Folk Women and Indirection in Morrison, Ni Dhuibhne, Hurston, and Lavin

FOLK WOMEN AND INDIRECTION IN MORRISON, NÍ DHUIBHNE, HURSTON, AND LAVIN Mark, mo ghrá Folk Women and Indirection in...

Author: Jacqueline Fulmer

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FOLK WOMEN AND INDIRECTION IN MORRISON, NÍ DHUIBHNE, HURSTON, AND LAVIN

Mark, mo ghrá

Folk Women and Indirection in Morrison, Ní Dhuibhne, Hurston, and Lavin

JACQUELINE FULMER University of California - Berkeley, USA

© Jacqueline Fulmer 2007 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Jacqueline Fulmer has asserted her moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Gower House Croft Road Aldershot Hampshire GU11 3HR England

Ashgate Publishing Company Suite 420 101 Cherry Street Burlington, VT 05401-4405 USA

Ashgate website: http://www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Fulmer, Jacqueline, 1955– Folk women and indirection in Morrison, Ní Dhuibhne, Hurston, and Lavin 1. Morrison, Toni – Criticism and interpretation 2. Ní Dhuibhne, Éilís, 1954– Criticism and interpretation 3. Hurston, Zora Neale – Criticism and interpretation 4. Lavin, Mary, 1912– 1996 – Criticism and interpretation 5. Women and literature – United States – History 6. Women and literature – England – History 7. Literature and folklore 8. Narration (Rhetoric) – History 9. Stereotypes (Social psychology) in literature 10. Women in literature I. Title 813.5’4 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Fulmer, Jacqueline, 1955– Folk women and indirection in Morrison, Ní Dhuibhne, Hurston, and Lavin / by Jacqueline Fulmer. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-0-7546-5537-4 (alk. paper) 1. Morrison, Toni—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Ní Dhuibhne, Éilís, 1954– —Criticism and interpretation. 3. Hurston, Zora Neale—Criticism and interpretation. 4. Lavin, Mary, 1912–1996—Criticism and interpretation. 5. Women and literature—United States—History. 6. Women and literature—England—History. 7. Literature and folklore. 8. Narration (Rhetoric)—History. 9. Stereotypes (Social psychology) in literature. 10. Women in literature. I. Title. PS3563.O8749Z638 2007 813’.54—dc22 2007025771 ISBN: 978-0-7546-5537-4 Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin, Cornwall.

Contents Acknowledgements

vii

1 Impossible Stories for Impossible Conversations Introduction Parallel binaries, parallel subversions Chapter overview

1 1 2 12

2 Rhetorical Indirection: Roots and Routes Back to the beginning Indirection in the context of previous criticism Impossible conversations made possible Indirection in folklore as an answer to censorship Terms of indirection in African American, Irish, and postcolonial writing Historical parallels Loss of rights coinciding with suppression of language and culture Obstacles to expression for African American and Irish women writers Rediscovered gardens

19 19 23 24 26 28 39 41 43 47

3 Folk Women versus the Authorities Throwing the binary back Zora Neale Hurston: “He can read my writing but he sho’ can’t read my mind” Mary Lavin: “Sly civility” from an Irish village Censorship, condescension, and the spleen of a saint Folk influences in Mary O’Grady Mary battles the Otherworld Morrison’s ancestors and a giggling witch Éilís Ní Dhuibhne: The wife, the witch, and the changeling Fairy tales for a postmodern world How to dump a goat Unmaking the world in The Bray House

49 49 52 60 60 67 69 74 77 77 80 85

4 Otherworld Women on Sex and Religion Sex advice from mermaids Hurston’s divine mermaid Erzulie “Cleweless”: Lavin’s Onny defies convention Ní Dhuibhne’s pub Mermaid “The Two Shall Be As One”: Morrison’s seaside duo, Celestial and L

95 95 97 100 111 117

5 Reproducing Wise Women Folk women with “ancient properties” Anti-Marys in Hurston and Lavin

129 129 131

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Folk Women and Indirection Jenny as a younger wise woman and Virgin Mary figure in The Bray House Paradise—Morrison’s folk “Marys” Ní Dhuibhne’s midwife: Delivering ambiguity Morrison’s Midwives: Freedom from the binaries within Midwives in Paradise and a fetus named “Che”

136 139 149 157 164

6 Final Indirections

169

Appendix: Correspondence with Éilís Ní Dhuibhne Works Cited Index

177 183 199

Acknowledgements I would like to thank the folklorists and scholars who have provided help throughout the research that led up to this book, especially Katherine Clay Bassard, David Lloyd, Catherine Mary Eagan, Anthony Hale, Miriam Thaggert, Reggie Scott Young, Al Haley, Tanika Beamon, Maria Teresa Agozzino, Karen Beardslee, Keith Ballard, Tracy Mishkin, Kathryn Klar, Dan Melia, Bridget Connelly, Wolfgang Mieder, Patricia Turner, the late Barbara Christian, and especially the late Alan Dundes. I have received so much kind support along the way; I hope that anyone who finds him or herself not listed here may forgive me for the oversight. Special thanks to my campus colleagues Jesús Arciniega and Katherine Brosnan; my students at Cal, including Siobhan Daly and Deirdre Funge for their personal accounts of Irish culture, and a certain student table on Sproul Plaza; past and present members of the Folklore Roundtable; the outstanding staff at UC Berkeley’s Doe Interlibrary Loan; the wonderful members of the Toni Morrison Society; and Éilís Ní Dhuibhne-Almqvist. And, last, but not least: my family at GFCC, especially our friend Bob Appleby, and Virginia and Richard Fulmer.

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Chapter 1

Impossible Stories for Impossible Conversations Introduction This book is concerned with the propulsion of story. Stories propel us toward new ideas, even ideas we resist. The story, if it is a good one, carries us off, and we do not complain. How is it possible for stories to triumph this way over our preconceived notions? When we take such pleasure in wondering, “What happens next?” we often suspend our biases along with our disbelief. Expression through language, at its most challenging, often depends on that narrative sweep, especially when the audience itself presents the challenge. When we consider how to express ourselves in a way that moves our audience closer to our way of thinking, we automatically engage in the study of rhetoric. Aristotle defines rhetoric as “the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion” (Aristotle, Rhetoric Book I, ch. 2, 1356a:line 25). The use of story as a means of meeting a rhetor’s expressive goals can allow him or her to evade the societal limits placed on speech or writing. But no subject matter is ever truly off limits—to the most skilled rhetors, that is. This book addresses how some unusually skilled writers, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, Mary Lavin, and Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, have presented difficult subject matter to unwilling audiences in the United States and Ireland in the twentieth century. Morrison and Ní Dhuibhne have been continuing these communicative accomplishments into the twentieth-first century. They have carried audience members into new arenas of understanding, with the result, over time, of more praise than kicking and screaming. Folk Women and Indirection presents a partial line of descent for the two most recent writers, indicating a movement from Lavin to Ní Dhuibhne which parallels the better known literary tradition that follows from Hurston to Morrison. Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison are already well known among literary critics in the US, but Mary Lavin (1912–96), who wrote primarily from the 1930s to the 1980s, and the contemporary writer and folklorist Éilís Ní Dhuibhne are not widely known. Considering the growing interest in Irish women’s writing, I expect this will change. The basis for comparing these authors lies in the strategies of indirection they use to write on subjects not often seen in print, either before or during their eras. Expression of frustration in women’s lives within African American and Irish communities, during these groups’ struggles for civil rights, often became suppressed in the name of the community’s greater good. Women in the arts who wanted to

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Folk Women and Indirection

address gender inequities were labeled divisive. Tension between women in the arts and male leadership often occurred because some men inadvertently duplicated, within their own movements, the dominant society’s habits of oppression toward women. Authors could not address this tension, as well as other concerns in women’s lives, as openly in the early twentieth century as they do now, either in the US or in Ireland, because publishers considered these subjects, if not divisive, then inconsequential. Areas of publicly suppressed discourse in Ireland have included unequal relations between the sexes, anything that could appear critical of secular or religious authority, and questions regarding women’s limited sphere of activity in early twentieth-century Ireland, all of which Mary Lavin would address in her fiction. Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, for her own part, questions assumptions about sexual expression in early twenty-first-century Ireland. African American women writers of both time periods have found not only their critiques of relations between the sexes, and of relations between the people and their leaders, suppressed, but also the stories of their own lives. Zora Neale Hurston faced much of that in her career. Even now, there are certain questions regarding sex and spirituality that have not surfaced much in recent fiction, questions that Toni Morrison, in her later works, has become bolder about asking. Morrison admits that Hurston, as part of an African American women’s literary tradition, influenced her, though indirectly (Naylor 214; Conner xxvii). Ní Dhuibhne, for her part, acknowledges Lavin to the point of paying a wry homage to Lavin’s folk-influenced story “The Widow’s Son” with her contemporary story “The Banana Boat.” As with that story, the development of the literary tradition appears most clearly in how the authors employ rhetorical strategies influenced by oral tradition. Aspects of orally transmitted forms of folklore, including legends, songs, word play, jokes, proverbs, fairy tales (marchen), and folk tales, as well as references to folk medicine, food lore, and material culture have enabled African American and Irish writers, especially women writers, to not only celebrate their cultures but to help them survive. More to the point, oral culture has enabled certain ideas to survive in written culture that would not have otherwise. The formal study of oral and other folk traditions as they intersect with the study of rhetoric in fiction has not received much attention. Hopefully, this study will stimulate further discussion of this rich and fruitful relationship. Parallel binaries, parallel subversions A more specific reason to focus on the development of women writers in conjunction with the study of folklore and rhetoric is that this comparison will increase our understanding of a pivotal concept of feminist criticism: the dichotomy of woman as either the “monster” or the “angel in the house.” Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, in The Madwoman in the Attic, first sought out the nature and origin of these images in their literary study of Anglo American and English women writers. Building upon Virginia Woolf’s call to “kill” these false roles, Madwoman pursues the binary relationship as it lurks in those two literary traditions. The anthropological concept

Impossible Stories for Impossible Conversations

3

that aids Gilbert and Gubar will also prove useful here. By relying on Sherry Ortner’s observation that representations of “woman” in a culture “seems to stand at both the bottom and the top of the scale of human modes of relating,” Madwoman addresses different examples of female stereotyping along a scale of extremes (Ortner qtd. in Gilbert and Gubar 19). One point the authors do not review is that many of the images cited, whether positive or negative, trace their origins to folklore. This makes sense, since the images excerpted from Ortner come from an anthropological study to begin with. Associations with “extremes of Otherness,” such as witches, castrating mothers, and dispensers of menstrual pollution and curses, or their opposites, “mother goddesses, merciful dispensers of salvation,” and “female symbols of justice,” set women either below or above, but usually outside, the sphere of influence. It does not matter whether the images elevate or denigrate, inspire awe or fear. When most of the images a culture generates of “woman” make her either less or more than human, she’s less likely to be viewed as a full member of “mankind.” There may be better perquisites in being worshiped rather than reviled, but much of the end result remains the same, disenfranchisement. Gilbert and Gubar do not delve much further into folklore beyond similar references to images of women in art and literature other than to note that, “As the legend of Lilith shows, and as psychoanalysts from Freud and Jung onward have observed, myths and fairy tales often both state and enforce culture’s sentences with greater accuracy than more sophisticated literary texts” (36). Folklorist Alan Dundes acknowledges what they have observed when he states that the “images of males and females in fairy-tales and other forms of folklore may be idealized and may involve stereotypes” (Dundes, Folklore Matters 22). The “angel/monster” binary has parallels among different subaltern groups. Another version of the “angel/monster” has come to exist in Irish culture. The “Young Queen (Éire, Róisín Dubh [Dark Rosaleen or Little Black Rose], the Brightest of the Bright)” as combined with her seeming opposite, the “Poor Old Woman (An tSeanbhean Bhocht or Shan Van Vocht),” into two personas who could, together, be called “Cathleen ni Houlihan,” as W.B. Yeats (with Lady Gregory) did in naming the patriotic play after her (Innes, Woman and Nation 16–21; Mills 73; Walsh, Favorite Poems We Learned in School as Gaeilge 21; Lawless, Field Day Anthology, IV 914). This young-old figure emerged from the Celtic lore of sovereignty goddesses, warrior queens, and mercurial women of the lís or fairy forts. As an aisling, or beautiful Otherworld vision, she dictated Ireland’s woes to smitten poets at least as far back as Ó Rathaille in the late seventeenth century (Ó Tuama xxvii, 139). When utilized repeatedly in song, poetry, drama, and later, propaganda, in the service of Irish independence, the enchanting maiden/death-dealing hag dichotomy finally engulfed the idea of the feminine in Irish culture (Boland, “A Kind of Scar” 81, 85; Coughlan 93, 94). Woman was the Nation, and the Nation was Woman. Sarah Briggs notes that sometimes even women writers have not questioned this construction of Ireland as woman, womb, cave, cow, Rosaleen, sow, bride, harlot, and “the gaunt Hag of Beare,” as described by Edna O’Brien’s Mother Ireland (1976) (Briggs, “A Man in the House” 92). Even as O’Brien’s list blurs “woman” with all manner of high and low non-human objects and entities, sometimes the categories between the aisling and the Virgin

4


Mary could become blurry, depending on variations of ballads and poems (Innes, Woman and Nation 20–1). Even the chaste versions of Róisín Dubh descends from an earlier folk song that makes lurid mention of the young woman granting the singer her “maidenhead” and doing “deeds” with him “behind the lios” (fairy fort) (21). In fact, depending on whether the woman looked to the Irishman for rescue, or whether she collaborated with the English, the pure woman of the “dream,” the aisling, could turn into the “harlot” (19). However, as the struggle to establish Ireland’s sovereignty continued, less variation occurred (18, 22–3). Rigid misapplications of the religious ideals evoked by the Virgin Mary and female saints wedged Irish women into limited roles. Lia Mills lists the “virgin mother” as one of a trio of feminine icons in Irish culture, alongside the enchanting maiden as “poetic muse” and the “Mother Ireland/Cathleen Ní Houlihan” (Mills 69; Coughlan 89, 90). To deviate from local interpretations of the “virgin-” or “sainted mother” template, as it developed over the last few centuries, could cause a young woman to be labeled a whore, and in some instances, land her in a Magdalene home for “wayward” girls. Once incorporated into the 1937 Constitution, the idea that respecting women meant hallowing them as mothers led to a perversion of that respect in the form of restrictions on women’s employment, economic, and political activities. The abuse of oral tradition led to the following conceptual impasse in both ancient and modern Ireland. As Maire Cruise O’Brien writes it, “As for a woman not owning land affecting the functions of the [sovereignty] Goddess: who needed to own land if they were the land?” (Marie Cruise O’Brien 28). In his Letters, playwright Sean O’Casey mourns the state of his character Juno, an ordinary woman, “compelled to live in a slum,” because woman as “reality” is “spurned, derided, sacrificed, or ignored” in favor of woman as “abstraction,” the “Motherland” loved to the point of death (Ayling 92). Across the Atlantic, often during the same periods of time, African American women faced a sometimes more degraded set of stereotypical images and depictions. African American women had forced upon them the role of a “reality” that meant being “spurned, derided, sacrificed, or ignored” under circumstances of political, social, and economic disenfranchisement that would have outpaced the women of even O’Casey’s time and place. In her analysis of the Africanist presence in Marie Cardinal’s The Words to Say It, Toni Morrison notes that “black or colored people and symbolic figurations of blackness” serve as “markers for the benevolent and the wicked; the spiritual (thrilling tales of Allah’s winged horse) and the voluptuous; of ‘sinful’ but delicious sensuality coupled with demands for purity and restraint” (Morrison, Playing ix). She discovers images of African Americans, both men and women, serving white authors in the US as conduits for Anglo Americans to contemplate concepts of class, sex, and power too threatening to approach directly in a concerted, conscious way (7). Her argument that much of the Africanist presence described works at this unconscious level because the discussion of these topics are as much about “policing” them as “talking” about them. She identifies some binary relationships well-suited to analysis here, sexual license and repression, “desire and fear,” and “chaos and civilization.” While the stereotypical extremes of the prior instances is limited to Irish male authority misapplying their own culture to Irish women, the US version of “demonizing and reifying” that Morrison sees ranges across a


5

color “palette” of African and European Americans (7). White male and female authors, in Morrison’s examples, misapply aspects of Anglo American and African American culture against African Americans. Simon Bronner accounts for part of this in his explanation of how Joel Chandler Harris “fixed an image of slavery times in American consciousness of black folklore” that featured a benevolent view of plantation life (Bronner 111). Harris’s retellings reinforced white perceptions of a quaint, affectionate, good humored, courteous stereotype (Bronner 111) that fit Morrison’s description of one end of the “polar opposites of love and repulsion” (Morrison, Race-ing xv): “On the one hand, they signify benevolence, harmless and servile guardianship, and endless love. On the other hand, they have come to represent insanity, illicit sexuality, and chaos” (Morrison, Race-ing xv). In an example from Playing the Dark, Morrison spots Algerian folklore being pressed into service on behalf of a type of “virgin/whore” binary unconsciously employed by a white European author toward images of African workers in her childhood. Morrison extends the extremes elsewhere. In her introduction to Race-ing Justice, Engendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality, she cites the “jump from puppy to monster” that can appear in Anglo American images of African Americans (Morrison, Race-ing xv). Depictions of both men and women straddle the gulf between “docile” and “savage,” in her analysis (xv). Morrison bases some of her examination of the “above/below” dichotomy on incidents in the media where African American intra-cultural references, some of which already tended toward the negative, such as “ABC, America’s Blackest Child,” and metaphors wrenched out of the context of African American history, such shucking and lynching, were used to frame the Hill-Thomas hearings (xxviii, xx, xvi). Echoes of the degradation described by Nanny in Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, “De nigger woman is de mule uh de world,” reappear in a situation where an African American woman perplexes her critics because she is an “intellectual daughter of black farmers; a black female taking offense” (Morrison’s italics) (Hurston, Their Eyes 14; Morrison, Race-ing xvi). Morrison offers another version of this binary in her introduction to Birth of a Nation’hood. In terms that reflect Anglo American society’s history of placing African Americans at either super- or sub-human levels, Morrison describes the circus of the O.J. Simpson trial as an “invention of wild dogs and angels,” which again introduces animal imagery to represent the sub-human stratus (Morrison, Birth of a Nation’hood xiii). By noting the presence of the above/below humanity binary, Morrison tips us off to another point of comparison with the Irish. The African American and Irish feminine stereotypes emerge out of a parallel situation that produced a larger binary that encompassed each group in its entirety. The dominant Anglo society in each instance set the subaltern grouping within a larger scale binary. “Normalcy,” interpreted as “a high capacity for reason, restraint and order, resolute honesty and industriousness,” was reserved for images related to white/Anglo Saxon hegemony (Innes, Devil’s Own 11). Images of subaltern peoples, in these instances, African American and Irish, provided the contrast of unreasoning “savagery” to buttress the Anglo-as-superior self-image in these times and places (Morrison, Playing 52; Innes, Devil’s Own 9). The Victorian anthropologist John Beddoe declared the

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Celt, especially the Irish Celt, as a “dark” people, in contrast to the “fair” Saxon in his “Index of Nigrescence,” which also aligns the Celt with “animal” qualities as opposed to the Saxon “man” (Trezise 3–5, 9, 10). Declan Kiberd echoes Morrison’s description of the dominant society’s use of the Other to project those aspects it disavows; Ireland as that place into which England’s “deepest fears and fondest ideals might be read,” paired with “the projection of the not-me,” and resulting in “a playground for the imagination” (Kiberd, Inventing Ireland 12; Morrison, Playing 38). If African Americans or Irish were being viewed by Anglo societies as compliant, non-rebellious, the dominant society’s images would slide up the scale to something more complimentary, but still not quite human. Kiberd refers to the upper end of the scale as the “feckless but cheerily reassuring servant,” while Michael Rogin refers to the “servant” end as the “mammy,” “the nurturing figure that deprived black men and women of adult authority and sexuality” that “gave white boys permission to play with their identities” in blackface (Kiberd, Inventing 12; Rogin 13). Rogin’s assessment of the “servant” end of the scale as enveloping both sexes of the subaltern group is echoed on the Irish side by Matthew Arnold’s and Ernest Renan’s earlier projections of the Irish as “essentially feminine,” “shy, delicate, sensitive, and imaginative” and A.G. Richey’s assessment of the “female” Celts with a “soft, pleasing quality and charm of a woman, but no capacity for self-government” (Innes, Devil’s Own 96; Curtis 110). In English depictions, “real” Ireland, as opposed to that “threatening,” “grotesque,” “simian,” male “Paddy,” would be compliant, a passive female Hibernia with “down-cast eyes, a half-averted face, and shy appearance,” an “almost angelic peasant” who did not want to rebel and who needed England to “protect” “her” from male rebels (Kiberd, Inventing 12; Curtis 159, 174; Innes, Woman and Nation 14). If at their “best,” by the standards of the dominant group, the African American and the Irish are “feminine,” “spiritual,” in short the “Angel” in the house of the Anglo, then what are women in this scenario? The answer is that the stereotypes of women become either a subset of the larger one imposed upon their culture, an echo of the “angel/monster” binary, or else a more subtle transformation. Morrison’s examination of selections of Hemingway leads to the observation that, at least in his texts, “a black female is the furthest thing from human, so far away as to be not even mammal but fish,” a predatory, devouring eroticism ... the antithesis to femininity, to nurturing” (Morrison, Playing 85). While not as extreme as the types of images Morrison traces, Curtis describes the “‘real’ Irishwoman of the dirty or repellant and witchlike variety” that began to appear around the period of the late Tudor and early Stuart conquests as the alter ego of the “lovely, sloe-eyed, forlorn, and often passive or defenseless young woman” who represented an imagined pre-rebellious Ireland (Curtis 157). A visual image not much commented upon for Irish women, lurking in the background of the “simian” cartoons of “monstrous” Irishmen, the “repellent” character, is a great, rough, moonfaced, fearsome Irish woman, also with the wide mouth, flaring nostrils, and snub nose of the male “ape” (63, 64, 65, 124, 125). In fact, most readers today will have seen a close facsimile of this Irish-woman-as-battle-ax but not known it. Sir John Tenniel (1820–1914), famous for his illustrations accompanying Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland books, was also one of the comic artists whose Irish grotesques received wide distribution (35). Caricatures similar to Tenniel’s hefty and high-


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tempered Duchess, as well as other ape-like caricatures, passed on to comic artists in New York like Frederick B. Opper (64). Another link between the sub-human male Irish images and the little-noted sub-human female Irish images in the nineteenthcentury English and American presses are pigs. Pigs appear in many of the cartoons, and the potential family resemblance between the cartoon Irishwoman and Tenniel’s Duchess strengthens when one recalls her baby turning into a pig. Sub-human Irish characters being associated with pigs and the filth associated with pigs is not an unheard of metonymy (Innes, Devil’s Own 11). David Lloyd posits in The Political Economy of the Potato that “the ubiquitous association of the Irish and their dung runs as deep as that with their potatoes” (Lloyd, The Political Economy of the Potato). Aside from being pressed into service as sub-humans, she-monsters, or angels, what other images become associated with these specific groups of women, especially if, in the recruitment of the men as the “feminine” half of a colonial binary, they disappear from the rhetorical scene? If obedience equals “femininity,” and if the men are pressed into that role in the eyes of the dominant group, then the women of the subaltern group may disappear altogether in the hegemonic as well as the subaltern male perception. Lia Mills argues in “‘I Won’t Go Back to It’: Irish Women Poets and the Iconic Feminine” that the alternative image within a postcolonial Republic to the aisling, virgin mother, Mother Ireland threesome is no image at all, nothingness. The result of a “rhetoric of the Republic” that “idealizes women,” presents itself as “policies” that, “on the whole, ignore us” (Mills 69). Similar in tone, Miriam Thaggert reviews the responses of African American critics to representations of Black women in mainstream film, stating, “Black female spectators are forced to choose between ‘absent image’ or fixed image of Aunt Delilah [the maidservant in the original Imitation of Life], the common dichotomy in films with a black woman” (Thaggert 487). Thaggert paraphrases bell hooks’s observation that an African American woman looking as at such films “does not find a black self there” (487).1 This has, to a perhaps lesser extent, a parallel in the lack Irish feminists have noted in Irish culture. Sarah Fulford, citing Eavan Boland’s phrase, describes this static presence/absence binary as positioning Irish women “‘Outside History,’ in either a public symbolic role as Mother Ireland or in a more private realm of motherhood,” with the absence of the latter explained as the female subject never having “been considered as a subject to begin with” (Fulford 132, 134). Mills and Thaggert outline the choices for women in the audience, the presence of a handful of dehumanizing “ideals” versus absence. Like the situation that placed whole groups in the non-rational bottom half of the above/below binaries perpetrated by hegemonic cultures, the women in the subaltern groups face their own binary situation set within that of her culture. Patricia Coughlan argues that the success of aisling, magna mater, hag, and “woman-asland-and-national-spirit” images, presumably in eliding representations of “real” Irish women, requires “an implicit assumption of the inescapability of a gendered allocation of subject-positions, by means of which rationality, speech and naming are the prerogatives of the autobiographically validated male poet” (Coughlan 89). If the dominant societies involved have used African American and Irish men to make 1

The African American critic bell hooks spells her name all in lowercase.

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dominant males look more “rational” by their purported contrast, then it seems that, on occasion, men from these subaltern groups have used African American and Irish women to provide them with their own contrast, so that, like the hegemony they copy, they have images of an Other to make them feel more “rational” as compared to a woman’s “irrationality.” Fulford reads Ailbhe Smyth’s depiction of this othering as a double dispossession, by “colonialism and by chauvinism”: “‘Irish Woman’ enables definition of ‘Irish man’ [sic]. I am the edge, defining the center. Border country. Margin. Perimeter. Outside” (Fulford 134; A. Smyth, “The Floozie in the Jacuzzi” 25). Some of the inspiration for describing that erasure of “the real woman” came to Eavan Boland in Ralph Ellison’s novel The Invisible Man; “she was never even seen” (Boland, “Kind of Scar” 88). When “woman” is “edited out of her own literature by conventional tribalisms,” the above/below becomes either an above/absence or a below/absence binary (88). One should note that while Boland and others may turn to the African American history and literature for inspiration in expressing their own situation, this does not draw them as equivalencies. Difference in degree doesn’t negate the possibility of finding commonalities and similar functions in separate binary scales. The stereotyping that sets women at the edges, “the bottom and the top of the scale of human modes of relating” as noted by Ortner, Gilbert, and Gubar in Anglo American and English writing, and noted as well in the Irish, reappears in the African American context in enlarged form. Regardless of the broader canvas, the exclusionary tendencies demonstrated in some scenarios of stereotyping—Anglo male to Anglo female, Irish male to Irish female, Anglo American male and female to the African American male and female, and African American male to African American female—function in similar ways. The basis in common between the elevated dehumanizing images and the degraded dehumanizing images is that the net effect is the same. In each historical situation, male authorities confront a female figure who actively inserts her own, living, contradictory intelligence into the affairs of her society, such as the ancient Irish and African queens, or the women who have emerged as Christian activists in both cultures, as nuns, saints, preachers, orators, and educators. In each situation, a male-centered power structure abuses references from oral tradition and cultural history to flatten “woman” to a cipher. The labels used by the power structure emerge from folklore originally, as with Éire or the Poor Old Woman, and other female figures drawing on Otherworld lore (Briggs, “The Man in the House” 92). Or, the labels may come from religious oral traditions, abusing the lore of wise-women figures, such as the Virgin Mary, Mary Magdalene, or other female notables from Christian oral traditions. Those in power take advantage of another’s culture along the way to coining these binary labels, declaring a woman a “Lady” or a “vamp,” a “puppy” or a “monster,” a “dog” or an “angel.” All of these labels parallel the “angel in the house”/”monster” binary (Morrison, Race-ing xvi). If we were to stop there, readers might assume that oral tradition and folklore are irredeemably tainted, irretrievably fated to depict women as outside the margins of the governance of society. This is not the case. Dundes has also stressed that “Folklore per se is neither good nor evil,” backed up by Angela Bourke who calls it “neutral in itself” (Dundes, Mother Wit 2; Bourke, “Legends” 1285). Whatever


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the form, folk expression serves as a neutral field onto which people project their biases, as each individual will tell a story from his or her own perspective. For example, Susan Edwards Meisenhelder confirms the neutrality of folklore, at least with African American folklore, in that male characters in Hurston’s Mules and Men use folktales to “counter women’s assertions of equality and to reinforce the status quo,” just as the women “use of folktales to elevate their status” (Meisenhelder 29). Like Hurston, “Lavin questions the dominant ideology when she re-tells old stories and subverts their messages” (Briggs, “Mary Lavin” 13). The message that has not yet spread is that the Otherworld holds its own answers to Othering. Where Gilbert and Gubar and many others have trotted out Snow White and Cinderella as the bogies of patriarchal oppression, feminists working in folklore have taken a closer look. Folklore holds much more promise for feminist criticism than those popularized variants, those passive princesses, indicate. Even without the pointed humor of various editions of “fairy tales for feminists,” as have been published by Vertigo and Attic Press over the years, the liberating possibilities of oral traditions have already been observed. Angela Bourke, in her introduction to “Oral Traditions” in the Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, argues against the impression some feminists have of oral tradition as “a reservoir of demeaning” stereotypes (Bourke, “General Introduction” 1195). In the same spirit of Dundes’s description of folklore as “a mirror for the rest of culture,” Bourke writes of the “interplay” that takes place in each oral performance between the individual and community that allows the “values” of both to be continually renegotiated (Dundes, Motherwit 2; Bourke, “General Introduction” 1195). Katherine Clay Bassard describes a parallel situation in pre-Emancipation era African American culture. Members of that culture, in “performing community,” could challenge the limitations set upon them by the dominant white society through the “encoding” possibilities of “oral cultural forms” (Bassard, Spiritual 9). In this way, African American practitioners of oral tradition could “negotiate” the “boundaries of self/other, insider/outsider,” and similar binaries, as set upon them by the dominant culture and even by restrictive elements within their own culture, as in the case of the African American women writers she examines in Spiritual Interrogations (9). Therefore, for every flattened representation of women in art, lore, and literature that Gilbert and Gubar, among others, have identified, it is possible to find visual, oral, or written examples where creative women have pushed the stereotype until it bursts into something new. Folk Women and Indirection points to a rhetorical strategy that, up to now, has been better known in oral rather than written cultures. If the images used to push women to the “top” and “bottom” margins of different cultures have sometimes been derived from folklore, folklore can also provide the images to complicate or counter this dichotomy. Elements of oral tradition may have contributed to depictions of women as “angels” and “monsters,” as alluded to in Gilbert and Gubar. Likewise, elements of oral tradition, as evidenced in the literary works to be examined here, also contribute to depictions of complex yet folkloric female characters. If “woman” has not been “fully named,” as Fulford writes, then she has the advantage of still being “uncontainable, allusive and uncontrollable,” which heightens the potential for active reclamation through oral tradition, as called for by Morrison and Boland (Fulford 134; Morrison, “Unspeakable Things Unspoken”

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30; Boland, “Kind of Scar” 89). If the root of the exclusionary images lies in folk and oral culture, then so does the root of a culture that celebrates women in all their complexity. Even in the face of “woman” being “edited out,” “invisible” in the misuse of a people’s oral tradition and literature, “folk lore can also contain myths that re-activate themselves endlessly through providers—the people who repeat, reshape, reconstitute and re-interpret them” (Boland, “Kind of Scar” 88; Morrison, “Unspeakable” 30). The flexibility of folklore to work for or against women is further demonstrated by Angela Bourke’s The Burning of Bridget Cleary. Even if stories from oral tradition can “express aggression against women in coded form,” a woman like Bridget Cleary could use the same tradition, in this case the changeling tradition, on her own behalf, by using fairy belief to persuade an abusive husband to leave his “changeling” wife alone if he wanted to get the “real” one back (Bourke, Burning 41, 76). The reason this works is because legends of the Otherworld offer a “system of metaphor and oblique reference” that individual tellers can negotiate according to their own “preoccupations,” especially regarding subjects disallowed in conversation (Bourke, “Legends” 1285). David Lloyd confirms the subversive possibilities cited by Morrison and Bourke when he adds to the conversation that radical feminists in Ireland “drew on subordinate popular traditions in a way that was deeply antithetical to the logic of state formation” that had led to freezing womanas-Ireland and as “sainted mother” (Lloyd, Anomalous States 81). Critics claiming descent from African American and Irish literary and oral traditions, therefore, support the rich potential of folklore to give voice to marginalized groups. References to oral and other folk traditions as they resurface in a culture, especially in literature, allow women authors to push the image of woman away from the edges, and into the center of human activity. Each set of women authors in this book has fought similarly alienating binaries coming out of dominant cultures. They have each written against the extremities of above and below, top and bottom, images of women. Hurston, Lavin, Morrison, and Ní Dhuibhne, in their depictions of folkloric women, may themselves focus more on one type of character than another, although evidence of both ends of the binary exists in their works. In some instances, the binary being broken may be the more subtle one described above, where the second option set next to servitude, false iconography, or monstrosity will be that of absence. Sometimes, the complication and breakage of the binary will exist in the new presence of a psychologically complex, realistically portrayed woman from an overlooked demographic. Thus, the value of pairing African American and Irish women authors is that, when placed together, these works can destroy both halves of the degraded/reified binary and produce a third entity in the literature: vivid, complicated, humorous, imperfect, self-aware female characters whose actions carry the stories and whose inner thoughts capture the readers’ sympathies. Otherworldly or “wise-women” female characters in Morrison, Hurston, Lavin, and Ní Dhuibhne, whether linked to magical immortals or to mystical and magisterial, but mortal, humans, demonstrate the appropriateness of reading feminism through folklore. The ways in which these authors use elements of oral tradition complicate and flesh out womanhood in literature. Characters drawn from the two categories, otherworldly and wise women, also illustrate the power of oral and folk traditions to carry suppressed arguments before hostile audiences. Previously lowered character


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types become elevated; previously elevated character types become lowered; both ends meet in the middle, where female human beings actually live. In one of the specialties of Morrison and Ní Dhuibhne, the two writers with whom this work spends the most time, Otherworld folk may be younger and more closely connected to immortal fairy worlds, while the wise women, or ancestor figures that Morrison refers to, may be older and more closely identified with the mortal world. For them to be “ancestral” figures, after all, means that they have likely been human at some time in the shared history of the characters in the story. However, some folk-women characters do not follow these trends so closely or else they possess qualities both wise and otherworldly. The “fairy doctor” of Irish lore and the “conjure women” of African American lore may be mortal, but their knowledge and power may come from their connections or experiences in the Otherworld. Those female characters may lend themselves more to one category or another depending on which community, mortal or fairy, the author associates most closely with that character. Human characters in realistic fictional settings may be set here among the fairy folk because they show more links to the Otherworld than other characters in the same story. By the same token, female characters whom some readers might identify as magical beings serve as their story’s voice of wisdom and humanity. Especially with Morrison and Ní Dhuibhne, the pleasure of their texts often lies with how successfully they blur the “real” with the “unreal,” so any categorizing with regard to their characters must remain fluid and only for the sake of discussion. The context of the character’s scenes, and whether her character brings a more human or a more otherworldly quality to her story, will determine her designation in this book as an Otherworld or wise woman. A few characters will appear in more than one chapter, according to certain scenes or aspects of her personality. Whether otherworldly and immortal or wise and ancestral, the two general types of folk women in these creative works repossess images that societies have attached to women and restore some life-like ambiguity to them. Therefore, to picture African American and Irish authors working in parallel to demolish the above/below binary of women in western literature is not merely an exercise of the imagination. As will be mentioned shortly, some unusual parallels between the cultures allows this pairing to reveal more of the inner workings of folklore and indirection in literature than could observing one culture alone. This seems appropriate, as both Morrison and Ní Dhuibhne have described their art as less an act of a lone individual and more as an act of creation that takes place in community, although that community may or may not support the artist’s goals (Morrison, “Rootedness” 342; Appendix). In furthering that notion of community, one more binary will be broken into in the works covered in this book. Most of the conflicts mentioned here that have produced the extreme fictions of womanhood, which these authors defy with their own fictions, have consisted of male authorities positioned against women in subaltern positions within subaltern societies. Most, but not all. Taking apart one more binary, these authors also write against limiting assumptions held by women. Some of these assumptions have not received as much attention as those concerning civil rights, independence from colonial powers, or self-determination for women, but they have been coming more to the foreground as women gain more agency in their lives and cultures. Flattened images, isolated at the extreme ends of the above/

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below binary, have also been bestowed by women upon women. This demonstration will further clarify the workings of rhetorical indirection, expressed with, from, and through folk and oral traditions, to increase freedom of expression. While both groups have had to work against static images of women, and while for the reasons stated above the groups make an efficient team in collapsing the binaries further, the basis for comparison lies not only in their experiences as women, but also in the development of their bodies of literature. The two cultural groups these authors come from provide the grounds for a stylistic comparison because of the high number of rhetorical conditions in common. While comparative studies of African American and Irish literature have appeared only recently, for example, the works by C.L. Innes, Tracy Mishkin, and Catherine Mary Eagan, research on African American women writers has seen a renaissance over the last thirty years. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, work on Irish women writers has only begun, an area to which this work contributes, as well as to the study of African American literature. Comparing authors from these two groups will allow readers to observe the effectiveness of folklore and indirection in helping authors succeed in expressing themselves. These parallels between the two different rhetorical situations, as well as parallels between different strategies of indirection between the two authors’ groups, will be described in more detail. Chapter overview The primary term of this book, strategies of indirection, does not refer to the linguistic use of free indirect style, such as when the authorial point of view in a story blends into a character’s point of view.2 Rather, the term refers to when rhetors wish to delay or obstruct their audience’s comprehension of their position on a subject, which may contradict that of the audience. Skilled authors and speakers manipulate the stages of the audience’s understanding to slow or obscure its comprehension. If later in the progress of public discourse on a controversial topic, rhetors have engaged the sympathies of their audience, or if the discourse has devolved into a crisis, they may choose to express themselves more directly, even bluntly. Chapter two will refer to the earlier stages of public discourse in Ireland and the US on racism or, in the case of Ireland, colonialism, and the status of women, as well as examples of how an otherworldly folkloric indirection has eased communication on those topics for Hurston, Lavin, Morrison, and Ní Dhuibhne. With the later writers, Morrison and Ní Dhuibhne, public discourse advances to the stage where they may write more openly on these topics, but then they encounter other topics that require similar strategies of indirection, as used by the earlier authors in African American and Irish literature. African American and Irish authors have both, over time, demonstrated expertise in using the language of a conquering Anglo society to manipulate readers from that dominant group into entertaining new ideas, especially ideas that cast doubt on the wisdom of dominating others. Via strategies of indirection, especially those 2 Henry Louis Gates, The Signifying Monkey (Oxford University Press, 1988), especially the chapter on Zora Neale Hurston, provides a thorough explication of Hurston’s use of direct, indirect, and free indirect discourse (style indirect libre).


