Molly Make-Believe: "Unreal but Not Untrue"?

Laura Vivanco

Over the holidays I'm going to be taking a break from blogging so I thought I'd leave you with a suitably wintry story and some reflections on fiction.

Jennifer Crusie wrote in one of her essays that

Folklorist Max Luthi says that fairy tales are “unreal but not untrue” because they deal with the greatest themes in literature and life, and much of genre fiction, grounded in myth, legend, and tale, retells those primal stories for adults.

In Crusie's The Cinderella Deal (1996) the hero, Lincoln Blaise, "need[s] a professional liar" (17) to help him, and he turns to Daisy Flattery, a storyteller whose card reads

Daisy Flattery
Apartment 1B

Stories Told, Ideas Illuminated

Unreal but Not Untrue (1)

Eleanor Hallowell Abbott's Molly Make-Believe (1910) is a love story which is also about fiction and truth.¹ Carl Stanton is bedridden due to a serious attack of rheumatism and his fiancée, Cordelia, has gone on holiday for six weeks. She writes to promise him that she'll send him a letter roughly once a week and suggests that he "investigate" a "ridiculous circular" because it "seems to be rather your kind" (6). The circular advertises the services of

THE SERIAL-LETTER COMPANY.

Comfort and entertainment Furnished for Invalids, Travelers, and all Lonely People.

Real Letters

from

Imaginary Persons.

Reliable as your Daily Paper. Fanciful as your Favorite
Story Magazine. Personal as a Message from your Best Friend. Offering all the Satisfaction of receiving Letters with no Possible Obligation or even Opportunity of Answering Them. (11)

I don't want to spoil the story for those who haven't read it, so I won't say much more about it, but here's one last quote, in which Stanton describes the letters he's received from the Company:

"[...] they're not lies!" snapped Stanton. "Surely you don't call anything a lie unless not only the fact is false, but the fancy, also, is maliciously distorted! (99)

Again, I'm going to be cautious about how I phrase this, so as to avoid spoilers, but since Stanton doesn't know the real identity of Molly Make-Believe he starts to speculate about what she might be like. Let's just say some of aspects of this speculation are "interesting" to a modern sensibility. But given that the novel has metafictional elements, and given the discussions of "slash" fiction we've had here, it makes me wonder what revisionist versions might be possible, in which Molly's identity turned out to be different.

You can read Molly Make-Believe in full online here, from the Internet Archive. The Internet Archive has copies available in many different formats, scanned directly from an original. I've chosen that edition because it has all the pages (and they're all in the right order) but unfortunately it doesn't have illustrations. They're available in this version and someone has them up at Flickr. The Internet Archive also has an audio version. The Project Gutenberg editions don't include any pictures or the original page layout, but they too are available free in many different text formats and also many different audio formats as well as being available to be read online.

One advantage of reading an original version is that you get to see some of the advertising that would have been seen by the original readers of the book. At the end of this novel we can find an advertisement for romances by Margaret Pedler (some details about her can be found at Wikipedia) and Ethel M. Dell (and some details about her can also be found at Wikipedia). She was born in 1881 and died in 1939. Her

success rests with The Way of an Eagle (1912), which was refused by eight publishers before re-typing and final acceptance by T. Fisher Unwin. By 1915 the book accounted for half Unwin’s turnover! By the end of the First World War, Dell was earning a huge income from her books – one of the wealthiest authors in Britain. Her easy style and clear eroticism made her an illicit favourite with middle-class adolescents and working-class servants and gained her the title of ‘the housemaid’s choice’ for her success in writing what Rebecca West called ‘tosh’. […]

During the 1930s Dell was still one of the most popular women’s authors to be asked for at the ‘tuppenny’ libraries (alongside Elinor Glyn and Marie Corelli). Although ‘spiritual’ and conservative, Dell’s stories also contained the violent passions so enjoyed by women (especially young girls) before World War Two. Her influence on women’s romance is still evident and can be seen clearly in the ‘sexier’ women’s writers of a later age, but also in works like E. M. Hull’s The Sheik (1919). She was also an early influence on Barbara Cartland and Catherine Cookson; she is one of the great progenitors of Mills and Boon. (Bloom 134-35).

