Children from Dysfunctional Families: Instruments of Mythic Healing

Abstract

There are many ways in which the mythic past intrudes into the lives of present-day fictional characters. In most of the books already discussed, there is a kind of possession or haunting of twentieth-century characters by entities from the past. The exception is A Swiftly Tilting Planet, in which the twentieth-century character, Charles Wallace, ‘possesses’ the people of the past whose choices he must influence in order to change the circumstances facing his own time and place. But there are other ways in which the past can intrude into present-day reality, and one of the most effective is by means of a threshold, which, once crossed, gives the character access to the past.