Phanopoeia: In the Shadow of the Snow Queen
Wendy
Donawa
University
of Victoria
I must
seem something of a wooly mammoth to my students when
I point out that my childhood unfolded prior to widespread
television; external stimuli to my imagination were
limited in a way subsequent media generations find
difficult to visualize. But I recall most vividly
how compellingly and repeatedly I was drawn to one
of the few books in our home—a 1908 publication
of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales, lavishly
illustrated by Edmund Dulac, sent by my father’s
Scottish great-aunts when he was a young child.
How
I pored over the intricate details of this book;
how it enchanted me, provoked me, if you will—not
because I needed help with the narrative—for
after a first reading,
I
knew what happened—but for something I
could not name, and still struggle to describe.
I was possessed by the sense that there is a
more-ness to the world: not only the
mysterious possibility of beauty, or the unpredictable
unfolding of events, but also an intractable
and unfathomable sadness. |
 |
 |
I
felt, in a completely instinctive and inarticulate
way, that if I gave myself over to these images,
I might come to understand this more-ness. And
I think so still; I agree with Dwayne Huebner
(1999) that to be human is to transform experience
into significant symbols, that our awareness
of language makes our consciousness available
to the world; I agree with Adrienne Rich (2002)
that the multiplicity of the poetic image offers
revelation, and is a way of learning and knowing
(43). This more-ness is what I understand by
phanopoeia,
as I respond to Rebecca’s and Leah’s
engagement with ways of evoking underlying memory
and imagination, and of divining touchstones
for poetic and curricular meaning. |
I teach literature now, mainly to education
students, and I often begin my children’s
literature course with a reading of Hans Christian
Andersen’s (1908) Snow Queen—a
self-indulgent choice, as it’s a personal
favourite. I like to share it for its wealth
of imagery, its openness to interpretation,
and here, for its applicability to our theme
of provoking curriculum. The images and representations
of mythic, archetypal experience seem to me
to offer transcendent moments, opportunities
to see how things might be other than they are;
they offer ways to hold back the rising tide
of educational means-and-ends values cloaked
in scientific, developmental, and technological
language.
|
 |
But I am almost always disappointed,
although not surprised, that, initially, students
do not take to The Snow Queen
at all. Too long, where’s it going, what’s
the point? they complain. Why all the unconnected
adventures? Too much description, too many obtuse
encounters. And indeed, the cadence is alien
in a sound-byte, media-oriented era. So the challenge
is to share with them the pleasures of listening for
the delicious inventiveness, the dark ironies, the
Lewis-Caroll-like nonsense, the pervasive existential
melancholy unweaving the didactic Christian material.
Such a reading offers an antidote to Adrienne Rich’s
(2002: 149) observation that in an era dominated by
marketing and capital, subtleties vanish, and complex
relations are reduced to banal stereotypes. The devaluing
of critical thought accompanies the devaluing of language,
its flattening and impoverishment, and its collapse
into the shallow and obvious. As Dwayne Huebner (1999)
puts it, when text is replaced by textbook, our interpretive
ability is diminished.
So the
reward is our coming to hear that the dreamlike and
startling qualities of the Snow Queen
narrative are Andersen’s voice, to hear that it is a voice, and a way of being, worth listening to. To
understand a reader’s capacity to listen to
undercurrents, to subtext, to Rebecca’s sideshadows,
is to invite tolerance for the uncertain, the ambiguous,
the disturbing. To evoke and provoke.
Andersen
summons our attention in his first sentence: “Now
we are about to begin, and you must attend, and when
we get to the end of the story you will know more”(1).
The story is a classic circular journey, its central
image the journey made by an immature protagonist
forced to leave home, to encounter tests and obstacles,
and finally to return home transformed by the crucible
of experience.
And it strikes me that this is
also a central energy of pedagogy, for however a trajectory
of knowledge and experience may bring us to a new
place, it also brings us home to our changed selves.
So, how can the poetic and archetypal images, the
phanopoeia,
of the Snow Queen in/form our memory, perception and
imagination? How can it offer touchstones in our pedagogical
worlds?
 |
The
narrative, patterned with dark and light, begins
with a cosmic encounter, angels and goblins.
The goblins have invented a dark mirror that
mocks and projects, which reflects only the
world’s ugliness and deformity. The goblins
fly the mirror too near heaven, and it shatters,
its shards flying about the world to lodge in
human hearts and eyes. In terms of our own lived,
embodied, politically structured lives, those
shards reflect the fear and projection of Otherness;
they foreclose empathy or understanding; they
justify visions of racism, misogyny, hegemony
and bigotry of all stripes.
|
Meanwhile,
the child protagonists, Gerda and Kay, play innocently
in their little rose-bowered garden, their Eden. But
it is Kay in whom flying fragments of the shattered
mirror lodge. Kay becomes a “bad” child,
hardhearted, defiant, and disobedient. So far, a conventional
Christian storyline. Or is it? Must innocence be ignorance?
