Maria Sachiko
Cecire, Re-Enchanted: The Rise of Children’s Fantasy Literature in the
Twentieth Century. Minneapolis. University of Minnesota Press, 2019.
Reviewed by:
Laura Dull (lauradull@delta.edu)
Maria Sachiko
Cecire’s Re-Enchanted: The Rise of Children’s Fantasy Literature in the
Twentieth Century accomplishes a great deal of critical work in less than 300
pages, starting with poking a finger directly into the soft underbelly of
medieval studies and the specter of its ties to white supremacist groups in the
twenty-first century. In her conclusion,
Cecire confesses her love for medievalist children’s fantasy (also reflected in
her curriculum vitae) and her belief in its value despite its “shortcomings,”
which seems a light charge for what she argues earlier in the book. Cecire argues that children’s medievalist
fantasy, particularly that coming out of the Oxford School started by J. R.R.
Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, successfully shaped children in a masculinist, white,
Northern European vision of selfhood that used the medieval past to critique
modernity and project an alternative present.
Because they and their followers published children’s fantasy, their
project flew under the critical radar of literary and cultural scholars until
the overwhelming breakthrough popularity of such fantasy with adult audiences
(as seen, for example, in the adult audiences for the Harry Potter books and
movies and the adult fantasy Game of Thrones franchise). Cecire calls upon readers to acknowledge the
dangers of the Oxford School’s project while recognizing the cultural power its
members harnessed. She encourages us to
embrace and explore new ways of expanding the scope of the tropes of children’s
fantasy to become more inclusive in the ways it reaches into the past to find
magic in a difficult contemporary world.
Cecire’s work is thoroughly medievalist in analyzing the way children’s
(and later adult) fantasy has been used to understand the past in response to
the present with an eye to shaping the future.
After a
powerful introduction in which Cecire delivers a series of analytical blows at
the sacred cow of children’s fantasy (provoking a response that she later
analyzes in chapter 4), Re-Enchanted settles into a set of chapters that divide
roughly into an analysis of the circumstances that created the Oxford School
(chapters 1 and 2) and a set of analyses of how the principles and tropes
established by the school are expressed in twenty-first western culture.
Cecire’s first,
and perhaps most powerful chapter for a reader outside the field of children’s
literature, follows the creation of the Oxford School’s medievalist fantasy,
which used a heroic Northern European past to critique the feminizing
secularizing modernism that was gaining ground in twentieth-century academic
circles. Cecire traces the ways in which
the twentieth-century understanding of the medieval world, and particularly
medieval literature, was suited to children’s literature with its dependence on
hierarchy and clear-cut moral lessons. The
Oxford School’s use of children’s fantasy to argue for the value of the
medieval Christian past, Cecire argues, was a strategy for resisting modernist
scholarly attention that was becoming the “serious” mode of scholarship in the
wake of the World Wars. She traces
nineteenth-century literary influences on Tolkien and Lewis (as they identified
in various writings) and notes the realist mode complete with mock scholarly
apparatus present in several of these works, tools Tolkien later employed in
his Lord of the Rings (LOTR) cycle. Such
a combination of genres gave weight to an otherwise light genre of fantasy and
is a strategy Cecire herself seems to perform in later chapters when her
analysis seems most to stray from traditional academic boundaries. She argues that Tolkien and Lewis saw magic
as an allegorical way to return to timeless truths (for them Christian) as long
as the reader was willing to think like white Christians. She offers close readings of tales from the
works of each, the most engaging of which is that of Eustace Stubbs, who
exemplifies the ills of modernity in Lewis’ The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
Chapter two
traces the academic rivalry between Tolkien and Lewis at Oxford and the
modernist scholars at Cambridge that resulted in the creation at Oxford of a
curriculum that foregrounded medieval literature and languages in opposition to
the modernist focus elsewhere and that sought to make the study of English
literature masculine and weighty enough to compete with the Greek and Latin requirements
of a Classics degree. Cecire traces the
history of English studies and its focus on moral education, starting with the
theoretical underpinnings of Adam Smith, and follows its reception by colonial
educators as a means of teaching morals without overt reference to Christian
education. English studies became a
powerful vehicle for legitimizing colonial hierarchies, a vehicle Tolkien and
Lewis embraced as England’s political footprint diminished. While Cambridge’s T.H. White wrote about the
young King Arthur (Wart) in his Sword in the Stone with plenty of
tongue-in-cheek, Tolkien and Lewis’s curriculum taught a reverence for the
medieval past and magic seen in the work of students such as Susan Cooper and
her The Dark is Rising trilogy through to Philip Pullman in the His Dark
Materials series.
The first two
chapters are the most straightforward as Cecire builds the academic and
intellectual genealogies of the Oxford School and argues for its impact and
areas of success. Chapters three through
five read like case studies that attempt to demonstrate the influence of the
medievalist fantasy promoted by the Oxford School on modern popular
culture. Chapter three makes a
connection between the work of children’s fantasy literature and the cultural
narrative of Christmas with their focus on enchantment and timeless
rituals. Cecire makes a textual
connection between the Oxford School and Christmas with the setting at
Christmas of a key scene in Cooper’s The Dark is Rising and in a staple of the
Oxford School’s curriculum, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (upon which
Cooper’s scene is modeled). Here Cecire
takes the odd step of using the original Middle English quotes from Sir Gawain
with modern English translations provided in parentheses. Her use of the original
text here disrupts the flow of her argument (as demonstrated graphically by the
need for the parenthetical translations).
