Fantasy Elements Research Articles

Our Landlady (review)

Reviewed by: Our Landlady Mark I. West (bio) L. Frank Baum. Our Landlady. Edited by Nancy Tystad Koupal. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1996. During his writing career, L. Frank Baum created a number of memorable female characters. There can be little doubt that Dorothy Gale from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, first published in 1900, ranks among the best known female characters in all of American literature. Baum’s other Oz books also featured intriguing female characters, including Princess Ozma from The Marvelous Land of Oz, Polychrome from The Road to Oz, and the Patchwork Girl from The Patchwork Girl of Oz. Baum’s interest in female characters can be traced back to his short-lived career as a newspaper publisher in Aberdeen, South Dakota. From January 1890 to March 1891, Baum published a weekly paper called the Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer. Every issue, except for those from the paper’s final two months, featured a column titled “Our Landlady.” Baum filled this column with the adventures and caustic observations of Mrs. Sairy Ann Bilkins, a fictional landlady who runs a boarding house. The most popular feature of Baum’s paper, this column greatly amused the citizens of Aberdeen. For about a year, Mrs. Bilkins was a household name in Aberdeen, but with the demise of the paper, Mrs. Bilkins fell into obscurity. Now, well over a century since Baum wrote his last “Our Landlady” column, Mrs. Bilkins has resurfaced. She owes her rescue to Nancy Tystad Koupal, the Director of the Research and Publishing Program of the South Dakota Historical Society. In Our Landlady, Koupal has collected and carefully annotated all of Baum’s columns about Mrs. Bilkens. Although Mrs. Bilkins has comical qualities, she is not simply a caricature of a frontier woman. She is a complex character who cares about her boarders, cherishes her independence, and feels proud of the town of Aberdeen and the brand-new state of South Dakota. She takes definite stands on various controversial issues, such as women’s suffrage, temperance, and organized religion. Her views generally parallel Baum’s, but she is a bit more flamboyant than her creator. Baum did not write these columns for children, but they have significant connections to the children’s books for which he eventually became famous. The Mrs. Bilkins columns reflect Baum’s emerging interest in feminism. When he later wrote The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, he drew on his feminist background in creating the character of Dorothy and in envisioning the largely matriarchal world of Oz. The aspects of these columns that deal with life on the Dakota prairie relate to some of the animal fairy tales that he later wrote, such as “The Discontented Gopher.” [End Page 451] Another intriguing connection between these columns and Baum’s children’s books concerns Baum’s use of fantasy. Several of the columns incorporate fantasy elements, including time travel and anthropomorphic machines. One of the final columns, for example, features a magical machine that Mrs. Bilkins calls an “automatick stenogripher.” This machine carries on conversations with people and often seems a bit arrogant. Many years later, Baum reworked this material when he included a magical phonograph in The Patchwork Girl of Oz. In addition to reprinting Baum’s columns, Koupal provides a scholarly introduction in which she discusses Baum’s life in South Dakota. Baum arrived in Aberdeen in the fall of 1888 and stayed until the spring of 1891, after which he moved to Chicago. Koupal is the first scholar to do justice to this period in Baum’s life. She not only covers the details of Baum’s Dakota years, but she also provides the historical context that modern readers need in order to understand why Baum moved to Aberdeen, why he found it so difficult to make a living there, and, finally, why he decided to leave the town, despite having formed an emotional attachment to the place. For readers who are interested in the influences that shaped the writing of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Koupal’s collection of Baum’s “Our Landlady” columns is a valuable resource. For readers who are interested in meeting an eccentric frontier woman, Koupal’s collection...

