dreams of Valinor

"but when the magic faded, and the heartless Peter Pan flew away, and Wendy was left behind to watch from the window, then Ermengarde suddenly could not bear it."

i've loved Burnett's The Little Princess since the first time i read it years and years ago. the princess, the servant, the story life and the need to bear...i loved the way the story makes you believe that virtue still has its beauty and goodness, its reward.

i'd never really thought about all the other characters that Burnett left behind in the Select Seminary, and the fact that theirs was our (the reader's) true position, not the fairy-tale ending of Sara's. who flies away, and who stays to watch from windows? in all the times of reading Burnett's story, Sara's was the story that consumed and lifted, the life for which i ached. i never saw the spaces brimming to be filled in the other characters, until McKay's Wishing for Tomorrow, written as a sequel to that classic, relegated Sara to her proper peripheral position and gave voice to the pathos and romance of the other human lives around her.

there is still magic in this book, though not the sparkles of sumptious dresses and Indian rugs; still pathos, though not the sufferings of the ill-treated, fate-tossed martyr. the acts of kindness are not those of Sara bestowing largesse or Sara displaying her inhuman ability to love, but kindness from scrimping, messy young girls, at times grudgingly given but still carried out. it is virtue displayed not for the sake that we might admire the doer of the virtuous act, and in so doing localise virtue on a single character; it is virtue wrapped in brown paper and brushed aside, so that in treating it as if it is of little consequence and not worthy of great attention, virtue is naturalised and brought back to the human realm. virtue acknowledged casually, virtue that comes through amidst foibles, virtue that is prevented from feeling self-heroic - in these ways are virtue celebrated more than in the classic rendering of virtue in the suprahuman figure.

who is Sara in this modern world? a blue cloak, words on folded papers, a hand, a voice. she is banished further and further from the real - sent to a house by the sea, then over the seas to India. Sara has no more place in this age. were we to cling on to her, to the memory of her, she would be a bane to our lives, an influence on our minds and a spectral figure haunting our vision. we see a ghost if we believe in Sara, as Miss Minchin does. consumed, she sees the world with a memory of Sara, sees the works of Sara in all the things around her. but that world with its glory and visions can no longer illuminate our world. magic (and the belief in it) lies, evades, blinds us from seeing and appreciating what is really there. which is why Alice, the figure of perfect sense and earthliness, has no interest in fairy-tale Sara, and Tristram, the new owner of the house which brought the magic to Sara, can only experience her as a voice, a touch, splinters of contact with a being antecedent to his (our) world.

but when all is said, we have, and always will have, need of Sara. which is why we place her by the sea, across the sea, the very places where we have always placed all our hopes. much as the world may offer its marriages and happy endings, a tune remains in our minds, enchants us with its singing of distant lands and forgotten times; much as we enjoy the playfulness of the fresh tale, we remember the first story of a little girl who was a princess, who lost her father and became a servant, who told stories and believed in magic to get by, who made friends with a rat and a monkey, who crossed one door, and another another time, and became a princess again and lived happily ever after. we remember the story and stories of Sara flaming our minds and bringing the tears, and the ache that comes with all these stories of old. we are holding on, as Ermengarde did, to the blue cloak, to these signs of the past. and we wrap them all up and send them to a place out of sight and hence believeable, to the Land Beyond the Sea.