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stemming from both groups’ rich oral traditions, authors from these two cultures smuggle concepts into minds that have tried to lock them out. Chapter two will discuss some of the parallels that make these bodies of work especially fruitful for comparison, preceded by a brief examination of how rhetorical indirection appears in even older oral cultures, such as the ancient Greeks and Hebrews, as well as the folk cultures that have influenced African American and Irish writers. Why rhetorical indirection must exist, in whatever cultural form and specific term it takes, will be revealed in the dangers faced by these ancient and more modern interlocutors Chapters three, four, and five provide test cases that demonstrate how strategies with folkloric elements provide authors cover from audience rejection while they enable authors to communicate with audience members ready to receive new ideas. Those cases will include topics that have already gained critical acknowledgement as having been silenced and will progress to examples in chapters four and five that have not yet received broad acknowledgement as topics for discussion in literary criticism. In chapter four, otherworldly folk-women characters will demonstrate aspects of the less-mentioned topics; in chapter five, wise-women folk characters will work with those topics. Some characters and authors will address some topics in more detail than others, but folklore and indirection appear in each instance. Many critical works at the turn of the twentieth century have delineated the strategies of those writing out of silenced situations. In addition to specific works mentioned in this introduction, African American feminist and womanist criticism, postcolonial criticism, including works from Irish critics, and selected writings on religion from African American and Irish women have particularly influenced this book. Barbara Christian, Katherine Clay Bassard, David Lloyd, Sarah Briggs, Derek Hand, Homi K. Bhabha, and Andrea O’Reilly stand out as among those critics who, for me, opened up new ways to view the four selected authors in the context of rhetoric and indirection. In general, this book has developed out of those bodies of criticism that address authors from subaltern communities, especially how those authors break down some of the assumptions of a dominant society by feeding the language of the dominant group back to them, with significant cultural changes buried like mental time bombs in the text. Folklorists Alan Dundes, Angela Bourke, Cristina Bacchilega, Geneva Smitherman, Claudia Mitchell-Kernan, and Roger Abrahams, among others, as well as Ní Dhuibhne and Hurston themselves, have guided the development of this book. They have explored how oral and folk traditions give authors both the material and means for those mental time bombs, those topics that challenge dominant assumptions. That challenge leads to further questions, such as, once those topics have been revealed, how will readers be able to see evidence of other indirect communications, other struggles? Even if the modifier “silenced” fades from view as a term that conjures critical curiosity, this does not indicate that the phenomenon of silencing will fade, too. The answer is to seek out new evidence of indirection in prose. How else does one test for evidence of silencing, and the strategies of indirection that follow in its wake, than to locate topics overlooked in one’s own time and place? One must seek out forgotten narratives. Clues can be found in references made by one’s peers to others in their midst whose stories trouble them or leave them feeling indignant. These “others” do not have to be hated, or even perceived as direct

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enemies to the larger society. They just have to be “inconvenient” or a disruption to complacency. Even expression of indifference leaves a clue. To label a topic as “uninteresting” to academic or lay audiences, as women’s narratives formerly were, can turn out to be a subtle form of social censorship. Strategies of indirection via folklore surface whenever these four authors broach these recognized controversial topics. By briefly observing folkloric indirection as it opens up topics that have already been recognized as silenced, we can then follow the trail of indirection into subjects that have not yet been recognized as such. Two sets of additional test cases include a questions directed toward issues of reproduction, such as sexual mores and abortion, and marginalized religious communities. Each folk-woman characterization that addresses these issues simultaneously deconstructs an above/below binary. Some folk women, such as Morrison’s wise women, set the ambiguous forces of folklore against some of the stereotypes and assumptions associated with reproduction and religion. Reader assumptions of what belongs “above” and what belongs “below” a preconceived “norm” may become reversed or completely muddied as a result. When the “below” of that binary falls off the scale altogether into “absence,” as described by some of the critics mentioned above, the folk-woman characterization fills in a void. Unusual folk women step in where a marginalized voice that could not be stereotyped as either angelic or monstrous has been silenced completely. The final binary to be pulled and pushed apart, the middle filled up with complex, human characters, is the one that sets women against men. Irish feminist Ailbhe Smyth and Alice Walker have foreseen this one. Smyth compares “nationalism and feminism” as driven “to name, to classify, to distinguish themselves from the Other” (A. Smyth, “Floozie in the Jacuzzi” 23). Walker coined the term “womanist” to answer the isolating effects wrought by a too-narrow interpretation of feminism by women who, as Morrison says, seek to “invent” themselves separately from culture, family, and the other half of humanity (Walker xii, 172; McKay 141). Folk women characters from Morrison and Ní Dhuibhne, especially, will take on binaries that both men and women have projected onto other women in the areas of reproductive issues and religion. How Hurston, Lavin, Morrison, and Ní Dhuibhne approach these topics range from intimations of inclusion to open defiance of popular opinion. This is not to say that any of these women accept or endorse any of the “test subjects.” However, through respectful inclusion of characters who represent aspects of these topics, and through indirect commentary on the topics, the authors acknowledge their existence, recognize them as legitimate for dialogue, and thereby violate the invisibility and hush surrounding these matters. Even when the authors do not advocate controversial positions on sexuality, abortion, or certain Christian traditions, for example, by withholding condemnation the authors further the project of free speech in their countries, and of the freedom of the artist herself. Sometimes combining vivid images with a teasing ambiguity, these women extend the boundaries of the “acceptable” not only for other writers who share their circumstances but also for writers not yet born, in circumstances not yet imagined. Where past and present meet, and where literature prepares the way for future artists, is the point at which folklore and indirection take on fleshly form in the works


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of Hurston, Lavin, Morrison, and Ní Dhuibhne. From the two categories of folkloric female characters, the magical characters refer to those women who share traits with non-human figures from the Otherworld, such as the sí, mermaids, selkies, witches, hags, or ghosts. The wise women, possessing the mystical knowledge of faith or the magisterial knowledge of communal history, share traits with more human-like folk figures from legends, folk tales, or religious oral traditions. In the context of the creative works discussed here, references may come from multiple Christian traditions and may include native African, Caribbean, and Irish religious practices. Some folk references, such as those in Hurston’s vodun research, may mix tales of African divinities in the form of myth and folktales along with references to active religious practices, such as those that Hurston herself participated in during her life. While “wise women” as a term in folklore may be synonymous with “fairy doctors” or “conjurers,” those who receive unusual talents, healing powers, or privileged knowledge from non-human beings, I am using the term “wise woman” here in the same sense evoked by Toni Morrison’s reference to the ancestor or “elder,” “timeless people whose relationships to the characters are benevolent, instructive and protective,” providing “a certain kind of wisdom” (Rojcewicz 489; Morrison, “Rootedness” 343). She describes African American women writers looking “back to their mothers and grandmothers for the substance and authority in their voices,” in contrast to what she sees as the Anglo feminist project of “inventing the authority in their voices” (McKay 141). Linda-May Ballard affirms a similar base of traditional knowledge regarding Irish culture when she writes, “‘the old people’ are often credited with much closer adherence to traditional belief and practice than that practiced by the current generation,” and when Ballard recounts a story where the “old woman” character is “supposed to know everything” (Ballard, “Seal Stories” 35). This type of wise woman might appear in the role of a mother, or she might not, but these characters usually possess an understanding that comes from yet surpasses age. These juggernauts of feminist literature do, in fact, appear most frequently in the works of Toni Morrison. In Morrison’s speeches and novels, the wise-women characters guide other characters, offer advice (sometimes unheeded), and tease audience members with comments that represent some of the underlying rhetorical points of the work. Morrison’s wise women tease audiences especially, as sometimes their comments blend into the narration in such a way that one must ask whether that voice of authority also represents a particular angle of argument in the work (Di Battista 106; Phelan 320). The choice of narrative point of view does carry ethical implications; the reader is being led somewhere, being exposed to a specific view of the world (Phelan 323). Yet, her wise women occasionally make mistakes, and even admit to it. Human fallibility in the folkloric women, whether their powers derive from age, God, or the Otherworld, marks their unique contribution towards a denial of the extremes of Otherness. Depending on which world they associate with the most, and depending on their origins as either human or non-human beings, witches, hags, and a few of Morrison’s ghosts may fall into either the otherworldly or the wise-woman camp. Human folk women may fall under the otherworldly category because that world intrudes so much upon their story, as in the situation of the title character of Lavin’s Mary

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O’Grady. Some wise women may possess both the magical traits of the women of the Otherworld and the authority of the mortal women of faith. For the purposes of this book, folk women may be grouped under otherworldly or wise and ancestral, depending on whom they most resemble and upon the company they keep. In each association, whether magical or magisterial, the folk-woman character subverts some extreme of Otherness, as Gilbert and Gubar write, so that the character herself is no longer just some “embodiment” to inspire “worship or fear, love or loathing” (Gilbert and Gubar 19). In most cases, the character in question will demonstrate some measure of autonomy, the subjectivity previous depictions may have denied that type of character. As evidence of the characters’ transcendence from being “female symbols of transcendence,” they frequently show human desires, failings, and ability to change over the course of the story (19). Whether or not those characters drenched in folkloric roles or references completely dismantle the limitations imposed upon them in their own plotline remains immaterial. The final effect comes from how much the folkloric women, whether otherworldly, wise, or both, disrupt reader expectations. The folkloric characters that these four authors employ, wild denizens of the Otherworld and wise women of a variety of traditions, help their creators insert controversy into fiction in ways that charm rather than alienate readers. Forms of rhetorical indirection that appear in folklore, such as signifying practices, masking, sly civility, and the grotesque or bizarre, come out of the mouths and actions of these writers’ magical and magisterial folk women. Specific strategies of indirection, as expressed through folklore, vary between cultures, world views, and the conditions for discourse that accompany these. Relationships between censorship, folklore, and specific strategies, as they affect these four authors, will be explained in greater detail in the next chapter. Examples of the authors’ use of savvy wise women and wild Otherworld characters to evade and question authority will illustrate how indirection has been known to operate in discourses critics already recognize as silenced. As differences in world views between times and cultures affect what “can” and “cannot” be said regarding sexual expression and reproduction, the full range of wise-women characters as depicted by Hurston, Lavin, Morrison, and Ní Dhuibhne will show some new ways to read sexual questioning in their works. Morrison’s wise-women characters, older and often mystical, will lead the charge in this area of conflict, with some assistance by other defiant female characters in Hurston, Lavin, and Ní Dhuibhne. For any of these characters to question their societies’ assumptions about reproduction, especially regarding abortion or infanticide, they will inevitably trip over religion’s trailing skirt. Therefore, the two categories of folk women will also address religious oral traditions that emphasize rhetorical indirection, only expressed this time through divergent Christian traditions. Originating as a divergent religious tradition itself, Christian oral traditions have contributed models of rhetorical indirection to both African American and Irish cultures over the centuries, via proverbs and parables, for example. The book includes, then, examples of folkloric indirection applied in the context of religious topics. All of the authors and all types of wise-women characters will hold forth on this topic. Hurston’s non-western spirituality combines with Christian inclusion, and Lavin combines questioning of


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church authority with inclusion of the faith of ordinary people. Ní Dhuibhne joins Lavin in asserting the right as an Irish author to question the church, as well as to not write in an explicitly Catholic vein. Yet Ní Dhuibhne, too, includes some positive references and depictions of Christian female characters in her works. One warning, however. The power of these otherworldly folk and wise women to surprise and enlighten us rests with their ability to switch positions when least expected. The most miraculous aspect of indirection expressed through folklore appears when these characters act as fun-house mirrors to each generation’s assumptions. Placed side by side, the different characters described in Folk Women and Indirection appear to take turns reflecting upon and altering each other’s positions. That which could not be written about without negative consequences in one time and place may become the reverse, the status quo, in another. Regardless, these four authors will, at certain points, use similar strategies to explore the same topic, but from alternate, even opposing, angles of inquiry. All of this will enable readers to see the versatility of indirection and folklore in literature, and how similar strategies of folkloric indirection might bring us works we cannot yet imagine from communities not yet recognized and even writers not yet born.


Chapter 2

Rhetorical Indirection: Roots and Routes Back to the beginning There are rhetorical situations where writers risk losing their audience’s good will, or more, if they approach a controversial subject directly. In the phrase of Emily Dickinson, the writer should, “Tell all the truth, but tell it slant—/ Success in Circuit lies ... The Truth must dazzle gradually/ Or every man be blind—” (Dickinson 248). To understand what rhetorical indirection is, and how its strategies operate, one must first take into account why it must exist at all, that is, one must understand the conditions for rhetorical indirection. The strategies that grow out of these conditions, such as those in African American and Irish women’s literature among other literary traditions, include folkloristic expression. The relationship between indirection, folklore, and the strategies normally recognized under other names, signifying, masking, mimicking, etc., will be explained further in the next section. For now, the “formula” might be stated thus: Add the “Desire to Speak” on a “Taboo Subject”; add to both a “Threat.” Out of this combination comes “Strategies of Indirection.” Different rhetors, histories, and eras produce their own strategies and terms tailored to that communicative context. Ultimately, the thread connecting these gulfs of time, location, and culture is that each rhetor in each of situation must not reveal all. If too many members of the audience understand too much of the message, the interlocutor will face grave consequences ranging from censorship and shunning to death. Indirection as a term, therefore, represents any communicative strategy designed to smuggle meaning past such obstacles to expression. This chapter illustrates the use and context of indirection with one ancient model, one ancient critic who comments on the use of indirection, followed by examples of indirection noted by critics working in Anglo American and English literature. Out of these more widely known illustrations of indirection, the chapter moves to figures of speech and elements of folklore that fit within the greater category of rhetorical indirection. The desire to know how to reach an audience has received critical attention from the earliest texts available to western culture. African oral tradition has much to teach on this subject, too, as do other non-western traditions, which in recent years have begun to gain more critical attention. As social beings, humans want this information in order for their meaning to reach those whom it must. Precedents for such strategizing exist as far back as the Bible and Aristotle and the oral traditions of

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many other peoples. Sometimes the need for indirection rests on the need for some eyes or ears to receive our meaning, but not others. While artists have often been accused of intentional obscurity for the sake of confusing their audiences, I am referring to something gentler and more considerate of the nature of rhetorical exchange. Interlocutors who employ rhetorical indirection do have the goal of creating a new picture in their audience’s minds, a new understanding of a subject, if not at that moment, then perhaps later on, when those minds have become more receptive. But to achieve this requires them to understand their audience first. In the New Testament, one finds an example of one of the most persuasive speakers in recorded or oral history, Jesus. Besides the value of examining strategies of indirection in as early a recorded example as this, a greater value in studying the rhetorical practices of this carpenter and teacher of the first century C.E. comes from the influence of those practices on African American oral and written cultures. That influence will appear prominently in the sections that address religious topics in Hurston, Lavin, Morrison, and Ní Dhuibhne. Jesus, a Jew living under Roman occupation, finds himself with multiple audiences. Many of the Jewish residents of the towns in which he preaches have witnessed his miracles and, as a result, want to listen to his teachings. On the other hand, some among the leaders of those communities interpret both the miracles and the teachings as a challenge to their authority. To say that this audience is less receptive understates the rhetorical circumstances. Between those extremes, his listeners have varying capacities for understanding his complex points. Some he does not expect to understand him at all. To speak to all of these individuals in a way that communicates his teachings to those who most need to hear them, he uses parables. Jesus advises his disciples that, “The secret of the kingdom of God has been given to you. But to those on the outside everything is said in parables so that, ‘they may be ever seeing but never perceiving, /and ever hearing but never understanding ...’” (Mark 4:11–12; Matthew 13:13–14; Luke 8:10) (All citations from the New International Version [NIV] unless otherwise noted). A parable “tells a special lesson or truth,” but indirectly, which the New Testament describes Jesus using with the crowds (“Parable” 1446): “So was fulfilled what was spoken through the prophet: ‘I will open my mouth in parables,/ I will utter things hidden since the creation of the world’” (Matthew 13:34–5). The quote that refers to prophecy comes from Psalm 78, so the concept is much older than the New Testament accounts. In this example, he reaches far back into Hebrew culture to quote Isaiah’s description of how God tells him to prophesy so that only those who care to follow God’s leadership will understand, a reference to obstinate audiences that appears as early as his people’s forty years in the desert in Deuteronomy (Isaiah 6:9–10; 42:20; Deuteronomy). Parables as they appear here and elsewhere often feature events and personages common in the human everyday world, usually anonymous, occurrences that listeners from that time or place could imagine happening to themselves or others they know. These short, simple stories allow an audience to see, in their mind’s eye, a moral point in action. Listeners may not necessarily understand the full implications of the moral or religious point, but the miniature drama will stay with them and repeat in their memories.

Rhetorical Indirection: Roots and Routes

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Some listeners, though, may never quite get the point. The reoccurrence of variants of the phrased “ever seeing but never perceiving” and “ever hearing but never understanding” indicates how much the Bible is a document of oral tradition. This phrasing appears in similar form in Isaiah 6:9–10 and even earlier, when Moses chides the Israelites for not having “eyes that see or ears that hear” (Deuteronomy 29:4). This strategy of tailoring speech to those “whose ears are willing” will later be paralleled when African American and Irish writers rely on folk speech with intricate multiple meanings to communicate between each other in front of hostile authorities. As Hurston states in Mules and Men, “Mouths don’t empty themselves unless ears are sympathetic and knowing” (Hurston, Mules and Men 178). Even when a group of hostile listeners demand, “If you are the Christ, tell us plainly,” Jesus claims he has, but still relies on a metaphor: they are not the sheep of his flock and do not know his voice (John 10:24–30). In other words, he tells them, yes, I am, but you are not going to understand even if I tell you outright. In the case of the “tell us plainly” scenario, those particular listeners pick up stones in response, but Jesus evades them. Evidently, speaking clearly in that time and place can make it so that one won’t speak again at all, that is, in the cases of those speakers who don’t have a penchant for coming back from the dead. Eventually, though, “whatever is concealed is meant to be brought out into the open” (Mark 4:22). In other instances, Jesus speaks to the level of understanding of his listeners, because at another time he admits to the disciples that he has “much more to say” to them, but it is “more than you can now bear” (John 16:12). In general, the New Testament examples of strategies of indirection serve to fit the message to the souls of the listeners. Yet the indirection of parables, stories that convey particular lessons or truths, must give way in time to direct speech. Even Jesus’ famously ambiguous response to the question whether he was the messiah, the king of the Jews, “If I tell you, you will not believe me, and if I asked you, you would not answer,” gives way near the end of his ministry (Luke 22:67–8). As seen here, the time will come in most rhetorical projects to speak “plainly.” When the high priest asks Jesus, “Are you the Christ, the Son of the Blessed One?” Jesus does answer, “I am ...” (Mark 14:61–2; Matthew 26:64, 27:11). Jesus chooses this moment to make himself fully clear, in order to set into motion those events leading from that point on to his crucifixion and resurrection to effect the salvation of humanity. All his moves head in that direction, ultimately, whether direct or indirect. The rhetorical point to take from this is that all rhetors need to choose their strategies bearing in mind how those methods will work toward their goals for expression. Even before the end, indirection through the oral tradition of the parable appears not only to obfuscate those who would try to stop Jesus from preaching but also to attempt to reach those same authorities. When some of the Pharisees investigate the healing of a blind man, Jesus tells the parable of “The Shepherd and His Flock” to explain His bond to those who follow him (John 10). In this instance, the narrator who has transcribed this oral account points out that “Jesus used this figure of speech, but they did not understand what he was telling them” (John 10:6). To emphasize that this time Jesus is using a parable to try to reach out to rather than deflect the authorities questioning him, the narrator states, “Therefore Jesus said again, ‘I tell

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you the truth, I am the gate for the sheep’ (John 10:7). To reach them, he narrows down the parable to identify himself in its primary metaphor. In summary, the strategies of indirection in Jesus’ rhetorical project derive from his desire to express himself on two subjects that, if broadcast widely enough, will cause authorities in his culture to threaten him with death. One is the issue of his messiahship, which undermines both local and imperial authority, and the second is the issue of loving one another as one loves oneself. As the expression of either topic will either confuse listeners or translate to revolution in the interpretation of certain people in authority, Jesus faces censorship in the forms of rejection and death. Even in that worst-case scenario, his primary figures of speech, parable and metaphor, both based on prior orally transmitted motifs from Hebrew tradition, carry his messages to this day.1 In addition, oral traditions continued to grow out of the events surrounding his resurrection. The impossible conversation, the arrival of Jesus as Messiah, brought to the impossible audience, human beings troubled by the concept of a king who conquers through love and self-sacrifice, succeeds largely through strategies of indirection from oral tradition. The parables and metaphors enable certain members of Jesus’ audience to understand most of the difficult concepts right away (his disciples), a larger number to understand only some of the concepts (the multitude), and another smaller set of listeners to have a fuller understanding delayed until that time when Christ determines his work on earth is “finished” (John 19:30). Furthermore, the examples of indirection via oral tradition Jesus provides in his time reappear in other societies, African American and Irish among them. Some of the same indirect references, in fact. In that way, his stated goals for telling “these things,” overcoming the world and imparting a lasting peace, pass on to later rhetors in various oral and written Christian traditions who attempt to be faithful to the original scope of his plan. Others employ similar forms of indirection to a more closely tailored range of human goals, such as overcoming specific forms of oppression and reaching out for peace between specific groups of people. In most cases for those who have been oppressed, those goals also include increasing freedom of expression, so that one does not have to rely entirely on indirection. The strategies for expression used by Hurston and Lavin have enabled greater openness for the generation that followed them, as will be seen in the expanded topics and public statements appearing in Morrison and Ní Dhuibhne. Although expanding freedom of speech may not be the same thing as saving the world, for those seeking models for expression, Jesus represents one of the most creative sources. More on the oral traditions that have passed down accounts and parables of Jesus will appear in the section on Paradise and Love, as that novel engages with those traditions in unusual ways. While he had different expressive goals in mind than salvation, Aristotle is one of the earliest writers in western culture to acknowledge the intricacy of the interlocutor’s relationship with the audience. In Book II of the Rhetoric, he touches 1 The use of the word motif in folkloristics differs somewhat from its use in the arts. A motif in folklore represents “a unit of the narrative capable of independent traditional life, as for example, the acquisition of a magic sword” (Clarke and Clarke 24).


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on a dynamic that comes close to describing indirection. While Aristotle’s goal of expression in Book II deals with political oratory and legal verdicts, his description of how one must take the frame of mind of the listener into account is valuable here. “Since rhetoric exists to affect the giving of decisions,” he notes, “... the orator must not only try to make the argument of his speech demonstrative and worthy of belief; he must also make his own character look right and put his hearers, who are to decide, into the right frame of mind” (Aristotle, Rhetoric ch. 1, 1377: line 23). Aristotle’s orator comes before his audience “for judgment,” and we may consider that a writer is presenting her text for judgment by her readers. Aristotle continues, when the people are feeling friendly and placable, they think one sort of thing; when they are feeling angry or hostile, they think either something totally different or the same thing with a different intensity: when they feel friendly to the man who comes before them in judgment, they regard him as having done little wrong, if any; when they feel hostile, they take the opposite view.

Therefore, as Aristotle discusses further on, “The Emotions are all those feelings that so change men as to affect their judgments, and that are also attended by pain or pleasure.” To prepare the audience to receive one with a “friendly and placable” state of mind, Aristotle urges his students to learn the various states of emotion in order to be able to inspire those emotions in the audience in a direction that will lead to a favorable judgment. He emphasizes that one must understand and direct the emotions of an audience toward that favorable “frame of mind.” Indirection in the context of previous criticism The concept of a privileged man in ancient Greece needing to inspire the right frame of mind in an audience in order to receive a legal or political judgment in his favor is not far removed from a twentieth-century woman writer needing to inspire a receptive frame of mind in her readers. If, as Aristotle says, one way that a speaker persuades listeners is “when the speech stirs their emotions” in the right direction, a fiction writer needs to stir readers’ emotions in the right direction to keep them reading and to open them up to the ideas incorporated in her story (Book I, ch. 2, 1356a: line 14–15). Seymour Chatman, in an interview with Homay King, ties these two rhetorical situations together for us: “... Though fiction makes no truth claims, the rhetoric of a fiction resides in the author’s attempt to make that fiction seem valid. In other words, it’s a rhetoric that tries to persuade the reader not of the literal truth of its content, but of its form, of the right of this text to exist. It says, ‘Accept me, I am a well-formed object. I am verisimilar’” (H. King 3). Fiction writers, the four in this book being no exception, must move the audience to accept the validity of their creation. Interestingly, the rhetorical basis for the ideas in African American and Irish women’s literature have often argued, as noted in the historical overview, for their right to exist—literally—as independent individuals. To persuade readers of African American and Irish women’s writing to accept the “validity” of both their creation, and in the past, their right to create it, they have

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had to induce changes in their audience, have had to alter its frame of mind. Jeff Mason, though discussing the rhetorical necessity of indirection in philosophical writing, affirms this necessity in a way that is true for fiction as well: “Indirect communication involves the attempt to bring about changes in the audience” (Mason 96). In commenting on the use of myth in Plato and Socrates, Mason points out that “Plato resorts to myth at crucial points in his arguments,” for myths, related in this application to fiction and folklore, “have something to tell us about ourselves which cannot be explained away through the mechanical application of rational analytic techniques” (108). However, “the audience or reader ... plays a crucial role in making sense of a myth” (110). This concept comes back in how Morrison and Ní Dhuibhne purposely expect readers to participate in their storytelling and retelling. If Plato uses narrative with the goal that “the reader or audience change his or her whole way of life, thought, and feeling,” then so, too, do many writers of African American and Irish traditions. Maurice Natanson confirms the use of indirection in this altering aspect of writing when he states, “In all cases, indirection points to an unsuspected second path which shadows our usual walk” (Natanson 46). The application of rhetorical indirection to achieve the acceptance of not only the work of fiction and its author as “valid,” but also an alteration of the reader’s mind, appears in the different expressive goals of Walt Whitman and Jane Austen. John Lee Jellicorse examines Whitman’s strategies of persuasion through indirection. Whitman believed that the persuader “must put truth into people’s minds by using techniques that hint and suggest rather than state or demonstrate” (Jellicorse 91). In an echo of what we will see operating in Morrison and Ní Dhuibhne, Whitman’s “theory of suggestion requires that the interaction of book and reader or of speaker and audience must be an active process,” and that “conscious ambiguity can be employed” to foster suggestion (103). The “persuader must always leave a margin of ‘indefiniteness,’” Whitman insisted (103). Whitman may have been trying to move his audience toward “life in the Religious Democracy” of his imaginings, but Jane Austen is trying to move readers toward a different understanding of womanhood through her use of indirection in her novel Persuasion. James L. Kastely considers Austen’s dialogue between Anne and Wentworth in the novel “a masterpiece not only of eloquence but also of indirection” (Kastely 164). Multiple levels of understanding that will appear when we examine the authors in this book appear in this scene, too: “On a literal level, [Anne] provides a general defense of woman’s passion, but her words are themselves a figurative expression that declares her love for Wentworth” (164). Anne’s, or rather Austen’s, “use of figure, of indirection, creates the opening that will enable Wentworth to risk the declaration of his passion for her” (164–5). As in the case of Whitman, and also of the rhetors here, indirection is used to create space for the audience, an “opening” that will allow audience members to take the “risk” of accepting the validity of the authors’ visions. Impossible conversations made possible To compare parallel drives to communicate ideas about blocked topics, as well as methods across cultures and times, one must find traits in common between sometimes


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culturally explicit strategies. The cultural contexts between different bodies of literature may change, as they do between African American and Irish literature, but what rhetorical strategies remain unchanged between differing situations? In comparing rhetors, those who communicate to persuade in any context including fiction, one will notice that rhetors usually rely on more than one way to circumvent obstacles to expression. How can one refer to the combined use of such strategies? Literary criticism, across recent schools of thought, lacks a term flexible enough that can embrace the totality of such rhetorical moves, let alone a term that can compare these moves across differing cultural contexts. Writers who face the most obstacles to expression tend to use the most variety in their methods of circumventing those obstacles. To observe and compare works of fiction that display multiple methods, one needs a way to refer to the overall effort of writers to express themselves in the face of multiple obstacles. By comparing strategies cross-culturally this way, while eliminating differences in class (all four authors come from non-wealthy backgrounds and achieved similarly high levels of education), gender orientation, language, and societal position (with some variations), I propose that it is possible to analyze indirection itself as an overall strategy. There is a need for a way to describe a strategy that encompasses different techniques used for the same purpose: to overcome different obstacles to expression. Many critics have already examined strategies such as signifying, masking, sly civility, mimicry, and the use of the grotesque or bizarre. Most of the time the strategy and the work examined will come from the same cultural background. Sometimes, though, rhetorical strategies based on specific folk-speech practices may lose meaning if critics applied them to works operating outside the cultural understanding that produced them. However, while cultural situations, linguistic constructions, and obstacles to expression vary between individual strategies, one rhetorical purpose recurs: the need to keep part or all of a rhetor’s meaning obscured from certain members of the audience. Until now, there has not been a way to discuss different expressions of the same rhetorical need. In this examination, the term “indirection” represents the underlying commonality between oftentimes culturally specific rhetorical strategies: the goal of communicating while under threat of censorship or retribution. The rhetor may be trying to communicate within his or her cultural group, to an outside group, or to both at the same time. Some messages may be meant for perhaps even a subset within the rhetor’s cultural group. Different elements of a story may be intended for different factions of the audience. Elements of the story’s meaning may, for that matter, be held back from either outside or inside audience members. If indirection stands for the general approach to such expression, then “strategies of indirection” here will refer to the endlessly inventive methods of artists, working in oral or print media, to express themselves under social pressure. The term “strategies of indirection,” in this application, does not refer to the linguistic use of free indirect style (style indirect libre), when an author’s point of view shades to his or her character’s point of view (Wood 114). Nor does it stand here for a situation that Michael Wood describes where the narrator “finds language for feelings which are not hers, but which are there in the fiction” (114). Nor does it represent the indirect use of second-person address by the author, placing the reader

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into the confidence, as it were, of the narrator or into the shoes of the protagonist. Writers can, though, use all of the above methods as part of a work’s larger effort to strategically conceal or reveal meaning. Indirection, here, instead describes an oblique manner of communication between the author and the audience, a manipulation of stance designed to obscure, or delay, the readers’ comprehension of the writer’s position. With a folkloric approach to indirection, writers who wish to explore unpopular topics may refer to proverbs, legends, tales, or other folk references to entice the audience into reading that which it might normally reject. For example, a writer may substitute animal characters, otherworldly plots, or magical motifs when more direct criticism of beings and behavior in the “real world” may repulse readers so much that the writer may lose their attention. In such instances, folkloric characters embody indirection itself in a work, as they can encompass a variety of folk expressions and figures of speech in their presentation, actions, and dialogue. As Roger Abrahams writes in Afro-American Folktales, “indirect arguments” “go round for long,” and convey what cannot be stated directly (Abrahams xix). Folk Women and Indirection will discuss how written fiction can carry out “indirect arguments” through folklore. Indirection in folklore as an answer to censorship Folklore may seem too old a reference for the contemporary and twentieth-century writers and readers of this book, but that would be a misconception. If, as Alan Dundes has written, the “folk” refers “to any group of people whatsoever who share at least one common factor,” and if the “lore” refers to those “traditions which [the group] calls its own,” often orally passed customs, stories, songs, sayings, and more, then all of us engage at some point in our lives with folklore (Dundes, Study 2–3). The authors in this study have been aware of folklore’s influence in their lives, in their work and in the assertion of the value of their cultures. In addition to the celebration of culture found in the folkloric references in their fiction, these authors employ their cultural background to express themselves in ways that have been censored or limited by hegemonic influences in society. Folklore, in its unique way of forming both the medium and the material for many indirect communications, possesses a unique resistance to censorship, since it can pass from person to person in ways no state or media can effectively control (Dundes, Motherwit 2). This ability to alter according to social context, combined with the ability to exist “under the radar” of authorities, gives folklore and its subset oral tradition a built-in subversive potential. As seen especially in the Hurston, Morrison, and Ní Dhuibhne materials, folktales may contain a point, a moral to the story, or it may be too obscure. The storytelling tradition, though, as it separates the teller and the listener from their immediate surroundings, lifts the discourse out of the tensions of the present moment. The charm of a “little story” can disarm an audience out its vigilance against new or challenging ideas. Since most storytelling and other folk traditions operate outside the mainstream of a culture’s mass media, whether ostensibly free-market or state-controlled, the potentially disruptive qualities of those traditions make them unusually appropriate


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for postmodern critical projects that seek out such creative disruption. The study of folklore as it appears in literature assists in postmodern analyses of how various influences shape identity in a society. When uncovering how culture-as-hegemony shapes citizen-subjects, in David Lloyd’s example, criticism “depends increasingly on the attempt to recover subterranean or marginalized practices which have been understood variously, as aberrant, pre-modern and residual, or incoherent” (Lloyd, Anomalous 7). Oral and other folk traditions, because they are spread person to person rather than via “official” media, have themselves been viewed as “aberrant, pre-modern and residual, or incoherent,” epithets often assigned also to groups who have been cut out of mainstream dialogues, much like some of the characters discussed in this book. Folklore is more than a marker of difference, though; it can also be a means for subversive expression, even that expression which reaches for the ineffable. Cristina Bacchilega, in Postmodern Fairy Tales: Gender and Narrative Strategies, reads “postmodern transformations of the fairy tale,” as “doubling and double: both affirmative and questioning, without necessarily being recuperative or politically subversive” (Bacchilega 22). She clarifies her point by stating, “in every case, though, these postmodern transformations do not exploit the fairy tale’s magic simply to make the spell work, but rather to unmake some of its workings,” that “only those rewritings which ‘expose or upset the paradigms of authority inherent in the texts they appropriate’ are ‘disobedient’” (Nancy A. Walker qtd. in Bacchilega 23). Adding humor to the “disobedience” disarms the recalcitrant reader too. The distancing and seduction of storytelling creates a communal space for the audience. In that space, ambiguity is welcomed, and so, therefore, may be the audience members who might otherwise feel alienated by potentially off-putting subject matter. The performative aspects of folklore also create a space for audience members to participate in making the meaning of the tale. Hurston, Morrison, and Ní Dhuibhne particularly rely on this aspect of folklore in their writing. Even Lavin, despite the greater narrative control of her modernist approach, does not spell out her folkloric allusions for readers. As in Morrison’s more postmodern approach, the narrative leaves the reader to recognize the references for him or herself. As the recognition of some of those aspects depends on a shared Irish cultural history, however, it does help to have a guide to the folkloric allusions, as this book will provide for some of Lavin’s references. Readers may or may not consciously recognize the allusions made by any of the four authors, for Hurston purposely leaves some references unlabeled for reasons of indirection. Regardless, attentive audience members can still spot the ordinary moments in their fiction where slippage between this world and the Otherworld may exist. Those ambiguous moments allow the rhetor in question, whether these four or the ancient and nineteenth-century examples noted above, to destabilize an audience member’s assumptions. With a temporary suspension of “real world” expectations, a heightened version of willing suspension of disbelief allows audience members to entertain different ideas about topics that they might not otherwise consider. From beginning to end, whether the example comes from Greek, Jewish, Christian, English, Irish, African, or American cultures, strategies of rhetorical indirection will surface wherever humans struggle with questions about where power resides.

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Terms of indirection in African American, Irish, and postcolonial writing In The Location of Culture, Homi K. Bhabha looks to Morrison’s writing as both a model of “the indirections of art” as well as “the ambiguities enacted in the house of fiction,” and in that work develops the concept of “sly civility.” The phrase, “sly civility,” comes from a quote from a certain Archdeacon Potts. The phrase appears in a sermon by Potts, which Bhabha excerpts, and tells the story of the frustration of a colonizer’s desire to confront, and beat down, a native population’s resistance to adopting his ways. In 1818, Potts complains that if one points out to the Indians “their gross and unworthy misconceptions,” that “they will turn it off with a sly civility perhaps, or with a popular and careless proverb” (Bhabha 99). The sly civility used to “turn off” Potts, to deflect his judgment of the population’s “gross and unworthy misconceptions,” equals resistance. “The natives’ resistance,” takes the colonizer’s passion for “unbounded, unpeopled possession, the problem of truth” and “turns it into the troubled political and psychic question of boundary and territory” (99). This strategy of indirection, even coupled with folklore (as in the reference to “proverbs”), appears repeatedly in the works of Hurston, Morrison, Lavin, and Ní Dhuibhne. Bhabha explores strategies of indirection from within their cultural contexts, but he also compares them cross-culturally on occasion, as demonstrated by his reliance on Morrison’s novel Beloved in The Location of Culture. In Bhabha’s example, he establishes the origin of the phrase “sly civility” in a specific historical context while tying in related examples and points from Freud and Derrida (93, 99). Yet, as Bhabha does at other points in his book, some terms so aptly describe similar rhetorical strategies originating in other times, cultures, and places, that it seems feasible, with care, to apply a term like “sly civility” to outside examples. Care must be taken, for as Yvonne Atkinson writes, “Each culture has its own systems of value and beauty that are defined by language” (Atkinson 24). But when the conditions for expression share parallel qualities, such as other colonial settings to which Bhabha refers, much can be learned from the similarities and differences between strategies. However, terms need to be shared, with distinctions made clear, for coherence to take place. Irish and African American, as will be seen throughout this book, demonstrate their own examples of “sly civility,” as a specific type of rhetorical pose that appears to submit to hegemonic influence only to subtly undermine it. In this strategy, as in others that follow, the rhetor at no time directly contradicts the hegemonic assumption under scrutiny, hence the strategy is indirect.2 To aid further in comparisons across different rhetorical settings, those parallel strategies are grouped here under the umbrella term of “strategies of indirection.” The strategies of indirection described here, sly civility, masking, mimicry, the use of the bizarre or grotesque, and signifying-as-folk-speech, have their presence in 2 Indirection in this use is conscious and used with the intent of elevating, not degrading, characters and readers. This distinguishes this form of the “indirect” from the “indirect” “allegorical fodder” Morrison has observed in the Africanist presence in American literature Although the use she describes may also “render permissible topics that would otherwise be taboo,” the strategies of indirection examined here tend to complicate “taboo” topics that may have been egregiously simplified in prior, more hegemonic depictions. Toni Morrison, “Black Matter(s),” Falling into Theory (Bedford/St.Martin’s, 2000), p. 322.


