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When Fairy Tales Get Grim: A Child’s War on Adulthood in MacDonald’s The Princess and Curdie (1883)
Though a sequel to MacDonald’s justly celebrated fairy tale, The Princess and the Goblin (1872), The Princess and Curdie is a much darker look into the forking paths of innocence and experience than his earlier book. Indeed, as his penultimate book of fiction (only Lilith would follow it), we find MacDonald at the end of his writing career, much as Lemuel Gulliver returned to his travels for a fourth and final adventure in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726). And like that famous work of fantasy, MacDonald can scarcely hide his scorn for the Yahoos (Gulliver’s humans) who have willingly debased themselves into all manner of senseless, sensual animals.
As Gulliver writes at the end of Part IV, “And although it be hard for a Man late in Life to remove old Habits; I am not altogether out of Hopes in some Time to suffer a Neighbour Yahoo in my company, without the Apprehensions I am yet under of his Teeth or his Claws” (266). In many ways, The Princess and Curdie is his final attempt to seek out a few reasonable “Neighbours” before quitting the world entirely, however little such animals are inclined to appreciate, much less understand, his moral outlook.
This might also explain why, a few years later in 1893, MacDonald wrote his essay, “The Fantastic…
