Dream of the Rarebit Fiend
Dream of the Rarebit Fiend is a newspaper comic strip by American cartoonist Winsor McCay, begun September 10, 1904. It was McCay's second successful strip, after Little Sammy Sneeze secured him a position on the cartoon staff of the New York Herald. Rarebit Fiend appeared in the Evening Telegram, a newspaper published by the Herald. For contractual reasons, McCay signed the strip with the pen name "Silas".
The strip had no continuity or recurring characters, but a recurring theme: a character has a nightmare or other bizarre dream, usually after eating a Welsh rarebit—a cheese-on-toast dish. The character awakens in the closing panel and regrets having eaten the rarebit. The dreams often reveal unflattering sides of the dreamers' psyches—their phobias, hypocrisies, discomforts, and dark fantasies. This was in great contrast to the colorful fantasy dreams in McCay's signature strip Little Nemo, which he began in 1905. Whereas children were Nemos target audience, McCay aimed Rarebit Fiend at adults.
The popularity of Rarebit Fiend and Nemo led to McCay gaining a contract in 1911 with William Randolph Hearst's chain of newspapers with a star's salary. His editor there thought McCay's highly skilled cartooning "serious, not funny", and had McCay give up comic strips in favor of editorial cartooning. McCay revived the strip in 1923–1925 as Rarebit Reveries, of which few examples have survived.
A number of film adaptations of Rarebit Fiend have appeared, including Edwin S. Porter's live-action Dream of a Rarebit Fiend in 1906, and four pioneering animated films by McCay himself: How a Mosquito Operates in 1912, and 1921's Bug Vaudeville, The Pet, and The Flying House. The strip is said to have anticipated a number of recurring ideas in popular culture, such as marauding giant beasts damaging cities—as later popularized by King Kong and Godzilla.
Overview
Winsor McCay first produced Dream of the Rarebit Fiend in 1904, a year before the dream romps of his Little Nemo and a full generation before the artists of the Surrealist movement unleashed the unconscious on the public. The strip had no recurring characters, but followed a theme: after eating a Welsh rarebit, the day's protagonist would be subject to the darker side of his psyche. Typically, the strip would begin with an absurd situation which became more and more absurd until the Fiend—the dreamer—awakened in the final panel. Some situations were merely silly: elephants falling from the ceiling, or two women's mink coats having a fight. Other times, they could be more disturbing: characters finding themselves dismembered, buried alive from a first-person perspective or a child's mother being planted and becoming a tree. In some strips the Fiend was a spectator watching fantastic or horrible things happen to someone close to. The protagonists are typically, but not always, of America’s growing middle-class urban population whom McCay subjects to fears of public humiliation, or loss of social esteem or respectability, or just the uncontrollably weird nature of being.Rarebit Fiend was the only one of McCay's strips in which he approached social or political topics, or dealt with contemporary life. He addressed religious leaders, alcoholism, homelessness, political speeches, suicide, fashion, and other topics, whereas his other strips were fantasy or had seemingly vague, timeless backgrounds. The strip referenced contemporary events such as the 1904 election of Theodore Roosevelt; the recently built Flatiron Building and St. Regis Hotel in New York City; and the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05.
The rarebit is a dish typically made with rich cheese thinned with ale and served melted on toast with cayenne and mustard mixed in. McCay used it despite its relative innocuousness: cultural theorist Scott Bukatman states rarebit was not the sort of dish a person would associate with having nightmares, thereby demonstrating his unfamiliarity with a belief long held - particularly in England - that the consumption of cheese - and more especially toasted cheese - was likely to cause unpleasant dreams.
McCay's most famous character, Little Nemo, first appeared in the first year of Dream of the Rarebit Fiend, on December 10, 1904. In 1905, McCay had Nemo appear in his own strip in the New York Herald. In comparison to Little Nemo, the artwork of the Rarebit Fiend strips had minimal backgrounds, and were usually done from a static perspective with the main characters often in a fixed position. The content of Rarebit Fiend played a much bigger role than it did in Little Nemo, whose focus was on beautiful visuals. The stories were self-contained, whereas the Nemo story continued from week to week. The dreams in Nemo were aimed at children, but Rarebit Fiend had adult-oriented subjects—social embarrassment, fear of dying or going insane, and so on. Some of the dreams in both strips were wish-fulfillment fantasies.