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literature well established by critics, even the many ties between the strategies and the culture from which the methods originate. But discussions have yet to tie multiple strategies to one communicative goal that appears in countless works throughout the history of human artistic expression—the need to express oneself under censorship, duress, or cultural erasure. Whereas previous important discussions of subaltern expression, such as Homi K. Bhabha’s The Location of Culture and Henry Louis Gates’ The Signifying Monkey, analyze the rhetorical strategies of marginalized communities in their specific cultural contexts, this book intends to widen the conversation to cross-cultural, cross-generational comparison of strategies on a sideby-side basis. In fact, some of the critics already mentioned have appeared to allude to the possibility of broader-based comparison of rhetorical strategies. For this book’s project of branching out the comparisons of strategies of indirection, other critics have also anticipated the potential in such a project. David Lloyd cites “continual transactions between American minority writers and their Irish counterparts,” in addition to the inspiration the Northern Irish Civil Rights Movement of the sixties drew from the stylistic and political approach of the US Civil Rights Movement (Lloyd, Anomalous 8). As part of his own project of engaging in an “archaeology of Irish culture,” Lloyd includes the “reconstitution or rereading of subordinated or occluded cultural forms” (6). Gates, too, admits that “although all theory is text-specific,” prone to fail when used outside the originating culture, “other aspects of theory are more broadly relevant than to one text milieu” (Gates, Figures in Black 58). Amusingly, and close to the heart of this study, he adds, “Free indirect discourse is free indirect discourse, no matter in what literary tradition is appears” (58). Gates sees the “shared concern with theory” as that which will “bridge text milieus,” but something more urgent and closer to home will bind some together more closely even than that: the need to overcome obstacles to expression (58). One influential critical theorist mentioned above whose ideas have already been applied cross-culturally, Mikhail Bakhtin, has long described one vital subset of rhetorical indirection, indirect discourse, as “the representation of another’s word, another’s language in intonational quotation marks: “ ” was known in the most ancient times,” before the appearance of the novel, “a rich world of diverse forms” would “transmit, mimic and represent from various vantage points another’s word, another’s speech and language,” even with the use of “conversational folk language” and “folkloric” genres (Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination 50). In her book on Hurston, Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick: Race and Gender in the Work of Zora Neale Hurston, Susan Edwards Meisenhelder focuses on the centrality of indirection as part of Hurston’s rhetorical strategy for getting into print (Meisenhelder 3). She refers to Hurston’s “strategies of indirection” at times as “indirection” and at other times uses “ambiguity,” “masking,” and “signifying,” and to describe moves Hurston makes as part of her overall “trickster strategy” (5, 12, 13, 33, 190–191, 194). Outside of specifically folkloric speech conventions such as “signifying,” many of the references seem interchangeable with “indirection,” as used to “convey a message” on “volatile issues” to a “divided audience” (190, 4, 194). I will be referring to “masking,” “signifying,” and “sly civility” as subsets of an overall strategy of indirection, however. All strategies of indirection partake stylistically of “ambiguity,” that which thwarts certainty in a reading. Thus, that term

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will accompany general descriptions of indirection only, rather than label a separate type of strategy. Many critics examining individual rhetorical strategies sometimes do so with specific communication goals in mind, but not always explicitly. In this book, the examination of “indirection” allows comparison of similar but slightly different strategies to evade obstacles to expression, which then can be observed operating on topics held in common by authors from two different cultures and two different times. The topics here, questions concerning reproductive issues and certain religious traditions, have not received a great deal of critical attention as “silenced” or overlooked subjects in literature. Nor have the tropes of subaltern expression been applied to them in detail, let alone in comparison across cultures, eras, and subtleties of position. As explained above, the value of cross-platform comparison will allow readers to see the common ground between strategies of subaltern expression. The study of the effort it takes to communicate around social obstacles, a study that can encompass multiple strategies across gender, culture, and time will, perhaps, encourage authors and critics to express themselves in ways not previously considered or encouraged. What allows an author to speak to multiple, culturally polyglot audiences so that the ones she wishes to understand her, will, and the ones she does not wish to understand her, won’t? According to Bakhtin, heteroglossia, a “simultaneity of discourse,” “another’s speech in another’s language,” will “express authorial intentions but in a refracted,” “parodic-travestying” way (Bakhtin 324, 55, 58, 59; Henderson 122). He refers to examples from Roman and medieval “oral tradition” and “comic folk art” to illustrate “parodic-travestying form” that created a “rich world” of “indirect, conditional discourse” Bakhtin 58–9) This heteroglossia frequently appears in marginalized communities. The prevalence of dialect in a community nurtures the existence of heteroglossia. With its attendant practices of folk speech such as sayings, proverbs, jokes, aphorisms, and epithets, dialect allowed an under-the-cover freedom of expression not possible in the master’s or landowner’s version of English. In a famous example cited by Eugene Genovese, a slave preacher praises runaway slaves in front of their owner by calling them “ba-ad niggers” (Genovese 437). “Irish speakers,” Hugh Kenner relates, “who were known to greet landlords with ‘Soft morning, sor,’” would have appreciated the preacher’s skill, as “sor” means “louse” in Irish (Kenner 83). (“Soft,” for that matter, does not mean “pleasant” or “good,” but “wet.”) Those placed in a subaltern position can ensure the survival of their message by eschewing, for the time being, a direct statement for indirection via folklore and humor. Katherine Clay Bassard’s Spiritual Interrogations, in fact, argues on behalf of the rhetorical efficacy of folk speech, what she terms “vernacular,” as a means of indirect challenge. The vernacular, reflected in literature by the depiction of dialect, “records the ‘hidden transcripts’ that mark the site(s) of resistance in a specific cultural sphere” (Bassard, Spiritual 18). The “hidden” quality of vernacular allows resistance. By adding Bakhtin’s “permanent corrective of laughter,” rhetors in such proscribed circumstances may improve the capacity of their audiences to live with an unacceptable situation. Authors employing the “permanent corrective of laughter,” later on, may even improve the capacity of hostile audiences to live with them. The wit inherent in many of the expressions


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described below, sly civility, signifying as folk speech, mimicry, or even the bizarre or grotesque, inevitably bring humor along in their trail. The operation of humor in folk speech, in rhetorical figures, depends on reader recognition as much as strategies of indirection do. Whether readers figure out the allusion tied to an indirect point, or whether they comprehend the punch line of a joke, laughter may come in either case from the pleasure and shock of recognition. Sometimes the punch line and the indirect point become one and the same. Postcolonial terminology may refer to operations like those above as “mimicry,” “masking,” or “sly civility.” Critics influenced by African American literary history may refer also to a “double-voiced” dialogue, influenced by “double consciousness,” as Denise Heinze does in The Dilemma of Double-Consciousness in Toni Morrison’s Novels. Many of the more recent Irish critics will use the postcolonial terminology, too, but they and earlier critics will describe the strategies of writers in similar, though not identical terms that appear in African American criticism. For example, folklorists and critics of African American and Irish cultures may refer to “signifying” and “hidden meanings,” while the cultural contexts vary, as will be seen in an Irish use of signifying cited below (Smitherman 206; Ní Dhuibhne, “International” 1215). In one demonstration of more general, but pivotal terms, and in an interesting echo of the “double-voiced dialogue,” A.A. Kelly quotes V.S. Pritchett’s praise of Mary Lavin’s “double vision,” representative of Irish writing, which is the “‘power to present the surface of life rapidly, but as a covering for something else’” (Kelly 14). Kelly clarifies later on that “Mary Lavin often writes at two levels of significance, one exterior and obvious, one hidden and implied” (24). African American anthropological linguist Claudia Mitchell-Kernan uses similar phrasing to describe how signifying, as an indirect utterance, depends on “implicit content” “potentially obscured by the surface content or function” (Mitchell-Kernan 311, 314). In both the Irish and the African American examples, the descriptions of double-layered messages almost mirror one another. Members from each group are described here using some strategy of indirection to convey meanings not intended for every one. Techniques of indirection, or strategies, have been previously described separately as sly civility, masking, mimicry, signifying, or the use of the grotesque or bizarre, or more. All of these separate strategies may be looked at, and employed, as indirection. The rest of this section compares some of the most commonly cited terms used for strategies of indirection, as used by critics in African American, Irish, and others working in subaltern bodies of literature. The same or similar term, set side by side with its near twin from one side of the Atlantic or the other, will demonstrate these subsets of indirection as well-suited to cross-cultural, crossgenerational comparisons. Early on in African American criticism, W.E.B. Du Bois coins “double-consciousness” in The Souls of Black Folk as a description of a feeling of “two-ness,—an American, a Negro, two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings,” and he ties the doubled cultural condition to doubled expression of “two thoughts” (Du Bois 5). Du Bois’s expression of a volatile subject with a folk-derived image of duality leads to later critical explorations of dualities in subaltern expression. Gates refers to texts produced by this doubling of consciousness and culture as being “double-voiced,” where their literary antecedents come from both Anglo-American

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and African American works of fiction, in addition to their relying on “modes of figuration lifted from black vernacular tradition” (Gates, Signifying xxiii). These later dualities also indicate the presence of points not directly expressed in literature. Maria DiBattista and Cheryl A. Wall both refer to “masks” operating in the multiple layers of Toni Morrison and Nella Larsen respectively, with Morrison including folk references to the tar baby in DiBattista’s examples (DiBattista 95; Wall 138). Yvonne Atkinson combines an analysis of indirection with that of masking when she writes that Black English oral tradition, especially as it appears in Morrison, uses “negative terms with positive meanings as well as contextual meaning” in “a practice of exchanging or masking one linguistic process with another language known as calquing or loan translation” (Atkinson 25). This technique comes up in Hurston texts frequently. As with other figures, the rhetorical use of the mask has been compared across cultures between Irish and African diasporas, especially from the point of view of postcolonial criticism. Elizabeth Butler Cullingford’s point that identification with a group engaged in “its own contemporary struggles” can produce “a politics of imaginative solidarity with the potential for practical action” reflects a concept of creative model seeking (Cullingford 99). Continuing with examples of cross-literary uses of the mask, the Irish critic Declan Kiberd uses Franz Fanon’s concept of the mask. Subaltern peoples have sometimes donned rhetorical masks to enable them to achieve greater freedom, although this should be only as a “transitional” phase before “the masks were set aside to reveal the face beneath” (Kiberd, “On National Culture” 45). Kiberd illustrates how such masking can lead to a freer approach: “For many intellectuals, the act of writing, of imagining oneself in somebody else’s shoes, became a prelude to revolution ... it became necessary for a people [citing Franz Fanon, Oscar Wilde, and Yeats] to wear a mask as a precondition of finally disclosing a face” (44–5). In a more specific postcolonial context, David Lloyd refers to masking in Irish literature in a way that further illuminates the complexity involved when rhetorical strategies involve a metaphorical use of visual obstacle, whether in the form of veil, mask, disguise, or camouflage. In his examination of both colonial and nationalist influences on Irish literature, Lloyd explains how a form of economic censorship could have “psychic effects” (Lloyd, Anomalous 43). In the “acquiescence of the Irish writer in the economy of imperialism,” to get into print even a decade after the founding of the Free State, Irish writers “perpetuate the alien stereotypes of the Irish” to “explain” a supposedly “quaint” people to another people who have been set up as the norm (43). Hurston may have been able to use this pose to smuggle her own ideas into print behind a supposedly “exotic” narrative, but her own use of that type of mask could lead to confusion with those who could not perceive what was going on behind it (Walters 353; Meisenhelder 191, 194–5). Morrison alludes to a similar situation as what Lloyd describes. She speaks of her relief that African American authors no longer had “to explain everything—somebody is going to understand what he’s trying to do, in his terms, not in somebody else’s, but in his” (Stepto 29). Yet later, in 1981, Morrison still saw a need for “masks,” at least as a theme running through African American literature, “theme of the mask is so important in black literature,” one with which she works “heavily” in Tar Baby


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(LeClair 127). She recalls that in the book Drylongso, “which collects the talk of black people,” that “they say almost to a man that you never tell a white person the truth. He doesn’t want to hear it. Their conviction is they are neither seen nor listened to” (127). Lavin, too, receives a designation as a writer with a “mask,” as Kelly writes that “her irony of provocation masks the moralist” (Kelly 111). The note on “provocation” has a mild ring of Ellison’s assertion, “We wear the mask for purposes of aggression as well as for defense; ... motives hidden behind the mask are as numerous as the ambiguities the mask conceals” (Ellison 62). Ellison writes of a strategy used as part of day to day survival, and this does not detract from the function held in common with Lavin’s use, that of the need to conceal. The need for masks as a theme continues, to reflect on historical obstacles to the development of more open expression, as well as a continued use of the mask as mask for what yet remains unsaid. As Hurston’s example and Lloyd’s explanation shows, though, the use of rhetorical masking is not without its risks. The problem is not just the continuation of a false image of Irish or African American people, or a continuation of a stilted author-reader dialogue that comes from hegemonic economic influences forcing subaltern writers to don the mask of a cultural “tour guide.” In the other case here, “what is left in Ireland is not the true identity of the Irish, unmasked and intact, but rather its absence, leaving English culture to fill a cultural void” (Lloyd, Anomalous 43). Lloyd then explores how nationalist literary corrections of a self-image, such that it is no longer “masked” can lead to further complications, chief of which is that whoever decides what is “normal” will inevitably leave out others. Or, as Lloyd quotes Renato Rosaldo, “‘Who isn’t invited to the party?’” (Lloyd, Anomalous 154). Masking as indirection joins other forms of camouflage in expression that can both free and complicate the rhetorical situation for subaltern groups. Homi K. Bhabha shows that mimicry can serve the colonial desire “for a reformed, recognizable Other” and can also threaten colonial influence by mocking “its power to be a model” (Bhabha 86, 88). Mimicry “disrupts its authority,” with a difference that disturbs by being “almost the same, but not quite” (88, 86). This description closely resembles Gates’s point that “black formal repetition always repeats with a difference, a black difference that manifests itself in specific language use” (Gates, Signifying xxii–xxiii). The subterfuge of “taking on the protective coloration of approved, official forms,” cannot be “detected as such, much less punished,” Kiberd writes (Kiberd, “On National Culture” 47). Hiding expression behind mimicry of those in charge, behind masks, enables an “‘answering back’” (47). Hurston features “imitation” or “mimicry” as an “art in itself,” and she ranks it high among her list of “Characteristics” of African American expressive arts, while alluding to its potential powers of indirect criticism (Hurston, “Characteristics of Negro Expression” 830, 838–9; Gates, Signifying 198). Enda Duffy provides an example of how mimicry can operate in fiction, when the fiction works to subvert other powers besides that of the colonialist. James Joyce plays with Irish nationalism in Ulysses by delineating the topic “within a formal architectonics of text within text, discourse within discourse,” employing the “trope of misquotation within misquotation,” that can shock “even as it appears coyly familiar” (Duffy 31). Kiberd notes a similar danger in masking as with mimicry. If taken to an extreme, mimicry leads to a hollowness—there will

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be no one left to disclose if the mimicry becomes one’s own behavior (Kiberd, “On National Culture” 49). In Irish literature, the famous foremother, Maria Edgeworth used her gift of “creative mimicry” of family servant John Langan to voice “scandalous truth” through Castle Rackrent’s “honest” Thady Quirk (Moynahan 22). But even this high-born use of mimicry for indirection derives some of its inspiration from the Irish peasant extension of mimicry into parody. Julian Moynahan surmises that Edgeworth and her family would have had opportunity to observe the Irish estate workers mimic to the point of obvious comic effect the mannerisms of the gentry, “because the Irish peasant has traditionally been a master of such parody” (Moynahan 22). Evelyn Jaffe Schreiber, in Subversive Voices: Eroticizing the Other in William Faulkner and Toni Morrison, similarly joins mimicry to other rhetorical figures of comedy. In this case, mimicry joins parodies, “put-ons,” and the Bakhtinian concept of the carnivalesque as some of the ways that African American resistance appears in the works of Morrison and Faulkner (Schreiber 53, 6). Schreiber ties all these different forms of indirect expression back to Du Bois’s double-consciousness, leading to an “articulation of cultural differences and its subsequent unsettling of the dominant subject status” (7). Susan Corey also leans on Bakhtin in finding the humorous side of indirection. She refers to the “negative, or ‘uncanny,’” grotesque of the “interior condition” and the “positive, or ‘comic,’” grotesque of “the exterior social sphere” as two parts of “a meaning-making tool” in Morrison’s novel Beloved (Corey 33). In addition, Corey asserts that Morrison “follows in the tradition of another master of the grotesque,” the Irish American author Flannery O’Connor (33, 47). Both the African American and the Irish American use the grotesque, especially in the context of folklore, to address political topics, to involve the audience in making meaning, to enable readers to face “moral questions,” and to “push,” in O’Connor’s words, “toward the limits of mystery” (33, 47). To Corey, the grotesque undoes the readers’ complacency and reminds readers of a “regenerative reality behind the surface of everyday life,” a reminder with its roots in folk culture (31–3). If the meaning lies behind the “surface,” it is indirect to be sure. The grotesque might be seen as a close relative to the bizarre, which Walter J. Ong notes aid in the audience’s memory, especially with details that contradict one’s day-to-day expectations (Ong 70). Morrison’s use of the grotesque joins Ní Dhuibhne’s use of the bizarre, then, in indirectly destabilizing reader assumptions of what is “normal” or “acceptable” reality. Most of the above strategies that could be encompassed under the general term “indirection” derive from the literary and folk backgrounds of groups who have been marginalized in the US, but they overlap with descriptions of rhetorical expression from marginalized communities elsewhere in the world. To approach assumptions that tear people apart, indirection often relies on strategies that depend on different ways of manipulating metaphor, as with the case of the grotesque and bizarre. Jeff Mason, discussing rhetorical indirection, writes, “A good metaphor is bursting with suggestions and hints to be taken up and followed by the person who contemplates it” (Mason 118). He clarifies that, “Metaphors conceal their meaning or significance at the same time as they reveal it” and “Metaphors spark thoughts in a number of different directions” (120, 121).


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Where the use of metaphor becomes more complicated, and more exciting, in African American and Irish writing is where the meanings for figures of speech split for different discursive purposes. Loreto Todd, in her exploration of Irish folk speech, refers to A.A. Kelly’s point that Lavin’s reliance on the Irish habit of employing “half-meanings,” perhaps an analogue to Du Bois’s doubled expression of “two thoughts” (Todd 137; Kelly 177; Du Bois 5). Todd continues, “It is perhaps easier to be aware of ‘half-meanings’ and ‘double entendres’ when a writer can select from two linguistic traditions as well as from the continuum that stretches between them” (Todd 137). Geneva Smitherman’s discussion of signifying and other African American folk-speech practices echoes Todd’s point. The shifts of meaning one finds in African American folk speech, which run throughout Hurston and Morrison, exploit “the unexpected, using quick verbal surprises and humor,” as seen in signifying as a folk practice (Smitherman, Black Talk 206). Smitherman uses indirection in conjunction with signifying as synonymous with “circumlocution” (Smitherman, Talkin and Testifying 94, 97–9). Todd and Kelly’s “half-meanings” and Smitherman’s “signifying” reappear throughout both bodies of literature in the service of expanding expression for those who cannot always rely on direct statement. Along another vein, Henry Louis Gates’s treatment of “signifying,” in western rhetorical usage, as the semiotic term derived from “the meaning that a term conveys, or is intended to convey,” and “Signifyin(g),” in African American rhetorical usage, as a figure out of a “double-voiced” “black tradition,” alerts readers to a critical apparatus always already at play in the African American literary tradition (Gates, Signifying 46, xxv). In fact, he credits Hurston with being the “first scholar to have defined the trope of Signifyin(g),” as well as the first one to “represent the ritual itself” (196). As he defines “black criticism” “with—and against—other theoretical activities,” Gates applies the new-old rhetorical figures to older and newer African American texts and reveals intricacies overlooked in previous critical eras (xxiv). Just as Gates refers to the speech act of “Signifyin(g)” as a “trope in which are subsumed several other rhetorical tropes, ... all of which are used in the ritual of Signifyin(g),” indirection may be used to refer to any of what Gates describes as similar “rhetorical practice that is not engaged in the game of information-giving” (52). If Gates describes Signification, in one sense, “as the term for black rhetoric, the obscuring of apparent meaning,” then Folk Women and Indirection offers “strategies of indirection” as the term to refer to similar occurrences of the obscuring of meaning in works from multiple cultural contexts (53). However, Gates “Signifyin(g)” stands for something larger than its previous definition as a speech act, often too narrowly defined as “ritual insult” alone. He favors the wider definition given by Claudia Mitchell-Kernan for discussing theoretical implications of it as “figuration,” with verbal dueling as only one part of a greater rhetorical approach (79, 80, 81; Mitchell-Kernan 311, 313). Signifyin(g) is a rhetorical mode of indirection, an “obscuring of apparent meaning” (Gates, Signifying 53). Gates has based his use of the term on Mitchell-Kernan’s description of it as “a way of encoding messages or meanings which involves in most cases an element of indirection,” an “alternative message form,” which, in artistic application, may appear “embedded in a variety of discourse,” not only speech acts (53, 80;

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Mitchell-Kernan 311). The significance of Gates’s choice among the definitions of Abrahams, Smitherman, and Mitchell-Kernan, in order of breadth of application beyond ritualized insult games, is that Gates sees the term as a portal to explaining a cohesive literary theory based upon African American oral tradition. Gates traces the roots of his rhetorical theory all the way back to “rhetorical principles” inspired by the origin myths of Esu in Africa and tales of Signifying Monkey in the New World (Gates, Signifying 20).3 While Gates has established Signifyin(g) as the basis for a culturally specific theory, which he explicitly describes as a mode of indirection, I will defer at this time the question of whether a cultural parallel to Signifyin(g), in Gates’s use of the term, exists in Hiberno-English or Irish. It may be possible to apply further afield this term that describes the artful obscuring of meaning. Other cultures also use strategies of indirection to obscure meaning with innuendo, to talk around a subject, to employ trickery, to make fun of a person or situation, or to encode messages for some interlocutors to receive but not others, some of the functions described by Roger Abrahams that Gates sets aside for Signifyin(g) (75, 80). For example, Loreto Todd lists among the characteristics of Irish oral tradition: (1) “the love of hyperbole;” (2) “the tendency to give apt nicknames;” (3) “the uncomplimentary description that takes time to decipher;” (4) “the proverbial wisdom that allows one to comment on any occurrence;” (5) “the love of polysyllabic vocabulary that can result in malapropism or punning;” (6) “the passing down from one generations to the next of traditional verse” (Todd 53–5). In other parallel developments, Hurston has been observed employing an analogue of “hyperbole,” “the will to adorn” (Hurston, “Characteristics of Negro Expression” 831, 833; Meisenhelder 20; Walters 353). Both Hurston and Morrison, besides other African American authors, have been observed as well using creative traditions of nicknaming (sometimes based on puns), proverb use, and oral arts treasured over generations (Meisenhelder 20; Walters 353; Hurston, Mules and Men 230; Mobley 103; Fabre 109; Stepto 25; Benston 87, 103–4; Prahlad “African American Traditions” 198). Mitchell-Kernan cites clever punning as a similarly well-regarded skill parallel to clever signifying (Mitchell-Kernan 318). But all of these details, which folklorists confirm exist in many cultures, pale next to Todd’s item number four: “the uncomplimentary description that takes time to decipher,” which bears a startling resemblance to signifying as ritualized insult, especially in its most obscured form. The similarities show in particular when Mitchell-Kernan when she notes that signifying can be expressed as “complimentary remarks” “delivered in a left-handed fashion” (314). The Irish oral tradition of the indirect “uncomplimentary description” parallels the sophistication of African American signifying-as-folkspeech, where the one being signified upon may not know he or she is being made a fool of. Signifying in this form often gave Hurston an advantage over her editor and patrons. Similarly, Begoña Aretxaga gives an account of Irish women prisoners “signifying” to get the better of those who control them. While not identical in 3 As early as 1973, Alan Dundes, in Mother Wit from the Laughing Barrel, posited as “likely” that signifying originated in “African rhetoric” (University Press of Mississippi, 1990), p. 310.


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contextual meaning or execution, a resemblance appears between the two uses of “signifying.” Granted, it would be impossible to find an analogous use for one of the assigned meanings, the Monkey as “signifier” and the Lion as “signified,” as based on African folklore, as there are neither monkeys nor lions in North Atlantic climes (Gates, Signifying 75). Although Gates uses indirection with an almost proprietary claim in its intimate connection to Signifyin(g), I choose to use “indirection” to stand in for a more culturally inclusive term with which one can refer to something resembling Gates’s signification, only with reference to analogous strategies that may appear across multiple cultures. The broader applicability of the term “indirection” has been anticipated by Claudia Mitchell-Kernan’s linguistic definition of indirection as a defining characteristic of signifying: Indirection means here that the correct semantic ... [content] of the utterance cannot be arrived at by a consideration of the dictionary meaning of the lexical items involved and the syntactic rules for their combination alone ... Meaning conveyed is not apparent meaning. Apparent meaning serves as a key which directs hearers to some shared knowledge, attitudes, and values or signals that reference must be processed metaphorically. The words spoken may actually refer to this shared knowledge by contradicting it or by giving what is known to be an impossible explanation of some obvious fact. The indirection, then, depends for its decoding upon shared knowledge of the participants ... (MitchellKernan 313, 325)

Indirect messages have the advantage, in their simultaneously implicit and explicit content, of allowing the persons involved to interpret them in “such a way that the parties have the opportunity of avoiding a real confrontation,” which especially suits indirection to situations involving taboos or censorship (318, 313). If indirection is an element that accompanies most signifying in her estimation, then all such rhetorical strategies that share that element, whether speech act, essay, or visual work, have the potential to be compared according to how they display that one aspect. Indirection, as a shared rhetorical element, then, allows us to group together those rhetorical strategies that rely on it to carry meaning to some interlocutors but not to others. Atkinson adds a caveat to the dialogue on Signifyin (her preferred designation for the folk-speech performance), stating that one cannot discuss “Signifyin” separately from its application in put-down humor or its “reaffirmation of communal identity,” which she sees Morrison as applying in the context of community interrelatedness, especially in The Bluest Eye (Atkinson 16, 17). At the same time, it “is an act of delineation; it is didactic and inclusive;” it is also capable of designating “otherness” (17). Even with the more specific interpretation that Atkinson gives it, the multilayered qualities of signifyin(g) as a verbal folk art mark it as an ideal strategy of indirection. For Atkinson, signifying, like the use of “Witness/Testify” and “Call/ Response” folkloric communications, “uses the act of communication as a metaphor for the unity expressed in the traditional African world view” (23). However, the capacities of these rhetorical strategies of expression to bring difficult truths to ears and eyes that may not accept them directly, such as those implied by “put-downs,”

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make them valuable in the face of obstacles to expression, and therefore valuable as strategies of indirection. Yet Folk Women and Indirection is not the first work to posit a form of signifying taking place in Irish culture. Signifying as a strategy, as a critical term to describe an overall approach to rhetorical indirection, appears in Begoña Aretxaga’s ethnographic study of women engaging in activism in Northern Ireland, Shattering Silence. While not a book exclusively treating postcolonial theory or literature, her observations reflect on the strategies of indirection used by women in colonial settings, whether taking the form of action in the streets and prisons, or in written form. “Signifying practices,” as carried out by Irish nationalist women, “disrupt dominant representations” (Aretxaga 20). Her description of the operation of signifying echoes Mitchell-Kernan’s definition of indirection: “Such practices signify precisely because they are deployed within a shared universe of meaning, but, in so doing they are capable of provoking a sliding of signifiers and thereby triggering new forms of representation and knowledge” (Aretxaga 20; Mitchell-Kernan 313, 325). Aretxaga’s “shared universe of meaning” sounds remarkably like Mitchell-Kernan’s “shared knowledge,” on which Gates draws for his interpretation of Signifyin(g). Aretxaga’s reliance on signifying as a more broadly theoretical term, going past figures of speech, appears when she states that, “a second form of transgression can be triggered by the transgression of taboo and the eruption of a feminine experience that is suppressed in language ...” (Aretxaga 20). Aretxaga examines mostly actions that speak indirectly of suppressed subjects, while Folk Women and Indirection will examine fiction that writes indirectly of suppressed subjects. Her ethnography does rely, in part, on the structure of storytelling, and she asserts that that she was “first attuned to the subtleties of politics through the murmur of stories and the telling silences of stories untold,” crediting the “well-deserved” Irish reputation for storytelling for shaping her book (21). Seemingly in concert with Gates’s description of “motivated Signifyin(g),” Aretxaga’s signifying “functions to redress an imbalance of power, to clear a space, rhetorically” (Gates, Signifying 124). While Aretxaga’s use of the term signifying relies on indirection, she does not ground the term in as specific a cultural context as Atkinson, Gates, Mitchell-Kernan, Smitherman, or Abrahams do. All we’re missing is the Monkey. (I would refer readers to an uproarious account of “ducks” and “hens” in Aretxaga’s book. Those animals serve the purpose of political subversion in a narrower context, of course, than Gates’s semi-divine simian) (Aretxaga 67–9). Aretxaga emphasizes the alternative feminist narratives of activism that have been overlooked in either more recognized feminist or nationalist narratives of activism, and she does so by extending a strategy of indirection, signifying, into the context of another culture. The rhetorical figures of the grotesque (or bizarre), mimicry, and masking appear in parallel strategies of indirection across two cultures here, as well. Sly civility will demonstrate its usefulness as a term to describe a form of subterfuge that appears most often when subject peoples try to communicate indirectly, as examples from the authors here will demonstrate. The specifics of each cultural context do need to be identified by critics. However, in order to learn from each other, to make coherent comparisons, we need to apply common terms to rhetorical strategies that can carry cross-cultural and


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cross-generational similarities. Again, all of the terms discussed above come into play whenever a rhetor cannot discuss a topic openly or directly. Any of the figures listed above may appear individually or in concert, throughout a creative work, in that work’s depiction of a folk-woman character. In what she thinks, says, does, or even in the ways in which the author describes her, the folk woman’s characterization itself may “embody” a combination of multiple strategies of indirection. As that “embodiment,” when she speaks in proverbs, slyly upbraids another character, engages in signifying in any form, applies a poultice, bakes an obscure animal into a pie, or lives out any folk-tale plot or motif, the character can act out an endless variety of folk expressions and figures of speech. By using the same strategies of indirection noted individually above, the character may mislead the reader on behalf of her creator, acting as a mask for the author’s rhetorical goals. Every reference, look, saying, action, and the like can add up to a book-length authorial mask. If so, then one could look at the Otherworld and wise-women characters described in this book as rhetorical constructions in themselves. Whether referring to one strategy or folk form or another, the entire discussion of folk-women characters here, as depicted by Hurston, Lavin, Morrison, and Ní Dhuibhne, will encompass indirection. Historical parallels To see indirection in action in literature, one should look at examples produced in a setting with more than one form of suppression, or blocked expression, in the writer’s milieu. Hurston, Lavin, Morrison, and Ní Dhuibhne, as women coming from current or formerly subaltern cultures, have all experienced multiple forms of suppression. Therefore, the reason for comparing these specific authors from these two cultural groups stems from some unique historical parallels. In looking at these parallels, one will notice a high number of rhetorical conditions in common. These parallels result in a unique mixture of strategies that evolved in answer to two different forms of Anglo-Saxon hegemony, one in Europe and one in the United States. As African American and Irish authors over the centuries have written to counteract two different systems of influence, living and writing conditions have varied between African American and Irish peoples. In spite of this variance, why these writers’ strategies hold so many aspects in common may have to do with how African Americans and Irish have lived, at different times, and—I must stress—in different ways, under some form of domination. As background for examining writers from these different cultures, C.L. Innes, with The Devil’s Own Mirror: The Irishman and the African in Modern Literature (1990), and Tracy Mishkin, with The Harlem and Irish Renaissances (1998), have laid some of the groundwork for stylistic comparisons between African American and Irish literature. Innes compares the influences of Irish and Black nationalism on the bodies of literature affected by those movements (Innes, Devil’s Own 5). Mishkin reviews some similarities between the histories of the African Americans and the Irish: loss of culture and self-determination by slavery for one and by foreign occupation for the other. She compares, specifically, the periods in the twentieth century in which their literatures each flowered and came into greater prominence in

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their countries. A few artists, in fact, on either side of the Atlantic drew inspiration at times from the progress of the group on the other side. Because each woman addressed here comes from a culture that has faced long periods of political and social oppression, as well as official and unofficial censorship, the comparison of their different situations yields insight as to how authors can usher their visions into print even when they face obstacles to expression. Folkloric expression in language appears more frequently among those groups whose culture does not receive widespread acceptance in the dominant discourse of the larger society. Where cultural identity survives under duress, the need to preserve a group’s identity spurs reliance on folklore as a way to continue the subaltern culture in the most direct way, as passed from person to person. Therefore, while other groups of writers may hold possibilities for fruitful comparisons with regard to folklore and indirection, there are parallel rhetorical conditions between African American and Irish writers that go beyond their tandem “renaissance” periods. To see indirection in action, one needs to find a juncture of more than one set of conditions. Although critics have found excellent grounds for comparisons among authors who share one suppressed mode of sexual expression, to see rhetorical indirection as operating in literature regardless of the group in question, one needs to examine more than one example of suppressed subject matter. Female writers make good subjects of study for indirection in the face of censorship because, historically, they have had so many more opportunities than many men, so to speak, to try to express themselves under adverse conditions. Every time and place seems to have some group of men free to take the podium at any time. Not every time and place seems to have a group of women allowed to do the same. As Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak notes, “If, in the context of colonial production, the subaltern has no history and cannot speak, the subaltern as female is even more deeply in shadow ...” (Spivak 28). By observing two different groups of women, then, who not only write in the same language, but who also write in the language of a group that has dominated their own, the writing will show traces a disregarded culture, traces of a disregarded manner of speech, and evidence of issues disregarded by the dominant society. Remnants of each group’s original tongue, part and parcel along with flourishing dialects such as Black English and Hiberno-English, appear in these works, sometimes in defiance of prevalent expectations for literature at that time. Furthermore, comparisons will lose little in translation here, as the works in question and much of the oral traditions of the two groups have been preserved in the same language as this study, English. Two significant parts of those disregarded cultures, folklore and religious beliefs and practices, create common ground as well as common tactics. African American folklore has been collected from the earliest days of the discipline in America, and Irish folklorists built one of the earliest, largest bodies of collected lore in history. Biblical and related forms of Christian lore take up an unusual amount of space in the folk collections of both peoples, too, religious lore that has persisted through time despite being disregarded as “primitive” by Anglo and European American societies. Add to this the limits on communication for these women on both sides of the Atlantic and the advantages of comparing these works becomes apparent. By lining


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up authors from two groups related only by their operating in the same second language, related Anglo second cultures, and similar second-class conditions of their women, especially while under the sway of resurgent nationalisms, the prevalence of strategies of indirection stand out as, in fact, strategies. With so many variables accounted for already, the authors’ strategies of indirection appear to us not simply as part of a shared literary tradition or as a side effect of translation into English. They appear as a form of stealth communication that might operate in any setting, any language, and perhaps any culture that finds itself under duress. Loss of rights coinciding with suppression of language and culture Each group found itself living under a foreign law that deprived them, in varying degrees over time, of what many societies consider the most basic of human rights, in addition to depriving them of some of the basics of their local, familial, and individual identities: language and many of the outlets for their traditional arts (Mishkin 27; Atkinson 13). For the Irish, the Penal Laws (1691–1778) were designed to “keep Catholics in a state of permanent subjection,” and the institution of slavery took that concept to a further extreme for African Americans (Moody and Martin 176; Mishkin 26–7). Voting, marrying outside one’s group, holding political office, owning guns or good horses, or seeking positions as lawyers or soldiers were forbidden under the Penal Laws, echoing the more severe limitations enacted upon African American slaves: “The nearly four million American slaves enumerated in the 1860 census had no right to be educated, own property, marry, maintain a family, vote, or choose an occupation. It was a crime to give a slave a Bible, but not to rape one” (27–8). Despite the disadvantages Irish women had under English rule, under the rule of slavery, the earliest African American women writers had to face additional obstacles to survival as well as to expression. The abolition movement provided some of the early writers with an urgent message and platform, upon which their lives might have depended, as some of the abolitionists were wanted individuals. Thus, the urgent voice of early African American women writers dates from the abolition movement, and even earlier with Phillis Wheatley. As Beverly Guy-Sheftall states, the horrific circumstances of slavery endured by African women since 1619 stirred their “yearnings for freedom and rebellious spirit” well before the abolition movement (Takaki 7, 53; Guy-Sheftall 2). The conditions of their lives would seem antithetical to expression: “They resisted beatings, involuntary breeding, sexual exploitation by white masters, family separation, debilitating work schedules, bad living conditions, and even bringing into the world children who would be slaves” (2). Sexual and political controls will strike those most severely who cannot claim “official” ownership of their minds, bodies, or souls. One loss resulting from domination that both groups shared almost equally was the disruption of the use of their native languages, a linchpin of culture. The slave trade disrupted the cultures of the displaced Africans, as individuals speaking a common language were often separated when taken, transported, or sold, leaving only a limited possibility for maintaining one’s native tongue (Innes, Devil’s Own 14; Mishkin 26). For the Irish, the Restoration period saw the fading of spoken Irish, “far

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more quickly than the native languages of Scotland, Wales or Brittany,” according to R.F. Foster, from “disruption, penetration, settlement and commercialization, rather than a result of government policy” (Foster 122). Loreto Todd sums up four primary obstacles to expression in Irish as the onset of Cromwellian settlements in the seventeenth century, with their attendant upheaval and confiscation of land, the reduction of the population to subsistence level by the Penal Laws in the eighteenth century, the introduction of English-only National Schools in 1831, and finally, the famine of 1846–49 (Todd 14). In business transactions, English dominated as the common language, and revealingly, “Béarla, the Irish word for the English language, originally meant something more like ‘technical jargon’” (Foster 122). Troubled social conditions between the seventeenth and early twentieth centuries caused literacy in the language to evaporate, and hence a population illiterate in Irish could provide no audience for written work (Todd 122). African Americans at that time experienced high illiteracy rates, as well, abating with the post-Civil War increase in school construction for that community. Written Irish did not reappear for large groups of readers until the language revival in 1893, while creative works in English by African Americans began to appear in greater numbers through the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (122). Whether it was language or cultural practices, both groups were forced to “bury” their cultures for long periods, but as C.L. Innes differentiates, Africans experienced this cultural shock at a greater degree of severity (Innes, Devil’s Own 14). Both groups were thrust by economic or physical forces into a new language, and most were prevented from obtaining any advanced education in it. Before the inception of the National Schools, the Irish carried out furtive lessons in hedge schools to maintain remnants of their tongue and written culture. African Americans, for their own part, often had to take their lives in their hands to learn how to read English. This, along with other barriers thrown up by the dominant cultures, initially hindered the two groups from competing in the English and American literary worlds in any significant number. When one must neglect the maintenance of one’s cultural tradition and native tongue for survival, economic in the Irish case and, more often than not, immediate life-or-death survival in the case of African Americans, one’s literature will not join the larger marketplace of ideas at the same point as that of the dominant culture. Publishing, as Brian Gallagher writes, “remained largely beyond the control of both Irish and African-American writers” (Gallagher 165). Aside from music, dance, and aspects of material culture, only folklore–only orally transmitted traditions could survive the transition, and even then, many items altered in the translation to English. Yvonne Atkinson affirms that language provided the new “canvas and clay” for Africans to express themselves artistically when their previous “tools” were lost across the Atlantic and when the new setting provided so little in the way of available media (Atkinson 13). In a similar spirit, linguist Loreto Todd describes the Irish “love of wordplay and their delight in patterning at all levels of language” that continues from the earliest records of the filí or poets, through invasions and famines, to today’s Irish writers working in Irish and English (Todd 117, 122, 85). Like the works of Geneva Smitherman and other African American scholars, the accomplishment of Loreto Todd’s The Language of Irish Literature lies in her tracing, via chronology


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and genre, how folklorically and linguistically unique aspects of spoken Irish have survived in print to this day.

