Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials: Recreating Paradise Lost as a Narrative of Adolescence

This article argues that the children’s fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman transforms the biblical narrative of the Fall of Man into a coming-of-age narrative. My analysis is guided by contemporary discussion on the uses of fantasy in children’s literature and the exploration of adolescence as a liminal stage between childhood and adulthood. His Dark Materials presents the fall as a necessary coming of age in which the transition from the sexual innocence and dependency of childhood to the sexual maturity and selfdetermination of adulthood is presented as an essential human experience. Pullman’s transformation of the fall draws upon the Romantic or Blakean reading of Paradise Lost, in which the exile from the ‘paradise’ of childhood is a felix culpa, a ‘happy fault’, and Satan as the tempter is an anti-hero. As well as William Blake’s reading of the epic poem, Pullman draws upon Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience to frame the fall as wholly necessary.
Pullman’s engagement with the interpretive debates surrounding Paradise Lost places the trilogy within the genre of theological fantasy and invites comparisons with its predecessors, most notably with C.S. Lewis’ Orthodox Christian fantasy series The Chronicles of Narnia. His Dark Materials’ subversion of religious orthodoxy – especially in its celebration of the fall – challenges longstanding conventions within the genre and proposes a new un-nostalgic paradigm of adolescence.
Keywords: Phillip Pullman, His Dark Materials, John Milton, Paradise Lost, children’s literature, young adult, adolescent, William Blake, C.S. Lewis, Chronicles of Narnia, religion, fantasy, fall of man, genesis, transformation, recreation