\"The Shadow-Self and Coming of Age in George MacDonald’s Phantastes, Ursula Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea, and J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan\"

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The Shadow-Self and Coming of Age in George MacDonald’s Phantastes,

Ursula Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea, and J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan1

Kris Swank

The nature of fantasy literature allows authors to employ shadows as physical manifestations of

characters’ inner struggles. Vogler (1992, p.83) states that the shadow usually represents

the dark side, the unexpressed, unrealized, or rejected aspects of something. Often it’s

the home of the suppressed monsters of our inner world. Shadows can be all the things

we don’t like about ourselves, all the dark secrets we can’t admit, even to ourselves.

Three fantasy novels that use the shadow in coming-of-age tales are George MacDonald’s

Phantastes (1858), Ursula Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea (1968), and Peter and Wendy (1911),

James M. Barrie’s novelization of his 1904 stage play, Peter Pan. In each of these works, a

young protagonist interacts with his shadow-self at a critical junction in life. Two are successful

in transitioning toward maturity. Peter Pan is famously “the boy who wouldn’t grow up”.

Although all three works feature a manifested shadow, each differs on the shadow’s meaning and

the best way to cope with it, reflecting each author’s own ideas about the nature of our inner

monsters and their role in reaching maturity.

1 Research paper for Fantasy 101 course taught by Dr. Dimitra Fimi, University of Wales Institute—Cardiff,

submitted 15 July 2011.

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Seven Deadly Sins in Phantastes

For Congregationalist minister George MacDonald, the meaning of the shadow, as well as the

solution for coping with it, was based on Christian principles.

In his seminal 1858 novel, Phantastes, MacDonald’s protagonist, Anodos, unexpectedly finds

himself in Fairy Land upon his twenty-first birthday. Amidst his several adventures, he opens a

cupboard out of which rushes a dark human figure. “Where is he?” Anodos asks an ogress

seated in the room. She points, “There on the floor behind you […] It is only your shadow that

has found you. Everybody’s shadow is ranging up and down looking for him. I believe you call it

by a different name in your world” (pp. 111-12).

As Nick Page discusses in an annotated edition of Phantastes (MacDonald, 2008, p. n112), there

has been much debate over the name of the shadow in our world. “For Wolff the Shadow

represented ‘pessimistic and cynical disillusionment’; for Raeper it is the blighting effect of

reality; David Robb calls it a form of dejection or despair”. For Page himself, the shadow

represents selfishness, self-centeredness. Chris Brawley (2006) relates the shadow to

possessiveness (p.106), disenchantment (p. 107) and pride (p.108).

While Anodos’ shadow may have multiple and layered meanings, a close reading of the text

reveals that the shadow appears or intensifies whenever Anodos commits one of the Christian

Seven Deadly Sins: pride, sloth, envy, greed, gluttony, lust and anger (see Table 1).

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Table 1. Anodos, The Shadow, and the Seven Deadly Sins—

Pride – The shadow makes its first appearance in the ogress’ hut. Though she warns Anodos not

to open the mysterious cupboard, “The prohibition, however, only increased my desire to see”

(MacDonald, 2008, p.110). After leaving the hut, the shadow at his heels, Anodos begins “to feel

something like satisfaction in the presence of my shadow. I began to be rather vain of my

attendant” (p.117).

Later, the shadow reappears when Anodos slays a giant: “feelings of pride arose in my bosom,

when I looked down on the mighty form that lay dead by my hand” (p.234).

Sloth – Sloth is described in early Church writings as sadness, spiritual torpor, restlessness, or

despair. Anodos’ shadow has the power to wither grass and scorch flowers “hopeless of any

resurrection” (p.114). It can blot out the sun (p.115). The weight of the shadow behind him

causes Anodos to “walk heartlessly along” (p.114), to walk “listlessly and almost hopelessly

along” (p.122).

Envy – When Anodos meets the sad knight again, he envies his friend. The knight “has plunged

into the torrent of mighty deeds” (i.e. virtuous behavior). “No shadow followed him. He had not

entered the dark house; he had not had time to open the closet door […] when round slid [my]

shadow and inwrapt my friend; and I could not trust him” (pp.116-17).

Greed – Anodos meets a maiden with a crystal globe, her greatest treasure. “The shadow glided

round and inwrapt the maiden. It could not change her. But my desire to know about the globe

[…] grew irresistible. I put out both my hands and laid hold of it […] it burst in our hands” (pp.

117-19).