Obstacles to expression for African American and Irish women writers Understanding the internal and external forces of censorship during those centuries for the African Americans and the Irish helps one to understand the necessity for strategies of indirection. When a dominant group who controls the institutions of education and publishing persists in viewing a subaltern group through the limitations of stereotype, expression will become limited. C.L. Innes, in The Devil’s Own Mirror: The Irishman and the African in Modern Literature, presents the “two tendencies” of stereotypes applied to African Americans that Morrison has noted, “the clown or the brute, the child or the animal,” have a nearmatch in the “dehumanized image of the Irish” (Innes, Devil’s Own 10–11). Quoting a 1836 letter from Benjamin Disraeli to The Times, the prime minister’s image of the Irish as “wild, reckless, indolent,” “superstitious,” and Edmund Spenser’s description of the Irish as “turbulent, semi-nomadic, treacherous, idle, dirty” and “belligerent,” set the Irish as similarly “Other” as the African Americans when compared by these Englishmen to Anglo Saxons (11). Even at their least offensive, the stereotypes in common between the African Americans and the Irish allude to the same above/below division of qualities that Morrison summarizes in her “angels” and “monsters”: an “emphasis on ‘soul’ in African peoples” parallel to “the insistence on ‘emotional warmth’ and spirituality as a mark of the true Celt” (5). Sterling Brown, in citing a passage from a play about the Irish, notes that readers might assume the writer to be discussing “the Negro”: “‘A strange people!—merry ‘mid their misery—laughing through their tears ...’” (12). But the bulk of Innes’s argument, as well as that of L. Perry Curtis, Jr., is that the dominant social class in each instance tended to emphasize both the Irish and those of African descent as “brutish, apelike,” wide-mouthed with thick lips, and with non-Anglo noses: either snub for the Irish or “flattened” for either African or Irish (12, 13; Curtis 154, 174, 195). The “child/brute” binary, as applied toward both African American and Irish populations, affected what authors from those groups could get into print. The editorial censorship that Lady Gregory and Jessie Fauset faced when trying to write against images pushed at them of African Americans and Irish as child-like and simple resembles the type of editorial pressures Hurston faced (Mishkin 32). Lady Gregory took welljustified offense when her London publisher asked her to rewrite her interpretation of the ancient sagas, Cuchulain of Muirthemne, at a more “juvenile” level, as evidently did Jessie Fauset when a publisher rejected her first novel There Is Confusion for its sophisticated, middle-class African American characters (32). Later on, in her essay from 1950, “What White Publishers Won’t Print,” Hurston craves a “realistic story around a Negro insurance official, dentist, general practitioner, undertaker and the like,” and points out that “the average, struggling, non-morbid Negro is the best-kept secret in America” (Hurston, “What” 954). Pressures internal to each group, however, also affected the writing of these movements and later. Hurston may have been among the first African American

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writers to have no qualms about the beauty and value of writing in dialect, yet shame and hesitation toward the Irish language, Hiberno-English, and African American dialects dogged many African American and Irish artists during these periods (Mishkin 47). Such shame affected the efforts of both Hurston and even some among the Irish Renaissance. As shown by the uproar at the Abbey Theatre over Synge’s Playboy of the Western World, popular audiences in both Dublin and Harlem could be slow, or antagonistic, in their reception of the “‘frank realisms of the younger school,’” as Alain Locke once put it (17). Furthermore, representatives of the artistic elite, like Alain Locke and Richard Wright, didn’t view the concerns of African American women as sufficiently “political.” This only meant that women writers had to face more difficulties having their work seen as “serious” than the men would have, at least in their own circles. Thus, despite the later impression of these aesthetic movements as successful, writers for both groups faced censorious reactions among the English and Anglo-American publishers, among their own audiences, and among themselves. When the post World War I migration north fed the expansion of Harlem, and when the Harlem Renaissance gathered steam, the nature of the obstacles to women’s writing gained certain subtleties. While the nineteenth-century obstacles of potential capture, rape, and abrupt silencing by death by white men had faded somewhat, more subtle silencing took place. African American women still worked for the most part in domestic service, as they had throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but more women began to receive college educations (Stavney 550). However, as Anne Stavney writes, African American women in the time of the Harlem Renaissance had been encouraged to reach for more limited career goals than African American men. African American cultural leaders had adapted the elevated Anglo Victorian “notion of womanhood” towards the goal of undermining racist images sexually degrading to African American women. These leaders, often male, promoted an image of Black female virtue (537, 551). The influence of what Claudia Tate labels as the ideal of the “‘true black woman’” “constructed the black female subject as nonsexual, devoted, demure,” and required women to become “diligent, modest, and attentive” (537, 551). Many women may have interpreted this ideal as bringing “respect, relief from menial labor” and interpreted an image of African American women as “morally and sexually pure human beings” as bringing relief after the racist images of sexual perversion promulgated by whites (537–8). But benefits for some became limitations for others, for the emphasis on mothers uplifting their people left little room for other life plans. Women were expected to take on “mothering” roles to uplift the race, and if it wasn’t at home, it could be “in a schoolroom, or library, or hospital,” supposedly to be kept “‘safe’” from “compromising or dangerous influences” (551). As Stavney points out, boundaries in the form of permissible employment “also kept her out of the geographical and discursive space claimed by urban black men. She was neither threatened nor threatening” (551). By keeping women out of the “discursive space,” the male pioneers of the Harlem Renaissance inadvertently censored those who would have been female pioneers. This policy of encouraging women to keep out of the discursive space meant that African American women writers who did not abide by what Marc C. Conner calls


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the “blueprint of constraint” (in reference to Richard Wright’s “Blueprint for Negro Writing” of 1937) would be denounced as “irrelevant,” or worse (Conner xvii). In an early example of supposed “irrelevance,” Barbara Johnson cites Richard Wright’s accusation that Hurston’s work contains “no message, no theme, no thought” (Johnson 53). Oddly enough, a similar hush fell over Irish women writers in 1937, following the establishment of Ireland as an entity separate from Britain. For many Irish women after the early twenties, after the flowering of the Revival, the dominant culture merely changed hands. Winning the war and winning the vote became bittersweet achievements for most women’s rights activists, as the new government, influenced by Eamon de Valera in various positions of power from 1919 to 1973, soon set up legal barriers to restrict women to the home. As Taoiseach, the executive head of government, de Valera oversaw the creation of the constitution for the twenty-six county state. The 1937 Constitution featured language in Articles 40, 41, and 45 that effectively legislated that women would be confined to homemaking and raising children (Foster 546). Article 40 withdrew the phrase “without distinction of sex” from the part that declared all citizens to “be held equal before the law.” Article 45 states that “citizens shall not be forced by economic necessity to enter vocations unsuited to their sex, age, or strength,” a line that was used to simultaneously support welfare measures and to close many forms of employment to women. Article 41, however, was the most blatant: “1. In particular the State recognizes by her life within the home, woman gives to the State a support without which the common good cannot be achieved. 2. The State shall therefore, endeavour to ensure that mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home.” Out of this came the “marriage bar,” which forced women in many fields to resign from their jobs upon marrying, and it was not retracted until 1973 (P. O’Connor 101). Effects from legislation from 1924 to 1937 that became rallying points for many feminists included: no legal contraceptives, no financial aid to unmarried mothers, no legal aid, no exclusion of abusive husbands from the home, and restrictions on women serving on juries or taking Civil Service examinations (Scannell 73–5). By the mid-twentieth century, Edna O’Brien’s memoir Mother Ireland reports a thin intellectual landscape for hungry young female minds: images of patriotism and romantic fantasy, worlds that “did not meet” the farm chores, cows, fields, bogs, food gone cold, and long sermons of her daily life (E. O’Brien 1587–8). “Reality was a dull second,” she writes, “And sex the forbidden fruit was the glass coach in which to do a flit” (1588). “Forbidden” was the operative word here. One of the differences between African American women writers and Irish women writers in trying to express themselves in print was the difference between a societal censorship that forbade access to economic stability, education, and publishing opportunities (experienced by both African American and Irish women writers) and a legislated censorship that seemingly covered every facet of life. In 1929, the Irish Censorship of Publications Act defined the word “indecent” as that which would “suggest or incite to sexual immorality, or in any other way to corrupt or deprave” (Howes 929). The concept of decency revolved around the idea of the “family circle” standard, “that any book that could not be read aloud in the home to all members of the family should be

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banned” (Howes, footnote 980). Although books were only to be banned if they were in “general tendency indecent or obscene,” many books were banned over only a line or two of text (929). As Zora Neale Hurston points out in “What White Publishers Won’t Print,” censorship was alive and well in the United States, too, only not in as clear a legislated form. As Marjorie Howes states, “Nearly all western nations had some form of censorship at this time, but the severity of Ireland’s censorship in practice and the fact that so many contemporary Irish writers were banned made censorship loom especially large in the Irish imagination, if not in the imagination of the population as a whole” (929). In 1948, the censorship law allowed for a board of appeals, and liberalization of the law took place again in 1967, when banning was limited to twelve years, then freeing “thousands” of books from the ban (929). However, the Censorship of Publications Board still exists, though its influence dwindled by the turn of the millennium. As recently as the early 1990s it banned pornography, materials advocating abortion, and, without explicitly stating so, materials addressing homosexuality (Ireland; Carlson 2). Government publications continue to state that materials that give “an unduly large proportion of space to matters relating to crime” may come under censorship (Ireland; “Censorship of Publications in Ireland”). In 1995, with the Abortion Information Act, health professionals were allowed to discuss abortion in the context of counseling women regarding crisis pregnancies (Maguire 355). Some Irish writers who have been banned in the twentieth century have not only experienced loss of income, but also have been harassed, have had their families attacked, and have even felt forced to leave the country (Carlson 2). Julia Carlson sees one of the worst effects of censorship as how it undermines the influence of writers on the community and brings about a subsequent alienation between writers and society (2). To protest this situation was to risk being victimized by the social fervor for purity in the thirties through the fifties (11). One of the most severe effects of official censorship was the internal censorship it created in many writers, as well as censorship driven by economic means. Authors interviewed for Banned in Ireland often mention such occasions. John Broderick recalls that “very often a man will write something which his wife mightn’t approve of or the other way around” (44). Ann Owens Weekes explains that the economic pressure came from “institutions and businesses dependent on public support,” that the Censorship Board was so successful, economic pressure brought about the self-censorship of those carrying or supporting books under suspicion (Weekes, “Trackless” 136). Providing a glimpse of how internalized censorship, as an effect of shaming, may work on some writers, Elizabeth Bowen describes the internal pressure of writing as she saw it in 1950: “He [the writer] cannot free himself from the hereditary influences without the sense of outraging, injuring and betraying them—virtually, it appears to him, he must cease to honor his father and mother” (E. Bowen 1099). Kate O’Brien’s novel, The Land of Spices (1941), was banned for one line: “She saw Etienne and her father, in the embrace of love” (K. O’Brien 1044). A testament to the effect of indirection in writing, Mary Lavin “was one of the few leading Irish writers whose work was never banned by the Censorship Board,” primarily because Lavin’s criticism of society was, as A.A. Kelly states, “veiled in irony” (Kelly 181).


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The poet Eavan Boland managed to stay in Ireland as well as avoid being banned, but there was a pressure in the culture, separate but related to the censorship, which drove her, like Kate O’Brien, toward strategies of indirection. She discovered in her youth that “a woman’s life was not honored” the way a male poet’s life was (Boland, Object x). “Yet,” she writes in her LIP pamphlet, “I still wished to enter that tradition; although I knew my angle of entry must be oblique” (Boland, “A Kind of Scar” 24). The need for such indirection extends, according to Boland in 1982, when “going up against two really formidable orthodoxies”: “One was the romantic orthodoxy that you didn’t write about this because it wasn’t that important, and the other was the admirable feminist—or separatist—orthodoxy that would have argued that I was writing about oppressive conventions and thereby exalting them” (Mahoney 269). Boland tells of a poetic tradition that was not supposed to include her. In spite of that obstacle, and ones like elsewhere, African American and Irish women writers have sought and found their own voices. Rediscovered gardens As the works of Eavan Boland, Christina Hunt Mahoney, Ann Owens Weekes, Julia Carlson, and Marjorie Howes demonstrate, feminist critics in Ireland have been on their own project of recovery. The presence of the Anglo-Irish provided Ireland with a source of educated upper-class women writers earlier there than developed in an African American free and middle class. Being present in the land of their and their ancestors’ birth, though often disinherited from it, provided advantages to Gaelic-Irish women writers that were denied to early African American writers like Phillis Wheatley. Although denied the same access to education as their Anglo-Irish peers, Gaelic-Irish women were able to carry forward their oral traditions with less disruption than the early African American women. But social and political pressures over time, especially during the period of official censorship in the twentieth century, force literary critics to dig as deeply as African American critics have needed to, in order to find the works of silenced women. Prior to the recent explosion of critical and creative responses to racism, sexism, and exclusionary forms of feminism, though, the majority of women, as Alice Walker surmises in In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, had to seek non-written modes of expression to keep the “creativity of the black woman alive” (Walker 234). Sewing, quilting, canning, laboring in the fields, singing in church, and urgent storytelling, the ways Walker lists, are responses to a situation where “the freedom to paint, to sculpt, to expand the mind with action did not exist,” “when for most of the years black people have been in America, it was a punishable crime for a black person to read or write” (238, 234, 240). Some of the expressive forms Walker lists fall under the category of folk practices, food lore, and folkloric material culture. Walker ponders, “How they did it—those millions of black women who were not Phillis Wheatley, or Lucy Terry or Frances Harper or Zora Neale Hurston or Nella Larsen or Bessie Smith; or Elizabeth Catlett, or Katherine Dunham, either,” and she finds her answer by examining her own mother’s life (238). Walker reminds us that the freedoms many take for granted now—the right to vote, read, write, work outside of menial

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labor, become educated, become published, lead departments—were prepared for by women who had to find highly indirect means of expression. When one cannot speak freely, how does one speak? Walker answers that question by uncovering marginalized forms of art and expression. When the marketplace of ideas is closed to you and your kind, you take it “outside,” literally, in her mother’s case. When the verbal and written venues open up some, but not a lot, how do one’s strategies change? The early abolitionist lecturers and writers and early journalists worked with what we call today alternative presses. The women of the Harlem Renaissance carved out a corner of an aesthetic movement while its popularity lasted. The women of the 1970s decided that their own numbers were sufficient for a movement, and the trickles of publications from specialized journals and presses finally burst open the gates of the publishers and universities. Since the 1960s, especially, Irish women scholars have also sought out those “gardens” that represent the creative expressions of their foremothers that have not always taken written form. By the same token, these scholars have reestablished earlier women’s writing. The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, Volume IV and V, takes 3,201 pages to document the presence of women in Irish history, culture, religion, sciences, and literature. Representing women in Irish culture in the early twentieth century, Peig: The Autobiography of Peig Sayers of the Great Blasket Island (1936) and An Old woman’s Reflections (1939, 1980) demonstrate those elements of oral traditions that are “subversive, pluralist, unruly, and potentially revolutionary expressions of a subaltern class,” as Angela Bourke restates some of Antonio Gramsci’s ideas on oral tradition (Bourke, “Oral” 1193). In a favorite Sayers phrase, she throws “big rocks of words” at life (Sayers, Peig 86). While her work may have been co-opted for purposes of inoculating Irish youth with a sense of awe for their nation, the preservation of her stories and life events, with its limited formal schooling, economic hardship, hard labor, and great losses, does give later readers a view of one of those “gardens” Alice Walker has sought in her own past. Walker’s mother and Sayers shared a space of urgent storytelling as a form of women’s creative survival, as well as cultural survival in the face of a dominant culture. Yet tensions remain, even in the twenty-first century. Obstacles to keeping those gates open remain. Furthermore, obstacles may arise within. The basis for agreement in groups of people alters over time; the late Barbara Christian had pluralized “feminism(s)” in her essays and course titles in acknowledgment of this. Ní Dhuibhne reports that pressures on writers continue to constrain expression on abortion, sex, or anything critical of Irish communities, values, or mores (see Appendix). Morrison has commented that social pressures create obstacles to talking about love for God, “or your race, or your brother, or your sister, or your mother, but all those things have been taken away from us in a way” with the accusation of being “backward” (Koenen 73). Regardless, Ní Dhuibhne and Morrison pursue questions of love—whether it involves reproduction or religion—in spite of social pressures to give only certain answers. Through folklore and indirection, they continue the work of their foremothers: collapsing binaries, contradicting stereotypes, questioning assumptions. For those Irish and African American women who find they, too, have hard questions to ask of their own group(s) as well as of others in society, they will still have need of the strategies of indirection of Hurston and Morrison, Lavin and Ní Dhuibhne.

Chapter 3

Folk Women versus the Authorities Throwing the binary back Critics regularly acknowledge two things about Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, and Éilís Ní Dhuibhne: that folklore and folkloric influences run throughout their fiction, and that their works express the realities of women’s lives. It seems that all critical commentaries on Hurston and Morrison have also given attention to how their writing champions civil rights as well as women’s rights. Postcolonial critics do make note of Ní Dhuibhne’s explorations of what it means to be Irish in the wake of the changes that followed independence and the changes that follow in the wake of the twentieth century. During her time in and out of print, critics had been less aware of Mary Lavin’s contributions to feminist literature, but some have noticed her integration of some Irish folk influences into contemporary realist fiction. Critical literature on these four authors has sometimes tied folklore explicitly to the success of their anti-authoritarian writings. Reviewing those ties will enable readers to more easily notice where the authors’ folkloric writing ushers other difficult topics into print. As the revolutionary qualities of Hurston’s and Morrison’s writings have received excellent coverage over the years, this chapter will provide only brief illustrations of how the folkloric influences in their female characters have made such bold expression possible. More attention will be paid to examples where the folk-women versus authority connection has been less evident in Ní Dhuibhne’s and Lavin’s fiction. In the examples here, the four authors rework the binaries that have hampered women in their time and place. Between each author’s set we will see representatives from the two folk-women categories: otherworldly beings, wise and mostly mortal women, and sometimes characters who bridge the two, as they disrupt the above/ below scale of extremes. In all instances, the texts indirectly contradict the status quo by grasping the revolution-making potential of the Otherworld to reverse the Othering. Hurston creates a near-oracle out of Nanny, who compares her degraded condition to that of a “cracked plate” (Hurston, Eyes 19). As explained further on, Hurston stops short of giving Nanny the magisterial “wise-woman” status that Morrison gives her older women. Hurston fleshes out Nanny, though, such that her observations and personality bust apart western stereotypes of servants as “angelically” above or “monstrously” below humanity, as with Shakespeare’s Caliban (Takaki 52). Janie, her granddaughter, has been compared to Cinderella, albeit a radically rewritten one (Meisenhelder 96, 227). Janie does not become a princess through otherworldly means, nor does she set out to enchant the men in the novel. That happens rather

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unconsciously on her part. As the structure of her role does conform to the roles of magical folk women, though, we can say that Hurston undoes the stereotype of the passive princess waiting for rescue. Janie also counters the white stereotypes of the time that would not have had her rise to middle-class status in the first place, let alone have her as an assertive, independent woman by the end of the story, servant to neither white nor Black man, and certainly not a “tragic mulatto” in any sense (Taylor-Guthrie, “Introduction” viii; Washington, “Foreword” ix). In the depiction of herself in Dust Tracks on a Road, Mules and Men, Hurston dresses up as a trickster, whom one could possibly describe as otherworldly, the way she plays it, borrowing folk linguistic moves that Gates associates with origin myths of Esu in Africa and tales of Signifying Monkey in the New World (Gates, Signifying 20). Hurston’s trickster persona keeps her one step ahead of her patrons, professors, and editors, so that they can never lock her into the “docile” end of the binary Morrison decries in Race-ing Justice. Hurston breaks the opposite end, the “monstrous” that Morrison names, by being a western-educated researcher who trains as a priestess in a faith that many Anglo Americans of the time would regard as monstrous. In the examples above, Hurston’s active application of elements from folklore enable her to carry out indirect arguments against the dominant white culture and against male domination in her own cultural group. In Mary O’Grady, one major character from Lavin’s one major woman-centered novel, takes on aspects of both folk-woman categories. At certain points, she occupies the liminal positions of the new mother, the mother stricken by the invasion of death, and the older mother of a “changeling,” all roles common to human female characters who take part in Irish Otherworld stories. However, in much the same way that Hurston pulls back slightly after she grants Nanny partial oracle status, Lavin stops short of making a “wise woman” out of Mary O’Grady. With perhaps a similar goal, Hurston resists making Nanny into the “angelic” stereotype of the aged African American female servant, as Lavin resists making Mary into the statesanctioned, nationalistic “angel in the house.” In one of the most perceptive articles written on Lavin, Sarah Briggs writes that Lavin’s “narrative strategies go some way towards deconstructing the usual gender binaries,” with female narrators who hold roles “other” than those “defined in terms of virgin, wife and/or mother, or whore” (Briggs, “Mary Lavin” 12). Where Mary O’Grady’s binary becomes peculiarly Irish is where she embodies then ravages the qualities of Cathleen ni Houlihan, the woman as Nation, and then does the same to some Irish stereotypes of the Virgin Mary. Named for the mother of Jesus, as is still a common naming practice in Irish religious oral tradition, Mary’s not-quite-sublimated rage bursts the confines of the role set for her. Lavin’s extensive undercutting of the “Virgin in the house” stereotype strikes an unusual contrast with Morrison’s alternate tactics toward stereotypes of the Virgin Mary. Chapter five will feature this comparison, along with Hurston’s and Ní Dhuibhne’s own contributions to disassembling this binary extreme. Subtle folklore references in Mary O’Grady propel a sharp but indirect point. Whether nationalism and patriarchal social structures have her scrubbing the floor in pious, misdirected submission, whether those same forces have her floating before the poet as an aisling, or whether their soldiers raise her to their shoulders as their sovereignty goddess-queen, woman is Woman, not Nation. When human women

Folk Women versus the Authorities

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are pressed into service as symbols, as abstract qualities, human women will burst through that box one way or another, and it won’t be pleasant for anyone. No Young Queen, no Poor Old Woman; no sainted mother, no fallen woman; Mary inhabits the likeable but rather frustrating middle of the scale. References to the Otherworld and to religious wise women, like the Virgin Mary, help Mary to disrupt the extremes assigned to Irish women. The later authors, Morrison and Ní Dhuibhne, move to much more direct references to abuses of authority. Susan Edwards Meisenhelder acknowledges that Morrison and Hurston do treat similar themes of tensions between the races and genders, but that what separates Hurston from Morrison and other African American women writers who came to the foreground in the 1970s is that Hurston had to “mask,” Morrison could “specify,” testify to directly in African American folk speech (Meisenhelder 196). However, the Morrison’s generation may not simply raise the prior “subtext” to the surface, as Meisenhelder clarifies, because the “dynamics” of gender tensions still linger (196). If the text in question does not, in the eyes of certain critics, affirm Black manhood, or if, as Deborah E. McDowell notes, the text instead places Black womanhood at the center of the story, the old accusation of “assault” still arises (196; McDowell 84). In such an instance, the implication is that strategies of indirection may still be needed for Morrison and her generation, even if surrounding discursive conditions have improved. The other area of difference between them and their foremothers is that, despite showing greater daring with topics and viewpoints, the later authors address different aspects of the above/below extremes and therefore engage with different folk-women characters. Hurston celebrates direct inclusion of African American folklore in her writing, while she foregrounds heroines who often defy misapplications of tradition, like Janie in Their Eyes Were Watching God and her own persona in her first person works. Morrison, though, integrates the folklore into her fiction such that she “replicates the process” of folklore while making subtle changes that cause newer images to feel “familiar” to readers (Harris 10–11). Yet Morrison does not privilege later-day mores to the exclusion of beliefs held by her elderly female characters. This may explain the prevalence of greater numbers of younger female protagonists in Hurston who dwell on the edge of the magical and fewer wise, magisterial women. In contrast, Morrison increases the number of older wise women in her fiction placed alongside younger female characters who dwell near or in the Otherworld, like Sethe and Beloved. Lavin and Ní Dhuibhne mirror this dynamic and mix it. As censorship in early twentieth-century Ireland pressed Lavin’s generation more on issues of morality than on race, daring heroines make a more muted appearance in Lavin’s fiction than in Hurston’s, whereas Ní Dhuibhne can foreground, with some caution, later attitudes toward sex, religion, and women’s lives. Unlike Hurston, whose peers sometimes criticized her use of folklore, Lavin’s milieu was soaked in a nationalistic use of folklore, such that for her, it was more challenging not to foreground folklore in a milieu where “tradition was the byword” and modernist writers were often censored (Levenson 63–5). Nevertheless, like Morrison’s performative blending, Lavin integrates folklore into a style that favors realism and “modern” Irish settings, whether urban or rural. It takes Ní Dhuibhne’s millennial postmodern style to foreground

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Irish folklore, but this time in a way that challenges the hegemonic misuses of it from earlier periods. The resulting folk-women characters break down into greater numbers of magical, younger characters, mixed in with a few older wise women. In general, the mystical emphasis that appears in Hurston’s autobiographical freethinker, Egyptian, and vodun musings and the mystical emphasis that appears in a number of Morrison’s characters’ African- and African Christian-belief systems do not have as strong a parallel in Lavin’s and Ní Dhuibhne’s characters. If it was daring for Hurston to dismiss Christian prayer by saying, “I do not choose to admit weakness,” then it was similarly daring of Lavin to include negative as well as positive critiques of Catholicism in her writing (Hurston, Dust 764; Kiberd, Inventing 409; Levenson 65, 131, 155, 153). By the same token, it is also unconventional for Morrison and, to a lesser extent, Ní Dhuibhne to include positive portrayals of Christian characters in their fiction during a time when such beliefs are, as Morrison puts it, popularly seen in western culture as a “form of delusion,” as something “backward” (Morrison, “Amazon”; Koenen 73). Because of the differing discourses on religion between time and place for these authors, they differ in how they feature wise women from the standpoint of religious oral and folk traditions. As an unusual resurgence of references to religious traditions appears in Morrison’s wise-women characters, with some interesting side notes from Ní Dhuibhne, chapter five will focus on these authors’ wise women. Magical, Otherworld women weigh in on most of the other topics for all the authors, and Morrison’s wise women have a variety of pert and pointed things to say about reproductive issues and religious beliefs. Zora Neale Hurston: “He can read my writing but he sho’ can’t read my mind” Lavin and Hurston, perhaps in response to limited opportunities to publish on these topics, used strategies of indirection that enabled them to express themselves and still see their works reach a wider audience. Due to the path-breaking works of the older women, the indirect approach becomes less necessary for the younger authors, although to this day publishers and public tastes still require a certain finessing. These strategies alter with changing social conditions, so that by Ní Dhuibhne’s and Morrison’s time in the late twentieth/early twenty-first century, elements of indirection in their writing become elements of deeper disclosure, in addition to the occasional disguise. Over time, though mostly after her passing, Zora Neale Hurston has introduced readers to a deeper appreciation of African Diaspora folklore and folk music. She has also opened up readers to a deeper appreciation of the lives of the women of the African Diaspora. Although it may have taken decades for the impact to fully register, Hurston’s double contribution to American letters, as a researcher of folklore and as a writer of fiction, began almost simultaneously. Her major accomplishments as a folklorist include collections of folk music housed in the Library of Congress, collaborations with Alan Lomax and Langston Hughes, collections of lore in Mules and Men and Tell My Horse, and scholarly articles, some published in Journal of American Folklore. Cheryl Wall gives Mules and Men the “distinction of being


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the first collection of Afro-American folklore published by an Afro-American,” presenting its lore “not to patronize and demean but to affirm and celebrate” (Wall 77). Hurston’s involvement with African American folk-culture communities, as documented and recorded on her trips south and to the Bahamas and Haiti, had a depth of detail and a breadth of variety that other researchers may have envied. She offered up stories and songs and impossible-to-get vodun practices that few others had recorded. These practices were available only to the initiated, and, unlike many other anthropologists, she was initiated. To read Hurston is to see the depth of her research as a folklorist and the depth of her childhood memories of African American communities in Florida. Particularly for African American women, her work in both fields sheds light on women’s lives, beliefs, and anxieties. She might have shared more on her own worldviews, but for her publisher’s censorship. The nature of her evasions has left us clues to the anxieties and worldviews that she could not state directly. Then, too, her fictional counterparts at times take over for what the flesh-and-blood Zora could not say. Characters such as Nanny and Janie in Their Eyes Were Watching God, and characters from other Hurston works, could model stories of women freeing themselves from the extremes of othering, binary images set upon them by the dominant Anglo culture and sometimes by the men in their own culture. Hurston raises Nanny from belittling stereotypes of the time of elderly servant class African American women, making her a complex woman, oracular almost to the level of a wise-woman character in Morrison. Janie’s journey takes her out of the stereotype of an impoverished pseudo-Cinderella “rescued” by a husband, to a woman who learns to rescue herself. The characters could free their tongues to an extent that nonfiction Black women then often could not. Hurston undoes some of the extremes of Otherness by using her own persona in Dust Tracks on a Road and Mules and Men to become a trickster who turns a subordinate position into something triumphant, like the African Otherworld tricksters Gates describes. Nanny, Janie’s grandmother, describes having been “used for a work-ox and a brood-sow” against her will, and she is determined to spare Janie that life (Hurston, Their Eyes 15). Contradicting what white society pushed upon her, Nanny had in fact wanted to be a preacher, to “preach a great sermon about colored women sittin’ on high, but there was no pulpit” for her (15). While Nanny is denied her own ambition in the plot of the novel, Hurston gave her a line much repeated since as summing up the depth of the difficulties African American women have faced in this country. White men throw down their burdens, order Black men to lift it instead, and those men hand off the burden to Black women, or as Nanny states it, the Black woman “is de mule uh de world” (14). It’s a pithy condemnation of the situation that has stuck in readers’ minds since. Thus, Hurston raises Nanny to a pulpit that the character had been denied in her fictional life. The folk-influenced language, since the mule appears prominently in African American tales such as Hurston collected for Mules and Men, also allows Hurston to indirectly criticize the power structure of the time. By hiding this angry critique behind a fictional character whose language and life circumstances would have been far removed from those of many of her readers of the time, Hurston could voice this rage with impunity.

