The Experience of Cinderella

Abstract

BY COMMON WISDOM is doing, living, acting, and means the opposite, temporarily residing in a zone outside of real time and activity. This cliche is honored most by the readers of popular novels for whom mental activity is not an experience. I propose to examine this attitude toward reading and experience with an analysis of mainstream, realistic popular fiction. I especially want to describe the nature of the experience it offers. Escape is the customary explanation of the experience: we read to remove ourselves from where we are to someplace else. The pages of fiction become a doorway. What is seldom clarified by those who use this term (the culture at large) is who and where we are, in this room, and who and what we become on the far side of the door. It is much more obvious why escapist fiction is so named. It always narrates escape: in the nick of time, at the end, Paul and Della give Perry the answers, Inspector Erskine's helicopters land, Indian maids are untied,-all mythic and serial heroes arise from their imminent ashes to live on for further brushes with obliteration. Transported from an armchair, the reader is lifted into crises like these and is gently, dramatically, returned by these narratives. The quality of this kind of vicarious journey is often visceral (as in the way we tense up for fourth-and-one attempts on the edge of our seat) and describable in terms of sublimation (that numb, drained state at the game clock's last digit). Escape so viewed is a local and transient experience. Memory often enforces effects of the reading experience that last much longer, when the power of the sublimation has faded, when the boundary that doorway marked has become blurred. For this reason we need another metaphor,-a window, for when we choose to escape into stories of escape, we are choosing to look at the world in a certain way. 1However frivolous the choice, it entails selective epistemology. The qualities of the vicarious experience in this sense are not merely concerns of depth psychology-they are cognitive transactions. It is less the last minute release from catastrophe that marks escapist fiction than it is the structures we see, recognize, and savor from the very beginning, the peculiar way the content of that vision is delivered. So we may speak of a popular model of what lies beyond the window. Having enjoyed, taught, and studied a good many works of popular fiction, I suspect that what we undergo in the experience of reading big adult escape narratives differs little from our early experiences reading fairy tales, that the worlds modeled by the windows of both kinds of escapist fiction are one and the same. To develop this suspicion I have