[In the following essay, Auerbach and Knoepflmacher examine Mopsa the Fairy against the backdrop of Victorian notions of the domestic role of women, focusing in particular on the novel's ending.]

Jean Ingelow (1820-1897) had, like Christina Rossetti, already achieved a high reputation as a poet before she began to publish children's fiction. Indeed, her 1863 volume, Poems, was so favorably reviewed that Rossetti, “aware of a new eminent name having arisen among us,” immediately, and deferentially, pronounced Ingelow to be “a formidable rival to most men, and to any woman” (The Rossetti Macmillan Letters, 19). Yet the two writers, together with Dora Greenwell, the third major aspirant to the poetic throne vacated by the death of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, became rather friendly competitors. That friendship extended to a nonpoetic contest which may have some bearing on the feverish sewing activities so prominent in the narrative frame of Rossetti's Speaking Likenesses, Greenwell once challenged Rossetti and Ingelow to produce a piece of needlework as good as her own. Rossetti declined, but Ingelow gladly complied. She not only sent Greenwell a flowery bag decorated with an intricate pattern “of my own invention,” but also promised to tease the third member of the triumvirate for some evidence of such domestic accomplishments: “When I next see Miss Rossetti I shall ask for proof that she can do hemming and sewing” (Some Recollections, 163).

The anecdote suggests that, for Ingelow, the skill required to pattern a piece of embroidery may be no less than that required to pattern verses. Both require fierce, if covert, competition in traditional womanly virtues. This competition need not stray beyond domestic space. Although that domestic space, which Victorian culture had assigned to women, may seem sheltered and static, it conceals a competitiveness that is based on the same aggressive energies more overtly displayed in an outer male world of action. It seems significant, in this connection, that Mopsa the Fairy, the highly inventive fantasy for children which Ingelow published in 1869, should end with a boy's grateful return to domesticity while the little girl who was his travel companion remains in the innermost heart of a female realm as a powerful ruler of a nation of fairies.

Only the title of Mopsa the Fairy allows a reader to anticipate the sharp reversal that takes place in its last chapters. A story that seemed ostensibly centered on the energies of “Captain Jack,” the determined little boy who penetrates deeper and deeper in his forays into a series of wonderlands, unexpectedly turns into a female Bildungsroman when Jack becomes displaced by Mopsa. The toddler who was so tiny that Jack easily confined her into one of his pockets now finds that she has been destined to preside as a wise and visionary Fairy Queen over an entire nation. Not only has Mopsa rapidly grown far beyond the size of the race of fairies to which she belongs but she also now outstrips her former protector in maturity, power, and authority. Less and less potent, the sturdy “Captain Jack” is no longer suitable as Mopsa's mate. Although indirectly responsible for her crowning, he has become her decided inferior.

The boy who had singled the sleeping Mopsa out from among her siblings with a prince-like kiss thus finds himself pathetically excluded from her magical domain. In a conscious reversal of the story of “Sleeping Beauty,” Ingelow has Mopsa sadly inform Jack that the time has finally come “to give you back your kiss.” As soon as that kiss is returned, the thicket that was successfully subdued by the intruding prince in “Sleeping Beauty” vehemently pushes back a boy who yearns to become Queen Mopsa's consort. Mopsa's “fairy castle” rapidly recedes as “spear-like leaves” spring up between it and Jack, forcing him to move back and back until he resignedly accepts his banishment.

Mopsa's prodigious maturation in a female wonderland shatters Jack's expectations. Aware that she no longer requires his protection, he had nonetheless hoped to be allowed to remain her companion. Thrust back into his father's yard, Jack suddenly finds himself repressing all memory of his bizarre adventures. In the drawing-room where he is matter-of-factly greeted by parents who seem never to have missed him, Jack hears his mother read a poem “aloud” to his father. Her voice proves soothing and allows Jack to forget the fairylands he has visited and, above all, to “forget the boy-king,” the much-resented clone who had replaced him as Mopsa's consort.

