Folklore and the Fantastic in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction

Jason Marc Harris

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138259546
• eBook ISBN: 9781317134640
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire

Jason Marc Harris's ambitious book argues that the tensions between folk metaphysics and Enlightenment values produce the literary fantastic. Demonstrating that a negotiation with folklore was central to the canon of British literature, he explicates the complicated rhetoric associated with folkloric fiction. His analysis includes a wide range of writers, including James Barrie, William Carleton, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Sheridan Le Fanu, Neil Gunn, George MacDonald, William Sharp, Robert Louis Stevenson, and James Hogg. These authors, Harris suggests, used folklore to articulate profound cultural ambivalence towards issues of class, domesticity, education, gender, imperialism, nationalism, race, politics, religion, and metaphysics. Harris's analysis of the function of folk metaphysics in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century narratives reveals the ideological agendas of the appropriation of folklore and the artistic potential of superstition in both folkloric and literary contexts of the supernatural.

Chapter One

An Introduction to Folklore and the Fantastic in Nineteenth-Century British Literature

“Mr Hartright, you surprise me. Whatever women may be, I thought that men, in the nineteenth century, were above superstition.”1 This assertion in Wilkie Collins’s mystery novel, The Woman in White (1860), appeals to Victorian readers’ tacit agreement; however, reason and superstition are not neatly divided between masculinity and femininity, nor was Victorian culture “above superstition.” It is no revelation to designate any particular culture as superstitious – to maintain beliefs that have no rational evidence; what’s intriguing about people “in the nineteenth century” is what comprised their superstitions: “belief ranged from […] those who wrote about the fairies […] those visited by true dreams, premonitions and telepathic encounters, to the sometimes unwilling, sometimes eager belief of Spiritualists and Theosophists and the alternatively enthusiastic and doubtful faith of Christians of all denominations.”2 These beliefs appear frequently in Victorian literature, for while the nineteenth century is famous for the profusion of literary realism, the era also witnessed the proliferation of literature referred to as “fantasy.” The collection, revision, and publishing of folk tales – especially European tales from Germany to Ireland – stoked British attention not merely to the motifs that fantasy writers have used and the structural aspects of their narratives but also influenced the metaphysical and moral discourse of both realism and the gothic.

How nineteenth century writers imitate, revise, and transform preternatural folkloric material into narratives of the literary fantastic is the substantive focus of this book. What emerges from these texts of the folkloric fantastic is conflicted rhetoric. Superstition and skepticism emphasize divisions among class, education, national identity, and faith while simultaneously revealing an underlying matrix of communal and contagious folk beliefs and motifs that are fundamental to a deeper understanding of the hybrid cultural consciousness of the writers and audience in England, Scotland, and Ireland.

Fantasy: cultural dreams

The term fantasy often suggests delusion, escapism, and irrelevance. J.R.R. Tolkien defines fantasy in his well-known essay “On Fairy-Stories” as “the making or glimpsing of Other-worlds”(64).3 A work of literary fantasy presents a “Secondary World”, which is not simply a mimetic representation of the “Primary World” or everyday reality, but an articulation of “images of things […] not to be found in our primary world at all, or are generally believed not to be found there” (69–70). Tolkien’s definition combines the “older and higher” use of the word fantasy “as an equivalent of Imagination” (“‘the power of giving to ideal creations the inner consistency of reality’”) with the idea of the unreal: “unlikeness to the Primary World […]” (68–69). Literary fantasy is a consistent presentation of the unreal: the unreal becomes the real in the context of the narrative. Fantasy is often perceived as having the significance of dreams: full of psychological and cultural projections of desires and fears, which are not irrelevant. It is especially through folk narratives and beliefs that the Victorians produced fantasies, and through folklore, nineteenth-century psychologists – most notably Sigmund Freud – explored the unconscious mind of humanity.

Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) uses examples from fairy tales. Although Freud wrote before the Indiana folklorist Stith Thompson and Anti Aarne of the Finnish School of folklorists canonized the terms, tale-type and motif, Freud was generally familiar with motifs and tale-types. A motif is a plot element in a folk tale: if a Fairy Godmother plays a role, that’s a motif. A tale-type is the narrative pattern that uses particular motifs to form a tale: Cinderella, for example.4 The motifs and tale-types of folklore are part of the stock of symbols that Carl Jung and his disciples studied, but it was Freud’s correlation between dreams and fairy tales that laid the groundwork for psychoanalytic approaches to folk narratives for decades to come: “There can be no doubt that the connections between our typical dreams and fairy tales […] are neither few nor accidental.”5

In 1897, anthropologist and avid fairy-tale collector Andrew Lang observed parallels between dreams and superstitious claims: “the alleged events of ghostdom […] are precisely identical with the every-night phenomena of dreaming, except for the avowed element of sleep in dreams.”6 Many theories of fantasy and the fantastic are occupied with “the fantastic as the outlet for the exclusions and taboos, the estrangements and alienation of bourgeois society.”7 Such conceptions of fantasy texts as dreams giving form to cultural repression resemble William Patrick Day’s contention that the Gothic serves to “externalize” in general the fears and desires that the “human imagination […] finds in itself” and that the “Gothic cosmology” of the Victorian age in particular “refers only to […] the human act of fantasizing” and is essentially then the “imaginative projection of the nineteenth-century.”8

Some evaluations of folklore have overemphasized assumptions about cultural anxieties and desires. For example, in “The Hook” urban legend, a teenage couple flees a murderous man with a hook for a hand. One analysis has concluded this narrative indicates “adolescent fears about sexuality and anxiety at violating social moral standards.”9 However, one must guard against hasty generalizing about tales; otherwise, all inhabitants of the spiritual world (fairies, demons, ghosts, etc.) become sexually repressive bogeymen like the deformed psychopath in “The Hook.” Folklorist Bill Ellis recognizes the danger of reducing responses to a folk narrative. He proposes that legends like “The Hook” “allow participants to experiment with a social taboo; violating, it, respecting it or compromising with it […].”10 Ellis clarifies that while the legend seems to be an admonition “as most informants concede, it encourages the proscribed act” because the audience for the tale finds the idea of parking in a remote area all the more intriguing because of the excitement generated by the legend.11 Therefore, while psychoanalytic approaches may prove revealing, one must avoid reductionism.

The interrogation of dreams, fairy tales, and superstitions that developed in the nineteenth century represented inquiry beyond empiricism; curious minds explored the mysteries of subjective experiences, just as they desired more from narrative than imitations of bourgeois or upper-class standards of reality. Fantasy and folklore presented new frontiers that provoked both enthusiasm and objection from all sides: the stakes were political, religious, and personal.

Folk narratives and the supernatural: fairy tales and legends

In addition to fantasy, folklore is another debated term. Many people today are aware that urban legends are folklore but don’t realize jokes are also folklore. Some consider old stories about ghosts and fairies the province of folklore yet would be shocked to learn that educated people still tell tales of personal encounters with the fairies as well as ghosts in this technological age.12 And what are fairy tales? Stories of meeting the fairies that people tell as though they are believable – folk legends about fairies – are not the same thing at all as those fairy tales that so many heard as children read from books by the brothers Grimm, Andrew Lang, Charles Perrault or Hans Christian Andersen.

The folkloric definition of a fairy tale, or what the Germans call märchen, is a folk tale (traditional prose narrative) that, according to Stith Thompson’s canonical work, The Folktale, “is a tale of some length involving a succession of motifs or episodes. It moves in an unreal world without definite locality or definite characters and is filled with the marvelous” (8).13 Fairies are not a requirement. Folklorists have expanded Thompson’s minimalist definition; for example, Linda Dégh defines märchen as “a lengthy and heroic adventurous journey from deprivation to fulfillment, through trial, danger, and suffering, acted out and counteracted with magic helpers and enemies.”14

Unlike the märchen, legends articulate communal beliefs, as Timothy Tangherlini explains in Interpreting Legend: Danish Storytellers and Their Repertoires:

Legend, typically is a traditional, (mono)episodic, highly ecotypified, localized and historicized narrative of past events told as believable in a conversational mode. Psychologically, legend is a symbolic representation of folk belief and reflects the collective experiences and values of the group to whose tradition it belongs (22).

When folklorists generally speak of folk legends they mean those narratives that deal with real people (local heroes or “common folk”) encountering supernatural beings or events. The heroic genre of legends is a separate category: those legends are regional – Ireland’s Cuchulain or Finn; such legends are glorified and mythic (almost sacred) unlike traditions of local experience. Reidar Christiansen’s The Migratory Legends indicates many legends spread internationally, as märchen also do, and Tangherlini explains how legends may adapt features particular to a region after migration (they become “ecotypified”), but certain legends are unique to a region and have not migrated.