While what Cecire argues in this chapter is interesting, its connection
to chapters one and two remains loose.
In considering the chapters as individual parts, one could imagine this
chapter as the original spark that prompted the entire project, now nestled in
the middle of the monograph, buttressed by the surrounding chapters as well as
an appeal to scholarly apparatus not dissimilar from the strategy of the
nineteenth-century fantasy authors who influenced Tolkien and his use of such
apparatus to give weight to a genre considered intellectually light by the
broader culture. The chapter offers key
analytical arguments—that children’s fantasy rehearses the Christian story of a
child savior who alone can save the world and that childhood rather than
children is vital because children become adults who lose access to
enchantment. Cecire’s analysis of
Christmas packs in a wealth of analytical work that gets lost in its abundance
and in the jumping back and forth between the narrative and rituals of
Christmas and their contemporary work for adults and the analysis of Christmas
scenes in various works of children’s fantasy.
This chapter is clearly central to the monograph’s arguments and is the
chapter that reads as the least polished and least tightly structured. Due to its rich arguments and its structural
choices, it is the chapter this reviewer found herself most wanting to be able
to discuss with Cecire.
Chapter four
tackles the racial implications of the Oxford School’s premises and the success
of the works of its members on the canon of children’s literature and its
ability to recolonize imagined spaces as the physical British Empire
shrank. Cecire demonstrates the success
of these works in communicating a white masculine supremacy through the
sometimes violent responses of fans when faced with critiques of their beloved
characters and tales. She points to the
creation of childhood, innocence, and whiteness and its impact on school
discipline and policing that disproportionately treats children of color as
more culpable than their white counterparts.
She could have added the sexualization of children of color and its
implications for sexual assault and sex trafficking. Cecire, of course, traces the trope of the
monstrous Saracen in medieval literature and its influence on the Oxford
School, most notably in Lewis’ The Horse and his Boy. She attempts, with less success, a neomedievalist
reading of the Harry Potter series that seems less neomedieval (which she
defines as the theory that a possible future world organization might be a
secular version of medieval political structures-205) than simply informed by
post-Cold War fears of unseen enemies and new manifestations of fascism.
The last
chapter turns to the influence of the success of children’s fantasy on adult
fantasy. Cecire analyzes Junot Diaz’s
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and Lev Grossman’s Magician series through
the lens of the post-ironic turn, which admits that life is terrible, but also
open to enchantment through self-actualization.
She argues that the rise of self-help literature in the late twentieth
century provided a context in which fantasy could turn from religious hierarchy
towards individual choice and fulfillment.
She traces a concomitant break away from the masculinist tradition by
creating heroines who find themselves through a heroic love. While she acknowledges this tradition goes
back to classics such as Pride and Prejudice, rather than analyzing why the
writers have not broken from its gendered confines, she connects it to a modern
trend to focus on individual problems and solutions over systemic ones. She introduces Neil Gaiman as a popular adult
fantasy author to demonstrate the turn to achieving inner happiness, but does
not engage how his work aligns him in many ways with the Oxford School,
including his use of British folklore and history. She cites examples of his works, but does not
include his modern translation of Norse mythology (2017), despite referencing
the Disney television series Once Upon a Time and its run through 2018. In fact, further exploration of Gaiman’s work
would better fit her overall arguments than the paragraph of reference to
Disney’s foray into adult fantasy, which only demonstrates that adult
medievalist fantasy is profitable and ubiquitous (which references to LOTR and
Harry Potter, with their huge film franchises, already accomplish). The most interesting analysis in this chapter
is of the ways in which the Stark children (and foster sons) in the Game of
Thrones books and HBO series upend the major rules of medievalist children’s
fantasy established by the Oxford School.
This and an analysis of Grossman’s Magician series demonstrate the
chapter’s argument that adult fantasy’s disruption is to critique the lies of
childhood fantasy that require reconciliation in order to become successful
adults. She notes that while these works
critique and acknowledge the dangers in children’s fantasy as shaped by the
Oxford School, they conclude that the feelings evoked by them still matter and
that they provide access to an enchantment that allows us to change the
world. While I applaud the feeling
behind this salvific argument and its ringing rhetoric in the closing lines of
the chapter, it obscures the fate of the only non-white character analyzed, the
death of Oscar Wao as he sacrifices himself to discover beauty (discussed at
the beginning of the chapter).
Cecire continues
her project to save children’s fantasy in her conclusion by pointing to three
ways in which non-white/male/heterosexual readers have responded to the
genre—fan fiction, disidentification, and published revisionist fantasy. She concludes with her hope (and one shared
by this reviewer) that criticism of the genre will lead to more productive ways
to re-enchant the world through its stories.
In a perfect world, I would wish for a tighter connection between the
chapters, but Cecire has offered a wealth of analytical suggestions for
scholars and fantasy authors to consider and explore further.
Laura Dull
Delta College
