George MacDonald's Doors: Suspended Telos and the Child Believer

Abstract

George MacDonald's The Princess and the Goblin (1872) is frequently read as a reflection of the scandalous theological doctrine conventionally attached to the author's name, the principle of universalism. But if the fairy tale seems to serve up an optimistic teleology of faith—belief triumphant, no matter the long odds—it also undermines its own project. The very overwrought Christian symbols that most seem to depict MacDonald's universalism in fact suggest its opposite, imagining spiritual progress and individual growth as contingent, indeterminate, and perpetually in process. Recognizing that representations of progress in MacDonald's Princess books are compromised at best and deliberately diverted, more likely, reveals a surprisingly inconsistent treatment of childhood, which he imagines not—or not just—as the telos of spiritual growth but also as a state of suspended development. In this way, The Princess and the Goblin endorses the concept of terminal spirituality while theorizing religious subjectivity as an intermittent temporal process.