What are the consequences of knowledge? For it is
the knowledge of previously unknown evil that provokes,
then overshadows, Kay’s own childhood curriculum
of devout and unquestioning innocence. Forbidden knowledge
arouses Kay’s ambition and his intellectual
hunger; it drives him out “into the wide world”
(a continual refrain) where we must all eventually
fare as we can.
And there
is a certain grandeur to Kay’s misdeeds, for
the clever boy is abducted by the
Snow Queen and taken to the vast, mathematical perfection
of her palace, its frozen centre “the Mirror
of Reason...the best and only one in the world”
(67). The Snow Queen’s beauty suggests the seductive
appeal and pristine aesthetic of pure rationality.
Her icy kisses ensure Kay’s allegiance, but
they take his innocence; they sever him from his origins
and his childhood loyalties; they leave him ungrounded,
incapable of heartfelt engagement , his loving but
limited childhood quite forgotten.
What does
Kay’s dilemma convey of the appeal of pure reason,
of unadulterated abstraction, of the seductive, authoritative
way of knowing that has held the academy in its icy
embrace for centuries? “Uncontaminated”
by the feeling life, by subjectivity, the rational
voice denies the subjectivity of which it is made;
it denies the interests and the power that are at
stake; it excludes all that is embodied, biological,
and specific, all that is Other. It obscures its relation
to any non-logical processes by which its knowledge
is achieved, so that the domain of knowledge production,
like the society in which it is embedded, is “befouled
with inequalities of power” (Rich, 2002: 117).
End justifies means, as we find in curriculum that
has become, as Rebecca says “handmaiden to conservative
and paranoid reforms.” In just such a way, a
culture is created that maintains inequalities of
power as effectively as any brute force might (Rich,
2002: 51).
So, what
alternatives might be suggested by the child Gerda,
whose quest it is to seek Kay? Gerda is the archetypal
child-soul, utterly vulnerable in the wide world Kay
longs for, her only strength her unknowing innocence.
Gerda is a problematic image for feminists. Her innocence
is conflated with her goodness, and suggests a life
without evident power or control, the life of a “good”
woman, unable to act in the public domain, guided
only by innocence and intuition. Nonetheless, Gerda
is the active agent and the rescuer in this tale,
suggesting that intuition and the heart’s ties
also imply ways of knowing, and offer another pathway
to agency and wisdom. Perhaps she illustrates the
“poaching” Rebecca describes; Gerda deconstructs
the womanly virtues of goodness and uses them to disrupt
the powers that thwart her quest.
 |
Gerda’s
search for Kay is a purely instinctual one,
and follows an elaborate pattern of capture
and escape, of darkness and light. Moreover,
each stage takes her further from her flowering
childhood garden into successive underworlds
of the violent and murderous, the primitive
and elemental.
The
lonely, befuddled old witch who first captures
Gerda has a garden of magic speaking flowers
who tell the child of the fleeting nature of
joy, of thwarted love, of the melancholy, narcissism
and despair of the real world. And they also
reveal that the lost Kay is not, as feared,
dead. This syncope unravels Gerda’s enchantment,
and she escapes from her delusions and illusions
to the “real” world of power and
politics and possible community.
|
| |
|
| She
eventually finds herself at an opulent and learned
court, the princess of which is so accomplished
that she “has read all the newspapers
in the world and forgotten them again, so clever
is she” (34). The ultimate in civility,
the courtiers, although elaborately ritualistic,
are kindly too, in their way, and they equip
Gerda extravagantly for her onward journey.
But there is something effete and bloodless
about this court too, its inhabitants so elaborately
learned, but shielded from the untidy vigour
of daily life. So impotent are they that at
night the sleeping courtiers cannot even dream
without assistance from the animal dream world.
The court’s refinement is not really Leah’s
logopoeia, a dance of the intellect; it doesn’t have the
energy and sinew to be a poetics,
a making,
at all. It is not a house of being; it cannot
be provoked.
|
 |
 |
And
how might this courtly image speak to our curricular
concerns? Any educational movement, to have
vigor and longevity, must have intellectual
and theoretical underpinnings, but what of ever-more-refined,
subtle and self-referring conceptual ramifications
that eventually seal themselves off from the
active domains in which they should be embedded?
“To be heard in the halls of high theory,”
says Patti Lather (1996: 526), “one must
speak the language of those who live there.”
But to work with teachers in the difficult world
of practice is to become aware of a current
of impatience with academia’s insistence
on strong theoretical curricular grounding.