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Despite the vivid and sympathetic description of Nanny’s struggles, Hurston plants the seed of Janie’s later rejection of her worldview. Nanny explains her “dreams” as “whut a woman oughta be and to do” (15). That includes translating her ideal of setting an African American woman “on high” into a narrow and literal application of marrying Janie off to a man with the only “organ in town” and “a parlor” (22). In the trajectory of Hurston’s plot, the implication is that setting up such narrow criteria to what a woman “ought” to be and do leads to suffering. As a result, just before Janie throws off the supposedly privileged life gained from Joe Starks, that she had been trained by Nanny to want, Janie makes a startling statement: “She hated her grandmother ... Nanny had taken the biggest thing God ever made, the horizon ... and pinched it in to such a little bit of a thing that she could tie it about her granddaughter’s neck tight enough to choke her. She hated the old woman who had twisted her so in the name of love” (85). This should read as a surprising comment to those with some understanding of African American folklore, as an African American proverb warns it is “bad luck ter sit in de house wid yo’ hat on or ter sass de ole folks” (Puckett 7). As late as Rusty Cundieff’s grimly humorous horror movie Tales from the Hood, folktales and folk-influenced arts carry warnings against disrespecting elders (Fulmer 429–30). Considering how many occasions come up in Dust Tracks where Hurston herself expresses a lack of regard for some of her elders’ views, it’s not too unexpected that she chose to part ways with that tradition somewhat. The “oughta” of Nanny’s ideal holds nothing in common with Janie’s final pronouncement that everyone has to figure out life and go to God themselves (Hurston, Their Eyes 183). According to the criteria that Houston A. Baker provides in discussing “gifts of the spirit,” of the three, “discernment, prophecy, and healing,” Nanny discerns the difficulties of the situation for many African American women, but her solution for it causes more harm than good (Baker, Workings of the Spirit 76). Without capacity to heal or to prophesy with more efficacy than shown here, the portrayal of Nanny stops short of qualifying her as a wise woman. Janie’s getting this last word in at the end confirms the younger woman instead as the voice we listen to in the novel. Yet the rejection of Nanny’s love in Janie’s memory only makes the older woman more complex. No “angel,” and too sympathetic to be a “monster,” as a flawed older woman with a few wise points to make, Nanny alters the scale of above/below extremes. Nanny learns to see love as only the “very prong all us black women gits hung on,” while Janie learns that love can instead be like the “sea,” “different” with everyone it touches (Hurston, Their Eyes 22, 182). In getting to that realization, Janie changes from obeying Nanny, albeit reluctantly, obeying Killicks (somewhat), and obeying Joe Starks until she can take it no more, into a woman who can hold her head up high, even when shocking Eatonville in her overalls. Mary Lavin’s Onny Soraghan in The House in Clewe Street also rebels against her family, church, and society’s rules, escaping her first small town with Janie’s quiet speed. Meisenhelder states that Hurston’s adventurous self-portrayals reveal “disgust with those passive blond girls” referred to cumulatively as “Cinderella,” which she in turn ties to the plan Nanny had for Janie (Meisenhelder 157, 96). While Janie does leave her impoverished home for Killicks’s nicer farm, and while she does get swept off her feet by Joe Starks, the rescue associated with certain versions of Cinderella ends there. Janie does appear


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as a refutation of the fallacies associated with popular, watered-down versions of Cinderella. At this point, a word about folk-motif and tale-type indices would be helpful, for if literary critics were more familiar with these reference tools, they would find a wealth of subtle images. An enormous number of references may be looked up in compilations such as those by Séan Ó Súilleabháin (Sean O’Sullivan) for Irish lore and by May Klipple for African lore, among others, or in indices of motifs and tale types such as those collected by Antti Aarne and Stith Thompson. Folklorists since the mid-nineteenth century have developed such collections and indices, along with various explanatory theories, because certain plotlines, images, actions, character types, and distinctive objects repeat themselves so often in stories passed from person to person. Therefore, if Meisenhelder had looked into earlier varieties of Aarne-Thompson (AT) tale type 510 “Cinderella,” she would have found more in common between the fairy-tale woman, the woman in the novel, and the “real” woman, Hurston. Meisenhelder refers to Cinderella as the “passive” antithesis of Hurston’s and Janie’s active responses to their abuse at the hands of others. Actually, the nonDisney, non-Little Golden Book variations of AT 510 hold out Cinderellas who do, in fact, “fight to protect themselves” and perhaps would not evoke the “disgust” Hurston supposedly held toward “passive blond girls” (Meisenhelder 158, 157; Yolen 296). Jane Yolen, who has written well-informed and spirited children’s stories about female pirates, asserts that numerous variations feature an “enduring but shrewd and practical girl persevering and winning a share of the power” (Yolen 296). In a description of the “hardier European” and Asian forebears, Cinderella tricks those who abuse her with “double-talk, artfully disguising” herself, “or figuring out a way to win the king’s son” (296–7). Thus, it seems that when Janie defeats Joe Starks in a game of dozens, Janie exemplifies the older version of AT 510’s heroine with her assertiveness and clever word play. The rags-to-riches plot of Cinderella may hold true for Janie, and perhaps also the rags-to-semi-middle-class plot for Hurston’s character in Dust Tracks. But the “passive” stereotype, as perceived by twentiethcentury Americans, has come undone in the old folkloric, adventurous way. On the above/below scale of extremes, Hurston raises Nanny to a complex, sometimes wise-woman level and brings “princess” Janie to the middle world of human women who struggle to make themselves heard. Hurston as heroine raises herself from abused child to manicurist, among other low-status jobs she takes in Dust Tracks, to anthropologist, in an academic version of the best AT 510 tale type. Positioning herself as an anthropologist, in effect as a scribe of the folk, may have also provided her with some professional grounds to defend her work with dialect. If it were not as “folksy” as some whites would want, she could have defended it as recording the voice of the people, not that of a caricature. Rarely do any of the people, real or fictitious, whom she depicts in dialect ever seem less than intelligent. On the contrary, they often appear grimly serious at times. By the same token, Hurston could have used the same defense to her intellectual cohorts, who accused her of less-than-dignified portrayals, that as a folklorist she needed to use dialect to represent rural culture accurately. At the end of the twentieth century, in

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parallel fashion, Éilís Ní Dhuibhne uses her skill as a trained folklorist to access, contemplate, and adapt her own culture’s lore in her other role as a fiction writer. Even taking the long view of her general approach reveals Hurston the author as Hurston the trickster. Trickster characters may or may not come from otherworldly tales, and sometimes they come only from the neighboring field of groups of people who have simply been “othered.” Henry Louis Gates, traces the origins of the folk trickster to the African god Esu (Esu-Elegbara), the “sole messenger of the gods,” who because of his role as mediator also unifies “opposed forces” such as the “sacred with the profane,” as well as other binary combinations (Gates, Signifying 6). In the case of Hurston as trickster, the inspiration she takes from talking animals and accounts of vodun allows one to see her trickster references as an extension of the magical world. The High John de Conquer trickster tales that Hurston recounts bear a resemblance to the Irish tales Peig Sayers recounts of Séamas na bPléasc (James the Explosion, or “Jimmy Ka-Boom,” as I translate it) (Sayers 118–26). John and Séamas find ways around Anglo masters to get material gain or the upper hand over those who have controlled their people. Both tale sets feature heroes who demonstrate “clever strategies for avoiding work,” placed upon them by an oppressive authority, “through the appearance of stupidity” (Meisenhelder 21). Ingenuity, scrappy selfpreservation, and verbal skill are traits in common between these cross-Atlantic tricksters. Meisenhelder describes the point at which Hurston the trickster blends with John the trickster when she notes that Hurston does not explicitly analyze the tales for the audience, as neither did Sayers (17). Instead, Hurston, and arguably also Sayers, conveys “cultural messages” by “embedding them in a social context” that emphasizes the “conflict and resistance” alluded to in surrounding conversations or life events (17). This coding lets Hurston comment on volatile topics without having to seek permission or fear reprisal (17). This strategy of rhetorical indirection also comes into play in the trickster stories retold and revamped by contemporary Irish woman Éilís Ní Dhuibhne. The trickster element of Hurston’s approach perhaps has been appreciated the least over the years. Other African Americans at the time accused her of playing into and encouraging negative stereotypes (Walters 345). Critics, then and later, who dismissed Hurston’s books on literary, philosophical, or political grounds did not always know the degree to which Hurston stepped “through a loaded mine field of racial feelings, both hers and her liberal white readers’” (Bordelon 19). Elsewhere, Hurston wrote more directly about atrocities, race riots, and lynchings, but during this pre-Civil Rights era, African American writers “filtered their racial commentary carefully” (19). In this interpretation of the situation, Hurston remains in “her place” at the low end of the binary. To those who could pick up the signifying behind the coy compliments, her voice no doubt came in loud and clear. In a further example of the tightrope Hurston found herself on, the patriotic atmosphere of the 1940s caused “Seeing the World As It Is,” a forthright criticism of American imperialism and the final chapter of Dust Tracks, to be “purged from the 1942 edition” (20). Gabrielle Foreman concurs with this interpretation of Hurston’s political side, that Hurston showed an anticipation of criticism, an ability to read “the critical signs of ideologies and constraints of the era” (Foreman 657). This compares to the self-censoring that


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Julia Carlson’s Banned in Ireland turns up again and again in her interviews with Irish writers of the heaviest censorship period. Such sensitivity to potential criticism that could halt one from getting into print plays, in Foreman’s words, “a very real role in the silencing of, and the silencing in, literary texts,” causing the writer to “subtextualize,” pull away from the most accessible level of the text (Foreman 657). At the description of Hurston pulling away from accessibility, we should be able to read “indirect,” for Hurston did succeed in putting the right words in the right readers’ ears, but only through strategies designed to obfuscate the message for the wrong ears. Keith Walters, in “‘He can read my writing but he sho’ can’t read my mind’: Zora Neale Hurston’s Revenge in Mules and Men,” further defends Hurston’s position at this time, citing the oppression of the time in addition to Hurston’s technique of signaling to readers who “read within the tradition” information that those outside the tradition would overlook (Walters 364–5). This operated at times like signifying on a larger scale, when one remembers that signifying sometimes means to criticize someone, while cluing others in on the joke, but without the first party knowing it. Any topic that came close to US race relations, international politics, integration, discrimination, or colonialism would trip the wires of Hurston’s conservative editors. This situation qualifies as censorship that, though not official, operated according to fear of “what will sell.” While she proved herself a professional in both fields, the strategies she used in building her career were such that neither Hurston the author nor Hurston the folklorist could do without the other. Beyond her training under Franz Boas, Ruth Benedict, and Gladys Reichard, her strategies of indirection made the mix possible, despite elements in the dominant society that tried to silence her because the formal discourse of time limited Hurston’s expression. Nevertheless, her “rhetorical strategy of exaggeration,” her “Sis Cat” “manners” of signifying while showing off her academic prowess, the “masking” of her assumed roles, and her technique of blending elements of oral narrative with written text, gave her the edge she needed to stay ahead of the academic, patronage, and publishing lions of US culture (LionnetMcCumber 241). Even then, critics have seen her strategies in a harsh light, sometimes in ignorance of what obstacles she faced in her research and publishing. Analytic techniques of African American feminist and post-structuralist criticism, in addition to those of other recent critics, have clarified many of these misunderstandings. Continuing the efforts of later critics to correct the false impression of Hurston as a “scribe of cultural traditions rather than a social critic,” Susan Edwards Meisenhelder echoes Sara Briggs’s effort to correct the lack of importance attached to Mary Lavin’s work (Meisenhelder 2; Briggs, “Mary Lavin” 10; Briggs, “A Man in the House”). Taking some of academia’s authority unto herself, her research provided some defense against prior negative portrayals. To get her writing and African American folk culture into print, Hurston wore many masks. Alternately, she shape-shifted into faithful follower of Boas, eager-to-please raconteur, serious academic, folksy hometown girl, and, uncomfortably for Zora as well as for her later readers, attaché, maid, or chauffeur to Mrs. R. Osgood “Godmother” Mason, Fanny Hurst, and Mrs. Annie Nathan Meyer, all to gain support for her work. The Mules and Men project left her twisting between the demands of the academic community, as personified

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by Boas, and the general reading public, as personified by her editors. Hurston apologized to Boas for adding “unorthodox material to make the book interesting to the general reader,” then, to lengthen the text as per her editor’s direction, she added the second section on vodun. This did two things: it attracted white readers intrigued by the “exotic” and simultaneously brought some of her academic research to the public and made it accessible to the lay reader (Walters 353). Behind these masks, and her apparent politicking, lies a double-pronged attack. While presenting an ultimately more dignified account of African American folk culture, Hurston’s work exposes the conditions African Americans were living under in the US and indirectly implicates white power structures along the way, especially with hidden digs at those who exercise control over her writing. In one example, Hurston as trickster specifically utilizes signifying as folk speech, in the beginning and end of Mules and Men. These parts of the text later turn out to be part of an elaborate revenge on her sometimes patronizing sponsors, Mrs. Annie Nathan Meyer, “Godmother” Mason, and “Papa” Franz Boas. By juxtaposing what reads as grateful, folk-tinged dedications and straightforward prose with two particular folktales, Hurston signals to a knowledgeable community “‘that some form of signifying is in play’” (Walters, quoting Gates 354). Almost as a warning, before Hurston launches into the “soul-piece” tale that prefaces her “acknowledgments,” she explains the difficulty of collecting folklore from shy “under-privileged” communities. She cautions the reader that her people are “evasive,” in spite of their apparent “acquiescence,” switching to first person plural to clarify, “we are a polite people and we do not say to our questioner, ‘Get out of here!’” (Hurston, Mules 10). When the “white man” wants to intrude, she states, again in first person, “All right, I’ll set something outside the door of my mind for him to play with and handle. He can read my writing but he sho’ can’t read my mind” (10). With the “play toy” occupying the white man’s attention, she expects him to go away, and “Then I’ll say my say and sing my song”: We smile and tell him or her something that satisfies the white person because, knowing so little about us, he doesn’t know what he is missing ... The Negro offers a feather-bed resistance. That is, we let the probe enter, but it never comes out. It gets smothered under a lot of laughter and pleasantries. (10)

Synge remarks on a similar operation of “play” as evasion when Irish peasants find an essentializing Englishman at their door: When a benevolent visitor comes to his cottage seeking a sort of holy family, the man of the house, his wife and all their infants, too courteous to disappoint him, play their parts with delight. When the amiable visitor, however, is once more in the boreen, a storm of good-tempered irony breaks out behind him ... the Irish peasant ... is neither abject nor servile. (qtd. in Trezise 13–14)

Simon Trezise cites Synge’s consciousness of the Irish use of “irony” as proof of an approach that favored “listening” rather than “idealizing” in collecting Irish materials, a consciousness that resembles Hurston’s (Trezise 14). Hurston next emphasizes that this evasive maneuver will affect her collecting, “I knew that even I was going to


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have some hindrance among strangers,” the reappearance of the “seizing” later on in the soul-piece story informs us that we should probably consider that story as an example of a “play toy” to distract certain readers from the veiled insult or criticism she makes toward her benefactor Mrs. Mason (Hurston, Mules 10). Yet Hurston has already warned readers that a form of rhetorical subterfuge is at work! The overly effusive thanks given to Mrs. Mason, while appearing innocent to readers, actually disrespects “Godmother” by defying her order against revealing her identity. Her acknowledgment also follows the “soul-piece” story, from which one may infer that Mrs. Mason receives the title “Great Soul” only because she, too, has loomed heavily over Hurston’s life and work. With a similar sense of ambiguity, Mules and Men ends with Hurston comparing herself to Sis Cat, who fools and eats Rat by using her “manners,” i.e., washing her face after dinner (228–9). After finishing the last chapter in the “Hoodoo” section of the book, Hurston tells a tale of the cat who defies the rat’s attempt to trick her out of a meal by making her feel insecure about her “manners.” Hurston then adds a personal touch to the last line in the book: “I’m sitting here like Sis Cat, washing my face and usin’ my manners” (228). “Manners,” in this instance, may call up the distinctions whites would use to keep African Americans out of many activities, standards that could be trotted out to tell someone he or she was “not good enough” to attempt certain goals. The cat succeeds in brushing off rat’s implications toward her manners, in achieving her goal of getting dinner, and in devouring the critic Rat himself. By finishing with “Sis Cat’s” satisfied licking, Hurston signifies on them all by celebrating. In spite of the influence of academia, patrons, and editors over her research and freedom of expression, she, Zora Neale Hurston, has been sustained by her culture and has succeeded in sharing at least some of it with her audience. With this double-voiced writing that destroys the vernacular/formal academic binary, she has changed the playing field for anthropologists working in African American lore for good (Baker, Workings 97, 302). It does say something sad about Hurston’s status as an academic, writer, and African American woman in the 1930s and 1940s that she needed such “‘strategies for survival’” as those Abrahams lists: playing “a number of roles, especially the stereotypical ones assigned by those in power”; possessing “the ironic perspective and tactics [of] signifying, even if that meant seeming to play” the role of a comic subordinate. As Abrahams writes, “indirect arguments” can “‘go round for long’” and convey successfully what cannot be stated directly (Abrahams, Afro-American Folktales xix). The interlocutor can still walk away from the exchange undamaged, which Hurston seems to have done. All of this effort equals “a way of prevaricating to save your neck, or just to save the trouble of going through explanations that you knew were not going to be believed or trusted” (19). Abrahams indicates that these motivations drive the trickster and his or her stories, and Walters encourages us to envision Hurston in that trickster position (Walters 343). As with her roles as scholar and writer, no one can truly draw a boundary between where Hurston’s contributions to folklore leave off and where her contributions to African American literature begin. Since she is both a participant in African American culture as well one of its earliest native-born folklorists, collected materials overlap

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with autobiographical materials, and childhood sources of inspiration cannot be separated, in such a case, from “cultural artifact.” By relying on phrases taken from oral tradition, and by using the conventions of oral storytelling, Hurston writes a book that sounds like oral storytelling, only it appears in print. The work is neither one nor the other, slipping across stylistic and genre borders even as Hurston ends a straightforward description of vodun practice with a folktale, and then utilizes the language of the folktale to form her own slightly sarcastic farewell to the audience. Hurston breaks the binary through which the dominant society had tried to isolate African American traditions at the lower end of their scale, with western formal knowledge at the top, but Hurston breaks this false and unnatural division with her research and fiction. With subtlety, she worked her own way to “change the joke and slip the yoke,” as Ralph Ellison’s essay title reads (Ellison 56). Signifying on her “benefactors” in Mules and Men, Hurston follows the tradition of workers who sang of everything the “masters or overseers” had ever done to them, “judiciously tempering satire” with “songs of flattery” (Pierson 25). At first, she seems to give her sponsors what they want to hear. In the end, while employing a slyly civil, folkloric approach, her “lies”—her significations, exaggerations, and masks—blur the boundaries between the comic and the serious and between the oral and the written. In this way, Hurston leaves, for those among the “sympathetic and knowing,” something of the truth. Mary Lavin: “Sly civility” from an Irish village Censorship, condescension, and the spleen of a saint Zora Neale Hurston goes after white authority figures, and dominating males of both races, by relying on folk-influenced characters to break images of African American women out of limiting above/below binaries. In the examples cited above, her almost-wise-woman character Nanny and her characters that recall the magic of the Otherworld, her assertive “princess” Janie and her trickster persona, Hurston mirrors some of the same rhetorical strategies that appear in the following decade in the works of Irish writer Mary Lavin. Lavin’s work also features a novel that doesn’t quite elevate the overlooked protagonist to the level of a wise woman. Her main character does, like Hurston’s persona and Janie, live on the edge of the magical. Lavin adds to this parallel situation a folk influence that derails a particularly Irish combination stereotype, the “sainted” mother, as mixed with the young queen/old hag personification of Ireland-as-woman. Lavin’s use of Mary O’Grady to subvert the Irish male tendency to merge the “sainted” mother and Ireland-as-woman with the Virgin Mary will be discussed in chapter five in comparison with Morrison’s, Hurston’s, and Ní Dhuibhne’s depictions of that religious wise-woman character. To reflect a line of descent, from Lavin to Ní Dhuibhne, one should examine those aspects that the two authors share which highlight the continuation of literary subversion in Irish literature. Like the lineage of Zora Neale Hurston to Toni Morrison, both Lavin and Ní Dhuibhne demonstrate vivid prose, unconventional heroines, and sharp critiques of society, and succeed in smuggling all of this past censors and


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reviewers. Again, the last item, due to the works of previous writers, becomes less of a concern for the younger writers, despite the need for continuing subtlety. To further appreciate the accomplishments of these women, one must first identify what topics, “unspeakable” during Mary Lavin’s time and “discouraged” during Éilís Ní Dhuibhne’s, have driven their fiction and their technique (see Appendix for Ní Dhuibhne’s statements on this). Such delicate areas have included unequal relations between the sexes, anything that could appear critical of secular or religious authority, and questions regarding women’s limited sphere of activity in mid-twentieth-century Ireland. Ní Dhuibhne has admitted that, even as of the nineties, “it’s still the early days for women writers in Ireland ... I think these earlier writers [Molly Keane and Mary Beckett, writing in the mid-twentieth century] may have been under such pressure” (Perry 24). Significantly, Ní Dhuibhne states that “Mary Lavin was the exception” to “this climate where women didn’t write” (24). In the exploration of issues about which women in Irish society have not always enjoyed freedom of discussion, what strategies of indirection have Lavin and Ní Dhuibhne used to make such an address possible? Along with occasions that evoke Bhabha’s “sly civility,” Lavin’s main character combines aspects of otherworldly and wise women in her words, thoughts, qualities, and actions, while Ní Dhuibhne’s characters focus more on the magical world. All of them undermine different aspects of patriarchal authority. Examples from Mary Lavin’s novel, Mary O’Grady, and from Éilís Ní Dhuibhne’s The Bray House and her story “The Search for the Lost Husband,” demonstrate how these strategies function within Lavin’s and Ní Dhuibhne’s narratives. Mary Lavin, known primarily for her short fiction but also for the novels The House in Clewe Street (1945) and Mary O’Grady (1950), has yet to receive as much attention from literary critics as her male counterparts. While Lavin received a flurry of awards and accolades in the middle of the century, attention on her work has been thin, with small flurries here and there, such as with the “Mary Lavin Special Issue” in Irish University Review in 1979, her literary biography by Leah Levenson in 1998, and tributes in journals on the occasion of her death in 1996. Joyce Carol Oates has called Lavin “‘one of the finest short story writers’ of the twentieth century” (as quoted in Kilroy 146). In spite of this high regard, most of her books, approximately twenty in all, have gone out of print. Through articles, books such as Ann Owens Weekes’s Irish Women Writers: An Uncharted Tradition and Katie Donovan’s Irish Women Writers: Marginalised by Whom?, reissues of Mary O’Grady (1950, 1986) and The House in Clewe Street (1945, 1987) (now both out of print again), and Lavin’s inclusion in the 2002 Field Day Anthology, Lavin is beginning to receive more attention as a predecessor of contemporary Irish women writers. Patricia K. Meszaros believes that “Lavin’s work has continued to suffer neglect” because not enough critics have recognized Lavin as “a feminist in the contemporary sense,” although, as the following examples attest, they should (Meszaros 39). In later years, some critics have paid a bit more notice. Christina Hunt Mahoney calls her “a precursor of feminist writers in Ireland” (Mahoney 23). Just as Hurston did, Mary Lavin’s style, rhetorical strategies, and literary concerns pave the way for later women authors. As criticism of contemporary Irish women’s

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fiction represents a relatively new field of inquiry, as it expands, so too will attention to such literary foremothers as Lavin. Like Hurston, too, Lavin’s treatment of social issues, similarly mistaken as nonpolitical or mildly conservative, has garnered negative reactions. In Lavin’s case, these reactions sometimes amount to damning with faint praise or benign neglect, even as late as the nineties with Declan Kiberd’s labeling her writing as “ever light and easy” (Kiberd, Inventing 409). Ignoring Lavin in a more complementary fashion than Hurston’s male critics ignored her, some critics have alluded to Lavin as “one who drifts alongside the margins merely observing middle-class society” (J. Stevens 26; Johnson 53). Most of her contemporaries, also like Hurston, and some of the later generation, tend to misread her protagonists as characters who do not argue with the status quo. More perceptive critics have noted her psychological complexity, yet sometimes damn her work with faint praise elsewhere. Some, such as Sarah Briggs, Katie Donovan, Jeanette Roberts Shumaker, Marianne Koenig, have increasingly observed the rebellious undercurrent in Lavin’s work. To explain, in part, why Lavin’s works have not always been treated as “serious” literature, it helps to look at the contrast between expectations for young male artists in turn-of-the-century Ireland, as reflected in Joyce, and the expectations set for young female artists. Katie Donovan, in discussing Maria Edgeworth’s approach and strategies, states that “The Irish male writer, especially in the nineteenth century, would have perceived his role as part of the larger arena of public life,” but that a woman’s experience in that time would “have taught her not to expect a socially acceptable role for herself as a writer, not to see herself as an authority in anything, least of all public affairs” (Donovan 10). It did not seem out of place for Joyce to write in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, “I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race” (Joyce, Portrait 281). But we do not see other young women writers of his time so expectant that their race would, in fact, allow itself to be forged by the power of their words. We do see scenes in Ulysses where Stephen’s family supports his schooling while his sister Dilly goes without food to buy herself a French primer (Joyce, Ulysses 243). No matter that Dilly’s eyes are “Quick, far and daring,” like his, no one expects Dilly to become a scholar or writer (243). While he pities her and sees her intelligence, Stephen sees Dilly as just a “shadow of my mind,” whose ties to him threaten to “drown” him (243). Alain Locke’s offering up of the idea that African American young women could be librarians, teachers, or nurses would have been a jump forward for young Irish women like Dilly in the early twentieth century. Mary Lavin’s early life and career straddle the eras of male entitlement to expanded horizons, which Joyce unknowingly depicted, and the new Irish state, which made that entitlement in effect official in the 1937 Constitution. Lavin was born in 1912, an only child to parents who, unlike Dilly’s, nurtured her gifts. Lavin published her first short story in 1939, “Miss Holland,” and soon after found a mentor in Lord Dunsany, philosopher, playwright, short story writer, and friend of Lavin’s father’s employer (Levenson 49–50). Lavin’s biographer, Leah Levenson, writes, “Mary’s career was getting under way at an inauspicious time,” as “books and periodicals were being banned at a great rate: 1,200 books and 140 periodicals between 1930


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and 1939” (63). Writer Nuala O’Faolain has said that Lavin was “dead lucky that by accident Lord Dunsany found a way out for her,” “otherwise she would have been pushed aside, as other women were at that time” (140). The statement perhaps underestimates Lavin’s gifts, as she was published in venues outside Dunsany’s influence and well after his death, but it does reflect the difficulties Irish women writers faced then. As Séamus Deane states, “The pressure of editors and audience is a very real one,” especially in the early to middle decades of this century, especially for women writers, and especially in Ireland (Deane 240). Just as Hurston had to face what amounted to an unofficial censorship, that is, her publisher’s economic concern about what would sell, and therefore what topics would give “offense,” women writers of Lavin’s period had to deal with official censorship. Topics that feminists and other critics redefined as political— sexual expression, women’s employment, child welfare, women serving on juries, economic independence from men, issues of reproductive health, disagreements with church policy—not only were not considered “political” issues for the public arena in the early to mid-twentieth century but also could be censored. Levenson sees “nothing to indicate” that Lavin “fought openly against the repressive church and the Censorship Board’s puritanism,” but sees evidence of a battle “all there in her work” (Levenson 65). Lavin’s life operated both within and outside the margins set for women in the constitution, as she established her career well before her husband passed away in 1954. Her widowhood allowed her to own her own house, which women could not otherwise do then (140). In spite of success, support, and grants later on, Lavin only wrote two novels in her career, as “the writing of them ran contrary to her temperament and the amount of time she had, as a wife and mother, to devote to them” (79). The expectations of women to perform as full-time mothers often conflicted with the scope of time needed for longer works. The obstacles and struggles that affected Lavin, Hurston, and other women writers of their time were not considered of “public” interest by males in authority in the publishing world at that time. Thus, Lavin’s accomplishment of bringing women’s lives and concerns into print makes her a wonderful model for protofeminist fiction. Lavin’s novel Mary O’Grady provides proof of Lavin’s submerged “political” writing, evidence of images that argue against the constitution’s “home and hearth” limitation of women as well as the stifling images of womanhood. Her indirection in these areas of the novel ensured that the doubts seeded within would pass by the Censorship Board. This argues for a view of Lavin as an “underground” predecessor to later women writers, such as Éilís Ní Dhuibhne. Mary O’Grady tells the life story of a Dublin woman at the turn of the century. In an interview with Robert L. and Sylvia Stephens, Lavin admits, I knew a Mary O’Grady, a woman who experienced the troubles I described in the novel. Perhaps, though, we only really know the people who are like ourselves. In that sense, I suppose, I am Mary O’Grady. I loved and understood that woman. She was a neighbor when I lived in Dublin with my parents, and I wanted to tell her story. (R. and S. Stevens 340)

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We see Mary from young womanhood, just after leaving her fondly remembered country home in Tullamore, to start a family with her Dublin-bred husband, Tom, up to her dying moment. In between, she yearns to go “home” to the country, but as the babies keep coming—Patrick, Ellie, Angie, Larry, and Rosie—she never does (Lavin, Mary O’Grady 18). When comparing herself to her eldest daughter, Ellie, she thinks, “She’s a real woman ... Not like me ... I stopped being a woman. I became a mother” (90). Her husband dies in their early middle age, followed by the loss of her son Patrick to emigration, and the deaths of her eldest daughters and their fiancés in a plane crash. Yes, the tragedies keep mounting, as some of the critics note, but Lavin displays “spleen” in her heroine more often than “heart,” as her passions alternate between terror and irritability at moments of tension, such as when her husband asks for a doctor and she peevishly asks whether he couldn’t wait until morning (he dies within minutes), and as when she terrifies her youngest son when he tries to tell her about the plane crash (80–82, 156). Little notice has been paid to the consistency with which the narration contradicts what Mary says about herself and her world. Many critics take the character’s observations at face value and believe that Mary is simply a saintly, devoted mother, happy in marriage and in all things, until she goes to her reward in paradise (Levenson 79, 80–81; Martin 384, 387; Z. Bowen 60–61; R. Peterson, Mary Lavin 74, 75). In a harsher note, Richard F. Peterson complains that Mary O’Grady never mentions the Irish Civil War, or other seemingly obvious historical events (Peterson 70). Katie Donovan has argued that male critics and authors in Irish literary history tend to interpret “important” art as that which they deem “political,” and they mostly interpret “political” to mean public events and utterances (Donovan 16). The catch remains that women in Ireland until some parts of the twentieth century did not have the opportunity to act in a “public” way. As a result, literary expression of what women authors deemed important subjects have been, and sometimes still are, overlooked or treated to condescending praise. This runs parallel to what Richard Wright saw as irrelevance in Hurston’s work (Johnson 53). Those who have not read Hurston or Lavin carefully probably misjudge how deeply the indirection flows in their writing. Donovan states that Lavin’s primary tool of expression is, after all, “that of self-effacing irony” (18). Irony appears in Mary O’Grady at those moments where the main character seems most compliant with the program for Irish women; at those moments, hints of rage force one to notice that sometimes the subtext actually opposes a surface reading. The mask of submission and propriety, as it did for Hurston, allows the novel to avoid triggering the censorship that might have followed if authorities in Irish society noticed the rage caused on occasion by the limitations of Mary’s life. The construction of Mary’s character sometimes mimics the outward behavior of the “sainted” Irish mother. In reality, odd moments, looks, stares, gestures, and denials reveal, only to knowing readers, the secret psychological strain in the woman’s life. Mary represents only a partial wise-woman character. While demonstrably the font of authoritative knowledge within the limits of the little house’s four walls, Mary’s lack of understanding when it comes to her own emotional reactions and true motives falls short of real wisdom. Inklings come to her over the course of the book,


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but even at the end of her days, she misses the mark. So, while Lavin’s portrayal of Mary’s intelligence and power contradicts simplistic portrayals of domestic life, and contradicts the Irish stereotype of the simple-hearted, “sainted” mother, it positions Mary in the realm of complex human beings, not at either end of a binary scale. Clues to indirection in Mary Lavin’s work appear, as it were, behind a decoy of domestic bliss. As an answer to Zack Bowen’s and Richard F. Peterson’s interpretation of Mary O’Grady as a suffering saint, Lavin buries a few time bombs within an ostensibly romantic scene of Tom telling Mary how proud he is of her, how she’s “just the same as the first day” he met her, a scene filled with their smiles “across the sleeping child” between them (R. Peterson, Mary Lavin 75; Lavin, Mary O’Grady 24). The narration describes how their children have come to them “as seasonally as the flowers came up in the fields, or as the stock in the pasture at home [Mary’s Tullamore]” (23). Lavin seems to parody the sentimental image of the flowers by undercutting it with an image of livestock. Mary is no longer a mother among flowers, but among cows! This demonstrates in Lavin’s work an ironic sense of humor that relies on the occasional bizarre image. For a parallel of this kind of humor, Rayna Green ponders those women who kept their feminist leanings “framed in artistic shrouding” in oblique sayings, jokes, songs, wisecracks, even political symbols and bread sculpture (Green 2, 6). In Green’s hypothesis, women in every time and place have used folklore and folk art to indirectly express their views, especially during eras when the social setting would not permit more direct expression. Some critics have likewise “missed entirely what the women had to say” in Lavin’s fiction as well (3). Lavin’s female characters do not perform those specific forms of folk art, but they do demonstrate her humor, and her unconventional expressions of women’s concerns do take similarly folkloric turns. For example, Lavin makes clear, via an omniscient point of view, that much of Tom’s tenderness revolves around Mary as an attractive appliance or a sensuous breeder: He was proud of the number of children she had borne him. He was proud of her good health and good spirits when she was with child on each occasion. And he was proud of the way her confinements had been accomplished so easily and safely in her own home, with only the help of the district nurse. But above all, he was proud of the fact that, unlike the pale, papery wives of other men, out of the fullness and plenitude of her body she had nourished her children ... and he had seen how other men had glanced at her, at her pink cheeks, and her soft hair, and at her twinkling ankles. (Lavin, Mary O’Grady 23)

While readers may be jolted into chuckling at imagining “twinkling ankles” as such an attractive physical feature, a heavy sadness lies cheek and jowl with such humor, a juxtaposition common in Éilís Ní Dhuibhne’s and Toni Morrison’s works, as well. The sadness reveals itself in what Mary knows of Tom’s attraction to her, “that it was not only in her looks that he took pride. He was proud of her in ways she could hardly understand” (23). This phrase does not mean his pride is beyond her comprehension. Rather, it could mean that Tom’s view of her is alien to her own view of herself. Mary’s most revealing recognition follows this inventory of her charms: “For although after each child was weaned, and, once more, she took her place as the most important member of her family, deep in her heart she always felt that it was

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not upon her alone that all the attention was centred, but upon the nameless, unborn child that would begin before long to form in her body” (24). Out of this limited sense of self-worth comes Mary’s drive and near-ruthless “practicality,” Lavin’s euphemism for Mary’s more terrifying qualities as a mother. This ruthlessness is seen when, after the plane crash that kills her two daughters, her youngest son Larry runs to her, “beseeching” her for some comfort from the shock: “all he wanted was to reach her” (156). Instead, he hears only her “harsh” voice, feels “her hands upon his shoulders clenched so hard” he feels “the grip upon his flesh” (156). He is “pushed aside ... her practicality cutting through his hysteria like a knife” (160). The pairing of “practicality,” a word that would indicate the narrator’s approval with its positive connotations, with the image of a “knife” reveals Lavin’s indirection. The pairing also reveals a subversive humor that reinterprets Mary’s socially acceptable “practicality” as harsh or frightening. Innocuous phrases to label the guilty also find many parallels with Morrison and Ní Dhuibhne. Here, though, the wisdom implied in “practicality” appears undermined by the grim context of Mary’s harsh reaction to Larry. This provides readers with one of the most potent instances where the mask of “sainted” motherhood slips. V.S. Pritchett’s introduction to Mary Lavin’s Collected Stories (1971) affirms Lavin’s Hurston-like “double vision: the power to present the surface of life rapidly, but as a covering for something else” in her work (Pritchett ix). On the surface, the stories appear to take place in quiet country communities, “then we notice that [the characters] are smoldering and what her stories contain is the smoldering of a hidden life” (x). “Her tales,” he writes, “are the mutinies of an observant mind” (xii). All this smoldering and mutiny lies under the cover of a folksy charm that would have seemed familiar to Hurston. Beneath descriptions of a “life” as “sweet as milk and honey,” though, lies the “drabness” that settles inside Mary’s heart (203). Lavin depicts Tom and Mary’s relationship with, I believe, a genuine tenderness at times, but that element of their relationship cannot cancel out the conditions of a poorer country woman’s life in Dublin. Regarding the malaise she notices in herself from time to time, Mary asks, “Why?” (203). “She did not know. She had spared neither toil nor sweat nor sacrifice,” Mary thinks, as she measures her efforts according to the expectations of the time. “Yet life,” she thinks, “that had been as sweet as milk and honey, was souring, hour by hour” (203). Lavin has her character question her situation, and then subvert the cliché that she has previously applied to herself. How any critic could not see the occasional bitterness alluded to beneath a facade of acceptable phrases only shows how subtle Lavin’s works had to be. If they were that eager to ignore such frank depictions of difficulties between the sexes, and questions regarding women’s limited sphere of activity, then she had gauged her public correctly. Those with more familiarity with the subjects, however, probably knew what they saw. Lavin’s soft-shrouded depictions of women being valued more for their fertility than for their company and women taking power from the only source available to them, over their children’s hearts and lives, reveal the false submissiveness at work in a subversive text. The phrase for this operation, “sly civility,” resembles the native population’s resistance to adopting the colonizer’s ways in Bhabha’s reading of the sermon of Archdeacon Potts. The sly civility used to “‘turn ... off’” Potts, to deflect


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his judgment of the colonized population parallels a type of resistance operating in Lavin’s fiction. If Lavin buries the reasons why Mary’s “spleen” has “been rising in her for a long time,” what does this imply about the welcome Lavin could have expected if, in A.A. Kelly’s words, she had “plumbed” her “further depths” and “research[ed]” her purported “inhibitions” in the more flamboyant manner of “Moore and Joyce” (Lavin, Mary O’Grady 203; Kelly 177; Kilroy 152)? An answer to this implied accusation of shallow writing might resemble what Bhabha calls answering the colonialist’s “demand for narrative” (Bhabha 98). More readers will eventually notice how, like Hurston, Lavin chooses the strategies of indirection of sly civility, as well as sly humor. This shows in her ridiculous juxtaposition of flowers and “stock.” Or, for example, when she calls the out-of-control Mrs. Maguire “good woman” when she redecorates Mary’s house almost as soon as Mary passes out from news of the crash (Lavin, Mary O’Grady 161, 168–9). Though not to the same pioneering degree as Hurston, “myth and folklore, fairy-tales, and ghost-stories” run beneath Mary Lavin’s work and enable her to carry out her strategies of indirection (Koenig 251). As for previous critics who gave her work the literary equivalent of a pat on the head, Mary Lavin’s writing reflects Hurston’s saying, “He can read my writing but he sho’ can’t read my mind” (Hurston, Mules and Men 10). Folk influences in Mary O’Grady Although “their presence is” only “occasionally felt in the novels,” in a move that more resembles Toni Morrison’s work than Hurston’s, Lavin carries the influence of her culture’s lore into her characters’ lives and creates some new yet familiar form, but she rarely inserts the traceable accounts of folklore that Hurston does (Koenig 251). In an interview with Robert L. and Sylvia Stevens, Lavin claims an “interest in recording and preserving the real life of living Irishmen and women whom I have known and seen with my own eyes. I want to note the way they acted and the things they believed, whether right or wrong. I’d like to preserve them, rather than the diluted culture that is being shown by tourist bodies and agencies—all good and no bad” (R. and S. Stevens 340).1 This statement resembles Morrison’s when she tells Amazon.com that she took “seriously” the characters in Paradise, stating, “I wanted their experience of life to be an absolute—one that the book takes for granted” (Amazon.com). The shock of Mary’s harsh reaction to Larry arrives with two Otherworld allusions. During the plane crash scene, Lavin gives readers the option of interpreting the voice that cries “Mother!” either as coming from Larry, running to her with the news, or as coming from another source. In the context of her anxieties about her daughters, the voice may also be that of one of her daughters, carried to her via some supernatural 1 Peter Haining, ed. Great Irish Tales of the Unimaginable: Stories of Fantasy and Myth (London: Souvenir Press, 1994), p. 159. Haining states that Lavin’s “interest in folklore and mythology was fostered by the nobleman-writer” Lord Dunsany, who lived near her family in County Meath.

