72 pages • 2 hours read
Susanna ClarkeJonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2004A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Nature of Power
Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell is ultimately a story about the consequences of the misuse of power in various forms. Mr. Norrell and Jonathan Strange have magical power, but their approach to wielding it has significant negative consequences for them and those around them. For example, Norrell’s refusal to share access to his magical library allows him to maintain power (for a time) through the hoarding of knowledge. However, despite his facility with magic, his influence in the world is limited by his inability to understand when to wield social power rather than magical power, and the rupture of his relationship with Jonathan Strange and everything that follows are in part his fault.
Strange’s magical power contrasts sharply with Norrell’s, for his innate powers of magical improvisation allow him to successfully use magic to advance his ambitions, especially when he fights alongside Wellington and secures government contracts. Strange feels thwarted in his ambitions because Norrell wants to maintain the power imbalance that keeps Strange in a subordinate role long after Strange has outgrown their initial teacher-pupil relationship. Once freed of Norrell, Strange shows no restraint in exercising his magical powers, leading to the loss of his wife and his imprisonment in the pillar of darkness.
When these two powerful yet flawed magicians engage in a struggle for power over magic, they abandon all restraint. Strange attacks his mentor in an open forum when he writes the scathing review of Norrell’s book, and later Norrell destroys Strange’s book and spreads the slander that Strange killed Arabella, all in an effort to reassert his power over English magic. Although the two men reconcile, many people become collateral damage of their struggle, and it is therefore fitting that their final realization upon encountering the Raven King is the knowledge of their own insignificance in the grander scheme of the universe. Thus Clarke implies that the nature of power is only as good as the people who wield it.
In a macrocosmic example of this theme, England as a country also engages in a quest for power. While wealth and industry helped the historic England to move into the 19th century as a superpower after the Napoleonic Wars, Clarke’s England relies upon magic that achieves that political power, for without magic, England is too weak to win its never-ending war with France, and only when Wellington, Pole, and Liverpool rely on Norrell and Strange’s magic are they able to secure England’s political and economic power. When the Raven King and magic finally return to England, however, power no longer rests in the hands of the upper class, for everyone—women, laborers who sabotage factories, poor people—can suddenly access magic. By the end of the novel, magic has become the birthright of every person in England: a true redistribution of power.
The Quest for Knowledge
As characters, both Strange and Norrell are driven by the pursuit of knowledge, but they differ in methods to acquire it and put it to use. Norrell’s quest for knowledge first expresses itself in the collection of (and restriction of access to) his magical books. Indeed, his first act in the novel—destroying the York magicians’ society after they ask for his participation—shows his understanding that knowledge can be used as a tool to control others, and so he creates a monopoly on magical knowledge until the arrival of Jonathan Strange.
In spite of himself, Norrell begins slowly sharing his books and knowledge because he so desperately craves community and collaboration, but there are limits to his generosity. By insisting that Strange be his pupil, Norrell gains authority over Strange and the use of magic beyond their educational interactions. He also withholds some of the most important texts on magic, knowing that doing so will prevent Strange from gaining equal status as a full magician. His desire to control who obtains magical knowledge and how they use it culminates in his destruction of Strange’s book, and because his quest for knowledge is driven by a desire to control, he ceases to grow as a magician.
Jonathan Strange has a radically different relationship to magical knowledge. He experiments with spells even when he isn’t sure of the outcome and enjoys creating and discovering knowledge in a social context. When Strange returns to Hurtfew after his work with Wellington, Norrell cannot maintain control over his apprentice or the library, for Strange’s willingness to experiment has rendered his expertise superior to that of his mentor. In the end, however, the two remain remarkably similar in their single-minded pursuit of magical knowledge, and thus the novel leaves the two of them trapped together within the pillar of darkness, contentedly engaged in magical practice but unable to leave either the darkness or each other, and their fate is emblematic of the dangers and rewards of the pursuit of knowledge.
Theory Versus Practice
Norrell is capable of practical magic, but he is content to pursue only the theoretical. His book hoarding and emphasis on magical theory over practice are rooted in class, for members of the English gentry choose theory over practice not only because the disappearance of the Raven King caused magic to diminish, but also because practicing magic is considered to be labor, which they see as being beneath the dignity of a gentleman, and therefore less than respectable.
When Norrell finally brings magic back to England, he wishes to prove that “magic is a respectable profession – no less than Law and a great deal more so than Medicine” (44). Ultimately, he believes that magic is a theoretical field that can be governed by reason and restraint—traits associated with the Enlightenment, the period in European history when many disciplines were founded by people with the means and leisure to explore the natural world.
One of the novel’s great ironies can be found in the fact that Norrell’s very insistence on keeping magic theoretical is the impetus that drives Strange to his reckless pursuit of practical magic. Strange fights in the Napoleonic Wars only to escape Norrell’s control, and he does amazing feats of practical magic that are nonetheless dogged by multiple mishaps, such as his success in resurrecting dead soldiers, followed by his failure to return them to the grave. Similarly, when he first walks into the mirror, he has no idea what will happen, but he impulsively takes chances for the sake of practicing magic at any cost.
The culmination of his reckless actions occurs when he eats Mrs. Delgado’s dead mouse to induce an altered state of consciousness and untether himself from reality; Clarke’s strategic introduction of the uber-Romantic figure of Lord Byron (known for his excesses and moody, creative work) emphasizes that Strange’s complete surrender to practical magic may begin as a rational process but ends with him being completely at the mercy of anarchic forces. His ultimate return to Norrell and the library at Hurtfew shows the importance of relying on a balance of both theory and practice.
The Magical World Versus the Mundane World
Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell is an alternative history in which magic is rare but still potentially a part of the mundane (ordinary) world. Although magic is mostly theoretical when the novel begins, Clarke’s vision is one in which the magical world and the mundane world have co-existed from the moment “King Henry and the boy [the Raven King] met to divide England between them” (538). Clarke symbolizes that balance between the worlds in a painting at the palace, one with two kings and their courts seated on two thrones. During the age of the Raven King, the English became accustomed to magic as an integral part of the mundane world. The fine balance between those is part of what makes England England in the novel.
The gentleman-magicians call this historical period the “Aureate or Golden Age” (850), meaning that this period of co-existence was one during which England prospered. On the other hand, even Strange, who idolizes the Raven King, acknowledges that it “was a violent Age” (594). By the time Norrell and Strange connect, the world has shifted so much that it is almost entirely mundane.
However, the trouble that drives the narrative is the blurring of boundaries between the magical and the mundane. When Norrell asks the fairy to resurrect Emma Wintertowne, it is magic employed for a mundane reason: the pursuit of political power. Norrell wants to gain status by making Walter Pole, a government minister, beholden to him. Wry chapter titles such as “The difficulty of finding employment for a magician” (104) and “The Spirit of English Magic urges Mr Norrell to the Aid of Britannia” (114) also emphasize the inextricable hold that everyday concerns have upon the use of supernatural forces. Indeed, the whole premise of Norrell and Strange’s efforts is based upon the idea that English magic must be restored because the mundane world has overtaken it.
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