Introduction

Play offers children the opportunity to try out new ways of relating to the physical and social world. Through a range of encounters they can develop their imagination and skills, without incurring the material consequences of similar activities enacted ‘for real’. It is an essential and often joyful part of child development, and glum is the adult who does not retain some playfulness. It is a laboratory where children can develop different strategies to cope with the practical tasks of daily living and integrate themselves into a social network. Aberrant patterns of play may indicate a variety of difficulties and disorders in development, and may often provide important clues as to the problem. For example, a gross lack of imagination and rigid stereotyped play are found in children with autism; violent play with underdeveloped elaboration of emotional states is characteristic of children with conduct problems; repeated re-enactment of a single disturbing scene may be seen in children with post-traumatic stress disorder; and a disturbed pattern of emotional relationships is often exhibited in the doll play of children with attachment problems. As well as providing clues to the nature of a child's difficulties, play often offers an opportunity to engage with the child, and can provide a main avenue for therapeutic work, particularly with younger children who are not adept at talking about emotions and relationships.In this and subsequent issues, we shall be publishing a number of commissioned reviews exploring children's play from a number of perspectives. Anthony Pellegrini and Peter Smith start us off with a review of the development of play and its forms and functions. As well as covering the structure of play including fantasy and pretend elements, the authors go on to consider its benefits for the child, and include a rather novel approach of attempting a cost-benefit analysis. Then Peter Blatchford reviews the state of play in schools. Here the importance of a time for the child to develop peer relationships and friendships away from the watchful gaze of adults is stressed, not only from a theoretical viewpoint, but from the practical standpoint of how much supervision should be given in the playground. In future numbers of the Review, we will publish an anthropological perspective by Allison James, a child psychotherapist's view by Anne Alvarez and Asha Phillips, and a review of the importance of drama in play and therapy by Peter Slade. At all times we would welcome your reactions, agreements, and disagreements, plus comments on what you think has been left out. Please do write to the Review office.

"Life Doesn't Seem Natural:" Ecofeminism and the Reclaiming of the Feminine Spirit in Cindy Cowan's A Woman from the Sea

While critical reception of Cindy Cowan's A Woman from the Sea has typically valued its magical and fantasy elements, little critical attention has been given to its larger implications for ecofeminist spiritual revisioning. In what follows, the author considers Cowan's efforts to outline the liberating potential of ecofeminism and female spirituality. Drawing on textual evidence, the author examines how Cowan organizes a rediscovery of the sensual feminine through dramatic narrative.

Errol Morris' Construction of Innocence in The Thin Blue Line

Errol Morris' Construction of Innocence in The Thin Blue Line Renée R. Curry California State University, San Marcos The Home Box Office video promotional campaign for Errol Morris' documentary The Thin Blue Line (1988) calls the film a "new movie mystery" and aligns it in the tradition of The Executioner's Song and In Cold Blood [in that it depicts] a chilling investigation and reconstruction of a brutal, cold-blooded murder. This reallife drama impartially sifts fact and fiction, bluntly controlling the evidence. The result will take you to the boundaries ofjustice and beyond. This promotion fails to point out, however, that unlike either of the two feature films in the comparison, The Thin Blue Line is a documentary and as a documentary, it explodes the concept of real-life drama by employing the actual convicted criminals, David Harris and Randall Adams, as the two key actors. Some scholarly attention has already been devoted to the phenomenological attributes of The Thin Blue Line (Mcllroy), its particular documentary style (Michaels), and the post-structuralist relationship between history and memory (Williams). My argument differs from these in that, while I explore some of the phenomena of the film and while I also discuss Morris' unique participation in post-structuralist film-making, I house these explorations within an interrogation of the technical and verbal paradigms of innocence constructed throughout the film. The "true" story upon which director Errol Morris bases this film tells a tale of Randall Dale Adams who spent an evening with a young man named David Harris. Late in the evening, one of these two men killed a Dallas police officer. Randall Adams claims that he was asleep in a hotel room with his brother at the time of the killing. David Harris asserts that Adams killed the police officer while he, Harris, sat as a passenger in the car. The Dallas police weigh the evidence and decide that Randall Adams pulled the trigger . They try him, convict him, and sentence him to Death Row. Randall Adams still maintains his innocence. This paper argues that Errol Morris' film reopens consideration of the facts of the case regarding the murder of Dallas policeman Robert Wood by aurally and visually constructing innocence, 153 154Rocky Mountain Review Randall Adams' innocence, on the screen. To construct this innocence , Morris relies on ordinary "telling" techniques such as verbal monologues and newspaper graphics. However, he also employs cinematic techniques to construct Adams' innocence. He replays key reenactment scenes (such "settings" do not occur in documentaries). He surrealistically displays key psychological images and sound effects such as the twirling crisis light of the police car, the clicking "sound" of the ever-blinking red and blue light, and the slow-motion flying milk shake released by the partner of the cop being shot (such fantasy elements of filmmaking are not in the domain of the documentary). Upon release of The Thin Blue Line, the "real-life" investigation reopened. Neither The Executioner's Song nor In Cold Blood had such impact; they both remained in the domain of attempting to explore criminal psychology with a film audience after the fact of the crime. The Thin Blue Line changes perceptions about the facts of the murder case just as traditional documentaries frequently do. However, this documentary privileges the fantastical elements of cinema to make its case and thereby drags elements of the feature film into the domain of art as political praxis. Errol Morris claims, "There's no reason why documentaries can't be as personal as fiction filmmaking and bear the imprint of those who made them. Truth isn't guaranteed by style or expression. It isn't guaranteed by anything " (Bates 17). Previous to this film, Errol Morris directed two other documentaries : Gates of Heaven (1978) and Vernon, Florida (1981). These films remain distinctive for their "non-linear, anecdotal style and their dead-on shots of ordinary people talking plainly to the camera, with no intervening interlocutor to be seen or heard" (Dieckmann 33). The Thin Blue Line takes detours with a deliberate linearity by interjecting anecdotes, fantastical images, and dead-on shots. Morris also forays into obtrusive interviewing in the ultimate scene of the film when...