Directed by his mother to “some strawberries on the side-board,” Jack is delighted to “find the house just as usual.” Like a dutiful little Victorian boy, he goes into his room, says his prayers, climbs “into his little white bed,” and “comfortably” falls asleep. He has repressed his acute pain at being separated from Mopsa; indeed, his memories of her have by now altogether faded. Gone, too, are his earlier anger and futile defiance at his banishment from her fantasy world. The boy whose last word in the book is “Mamma!” no longer resembles the aggressive Captain Jack or Master Jack who had penetrated deeper and deeper into ever more dangerous realms of the female imagination. Instead, he welcomes the security of the parental home. The last paragraph of the novel—a bare two words—ostensibly endorses this quietistic closure. “That's all,” says a narrator, seemingly as eager to soothe the child reader as the mother in the book was eager to calm her own child. Yet in their abrupt finality, these last two words also imply that there can be no return to the imaginative worlds Jack has now altogether forgotten.

Neither the narrator nor the mother, however, can forget what Jack, who now admiringly looks up at his father and thinks “what a great thing a man was,” is allowed to suppress. Their awareness of division—like that of a Mopsa who has outgrown her onetime playmate—exceeds his by far. And, as adult women, they must—again, like the grown Mopsa—bear the burden that such division entails. Mopsa's pain as she turns away from the ejected Jack is evident to the reader, but not to the boy who assumes that she is “quite content” with her new duties as a fairy queen. Her melancholy at their parting seems deeper than his self-pity. Musing “as if speaking to herself,” she notes that Jack can, after all, return to a freer world, at liberty to play again “in his father's garden.”

For her part, the girl turned into matriarchal ruler must accept the duties for which she has been destined by “Old Mother Fate.” Mopsa is no longer the doll-like toddler Jack both loved and patronized. Her sadness betokens her reluctant acceptance of the powers with which she is now invested. She has too rapidly outgrown her stolid boy protector in order to become herself the protectress of her new subjects. Not blessed, like Jack, with obliviousness, she is condemned to remember the shared childhood from which she, but not he, has egressed. Ingelow here inverts the emphasis of Victorian male writers such as Lewis Carroll, who tried to prevent the growth of a beloved dreamchild into an adult woman. Mopsa has ceased to be a dream-child well before Jack sinks gratefully into his dreamless bed. Having grown far beyond him in size and in responsibilities, it is she who remains haunted by memories that become the final mark of her superiority to the fearless, but unthinking little boy.

Jack's ability to screen out all consciousness of his loss stems from a capacity for forgetfulness that has been stressed throughout his adventures. As Ingelow implies, Victorian boys who grew into men found it easier to forget what could not be ignored by girls who, by growing into women, became more acutely conscious of an impairment of their former freedom. Their sense of separation from their male playmates was sharpened by a segregation that decreed their confinement, as adults, to a domestic sphere. And their consciousness of that confinement only helped, paradoxically enough, to activate their restless powers of imagination. Jack can compensate for the loss of a female complement by returning to a still nurturing “Mamma.” He had begun his adventures, after all, by adopting for himself the maternal role of nurturer: he first fed his plum cake to the fairy nestlings left by their “old mother” and then replaced her as an incubator and carrier. But the good-natured, unimaginative little boy who encounters ever more powerful female figures in his peregrinations finds himself increasingly out of place in their world of fantasy. Femininity lost thus becomes supplanted, in the parental home, by the pater familias who decrees that it is “time this man of ours was in bed.”

The narrator and the mother, however, like Mopsa, remain fully aware of the losses involved in a child's growth into an order divided by genders. Ingelow calls her last chapter “Failure.” She begins it by having her narrator offer, as an epigraph, a sonnet about the art that stems from the inevitable partings that make all life a “failure.” Using the example of Orpheus's separation from Eurydice, she suggests that even though this poet's lyrics have been forgotten he will continue to be remembered for his segregation from Eurydice. He may “win” a contest by his superior artistry, “but few for that his deed recall: / Its power is in the look which costs him all.”

