Educating the Moral Imagination: The Fantasy Literature of George MacDonald, C.S. Lewis, and Madeline L'Engle

This thesis explores the education of the moral imagination through the fantasy literature of George MacDonald and two authors he directly influenced, C.S. Lewis, and Madeleine L'Engle. Though moral education is the oldest curriculum, and considered by many, from Plato to the present, to be the ultimate aim in education, much of academic literary discourse and contemporary classroom practice ignores moral education. We excel in reading literature through various theoretical lenses, and teach for intellectual and stylistic excellence but, ironically, ignore too often literature's most serious purpose: to teach virtue. To the extent that this is so, we are failing to equip children and young adults with what they need most: literary nourishment that facilitates the development of spiritual well-being. This inquiry is addressed to such a gap in the curriculum: the need to educate the imagination with healing stories of courage and hope, and the need to do so with an imaginative pedagogy that encourages moral fortitude. Unlike rationalistic discourse, which alienates learners, I argue that MacDonald, Lewis, and L'Engle nurture the ethical human being with an education into the "feeling intellect." I describe how they achieve this in a subversion of the cultural privileging of the traditionally viewed "masculine" values of reason, autonomy, and egotistical power and, concomitantly, by a celebration of the traditionally viewed "feminine" values of imagination, interdependence, and humility. In the six chapters that make up the body of this work, I explore how MacDonald, Lewis, and L'Engle nurture the moral imagination: one, their ethical pattern of humility as grounded in the moral imagination of the Christian Gospel, particularly as articulated by John Milton, and that of William Wordsworth; two, the childlike heroic in George MacDonald; three, the "feminine" heroic in C.S. Lewis; four, the mythic understanding of heroism in Madeleine L'Engle; five, theoretical curriculum implications for the imaginative education of these three authors; and six, practical pedagogical interpretations of teaching this heroic fantasy literature in the classroom. Together, these chapters are intended to help teachers explore educating the moral imagination through fantasy literature.