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• Bloom, Clive. Bestsellers: Popular Fiction Since 1900. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.
• Crusie, Jennifer. "Let Us Now Praise Scribbling Women." Originally published in Inside Borders March 1998: 19.
• Crusie, Jennifer. The Cinderella Deal. New York: Bantam, 1996.
• Hallowell Abbot, Eleanor. Molly Make-Believe. 1910. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1920.

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1 Molly Make-Believe was number 9 in the 1910 best-selling fiction rankings from Bowker's Annual/Publisher's Weekly.

The image is of Carl Stanton, in his sickbed, chuckling after he's read the advertisement from The Serial-Letter Company.

Fictions and Reality

Laura Vivanco

"Life, the aggregate of defined actions, events, or experiences, only becomes plot, story, theme, or motif once it has been refracted through the prism of the ideological environment, only once it has taken on concrete ideological flesh. Reality that is unrefracted and, as it were, raw is not able to enter into the content of literature." (Medvedev and Bakhtin [1928] 1978 qtd. Talbot 3)

"Fiction has to make sense; real life is often so perplexing as to defy explanation." (Miss Snark)

"Truth is stranger than fiction." (common phrase)

"As Luthi has pointed out, 'Fairy tales are unreal, but they are not untrue: they reflect the essential development and conditions of man's existence' (70).
But what can't be escaped can be revised." (Crusie 57)

"So what is fiction? Simply stories that do not pretend to be about real events. That's the easy answer, but of course there is more to it than that. The relation between fiction and reality is not a straight-forward one. The two have a peculiar way of getting mixed up together; distinguishing the two is not quite as easy as one might think, or hope." (Talbot 5)

Fiction, then, is selective. It can take elements of reality, but the particular elements which are chosen, and how they're placed together to form a whole, reflect choices made by the author, both consciously and subconsciously. What of reality? To a certain extent, all of us construct that too, as in the photo I've included above, of which the photographer commented that "This is a picture I took at the base of Niagara Falls, which itself is perhaps the world's most photographed subject. [...] I still use this picture to illustrate mediated reality, e.g. replacing reality with what's really there..." As individuals living our lives

When we chat to one another, we very often make stories about ourselves - about our excursions and exploits, about our thoughts and feelings. We create stories out of our memories - turning our lives into words and keeping the past alive. [...]
The news on television is full of stories. So are history books. We make narratives out of sequences of events all the time, even when involved in kinds of activity we would not associate with storytelling at all. (Talbot 3)

When we tell this kind of story about reality, we don't have as much creative freedom as an author writing fiction, but the similarities exist because this "storytelling" about reality is also "refracted through the prism of the ideological environment," and is also selective. Sometimes this selectivity is intentional, either because we deliberately want to mislead ourselves and/or others or because we think particular facts are not worth mentioning. At other times we may unintentionally forget or omit elements that seemed less important, or our narrative may take a particular shape because certain facts are not available to us. The Guardian advert, "Points of View," gives us an example of how this last possibility can affect the stories we tell about reality:

What we see in the advert is the same event, shot from various different points of view, and from each the "story" is different.¹ The final shot claims to present "the whole picture" but of course it doesn't, because the advert itself is a story (created by John Webster). There is still so much left unknown and unseen.

The advert also depends for its impact on the reader's knowledge. In other words, the story is "refracted through the prism of the ideological environment" not once, but twice. When we read or listen to a "story" (whether it's intended to be read/heard as fiction, or as a narrative about reality, such as a nation's history and identity) we interpret that story in ways which reflect own experiences and beliefs. Readers too are selective. We choose which elements of the story to prioritise, we do not tend to remember every word the author wrote, and we may have differing interpretations of identical or similar narratives depending on the context in which they appear and/or what we know about the narrator. Here's a very topical example:

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Changefest '09 - Obama's Inaugural Speech

Barack Obama Interview
John McCain Interview

Sarah Palin Video
Funny Election Video

• Crusie, Jennifer. "This Is Not Your Mother's Cinderella: The Romance Novel as Feminist Fairy Tale." Romantic Conventions. Ed. Anne K. Kaler and Rosemary Johnson-Kurek. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State U. Popular P., 1999. 51-61.
• Talbot, Mary M. Fictions at Work: Language and Social Practice in Fiction. New York: Longman, 1995.