Let the wordspinners stay trapped in the palace
of discourse with its elaborate protocols of
tenure and promotion, say those in the field;
let them stay trapped with the princess who
has read all the newspapers in the world and
forgotten them again.
|
 |
The provisional nature of “civilization”
and the insufficiency of pure theory is shown
by the next episode in the tale, for deep in
the forest, that unconscious domain where all
that is dreaded and unknown lurks, Gerda’s
golden coach is ambushed, her servants are murdered,
and Gerda is captured and taken to the Robber
stronghold. If the court is an elegant dream,
the robbers’ castle is the cannibalistic
shadow stuff of nightmare. Against the orderly
refinement and decorum of the court, Anderson
sets actual, animating sources of power: violence,
savagery, appetite and drive unfettered by law
or scruple.
|
And if Gerda
encounters the dark shadow of civilization, she also
meets her own shadow in the little robber girl. Andersen
takes pains to point out that the little robber girl
is about Gerda’s age and size, but stronger,
and darker. She is “all that gets suppressed
in the process of becoming a decent civilized adult”
(Le Guin, 1979: 60), everything Gerda is not, and
that “good” children are not—headstrong,
amoral, ingenious, unscrupulous. She does all the
things good children might, in their darkest hearts,
wish to do—she torments her animals, lies to
her mother, helps herself to Gerda’s pretty
possessions. But because the robber girl’s desires
are authentic, and her will unconstrained, her passions
have energy and agency, and it is she who equips Gerda
and engineers her
escape on her prescient speaking reindeer, almost
an animal familiar. And frankly, the darkly passionate
little robber girl, seething with qualities repressed,
denied, or unacknowledged by good children, is a great
deal more interesting than innocent, passive Gerda.
|
 |
But how
do we help our students recognize and incorporate
their shadows, so that they can integrate authentic
desire, the capacity to imagine alternatives, the
relation of knowledge to self-knowledge, and a transcendent
sense of the “more-ness” possible in their
lives? And how consciously do we model this process
ourselves? How effectively do we discern the light
and dark energies of curriculum? The discourse of
learning theory is an inadequate conceptual tool for
thinking about education (Huebner, 1999, chapter 26),
its language more concerned with control and behaviour
than with the meaning of life.
Gerda escapes
north with her faithful reindeer, again vulnerable
and adrift in an increasingly wild environment as
she draws nearer to the oblivious Kay. Once more she
encounters shadows of civilization, but generative
ones this time: instinctively wise primitives, women
attuned to survival in a harsh environment. Here instinct
is not blind, but practical, wise and generous, and
Gerda is sent on the last stage of her journey.
Barefoot
in the palace of the Snow Queen, Gerda at length finds
Kay. Her hot tears of love melt the mirror fragments
in his eye and heart; the innocent intuitive self
and the intellectual rational self are reunited. Thus
whole, they are able to retrace the whole reverse
journey of Gerda’s quest to arrive transformed,
mature and integrated, where they first began.
Resolution
is effected through the interruptions, the syncopes
that Rebecca and Leah evoke; the disruption of innocence
by knowledge, of knowledge by excessive refinement,
of refinement by primal savagery, and of all these,
by a recognition of the shadow and the wisdom of the
loving heart. For if the multiplicity of imagery offers
a way of knowing, it offers a way of unknowing too.
The subtlety, expressiveness and complexity that serve
ideology also weave threads that can effect their
own unraveling, subtexts that can resist, deconstruct,
“write back” (Ashcroft, Griffith &
Tiffin, 1989) its original intentions, text that can
be “read against” itself (Schweikart,
1998: 197).
What, then, is foreclosed, in the
life of the mind and spirit, in curriculum, when phanopoiea
is dissolved by instrumental language, when discourse
is robbed of image? What options, multiplicities,
and potential disappear when the metaphors by which
we live and make meaning are flattened into stereotype?
When “language itself collapses into shallowness”
(Rich, 2002: 149), we lose the facets and doubles
and reflections and shadows of images that are our
spiritual capital, and our pedagogical capital too.
Those evocative images on the edge of meaning are
not just for the isolated visionary, but for the collective,
says Adrienne Rich (p. 117), who speaks searingly
to the resulting overall impoverishment of human imagination
and intelligence:
Waste.
Waste. The watcher’s eye put out, hands
of the builder severed, brain of the maker starved
those who
could bind, join, reweave, cohere, replenish
now at
risk in this segregate republic
locked
away out of sight and hearing, out of mind, shunted
aside
those needed
to teach, advise, persuade, weigh arguments
those urgently
needed for the work of perception
work of
the poet, the astronomer, the historian, the architect
of new streets
work of
the speaker who also listens
meticulous
delicate work of reaching the heart of the desperate
woman, the desperate man
--never
to be finished, still unbegun work of repair--it cannot
be done without them
and where are they now?
