<u>So she had passed her childhood, like a half-wild cat.</u>
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In The Golden Compass, Pullman describes Lyra’s childhood as a time of wild joy. Because Lyra has no parent figures in her life, she is allowed to roam the streets of Oxford and seek out adventure. She has very little education, no manners, and no sense of propriety. Until she hears Lord Asriel’s speech about Dust while she and Pan are hiding in the wardrobe, Lyra has no inkling that any world outside her childhood paradise exists. Like Eve, Lyra lives in a state of savage innocence. It is Lyra’s passage from a state of ignorance to a state of knowing that drives the trilogy. Just as Adam and Eve must leave their garden paradise, Lyra must leave her childhood paradise and enter the real world, where terrible and frightening things happen all the time. Lyra’s friends die, people lie and cheat, and, worst of all, Lyra is parted from Will, the person she loves most. Despite these difficulties, Pullman suggests, adulthood is better than happy but ignorant innocence.
<u>Why do they do these things to children, Pan? Do they all hate children so much that they want to tear them apart like this? Why do they do it?</u>
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In The Golden Compass, Lyra asks Pan this question at Bolvanger after meeting Tony Makarios, who has no daemon, and realizing that is the separation of a child from his daemon. The Church tears children away from their souls not because it hates the children, but because it fears the potential for sin inherent in children. According to Church doctrine, the source of all sin in the world is the growing awareness of children as they approach adulthood. The Church and the scientists at Bolvanger believe that by cutting children’s daemons away, they will prevent children from gaining awareness of themselves, which in turn will prevent them from exercising free will and sinning. For Lyra, who dearly loves her daemon, Pan, this Church practice seems cruel. Her journey becomes a struggle against the Church’s misperception of the relationship between child and daemon. She has to prove that becoming an adult and gaining awareness is the right of all conscious beings and that what the Church calls sin is something necessary and important.
<u>Tell them stories.</u>
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The ghost of a dead woman speaks these words to Mary Malone in The Amber Spyglass after Lyra and Will have cut a hole from the world of the dead into the world of the mulefa. In the world of the dead, Lyra made a deal: the harpies would escort the ghosts to the window if the ghosts would tell the harpies stories about their lives. Only those who had lived their lives fully and could tell stories about what it meant to be alive would be allowed to pass into the world of the mulefa. Those who had squandered their lives and had no stories to tell would wander forever in the world of the dead.
The ghost exhorts Mary to “tell them stories,” reminding her to live fully and to accumulate a rich assortment of stories with which to feed the harpies. The ghost’s words also reflect Pullman’s belief that stories and storytelling are an integral part of human existence. One of Lyra’s great powers is her ability to mesmerize audiences with invented stories. When she is in a tight spot, Lyra will distract her audience by making up some fantastical tale about robbers and barons. When Lyra is in the world of the dead, however, her storytelling abilities don’t work. The harpies respond to her lies by attacking her. Of course, Pullman does not mean for this scene as an attack on fiction—indeed, his invented worlds rival Lyra’s. He simply means that the best stories contain nuggets of truth and that the most successful writers are those who draw on their own life experiences to tell stories.
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