1 I've tried to embed the video, from YouTube, in the post but if the link breaks or if it fails to work for some other reason, you might be able to watch the advert at this website. Some stills from the advert are shown and described here.

The photo is from Wikimedia Commons.

Once Upon a Time - Romance and Fairy Tales

(First of all I need to apologize for I said I would post this last week. But I got embroiled in another Ikea-adventure, which involved, among other things, a wooden bookshelf door dropping onto my foot and some major rearrangements of my library.)

Like fantasy, romance fiction employs various elements of fairy tales, a genre which has been analysed by Max Lüthi (THE EUROPEAN FOLKTALE, 1947), among others. The familiarity of romance with fairy tales becomes obvious in the structure: at the beginning, the order is disturbed; the heroine often has to leave her home (e.g. in Gaelen Foley's LORD OF FIRE) and has to master several adventures before the order is restored or a new order is established at the end of the book. Similiarly to fairy tales, this new order is usually represented by the marriage of the protagonists and/or by the birth of a child: the adventures are over, the villains punished, and hero and heroine can finally return home:

". . . they raced across the wild, windswept crags and green valleys of
Scotland.
Home. Their land.
And the land of their unborn babe ...
And all their sons and daughters yet to be.
(Shannnon Drake, COME THE
MORNING 420)

Contrarily to what Jeanne Dubino writes in "The Cinderella Complex: Romance Fiction, Patriarchy and Capitalism", "home" in these cases doesn't only stand for a building of a mortar and stone and most certainly does not stand for the suppression of woman and her exploitation as a houseworker in patriarchal society (compare Dubino 105-06). The term "home" in romance stands for the protagonists' love for each other and for a new harmony in their relationship.

Apart from using structural elements of fairy tales, several romance novels also refer to specific fairy tales, most importantly:

A) "Beauty and the Beast": in this case, the hero embodies the beast, which is emphasised by animal or demon similes, metaphors and nicknames. Paranormal romance even goes one step further: here the hero is not just described as a beast, he is a beast: a supernatural being, often a shapeshifter, as in Christine Feehan's Carpathian series. The heroine is often forced to stay in his home (e.g., in Foley's LORD OF FIRE) or he comes into possession of hers, either by conquering it (e.g., in Penelope Williamson's KEEPER OF THE DREAM) or by receiving it as a gift from his king (e.g., in Drake's COME THE MORNING). It falls to the heroine to conquer and tame the beast, "to change [the hero] from an emotionally frigid Neanderthal into a sensitive, caring, nurturing human being", yet with his warrior qualities still intact (Susan Elizabeth Phillips, "The Romance and the Empowerment of Women" 58).

B) "Cinderella": the heroine in romance is often poor and has a lesser social status than the hero. Their love story consequently bears a resemblance to the Cinderella tale, and while only few heroines become actual princesses, they do become countesses/duchesses (in historical romances) or the wives of a multi-millionaires (in contemporary romances, especially category romances).

Despite all these similarities to fairy tales, it is important to realize romance (and fantasy, for that matter) differs from fairy tales in one important point: in contrast to the latter romance is set in reality, albeit a fictional one. Thus, even though romance uses elements of the fairy tale genre, it does not share its most important characteristics as described by Max Lüthi: romances are in set in specific places not just in "a forest", in "a village"; the characters are three-dimensional and, thus, they age, learn from their experiences, bleed and hurt when cut, and experience a host of emotions. In romance characters are individuals with individual names (the only names that appear in fairy tales are either nicknames like Little Red Riding Hood or commonplace names like Jack/Hans, Gretel); they are usually neither completely good nor completely bad.

The vital difference between romance/fantasy fiction and fairy tales becomes especially pronounced when magical gifts like gems and flowers falling out of one's mouth while talking come into play: in the "real" life of fiction such a gift turns out to be immensely impractical: "'I can still say 'morning,' ' Rowena growled, 'but I'm deleting the other word [i.e. good] from my vocabulary. Rose thorns hurt when they scrape across your lips'" (Elisabeth Waters, "The Birthday Gift" 104).