38 pages • 1 hour read
Tony DiTerlizzi, Holly BlackThe Field Guide
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2003A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Cultural Context: Faeries in Folklore
Faeries—or fairies and fae—are mythical creatures described in central- and northern-European folklore as rural beings, often human-like, sometimes invisible, who possess magical powers. They can be as large as a person or as small as a butterfly, and they possess both good-natured and troublesome personalities. Their name derives from ancient Latin and Germanic root words for fate, and from the ancient Persian stories about a similar type of creature called a Peri.
Derived partly from Celtic myths about magical woodland creatures, they are pagan symbols. Paganism is a “polytheistic or pantheistic nature-worshipping religion” (“What is Paganism?” Pagan Federation International). Polytheistic means the worship of more than one god, and pantheism is the belief that the divine inhabits everything, including nature, people, and animals. As part of pagan tradition, faeries are frowned upon by many Christian theologians and regarded either as fallen angels or half-demonic. Celtic-revival movements in recent decades have raised the profile of faeries and made them more respectable.
Because various traditions assert that faeries can be invisible, they’re sometimes thought of as the ghosts of departed people. Many inexplicable events—noises, lights, lost items, machines that suddenly stop working—are sometimes blamed on faeries; this adds to the notion that they’re mischievous or evil.
Many fairy tales contain faeries, and the creatures are popular characters in literature. Mentioned in English-language stories since the Middle Ages, they appear famously during the 1590s in English poet Edmund Spenser’s epic poem The Faerie Queene and English playwright William Shakespeare’s comedy A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Faeries enjoyed a literary revival during the Victorian Age of the mid- to late 1800s, and, during the Edwardian period of the early 1900s, many authors published works arguing that faeries were real.
Faeries appear today in books and films. In The Field Guide, the Grace children discover faeries in and around their house—some good, some mischievous, some evil; their wide variety underscores the myriad types collected by writers over the centuries.
(Study guides for The Faerie Queene and A Midsummer Night’s Dream are available at SuperSummary.com.)
Literary Context: Haunted Houses
In literature, a haunted house contains ghosts or evil spirits that torment the occupants. Most of these houses are old, many decrepit, their musty, creaky age suggesting a long history of bad happenings.
One of the most popular architectural types of haunted house is the Victorian. Built in the US in the late 1800s during the Victorian Era—the time of Queen Victoria’s worldwide influence on arts and morals—these houses sometimes contain towers and turrets, wizard-hat roofs, elaborately carved wooden overlays called stickwork, and bright multi-color paint. They have an eccentric, almost magical feel to them that, as the decades pass, sometimes decay into aging, slightly creepy wrecks. This makes them ripe for horror stories.
Fictional haunted houses often symbolize the state of mind of the main characters. American writer Edgar Allan Poe’s short story The Fall of the House of Usher describes a man and his sister who live in an old, broken-down house and slowly lose their grip on reality due to a sinister effect caused by the house. The structure, slowly decaying, symbolizes its residents’ similar dissolution. The horror classic The Haunting of Hill House (1959) by American writer Shirley Jackson puts four researchers inside an old, rambling mansion that somehow picks away at each of their weaknesses and fills them with terror.
In The Field Guide, the Grace family moves to an ancient ruin of a Victorian house that represents the wreckage of the Grace family itself from divorce and financial ruin. Its mysteries and magical possession by faeries suggest the wide-eyed imagination of children and their willingness to explore realms of wonder and terror.
(Study guides for “The Fall of the House of Usher” and The Haunting of Hill House are available at SuperSummary.com.)
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