Gluttony – When Anodos enters a Fairy Palace, he sits down to an enormous meal where every

food or wine he desires is brought to him by invisible hands. “I had eaten and drank more

heartily and joyfully than ever since I entered Fairy Land” (p.131). But the next morning, “did I

look round to see if [the shadow] was behind me: it was scarcely discernible. But its presence,

however faintly revealed, sent a pang to my heart” (p.133).

Lust – Anodos’ desire for the Marble Lady summons his shadow: “In the night I dreamed that,

walking close by one of the curtains, I was suddenly seized with the desire to enter, and darted in

[…] standing in marble coldness and rigidity upon a black pedestal in the extreme left corner –

my lady of the cave; the marble beauty who sprang from her tomb or her cradle at the call of my

songs. While I gazed in speechless astonishment and admiration, a dark shadow, descending

from above like the curtain of a stage gradually hid her entirely from my view. I felt with a

shudder that this shadow was perchance my missing demon” (pp. 177-78).

Anger – When Anodos meets a dopplegänger knight, he immediately wants to fight him.

Following him instead, Anodos seethes, “Would that I had at least struck him, and had had my

death-blow in return! Why then do I not call to him to wheel and defend himself?” The

dopplegänger and the shadow are one and the same (pp.239-41).

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Just as the commission of the Seven Deadly Sins gives the demon-shadow strength, it disappears

whenever Anodos exhibits one of the Seven Heavenly Virtues: prudence, temperance, justice,

fortitude, charity, hope and faith. As Anodos prepares to help two brothers battle giants to save

the countryside, his shadow is absent (i.e. charity, justice and fortitude; ch.20). His shadow is

also absent as he reads books and gains wisdom in the Fairy Palace library (i.e. prudence; Ch.11

and pp.171-72). When the maiden, whose crystal globe he broke, rescues him from a tower, her

forgiveness gives him hope; the shadow disappears (pp.240-47). Finally, when Anodos sacrifices

his own life to save others from false idols (i.e. charity, fortitude, justice and faith, pp. 258-263),

the shadow vanishes for good.

As Anodos turns from sin and begins down the path of Christian virtue, he is reborn into his own

world, having proven himself worthy to take up his duties as an adult. The visible proof of his

newfound maturity is the absence of his demon shadow. In its place is only “a natural shadow,

that goes with every man who walks in the sun” (p.270). Still, he worries:

Could I translate the experience of my travels [in Fairy Land], into common life? […]

Even yet, I find myself looking round sometimes with anxiety, to see whether my

shadow falls the right away from the sun or no. I have never yet discovered any

inclination to either side. (p.271)

Anodos has passed from adolescence to burgeoning maturity, but the process of avoiding sin and

remaining virtuous is a lifelong task.

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Carl Jung and A Wizard of Earthsea

For Ursula Le Guin, a proponent of psychologist Carl Jung, the shadow-self, though a

manifestation of an individual’s darker nature, is not something to be avoided; it is a vital part of

the Self to be embraced and accepted.

In her 1968 novel A Wizard of Earthsea, a young goatherd named Ged exhibits great natural

talent for wizardry. He is clever, quick to learn, a star pupil at the School for Wizards on Roke

Island. But he is also full of adolescent willfulness, pride, arrogance and envy. Three times these

traits drive Ged to perform magic beyond his skill and maturity level (pp. 30-31, pp.63-64, and

pp.80-81), resulting in the unleashing of a dark shadow-beast into the world. Although the

Archmage Gensher tells Ged, “It is the shadow of your arrogance, the shadow of your ignorance,

the shadow you cast” (p.68), Ged at first does not, or will not, recognize that the shadow is part

of himself. He fears it could possess him and turn him into a gebbeth, “a puppet doing the will of

that evil shadow” (p. 67). He flees across the seas and islands of Earthsea, fearing that if it

possessed him, the shadow would absorb his magical powers and use them for evil.

In her essay ‘The Child and the Shadow’, Le Guin (Language, 1978, p. 60) explains that in

Jungian psychology, the shadow is an archetype for the unconscious:

The man is all that is civilized –learned, kindly, idealistic, decent. The shadow is all that

gets suppressed in the process of becoming a decent, civilized adult. The shadow is the

man’s thwarted selfishness, his unadmitted desires, the swearwords he never spoke, the

murders he didn’t commit.

In other words, the shadow represents one of man’s “inner monsters”.

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For MacDonald, the shadow-self is a manifestation of sin, something to be avoided and dispelled

by virtue. When his protagonist, Anodos, rids himself of his demon shadow, he regains his vigor

and vitality. But as Slethaug (1986, p.329) points out, when Ged flees from his shadow-self, he

“loses his youthful vitality, his handsomeness, and his quickness at learning, his innocent spirit .”