Unlike most comic strips from the time, Rarebit Fiend is not humorous or escapist. The strips highlight readers' darker selves—hypocrisies, deceitfulness, phobias, and discomfort. They offer often biting social commentary and show marital, money, and religious matters in a negative light. McCay had an interest in pushing formal boundaries, and playful self-referentiality plays a role in many of the strips; characters sometimes refer to McCay's alter-ego "Silas" or to the reader. Though frequent in Rarebit Fiend, this self-referentiality does not appear in McCay's other strips.
In contrast to the skilled artwork, the lettering in the dialogue balloons, as in McCay's other work, was awkward and could approach illegibility, especially in reproductions, where the artwork has normally been greatly reduced in size. McCay seemed to show little regard for the dialogue balloons, their content, and their placement in the composition. They tend to contain repetitive monologues expressing the increasing distress of the speakers, and show that McCay's gift was in the visual and not the verbal.
Background
McCay began cartooning in the 1890s and had a prolific output published in magazines and newspapers. He became known for his ability to draw quickly, a talent he often employed during chalk talks on the vaudeville stage. Before Dream of the Rarebit Fiend and Little Nemo, McCay had shown an interest in the topic of dreams. Some of his earlier works, numbering at least 10 regular comic strips, had titles such as Daydreams and It Was Only a Dream. McCay's were not the first dream-themed comic strips to be published: McCay's employer, the New York Herald, had printed at least three such strips, beginning with Charles Reese's Drowsy Dick in 1902. Psychoanalysis and dream interpretation had begun to enter the public consciousness with the 1900 publication of Freud's Interpretation of Dreams.McCay first proposed a strip in which a tobacco fiend finds himself at the North Pole, unable to secure a cigarette and a light. In the last panel he awakens to find it a dream. The Herald asked McCay to make a series of the strip, but with a Welsh rarebit theme instead of tobacco, and McCay complied. The strip appeared in a Herald subsidiary, the Evening Telegram, and the Heralds editor required McCay to use a pseudonym for the strip work to keep it separate from his other work. McCay signed Rarebit Fiend strips as "Silas", a name he borrowed from a neighborhood garbage cart driver. After switching to William Randolph Hearst's New York American newspaper in 1911, McCay dropped the "Silas" pseudonym and signed his work with his own name.
McCay married in 1891, and the marriage was not a happy one. According to McCay biographer John Canemaker, McCay depicts marriage in Rarebit Fiend as "a minefield of hypocrisy, jealousy, and misunderstanding". McCay was a short man, barely five feet tall. He was dominated by his wife, who stood as tall as he was. Images of small, shy men dominated by their taller or fatter wives appear frequently in Rarebit Fiend. Gigantism, with characters overwhelmed by rapidly growing elements, was another recurring motif, perhaps as compensation on McCay's part for a sense of smallness. McCay's brother Arthur had been put in a mental asylum, which may have inspired the themes of insanity that are common in the strip.
Despite the strip's bleak view, McCay's work was so popular that William Randolph Hearst hired him in 1911 with a star's salary. Hearst editor Arthur Brisbane deemed McCay's work "serious, not funny", and had the cartoonist give up his comic strips to work full-time illustrating editorials.
Influences
Scholars such as Claude Moliterni, Ulrich Merkl, Alfredo Castelli, and others have located possible influences. These include Edward Lear's popular The Book of Nonsense, Gelett Burgess' The Burgess Nonsense Book, Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland , and a variety of dream cartoons and illustrations that appeared in various periodicals McCay was likely familiar with.The most probable influence on the strip was Welsh Rarebit Tales by Harle Oren Cummins. Cummins stated that he drew inspiration for this collection of fifteen science fiction stories from nightmares brought on by eating Welsh rarebit and lobster. Several of McCay's post-Herald strips from 1911 and 1912 were even titled Dream of a Lobster Fiend.
Other influences have been established: H. G. Wells, L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, J. M. Barrie's Peter and Wendy, Carlo Collodi's The Adventures of Pinocchio, Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes story "The Adventure of the Engineer's Thumb", Henryk Sienkiewicz's Quo Vadis, Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and Mark Twain's "The 1,000,000 Pound Bank-Note".
McCay never acknowledged the influence of Sigmund Freud, whose The Interpretation of Dreams had been published in 1900. McCay scholar Ulrich Merkl says it was likely McCay was aware of the Viennese doctor's theories, as they had been widely reported and talked about in the New York newspaper world of which was McCay was a part.