American students brought up on Disney are shocked by British Christmas pantomimes. Accustomed to receiving the fairy tale as a seamlessly efficient, right-minded fantasy within which they can lose themselves, they encounter instead an invitation to join in a noisy collective celebration of multidirectional cross-dressing, sexual and scatological innuendo, slapstick, blatant stereotyping, stage machinery that goes out of the way to expose itself, and self-aware, often clumsy narration. Surprised that such entertainments are offered to young children, students concede that to grow up recognizing the story as a story, the stage as a stage, and the types as types might be both liberating and enabling.
I learned about the Christmas pantomimes from Jennifer Schacker's work, and now she has published the magisterial summa of her researches, Staging Fairyland: Folklore, Children's Entertainment, and Nineteenth-Century Pantomime. This book opens up the project of her earlier study, National Dreams: The Remaking of Fairy Tales in Nineteenth-Century England, by demonstrating that scholars and children's authors played in the same marketplace as the women in tights, and were fully aware of their competition. For the scholarly reader, the reflexivity of Staging Fairyland is as liberating and enabling as the pantomime itself. The book is a richly learned unsettling of a master narrative often taken for granted by folklorists, historians of childhood, critical media theorists, performance studies scholars, and the literary historians of the fairy tale. In this narrative, modern culture coopts original traditional content, mediating and commodifying it for profit and ideological control; it represses spontaneity and critique; it marches children towards normative futures; and it is in due course destabilized by marginal actors and post-modern perspectives. All of this marches in lockstep with technological succession.
Schacker declares her intention to challenge this linear history of "adaptation" with an account of intermedial interactions. In this "more ambidextrous history," the linear narrative itself emerges as the discursive strategy of a folklore studies taking shape amid and against the multimedial networks of nineteenth-century British culture. Circulating across children's literature, scholarship, social masquerade, and popular theater was the seductive matter of the fairy tale, a French imaginary that had invaded Great Britain and Ireland to lodge itself at the very heart of popular nationalism. Within this bigger picture, the history of folkloristics is part of the history of the lore itself: the "sociability" of the fairy tale traverses analytical levels along with post-hoc boundaries of genre and register. Schacker follows folklorists like Richard Bauman and Charles Briggs in their operationalization of Mikhail Bakhtin's dialogism into a new philological method. Moreoever, like literary scholars such as Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, she draws on Bakhtin's construction of the carnivalesque. The nineteenth-century fairy tale, she argues, was fully entwined with carnival's British equivalent—Christmas misrule, amplified and multiplied by the commercial spirit into staged pantomimes, books published just in time for gifting, and sociable masquerade, amid every other kind of gaudy spectacle and consumer excess.
If Christmas was the fairy-tale season, the defining fairy-tale trope was Cinderella's magical transformation. Building on Pravina Shukla's account of costume as dress that is intensified in material elaboration and communicative power (2015), Schacker shows hows the pantomime could transform a slender male actor into a ribald middle-aged Dame and a shapely young woman into Jack, defender of empire. Costume turned bourgeois Britons into heroic or piratical metaphors of themselves at fancy-dress balls. Careful lighting and elaborate ephemeral décor remade grubby theaters and Victorian pleasure gardens as spaces of social license and enchantment. Indeed, in this period the adjective "fairy-tale" referred to any kind of pleasure-giving artifice, achieved by human ingenuity, in a commercial and normally urban setting. Though often celebrating British glories, fairy-tale magic drew heavily on Continental inventions and was studded with exotic referents; it was shot through with sexuality of the most polymorphous kind and was knowingly self-aware. In short, the fairy tale was the absolute inverse of Romantic conceptions of folklore as natural, spontaneous, rural, innocent, normative, and national.
Accordingly, this is in part a history of purification, and thanks to the work of Regina Bendix, Bauman and Briggs, and others, we know where it's headed: ideals of authenticity and generic stability. What's different is that by enlarging her history beyond the discipline, Schacker demonstrates the complete failure of purification. The polymorphous perversity of the fairy tale simply overwhelmed middle-class containment projects, and even such arbiters of Victorian high seriousness as John Ruskin and Charlotte Yonge were haunted by childhood memories of the pantomime. Fabricating scenes of oral transmission from theatrical prototypes to sell their books, the folklorists were intertextual hucksters even more shameless than the outright merchants of magic. Schacker's conclusion reminds us that despite the weight of moral reform on the narrative content of Anglo-American children's culture, other inheritances of the fairy tale are far richer: not just the persistent Christmas pantos on which every British provincial theater depends, but burlesque and magic shows, the spectacular magic of Broadway and Disney, the Cinderella wish-fulfillment plots of rom-com and reality TV, the Veblenesque impostures of the socially mobile, and the delight in cosplay and material self-fashioning that are so central to contemporary forms of identity. An important subtheme of Schacker's book is that the pantomime encapsulated what David Buch calls "the comic-marvelous," burlesque material horseplay that transforms the circumstances of a low-born actor, in contrast to the refined, disembodied artifice of court opera and other aristocratic genres. Compatible with the bluff masculinist rhetoric of British nationalism as it disclaims French influence, this mode of magic also lends itself to democratizing political critique, by foregrounding its machinery and ephemerality. (Americans might compare the revelation of the "man behind the curtain" in the populist rhetoric of The Wizard of Oz.) A cynical elaboration of Schacker's conclusion could point to the future of media and commercial magics that facilitate both personal and collective self-deception.