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agency. The phrase that describes the sound as coming to Mary “from a place so very far,” could refer to Larry, because he is far from Mary’s thoughts, or could refer to the far distance of death (Lavin, Mary O’Grady 155). Furthermore, upon hearing that not only Ellie and her fiancé have died, but also Angie and her fiancé, Mary promptly passes out (161). She spends “three days” unconscious, as though in a paralyzed state that Angela Bourke states might have been referred to in more traditional households as “fairy stroke” (Lavin, Mary O’Grady 167; Bourke, Burning 35; Ó Súilleabháin, Handbook 478–9). Although Lavin sets her countrywoman down in the relative sophistication of a major city, the “odd” disembodied voice Mary seems to hear before Larry arrives signals an allusion to fairy lore (Lavin, Mary O’Grady 155). Birth, adolescence, and death, and the rites associated in a society with these conditions represent those liminal periods when the Otherworld denizens or their influence most often make their presence felt (Narváez 337, 358). People who might be singled out as living on the margins of a community, those lacking in authority, such as widows, children, young women, and lonely bachelors, are also vulnerable to fairies (Bourke, “Legends” 1285). In one example cited by Peter Narváez, the person affected is also “off” with the fairies for “three days,” but the “three days” could just as easily be a coded reference to the biblical oral tradition of the resurrection, which is significant in that Mary’s motivation as a mother revives at that time (Narváez 337; Peterson 68). In further support of the liminal moment use of Otherworld references in Lavin, Mary behaves oddly at an earlier time in the book. Just after the birth of her first child, Patrick, a neighbor offers to watch the infant so the teenage couple can go out (Lavin, Mary O’Grady 11–12). In the context of the realistic depiction of a workingclass Dublin neighborhood, Mary turns down the repeated offers, blushing, because she is breastfeeding the baby, unlike the rest of the mothers who use bottles. But Mary admits in her thoughts that “never would she contemplate for an instant leaving him with anyone” and that “she had heard stories” (Lavin, Mary O’Grady 12, 11). Lavin uses such subtle details to embed apparent realist fiction with references to another type of fictional reality, even as Hurston embeds references to the reality of racism and sexism in Otherworld stories (Meisenhelder 17). The allusion here is to the fear of infant abduction that appears in so many Otherworld tales, where leaving a child out of your sight puts the baby in danger of fairy abduction, as noted by Robin Gwyndaf in Welsh abduction tales (Gwyndaf 187). As in the works of Hurston and Morrison, Lavin’s work takes her characters’ lives and culture seriously, without the idealization of the outside “visitor” that Synge describes. Loreto Todd and Maria Gottwald support the folkloric influence in Lavin from the point of view of linguistics and narrative theory (Gottwald 188, 183). Gottwald identifies “devices characteristic of oral narrative (skaz) and those of the fairy-tale” in Lavin, while Loreto Todd uses Lavin’s work to illustrate how Irish writers indicate linguistic details of the oral tradition with references to God, non-standard verb forms, and “characteristics of Hiberno-English,” which parallels Hurston’s use of African American dialect and religious folk speech (Todd 136–7; Gottwald 188, 183). In a parallel with African American writers, A.A. Kelly observes, and Todd concurs, that Lavin’s work presents “multiple and opposing points of view,” “two ways of interpreting events,” and an Irish mastery of “half meanings”


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(Todd 137; Kelly 177). Unlike Hurston, though, Lavin’s interest in preserving “real” Irish life appears most often in subtle phrases, allusions, and references rather than in Hurston’s manner of integrating identifiable excerpts. In that tendency, Lavin more closely resembles Morrison’s altered folk references, although Lavin will usually stop short of openly revealing any magical underpinnings, as Morrison and Ní Dhuibhne do. Lavin may differ from Hurston, Morrison, and Ní Dhuibhne in degrees of direct reference to Otherworld lore and dialect, but those folkloric influences do reveal themselves under close scrutiny. Further scrutiny of Lavin’s folk references reveals, too, the author’s reinscription of “woman” in Irish culture. Sarah Briggs comments on Lavin’s rejection of Celtic myth “in the establishment of a sense of Irish national identity,” noting that Lavin “questions the dominant ideology when she re-tells old stories and subverts their messages” (Briggs, “Mary Lavin” 13). Reflecting the project of contemporary Irish women writers to recover the feminine from nationalist iconography, Lia Mills describes how those writers have been taking the “stilted, ‘pure,’ lifeless” “arrest of the feminine,” that which had been frozen into “a programmed political form,” and have reached back and “reclaimed” “legendary women” out of “specific folkloric and mythological figures in the Celtic tradition” (Mills 74, 76). This illustrates how rhetorical movement through the portal of the Otherworld, of folklore, goes both ways, how the way out of Othering may be the same way “in.” That is the way Lavin takes, even if this does not appear as much on the surface as in the poetry Mills cites. Mary battles the Otherworld Powerful Otherworld qualities in Mary’s experiences, however, appear in conjunction with the “changeling” legend found in Reidar Th. Christiansen’s The Migratory Legends (ML) legend type 5085 and various motifs (Earls 133). The text evokes such changeling-themed motifs as F320 “Fairies carry people away to fairyland”; F321.1 “Changeling” and a being who “leaves fairy substitute”; F321.1.3 and F321.1.4 “Exorcizing a changeling” and “Disposing of a changeling”; and motif F362 “Fairies cause diseases” (K. Briggs, Encyclopedia 464, 473–4; Ó Súilleabháin, Handbook 473, 475–6). The manners of speech for a woman of that time and place establish a folktinged atmosphere in the novel, but so do the recurring motifs of characters having “visions,” premonitions, fear based on “stories” heard, and subtle references to changeling stories (Lavin, Mary O’Grady 19, 12, 373, 381). Early on, when Mary’s city-bred neighbors pressure her to leave her first-born, Patrick, with them to allow her to go on outings with her husband, one woman states, “‘I suppose you think I’d let him fall out of my arms on the top of his head!” (12). Mary’s response seems at first odd, but not when taken into account with Irish folklore: “It was all Mary could do not to let it be seen how words like that made her shudder. More than anything in the world, even when she held him tightly in her own arms, she was afraid of his falling. She had heard stories ...” (12). Lavin never repeats these stories, but much Irish lore exists on the topic of infant abduction or enchantment, such as substituting healthy babies, new mothers, or other humans for sickly, mute changelings. Lavin

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leaves this gap for readers to fill in for themselves, as Morrison does with many of her folkloric references. While the ostensible “stories” Mary “heard” may refer to head injuries caused by dropping babies, her level of fear appears consistent with these more otherworldly stories, too. Mary’s frowning when Tom praises Rosie’s beauty may also be a reference to Mary’s folklore-based fear, that of the jealous Otherworld denizens who steal beautiful children. Praise of beauty traditionally alerts such characters to the existence of potential victims. Even the neighbor eyeing Patrick, offering help, might hide a threat of jealousy, perhaps, to Mary’s understanding. When she changes the topic of conversation to that of Rosie’s christening, it may be to hide Tom’s compliments from prying eyes, but it also may be to bestow some protection on the child, as unbaptized children would have been seen as “unprotected and in danger from supranormal powers and agents” (Skjelbred 219). To protect a child, one had to keep him or her “under constant supervision,” which Mary does to a fault, not even allowing anyone to babysit her children (Skjekbred 219). Images from Mary’s rural life, in the form of echoes from folklore, also reveal her innermost fears. This second clue to Mary’s motivations comes a few pages after her memory of the “stories,” again in connection with her first child. She begins “to be afraid of the fascination” mountains have for Patrick (18). When the child asks, “‘What tram would you take if you wanted to get to the mountains, Dad?,’” “something in his voice made her turn around” (18). Mary pries open his fist to reveal tram fare. “Don’t you dare think of such a thing!” she thunders, and both the boy and Tom are amazed, and Mary inwardly trembles at “her vision” (19). Intuition as “vision” and fears of loss appear throughout the book, culminating in the losses mentioned before. A “nightmare” terrifies Mary before Tom’s sudden death of something that appears to be a stroke (78, 81). Mary has a “vision” of “heavenly fields” before the end of her life, but then grieves that she won’t see her loved ones “again in the old familiar way” (349–53). She does, in the final vision at her death. However, Lavin undercuts it by having Mary’s unborn grandchild turn its back to her in an implied chastisement (381). Foreshadowed by the untold “stories” of child abduction, Patrick’s story, his irresistible attraction to far away places, and his mother’s dread, represents the subplot most overshadowed by Irish tradition. After a mourning period for Tom, when Patrick reaffirms his intent to leave, Mary thinks of “tales of the Irish emigrants from the barren sea coasts,” and with dread of the “poverty and sorrow” that “attended their departure” (89). In each instance, Mary’s understanding of the subject of immigration appears shaped by the “long ago” culture of her rural Irish town in “saying(s)” and “tales.” As before, Mary’s fears and dread of the future take shape from the folklore of her past, as well. Peter Narváez theorizes that “one of the morals” of these abduction folk tales lies in the privileging of the community’s welfare over one’s own and the dire results if one does not (Narváez 354). In keeping with this observation, Patrick puts off his departure when his father dies. Mary urges Patrick to stay at least until after his sister’s wedding. Then she requires him to use her money for passage, so as to not dishonor the family by working his way over, like sorrowful immigrants in the tales


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she has heard (Lavin, Mary O’Grady 117, 97). But Patrick resists putting the family first, according to Mary’s interpretation of duty. His admitting he already has his passport seems like a “stab” to Mary, which causes her to feel “an impulse to stab back at him” (95). Mary conflates Patrick’s desire to leave Ireland with a desire to leave her, appropriate if Mary is acting as a nightmare version of Mother Ireland here. Yet, Lavin reveals Mary’s internal dialogue: “What have I ever done that you should treat my love like this? Did you think that, whoever else might impede you in your ambitions, I, your mother, would have set obstacles before you?” (97). In the preceding pages, she does nothing but place obstacles, and in a hectoring tone of voice: “I heard it cost a small fortune to get to America, and you have to have money in your pocket when you land there. That’s a law! You have to have a five-pound note in your pocket. Did you know that?” (95). Her internal dialogue ends with, “My son I love you; but I love you less” (97). Without saying so, Mary punishes Patrick for his desire to leave. Mother Ireland, if conflated with “sainted” motherhood in the form of Mary O’Grady, is unappeasable in war or peace, it seems. This reads like a comment on the economic predicaments of the working class family in the “new” Ireland. More to the point, Mary’s ominous reflection of Mother Ireland shows her character stepping away from these aspects of the folk character in order to establish her as human. Even if this means making her less appealing, it ultimately makes Mary less “saintly” and less a part of the above/below set of extremes. Patrick’s wanderlust eventually causes him to fight his mother for her permission to go to America. She re-experiences her foreboding a number of times more, then feels a “panic” when his train leaves before she can say goodbye or impart any last words of wisdom to him (96, 126–7). Most of her “visions” seem like commonplace omens, such as Patrick’s neglecting to tell them of his return, or leaving an aunt to write for him, but the structure of the plot hints of the folkloric precursors to an otherworldly abduction (212). Robin Gwyndaf records a Welsh informant repeating a neighbor woman’s warning that one should never let children out of one’s sight, especially near the river (Gwyndaf 187). At Patrick’s slipping away, Lavin writes from Mary’s point of view that her “son, her first-born” had been “standing beside her, within reach of her hand, but now being borne so rapidly from her, perhaps for ever;” “she had been talking to a little girl,” her attention taken away from him momentarily (Lavin, Mary O’Grady 126). The train station seems a modern substitution for the river setting described in Gwyndaf, yet the distraction and snatching effect seems similar. As in many tellings, the human taken away to the Otherworld (sometimes referred to as the “land of the young,” Tír na n-Óg, a term also applied sometimes generically to “the West,” or to America) is not expected to come back. In the cases where the lost one does return, he or she returns changed in appearance and behavior, a common enough occurrence in both the stories of fairy returnees and returned immigrants. Support for Mary knowing about, and taking some credence in, otherworldly tales resurfaces on the occasion of Larry’s return from seminary. When she thinks she sees him in the darkness, her mind is “invaded by tales she had heard, of visitations and apparitions” (322). However, in Patrick’s case, returning as he does after the stock market crash of 1929, his return is marked not so much by his changed clothes, but

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by his changed behavior. In keeping with the changeling and adult abduction stories, Patrick does not speak, react, or even show recognition of his house and family, much like the illnesses attributed to fairy abduction which “have involved paralysis, loss of speech,” or the “fairy stroke,” from which the medical term “stroke” actually derives (Lavin, Mary O’Grady 228; Jenkins 315–16; K. Briggs, Encyclopedia 25; Bourke 35). Peter M. Rojcewicz, in comparing UFO abductee tales to fairy belief, describes similar outcomes to that experienced by Patrick in the novel, “Some fairy abductees suffer severe depression and catastrophic mental effects lasting a lifetime ... Instances of paralysis, burns, and disorientation are plentiful” (Rojcewicz 491). In keeping with the accounts that tie the abduction to occurrences of evil temper, depression, and paralysis, Patrick appears “dead out” to Mary, so “jaded” that “he can’t speak” (Lavin, Mary O’Grady 228). His “still and unblinking stare,” silence, and menacing presence frighten his younger sister Rosie (229). For days, Patrick does little except sleep, a common symptom of depression. Rosie and Mary, though the latter grudgingly, do see a “noticeable change in behavior patterns” in Patrick, common to “individuals most commonly diagnosed as being changelings” (Jenkins 315). While Patrick does not show such “telltale signs of a changeling” as “long fingers” and “bony development,” he does have a somewhat wan appearance, “fractious behavior and voracious appetite” (Rojcewicz 491; Lavin, Mary O’Grady 240). Patrick soon resembles one of those “eccentric, deviant, or reclusive individuals—or people with mental or physical disabilities,” who, Bourke writes, “were often said to be ‘in the fairies,’ or to have spent time ‘away’ among them” (Bourke, Burning 66). Patrick’s worst episodes are bracketed by his describing the differences between Ireland and America. Ireland compares poorly with America (or Tír na nÓg) in Patrick’s mind, a place unreal and no longer reachable for him. Placing a “changeling” character in the position of a returned immigrant reflects on the changing conditions in Ireland at the time it was becoming two countries, the Republic and Northern Ireland. Promises of riches lure Patrick away to the west, “Land of Youth,” only to have this “substitute” of himself return. If Mary’s character is conflated with Mother Ireland, Ireland could not keep Patrick safe from the threats of foreign capitalism. An indirect commentary here on de Valera’s era of distrust of outside influences in Ireland perhaps appears between the lines. Regardless of de Valera’s work, the “shabbiness” Patrick sees in comparison with the “west” drives him away. Patrick complains of lack of opportunity as part of his motivation for going away, and while that was a common enough a reason for immigrants, inclusion of it here may have further meaning (Lavin, Mary O’Grady 88, 118). Returning to some of Mary’s own otherworldly aspects, an odd change occurs to Mary’s “visions” on the first occasion of Patrick’s leaving. She lessens her nightly worrying about him when he leaves for America. Years later when a doctor tells her that the hospital for the mentally ill could release him, the doctor senses Mary’s “utter weariness,” that she “was too tired and too wearied to be able to visualize him in any other place, least of all in the home he had quitted so many years back” (346). So the doctor tells Mary that Patrick “doesn’t want to come out,” which leads Mary to accept Patrick as finally “safe” (347). Her job done, it seems, the narration states, “Yes, she was reconciled about Patrick” (347). When Patrick returns, the punishment of his “changeling” condition seems extreme. The punishment only


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reaches completion when Mary’s reaction to the doctor at the asylum causes him to keep Patrick permanently. This odd reconciliation via the doctor’s “narrative” after all those years of Mary’s fears and “visions” dramatizes another transition in Irish society. As Angela Bourke writes of the turn-of-the-century court case in The Burning of Bridget Cleary, we see a “clash” “between two different world views, two ways of dealing with troublesome people, two ways of accounting for the irrational, at a time of profound social, economic, and cultural change” (Bourke 234). Either one attributes the change to legendary forces, or one attributes it to scientifically labeled illness. Mary chooses to adopt the more modern narrative, apparently. But does she? Does she reject the doctor’s assessment of Patrick’s mental “return,” the modern narrative’s happy ending, because the narrative she may know from her past, the changeling tale, rarely promises a return to “normal”? Her understanding of “sanitorium[s]” parallels an understanding of the Otherworld, where people rarely come back from such a “holiday,” or they change, turning “grey” and old, as she sees Alice change (Lavin, Mary O’Grady 65, 257). In all of the above instances of communication between Mary and her family, we see her having to express her desires solely from a vocabulary of caring for others, which, for Mary, often incorporates folkloric expressions handed down by her mother, another being whom we only witness in Mary’s memory in the context of caring for others. We read that she cannot bring herself to explain to Tom that she feels “excruciating” pain in her breasts when he presses her to him (13). She loves her children but fears and dreads the sense of failure that their choices will cause her to feel. All her pushing of the children seems to one end, to give her a respite from emotional as well as physical caring for others. At the end of the novel, the concept of love seems rather beside the point. Lavin forces attentive readers to wonder why. When, at her death, the baby turns his or her back on Mary, we have to trace the source of this mystery, this rebuke, to her behavior, and then her behavior to its possible motives. Clues left for us in the folkloric expressions of Mary’s thoughts, speech, and actions prompt the questioning and assist in gaining further understanding. The understanding, found behind a façade of maternal “sentiment,” even as Mary, too, buries herself behind that façade, leads to a sense of wonder at Lavin’s subtlety. The indirection Mary O’Grady must use in order to have even a minimum number of her physical and emotional needs met parallels the indirection that Mary Lavin must use to explore women’s needs in general and their position in Ireland during this time specifically. The fields of Tullamore, in the novel, become a totem for the main character of everything that is safe, clean, and free in the world, yet one must wonder where it was then that her hidden communication, often hidden even from her own mind, was forced to develop. The rituals and folk customs of a country-bred housewife in early twentieth-century Dublin, her sayings, practices, “visions” and nightmares, “stories” and “tales,” and secret rages add up in layers. Mary O’Grady takes shape from a modern novel form, on top of a folkloric “changeling” subplot, on top of a subterranean—and highly critical—“tale” of alienation between the separate spheres of men and women. That tale may have perhaps contained as well an indirect critique of the specific alienation between the women of Ireland and those governing them. A kind of political writing appears in Mary O’Grady, one

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that not only anticipates the expansion of “politics” to include women’s lives in later literature, but also provides an answer to the masculine “heroics” of early twentiethcentury Irish politics. Indirectly, by purposely avoiding reference to the historical events of the period, Lavin, in effect, silences the “heroes” as clearly as that rhetoric silenced women. The depiction of a mother, one of the “ignored” mentioned by Sean O’Casey and Lia Mills, who is not at peace with her assigned sphere of influence, argues against the Irish Constitution’s “home and hearth” limitation of women (Ayling 92; Mills 69). Stifling images coming from the politicized conflation of womanhood with Mother Ireland receive an answer in the sacrificial nature of Mary’s relationships with her children. Lavin demonstrates a sly civility in appearing to acquiesce to the conflation of nationhood and motherhood, only to sabotage the relationship as well as the above/below binary extremes of otherness that have accompanied that use of “woman” as “Ireland.” Katherine Clay Bassard has observed a similar operation in African American women’s writing. Citing Anna Plato’s poetry, the writer buries “a discourse that is precisely disobedient” behind a “‘social piety’” of apparent obedience to authority, a “‘hidden transcript,’” in the phrase of James C. Scott (Bassard, Spiritual 81). Gilbert and Gubar do not quite enter upon Bassard’s understanding of such subterranean rebellion, although they do refer to what reads like a more open, English, version of Mary’s rage. They alert readers to the occasional appearance in English literature of “the Victorian angel’s scheming, her mortal fleshiness, and her repressed (but therefore all the more frightening) capacity for explosive rage,” and they could have been describing Mary O’Grady (Gilbert and Gubar 26). Mary O’Grady’s character meshes a realistic portrayal of a frustrated working-class woman with subtle references to the Otherworld, her uncanny intelligence with a blindness to her own motives, and her earthly discontent with allusions to a misappropriated image of saintliness. Otherworld references that operate within a “modern” urban context and humor that surprises readers aid Lavin in her indirect critique. In the end, we see that Lavin, as Hurston did, while writing in a time and place that restricted the publication of women’s writing, has left a legacy of ambiguity and indirection, as well as excellence, for the Irish women writers coming after her. Morrison’s ancestors and a giggling witch Toni Morrison’s novels have already had much written on their connections to African American folklore. Of the four authors here, her works have received the most critical attention, especially regarding their treatment of African American history, culture, civil rights, and women’s concerns. Trudier Harris’s Fiction and Folklore: The Novels of Toni Morrison anticipates the point that the way out of “othering,” which may have been fed by misuse of Otherworld imagery, actually winds back through the Otherworld. Harris explores Morrison’s “reconceptualization and restructuring” of recognizable folklore patterns in such a way that traditional forms are “inverted, changed, or parodied” (Harris 8). Morrison’s “primary folkloristic technique is reversal,” of western hero patterns, Horatio Alger success stories, as well as more


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“universal” tale patterns (11, 12). Binaries that become reversed include, in Harris’s account, “witchlike characters” who “turn into nurturing mothers,” “antiheroes become heroes,” north-as-freedom and south-as-oppression become transposed, “the ugly duckling does not become the beautiful swan” (12, 11). As demonstrated by Harris and other critics, Morrison lets her folk-saturated plots, settings, and characters upturn such dominant assumptions for her. In examples of Morrison’s living “ancestor” figures, her wise-women characters, critics often identify three binary-bending older women in Morrison’s novels: Pilate, Thérèse, and Baby Suggs (Harris 147, 174; Duvall 145; Atkinson 21). Each character uses her position as a wise woman to stave off negative cultural influences coming out of the dominant Anglo society, and they sometimes correct African American male attitudes, too. Susan Willis perceives a linkage between Hurston’s wanderer persona and Pilate as wanderer in Song of Solomon, just as Houston A. Baker, Jr., sees Hurston’s work on conjure lead similarly to Pilate (Willis 117; Baker 304). Thérèse from Tar Baby and Pilate from Song of Solomon are folkloric “helpers,” but ones who exert their influence beyond the boundaries identified by Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale (Harris 147). Thérèse’s “magic breasts” and Pilate’s ability to grow tall or shrink, along with their other unusual gifts, cause them to overlap with the magical category of Otherworld women somewhat, but they remain mortal wise women in the stories. Gideon, Thérèse’s kin, goes so far as to call her a “crone” in his thoughts of her (Morrison, Tar Baby 93). These characters use their folkloric traits to undermine a problematic white society in their novels. Pilate shape-shifts so the police think she is a “shaking” “old lady” (Morrison, Song 206–7). Thérèse makes the Street household think she’s another “Mary,” replacing herself as the “new” washerwoman companion to Gideon (Morrison, Tar Baby 33, 34). Baby Suggs preaches services in the forest designed to counteract the hatred heaped upon Black bodies (Morrison, Beloved 88–9). Through their deep folk understanding of the seen and unseen worlds, Pilate and Thérèse also alter how the young male protagonists think of women. For that matter, Pilate’s conjurer knowledge makes Milkman’s life possible in the first place (Morrison, Song 40, 124). Thérèse alters the life path of Son twice: when she feeds him at the point of starvation while in hiding, and when she purposely sends him off in the dark toward where the Blind Horsemen ride free from society’s constraints. Like the subterranean rebel Mary in Mary O’Grady, Thérèse fights the image of herself as a “Mary” on her specific island. The character and the text, like Lavin’s, insist on the uniquely individual qualities and passions that break Thérèse and Mary out of their society’s misguided assumption of a “Mary” as a passive, suffering servant. Chapter five will provide more detail on the undoing of the passive Virgin Mary stereotype as it appears in both Lavin and Morrison. One character who leaves the realm of mortal wise women, and without whom no discussion of wisdom and Otherworldliness in Morrison would be complete, is Circe in Song of Solomon. Milkman’s misdirected urge for gold enables him to meet the eerie Circe, a former housekeeper for the Butlers, the family who shot Jake the first Macon Dead, Milkman’s grandfather, for his land. Circe combines aspects of witch and helper figures in folklore, providing another twist to Milkman’s epic journey while assisting Milkman’s future improved unity with others. The prophetically

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named Circe keeps dogs, has the “strong, mellifluent voice of a twenty-year-old girl,” and would be over a hundred—if she were alive—and Morrison gives ample hints that she is not (Morrison, Song 240). The scene where Milkman approaches the house is compared to “Hansel and Gretel” with a smell of sweet ginger mysteriously replacing the stench of decay, and Circe’s mannerisms are compared to “Shirley Temple” (219, 248). The emphasis on Circe’s “girly” qualities not only demonstrate her Otherworldliness, but also bends the “young maiden” versus “hag” binary that appears so often in superficial redactions of fairytales and shallow fictionalizations of women’s lives. Circe complicates the character of the fairy tale witch just as Ruth Foster Dead and Hagar undercut the stereotypical purity of fairy tale heroines from Rumplestiltskin and Goldilocks (13–14, 27, 135). Despite the whimsical, witchy details, Circe remains in the world as a vengeful witness to the Butlers’ brutality, supervising the dogs as they slowly destroy the Butler mansion. Circe encompasses and exceeds the role of “witch” in Milkman’s fairy tale, as she is more supernatural helper to him, as in Propp, than witchy opposition, as in Grimm. Circe exemplifies Morrison’s retelling of the Grimm tales, while playing a role as a survivor from the grim tale of slavery. The information left out about Circe represents another example of the openings Morrison leaves for her readers. Readers may wonder why the narration does not reveal whether Circe is a ghost or an impossibly old woman. The sweet “ginger” smell that Milkman notices when he nears her house corresponds to the sweet ginger smell of the bag of bones that Pilate carries. While a miraculous detail, a sweet smell coming from human remains is also indicative in religious legends of the resting place or relic of a saint, which reflects well on Circe’s position as a character in the novel. The identity of Pilate’s bones when they were alive is left a mystery only temporarily, but Circe’s identity as dead or alive is left unresolved. Some of the particular pleasure in ghost lore is frequently derived from such indeterminacy, similar to the indeterminate status of the Vanishing Hitchhiker from urban lore. This evasion provides dramatic tension, heightened eeriness, certainly, but also underscores the centuries-long spiritual battle of African Americans against oppressive masters and employers. Irrespective of Circe’s life signs, she fights a nearly silent battle to erase the vestiges of the Butlers’ dominion, which had silenced Circe in her position as servant and the first Macon Dead; the first silenced in life, the second silenced in death. Circe and Pilate remain in readers’ memories as wisely mortal and otherworldly wise, yet deeply human folk women without whom neither Milkman nor the novel could get off the ground. At all points in Morrison’s fiction, unlike the limited functionaries of Propp’s helpers, the wise and otherworldly folk women express their thoughts and passions throughout the three novels. With these three characters, and many more, some of which will be looked at later, Morrison disrupts the above/below binary. While at times they can mimic those traits for their own trickster purposes, Pilate, Thérèse, and Baby Suggs are neither “docile” nor “savage,” but everything in between (Morrison, Race-ing xv). Seemingly overlooked older Black women, isolated from the center of human influence by Anglo society, some male characters, and by some hero tales, twist angelic and monstrous traits together with their powers and reign as the moral and spiritual centers of their stories. Under the character’s entry in the Toni


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Morrison Encyclopedia, Nicole N. Aljoe extols Thérèse as a “witch,” a “keeper of history,” and “the center of Black female authority in Tar Baby” (Aljoe 131). Noting a pattern that will affect other topics besides challenging Anglo and male authorities, James Phelan argues that readers are meant to see wise women like Baby Suggs as “a source of knowledge and wisdom throughout the novel” (Phelan 7). Yvonne Atkinson calls Pilate, Thérèse, and Baby Suggs, as well as the knowledgeable female narrator of Jazz, “griots,” “caretakers of knowledge, guardians of history” (Atkinson 21). Their communities desperately need that knowledge, judging from the difficulties of Ruth and Hagar, as Morrison’s more complicated fairy tale heroines. Although they have their human failings, such as Baby Sugg’s loss of faith and Thérèse’s capacity for hate, and therefore make mistakes of judgment, their role as sources of wisdom in the novels is a role that repeats with other older African American women elsewhere in Morrison’s work. Even Circe, in her blend of witch, ghost, and ancestor figure, projects human charms and foibles. The strong personalities of folk women enable them to speak more boldly while still holding the audience’s attention. As will be observed in later chapters, the older women’s penchant for ignoring popular opinion leads to surprising results, especially in the context of indirect argument in Morrison’s novels. Éilís Ní Dhuibhne: The wife, the witch, and the changeling Fairy tales for a postmodern world As of 2006, Éilís Ní Dhuibhne has written the novels The Bray House (1990), The Dancers Dancing (1999), and (in Irish) Dúnmharú sa Daingean (2000), and the short story collections Blood and Water (1988), Eating Women Is Not Recommended (1991), The Inland Ice (1997), and The Pale Gold of Alaska and Other Stories (2000). Like Lavin, her writing style and concerns reveal a unique understanding of her time period. Although Lavin wrote primarily from the 1930s to 1970s, and Ní Dhuibhne is writing from the 1980s through the early twenty-first century, both women’s works prove valuable resources for postcolonial and feminist critics today, as well as models for younger women writers. In particular, they can serve as models to those who seek examples of how to express oneself indirectly in the face of a variety of obstacles. Ní Dhuibhne, a curator of manuscripts in the National Library of Ireland with a doctorate in folkloristic studies, seems on the verge of gaining a wider audience outside her country, as new readers discover her works, and as Irish women’s writing continues to gain more attention. Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, in her own way, in her own publishing milieu, like Toni Morrison, uses methods of indirection to plant seeds of doubt in her readers’ gardens of assumptions. Following in the wake of Mary Lavin’s ambiguity, Ní Dhuibhne also uses a certain amount of sly civility, but mostly as incorporated into her primary strategies of indirection: folkloristic expression and folkloric, often magical, characterization. Ní Dhuibhne’s magical folk women challenge erroneous and limiting assumptions about women in conjunction with patriarchal authority, whether from Irish males, remnants of colonial pressure, or the state. Examples to

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be drawn on here include the unnamed young wife who enters the Otherworld in search of her enchanted husband in “The Search for the Lost Husband,” a futuristic “witch/wizard” who revives the worst traits of English colonists, and the elderly Irish woman “changeling” who defies her in The Bray House. Ní Dhuibhne’s works appear in a time more congenial to women writers and women’s topics, and so she does not, as David Lloyd describes it, need to rely to the same degree “on cultural practices which have appeared discontinuous, submerged,” as many women writers like Lavin and Hurston have before her (Lloyd, Anomalous 7). However, Margaret Ward, in Unmanageable Revolutionaries: Women and Irish Nationalism, calls for a reexamination of the reasons why Irish women have been cut out of the political and economic life of the country, and she calls, too, for those responsible for cutting women out to question the patriarchal belief in “the primary importance of women’s domestic role” (Ward 2). In other words, despite advances made for women in Ireland at the end of the twentieth century, the dichotomy continues between the passivity of the delicate maiden and the fearsome hag whose presence foretells the deaths of young men. Aisling or witch, images of Irish women still need recuperation. Even more, the idealized image of woman-as-Ireland needs to be addressed in light of the flesh and blood women, like Ní Dhuibhne’s unnamed young wife, whom as Lia Mills puts it, are “on the whole, ignore[d]” (Mills 69). Into this late twentieth- to early twenty-first-century atmosphere of increased openness on sexuality, greatly reduced censorship, and a still-developing women’s movement, enters Éilís Ní Dhuibhne’s fairy tales for a postmodern world. Christina Hunt Mahoney includes Ní Dhuibhne in her critical review Contemporary Irish Literature: Transforming Tradition, and she draws a generalization about Ní Dhuibhne’s generation of writers, that the ancient storytelling tradition is “largely responsible for the magical or revelatory tales recent Irish novelists and other prose writers have been telling us” (Mahoney 25). Mahoney includes Ní Dhuibhne’s writing as part of a larger movement in literature, as well as part of the Irish tradition, that encourages artists to leave behind linear narrative and “blur the historically sacred boundaries between the real and the imagined” (25). What she distinguishes as “Irish” in her critical reception of Ní Dhuibhne’s body of work leads back into oral tradition, which, for Mahoney, has never left the culture (25). With the old comes the new, however, as Christian Hunt Mahoney, in describing the title story of Eating Women Is Not Recommended (1991), describes Ní Dhuibhne’s writing as erupting “into full-scale resentment of the imposition of traditional female roles” and questioning the “strictures imposed upon married women and the expectations society has of them” (260). Ní Dhuibhne’s fiction will not likely be confused with Declan Kiberd’s picture of Lavin’s writing as “ever light and easy” (Kiberd, Inventing 409). Consciousness-raising, nevertheless, accompanies consciousness of tradition in Ní Dhuibhne’s works. Critical writing on Ní Dhuibhne’s own work has just begun to appear as of the early twenty-first century. In the meantime, Cristina Bacchilega’s Postmodern Fairy Tales: Gender and Narrative Strategies provides additional ways of looking at Ní Dhuibhne’s strategies of indirection. Bacchilega examines contemporary versions of European fairy lore in popular media and literature. She distinguishes between interpretations that “support a humanistic and nation-building project,” “like the


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Grimms” or Italo Calvino’s Italian Folktales, and those that support a postmodern “focus on subjectivity as constructed in social and narrative contexts,” like Angela Carter’s collection, The Virago Book of Fairy Tales (Bacchilega 20–21). Some signs of a postmodern approach that she sees in Carter, and which also appear in Ní Dhuibhne’s work, include that which “precipitates a conversation with and among different kinds of tales and female protagonists,” heroines who include “‘sillies,’ clever women, brave, and good ones,” and a “tongue-in-cheek” “shaping” of the tales (20–21). The occasionally bizarre appearing among the seemingly normal in the contemporary settings of these heroines only reinforces the conversational qualities of the discourse. Readers want to hear what happened next to the chatty midwife in “Midwife to the Fairies,” a woman who recognizes a family as otherworldly by how their “funny set up,” “such a big crowd of them, all living together,” resembles the TV show Dallas (Ní Dhuibhne, “Midwife” 30). Seeing the fairy family through her eyes makes the “set up” simultaneously recognizable, disturbing, and humorous. As Walter J. Ong has pointed out, “bizarre figures here add another mnemonic aid: it is easier to remember the Cyclops than a two-eyed monster, or Cerberus than an ordinary one-headed dog” (Ong 70). The bizarre appears throughout Ní Dhuibhne’s work. In “The Search for the Lost Husband,” a husband becomes a goat by day and a man by night. In The Bray House, a nuclear holocaust survivor takes refuge in a fairy fort—next to the skeleton of her husband. These bizarre details, and more, reinforce the indirect points of Ní Dhuibhne’s fiction and help her readers to remember them all the better, just as Morrison’s use of the bizarre does with Circe’s “dogged” haunting of the old mansion in Song of Solomon and Paradise’s resurrected wild women. Besides the “sillies,” the “brave,” the “tongue-in-cheek,” other accompanying signs of the postmodern in Ní Dhuibhne’s tales include doubling and ambiguity. As Bacchilega notes how postmodern feminists have altered the fairy tale, she argues that these new tales “are doubling and double: both affirmative and questioning, without necessarily being recuperative or politically subversive” (Bacchilega 22). Magic, in these fairy tales, exists not just to carry out spells or to move the plot along, but also to undo some of the less beneficial charms of the genre. Bacchilega relies on Nancy A. Walker’s understanding of these transformations, that “only those rewritings which ‘expose or upset the paradigms of authority inherent in the texts they appropriate’” can be termed, in the best feminist sense of the word, “disobedient” (Nancy A. Walker qtd. in Bacchilega 23). This unmaking appears in Ní Dhuibhne’s “The Search for the Lost Husband,” when the woman searches for him “up hill and down dale,” only to reject him in the end, stating, “... It’s time for me to try another kind of love. I’m tired of all that fairytale stuff” (Ní Dhuibhne, “Search” 262). In all of these instances, Ní Dhuibhne accesses subject matter that her forebears could not, due to censorship and social pressure. Especially with regard to her foremothers’ limitations, some of the more pointed critiques she directs toward male authority, whether in the clergy, government, or home, would have been discouraged. Gerry Smyth’s The Novel and the Nation: Studies in the New Irish Fiction underlines this new openness, “simultaneously allowing silenced voices to speak and questioning the voices which have dominated society since the revolution” (G. Smyth 177). No more do writers like Ní Dhuibhne have to adopt

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rhetorical positions outside the context of mainstream argument, as many writers in not-so-distant history were forced to, due to societal pressures and censorship in post-revolutionary Ireland (176). Where Hurston’s work and Lavin’s fiction may not have openly disrupted or obviously mocked racist or sexist assumptions, Ní Dhuibhne’s sarcasm in “Search” flows freely (Ní Dhuibhne, “Search” 261). Even more sarcasm flows through her other folkloric stories that feature modernday “fairies,” mermaids, and witches. Where Hurston can only hint at the rebellion behind her faux-obsequious compliments to her patrons, and where Lavin can only have Mary O’Grady ponder her husband’s almost bovine view of her, Ní Dhuibhne and Morrison have their mermaids, bootlegging women, and “go-go girls” defy the male characters, who are left to scratch their heads in puzzlement. The strong presence of Irish tradition in Ní Dhuibhne’s work recalls, also, that Irish satirists were among the last to be silenced in ancient times: “It was held that not only would a person be shamed by verbal abuse, but that they could actually be harmed physically by the power of words. The satires were seen almost as magical spells” (Harrison 32). These women’s fiction provides the verisimilitude that readers frequently expect, while it leads readers to question the nature of that supposed reality. Barreca describes the process that begins this questioning: “By encoding a system of language shifts that continually displace us from the fixed, naturalized meanings of commonplace phrases, our ‘naturalized’ mythology is called into question” (Barreca, Last Laughs 250). This process would also explain how Ní Dhuibhne, as well as Morrison, Lavin, and Hurston, defeats extremes of otherness applied to women from their times and cultures by referring to images that allude to these stereotypes and then by undermining the images with their complex, contradictory, and surprising folk-women characters. For Ní Dhuibhne, disrupting stereotypes comes most often through the agency of magical folk women. How to dump a goat In “The Search for the Lost Husband,” The Bray House, and her other works of fiction, Ní Dhuibhne’s writing displaces the audience from any casual disregard of what words can do, whether magical, satirical, or bizarre. As Barreca writes, “Women’s comedy is ‘dangerous’ because it refuses to accept the givens and because it refuses to stop at the point where comedy loses its integrative function. This comedy by women is about de-centering, dis-locating and de-stabilising the world” (Barreca, Last Laughs 15). Ní Dhuibhne’s folkloric fiction demonstrates, in its humor, this “de-centering” aspect at its fullest. With some “disobedient” touches, Ní Dhuibhne “unmakes” some of the internal workings of a folktale which appears in Ireland and elsewhere, Thompson tale type 425 “The Search for the Lost Husband” (Thompson motifs B600–B699 “Marriage of Person to Beast” and Thompson motif D621.1 “Animal by day; man by night”) (Ó Súilleabháin, and Christiansen, Types of the Irish Folktale 90; S. Thompson, Folktale 490). The tale type appears in her story appropriately titled, “The Search for the Lost Husband” from her collection The Inland Ice and Other Stories. Some significance in the title bearing the exact wording as that in the tale type may lie


