6 - Christian Marvel and Demonic Intervention

Summary

As the ambiguity of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight demonstrates so acutely, it is difficult to place the supernatural in romance. Romance writers play on the shifting manifestations of the otherworld, which seems most of all to be defined by enigma and ambiguity. The complexity of the faery is heightened by the frequent occurrence in romance of the explicitly Christian supernatural. The genre takes for granted and exploits the sense of a larger, spirit world that includes God, devil, angels, demons and spirits of more ambiguous kinds, as well as the monsters and marvels that are part of the created world. Romances repeatedly play on the wonder of God's marvellous power, thus conveying a didactic message but also heightening fantasy and exoticism. Situations of extreme suffering and miraculous reprieve, in particular, allow for dramatic explorations of the strength of Christian virtue against the power of the devil. Angels and demons, miracle and marvel play crucial roles in endorsing or challenging the protagonists of romance, but also provide a kind of authorised supernatural that is exotic, wondrous, fantastic and fearful by turns, and that fulfils many of the same functions as magic and the faery. Romance probes too the complicated, often ambiguous quality of the marvellous, the difficulty of reconciling its sometimes destructive manifestations with the beneficent movement of providence, and of distinguishing between it and the fearful possibility of demonic intervention in the world. The special powers of magic, divination and shape-shifting, characteristic of the world of faery, also belong both to God and devil, who in their various manifestations shape and intervene in human destiny, again in profoundly physical ways, through the motifs of loss and return of the body, and through bodily transformation. The transformative power of the supernatural, fundamental to narratives of penitence and testing, is intimately associated with notions of monstrosity and beauty, and the alignment of interior and exterior qualities. Miracle and retribution may be written on the body, and the illness and healing of both body and soul are prominent motifs. Miracle finds a dark counterpart in the sinister wiles and temptations of the devil, and the struggle between angels, demons and men can become a subject in its own right.