Popular Culture, Spectacle, and Cruelty Theme Analysis

Sylvia Townsend Warner’s “The Phoenix” depicts a society that wants to be entertained. Mr. Tancred Poldero runs a tourist attraction called “Poldero’s Wizard Wonderworld,” where he uses a phoenix to help boost ticket sales. While phoenixes are actually mythical birds, the story presents them as real but exceptionally rare, so it makes sense that such a bird would draw a large audience. Nonetheless, the British public soon grows bored with the phoenix, which leads Mr. Poldero to recapture their attention by selling tickets to witness the phoenix’s death. As in myth, this death entails the bird bursting into flames and being reborn from the ashes—but the fire gets out of hand and kills Poldero and the audience. By ending the story with such a violent spectacle, Warner draws attention to the cruelty of popular culture. Mr. Poldero relies on violence to satisfy the public’s demand for constant novelty, suggesting that a society obsessed with entertainment becomes cruel itself. Furthermore, it’s telling that the audience’s preferred entertainment literally kills them. This suggests that midcentury British popular culture was at least spiritually destructive to consumers, if not literally so.  

At first, the phoenix is popular with the public due to its novelty. This is a bird that’s so rare that many believe it to be mythical. In fact, before Lord Strawberry ventures to Arabia in search of the phoenix, other bird experts dismissed the creature as a mere fable or something long since “extinct.” When Lord Strawberry proves his detractors wrong, however, and is successful in finding a phoenix, the sight of the rare bird causes a media frenzy. The bird is “constantly visited” and “in the news” upon its arrival to England. Because the bird is so unusual, it sustains a stable level of public support. After Lord Strawberry dies, bird enthusiasts and students create the “Strawberry Phoenix Fund.” Though “their means were small,” the fund shows that interest in the phoenix never ceased. When Mr. Poldero buys the phoenix, the Strawberry Phoenix Fund is able to help promote the bird, and the people who supported the fund are willing to pay Mr. Poldero’s fees to see the phoenix in person. Their continued support of the bird is a testament to the truly exceptional and novel qualities of the bird.

But the novelty wears off eventually, and the public turns away from the charming, dignified phoenix, demanding more sensational entertainments. Compared to the phoenix, for example, the other animals at “Poldero’s Wizard Wonderworld” are wilder and more aggressive. Audiences flock to see the “antics of the baboons, or to admire the crocodile who had eaten the woman.” This shows that public tastes are inclined to more gruesome and thrilling entertainments. In contrast to these animals, the phoenix’s more subdued behavior and “classical” charm is unable to draw crowds. More importantly, audiences have already seen the bird, and thus are no longer interested in visiting it again; the novelty has worn off. This suggests that even the rarest creatures can capture the popular culture for just a brief span of time before people move on to something else. The excitement towards the phoenix always ends with a steady decline, with the “visits [falling] off” at Lord Strawberry’s and “business slacken[ing]” at the Wonderworld. Thus, in a news-driven popular culture (where rare birds are discovered and forgotten as other events and spectacles grab attention), public attention is inevitably fleeting. And, when juxtaposed with wilder animals, audiences ignore the calm charm of the phoenix in favor of the livelier displays of baboons.

In order to recapture the public’s attention (and thereby reverse his financial decline), Mr. Poldero resorts to violence, producing a spectacle of cruelty. What the other animals reveal is that violence captures the audience’s attention. The phoenix must compete, notably, with a “crocodile who had eaten [a] woman.” Unlike the phoenix, this crocodile draws crowds because of its gruesome history, which hints at the public’s appetite for violence. Realizing that he needs to reignite interest in the phoenix, Poldero resolves to torment the bird, sending other birds to peck at it, “jeer[ing]” at it himself, and sprinkling it with water each night. These torments, while not themselves done for public attention, are meant to prematurely “age” the bird so that Poldero can sell tickets to its fiery death. Excited by the prospect of the phoenix bursting into flames, a public audience indeed comes in droves, “some thousand” people packing around the phoenix’s enclosure for the cruel, violent spectacle. Only the most shocking event of a rare bird’s destruction can capture this audience’s attention. Finally, emphasizing that this event is a spectacle, Mr. Poldero hires a film crew to capture the phoenix’s death on camera. With the “lights and cameras [] trained on the [bird’s] cage,” Mr. Poldero narrates through a loudspeaker what his audience is about to witness, giving the entire moment—especially the anticipation of violence—a cinematic quality. The medium of film, moreover, offers Mr. Poldero the chance to capitalize on the cruelty even after the phoenix’s death has already taken place, allowing him to reach the widest audience possible.

The story ends, however, by punishing Mr. Poldero and the audience for their cruelty. After watching the phoenix burst into flames, Poldero and the audience also catch on fire. Warner uses the “The Phoenix” not just to showcase the excitement found in cruelty, but also to show how that excitement destroys the audience itself. The audience fails to see the beauty in the phoenix, clamoring only for novelty and violence, meaning they have become ruled by their baser, more cruel desires. While this cruelty is spiritually destructive as society neglects its moral principles, it is also unsustainable. Moving from one increasingly horrifying and cruel spectacle to another results only in greater violence and more cruelty—death piling on and on. And when the popular culture continues to up the ante, the cost, if something goes wrong, is not merely destruction, but self-destruction.