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in the fact that Éilís Ní Dhuibhne holds a doctorate in folkloristic studies and has published scholarly articles on the subject. The story appears in short increments before, between, and after Ní Dhuibhne’s other stories in her collection The Inland Ice and Other Stories. Enchanted spouses appear throughout variants of type 425 “The Search for the Lost Husband,” such as in motifs like D133.2 “Transformation: man to bull,” as featured in “The Speckled Bull,” in Seán Ó Súilleabháin’s Folktales of Ireland and in Ó Súilleabháin’s Handbook of Irish Folklore, under category number 1 in the section “Tales of Magic” (Ó Súilleabháin, Folktales of Ireland 117, 267; Ó Súilleabháin, Handbook 611). Ní Dhuibhne’s version, though, features a transformation of a man to a “little white goat,” who charms a farmer’s daughter (Ní Dhuibhne, “Search” 1). (Similar story lines also appear in tale types 425, 430, 432, and 441 in Suto, Zulu, Bondei, and Hausa lore [Klipple 155–8].) The husband story also exemplifies motifs C31 “Tabu: offending animal wife,” which comes close to this wife’s offending her animal husband; D700 “person disenchanted”; D1472.1.7 “Magic table [here a magic table cloth] supplies food and drink”; and D1652.1 “Inexhaustible food” (S. Thompson, Folktale 490–91). Christina Hunt Mahoney interprets the interspersing of the tale’s fourteen sections throughout the book as replicating the performance and experience of a “nightly story telling” and giving “an authentically folkloric ring to this tale” (Mahoney 260). Yet this “sprinkle of magic” from a folkloric context enables Ní Dhuibhne to deliver “trenchant social commentary,” that although “answering a feminist imperative,” is “not constrained by contemporary feminist fashion or critical dicta” (261). Irish fairy lore, as a basis for a type of feminist subtext in fiction, is more appropriate than a superficial reading of watered-down fairy tales would lead one to believe. People of the Otherworld in Ireland, the fairies, originate in the Daoine Sidhe (“fairy people”). Referred to in Irish as the sí for short, according to legend, these people dwell in the mounds that dot the Irish landscape. Also known as the Tuatha Dé Danann, the “children of the goddess Danann, a Mother Goddess who fought alongside other goddesses to displace the “first” inhabitants of Ireland, the Firbolgs (K. Briggs, Encyclopedia 87–8). After another set of ancient invaders, the Milesians, supplant Danann’s people, they become the fairy folk who supposedly dwell in the mounds, in addition to air and water (K. Briggs, Encyclopedia 318– 20, 418). The mounds also serve sometimes in the folklore as portals between the worlds of the living and the dead. The history of the sí as a people belonging to a strong, warring goddess affects the folklore that follows. Tok Thompson examines different theories regarding the sí legends. According to Thompson, elements in the early legends indicate a struggle between the matrilineal, and more matriarchal, “pre-Celts,” the Tuatha Dé Danann who become the sí, and the kings of the Celtic tribes (T. Thompson 113). Queens like Medb in the Táin Bó Cúailnge (“The Battle for the Bull of Cooley”) struggle with kings like Aillill, each one assuming that power will issue from one gender or the other (113–14). In other words, the sí, with their connections to the past, the dead, and an “Other” world of magic, are also a people representing the “Other” as critics think of the term (116). From the viewpoint of the conquered, of an emphasis on powerful women, of those not just pushed aside, but literally driven underground, the Otherworld folk do, in fact, come

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across as “Othered” (147). Even in the late twentieth century, Patricia Lysaght cites the unconventional appearance and behavior of the banshee as inspiration for a radical feminist journal, Banshee (1975), and a punk rock band, Siouxsie and the Banshees (Lysaght, The Banshee 37, 243). The bean sí translates to “fairy woman,” but one with influence limited to acting as a local death harbinger (30). However, her reputation for having a surprisingly loud wail and an alarming appearance does not conform to patriarchal concepts of passive womanhood, especially not the domestic images prevalent in the de Valera years following the 1937 Constitution. Furthermore, the theoretical origin for that character in the badhb (“name of a wargoddess”), a “dangerous, frightening and aggressive” female being, holds a possible connection, as Lysaght phrases it, to those Irish tales that represent the Otherworld as “The Land of Women” (Tír inna mBan) (37, 32). Thus, Irish fairy lore, when more fully explored, reveals a rich resource for authors challenging stereotypes of women as passive household “angels,” and the more queenly aspects of the tales balance out the possibly “monstrous” qualities of the banshee. This background may lend a fuller understanding for Ní Dhuibhne’s forays into the Otherworld for contemporary short stories and novels. In one such story that challenges male and female roles, she begins “The Search for the Lost Husband” with the formulaic opening, “Long long ago there was a farmer ...” “Every day” the little white goat comes to the daughter’s door, and “eventually,” she falls in love with it. “After a year or so the goat stopped coming ... an old woman told her that he had gone over the road to the east. When the girl heard that, she set off after him” (Ní Dhuibhne “Search” 1). Thus begins this modern fictionalization. The qualities, however, that would include this version in Cristina Bacchilega’s category of the postmodern would also include it among examples of folkloristic expression and humor as strategies of indirection. While innocuous on the first page, the phrase, “After a year or so the goat stopped coming,” this line grows to take on the overtones of an on-againoff-again affair of contemporary times. In the second installment, the unnamed daughter sets “up home in a big fine house. And he was a goat by day and a man by night” (27). “Well and good,” as some Irish storytellers say, but then the goat sets certain taboos on the young woman. He decrees that, upon the birth of their baby, “if anything happened,” if she were to “shed a tear,” “she would lose him, her husband” (43). All three babies are “snatched” from her, with the goat watching her closely to make sure she does not show her emotions. “Haven’t you me for company?” is his shallow reply. The narrator ends this with the formulaic phrase, “That’s how it was,” which carries a hint of doleful resignation, like a tone appropriate to the reciting of a friend’s failed affair. At this point, not only do the formulaic punctuating phrases, generic setting, and magic seem familiar, so do the reactions of some of the characters to the situation. Only these do not take their familiarity from the world of legends, but from something modern and mundane: the restrictions and persuasions women hear sometimes from the lips of lovers and husbands. The threat of a husband’s leaving held over the young mother’s head recalls motif F833.2 “Sword of Damocles. Sword hung on thin thread above person,” a motif Críostóir Mac Cárthaigh actually does see in variants of “Midwife” (Mac Cárthaigh 138). The sword in this case is the expression


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of any emotion displeasing to the goat-man, a common enough occurrence in nonlegendary fiction. The wording further on starts to emphasize, more and more directly, these aspects familiar from modern relationship stories, especially after she sheds one tear after her third baby is “taken away from her” (Ní Dhuibhne, “Search” 77). The husband’s wording becomes stronger and more idiosyncratic and deviates from the generic quality of folklore encountered in some transcripts. This wording exists in Ní Dhuibhne’s translation of “The Story of the Little White Goat” in The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, which perhaps reflects how she aims to preserve the performative flavor of the tale (Ruiséal 1219–32). The dialogue takes on the idiosyncratic qualities that the storyteller herself, Máire Ruiséal, might have infused in the characters during performance. Looking over the summaries of “Tales of Magic” in A Handbook of Irish Folklore, one is hard pressed to find arguments over separation as a specific motif, but here you do: “‘... I warned you,’ he said. ‘You can cry away as much as you like now, but I won’t be here to comfort you. I’m leaving you now ... you haven’t got a chance of getting me back’” (Ní Dhuibhne, “Search” 77–8). Yet this plot element exists in “The Story of the Little White Goat” translation. The rhythm and syntax of the voices sound like the Hiberno-English of Irish folk tales, and the narrator inserts once more, “That’s how it was.” Ní Dhuibhne’s knowledgeable recreation of Irish dialect recalls Hurston’s expertise, while Ní Dhuibhne’s updated context reminds one of Morrison and of Lavin’s more contemporary stories. The respect all four show to their characters’ voices may have begun with the Harlem and Irish Renaissance movements, but it is continually refreshed with the later authors’ respect for their characters’ lives. The parallel structure of “you can’t keep your eyes dry/you can’t have me” and the repetition of “he said” to punctuate the lines all reflect traditional oral storytelling style. The increasing threats of the goat-man, though, seem to speak of a more recent vintage of fiction. One might find such individualized details of a failed relationship as “you can’t keep your eyes dry” in the modern novel or short story. Especially in stories of the late twentieth-/early twentyfirst century, authors still describe similarly troubled relations between men and women, such as in stories by short story authors in The New Yorker. Normally one doesn’t find such specifics on a couple’s relationship in folktales, at least not as they are usually recorded in print. This points to how Ní Dhuibhne sees in folklore the possibilities for a disobedient, tongue-in-cheek approach that “expose[s]” not only “the paradigms of authority inherent” in the folktale in which the woman goes over hill and dale, “briars and brambles,” unquestioningly, to pursue the lost husband, but also the paradigm of authority inherent in many women’s affairs in which she must squelch her emotions to keep from “scaring off,” as it were, a none-too-committed lover (Bacchilega 23; Ní Dhuibhne “Search” 103). This may point, also, to Éilís Ní Dhuibhne’s sense of the performative in storytelling, the individual teller’s own infusion of personality in use of character detail and embellishment. The commentary on the power of utterance, and the denial of utterance, that occurs in a modern relationship where the scale of influence has tipped on one side or the other, in cases like this, strikes one as an example where folkloric indirection can broach a still-delicate subject. One could imagine a woman in such a relationship leaving the innocuous-looking “folktale” out on a

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table for a man, much like one hears of people leaving out something as “public” and seemingly “neutral” as a newspaper advice column. The public nature of folklore, its popular image as something for children, non-political, unbiased, non-threatening, in this case works to slip in some “questioning,” as Bacchilega describes, about the nature of power in romantic relationships. Yet this story stays in the realm of the “affirmative” pleasures of a folkloristic short story. A directly critical approach, as other feminist authors might write for an audience of like-minded readers, would not likely be read by a broader audience, one that would include men who perhaps bear some resemblance to the little white goat. In addition, the irony of the statement, “You can cry away as much as you like now, but I won’t be here to comfort you,” lies in a Bakhtinian sense of layering between the author-storyteller, the narration, the character himself in the tale, and the reader. The character does not sense the irony that he was never there to “comfort” her at any other time, or the irony that the first clause of the sentence automatically cancels out any possibility of the second clause being true. The dialogue in the narrative appears as a knowing wink to the readers, much as it would to an audience of listeners, that the woman, at least in this instance, is blameless. The final “disobedience” of the story is the end: after tracking down the husband, losing him, tracking him, trading magic scissors, a magic comb, and a “foodproducing cloth,” lifting the curse, and getting her children back, the young woman alters the plot by telling him, I think I’ve had enough of you ... Goodbye to you now ... And maybe I will find another husband, who will be kind to me and my children, and who will look after all of us and not lead us around in circles. Because it’s time for me to try another kind of love. I’m tired of all that fairytale stuff.” (Ó Súilleabháin, Folktales of Ireland 611; Ní Dhuibhne, “Search” 262)

This, too, like the goat-husband’s break up speech, carries more nuances of contemporary informal discourse than oral tradition, as it is usually documented, does. Ní Dhuibhne has mostly changed only the ending from translation. The irony of a fairytale-like character commenting that she herself has tired of “fairytale stuff,” and her subversion of the ending—she leaves him—indicates a reversal emblematic of Regina Barreca’s feminist humor. Ní Dhuibhne, in fact, has commented on her reversal of the traditional reunion ending: “I reversed that because I felt that wasn’t an appropriate ending ... In the book, I am exploring a destructive kind of sexual love, and having gone through all the trials and tribulations that the girl in the story goes through, and then to stay with the man, seems like the wrong conclusion” (Moloney 112). The woman admits she’s become tired of “running in circles,” of being led in a “merry dance,” spoken sarcastically, and the revised ending shows her acting on what she has learned. Ní Dhuibhne ends her collection with this development, and with this concluding formula: “That is my story. And if there is a lie in it, it was not I who made it up. All I got for my story was butter boots and paper hats. And a white dog came and ate the boots and tore the hats. But what matter? What matters but the good of the story?” (Ní Dhuibhne, “Search” 262). When I asked Ní Dhuibhne about the


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formulaic phrasing, including the meaning of “butter boots and paper hats,” she wrote back, “Nonsense, I think, the message being that the storyteller got nothing at all (i.e., no material gain) for the story” (Appendix). In other words, it represents a folktale’s traditional run of “nonsense” at the end. In this way, Ní Dhuibhne ends her reinterpretation of both Type 425 and modern break-up stories with humor, folk tradition, and graceful absurdity. Unmaking the world in The Bray House In what Christine St Peter calls “historiographic metafiction,” The Bray House juxtaposes an unreliable narrator’s interpretation of logic with the trust readers may place in what Ní Dhuibhne refers to as the folklore at the novel’s “heart” (St Peter 156; Hand 103; Appendix). The affinities Derek Hand and Gerardine Meaney see between postmodern writing and fantastic literature are enhanced by Éilís Ní Dhuibhne’s use of folkloristic expression, because science fiction enables questions to be raised “about the nature of the world and mode of being in the world,” it “asks, ‘What if ... ?’” (Hand 104; Meaney, (Un)like Subjects 85). The Bray House finds the real life issues at the heart of the “fantasy” in folklore and joins it to the interrogation of science fiction (85). By positioning folklore next to science fiction, Éilís Ní Dhuibhne solves one of the primary stylistic difficulties of science fiction, the delay in pacing caused by the need to acclimate readers to a sometimes literally alien setting. With the familiarity of folklore, even to a certain extent with tales types and motifs from another culture, the rules of the science fiction universe do not need as much explanation. Folklorist and theorist Tok Freeland Thompson states that, while folklore provides “templates for conceptions of the past, the templates themselves can contain truly ancient forms, out of which new interpretations are constantly fashioned” (T. Thompson 124). Having folklore hovering in the background, as in Ní Dhuibhne’s fiction, leaves such a “template” to familiarize readers, especially in The Bray House’s rendition of “a new interpretation,” that is, an alternate reality of the future. As a result, the verisimilitude from replicated experiences, such as that which we find in “The Search for the Missing Husband,” reappears in The Bray House. The fantastic, “like science fiction,” Hand writes, tests limits and boundaries and “questions accepted assumptions” by estranging readers from the familiar (Hand 104). Fairy legends function similarly to science fiction and fantasy genres, Angela Bourke notes. While “fairy legends have been denigrated as superstition, and trivialized in ethnic stereotypes,” the legend enables “the expression of ambivalence and ambiguity,” provides a “firm, yet forgiving” model, and offers a medium “flexible enough to accommodate transgression” (Bourke, Burning 235). Bourke, in fact, cites Ní Dhuibhne’s fiction for her example of this rhetorical flexibility (235). The familiarity generated by Ní Dhuibhne’s references to witches, selkie, mermaid, and changeling legends, and Otherworld motifs of the Tuatha Dé Danann acclimates readers to her post-nuclear apocalyptic future. The issues of real life, of women’s lives, that can lie at the core of examples of folklore, such as both Ní Dhuibhne and Bourke have uncovered, can be investigated, tested, questioned, but

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left free of any dogmatic closure through the “fictional space” Hand sees in fantasy and science fiction and through “firm yet forgiving” model Bourke sees in folklore. In seeming contradiction to the discursive spaces described by Hand and Bourke, the novel’s protagonist presents the story as her scientific “report” of an exhibition. Even as the earliest science fiction novels seek to suspend disbelief with the trustworthy appearance of an objective report, as in H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898), The Bray House also presents an unreal future in a format we associate with provable data, the scientific report. The apparent objectivity of the novel’s form will soon invite doubts, however. The first-person narration of the voyage of the crew of archeologists aboard the Saint Patrick is told by Robin Lagerlof, who might be considered a model for the unreliable narrator. The Bray House is set in the near future, early- to mid-twenty-first-century Europe. Robin Lagerlof, a Swedish archeologist, organizes an expedition to Ireland to search for the remains of Irish civilization after a nuclear accident that, it has been assumed, killed everyone. Once among the ruins, Robin’s tenuous command of her team, and her mind, unravels. Likewise, Robin’s narration of the voyage of the Saint Patrick becomes progressively unreliable, and folkloric characters and motifs increasingly appear in situations that remind Robin that her authority is not absolute. Christina Hunt Mahoney describes the narration as “peculiarly cold and disaffected,” but one which “helps to fuse plot, characters, and imagery in a chilling cautionary tale” with “allegorical implications” (Mahoney 259). Not only do Robin’s blanket pronouncements provoke mistrust, as when she states, “I rarely, if ever, make mistakes,” she admits to lying when it suits her purpose (Ní Dhuibhne, Bray 7). As recorded in Robin’s “research objectives,” “The aim of the Ireland Expedition was to survey the Hibernian region in the wake of the Ballylumford disaster, to estimate the extent of the damage from an archaeo-ethnological point of view, and to assess the possibility of future archeological excavations in the area” (117). They excavate an upper-middle-class house in Bray, a seaside town twelve miles from Dublin in County Wicklow, the house of a couple who had been in the process of divorcing at the time of the nuclear disaster, which echoes Robin’s own parents’ divorce, and the tensions she experienced with her deceased husband. She shares these memories with the readers, often denying that these memories, or her own feelings of guilt attached to them, have any impact on her current feelings or actions. Karen, her chief excavator, is also divorced, with a son Robin describes as “an obnoxious brat” (10). Robin, after alienating her crew and trying to torture a mute refugee into speech, shoots crewmate Karl in her attempt to retrieve his notes on meeting the apparently silent woman. She claims he commits suicide, expects a grand welcome and immediate fame upon returning to Sweden, becomes angered when she does not receive this, then becomes outraged when, after a lengthy quarantine, she is sent to jail on suspicion of murder. Her exhibit, which she expects to make her famous once and for all, is “stalled” for five years, interest fades, and Robin shoots herself (255). Her book and exhibition finally arrive in the public eye, posthumously. Her obituary forms the “Epilogue,” and reveals this information to us, as the rest of the book is presented as her personal records and report of the expedition. In death, Robin is finally called “one of the truly original minds of the age,” too late for her to enjoy it (255).


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In life, in these “records,” the narrator often justifies her combative attitude toward her crew, Karen, Karl, and Jenny, by pleading that they are against her, that all her actions are ultimately reasonable and moral. Despite her image of herself as the magnanimous leader, Robin frequently makes catty, even sexist, comments about her crew members. Despite her image of herself as a confident iconoclast, Robin always speaks of her emotions and reactions to events as being representative of everyone concerned, as though she cannot bear to be alone in her response, contradicting her insistence on her own originality and unique genius for insight. Witches, selkies, fairy mounds, mermaids, and changelings, familiar to readers from childhood, create a point of connection for readers in this post-nuclear apocalyptic future. Alterations to the folklore, as they appear in The Bray House, mirror changes over the centuries to Irish culture, especially with regard to women’s history and colonialism. Taken together, the alterations reveal a cautionary tale, containing implied warnings of a dystopic future for Ireland and England. Explicit references to folk culture combine with deliberate reversals. Cultural “fall-out” from colonialism and implications of different interpretations of feminism materialize in The Bray House in sly, humorous, and folkloristic ways that challenge reader assumptions. Regarding tensions over interpretations of womanhood, Ní Dhuibhne admits that even now, “Being too feminist is also unacceptable to a lot of Irish people.” Still, Ní Dhuibhne notes that folklore provides her with a way to “to emphasise feelings and ideas which are touchy. Metaphor or symbol can distance writer and reader from an idea while simultaneously deepening its impact and meaning” (Appendix). In fact, she is conscious that folklore has “clearly” had an impact on this novel, stating that, “The Bray House has at its heart a legend.” All of this allows the author to interpret subjects in new ways that would, with a more direct address, cause some readers to close the book. Examples from Ní Dhuibhne’s The Bray House demonstrate how these strategies function within their narratives. One of those subjects that Ní Dhuibhne has indicated still causes readers to tune an author out is feminism. Feminism appears favorably portrayed in the actions of one of the more likeable women onboard, Jenny. Yet Ní Dhuibhne’s allusions to witches, selkies, otherworldly underground dwellers, mermaids, and changeling lore seem to read like a critique of an interpretation of feminism that repeats the mistakes of the patriarchal and colonial past. Each of her magical characters, as with the no-longer-ignored unnamed wife in “Search,” disrupt or complicate placement of Irish women on an above/below binary. The examples cited here will include Ní Dhuibhne’s outrageous “witch/wizard” Robin and her would-be victim, an elderly survivor/changeling Maggie. Ní Dhuibhne has visited the witch folk character before, also in ways that cause readers to question not only their assumptions about witches in fiction, but also their assumptions about women in the real world. Other modern-day “witches” appear in her short stories. In “Some Hours in the Life of a Witch,” a put-upon mother of two has a “metamorphosis” in a hospital waiting room from “competent professional woman to haggard drudge,” and then to a “witch,” when she can no longer tolerate the unrealistic expectations of the hospital staff (Ní Dhuibhne, “Some Hours” 128, 130). The moments of transformation for the contemporary characters usually appear

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when the women have to decide whether hanging on to “control” over their expected persona is worth the effort or not (128–30). They “become” witches when they realize that they have spent too much effort on an ideal unworthy of their energy. A similar moment occurs for Lennie in “Eating Women is Not Recommended,” when, panicstricken about ruining the turkey for her lunch party, she rushes into the bewildering bounty of her local supermarket. After noting the number of items on the shelves exist to make women into idealized objects of desire, another shopper and a manager point out that Lennie has blood on her pants. The shopper, a woman, shows some sensitivity about it; the manager, another woman, browbeats Lennie about the blood. On finding out at home that the spot is “the size of a new penny. No, smaller,” Lennie storms back to the store and transforms, metaphorically, into what she calls “the menstruating tiger” (Ní Dhuibhne, “Eating Women” 137, 139). The ability to transform into animals, especial cats, has always been one of the skills of witches (Ní Dhuibhne, “Old Woman as Hare” 77; Opie and Tatem 57; Ó Súilleabháin, Handbook 446). Yes, the police haul Lennie off for “breach of the peace.” But her real magic act, like the mother’s in the hospital, is to reveal some unseemly “taboo” beneath the dainty façade society has forced upon women: “The crime is being seen. This blood is not to be seen: it’s to be invisible, odourless, unspoken. Because it’s female blood, isn’t that it?” (Ní Dhuibhne, “Eating Women” 140). Likewise, Kay in “Transformers in the Sky” pictures herself transforming into a hare, in keeping with the Irish witch tale “The Old Woman as Hare,” when she can no longer abide the hypocrisy and snobbery of a school “parents’ committee” (Ní Dhuibhne, “Transformers” 148–9, 143; Ní Dhuibhne, “Old Woman as Hare” 77). (The pun of “transformers” here combines Kay’s route of escape with a reference to a popular toy, owned by her son Keith, which switches from robot to car or plane.) The interesting problem shared by all the “witches” in these stories is that the pressures that instigate their identities as “transformers” arise as much from other women who enforce the status quo as much as from the men who do. These witches have an element of the trickster about them, since their expressions of discontent come out in ways that evoke memories of animal stories. The “woman as hare” comes closest to the trickster, especially to the story of Brer Rabbit, as she shapeshifts as a way of fooling her neighbor to get milk. The difference with Ní Dhuibhne’s “hare” lies with the fact that women prompt the need for transformation and escape. With other women helping to trigger the women’s transformations, the perceived cliché of feminism perpetuating a “male versus female” binary conflict becomes muddied. The folk figure of the witch in these cases shows up to alter the balance of power between women who have had “enough” and the agents of a patriarchal social code, regardless of gender. In one other witch-related story, however, “The Wife of Bath,” women work together. The magical longevity of Chaucer’s character allows her to take a distanced view of societal taboos. Her inhuman age, though she looks only around “forty,” and her advice to the protagonist put the Wife into the categories of both the otherworldly witch or hag and the magisterial wise woman, rather like Morrison’s Circe and ancestral wise women (Ní Dhuibhne, “Wife of Bath” 91; Ó Súilleabháin, Handbook 446). Her humorous ability to flaunt society’s expectations of women and her arguments about marital “maistrye” free the story’s protagonist. The formal tie


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to otherworldly hag folklore is only alluded to with the reference to “maistrye,” as the short story does not retell the Wife of Bath’s tale that combines the folk motifs of “Ugly by Day, Fair by Night” (motif D621.3), “Loathly Lady” (motif D732), and “Riddle propounded with penalty for failure” (motif H541) (K. Briggs, Encyclopedia 434). The question of the “hag versus beautiful maiden” binary inherent in the original Wife of Bath’s tale becomes complicated by the ambivalent discussion of power in marriage carried on between the modern-day Wife and the contemporary Irish wife. Some time after they hash out these concepts of power and authority, the Wife and the protagonist hop on the back of the Wife’s “broad-backed mare,” ride past the prim tourists, and jump into the Roman bath (Ní Dhuibhne, “Wife of Bath” 103). In the “bubbles,” the contemporary protagonist dissolves her “realization of whom [she] was, what [she] was, of the privileges and duties that [she] should bear” (104). She dissolves in the “sacred spring” along with the “parchment” Wife (104). She does so “laughing,” though, making her escape from her cartoonishly insensitive husband and “brat” son. Broadly comic, such fantasies of comeuppance, escape, and truth-telling rely on references to folk women, especially witch-like, transforming women, to help the harsher truths go down with a laugh. The untold ages of the references to folk women predate the contemporary arguments about authority, whether women should be seen and not heard—or smelled—and whether domestic duties take up too much space in one’s brain, and soften the initial impact of sharp social commentary. Folkloric indirection eases the way for the rhetorical points of the stories to reach their targets in readers’ minds, while Ní Dhuibhne’s humorously bizarre characters help the points to remain in readers’ memories. In The Bray House, the otherworldly transformations operate for good and ill, as the antagonistic narrator, Robin, becomes a “witch” but is thwarted by an unusual wise woman, Jenny, and another magical woman, Maggie. Like three of the short stories above, a transforming woman must battle another woman who upholds a dangerous status quo of sexist attitudes, as well as a revived colonialism. This time, the “witch” allusion carries negative, not freeing, connotations. Yet a partnership founded on magical folk allusions forms between the young woman Jenny and the older woman Maggie that defeats Robin the “witch/wizard.” Jenny also visits the Otherworld like the unnamed Wife in “The Search for the Lost Husband,” and so also appears as a “maiden” or liminal character from fairy lore. As becomes apparent later in the book, though, the reader must update Jenny’s liminal position to that of young pregnant woman, as she is not the “quintessential maiden” Robin mistakes her for (Ní Dhuibhne, Bray 13). Between Maggie and Jenny, we meet the novel’s most vibrant folk women representing the Otherworld and wisdom. Robin ends up playing out another otherworldly character, as playfully presented in the novel, the amalgamated “witch/wizard.” With this set of characters, a maiden acts like a knowing older woman, a knowing older woman acts like a changeling or mermaid, and the self-appointed heroine acts like a villainous “hag.” Human and fairy figures mix, age roles meander back and forth, and, in Robin’s case, the sexes become blurred, and the “ignored” are heard, all while undermining the narrator’s authority. Ní Dhuibhne ties the disruption of binaries through folk women, and other folk references in the novel, quite closely to the overthrow of Robin as a cultural imperialist.

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Early on in the novel, Robin alludes to witches in the context of guilt, stating that some survivors saw in the Swedes’ “friendship with nature” “some sort of diabolic pact, such as medieval witches enjoyed” (24). She claims that her fellow Swedes began to see themselves after the disaster as “effeminate, false, witches, hags” (25). This survivor’s guilt is described as “This awful, silly, vain guilt” by Robin (23). She claims, “I had not, indeed, personally experienced any guilt at all as a result of the Ballylumford affair, and so did not require purging” (20). We later have much reason to doubt her claims when she admits her husband died while visiting his parents, without her, when the cataclysm hit Ireland. The witch as a folkloric image in the book becomes prominent after Robin overhears the crew criticizing her “lust for power” and megalomania. Robin rationalizes this behavior as “quite normal” to “anyone who has investigated the witch-hunting process,” a behavior rooted in “guilt” over mistreatment of the witch that amplifies into “hatred” of her: “Blame is transferred from the community to the individual who has been victim all along. In our little community, the witch was me” (197). Folk references to witches take on more importance to the plot when crew member Jenny tells her a “fairy (hill)” tale and casts Robin as the “wicked old witch” or, reflecting Robin’s possible internal tensions regarding gender and sexuality, “a witch-like wizard” (218–19). Beginning with “‘once upon a time,’” “in a low intense tone, a story-teller’s voice,” Jenny tells of two “rejected, dejected, worn out, useless” feeling people, Karl and Jenny, who defy the witch/wizard, who has abandoned them to wander the “desert,” “dressed only in bikinis” (219). More bizarre and humorous details appear in Jenny’s telling that recall other absurd and satirical images from Ní Dhuibhne’s other fairy tale-inspired stories. Folkloristic expression of this tension between women as well as between the colonizer and the colonized become embodied in the silent underground survivor, Maggie. Survivor’s guilt, power lust, and sexual confusion masquerade in witch costume, and later on a real human woman masquerades in Robin’s imagination as a mermaid and a green changeling. But upon arriving on the Irish coast, Robin sees breast-like mounds that give death, not life. Paradoxically, Jenny sees a womblike entrance to the Otherworld that provides life instead of death. When the formal record of the expedition begins two-thirds of the way through the novel, the “site of the Bray House” is entered as being in “the townland of Raheenaclig (Ir Little Fort of the Stones)” (119). Mounds or hills like these have been the nexus of much lore and many folktales, often with reference to the Tuatha Dé Danann, or the “Children of Danann,” the fabled predecessors of the Celts. Tales of the “Good People,” or fairies, often include references to these mounds as the entry points to the Underworld of supernatural beings of human-like appearance. The human dead sometimes end up in this world and, on rare occasion in the tales, return. In this novel, an ecological disaster, hastened by continued postcolonial economic woes in Ireland, extends the deathly eeriness of the underground chamber to the whole country. Maggie’s encounters with the crew of the St Patrick combine references to the Otherworld, as well as to mermaid and changeling lore. Jenny compares Maggie’s emerging from her fallout shelter, a fairy fort or mound, to the sighting of “a ghost, or some kind of otherworld creature, the kind of thing you read about inhabiting


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fairy mounds in Ireland ... the Tuatha De Danainn ... a race of little people who have vanished into the mounds” (222). Even Jenny compares Maggie’s emerging from the crack in the rocks of the mound to the sighting of “a ghost, or some kind of Otherworld creature, the kind of thing you read about inhabiting fairy mounds in Ireland (222). Robin says that Elinor/Maggie has been “buried alive,” and Jenny compares to her a “daughter of Lazarus” (223–4). Katharine Briggs recounts that Lady Wilde’s Ancient Legends of Ireland places the Tuatha Dé Danann “under the heading of ‘Cave Fairies’” and cites motif no.s A1611.5.4.3 and F211.0.2.1 for them (K. Briggs, Encyclopedia 418). They represent the same “good people,” otherworldly mound dwellers, who would take infants, women, and some men and leave strange beings, changelings, in their place. “The connotations of changeling-labeling are never positive,” as Bourke writes, “... neighbors who might not assign a label themselves could nevertheless use one already assigned as euphemism or evasion” (Bourke, Burning 43). “The subtlety of stories” such as these legends, Bourke states, gives “ambivalence” “a stage on which to perform,” and provides an appropriate canvas for strategies of indirect rhetoric in fiction (121). Maggie takes “one look” at the pair in their colorful anti-radiation suits and vanishes “back into the mound” (Ní Dhuibhne, Bray 222). Robin describes Maggie as “emaciated, apparently bald, with wide crazed eyes staring from greenish skin” (216). Maggie makes “no response whatsoever. Her bright, wild eyes” remain “curiously expressionless. Her mouth did not smile, indeed, the muscles of her face seemed atrophied. And so did her tongue.” Maggie’s wooden affect reminds one of the literally wooden figures, or “stock,” that sometimes appear in fairy legend as changelings substituted for stolen people (K. Briggs, Encyclopedia 25). Her behavior also resembles Mary Lavin’s portrayal of Patrick, the eldest son in Mary O’Grady, who returns from America with similar drastic changes. In the case of Bridget Cleary’s mound-related story, one version claims that Bridget’s silence, from her illness, caused her husband and male acquaintances to threaten her, saying, “‘We’ll make you speak’” (Bourke, Burning 193). Maggie encounters similar threats from Robin. Maggie’s silence seems to echo postcolonial descriptions of the struggle of colonized peoples to control their own image and their own speech. Robin admits to trying to “force” speech out of Maggie with “bribery, threats, distraction” (Ní Dhuibhne, Bray 231) Robin offers her “money, property, life-long protection. But to no avail ... ‘If you don’t speak ... I’ll throw you overboard!’ ... Her only response was a short dry chuckle” (231). Robin alters her tactics to a form of psychological torture that involves racial insults similar to those used by other oppressive authorities. This one, in her words, is inspired by the “old Irish legend” of the “mermaid” (232). She doesn’t hesitate to copy the man in the tale who, after he has “married or raped” the mermaid, as Robin relates, insults the mermaid’s family and thereby “manages to break her silence” (232). Robin calls her “a tough old cookie,” an “old dame,” with “ugly white hair,” “of rough stock,” “rough and ready,” who eats “like a horse,” “obviously of peasant stock” (232). Robin continues, in a more explicitly racist vein, calling the Irish “inbred,” “snub”-nosed, “Slaves, serfs. Trolls,” from the “lowest

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social classes,” and she compares Maggie herself to a “milkmaid, someone born to carry children and other burdens from the beginning to the end of her days.” The “torture” scene with Robin and Maggie over the control of speech echoes concerns from postcolonial and feminist critical works. Hand notes that, “The feminist reading stresses gender conflict,” while another reading “acknowledges the ‘land’ as a contested site of conflict in Ireland’s colonial and post-colonial relationship with Britain” (Hand 109). It almost appears as though Robin is trying to resurrect a subaltern state in her efforts to force Maggie to speak, as she seeks to make Maggie serve as the representative, as the living artifact, of “dead” Ireland in the mistaken identity of Elinor MacHugh of Bray House. Hand also notices here Ní Dhuibhne’s “meditation” on the “Irish obsession with ‘texts’ and interpretation,” as well as with “naming” (110). One could point out that the Irish interest in interpretation and naming finds a parallel in the African American interest in interpretation, as explored over the years by Henry Louis Gates, Barbara Christian, and Katherine Clay Bassard, and in the many critical and folkloric analyses of naming practices, especially in Toni Morrison (Gates, Signifying xx–xi; Christian, Spiritual 28–9; Puckett 156–74; Dillard 175–81; Wilentz 68; Middleton 66–9; Handley 684). In spite of her captor’s efforts at renaming and coercion, Maggie triumphs, keeping her silence, even kicking Robin in the nose (Ní Dhuibhne, Bray 233). Although Maggie is only an ordinary woman caught in unusual circumstances, she responds to Robin’s attempts to impose her fantasies upon her with wit and wiry resolve. Hence, this oddly sexual, pseudo-colonial encounter climaxes in a bit of slapstick. Maggie as a female subaltern figure triumphs over Robin as the would-be imperialist, would-be “rapist.” The torture scene provides a fictional example of Homi K. Bhabha’s defining account of “sly civility,” a case in which an English authority figure pesters a colonial subject until he hears what he wishes to hear (Bhabha 99). Maggie’s parallel with denizens of the Underground ties this aspect of the “colonial vs. native” tension to tensions that Angela Bourke sees mediated via folklore (Bourke, Burning 42–3). Besides Robin’s derogatory line about “trolls,” one might also point to the folkloric reference inherent in Maggie’s silence: Motif no. F420.1.2.2 “Water-maidens are mute,” which appears in Katharine Briggs’s An Encyclopedia of Fairies (K. Briggs 477). This adds a further folkloric touch to Maggie’s otherworldly behavior. Yet, just as Jenny’s silencing as an “ignored” woman ends, so too does Maggie’s, as she gets to tell her story in her own voice near the end of the novel, not as Robin’s intended ventriloquist dummy “Elinor.” Angela Bourke has commented on the subtext of tense male–female relations in stories like the selkie or mermaid capture tales (Bourke, Burning 118). In Robin’s case, if she is in the role of the fisherman with the selkie or mermaid as Maggie, this not only reflects on her ambivalence of how she sees other men and women in relation to herself, it again reflects the colonial impulse in her aggressive tactics to force Maggie, a working-class Irishwoman, to speak (Ní Dhuibhne, Bray 57). Like the Englishman in Bhabha’s story, though, we can tell from Robin’s questions, and by her stubbornly calling her “Elinor MacHugh,” not even asking the woman her name, that Robin, like many colonizers before her, expects certain answers (231).