(Rich, 1991: 11)
That
Unlikely Green
Seen from
the coulee’s scoured edge
in the
hot wind
that bristles
its scruffy pelt,
marvel
that anything fluid
could so
burrow the valley,
could so
insinuate that gleaming celadon curve.
Walk the
river’s edge
where scrub
and root entangle overhead
and wedge
the astonished trees
inscribing
winter’s roil and floodwrack.
Suspended
over the
river’s fluent drift,
a flotilla
of white pelicans
floats
the air.
A heart,
foolish hermeneut,
could open
to their floppity grace;
could yearn
after that unlikely green
threading
archeologies of loss;
could imagine
it to be more
than its
meandering
tough
geographical
self.
—Donawa,
2002
Resources
Alberta Language Arts Curriculum
Guides and Program of Studies, 2002.
Andersen, H. C. (1908). Stories
from Hans Andersen. [Illustr. Edmund Dulac.] London: Hodder & Stoughton.
Ashcroft, B., Griffiths, G., &
Tiffin, H. (1989). The empire writes back: Theory
and practice in post-colonial literatures. London:
Routledge.
Bruner, J. (1990). Acts of meaning.
Cambridge, MS: Harvard University Press
Donawa, W. (2002). That unlikely
green. Unpublished poem. Victoria, British Columbia.
Elias, J. (1999). The prayer cycle. [CD]. Sony.
Finke, L. A. (1992). Feminist
theory, women's writing. Ithaca and London: Cornell
University Press.
Findley, T. (1990). Inside memory:
Pages from a writer’s notebook. Toronto:
Harper Flamingo Canada.
Foucault, M. (1984). What is an
author? In P. Rabinow (Ed). The Foucault reader.
New York: Pantheon Books.
Friedman, S. (1994). Craving stories:
Narrative and lyric in contemporary theory and women’s
long poems. In L. Keller & C. Miller (Eds.), Feminist
measures: Soundings in poetry and theory. Ann Arbor,
MI: University of Michigan Press. 15–42.
Grumet, M. (1988). Bitter milk:
Women and teaching. Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press.
Havel,V. (1997). The art of the
impossible: Politics as morality in practice. Toronto: Knopf.
Hirshfield, J. (1998). Nine gates:
Entering the mind of poetry. New
York: Harper
Huebner, D., Hillis, V. (Ed.), &
Pinar, W. [Introd.]. (1999). The lure of the transcendent:
The collected essays of Dwayne. E. Huebner.
Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. [I have cited Dwayne
Huebner from course readings and discussions offered
during a doctoral seminar he taught at the University
of Victoria, summer, 1998. The 1999 date refers to
the subsequent publication of the course readings
by Lawrence Erlbaum.]
Lather, P. (1996). Troubling clarity:
The politics of accessible language. Harvard Educational
Revue, 60, 525–545.
Le Guin, U. (1979). The child and
the shadow. In U. Le Guin, The language of the
night. New York: Perigee. 59–71.
Luce-Kapler, R.
(in press). The gardens where she dreams. Ottawa,
ON: BorealisPress.
Morson, G. (1994).
Narrative and freedom: The shadows of time. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Nussbaum, M. (1990). Love’s
knowledge: Essays on philosophy and literature.
Oxford: Oxford.
Pinar, W. (2000). “Strange
fruit: race, sex, and an autobiography of alterity,”
in P. Trifonas (Ed.) Revolutionary pedagogies:
Cultural politics, instituting education, and the
discourse of theory.
New York: Routledge. 30-46.
Pinar, W. Reymolds, W., Slattery,
P., and Taubman, P. (1995). Understanding curriculum:
An introduction to the study of historical and contemporary
curriculum discourses. NewYork: Peter Lang.
Rich, A. (2002). Arts of the possible:
Essays and conversations. New
York: W. W. Norton.
Rich, A. (1991). An atlas of the
difficult world: Poems 1988-1991. New
York: W. W. Norton.
Schweikart, P. (1998). Reading ourselves:
Towards a feminist theory of reading. In R. C. Davis
& Schleiffer (Eds.), Contemporary literary
criticism: Literary and cultural studies. New York: Longman.197–219.
Sullivan, R. (2001). Labyrinth
of desire: Women, passion, and romantic obsession. Toronto: Harper Collins.
*Quotations from
Hildegard von Bingen appear on the CD Vision, produced by Tony McAnany for Angel records. (1994)
About the Author:
Wendy Donawa, Ph. D.,
has spent most of her adult life in the Caribbean
as pedagogue, artist/illustrator, poet, and museum
curator. She is now an independent scholar, teaching
for the College of the Rockies (Cranbrook), The University
of Lethbridge, Alberta, and The University of Victoria,
British Columbia.
E-mail: wdonawa@uvic.ca