Towards the end of this last chapter, the separation of the feminine from the masculine is again dramatized through poetry, a more elliptical form of expression than prose narrative. Ingelow now has Jack's mother read a ballad “about the Shepherd Lady.” Why is the mother assigned to recite the last of the poems Ingelow has inserted in the text? Earlier, on hearing his mother read to his father, Jack became aware that her reading was not “like anything that he had heard,” in Fairyland. It was at that point that he began to forget all his former adventures. Ingelow here seems to tease the reader with implications that she deliberately veils. Is the mother now inducing a further forgetfulness in her child, by lulling him to sleep, just as the previous enchantresses he had met in fairylands had managed to do? Or is she, conversely, implanting in him a subliminal memory of his own separation from Mopsa?

In either case, Ingelow appears to hint that a seemingly ordinary woman confined to her domestic world can be fully attuned to the extraordinary fairy world that manifested itself to her son when he took upon himself the role of nurturer. The mother whose familiarity Jack finds so reassuring thus may know more than she lets on about the fantastic female realms she is helping him to forget. Her unsurprised look upon his return and her choice of poem suggest that her powers go well beyond the provision of strawberries. Hers is a double role: a comforting presence in the quotidian world, and, at the same time, our last link to a fantasy world ruled by the female imagination. In this sense, this matriarch is Queen Mopsa's everyday counterpart.

The ballad about the Shepherd Lady replays Jack's separation from Mopsa and Orpheus's separation from Eurydice. Charged with the task of tending and feeding a flock left to her by a vanished male lover, the lady also inherits the musical powers of the seductive piper she had first heard “in her sleep.” The voices of mother and narrator blend with lyrics this female caretaker “sings when light doth wane.” Tennyson's fragile female lyricists—Mariana and the Lady of Shalott—could not bear their severance from the masculine order operating in the world outside the walls in which they were immured. But this lady, though drawn out of her “high tower” like the Lady of Shalott, can wield the shepherd's crook as well as he did. Unlike Mariana, who bewails the absent “he” who “cometh not,” the Shepherd Lady is confident that “he will come again.” But even without her male complement, she resolutely discharges her task when she leads his sheep. The flock he has deserted has become “her flock.”

The song of the Shepherd Lady allows Jack's mother to impersonate Mopsa's simultaneous empowerment and sense of loss. The poem thus acts as a last reminder of the subversive texture of Mopsa the Fairy, a book full of surprises and unexplained ellipses. The narrative that had started out with Jack as its ostensible hero, the patron of a nameless fairy-child, ends with her eminence as a crowned queen and his abasement and reduction. A story that might well have borne the title of Captain Jack turns out to be named after the chubby fairy child who will outgrow him in wisdom and authority. It is precisely Jack's unimaginativeness, his stolidity, that protects him in his forays into the dangerous realms of the fantastic fairylands so persistently identified with a female imagination. And that female imagination, though superior to Jack's, is treated as mercurial and painful, accompanied by a self-aware suffering from which the more easily domesticated boy is exempt.

