There is some material about daydreams and the imagination in Stella Gibbons's My American that reminds me of points I have made in various articles in the past, articles written long before I had read this novel. The contexts and the people may be very different but the principles are the same.
The young writer Amy Lee in My American spends much of her time in a trance-like state; her life is one long waking dream. What Stella Gibbons tells us about Amy's imagination and the imaginary people she dreams about provides independent confirmation of and adds to material in articles such as the ones about Stella Benson's imagination and Stella Benson's imaginary friends.
Stella Gibbons's words provide further support for the proposition that a strong, vivid imagination can be a two-edged sword, a handicap or even a curse that ruins lives and destroys its possessor. She mentions the dangers of having a super-developed imagination: it can cause mild delusions; it can create a mist that shuts the owner away from the world; it can prevent the owner from growing up, getting on well with people and acting effectively in the real world. The article about Terry Pratchett's sinister Fairyland is relevant here.
Amy Lee's imaginary companions
Stella Gibbons says this about Amy's attitude towards the characters she created for her stories:
“Day by day she cared less for people and more for imaginary pictures so strong that they were more like feelings or dreams than ideas inside her head. She felt only a passive affection for the Beedings. Indeed, she did not feel active affection for anyone living; she only loved the memory of her mother, while for the dream-people in her mind she felt such a strong interest and concern that it could have been described as love.”
This is exactly how some people feel about fictional and imaginary characters who are much more glamorous and interesting and do more exciting things than the real people in the dreamers' and readers' lives.
Stella Gibbons is spot on here too:
“The dream-images in her mind absorbed her interests and affections with dangerous ease, as anyone who has ever lived with such phantoms will immediately recall their power to do.”
Some people are indeed lured into another world and taken over by it; they give as much time and attention to their inner lives and imaginary companions as the requirements of their outer lives and the people around them will permit; they may deal with real life and real people only when forced to, under protest, in snatched moments and with the backs of their minds.
Amy escapes through a door in her mind
People with strong imaginations have an additional option to the usual 'fight or flight' scenario: instead of running away if they can't defend themselves in or deal with the real world, they can escape into another dimension.
The young Amy Lee often copes with difficult situations by escaping into her imagination and letting one of her imaginary companions deal with the problem:
“A lump ached in her throat, but she fought it down somehow, fiercely remembering her mother’s voice telling her to be brave. And then, exactly like a door quickly opening, she thought of Buck Finch among the savages, the Pony Express rider surrounded by Indians, all the heroes of her secret world who had faced danger against horrible odds—and she ran straight through the open door and suddenly felt better.”
“Suddenly, as though a door had opened, she saw herself talking easily and without fear...the fear vanished as she ran through that open door in her mind, and escaped.”
Many people have mentioned escaping into their imagination, but Stella Gibbons's open door in the mind is an original way of describing the experience.
Real and unreal
There is a good point here:
“For almost the first time in her life she was in a serious situation and was not pretending to be a hero surrounded by enemies. This was because the situation concerned her previous writing, her stories, the only things she cared about in the real world, and therefore the situation was, for once, completely real to her. The little door in her mind would not open, there was no escape.”
It is not always fear and the inability to cope that makes people avoid dealing with something: sometimes they just don't take the situation seriously enough because it appears unreal to them. Why react to something that seems like a dream? They may well be able to rise to the occasion if they can only be brought to understand how important it is to act immediately and effectively. Sometimes a terrible shock or a disaster is needed for this to happen.
Amy Lee faces reality
Stella Gibbons is surely describing her younger self when she says that by identifying with the people in her dream world, Amy Lee was prevented from growing up, having a sense of self and seeing herself objectively. Adjusting to reality may involve realising and accepting some painful and inconvenient truths. There comes a time when Amy Lee starts to see herself as others see her:
“...everyone was so kind to her that she soon stopped feeling like Buck Finch, and as the little door in her mind refused to open and let her escape through it, she found herself only a nervous girl without social background and without anything to say to some of the most intelligent and charming people in London.”
Even worse:
“Amy thought more about her own feelings and character than she had ever done before, and came to the natural conclusion that she was a very queer person indeed. One night she made a list of the ordinary things she did not like, and also a list of the things she had never done, and to her amazement it covered two sheets of notepaper.”
Unlike Elizabeth Taylor's Angel, who as a young girl turns her back on reality after getting a glimpse of her real self and her unsatisfactory situation, Amy Lee emerges into the daylight of the real world. She slowly changes for the better and leaves her fantasy life behind her:
“...when she was a child she had been able to retreat from loneliness and fear into her secret world; and now, when she was grown up and famous and rich, her secret world was becoming unreal to her, as if shafts of sunlight were breaking through the tattered walls of a sorcerer’s tent.”
This is a good description of the dissolution of a spell.
When the doors refuse to open
Escaping through a door in the mind is a short-term solution that may work for a while – it is often an imaginative child's best option - but will cause problems in the longer term. It is best to build up inner strength and coping ability by dealing effectively with real people and real situations in the real world in the normal way; sooner or later the escape door may close.
It may even be that for some people it is the door to the real world that refuses to open. They become trapped in their fantasy world, so in it they can't see it, which ruins their lives. Mary Webb and the Victorian novelist Ouida are good examples of this.
On the other hand, Stella Gibbons does realise that going through the door into the imagination is not always harmful and that it is not always for the best when the door remains closed:
“...she could not fall into that daydream, that fruitful trance, which comes to some writers when they sit silent and observant in a crowd, and which until now had never failed to come to her.”
What Stella Gibbons says about Amy Lee's daydreams, imagination and coming to terms with reality is authentic and convincing. Much of it obviously comes from from personal experience; perhaps she too had a door that closed, forcing her to remain in the real world, face reality and move on.
She would have agreed with this:
