Spellbound: The Fairy Tale and the Victorians by Molly Clark Hillard (review)

At the outset of Spellbound: The Fairy Tale and the Victorians, Molly Clark Hillard delineates a general ambivalence toward fairy tales during the Victorian era. Although Victorians tended to consider them “a nostalgic refuge from an industrial age” and “a narrative space outside of progressive modernity,” fairy tales demonstrably contributed to the articulation of the age, leaving their mark on the “language and images of industrial, material England” (1). Thus writers, too, generally viewed these tales as a marginal, childish, or primitive form, on the one hand, but often found them a source of intense interest and inspiration, on the other. Hillard underscores the ironic results of this ambivalence: “Valuing the fairy tale as a coin out of circulation was, paradoxically, what insured its currency” (5).

Hence the argument encapsulated in the book’s title. Victorians were spellbound, that is, both enchanted by and bound to fairy-tale forms and themes to such an extent that these allegedly quaint, puerile stories became integral to their discursive systems — literary, cultural, and ideological — throughout the period. To demonstrate the pervasive, influential reach of fairy tales, Hillard divides her study into four main parts: “Matter,” “Spell,” “Produce,” and “Paraphrase.” This division itself already points to an innovative approach to her subject. Each part is further subdivided into chapters focusing on distinct aspects of the Victorian intellectual and material world, thereby establishing the considerable discursive or “dialogic” power (to use Bakhtin’s term, as Hillard does) that fairy tales wielded over the British imagination.

In Part 1, “Matter,” Hillard sets out to show how 19^th-century collections of fairy tales and legends evolved out of the popular interrelated fields of antiquarianism, natural history, and folklore. After contextualizing the rivalrous relationships between novelists and collectors during this era, she devotes three successive chapters to a discussion of Dickens’s Pickwick Papers (1836–1837), Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), and Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–1872). Hillard brings to these much-discussed texts a fresh perspective. Disparate though the novels are, she argues, they exhibit a similar competitive disposition (and anxiety) in their authors’ efforts to define as well as to elevate the genre of the novel in opposition to the antiquarian’s or, later, the folklorist’s chronicling of history.

In the opening chapters and those that follow, two significant trends (which also constitute polemical positions) in fairy-tale scholarship may be observed. First, contra the universalizing tendency of psychoanalytic approaches that disregard time-bound and national contexts, Hillard’s study reaffirms the work of late 20^th-century and early 21^st-century critics in regarding specific economic, gendered, and racial or ethnic issues as vital for understanding the literary uses of enchantment. Second, and more markedly, Hillard’s emphasis is on the ways in which fairy tales and adult literature comingled in Victorian texts. “I seek to demonstrate,” she writes, “the fairy tale’s integrality to the canonical poetry, fiction, and drama of the Victorian period, specifically to address and counter the persistent idea that the fairy tale is and was a subject only for children” (18).

For Hillard (and likewise, for the writer of this review), fairy tales hold a mirror up to human nature within historically-situated discursive contexts. Storytellers cannot help but superimpose or etch their own features onto the stories they appropriate and adapt for divergent localized audiences. As Hillard puts it, folk narratives are “sturdy enough to bear the weight of multiple agendas. … Fairy tales do the nation in different voices” (20). This precept, together with its detailed demonstration, constitutes one of the valuable lessons (and agendas) of her book.

Whereas Part 1 focuses on prose fiction, in Part 2, “Spell,” Hillard turns to poetry and the Sleeping Beauty motif as an exemplum of the Victorian preoccupation with gender and the movements of time. Drawing on Julia Kristeva’s “Women’s Time,” she examines the distinction between temporal circularity (“the princess rapt in cyclic slumber”) and temporal linearity...