Victorian heroines: representations of femininity in nineteenth-century literature and art

Kimberley Reynolds and Nicola Humble here provide a radical revision of constructions of femininity. Using a wide range of textual examples (including children's literature, sensations fiction, diaries, and autobiography) as well as visual illustrations, offers a new look at the representation of women and sexuality in nineteenth-century literature and painting. Arguing against the conventional dyadic model that interprets fiction in terms of a rigid distinction between the good and bad, the sexual and asexual woman, the authors suggest a more complex paradigm, simultaneously concealing and revealing contradictory attitudes to womanhood. The book explores the highly erotic fantasy elements frequently found in widely disseminated orthodox female images, and effectively demonstrates how both male and female writers used similar techniques to subvert this orthodoxy. Drawing on contemporary critical and cultural theories, Victorian Heroines is a lucid and accessible analysis of the depiction of women during this period, challenging the prevalent views of recent decades.

Effects of fantasy contexts on children's learning and motivation: making learning more fun.

Two studies examined the effects of embedding instructional materials in relevant fantasy contexts on children's motivation and learning. In Study 1, Ss showed marked preferences for computer-based educational programs that involved fantasy elements. In Study 2, Ss worked with these programs for 5 hr. One program presented purely abstract problems. Others presented identical problems within fantasy contexts. Some Ss chose among 3 fantasies; others were assigned identical fantasies. Tests on the material occurred before, immediately after, and 2 weeks after the experimental sessions. Ss showed significantly greater learning and transfer in the fantasy than in the no-fantasy conditions. Having a choice of fantasies made no difference. Motivational and individualization strategies for enhancing interest and promoting learning are discussed.

Feminism and fairy tales

To examine selected popular folktales from the perspective of modern feminism is to revisualize those paradigms which shape our romantic expectations and to illuminate psychic ambiguities which often confound contemporary women. Portrayals of adolescent waiting and dreaming, patterns of double enchantment, and romanticizations of marriage contribute to the potency of fairy tales. Yet, such alluring fantasies gloss the heroine's inability to act self‐assertively, total reliance on external rescues, willing bondage to father and prince, and her restriction to hearth and nursery. Although many readers discount obvious fantasy elements, they may still fall prey to more subtle paradigms through identification with the heroine. Thus, subconsciously women may transfer from fairy tales into real life cultural norms which exalt passivity, dependency, and self‐sacrifice as a female's cardinal virtues. In short, fairy tales perpetuate the patriarchal status quo by making female subordination seem a romantically desi...