Abstract
To go back to the past, let alone come back from the future, one has to have gone some “where”; yet, outside the realms of science fiction, Texas Ranch House’s promise of a trip to the Texas range circa 1867 is not physically possible. To come back to one’s self, again, one has to have gone some “where” in the first place; yet, the medieval dream vision details the fictional journey to and from the ineffable world of a dream. In any of these instances where, exactly, does the individual go? Into the realm of the liminal.
Saddle Up and Ride off into the Past with the Newest PBS Reality Show: Texas Ranch House—Where: The Texas Range—When: 1867—Who: Wranglers, Cowhands, Cooks, Vaqueros, Ranchers, and anyone interested in taking part—What: Going back in time to live and ranch on the Western frontier—Why: Experience the past first-hand and get the challenge of a lifetime!
—Casting call for Texas Ranch House1
Or te reviens a toy meismes, reprens ton scens et plus ne te troubles pour telz fanffelues. [Come back to yourself, recover your senses, and do not trouble yourself anymore over such absurdities.]
—Dame Raison to Christine, in Christine de Pisan, Livre de la Cité des Dames2
Both the reality TV show and the medieval dream vision create performative and playful liminal spaces through which to work out sociocultural problems. Both forms also reveal the power of rigid social stereotypes to overwhelm the individual. Ultimately, liminal spaces, whether medieval or modern, reinforce the normative communities that create them as “games.”
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Notes
Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York: PAJ Publications, 1982), p. 27. Turner based his theories on studies of indigenous communities, later expanding to performance and theater studies. Turner collaborated throughout the 1970s with Richard Schechner, the founding theorist of contemporary performance theory. Performance theory (as first outlined by Schechner) draws not only on aesthetic and dramatic theory, but also on anthropological theory via Turner and on sociological theory via Erving Goffman. As a result, performance theory is markedly interdisciplinary—unlike reality TV studies—and seems an ideal way to try to understand the phenomenon of reality TV “performance” for both player and audience. See Richard Schechner, Performance Theory (New York: Routledge, 1988), as well as Turner, From Ritual to Theater. For more on performance theory, see Henry Bial, ed., The Performance Studies Reader (New York: Routledge, 2004) and Marvin Carlson, Performance: A Critical Introduction, 2nd edn. ( New York: Routledge, 2004 ).
The first cultural critic of game, Johan Huizinga, outlined six components of cultural game, including freedom, separation, limitation, order, rules, and difference. For Huizinga, a game is both a social function and a social construction; and such play has two primary functions, as a “contest for something” and a “representation of something.” See his Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1950). For game in anthropological studies see Gregory Bateson, “A Metalogue: About Games and Being Serious” and “A Theory of Play and Fantasy,” in Steps to an Ecology of Mind (New York: Ballantine, 1972), pp. 14–20 and pp. 177–93, respectively;
Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures ( New York: Basic Books, 1973 );
and Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience ( Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974 ).
Peter Brown, “On the Borders of the Middle English Dream Visions,” in Reading Dreams: The Interpretations of Dreams from Chaucer to Shakespeare, ed. Peter Brown (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 25 [22–50]. In this essay, Brown also touches briefly on Turner’s theory of the liminal as one way to historicize the late medieval dream, but Brown focuses on Turner’s interpretation of the pilgrimage as liminal, as opposed to my focus on the idea of a liminal space.
Steven Kruger, Dreaming in the Middle Ages ( Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992 ), p. 129.
In addition to Kruger and Brown, see also A.C. Spearing, Medieval Dream-Poetry (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1976)
and Kathryn Lynch, The High Medieval Dream Vision: Poetry, Philosophy and Literary Form ( Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988 ).
See John Corner, “What Can We Say about ‘Documentary’?” Media, Culture and Society 22 (2000): 681–88, and “Performing the Real: Documentary Diversions,” Television and New Media 3 (2002): 255–69;
Sam Brenton and Reuben Cohen, Shooting People: Adventures in Reality TV ( London: Verso, 2003 );
Richard Kilborn, Staging the Real: Factual TV Programming in the Age of Big Brother ( Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003 ), pp. 255–69;
Mark Andrejevic, Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched ( Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004 );
Susan Holmes and Deborah Jermyn, Understanding Reality Television (New York: Routledge, 2004), especially pp. 1–8;
and Susan Murray and Laurie Ouellette, Reality TV: Remaking Television Culture ( New York: New York University Press, 2004 ).
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© 2007 Eileen A. Joy, Myra J. Seaman, Kimberly K. Bell, and Mary K. Ramsey
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McCormick, B. (2007). Back to the Future: Living the Liminal Life in the Manor House and the Medieval Dream. In: Joy, E.A., Seaman, M.J., Bell, K.K., Ramsey, M.K. (eds) Cultural Studies of the Modern Middle Ages. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230610040_5
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