Le Guin (1978, p.64) explains, “The less you look at [the shadow...], the stronger it grows, until

it can become a menace, an intolerable load, a threat within the soul”.

If separating from the shadow strengthens it and imperils the individual, then the appropriate

action is to mend the rift between self and shadow, as Slethaug (1986, p.329) explains:

The loosing of the shadow shows the disintegrated personality, for in the integrated self

the shadow – the selfish, uncivilized, emotional, erotic, antisocial instincts – is held in

check by the benevolent, rational, social response.

In the end, Ged learns to mend the rift. His old mentor, Ogion, tells him he must stop running,

turn around and face what is hunting him (Le Guin, 1993, p.120). Ged finally confronts his

shadow on the seas at the edge of the known world:

In silence, man and shadow met face to face and stopped. Aloud, and clearly, breaking

that old silence, Ged spoke the shadow’s name, and that same moment the shadow spoke

without lips or tongue, saying the same word: ‘Ged.’ And the two voices were one voice.

Ged reached out his hands, dropping his staff, and took hold of his shadow, of the black

self that reached out to him. Light and darkness met, and were joined, and were one.

(p.164)

By accepting his dark side as a part of himself, and drawing on its strengths, Ged passes from

adolescence toward maturity and, in time, becomes the greatest archmage of Earthsea.

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Peter Pan and Sympathetic Magic

Peter Pan is the famous not-coming-of-age story by J.M. Barrie. Peter is also confronted with his

shadow-self at a critical juncture in his life, but unlike Anodos and Ged, Peter’s actions work

toward maintaining the status quo of prolonged adolescence rather than helping to push the

maturation process forward. Barrie uses an ancient magical interpretation of the shadow-self to

reflect Peter’s anxiety about losing his freedom with the onset of maturity.

In Barrie’s novelization of his 1904 stage play, Peter and Wendy (1911), Peter Pan visits the

Darling children’s nursery to hear their mother tell them stories. Surprised by Mrs. Darling one

night, a startled Peter leaps out the window, but not before the dog-nurse, Nana, slams the

window shut. Too late to catch Peter, the window instead snaps off Peter’s shadow (pp.16-18). In

the published playscript for Peter Pan (Barrie, 1928, I, i: 60), Mr. Darling exclaims, “There is

money is this, my love. I shall take it to the British Museum tomorrow and have it priced”. Mrs.

Darling rolls up the shadow and puts it in a drawer. Eventually, Peter and the fairy Tinker Bell

come looking for his shadow.

In a moment he had recovered his shadow, and in his delight he forgot that he had shut

Tinker Bell up in the drawer. If he thought at all, but I don’t believe he ever thought, it

was that he and his shadow, when brought near each other, would join like drops of

water; and when they did not he was appalled. He tried to stick it on with soap from the

bathroom, but that also failed. A shudder passed through Peter and he sat on the floor and

cried. (Barrie, 1911, p.36)

His sobs wake Wendy and she asks him what the matter is. When Peter explains, Wendy offers

to sew the shadow onto his foot.

And he clenched his teeth and did not cry; and soon his shadow was behaving properly,

though still a little creased. ‘Perhaps I should have ironed it,’ Wendy said thoughtfully;

but Peter, boylike, was indifferent to appearances, and he was now jumping about in the

wildest glee. (p.39)

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And that’s it. The shadow, back under control, is barely mentioned again in either the novel or

the play script.2,

3

Most people who see or read Peter Pan find this scene a bit of comic fun. Some wonder at its

significance, as a 1905 report from poet Alfred Noyes (p.110) shows:

In the first scene of Peter Pan, I think there must be a sort of fairy philosophy behind the

fact that Peter himself is represented as being quite miserable about the loss of his own

shadow, and blissfully happy when he finds it again.

In fact, there was a ‘fairy philosophy’ at work. Steeped in Scottish stories of the paranormal from

an early age, Barrie often wrote about the supernatural. According to one contemporary critic,

“Barrie pours out almost at times, with a sob, his love of fairies and immortal emanations”

(Braybrooke, 1924, p.154). Barrie’s ideas about Peter and his shadow were based on another

supernatural concept: sympathetic magic.

