully, as she remembered
the number of changes she had gone through, that day.
(Carroll 1929: 47)

That ‘number of changes’ incorporates sequences of animal fan-

tasy, a quest narrative, political allegory, and unconscious desires
or, in other words, the topics of all the subsequent chapters of this
book. In Chapter 2, we will trace some of the key ways in which
fantasy, too, has undergone a ‘number of changes’ from the time
of Classical Antiquity to twenty-first-century digital gaming,
beginning with Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

NOTES
1 See Armitt (1996), especially chapter one: ‘Structuralism, Genre and Beyond …’;
17–38.
2 ‘Peculiar’ in this sense means ‘different’. The children here have what might be
considered super-powers: the ability to levitate, self-imposed invisibility, superhuman
strength.
3 See, for example, Seamus Heaney’s ‘The Tollund Man’, in Wintering Out (Heaney
1972).
4 The original Toy Story movie was ‘the first feature-length film entirely created
using computer animation’ (Blum 2010), arguably a fact that made it as interesting
to adult film buffs as to its target child audience.
5 See www.bbfc.co.uk/releases/toy-story-1995 and www.bbfc.co.uk/releases/toy-stor
y-3-2010-2.
 NOTES

Chapter 1

1 See Armitt (1996), especially chapter one: ‘Structuralism, Genre and Beyond …’;
17–38.
2 ‘Peculiar’ in this sense means ‘different’. The children here have what might be
considered super-powers: the ability to levitate, self-imposed invisibility, super-
human strength.
3 See, for example, Seamus Heaney’s ‘The Tollund Man’, in Wintering Out (Heaney
1972).
4 The original Toy Story movie was ‘the first feature-length film entirely created
using computer animation’ (Blum 2010), arguably a fact that made it as interesting
to adult film buffs as to its target child audience.
5 See www.bbfc.co.uk/releases/toy-story-1995 and www.bbfc.co.uk/releases/toy-stor
y-3-2010-2.

Chapter 2
1 The NATO bombing raids of Iraq took place in January and February 1991. In
name, Agrabah closely resembles the Indian city of Agra, site of the Taj Mahal,
further removing the Middle Eastern cultural connection from Disney’s Aladdin.

Chapter 3

1 Beatrix Potter was herself an amateur botanist of some repute.

2 According to the Daimler motor company, the very first patented automobile was
produced in 1885–1886, quickly followed by the three-wheeler ‘Velocipede’ in
1886, but four-wheeled motorized transport only emerged in 1894. According to
the Ford motor company, Henry Ford’s ‘Quadricycle’ was first produced in 1896,
though he did not develop his ‘first moving assembly line’ until 1913. See www.da
imler.com/company/tradition/company-history/1886-1920.html, www.ford.co.uk/
experience-ford/Heritage and www.ford.co.uk/experience-ford/Heritage/Evolutio
nOfMassProduction (all accessed 13 January 2017).

Chapter 4

1 Although social degeneration was developed more fully by scientists and philo-
sophers in the twenty years following the publication of The Water-Babies, the
early seeds of it were being sown during the period when Kingsley was writing.
2 Lewis acknowledged that a copy of Phantastes which he bought at a railway sta-
tion bookstall in 1916, played a landmark role in his conversion to Christianity
(see Prickett 2005: 176).

Chapter 5

1 The 26 counties now constituting the Republic of Ireland only gained full inde-
pendence from Britain in 1937, the remaining six being partitioned off as Northern
Ireland, which remains part of the UK.
2 According to Bob Dixon, ‘in 1968, the year of [Blyton’s] death, the Noddy books
had sold more than eleven million copies’ (Dixon 1978a: 56). By 1992, David
Rudd tells us that ‘Noddy books were reported to have sold over 100 million
copies, with overseas sales of 46 million’ (Rudd 2000: 65).
3 In 2014, in a Guardian newspaper article, James Miekle uses figures from the
Office for National Statistics to reveal that, in the 1940s, ‘well over half’ of the UK
population smoked cigarettes, reducing slightly by 1974 to 45%. By 2013, however,
levels had reduced dramatically to 18.4% (Miekle 2014).
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