Each chapter anchors its argument in two case studies, so that Schacker's astonishing interdisciplinary breadth is grounded in still more remarkable empirics, drawing on extensive bibliographical and archival research. Scholars of print culture, cross-dressing, French women writers, stock characters, and any number of other topics will not only find themselves cited but gain new insights into their own concerns. One lesson of this book for authors, publishers, and academic evaluators is the immeasurable value of allowing a complex project to take its time.
As a folklorist reading, I applaud the demonstration that folkloristic methods and concepts are perfectly well adapted to the analysis of mediated, commercial, and middle-class cultural expressions. On the other hand, I note an absence--and here that linear metanarrative of the field is tugging at me, but perhaps raising a useful question. In this rich sociability across media, genres, and performance domains, the networks are extensive and surprising: the character of Daniel O'Rourke is shared by folklorist T. Crofton Croker and African American entertainer James Hewlett. But there are no mentioned connections to rural communities or oral narrators in communal settings, except as impostures to be debunked. Yet late nineteenth and twentieth century tale collections from around Europe and its empires participate in the narrative and entextualizing strategies documented here while still retaining the verifiable participation of known individual storytellers. The works of Sadhana Naithani, Leela Prasad, Elizabeth Mathias and Richard Raspa, David Hopkin, and many others have documented both these complex interactions and the agency of the storytellers in question. To be sure, such interactions may leave little trace and can rarely be reconstructed. But it's a question: to what extent would Schacker's networks of fairy-tale sociability have extended into rural Britain and Ireland? Was there any social space for the input of community narrators? Not much, I expect, but lest our revisionist projects institute a new mode of exclusion, it is perhaps simply worth mentioning that, at a distance from the centers of popular commercial culture, oral networks of narrative exchange continued to exist. And if the sundering of rural from urban sociability was consolidated as early as this, that offers some insight into present-day cultural divisions.
Here it's also worth reminding ourselves that other histories of folkloristics exist, imbricated with other histories and genres of folklore and shaped in other social settings. These lie far beyond the scope of Staging Fairyland, but I make the point for the folklorist reader, lest Schacker's dethroning of Richard Dorson's historiography simply loft her in turn to the vacated pedestal in our curriculum. I leave aside continental European and Latin American histories of vernacular tradition, in which oral-literate and verbal-customary-material boundaries are less fetishized than in Anglo-American folkloristics, and in which the space of folklorismus--cross-transfer between ideology, marketplace, and cultural practice--is largely taken for granted; I also leave aside other histories I do not know. Within the British Isles themselves, we can point to a range of scholarly production allied to local and worker history and education projects: the kind of work that would eventually call itself folklife studies, or social history, or cultural studies. Encompassing folksong and oral narrative but centered on custom and material culture, this work understands vernacular expression not as the warbling of native woodnotes wild but as the product of social labor. Even more than the US, the British Isles have a "Botkin" folkloristics to balance their "Dorson" folkloristics, but this weary binary is itself far too simple to capture the networks of interaction both documented and practiced in British (or indeed American) scholarship. Consider, for example, the historian Ronald Hutton, whose history of British custom, Stations of the Sun (1996), gives full weight to the agency of early modern craft workers under economic stress in the shaping of supposedly ancient practices such as mumming, and also credits the pagan beliefs and aesthetic inventions of upper-class British folklorists in their further history; the more socially diverse contemporary paganism studied by Hutton and Sabina Magliocco (and participated in by both) has carried these innovations forward.
In short, there are networks everywhere, intermedial circulation everywhere, and scholarship everywhere, and one salutary effect of Schacker's book is to show the English-speaking field the folly of finding its representative anecdote in the fairy tale, which turns out to stand for everything the founders sought to repudiate. The current push across the field to acknowledge a wider range of ancestors (e.g., the American Folklore Society 2020 annual meeting) and to reconceptualize folklore scholarship in terms of a far broader range of intellectual activities and actors is pushing us toward a fuller conception of folklore as a historical field of practice, rather than to the "history of the discipline" as a dreary bloc on the syllabus to be summed up with a critical dismissal. Schacker's important book takes a complementary strike at the very heart of the field's self-mythologizing, both positive and negative. It demands that we pay fuller attention, not just outside but inside the hegemonic spaces, to the networks within which we constitute our narratives.
Works Cited
American Folklore Society. Notable Folklorists of Color: Remembering Our Ancestral Legacies. An Exhibition Marking the 25th Anniversary of the Cultural Diversity Committee. https://notablefolkloristsofcolor.org/, 2020.
Hutton, Ronald. The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.
Schacker, Jennifer. National Dreams: The Remaking of Fairy Tales in Nineteenth-Century England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003.
Shukla, Pravina. Costume: Performing Identities through Dress. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015.
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[Review length: 1885 words • Review posted on January 28, 2021]