A Note on "Pantouflia"

Folklore, April, 2000 by Sanjay Sircar

On page 82 of my recent article "The Generic Decorum of the Burlesque Kunstmarchen," Folklore 110 (1999):75-92, I stated that Lang's Pantouflia was a portmanteau of "pantomime" and "souffle." Mrs Maureen Crago has since informed me that, though the name may indeed be redolent of the portmanteau I see in it, since its components relate to the dramatic affinities and the lightness of the burlesque Kunstmarchen, a "pantoufle" in French is a slipper.

"En pantoufles" means to be "in slippers, free and easy," a "pantouflard" is "a man who loves his slippered ease, a stay-at-home," and slang has "raisonner comme une pantoufle," literally, "to reason like a slipper, to talk nonsense, to talk through one's hat" (and in medicine "slipper" stands for "bedpan"). Lang and his readers would have known all these, and his burlesque Kunstmarchen fairyland is thus, for narrator and narratee, to be seen as a land composed of free and easy, homely nonsense--as all burlesque Kunstmarchen fairylands are.