In his famous study of ancient magic and religion, The Golden Bough, James G. Frazer (1922)

describes sympathetic magic and shadows:

[The] branch of sympathetic magic, which I have called Contagious Magic, proceeds

upon the notion that things which have once been conjoined must remain ever afterwards,

even when quite dissevered from each other, in such a sympathetic relation that whatever

is done to the one must similarly affect the other. (p.37)

Often [the savage] regards his shadow or reflection as his soul, or at all events as a vital

part of himself, and as such it is necessarily a source of danger to him. For if it is

trampled upon, struck, or stabbed, he will feel the injury as if it were done to his person;

and if it is detached from him entirely (as he believes that it may be) he will die. (p.189)

2 The shadow is mentioned twice more – when the children are flying to Neverland, and in the last scene when

Wendy recounts how she met Peter Pan – but those instances are negligible. 3 When Barrie was developing the play, he envisioned a greater role for Peter’s shadow which, for unknown reasons, never made it on the page or stage. This original play draft, entitled simply Anon: A Play, was easily found on http://www.jmbarrie.co.uk/ at the time this paper was written in 2011; unfortunately, it now (in 2015) seems to have been moved or removed.

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Barrie knew about sympathetic magic. A contemporary of Barrie’s, Frazer describes a tradition

of sympathetic magic in the Scottish Highlands “within living memory” (1922, p.18). Several

notes Barrie made in 1903 as he was developing the stage play, Peter Pan, reveal his familiarity

with the subject and that he considered writing several more scenes based upon it (see Table 2).4

Table 2. Barrie’s ‘Fairy Notes’ (1903), selected entries 5 –

64

Peter's shadow flung before he appears - dog sees & looks vainly for original - how abt

eating or cutting off shadow? (parents examine shadow left) see it was son (keep

shadow like photograph). Peter tugged at it & had to leave it like a cloak.

95

Girl suffering from want of her shadow - shadow also suffers, dwindles &c.

96

It might be Peter's shadow.

97

Suppose you cd hurt Peter by hurting his shadow, &c. (as in Indian fairy tale)

99

Similarly in last scene (nursery) shadow seen quivering {therefore} original is suffering

somewhere.

100

Rolling up shadow to take to get it sewn on (or cd it be rolled up without Peter being

rolled up?)

205

Last Act. P sorrowful believes children destroyed - then knows if girl's shadow left

behind is still warm = healthy - it is {therefore} she must be - mother & he excitedly

regard shadow - it limps, &c showing girl hurt foot.

4 Other notes show Barrie considered using shadows as psychopomps, escorts of the dead to the afterlife, a role which Barrie eventually gave to Peter himself (Barrie, 1911, p.11). 5 The notes are numbered in chronological order as Barrie wrote them; freely available on http://www.jmbarrie.co.uk/ at the time this paper was written (in 2011) they also now (in 2015) seem to have been moved or removed.

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210

Shadow of girl - P expected to find it cold - it's warm! Then she's not dead, &c.

401

Perhaps shadow of robber had been caught - now framed on wall. He is supposed often

to come after it &c {therefore} window guarded. Fairy? Father cynical on fairer [sic] -

it is really P's - he comes, gets it, flies about happy (ties on - lightning effects). Dog had

caught shadow.

402

Suppose he rolled it up - then got W to sew it on him.

405

"Fling out my shadow in ¿there"

Sympathetic magic explains Peter’s anxiety to reclaim his shadow. If “you cd hurt Peter by

hurting his shadow, &c. (as in Indian fairy tale)”, then Peter would be at the mercy of whoever

possessed it. Nana wants to bite it; Mr. Darling to exploit it; Mrs. Darling rolls it up and tucks it

away in the nursery. By keeping his shadow, the Darlings could keep Peter too.

Peter’s inner monsters are his conflicting desire for and fear of a traditional home-life.

Throughout, Peter is shown to vacillate between the two. He fled his own nursery the day he was

born because he hated that his parents were talking about him becoming a man someday (Barrie,

1911, p.42). Yet later he tried to return, but found the window barred against him (p.167). He

yearns for Wendy to come “mother” him in Neverland (p.50). Yet when Mrs. Darling offers to

adopt him, Peter declines: “Keep back, lady, no one is going to catch me and make me a man”

(p.252).

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By regaining control of his shadow, Peter regains control of himself. No one can make him

become a man. Ultimately, Peter eschews stability and the path to maturity for eternal

adolescence and the freedom of Neverland, shadow firmly sewn to his feet.

Conclusion

All three authors use the shadow-self as a symbol of the dark emotions, the inner monsters, of

adolescence. It is in the various coping strategies where theses authors differ the most.

MacDonald and Le Guin see confronting the shadow-self as a path toward maturity: MacDonald

through dispelling the darkness; Le Guin through accepting it. Barrie’s Peter Pan, on the other

hand, seeks to control his shadow in order to retain control over his freedom and avoid maturity.

Peter fears that anyone who controlled his shadow could make him become a man. MacDonald

and Le Guin would say, however, that no one can make a man but the man himself.

References

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