Just as urban legends today often express people’s worries about crimes so the Victorians used legend elements to symbolize their fears. The traditional legend presents to its audience a sense of pervasive and perennial threats:

The legend tells us we can never be safe because extranormal powers may interfere with our lives at any time. The earth we know as our home is not entirely ours, the logic which guides our thinking may be uncertain or invalid; we cannot trust our senses, and even scientific instruments are unreliable.15

Clarifying how folk narratives and beliefs influenced nineteenth and early-twentieth century writings of the literary fantastic entails exploring the conceptual context of folklore in the nineteenth century.

Folk metaphysics vs. Enlightenment rationality: shaping the literary fantastic

Nineteenth-century literary representations of fairy tales, folk legends, and superstitions are the culmination of attitudes towards the supernatural in general and folklore in particular. While post-Enlightenment philosophers and scientists claimed to have the power to banish superstition, the attraction of folk metaphysics – the rules, behaviors, powers, tendencies, and borders of the spiritual world implied by popular beliefs – persisted in both rural and urban contexts. Besides championing “free-thinking,” Anthony Collins’s statement from Discourse of Free Thinking (1713) reveals the vitality of folkloric perspectives on the Devil (note the myriad of traditional incarnations (old man, corpse, cat), which are not part of religious orthodoxy):

“The Devil,” said Collins, “is entirely banished [in] the United Provinces where free-thinking is in the greatest perfection, whereas all round about that Commonwealth, he appears in various shapes, sometimes in the shape of an old black gentleman, sometimes in that of a dead man, sometimes in that of a cat.”16

This manifesto of rationality notes the seeds of dissent in the hybrid nature of folk beliefs, which here conjoin unofficial and official perspectives.

Superstitious thinking in folk tales, religious narratives, and literary ghost stories is an attempt to delineate the borders of experiential truth by implying (and sometimes explicating) the effects and tendencies of invisible laws that defy reason but not belief. What Marshall Brown claims for the philosophy of the Gothic also applies to the metaphysics of superstition:

Causality, the core of Kant’s epistemology, is just as much a concern of narratives based on the unequal powers of natural and supernatural creatures. At one level, the obsession with the supernatural found in a number of Gothic novels can be understood as an exploration of the philosophical and scientific questions of how nature does and doesn’t work.17

Deciphering “what does and doesn’t work” is the epistemological justification for folk beliefs: the communal consciousness of these traditions offers an aggregate of checks and balances for negotiating with helpful and harmful invisible forces. The knowledge of folk metaphysics is meant to be useful, as Patrick Joyce asserts, “Above all, in industrial England there are clear signs of popular beliefs expressing a kind of animism […] as in rural England, these submerged aspects of popular belief involved getting things done, an efficacy contrasting with the comparative quietism of Christianity.”18 Folk beliefs arm a believer with practical charms of salt, iron, and silver when faith and prayer might not suffice against the tenacity of known and unknown terrors.19

Despite the enduring reference to folk traditions to describe subjective experiences on the popular level, the theories of the likes of Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, and John Locke shifted literary representations of reality to concentrate on empiricism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It is due to the predominance of rationalism that the literary fantastic could be born. Fixed laws of reality needed to be established before a narrative alternative could challenge those principles:

With the publication of Newton’s Principia in 1686–1687, a new system of thought came into existence that defined the real as material objects and forces, acting under invariable laws […]. Indeed, science banished the marvelous and fantastic from reality, and the immeasurable became the unreal. […] As romance and all...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 An Introduction to Folklore and the Fantastic in Nineteenth-Century British Literature
• 2 Victorian Literary Fairy Tales: Their Folklore and Function
• 3 Victorian Fairy-Tale Fantasies: MacDonald’s Fairyland and Barrie’s Neverland
• 4 MacDonald’s Lilith and Phantastes: In Pursuit of the Soul in Fairyland
• 5 James Hogg’s Use of Legend: Folk Metaphysics and Narrative Authority
• 6 Ghosts, “Grand Ladies,” “The Gentry,” and “Good Neighbors”: Folkloric Representations of the Spirit World’s Intersection with Class and Racial Tensions in Le Fanu
• 7 Robert Louis Stevenson: Folklore and Imperialism
• 8 William Carleton and William Sharp: The Celtic Renaissance and Fantastic Folklore
• 9 Conclusion: Second Sight
• Bibliography
• Index