Revisiting A Wrinkle in Time

I loved A Wrinkle in Time as a child. It was imaginative, fascinating, smart, and it had all my favorite things, like space travel, time travel, unlikely heroes chosen by destiny, titanic clashes of good against evil, and a message against bland conformity. So I decided to re-read it. That turned out to be a mistake.

Some parts of the book don't hold up as well as I remembered. Some parts seem frankly clichéd nowadays; it's tough to keep in mind that this book came out in the 1960s and those clichés are clichés now because of this book and others like it. Other parts are clumsy or rushed because it's a children's book, and children probably won't notice that. As a child, I connected more with the ideas and feelings of a book than with its wordsmithing or plot construction, and I was more willing than now to swim out of my depth and paddle through a book where I was lost at sea, where some elements were beyond my experience or comprehension. That's how I was able to get through things like Mrs. Who's endless quotations from the original German, Latin, Spanish, and even Greek at one point. (The Kindle edition of the book contains a clumsily inserted picture of the Greek text.)

Meg Murry, the book's protagonist, is a gawky, geeky, spindly high school girl with glasses and braces and low self-esteem. She's smart, but she gets low grades because she's bored with the schoolwork or because her teachers are narrow-minded or biased against her. She tends to act out, backtalk, and roughhouse. At home she's gifted with a beautiful mother with dual Ph.Ds in the life sciences, two normal twin brothers in middle school, and a savant younger brother named Charles Wallace who seems to be able to read her mind, but she yearns for the return of her physicist father, who's been away doing black ops for the government for several years.

One night, the Murrys are visited by a strange woman named Mrs. Whatsit, who informs Mrs. Murry that there is such a thing as a tesseract. In real life, tesseract is an old name for the mathematical object now called a hypercube: a geometric object analogous to the three-dimensional cube but existing in four space dimensions. In the book, a tesseract is basically a wormhole: it refers to a way of bending spacetime to allow instantanous travel over long distances. Mrs. Murry used to discuss the idea with her husband and is deeply upset to hear the word again out of the blue from Mrs. Whatsit. Meg and Charles Wallace meet two more mysterious beings, Mrs. Who and Mrs. Which, staying with Mrs. Whatsit in a cabin out in the woods. They also meet Calvin, another smart boy from Meg's school who's managed to fit in by having social skills. They invite him home for dinner, where he makes nice with their mother and twin brothers and has a talk with Meg about her low self-esteem.

If I were very unkind (and I am, very), I would point out that Meg feels like a proto Bella Swann. Both are teenage girls unsatisfied with their lives, bored by schoolwork they're too smart for and misunderstood by narrow-minded adults. The main difference, which stops Meg from being insufferable, is her lack of self-confidence; instead of always being deeply convinced of her own superiority, Meg rags on herself for being unable to fit in. If Meg is the elf of misunderstood teenage girl protagonists, Bella is the orc: a twisted, evil perversion.

Being very, very unkind, I'll also point out the strange Oedipal (and Electral) subtext in much of the scene where Calvin visits the Murrys for dinner. Calvin raves about the beauty of Mrs. Murry, even comparing her to his own old, ugly, haggard mother with eleven children. He seems romantically uninterested in Meg, but perks up when he finds out that Mrs. Murry was also geeky, gawky, and spindly at Meg's age, and finds excuses to whisper passionately of her secret, hidden beauty in a grove. He also probes into Meg's deep desire to be with her father again, saying at one point that it's clear she's "crazy about" her father. The whole dinner scene and following romantic scene in the grove came off as awkward and uncomfortable because Calvin's words and actions were so strange. I think Madeline L'Engle can't have intended it to come off like this; in the third book, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, I recall Meg and Calvin married and expecting their first child, and I don't remember their marriage being strange or emotionally abusive. (Then again, that might have been Calvin's plan all along: knowing that by the time he was old enough to have a chance of luring Meg's mother away from her father, Meg's mother would be old and not hot anymore, and knowing that Meg would grow up like her mother, he ingratiated himself with the family and carefully raised Meg into his perfect woman.)

Fortunately, this awkward scene is interrupted when Mrs. Whatsit, Who, and Which appear along with Charles Wallace and whisk Meg and Calvin off to another planet, where they show a great darkness enveloping pieces of the universe, described as pure evil. (Which caused me in a later scene to cry out, "No, don't touch it, it's evil!") They also bring the children to the Happy Medium, some sort of gypsy fortune teller with a crystal ball living in a cave on a distant planet. The Happy Medium shows them Earth, which is tinged with shadows but not yet fallen to the darkness. Mrs. Whatsit, Who, and Which explain that Earth has warriors against the darkness, like Jesus, Buddha, Gandhi, Shakespeare, Beethoven, Euclid, and presumably Steven Spielberg, who battle to keep the darkness from enveloping our fair blue planet. They then whisk the children off to Camazotz, a planet where everyone is exactly the same due to the influence of the sinister IT, which turns out to be a giant brain (but giant like Andre the Giant, not giant like the BFG) that exerts mind control on everyone. Charles Wallace is taken captive and becomes one of IT's servants; Meg manages to rescue her father, who also has the ability to tesser and whisks himself, Meg, and Calvin off to another planet inhabited by furry, eyeless things with tentacles for fingers. They turn out to be nice and nurse Meg back to health after a run-in with the darkness during their escape. Meg goes back to Camazotz alone to rescue Charles Wallace using the power of love. She returns to Earth with her father, Calvin, and Charles Wallace, where they all hug and the book ends abruptly.

