The heroes in Morris’s romances, like the heroes in the medieval romances he emulated, are knights who set forth in search of adventure, passing through castles, towns, and isolated cottages, battling other knights, rescuing ladies, swearing loyalty to leaders and companions, and encountering supernatural wonders like giants or sorceresses. They become embroiled in complicated questions of honor and often struggle to figure out who among the strangers they meet can be trusted and who cannot. A beautiful maiden might turn out to be a foul crone or even a serpent in disguise; a magnificent palace might conceal an ugly secret. As is often the case in romances, the Morris hero pursues a quest; he searches for a kidnapped lady, or a magical object or place. In The Well at the World’s End, Ralph, the youngest son of the king of Upmeads, leaves home without a particular goal in mind, but soon decides to seek the eponymous well, whose waters will renew a drinker’s youth and fortitude.
All of these elements are as familiar to us as cops and robbers, even if we’ve never heard of Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur or Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The iconography of medieval romance is woven into our world and our language. The knight in shining armor, the damsel in distress — these are half-mocking labels we use to tease people for acting out roles from an idealistic, outdated notion of chivalry. The Holy Grail or the dragon that requires slaying are metaphors invoked in newspaper or magazine articles to indicate that a particular goal or challenge has some extraordinary significance. Four hundred years ago, Cervantes mercilessly parodied the clichés of the romance in Don Quixote, but his mockery didn’t slow it down; romance mutated and evolved, manifesting in dozens of new forms: the gothic tale, magic realism, the road novel. It lives on in comic books, science fiction, movies and television series, even video games. Once you learn how to recognize it, you see it everywhere, especially in narratives (whatever the medium) that speak to the young.
Northrop Frye, one of the last great literary critics to flourish before the advent of structuralism, defined the classic romance as belonging to “the mythos of summer,” in which the essential element is “adventure.” This observation comes from Anatomy of Criticism, Frye’s attempt, in 1957, to devise a systematic, objective catalog of literary modes and forms. As a student at Oxford in the 1930s, Frye attended Lewis’s famous lectures on medieval literature, and I can’t help wondering if he recognized in himself the two qualities Lewis listed as the defining traits of the medieval thinker. The medieval scholar was “bookish,” Lewis wrote, and above all “an organizer, a codifier, a builder of systems. He wanted ‘a place for everything and everything in the right place.’”
Frye took this mentality to its logical extreme by devising a codification for all books, slotting the vast, multifarious body of English literature into a gridlike system of classifications. He called his approach “archetypal criticism.” Although it has since fallen out of fashion and at times seems almost pathologically optimistic (Frye describes his project as based on “the assumption of total coherence”), the aerial view it offers of literature’s evolution shows us connections not visible from any other angle.
Since the romance’s essential element is adventure, Frye observed that it is “necessarily a sequential and processional form.” Travel is its central metaphor. A beginning that involves the hero “setting forth” is more crucial to making a story a romance than whether that hero is a young man in armor, or a young man at all. “Of all fictions,” Frye wrote, “the marvelous journey is the one formula that is never exhausted, and it is this fiction that is employed as a parable in the definitive encyclopedic poem of the mode,” which is Dante’s Divine Comedy.
The Divine Comedy is a rare romance of middle age, beginning with its narrator midway through “the journey that is our life,” lost and desperately in need of someone to show him the path forward. Most romance, however, belongs to youth and speaks to the desire to get out in the world and prove oneself, which may be why the form proliferates most luxuriantly and in some of its purest strains in children’s fiction. I knew as a little girl that there were really two kinds of readers: those who liked Little Women and those who preferred The Phantom Tollbooth, but it wasn’t until I was much older and learned to think like a critic that I understood exactly where the difference lies: Little Women is a novel; The Phantom Tollbooth is a romance. Little House on the Prairie is a novel; The Wizard of Oz is a romance. Magic is, without a doubt, a fictional device you almost never see outside of romance, but not all romances are magical. Island of the Blue Dolphins has neither magic nor a traveling protagonist, but the main character’s journey from helpless child to self-sufficient adult, a destination reached via a series of often desperate but also exhilarating adventures, makes it a kind of romance, the romance of survival.
Frye defined his literary modes (they are: myth, romance, high mimetic, low mimetic, and ironic) according to the relationship between the main character and the reader. A hero who is superior “in kind” to the reader — in other words, a divine being — marks the story as a myth. A hero who is human, but possessed of superior rank and qualities, a king or other leader, is the sign of a high mimetic narrative, usually a tragedy or epic. The low mimetic hero, the figure at the center of most realistic novels and comedy, is the reader’s approximate equal. The ironic portrays characters we look down upon or pity. The classic hero of romance is human, like the high mimetic hero, but capable of “marvelous” actions. He inhabits “a world in which the ordinary laws of nature are slightly suspended,” and is assisted or hindered by “enchanted weapons, talking animals, terrifying ogres and witches, and talismans of miraculous power.”
Narnia and Middle-earth are worlds of this kind, and so is the Land of Oz and the wizarding community of the Harry Potter series. But the main characters in these books are not always capable of marvelous actions or singled out from the ordinary run of mortals. Harry, it’s true, has much in common with King Arthur in his boyhood; he is a hero with a special destiny as well as a past shrouded in mystery. But Dorothy Gale is no more than a plucky little American girl of unexceptional descent, and Milo, the listless hero of The Phantom Tollbooth, is distinguished only by the enigmatic package he receives at the moment when his chronic boredom seems about to blossom into full-fledged depression.
As for the Pevensie siblings, we do learn of a prophecy in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, a poem predicting that evil won’t be driven from the land until “Adam’s flesh and Adam’s bone” sit at “Cair Paravel in throne.” However, Lewis believed people ought to be discouraged from thinking of themselves as singled out for an extraordinary, exalted fate; that way lies the deadliest of the seven deadly sins, pride. In the Chronicles, it’s the selfish villains like Jadis and Digory’s uncle Andrew who talk of having “a high and a lonely destiny.” Narnia is meant to be ruled by human beings, and the Pevensies are simply the human beings who happen to come along to do it. Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy are ordinary children, much like the readers for whom the Chronicles were intended; it is Narnia that makes kings and queens out of them. In Frye’s terminology, the Pevensies are low mimetic characters, the kind of people routinely found in novels, but somehow they have stumbled into the realm of romance.