Jane Langton: goodness in fantasy

Jane Langton's The Fledgling was a 1981 Newbery Honor book. It is set in modern Concord, Massachusetts, where Thoreau became famous. Georgie is a girl of about 8 or 9 who loves geese, and wants to fly. She develops a relationship with a goose, and flies. It's a good read, for youngsters, or adults. It's about wanting to fly, and wishes. But the book is also about character, or goodness. Here's Langton's contrast of Eleanor, Georgie's step-cousin, who is being raised by Georgie's mother, Aunt Alex, and her stepfather, with Georgie:

How different they are, thought Aunt Alex, Eleanor and Georgie. Altogether different. And it isn't just that Georgie is younger. Georgie is different from Eleanor all the way through, from the inside out. Why, look at her, right now. She doesn't even know that she exists. She's just eyes and ears, that's all she is, just looking and listening. She doesn't think about herself at all. The world outside her rushes into her, and that's what she becomes. She doesn't think to herself, "This is me, Georgie." Instead she pulses with the sunrise and the rain and the geese flying over the house. She's in them, not outside them. She's more like a bird or a flower than a girl named Georgie.Whereas, Eleanor! Oh, Eleanor! Just look at Eleanor! Eleanor is all Eleanor! And everything outside Eleanor becomes Eleanor too -- sisters, brothers, uncles, aunts! She sucks us all in! There isn't anything else but Eleanor in all the world! Jane Langton, The Fledgling. New York: Harper, 1980. pp. 117-8 Aunt Alex is Georgie's mother. Eleanor is her husband's niece, and the two of them are raising Eleanor and Eddy. Georgie is her husband's stepdaughter.

A nosy woman has moved into the house next door. Alex's husband can't understand why she keeps coming around so much. Alex understands:
One day when Uncle Freddy was protesting a new Prawnish assault, yet another rap on the glass, some further pressure from next door, Aunt Alex had explained to him fiercely. "It's your goodness that attracts her, that's what it is. She can't stand it. She has to poke it and pinch it and squeeze it and try as hard as she can to squash it entirely. Only she can't. And it drives her mad. Jane Langton, The Fledgling. New York: Harper, 1980. pp. 119-120.

Langton is also the author of "The Weak Place in the Cloth: A Study of Fantasy for Children" (Fantasists on Fantasy, edited by Robert H. Boyer and Kenneth J. Zahorski. New York: Avon Books, 1984. pp. 163-179. Originally published in The Horn Book Magazine, October and December 1973, pp. 433-441). In this, Langton says that fantastic worlds "on the other side of the cloth" may be reached in eight different ways. Langton, herself, in this work of fantasy, uses one of her methods, a magic being which breaches the cloth between the real and the fantastic. That magic being is a goose.

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Jane Langton on types of fantasy

I have recently acquired Fantasists on Fantasy. It's a good book, containing essays by several authors of fantastic literature, including C. S. Lewis, George MacDonald, and J. R. R. Tolkien. An author I wasn't familiar with is Jane Langton. She writes:
. . . I've been sorting and categorizing a lot of old and new favorites to see if I can make some sort of sense out of them. The result is a modest set of conclusions concerning the three primary questions which each fantasy asks and answers What if? Then what? So what?
. . . What if rugs could fly? What if pigs could talk? Every writer of fantasy poses a what-if question that is the theme of his book. He can ask it in many ways, and all of these ways are different approaches to the dividing line between truth (the real world) and fantasy (the unreal world). For E. Nesbit, the dividing line was a piece of cloth. - pp. 165-6, emphasis in original.

Her essay attempts to categorize fantastic literature. Here's my summary of her eight categories.
Her first category does not, as she puts it, go through the cloth from the real to the other side. In this category, which she calls tall tales, reality is exaggerated. I don't have a good example. Hers is from a story where someone invents a device that attracts mice, like the Pied Piper's.

Her second category is when the characters go through the cloth, from the real to the fantastic side, by use of some device, such as the wardrobe in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis. As Langton says, sometimes it's not a device, but a person, like Mary Poppins. She also says that, in this kind of book, everything comes back to the real side at the end.

In the third type, the two worlds, fantastic and real, exist side-by-side, as in Norton's books about the Borrowers.

In the fourth, we are totally in the fantastic realm, in once-upon-a-time. Langton describes it:
If we were to place it vaguely in space and time, we would attach it to northern Europe and sometime between the fall of Rome and the invention of the internal-combustion engine, and populate it exclusively with wizards, witches, jesters, goose-girls, youngest sons, aristocrats of royal blood, absolute monarchs, and a scattering of peasantry. p. 169.

The fifth kind answers the what-if question "What if animals could talk?" The Wind in the Willows is an example.

In her sixth kind, characters go to a different time and return.

In her seventh, there are ghosts.

Her eighth category is science fiction, in which, she says "the curtain hangs between a finite present and a kind of infinite future, a time in which the possibilities of knowledge will be infinitely extended or in which nature itself will be discovered to be infinitely varied." p. 173.

-Jane Langton, "The Weak Place in the Cloth: A Study of Fantasy for Children" Fantasists on Fantasy, edited by Robert H. Boyer and Kenneth J. Zahorski. New York: Avon Books, 1984. pp. 163-179. Originally published in The Horn Book Magazine, October and December 1973, pp. 433-441 and 570-578. The material above is from the first part only.

Thanks for reading.