In Consuming Agency in Fairy Tales, Childlore, and Folkliterature, Susan Honeyman uses a mosaic of folk, literary, and popular sources to examine ideologies of childhood, primarily in the United States. The book is about what she calls “folklures”—objects of mass consumption that are “constantly held up... to children and bartered for agency” (140, 5–6). Honeyman claims a “historically materialist” and “explicitly child-rights-oriented” approach to the subject, positing images of food, especially, as loci at which the parameters of childhood are constantly being negotiated. Her argument is that in the last century—in the wake of Progressive-Era child labor reforms—parents, child advocates, and corporate interests have increasingly eroded the agency of children, replacing it with a gilded prison of consumerist choice. Marginalizing children’s actions on their own behalf as bad behavior, or sometimes ignoring those actions altogether, these interests offer a broadening array of preprocessed options that allow for the illusion of freedom of choice, while limiting its scope to what has been preordained “safe.”
To make this point, Honeyman draws on a wide range of materials produced for and about children, though she concentrates primarily on five texts: Carlo Collodi’s (and Disney’s) Pinocchio, “Hansel and Gretel” in its various incarnations, Halloween traditions (both folk and corporate), Brer Rabbit tales, and Elzie Segar and Max Fleischer’s Popeye. The book’s first chapter, “What Good Little Girls and Boys Are Made Of,” considers the concept of agency, generally, as it relates to “the materials of youth” (25). Honeyman writes that through Pinocchio, as well as related texts like The Velveteen Rabbit and The Brave Little Toaster, children are encouraged “to unquestionably accept absolute norms of consumership” (39). They are encouraged to value the mass produced, while learning from mass-produced objects that it is better to be loved—to be passive— than to love—to assume agency.
In the next four chapters—“Honey(cakes),” “Sweet Teeth,” “Molasses,” and “Muscle and Greens”—she explores some of the implications of this thesis through discourses about food. “Honey(cakes)” is about children’s accountability in controlling their own consumption—it is about the manner in which child characters are held responsible for their actions in what she terms “premodern” versions of stories like “Hansel and Gretel,” whereas in “consumerist revisions,” agency is relocated to the alluring, malevolent power of the object of desire (55). “Sweet Teeth” addresses the corporate transformation of Halloween—the way in which children have been encouraged to give up on tricksterism in favor of mass-produced, individually wrapped treats. In “Molasses,” Honeyman examines narratives of gastronomic utopia—“Cockaigne” or “Diddy-Wah-Diddy”—as means of social control, manipulating “poverty and hunger” by making “false promises [of plenty] to lure the vulnerable” (112–113), while “Muscles and Greens” is about the exertion of a similar brand of social control through early-twentieth-century claims about nutrition.
This book contains a number of moments of thoroughly compelling analysis. Particularly impressive are Honeyman’s discussions, in the first chapter, of the appeal of inanimate objects come to life, and the relative value of the superhero. In terms of the former, she draws heavily on the work of Susan Stewart, writing about toys as material mnemonics for fiction, devices through which children play out fantasy. Citing Disney’s Toy Story as an example, she writes that post-industrial narratives about animate toys encourage a particular kind of fantasy—they “idealize passivity by romanticizing the object” as an object, the most important desire of which is to be looked at, to be manipulated rather than assuming agency itself (33). In terms of the latter, she argues that superheroes teach the same lesson from an alternate perspective. Passivity is idealized, once again, this time by “empowering fictional characters... through means inaccessible to their audience—bionics, genetic mutations, and powers endowed by alien creatures” (48). By encouraging children to aspire to a brand of fantastical agency that they cannot have, narratives of superheroes blind children to the mundane agency that is open to them, should they choose to embrace it.
Unfortunately, though, despite its compelling moments, Consuming Agency in Fairy Tales, Childlore, and Folkliterature seems to promise considerably more than it delivers. Contrary to the book’s title, and despite the fact that it is part of Routledge’s new series, “Studies in Folklore and Fairytales,” it does not seem to engage very deeply with either folklore or fairy-tale studies. In terms of fairy-tale studies, Honeyman does draw on the work of several key scholars in the field, most obviously Jack Zipes and Marina Warner. But discussions of fairy tales comprise only a small part of her overall project. While in her second chapter, she works with “Hansel and Gretel” (ATU 327A) and to a lesser extent “The Three Fairies” (ATU 480) and “Cinderella” (ATU 510A), she treats these narratives primarily as a jumping-off-point for a discussion of the relationship between food consumption and agency in children’s literature more generally. While elsewhere in the book, the closest she comes to further dealing with fairy tales is in her discussion of popular renditions of Brer Rabbit stories—a distant cousin to the genre at best.
In terms of the discipline of folklore, the issue is much more serious. Beginning in the book’s introduction, Honeyman mischaracterizes the contours of contemporary folklore scholarship. She uses Alan Dundes’ 2004 address to the American Folklore Society as the cornerstone of her assessment, portraying a field obsessed with authenticity, with the search for oral forms uncontaminated by the generic hybridity of modernity, and with the distinction between folklore and fakelore (12–14). She damns folklore with faint praise, writing that it is “of great importance to pop culturalists, fairy-tale studies, and... cultural studies” because it prioritizes data collection, presumably leaving the theorizing to the experts (15). And she poses her own work as a kind of alternative folkloristics, a book that breaks “the old binaries” of “‘oral’ versus ‘written’ and ‘collective’ versus individual,’” seemingly unaware of the fact that those binaries have been broken again and again in folklore by the turn toward performance and by, in the majority of his work, Dundes himself.
But then, this sort of scholarly flaw is indicative of a pattern in the book. On the one hand, Honeyman’s writing displays moments of keen analysis—fresh insights into materials that have been well-trodden by scholars of popular culture, of cultural studies, of children’s literature, fairy tales, and folklore. And on the other hand, the book’s insights all too often rest on a half-formed grasp of relevant scholarship. To offer one final example, in her chapter on Halloween, though she writes about notions of stranger danger and Halloween sadism, Honeyman makes only one passing reference to the foundational work of sociologist Joel Best. But she devotes significantly more space to David Skal’s Death Makes a Holiday (2002), which is certainly relevant, but only marginally scholarly (90). The argument of the section is compelling—that narratives of poisoned treats and razor blades in apples contribute to the disempowerment of adults and children alike, placing agency in the hands of big corporate candy makers. But in its execution, Honeyman undermines her authority. Because she seems to lack a sense of the scholarship as a discussion in progress, she pushes away all but the most casual reader, obscuring what is most compelling about her book.
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[Review length: 1199 words • Review posted on April 13, 2011]