Ingelow's book is dedicated to a little girl, her younger cousin Janet Holloway. But what starts out so deceptively as a boy's book, promising to feature Jack's adventures in a series of wonderlands, turns out to be in many ways a conscious pendant to Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, which purported to be—but really wasn't—a girl's book. Its relation to Carroll's text is, in fact, even more overt than that of some of the other fictions gathered in this volume. The echoes and reversals are numerous: whereas Alice falls down, down, down in pursuit of a male white rabbit, Jack shoots up, up, up, propelled out of the hollow tree trunk by the female albatross who dashes “through the hole.” Alice is shunned and degraded by most Wonderland creatures; the discomforts she experiences reach their highpoint at the Mad Hatter's Tea Party and their climax at the Kafkaesque trial at the end. Jack, on the other hand, is always received with great awe and respect by fairies who value the material objects carried by any ordinary human boy. His denigration at the end is therefore all the more unexpected. Whereas Alice, increasingly irritated by the indignities she suffers at the hands of Carroll's fantastic agents, wills her exit from Wonderland, Ingelow's Jack refuses to accept his displacement. He cannot understand why he should not be allowed to remain with Mopsa as her consort. Carroll's Alice asserts her superiority by exposing the powerlessness of Wonderland's matriarch, the Queen of Hearts. Ingelow's Jack, however, must be deposited back in his father's garden precisely because there is no place for him in a female Utopia in which even monarchs cannot evade the dictates of Old Mother Fate and her punitive three daughters. Like Alice, Jack forgets his bizarre adventures. But by then he has ceased to be the book's protagonist.

Alice's dream had to be reprocessed by a more mature female figure, her older sister. In Mopsa the Fairy, however, it is Mopsa herself who is charged with the task of remembering. Her decision not to forget makes her superior to that other resident of fairyland, the Apple Woman, a human who prefers the adulation of the fairies who flatter her to the memories of a reality full of “cold and poverty.” The Apple Woman misses her three sons but cannot bring herself to return to her former world. Painfully hovering, like Mopsa herself, between the human world she has left behind and the fairy world where she is destined to remain, she becomes enslaved by her very superiority to the fairies who feed on her human capacity for emotion.

Mopsa's imprisonment in her own fairy world, however, is far more painful than the Apple Woman's paralysis. For Mopsa has chosen to endow the boy-king with Jack's features in order to make sure that she will never forget the human boy whose kiss sealed her fate. Like the abandoned Shepherd Lady, Mopsa's willingness to carry the burden of memory is a mark of her imaginative superiority. And yet that superiority, as Ingelow so well knew, carries a great price. Ingelow may have inscribed her own yearnings in figures like Mopsa, the Apple Woman, and Jack's mother. Yet by identifying herself as well with the unnostalgic Jack, Ingelow manages to resist the lugubrious sentimentality that marked Lewis Carroll's later work as well as the writings of those women who beatified little boys (Molesworth comes to mind, as well as Ewing). If Jack displays unimaginativeness and dullness, he also exhibits a healthy resistance to nostalgia. The boy who welcomes the strawberries and gladly climbs into his clean bed refuses to be fixated on loss. Since retrogression—a return to Mopsa's Ur-world—becomes impossible, he cheerfully submits to an ordinary world in which growth is much slower than in Mopsa's fairyland.

The “comforts” that Jack finds at the end of Mopsa cannot, therefore, be wholly discounted. They must be placed in apposition to the profound discomforts which so many child readers claim to have felt, in Victorian times as well as in our own, on first experiencing the account of Alice's abrupt size changes or on encountering with her such unpleasant creatures as the hideous Duchess or the sadistic Mad Hatter. Indeed, even in the thick of his most grotesque adventures, little Jack is never much disturbed by threats that would have unnerved a more imaginative child. Mopsa the Fairy is a highly imaginative work that rewards its hero's lack of imagination.

Ingelow's own imaginative faculties led some American intellectuals to petition Queen Victoria that she succeed Tennyson as England's first female poet laureate. The petition was unsuccessful, much to Ingelow's apparent relief. The poet who professed to value hemming and sewing as much as verse making preferred to lead an unobtrusive life. The closure of Mopsa the Fairy, though at odds with the book's extraordinary powers of fantasy, is in keeping with that unobtrusiveness. It is a tribute to Jean Ingelow's art and psychology that she so well understood the simple comforts that close out her decidedly unsimple book. As for the discomforts of her myth-making imagination, she seems to suggest that these are a burden best borne by fairies like Mopsa, whose matriarchal country allows her to outgrow, albeit reluctantly, the pocket of a nice English boy.