In Wise Child’s struggle to choose her own way is every daughter’s fight to free herself from the devouring side of her own femininity. Wise Child’s instinctive, irrational longing for the mother who has abandoned her threatens to overturn everything she has learned. She tempts her daughter with an alternate way of life, a way of using power for one’s own ends rather than in serving the whole.
A legendary beauty and sorceress, she is faithful to nothing and no one but her own willful pleasure. Akin to Sophia and Shekinah, avatars of divine wisdom, she stands for “the love that was woven through every fiber of the world,” as Wise Child says and without which the world would inevitably fall apart.Īt the other pole of feminine power stands Wise Child’s mother, Maeve. Juniper sometimes seems a bit too good to be true, but there’s something archetypally satisfying about such a wise female figure–as also in George MacDonald’s stories, where she appears repeatedly. Though Wise Child sometimes wearies of the hard daily work of keeping house and learning herb lore, she gradually recognizes that it is in such small tasks–not in learning flashy magic tricks–that the real work of becoming a doran lies. Her house is a place of mystery and beauty, a sanctuary high up above the more mundane and petty world of the village. “Wise Child” may not yet deserve her name except in jest, but Juniper is certainly a wise woman–full of healing skill and knowledge, yet humble and with a sense of humor. Wise Child will need all the strength she has found through her schooling to bring herself and her teacher to a place of safety. But those fears still live in others, particularly in the malice of the local priest. Initially full of fears and suspicion bred by village gossip, the child grows to love her enigmatic but kind teacher. Wise Child (a teasing nickname for a small girl who uses big words) has become the ward and pupil of the village healer, Juniper. Ignorant outsiders may call her “witch,” though, for they fear her power without understanding it–and this is one of the dangers that threatens in the first novel.
The word, from the Gaelic “dorus,” an entrance or way in (not unlike the English word with the same meaning) signifies “someone who has found a way in to seeing or perceiving.” Learning to perceive the pattern at the heart of being, and to love and protect it, is the way of a doran. In a stark, elemental setting based on medieval Britain, dramatic battles between good and evil drive the plot–but the narrative really turns on the quiet struggles within the souls of the three protagonists, each a young person with the potential to become a “doran.”
Fairy tales and real life intertwine to create a most unusual education in Monica Furlong’s Wise Child and its two sequels.
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