Sophie and Christiana
Sophie from Howl’s Moving Castle (the movie): If you’re looking for unique, creative, and cozy movies, look no further than Studio Ghibli. They delight in the ordinary and make you want to tend home, eat good food, and seek out the odd and magical.
Now, the book Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones is delightful, as is all of Jones’ writing. I highly recommend her books for middle grade on up, but for now, let's look at the movie, which is a more streamlined version of the book.
Sophie is cursed to be an old woman and seeks out Howl to lift the curse, but she can’t tell him she’s cursed. So she just moves in with him and becomes his cleaning lady. Something about being suddenly old gives Sophie more courage than she had as a young woman.
From the perspective of a tender, this is grand. Sophie is appalled at the state of Howl’s castle, the food, everything. As the story progresses, she makes the castle home, gathers in the needy, gives Howl’s apprentice Markl some much-needed love and mothering, and she’s the only one besides Howl that can make the hearth-fire, Calcifer, behave. In the end, she saves all of them.
It is her love, crusty sometimes, that wins the day, but her love is shown by her tending. Sophie believes she’s not beautiful, so she tends to all these people and places without thinking of herself. And being an old lady—not realizing that all these characters circle around her because of her love and the unique magic she can manage with food, flowers, and cleaning—allows her to tend contentedly and courageously.
It is magic to see Howl’s castle as it is when it’s just him and Markl contrasted with the new castle he builds with Sophie. It has plants, a yard for Markl, and is so much homier. I love how you slowly see Sophie’s curse break as she tends to all these people. Her back gets straighter, and her face is less lined. Being suddenly old gave her great courage. Sophie worked back from there to become a wonderful and brave young woman who tends to the very end, even with her house falling apart around her ears. She tends to the point of recovering the heart of the man she loves and freeing Calcifer who comes back of his own free will. It is just such a lovely homage to women and our everyday magic.
Christiana from The Pilgrim’s Progress: I recently reread The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan, which I hadn’t read since I was a kid. I was struck so much more by Chrstiana’s story than by Christian’s. Christiana admits her sin and how she wronged her husband with a frankness we often don’t get from women today. She admits to needing a protector and is provided one for herself, her sons, and Mercy. There is a refreshing lack of independence and a whole lot of honest expressions of weakness.
As they go along, not only does she get the blessing of seeing the path her husband traveled, but she collects all these broken, weary saints as she goes along. She gathers the young, the old, the infirm, and the struggling. The slower place she must set as a woman makes room for the weak. She accumulates quite a host by the time she reaches the Celestial City, including her sons, daughters-in-law, and others. And she also gains two great knights who make the way safer for more pilgrims.
Christiana’s story is so beautiful because it was solidly feminine, convicting, honest, and honoring of women. It shows how our gifts may be softer, but they can be used mightily by the Lord if we stop being bitter about not being knights and start tending to the ones the Lord puts around us who need a mothering and gentle hand.
Side Note: Please tell me I’m not the only one who craves a day when women were honored in their roles as women and mothers. It sometimes seems that all that the feminists have gained for us is to be treated like “one of the boys”. And yet when I read Dracula or Pilgrim’s Progress, I see great honor being paid to women, their role, and their creaturehood. Even in my own generation, boys were taught to respect women, all women. I miss those signs of difference and deference.
Here are two women, Sophie and Christiana, which can encourage us on our way. One is an anime that is secular, and one is several hundred years old now and written by a believer. Both are well worth the time to explore and enjoy.