I was pretty snide about the book throughout my summary, and that's because, to an adult in 2016, there's a lot about it that doesn't hold up. Compared to a more modern children's book like the Harry Potter series, the plot of A Wrinkle in Time is poorly constructed and relies too much on the deus ex machina; the characters are clichéd; and the style is pretentious. Genius children who save each other with the power of love are a stereotype of the fantasy genre, and Mrs. Who’s quotes from such luminaries as Cervantes, Dante, and Euripides come off as trying too damn hard. Even the message about nonconformity feels very of its time; as Anna Quindlen says in her foreword, “Madeline L’Engle published Wrinkle in 1962, after it was rejected by dozens of publishers. And her description of the tyranny of conformity clearly reflects that time.” Quindlen goes on to point out contemporary fears about the Soviet Union, but the 1960’s were also a time when Americans were starting to rebel against the bland suburban conformity expected of them during the 1950’s, and there’s a little of that in Camazotz too. But I dispute Quindlen when she says that the story “still feels contemporary today”. Angst over conformity or one’s inability to do so is timeless, as Quindlen points out, but it doesn’t occupy the zeitgeist today the way it did in 1962.

That Hideous Wrinkle

Even though the plot and characters don’t hold up as well as they might, A Wrinkle in Time does have some interesting ideas. It came out nearly 20 years after the 1945 publication of C.S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength, but otherwise you’d swear they were in the same universe. Both stories feature science fiction concepts like space travel and aliens in a universe that’s very clearly based on Judeo-Christian religious philosophy. In both books, there are godlike beings with abilities that appear supernatural, identified through symbolism or explicit connection with Judeo-Christian angels, fighting for good against a great darkness, representing the forces of evil, with this battle playing out on a cosmic scale. Despite the vast scale of this battle between good and evil, the actions of individual humans do matter to the end result, in the same way that every believer is significant to the war between God and the Devil. Lewis purposefully set out to unify the science fiction genre with his Christian philosophy. He does this across the entire Space Trilogy, but the plot structure of A Wrinkle in Time is closest to That Hideous Strength: a small group of humans discover that Earth is threatened by evil and fight alongside the good cosmic beings to stop it from falling to the darkness by struggling against a dystopia. In That Hideous Strength, it’s the N.I.C.E., a cabal of fascist pseudo devil worshippers who embody the sins of imperialist Europe, as Weston and Devine did in the previous two books. In Wrinkle, it’s Camazotz and IT, who embody stifling conformity.

However, L’Engle allows a more humanist view on this universal struggle. She represents Earth as falling under a shadow, instead of fully encircled by darkness from the beginning as Lewis does. Lewis depicts Mars and Venus as Edenic gardens where the people are simple, happy, and willingly maintain a low level of technology. Throughout the Space Trilogy, Lewis focuses on the worst of humanity, depicting them as fallen beings, and uniquely singles out Earth as a dark planet; this is most clear in Weston’s speech at the end of Out of the Silent Planet, but also very evident in That Hideous Strength as it shows a dystopia beginning to form. L’Engle allows human cultural achievements in art, music, science, mathematics, and philosophy to be godly things which fight against the darkness. And in A Wrinkle in Time, positive human emotions such as love have power to fight against the domination of evil. Lewis occasionally associates positive emotions with goodness, as in the free loving finale of That Hideous Strength when the spirit of Venus descends to Earth and everyone starts getting it on, but throughout most of the Space Trilogy, emotions and relationships are ignored in favor of abstract theological concepts like temptation; in Wrinkle they are key to everything.

L'Engle's partially humanist philosophy raises some interesting non-theological questions. A Wrinkle in Time isn't clear on how figures such as Jesus and Beethoven fought against the darkness, but if the book is to be thematically consistent, it must be linked to their capacity to spread peace or create great art. I joked above about Steven Spielberg being a warrior against the darkness, but that joke is also a serious question: in L'Engle's view, is Steven Spielberg a warrior against the darkness? Is Roald Dahl, or Stephen King, or Alan Moore, or Wes Anderson, or John Lennon? Is Quentin Tarantino, who creates films that many consider great works of art, but which focus on amoral protagonists and graphic violence? Are Friedrich Nietzche or Karl Marx, who are doubtless great philosophers but whose work has inspired at least a few authoritarian dictators?

There are two root questions here: what products of human thought are great enough to make their creators into warriors against evil, and does that product need to have a certain character or promote certain emotions above others? Steven Spielberg films such as E.T. and Schindler's List promote peace, compassion, and understanding, but they're popular works, not "high art" like Bach or Shakespeare, meant for an educated elite capable of appreciating them. Tarantino, whose work was initially seen as art house cinema, is closer to "high art", but if the power of love is what defeats the darkness, it's hard to imagine that Reservoir Dogs is an effective weapon against it.

We don't learn enough about the exact mechanism of "great thinkers are warriors against the darkness" to be able to answer these questions. Perhaps just by doing their work, they create some kind of psychic energy that repels the darkness. Or perhaps all of these great thinkers were literally whisked off by cosmic beings for black ops missions on dark planets, like Meg is in the book. In which case we can still ask what it was about these particular humans that attracted the cosmic beings; do cosmic beings have taste? Do they make a judgment call that Shakespeare's work is better constructed than Stephenie Meyer's, making him worthy to whisk off into space for a mission?

In 1962, pop culture criticism was just beginning with pop art, and L’Engle was classically educated in the world of upper-class boarding schools, so chances are she never thought about these questions; it probably never would have crossed her mind that a filmmaker like Steven Spielberg or a comic book writer like Alan Moore could be in the same league as Shakespeare and Beethoven. Still, it’s interesting to think about, even if the author herself had no intention of introducing it.

Agency and Ability

One more trait that Wrinkle and Lewis’s Space Trilogy share, and which sets Wrinkle apart from modern young adult stories like Harry Potter, is the main protagonists’ lack of agency in anything that goes on. Not much in the story happens because of any action or decision on the part of the main characters. Meg, despite being our viewpoint character, is particularly bereft of agency. Everything happens to her; MacGuffins and dei ex machina are provided to her, and she just figures out their meaning and how to apply them to the current situation, always left maddeningly vague by whatever godlike being provided it to her.

I would be tempted to put this down to societal attitudes towards women in the 1960s, except that the male characters are nearly as lacking in agency. Calvin meets the Murrys because he feels a mysterious compulsion to go to the crumbling shack where Mrs. Whatsit, Who, and Which are staying. Even though Calvin, as the perfect love interest, is a more important development for Meg than for anyone else, she remains mostly silent during their first encounter, while Charles Wallace verbally duels him and then invites him over for dinner. Calvin is very nearly superfluous anyway; he barely does anything, other than being gifted with the magical power to talk to the furry aliens. The three children follow a set of instructions from the three cosmic beings which are at once rigid and so indefinite that they make the vague pronouncements of characters such as Gandalf and Yoda seem as straightforward as a recipe for pancakes, and end up facing IT on Camazotz.

During the showdown with IT, Charles Wallace becomes the only character in the entire book other than the three cosmic beings to exercise any kind of agency. He agrees to take on IT directly at the mental level, giving in to hubris and going against the instructions he received from the Mrs. W’s. He succumbs to IT’s control and has to be rescued by Meg, returning to Camazotz alone. She uses the power of her love to rescue him from IT.

The close relationship between Meg and Charles Wallace was well established earlier in the book. The problem with this climax is that we’ve known all along that Meg loved Charles Wallace, so she’s not using any ability, exercising any agency, or growing as a character when she wins this way. In the sequel, A Wind in the Door, Meg finds out that she has to rescue Mr. Jenkins, the school principal she clashed with in the first book and by this point blames for not protecting Charles Wallace from bullies. Meg resists, protesting that she can’t possibly love Mr. Jenkins. But she does, by learning to understand him, by learning to see his point of view and find out what makes him the person he is. This is a real moment of character growth; what we get at the end of Wrinkle was obvious from the third page of the book. It doesn’t show Meg growing, and it doesn’t represent any agency or ability on her part.

Because no one has any agency, the entire story comes off as mostly predestined. As this air of predestination becomes obvious during the second act on Camazotz and the early third act on the furry tentacled beasts’ planet, the story loses all its stakes. Even if the reader manages to suspend disbelief and forget that out-of-universe laws of children’s books prevent the characters from failing or dying, we now have to contend with in-universe laws that guarantee the main characters’ success. To me, this is the core flaw of the story, much more damaging than the surface elements that I made fun of earlier. L’Engle is much more interested in ideas than in plot or character. Some of the ideas are fun and creative; L’Engle’s space creatures and alien planets are mostly interesting, and she offers plausible explanations based in scientific fact for phenomena like the tesseract and some of the technology that appears. But the core ideas, the political and philosophical ones, are no longer strong enough to carry the book on their own. And the characters, while not completely beyond reproach, are interesting enough that some good character development, some way of tying the events they go through to who they are and their relationships with each other, could have gone a long way to strengthening the third act in particular.

It seems too easy to blame this lack of agency and feeling of predestination on L’Engle’s religious philosophy. The children are going on an adventure, but the dangers they face are abstract: not hunger or death, but loss of identity and ethics. They are fighting forces too big for them to handle; the only way they could win is divine intervention.

Conclusion

The book is definitely flawed, but I would still recommend it to lovers of fantasy and young adult literature. If nothing else, it serves as an example of how sophisticated a young adult book can be. Even if we ignore the copious name dropping of classical writers and artists, the book still deals creatively with fairly complex themes and includes some suprisingly hard science fiction elements.

I can also recommend the book to its intended audience: children. I was about seven when I read this. Children will differ in how fast their reading abilities develop, but with the amount of media that children consume nowadays, they’ll probably find this book boring and clichéd if it doesn’t get to them before age ten.