Tuesday Tomes - Pinocchio and Moral Imagination

Last month, I attended the 18th Annual Paul Holmer Lecture at the University of Minnesota, sponsored by MacLaurinCSF. The speaker was Vigen Guroian, author of Tending the Heart of Virtue: How Classic Stories Awaken a Child's Moral Imagination.

At one point in the lecture, Guroian made a few comments about Carlo Collodi's classic story, Pinocchio. This reminded me that I have never read the original story and piqued my interest. So, right there and then I opened up the Amazon app on my phone and ordered the Penguin Classic edition.

Several weeks later now, having read the original Pinocchio, I can report that it is a far cry from the Disney-fied version familiar to most people. It's a story that explores values, maturity, personal identity, spiritual weakness, self-deceit, and the struggle for self-control. It's a children's fantasy, but it focuses on the same human struggle the Apostle Paul describes in Romans 11 – doing what we know we shouldn't do, and failing to do what we know we ought to.

Here are a few words about Pinocchio excerpted from Guroian's book, Tending the Heart of Virtue.

Pinocchio is a wooden puppet, and as the blue-haired fairy says to him, puppets never grow: "They are born puppets, they live puppets and die puppets." The deeper meaning belongs to the metaphor of "woodenness."

This woodenness of his mind and will, and not the matter of being physically made of wood, is Pinocchio's greatest obstacle to "growing up." ... Collodi's Pinocchio is no mere innocent, and the wrongs he commits are, more often than not, not merely the mistakes of ignorance but the consequences of a hard head, undisciplined passions, and a misdirected will that resists good advice.

In the Disney version, real boyhood is bestowed on Pinocchio as a reward for being good by the Blue Fairy with a touch of her magic wand; or, as the Blue Fairy herself says, because Pinocchio has proven himself "brave, truthful, and unselfish." In Disney's imagination this is magic. In theological terms this is works righteousness.

By moral description, the Disney story presents the virtues as the completion and very essence of Pinocchio's humanity—once he has proven himself "brave, truthful, and unselfish" he is transformed into a real boy.

Collodi views things differently. In his story, Pinocchio becomes a real flesh-and-blood human child after he awakens from a dream in which the blue-haired fairy forgives him for his former waywardness and present shortcomings, while she also praises him for the good path he has taken by showing a son's love for his father. For Collodi, real boyhood is not so much a reward as it is the visible sign of a moral task that has been conscientiously pursued, a task that even at that moment when Pinocchio is transformed from wood into flesh and blood is not yet wholly completed. Pinocchio's filial love, obedience, truthfulness, and self-expenditure for the sake of others ultimately triumph over his primal propensity to be selfish and self-centered. His good heart with its innate capacity to love finally dominates over his wooden head.

 • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

Tending the Heart of Virtue: How Classic Stories Awaken a Child's Moral Imagination
by Vigen Guroian 

Guroian illuminates the complex ways in which fairy tales and fantasies educate the moral imagination from earliest childhood. Examining a wide range of stories--from "Pinocchio" and "The Little Mermaid" to "Charlotte's Web," "The Velveteen Rabbit," "The Wind in the Willows," and the "Chronicles of Narnia"--he argues that these tales capture the meaning of morality through vivid depictions of the struggle between good and evil, in which characters must make difficult choices between right and wrong, or heroes and villains contest the very fate of imaginary worlds.