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Hand quotes Carol Morris on Robin’s revealing choice of reading material on the voyage, Robinson Crusoe, “‘[Robin] is in fact another coloniser, yet another invader of Ireland, taking and not giving back, no better than the oppressors who have preceded her through the centuries’” (Hand, quoting Morris, 115). Morrison’s postcolonial reading of Robinson Crusoe in her critical work Playing in the Dark draws attention to how Crusoe imposes an identity on Friday that has nothing to do with his prior identity, without regard for Friday’s true name or language (Morrison, Playing in the Dark xxiii–xxix). Likewise, Robin cares little whether Maggie Byrne has an identity apart from the one as “Elinor MacHugh” that she has superimposed upon her. Despite Robin’s efforts to make Maggie speak, her silence enables Robin to persist in her delusion about her being Elinor. Maggie sometimes seems as much a tool to Robin Lagerlof as Friday is to Robinson Crusoe. Maggie’s parallel with denizens of the Underground ties this aspect of the “colonial versus native” tension to tensions that Angela Bourke sees mediated via folklore. Fairy legend charts the territory of no-man’s land. It carries with it an air of the preposterous, the nod and wink, that allows one thing to be said, while another is meant. It permits face-saving lies to be told, and disturbing narratives to be safely detoured into fiction if children are found to be listening, or if the complex web of family relationships means that someone may take offense, or threaten retaliation ... Those in the past who refer to fairy legend in response to questioning, may simply have used them as “a way of saying, ‘Your questions are intrusive and embarrassing; we don’t choose to answer them!’” (Bourke 42–3)

Bourke’s description, like Synge’s comic cabin scene, closely resembles Hurston’s description of a “feather-bed” resistance (Hurston, Mules 10). Between Bhabha, Bourke, and Hurston one may notice how in both life and fiction, folkloric expression empowers those in insecure positions to speak, albeit indirectly through tales, sayings, or even silence, to those who cannot or will not hear their side of an issue. Or, for that matter, enabling the silenced to speak only when they choose to do so. In the end, when Maggie does give her own account of her survival, she does not appear traumatized into speech, when she ends the section written from her point of view with, “and now Karl is gone and me here. Isn’t life funny, isn’t it really?” (247). Readers may find further significance here, historically and psychologically, in references to the mermaid tale in context of conquest and “rape,” a common image employed to discuss the effects of colonialism. In two separate sections, Robin states that “Ireland did not die a natural death. As a country, she was murdered” (168). Though she blames Ireland herself in that instance, Robin alludes to other participants in her demise when she refers to “the period prior to its final extinction” (147). Adding “final” to “extinction” seems redundant, except if one considers other “periods,” invasions, famines, and the like, as crises that push a people toward extinction. As support to this reading, one may point to the pre-disaster news “clippings” included in Robin’s formal report that mention British “toxic waste” making its way, over and over, to Irish waters (151–2). Especially in light of passages like these, Hand does see Ní Dhuibhne writing from the position of an Irish woman while “being critical too of the Irish themselves” for perpetuating an unequal relationship with England (Hand 116).

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Like Ní Dhuibhne’s use of satire to indirectly encourage greater introspection among feminist critics, Ní Dhuibhne’s application of folkloric references to a dystopic future indirectly encourages greater introspection among those coming to terms with the aftermath of colonialism. Ní Dhuibhne’s unnamed young wife shoved aside by her “goat” husband; her silent, elderly, working-class, “changeling” Maggie; and her “witch/wizard” subverter of feminist ideals Robin all reverse some form of above/ below binary. The wife, who fits Lia Mill’s category of “ignored” Irish women, takes charge of her and her children’s lives in the revision of “The Little White Goat,” as does the previously “ignored” Jenny. Maggie may be viewed as another representation of the Poor Old Woman, in that she literally must represent all the Irish people in the present time of the novel. However, rather than commanding her people to send their sons to die to retrieve her “four fields,” Maggie asks little but to be left alone from Robin’s pseudo-colonial prying. The real Maggie thwarts Robin’s desire to impose an upper-class version of Irish womanhood, as Robin interprets the dead Elinor MacHugh. Instead, Maggie’s own working-class voice and references reveal her as another one of the “ignored,” a flesh-and-blood woman, not an idolized Mother Ireland nor an idealized, upper-middle-class icon, as Robin seems to want to make her. Meanwhile, the earthy character of Maggie still functions in the plot as an unearthly character from the fairy fort. As a magical folk woman from the Otherworld, Maggie can undermine Robin’s imperious grab at glory. Robin, desiring to inscribe herself as the hero of this adventure, as the ultimate achievement of feminism, finds her witch/wizard powers cut out from under her by the team of Karl, Jenny, and Maggie. One ordinary, erased woman is elevated by her “powers” as a changeling, and a self-imagined superwoman is lowered by her association with the roles of witch and colonialist. The above/below assumptions of who wins and who loses in this novel become reversed, humorously, indirectly, through folklore of the Otherworld. Strife between the sexes, past, present, and future; questions of authority; cultural “fall-out” from colonialism; and implications of different interpretations of feminism materialize in The Bray House in sly, humorous, and folkloristic ways that challenge readers’ assumptions. The wife, the maiden, the witch, and the changeling, as a sampling from those parts of Ní Dhuibhne’s work that undermine any authority, male or female, parallel the use of Morrison’s ghost and wise women, Lavin’s combined magical and notquite-magisterial Mary O’Grady, and Hurston’s “princess,” trickster, and almostwise-woman characters. Mary O’Grady has received a lengthier treatment here because so little has been written about this hidden revolutionary, but more binarybending folk women from Hurston, Morrison, and Ní Dhuibhne will follow. The examples here have addressed abuses and false assumptions propagated by systems of thought that place women either in servitude and silence or in a cardboard heaven and silence, neither being a niche that allows for much expression or action. The examples to follow will address assumptions that cross gender lines. Assumptions, as they fluctuate in time and place, have limited the discourse of women over this past century and into the next. The folk women, however, have something to say about that.

Chapter 4

Otherworld Women on Sex and Religion Sex advice from mermaids As mentioned earlier, writers challenging assumptions regarding sexuality faced censorship from a variety of institutions in the earlier twentieth century. The typescript of Hurston’s Dust Tracks on a Road “was cut by her editors by almost ten percent before the book was published in November 1942,” due to deletions in three categories: “possibly libelous material, political opinion, and sexually explicit passages” (Wall, “Notes” 983). Lavin faced state- and church-sanctioned censorship that could result in an author’s works being banned for even one line out of place, as in the case of Kate O’Brien (K. O’Brien 1044). Morrison and Ní Dhuibhne do not face such extreme suppression on reproductive issues such as sexual mores and abortion. Instead, they have to negotiate the minefields of opinion in their respective cultures, and oddly enough, they have to pick their way through from different directions. Ní Dhuibhne has explained that explorations of reproductive issues, in the form or sex or abortion, can still stir negative reactions among Irish readers (Appendix). Meanwhile, Morrison has commented on the opposite pressure, that explorations of love that do not involve a sexual act garners suspicion (Koenen 73). Morrison has not come out that directly about that other potent issue of human reproduction, abortion, but it has nonetheless come up with great regularity in her writing. The surprise here is that all four authors, although they write against wildly varying forms of pressures and negative attitudes, use Otherworld references to broach a variety of questions regarding reproduction. The magical folk women will confront issues of reproduction and religion while simultaneously dismantling above/below binaries that stereotype women in their cultures. Each of the four authors have characters who fall in the categories of otherworldly or wise folk women, and each of the four address, through these characters, volatile questions of reproduction and religion. This chapter examines how their otherworldly women help them indirectly address these subjects. In addition to her depiction of Janie’s relationship with Teacake in Their Eyes Were Watching God, sensual yet still discreet for that time, Hurston defies the mores of her period with her folklorist’s treatment of the worship of Erzulie in Tell My Horse and the surreptitious treatment of abortion in Mules and Men. Lavin uses magical folk references, albeit subdued ones, in her depiction of the daring character of Onny in her novel The House in Clewe Street (1945). Onny takes on the assumptions of her day regarding sexual expression, abortion, and even differing interpretations of Catholic traditions. Ní Dhuibhne negotiates a range of assumptions on sex through her modern-day folk woman in “The Mermaid Legend,” with other folkloric allusions in stories based more on the “real” world, including two scenes in her novel The Dancers Dancing.

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Her “Mermaid” also takes on, in a tragic-comic way, the side effects of an English Protestant publican marrying an Irish Catholic drinker. Morrison’s women who border the Otherworld act out some observations on sex and abortion as well as religion. One type of Otherworld woman, in particular, forms a crossroads for all four authors: the mermaid (ML4071*; ML4080 and motifs B81.2.2, B81.3.1, F420.5.1, F420.5.1.8, F420.5.2; F420.5.2.1, F420.5.2.7.3; Irish legend title “The Man Who Married the Mermaid”; and the “The Three Laughs of the Mermaid” (AT type 670) (K. Briggs, Encyclopedia 289; Almqvist, “Of Mermaids and Marriages” 5, 29; Ó Súilleabháin and Christiansen, Types of the Irish Folktale 137). The mermaid, like the selkie or seal maiden, often appears in folklore doing things human women would be barred from by nature or social stricture, like roaming large expanses of water unattached to any family, partner, or institution, or seducing and claiming men at will (Seal maiden motifs: B651.8, D721, D1025.9, F420.1.2*; Selkie migratory legend types: ML 4080, ML 4081*, ML 4083*; motifs: B81.13.11, F420.5.1) (K. Briggs, Encyclopedia 349–50, 353–5). Mermaids belong to the category of fairy folk, especially in Irish lore, because both explanations for the origins of fairies place their abodes in water, as well as in the air or under the ground (Bourke, Burning 31; K. Briggs, Encyclopedia 318–20, 418). As the Tuatha Dé Danann, they become fairy folk and take refuge in earth and water after being displaced in the surface world by the fabled ancient Irish people, the Milesians (K. Briggs, Encyclopedia 418). As fallen angels, they dwell wherever it was that they stopped when God halted their fall, whether stopped in the middle of the air, the earth, or the ocean (Bourke, Burning 31). Sometimes the Otherworld’s porous boundaries take in and emit departed humans, but the fairies themselves, despite occasional ties to the mortal dead, do not descend from them. Just as mermaids and selkies can take on human form of a normal size adult, the other fairy folk can appear human-like, either slightly smaller than a normal adult or as the commonly pictured tiny person (31). Either way, they may have it in for humans, as humans displace them in the land of their choosing or in God’s favor. Angela Bourke points out that Irish fairy lore stresses dire outcomes for those who sacrifice long-term goals for short-term gains or who place their own desires above those of their community (106). The stories argue against selfishness, impatience, greed, envy, and sexual licentiousness, the latter especially in women (106). By the same token, fairy lore offers “an imaginative freedom from social and familial constraint” (Bourke, “Legends” 1286). They enter human lives at the most permeable points of society’s boundaries, where controls are either tenuous, as with human desire, or where individuals are caught between the social roles of childhood and adulthood, just as the falling fairies are caught between heaven and earth. Above all, the Otherworld folk can do what they like, being “unpredictable,” powerful, undomesticated, usually invisible to humans, and “essentially amoral” (1284). As laid out in chapter three, “Folk Women versus the Authorities,” women characters modeled after fairies take advantage of that aspect of “imaginative freedom,” and especially that earlier strain of woman-centered leadership in the Otherworld. Maggie in The Bray House represents a combination of Irish changeling and mermaid legends in her defiance of Robin’s neo-sexist, neo-colonial aggressions. In a similar way, other fairy folk references in Hurston, Lavin, Morrison, and Ní Dhuibhne unearth and explore assumptions about reproductive and religious issues.

Otherworld Women on Sex and Religion

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Hurston’s Erzulie, who is sometimes drawn or sculpted as a mermaid, provides an anthropological depiction. The extent of a discussion of sexuality in Mary Lavin’s Mary O’Grady does not go further than oblique allusions to the mere idea of sex, Mary having trouble telling Tom when she didn’t want to cuddle because her breasts were sore, and Mary’s discomfort with early twentieth-century dancing and make up (Lavin, Mary O’Grady 108, 13, 66, 216). However, Lavin brings up sexuality in a big way, for Ireland in 1945, that is, in The House in Clewe Street. One of its main characters, Onny, in a psychologically detailed portrayal, carries some subtle allusions to the fairy folk who landed in the water. Later, in “The Mermaid Legend,” Ní Dhuibhne’s bartender lives out certain parallels of the mermaid’s story, as it is retold as a folk narrative. In Ní Dhuibhne’s novel The Dancers Dancing, an incident by a stream leads to a teen girl’s vision of an aisling-type character committing infanticide. In the time period in which Ní Dhuibhne writes, any mention of infanticide alerts readers to ongoing discussions of the question of legalizing abortion in Ireland. As will be seen later with Ní Dhuibhne’s wise-woman “Midwife,” this author relies on the Otherworld to negotiate such volatile reproductive topics. Morrison’s Celestial, from her novel Love, combines African folk allusions, psychological detail, and a magical storyline, while reflecting on the topic of sexuality. Celestial’s counterpart, L, while not a mermaid, spends much of the novel as an otherworldly woman who calls the ocean her “man.” L and Celestial make up two halves of a large territory of human understanding, eros and agape. Together, they hold all possible reproductive and religious topics in their purview. L, herself, has so much to say, this chapter will only provide samples of her most potent comments. These last two otherworldly women combine many of the qualities of the other three authors’ mermaid-type folk women. Sometimes the depictions of the otherworldly characters will encompass such figures of speech as masks, signifying-as-speech-act, mimicry, sly civility, or the grotesque and bizarre. At all times, though, the otherworldly women embody the author’s overall strategy of indirection. Acting like large, multi-page masks, the characters let the authors pose questions and make comments which, if stated directly, might enflame or repulse readers. The magical folk women enable the four authors to contradict and complicate some type of above/below binary attached to issues of religion and reproduction, such as Christian beliefs, vodun practices, sexual expression, or abortion. Because these folk characters allow their creators to act out, in some cases even mime, topics that cannot be discussed directly, the term “indirection” becomes a vital tool for comparing variations in rhetorical approach between multiple authors and cultures. Hurston’s divine mermaid Erzulie As mentioned before, Hurston’s editors gave her little or no leeway on frank discussions of sexuality. With Tell My Horse, though, Hurston does not speak for herself, officially, nor does she write fiction. Her chapter “Voodoo and Voodoo Gods” reads as anthropology, although an entertaining, first-person form of it. There, Hurston’s prose can get sexy in the name of “science.” The mask of the scientific anthropologist/folklorist allows Hurston to indirectly critique western notions of

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sexuality and male–female relationships, with a small jab at Christianity thrown in. In the section titled “Erzulie Freida,” Hurston tells of Haiti’s “pagan goddess of love” (Hurston, Tell My Horse 383). In the second sentence, Hurston lays down the gauntlet of negative comparisons with what she interprets as the more dowdy Greek and Roman goddesses. Unlike those, “Erzulie has no children and her husband is all the men of Haiti. That is, anyone of them that she chooses for herself” (383). Already we have an overtly sexual character that Hurston claims is worshipped specifically because of her habit of taking multiple partners. Meisenhelder also interprets Hurston’s anthropological writings as “smuggling” in censored religious and sexual topics, especially with Erzulie and other aspects of vodun (Meisenhelder 9, 161, 201). In Meisenhelder’s text, Erzulie seems like a folkloric prototype for Hurston, a type of Venus who allows Hurston to champion a depiction of African American women as bold lovers, operating outside perceived Judeo-Christian constraints, and the antithesis of a Disney-type Cinderella. Erzulie, as presented here, confounds any binary of this folk woman of color being either subservient, or passively waiting for rescue as an elevated “princess” stereotype. Again, in the act of providing a cultural context for this character, Hurston can describe a human-looking woman who is free to claim all manner of excessive attentions from endless numbers of her lovers. Most commonly in the shape of a beautiful, richly dressed young woman, Erzulie can demand the best room in the house of any of her devotees, with white bed sheets, flowers, perfumes, sweets, libations, and candles (Hurston, Tell 384). No mortal woman can enter, except to “prepare” it for a rival with whom they cannot compete. Although cruel to women, Erzulie, as Hurston describes her, treats kindly the men she calls to herself. Men may benefit financially and professionally by the alliance. On top of that, they schedule Thursday and Saturday nights for “radiant ecstasy” with her (384). In that final detail, Hurston does let Erzulie push mortal women into the extreme end of subservience on the binary scale. From another angle, Hurston’s Erzulie signifies on the idea of men “rescuing” women, along the lines of watered down Grimm and Disney, because it is Erzulie who rescues her male devotees. Erzulie’s ties with the fairy folk of the sea, mermaids or selkies, appear in the visual images associated with Erzulie. Hurston includes a photo, “Door of Room to Erzulie,” that shows a “mulatto” woman with “firm, full breasts,” long hair, a beaded necklace, and a rather large fish tail (385). Henry John Drewal describes a similar “water spirit” appearing in some of the lore and worship practices of Ghana, Zaïre, Liberia, Nigeria, Togo, Senegal, Tanzania, and Sierra Leone (Drewal 310, 311, 327, 314). Devotees of “Mami Wata” attach qualities, images, and practices to this goddess almost perfectly identical to those Hurston described in 1938. The water connection dominates more in Mami Wata’s description than it does in Hurston’s, as does mermaid imagery. Drewal finds evidence linking visual depictions of Mami Wata as a beautiful young woman with a fish’s tail to fifteenth-century encounters with European sailors and mermaid figureheads (311). Details from “mermaid lore” build up the character of Mami Wata as “alluring,” vain—signified by her most prized possession, a mirror—and often seated on a rock to comb her long hair (Drewal 324; K. Briggs, Encyclopedia 287). The photo he provides seems like a three-dimensional version of Hurston’s wooden painting. An eighteenth-century ship’s figurehead of a


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long-haired woman with a fish tail has been pressed into duty as a Mami Wata figure by its owners (Drewal 311). Hurston’s carving resembles other, older mermaid carvings in abbeys in Ireland from 1182 and 1471, with at least one also holding a comb (M. Murphy 33, 34). Interestingly, the Irish mermaid who most resembles Hurston’s Erzulie is a “Black Mermaid” carved in a fifteenth-century priory in Galway, who holds a comb and a mirror (M. Murphy 31–2; Morse and Bertha i). (In a reversal of Hurston’s mermaid appropriating the Virgin Mary, these abbeys appropriate the mermaid to depict “sensual temptations” or, in the case of the “Black Mermaid,” the lesser sin of “vanity” (M. Murphy 31). The images cited here show a reasonable basis for comparing the different applications of mermaid lore in worship, legends, folk tales, and material culture between European and African cultures. Maureen Murphy differentiates between mermaids and sirens, who, in Irish lore, differ in how they bring death to mortal males. Both possess fish tails, sweet singing voices, and great beauty, but the siren, with sharp bird’s claws, intends to kill sailors, while the mermaid may drown them only accidentally (31). Hurston’s Erzulie and the West African Mami Wata command great power over mortal men, too, and differ from the North Atlantic sea women in that they would pose dangers instead to any mortal woman who would attempt to come between them and their devotees. As in Hurston’s account of Erzulie, Mami Wata lays jealous claim to male, not female, devotees in return for wealth and success (Drewal 310). Mami Wata, however, does not let men go back to human women the other days of the week. She might even kill wives (310). Drewal draws out the inescapable conclusion, that, unlike Erzulie, Mami Wata “demands total abstinence” from devotees (310). Overall, Mami Wata represents the same qualities as Hurston’s Erzulie, “unattainable, exquisite beauty, vanity, jealousy, sexuality, romantic not maternal love, limitless good fortune— not health, long life, or progeny, but riches, material and monetary” (311). In no instance, Haitian, West African, or Irish, does the mermaid spirit seem connected to ancestors. Mary Jo Arnoldi reports of a legend of a “beautiful water genie” in Mali, JinéFaro, who can change into a young maiden like Mami Wata (Arnoldi 182). But this legend lives in the Niger River and lures men toward drowning and death, not abstinence (or “ecstasy”) and riches. Still, the water genie legend supports a similar non-familial theme of a superhuman sexual renegade, such as Mami Wata, Erzulie, and various European mermaid legends. The active worship activities Hurston and Drewal describe for Erzulie Frieda and Mami Wata, as well as the folk legend in Mali of Jiné-Faro, provide the basis for stories of women who express themselves sexually outside of marriage or committed relationships. Erzulie and Mami Wata, like Janie, are not defined by any role as mother. Through Erzulie, Hurston could write of an outrageous character, who, as a non-human icon, could personify actions and attitudes that a censored African American woman could not depict in fiction or memoir. The indirection possible in direct depictions of folklore allowed Hurston to express herself behind the mask of anthropology and to signify on the stereotype of Cinderella by making Erzulie the queen of love who rescues her “Cinderfellas.” In the act of satisfying the desires of white academics and white publishers for exotic

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accounts of “Other” societies, Hurston’s indirectly criticizes those authorities for suppressing sexual expression. In another of Hurston’s vodun accounts, at the back of Mules and Men, she addresses a detail that may come to mind when reading about the vodun worship of a being with multiple partners. No mention of Erzulie’s capacity to reproduce appears, other than that she chooses not to. She is a divine folk character and may simply have the power to avoid pregnancy altogether, but that much sexual intercourse begs the question. A hint appears buried in the back under “Prescriptions of Root Doctors.” Hurston states that she has gathered the folk medicine of “root doctors,” who may or may not be “hoodoo doctors” practicing vodun, from Florida, Alabama, and Louisiana (Hurston, Mules 264). Among recipes for treating “Gonorrhea,” “Syphilis,” “Rheumatism,” “Loss of Mind,” and “Live Things in Stomach (Fits)” appears one for “Flooding,” which Hurston footnotes as meaning “Menstruation”: “One grated nutmeg, pinch of alum in a quart of water (cooked). Take one-half glass three times daily” (264–6). If she lists prescriptions for other health issues resulting from reproductive acts, it makes sense that she would include one to treat an unwanted pregnancy. In the nineteenth century, advertisements in American periodicals featured medicinal products designed to make a woman’s period “come down,” as the euphemism went. Rarely would a woman need to instigate menstruation except at the time of an unwanted pregnancy. In any case, giving details for an abortifacient in an American text at that time would have undoubtedly resulted in censorship of some form. “Cleweless”: Lavin’s Onny defies convention While Hurston’s mermaid and the mermaids of Haiti and West Africa eschew childbearing and family connections of all kinds, Celtic sea maidens may sometimes choose to have a family, depending on who has possession of their seal skin, tail, or other talisman of self-rule. The African mermaids do not seem to fall vulnerable at any point to human males. Even with that one restriction, these sea women have the potential to negotiate sexual relationships in ways Irish Otherworld women historically could not. If a man has not captured her, via theft of her covering, she is free all of rules and obligations. If a man has captured her, many stories end with her reclaiming her covering and her freedom. But if she has borne half-human children, many variants depict a bond that, though loosened, may not be broken, a major difference between the Irish and African mermaids. Also unlike the African and Haitian mermaids, as Maureen Murphy points out, “in Irish tradition the mermaid is far more likely to be captive than captor” (M. Murphy 36). The Irish mermaid or sea-related Otherworld woman may not hold the upper hand as does Erzulie, yet in Lavin’s and Ní Dhuibhne’s fiction she does challenge those who would capture her. Lavin’s version of a mermaid character who explores issues of sexuality is Onny Soraghan from the novel The House in Clewe Street (1945). Lavin also explores negative effects of sexual repression and withholding information from young adults in the short stories “Sunday Brings Sunday,” “Nun’s Mother,” and “Sarah.” Jeanette Roberts Shumaker singles out Lavin’s story “Sarah” as one of her “most


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hard-hitting pieces of social criticism,” depicting the wrongful death by neglect of a woman pregnant out of wedlock, published in 1943, decades before the scandal concerning Ann Lovett’s similar death (Shumaker). Sarah Briggs singles out that story as well as an example of Lavin successfully flouting cultural mores, especially mid-twentieth-century Ireland’s “strong moral line on sex outside of marriage” in (Tales from Bective Bridge, 1942) (Briggs, “Mary Lavin” 12). Briggs points out that Lavin’s “privileging” of a promiscuous character, Sarah, over her “very respectable neighbor,” Kathleen, is “astounding” in an environment that “banned Edna O’Brien’s novels in the ’sixties because she wrote of female sexual promiscuity” (12). Briggs correctly ascertains that to question the sexual climate in Ireland at that time took considerable tact on the part of writers. Lavin was able to confront issues such as these successfully, that is, by actually getting the confrontation into print, only by approaching the issues—and planting seeds of doubt—indirectly. The House in Clewe Street, as a novel, allows for more development and depth, for it follows the entire history of one character, from childhood to death, with special emphasis on her sexual development. As a way of accessing the topic of sexuality in a culture that did not allow for much detail, Lavin uses folkloric references to the Otherworld, especially to members of the fairy clan who dwell in water. In the variation here, the mermaid alters to a near relative, the water nymph, with classical origins in the Nereids, who inhabit the sea, and the Naiads, who inhabit brooks, springs, or fountains (Hamilton 41–3). The body of the water nymph or water sprite appears entirely humanoid, rather than half-human, half-fish, or occasionally allseal. Lavin’s character, significantly, has a habit of teetering and falling in the river. Onny is a young servant girl who has an ill-fated affair with Gabriel Galloway, the son of a prominent family. We first see the character as a small child, already showing signs of her delight in upsetting the social institutions of her town. She manages to disappear completely from her mother and baker’s dozen of siblings, a hard trick to begin with. Gabriel, age six, has come over for the day while his mother and aunts prepare for his grandfather’s funeral, and while there, the family discovers Onny’s absence. Gabriel spots the little girl first, sitting on the other side of a hedge, “chuckling” and “without a stitch of clothes on her” (Lavin, The House in Clewe Street 125–6). The little boy doesn’t notice until Mrs. Soraghan starts screaming that “the small defiant girl ... was a naked as the flowers.” Amidst roars of “the bold strumpet,” “slap her,” “wicked child,” and “Glory be to God!,” Gabriel feels only “admiration” for Onny, who returns his “stare” with “unmistakable but ambiguous acknowledgment” (125). Her lack of concern about clothes, which she has folded in “a pile” “a little way off,” indicates a wildness common to fairies. One other detail links her more closely to those fairies who dwell in water. While sitting on the grass, Onny does nothing but play with her “golden hair,” exhibiting “fierce concentration” (125). Hair, hair combing, especially, is a common preoccupation with mermaids. Her attractive hair, which becomes “coppery” later in the book, usually stands as another distinction of mermaid in folklore, as the one detail that carries over most often between variations. When Gabriel next encounters Onny, on her first day as a servant for his aunts, the girl’s name connects in his memory with “something that had shamed him” in the past “and made him hang his head,” and although he cannot remember the

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incident, his face reddens anyway (238). Gabriel’s tendency to alter his feelings and thoughts to suit those of others appears here, as a memory of vague shame blots out his original admiration for Onny. She doesn’t say anything, only smiles and giggles when he asks after her brother Larry. But the stage is set, between these two scenes, for readers to expect something out of the ordinary from Onny. The main characters’ names carry additional clues to their personalities through Lavin’s folk allusions. Gabriel Galloway carries the name of the archangel, which reflects somewhat on his idealism and attachment to propriety, and which Lavin ties to a devotional picture of a “guardian angel” in Onny’s imagination (333). “Onny” seems a strange nickname, and though she reveals that the priest christened her “Honor,” she only goes by “Onny” in the novel (374). The nickname could just as easily be a diminutive of “Ondine,” though, a variant of “Undine,” the name for a water nymph (unda, Latin for “wave”) (Oxford English Dictionary). Writers of the Romantic period, such as Goethe, E.T.A. Hoffmann, and Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué, referred to and retold the story of a water nymph, “Undine,” who may become human or gain a human soul if she marries her human lover, and in some cases, if she gives birth to his child (D. Johnson, 235; Microsoft Encarta, Columbia Encyclopedia, Encyclopaedia Britannica). In each case, the affair fails. Onny’s last name, the unusual “Soraghan,” would be pronounced similarly and reads like a variant spelling for the Irish word “sorachán.” “Sorachán” means “verminous animal,” “measly creature,” or “low mean person” (Ó Dónaill 1135–6). The root word here, “sor,” appears in the previously mentioned classic line of Irish sly civility, “‘Soft morning, sor,” where a Hibernic pronunciation of the English “sir” hides the Irish insult of “louse” (Kenner 83). The class conflict between the Coniffe-Galloways and the culturally designated Soraghans, as it surfaces in the young couple’s affair, becomes most noticeable when Gabriel’s imperious aunt Theresa continually refers to Onny as a “worthless piece,” a “very pitiful creature,” a “hussy,” and a “slut” (Lavin, Clewe 340, 341, 292, 327). In a peculiar way, the positioning of Onny through her name, set above humanity as an otherworldly Ondine and set below humanity as a “Sorachán,” mirrors the oddity of the mermaid herself. The mermaid possesses an exalted upper torso, human-like and superior in beauty, and a degraded lower half, not human or even mammal, but fish. The high and low meet powerfully in Onny’s depiction. For, unlike the rest of the characters, the narrative “honors” Onny with an acknowledgment of her own motivation, drive, and desire to free herself from servanthood. At each stage where Onny and Gabriel make another jump forward in their relationship, Gabriel sees Onny in an otherworldly setting. He first becomes intrigued by her when he seems like an apparition in the dark churchyard, perched on a headstone (249). Onny is avoiding going to mass, but Gabriel doesn’t recognize her. He chases her when she starts up like a “hare” (250). Lavin’s choice to have Onny flee like a hare ties the character more deliberately to the magical folk women of the Otherworld. The allusions to magical transformation here and in other scenes in the book affirm this subtext (Lysaght, Banshee 41). Éilís Ní Dhuibhne has actually written one of the primary articles on the international migratory legend of “The Witch that was Hurt” (ML3055), and its Irish version of “The Old Woman as Hare” (Almqvist, MLSIT 3056; Ní Dhuibhne, “Hare” 78). Ní Dhuibhne has interpreted the


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story as one of resentment focused on the “most vulnerable and also most despised representative” of a “minority group” and a story of sexual opposition and violation (Ní Dhuibhne, “Hare” 78–9). The novel reveals later that Onny’s grandmother was a “tinker,” one of Ireland’s most oppressed groups, equivalent to the Romany elsewhere (Lavin, Clewe 444). Gabriel’s false-hearted friend Sylvester reacts with amusement to this, declaring her “Queen of the Tinkers,” and his praise, then and elsewhere, while taken at face value by Onny, is portrayed to readers as sneering condescension, further revealed when he calls Onny “a little fool,” “just a little servant; no more or no less” (469). The “chill” that descends on Gabriel, before he knows that the hare-like “creature” flitting away is Onny, emphasizes his initial impression of Onny as other than human, elevated in an Otherworld way (250). But the binary that falsely represents Onny in her society swings more often to level “below” human, from Theresa’s and Sylvester’s treatment of her. The scenes during which Gabriel begins to see Onny as an equal, however, take them both back to the edge between this world and the next, to the river where the novel ties Onny closer to “Ondine.” Gabriel longs to join Onny with the working-class youth dancing at the crossroads, and he has delayed her from going, so he suggests they go across the stones at a low point in the river as a shortcut. With Onny on the other side, “The bank of the river which he had left was like the shore of another world ... He had stepped into the enchanted land towards which he had yearned in childhood ... This was the unreal land. This was the land of impossible dreams and impossible actions” (282). This “dark, secret place” leads to another dark, secret place, the ruined castle tower where Onny and Gabriel go next (282, 284). They never make it to the dance. They meet at the tower after Onny finishes work every night afterward, for a long period, and Lavin leaves no doubt as to “the way in which they had come together” in “relations” that become “more intimate” in “struggle[s]” and “caresses” (285, 287, 288). During a period of official censorship by church and state, Lavin opts for the route of indirection offered by euphemism. Lavin shows only Gabriel as having some “misgivings” that fade, not Onny, who she shows enjoying their more rambunctious activities even more than the caresses (285, 287–8). Onny worries more about getting caught, because she will lose her job with Gabriel’s family and bring her own mother’s ire down upon herself, and she worries about being able to get married only in the event of a “misfortune” or “disgrace,” that is, a pregnancy (285, 287, 335, 336). Onny’s perception of her status doesn’t alter, yet Gabriel’s does, for he now imagines himself as the “ruling lord” of this land (282). Sexual intimacy with Onny gives Gabriel, in his fantasies, the equivalent of the sovereignty bestowed upon those kings who slept with the patron goddesses of certain areas (Lavin, Clewe 282; T. Thompson 114; Lysaght, Banshee 243). If crossing the river to the “enchanted land” brings the couple towards a sexual relationship, then Onny’s falling into the river hastens the next stage in their relationship. Onny teeters on the crossing, but falls in and nearly dies, until Gabriel rescues her. He hears screams in the dark that he mistakes, upon second thought, for birds (Lavin, Clewe 314–15). When he comes to the river, every object takes on another identity. “Ash and willow” become “woodland girls bending their heads to

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wash their tresses in the stream;” “a weight of rubbish” on branches like “bundles and clumps of rags” hung by “tinkers” turns out to be Onny (316). Here, she is mistaken not for a tinker but for a piece of trash left by tinkers, in Gabriel’s obscured view. On the same page, nature becomes elevated into the form of nymphs, and the human becomes degraded into the “rubbish” of an oppressed minority. Onny has become one with this physically real yet sinisterly enchanted landscape. This has a certain logic, because the narration describes her as “a dying woman” (318). Onny hangs on the “border” between this world and the next, and though Gabriel succeeds in bringing her back from the brink, he is clumsy, ignorant, “having no knowledge of how to treat a dying woman.” The most sexually charged image in the book comes at the point of rescue, when he catches her by “grasping her with his thighs, and using them like a vice” (318). Like Hurston, the most sexually audacious details must masquerade as something else. The impartial mask of scientific inquiry masks Erzulie’s wildly open sexual couplings, and here, an apparently innocent mask of melodrama provides the image of Gabriel’s illicit coupling with a girl from the border between life and death, humanity and the Otherworld. What leads Onny into the river takes the reader back to the “witch and hare” allusion, for a “poacher” “with rabbits slung over his shoulder,” a “stranger” to Onny, pursues her and tries to capture her by backing her into the river (336–7). Onny had been hiding, waiting, for Gabriel in the trees, because she “wanted to see what” he would do (336). Instead of meeting her lover, she meets a “stranger” who goes after her in sexual pursuit, as though he hunted her like one of the rabbits. Foreshadowing Onny’s reactions in later scenes, she risks death trying to cross the high river rather than face capture. As with the “circle of light, like a fairy ring” in Mary O’Grady, where Mary’s daughter Ellie has a premonition that she and her fiancé Bart won’t have children, objects with physical reality in the modern world stand in as allusions to places in the fairy world (Lavin, Mary O’Grady 143–4). In the case of Onny and Gabriel in Clewe Street, border areas of a graveyard and a river stand in for “enchanted lands” where their status in their minds and in each other’s eyes can change, despite the strictures of their town’s class system. Onny herself can be something other than a “servant,” a “measly creature,” at the low end of above/below binary scale. In the enchanted places, Onny seems other than human to Gabriel; crossing the river, she becomes his passport to adventure with people his own age, an equal; on the other side of the river, he is a “lord;” after he rescues her, he briefly seems to her a “guardian angel,” enabling her to triumph over her low position (Lavin, Clewe 250, 281, 282, 333). Sexual initiation follows the first river scene, the couple runs away to Dublin, and Onny feels no hurry to marry. When Gabriel finds himself falling for Helen, a sensitive, rational, and religious sculptor, to fight off temptation, he insists on marrying Onny. By that time, Onny has rejected the idea entirely. The narrator occasionally casts doubts about the match, citing the “mystery of sex” as what has “held them together” (290). The narrator drapes further doubt over the couple’s future by calling this a “relationship knit together by a thousand bonds of secrecy, guilt, and wretched loyalty” (329). Lavin’s portrayal indicates that the effect of basing a relationship only on a sexual attraction of opposites leaves the two wandering a “middle” ground, uncertain of where they stand with each other, and prone to battle


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over roles. The emotional murkiness of such sexual politics, little explored by Irish literature up to that point, is well served by the ambiguities of folklore. By locating their relationship on the border lands of both the town and the Otherworld, Onny and Gabriel can break the social codes of sex and class with which they were raised, and Lavin can explore where breaking those codes leads the young man and woman, where their social interactions have both positive and negative results. Lavin’s criticism of the cruelties of a class system that places Onny at the bottom and Gabriel at the top reads quite clearly in the voice of the narrator, who takes a long paragraph to make a cutting critique of class attitudes in the little town, with no attempt to disguise an open anger toward “the tyranny of the loud voices over the thin voices,” “of the politician over the electorate, the priest over the sinners, the husband over the wife, the teacher over the child,” even “of the tinker over the tinker” (122–3). While that theme comes out in the open, issues of sexuality take the indirect route via the river, the castle tower, and a tragic end in an urban setting. Even as the narrative provides only euphemistic details of the couple’s pleasures together, statements about the nature of their rebellion leave Lavin’s position regarding the story quite ambiguous. Onny feels “sweetness” in her “struggles” with Gabriel, but the phrases “against her will” and “enforcing his will on her” leave some confusion as to the mutuality of the initial sexual encounters (287). She keeps going back, though, and when she exchanges “glances” with Sylvester and goes to Telman’s studio at “odd hours,” Lavin indirectly alludes to Onny’s additional sexual experiences, which Sylvester confirms at the end (426, 450, 495–7). At no point does the narration condemn Onny’s actions. On the contrary, the narrator points out that if Gabriel had not had this relationship with Onny, that he would “never have seen in her any more than his aunts saw, a miserable servant girl, unkempt and ill-clad” (285). The narrator’s tone almost takes on a condescending edge toward Gabriel when it notes, “It must not be thought that Gabriel had any ideas about free love, or the independence of the sexes ... And it never entered his head to doubt the wisdom of things as they were” (285). When it comes to Onny’s own reactions to the fluctuating changes in status and sexual expression she and Gabriel experience, the omniscient third person narration lets Onny’s actions reveal, indirectly, the most rebellious content of the book. Onny’s status in the eyes of Gabriel’s friend Sylvester, with whom they live while in Dublin, makes her a model for an assault on subaltern female binaries. Observing her rapid shift in moods after her anger at Gabriel’s aunts for trying to visit them, Sylvester describes her as displaying the “vulgarity, vindictiveness, spite and pettiness such as one would not expect from the lowest type of creature, and now ... and now, with the instincts of an angel, she is reheating your badly cooked dinner” (419). Gabriel, however, sees it as his “duty,” a word he repeats throughout the second half of the book, to “guide” her toward “reason” and away from “old superstitions” (460, 469, 459). He talks to her as though to a “child,” viewing with “pity” her apparent inability to attach “meaning” to words (459). The continuous insistence with which Onny’s society places her at the very lowest end of the above/below scale, as witnessed by the comments of many characters, should alert readers to notice that her story, her awakening, forms the primary struggle of the book. Only Helen, one of the more admirable characters in the book, and a woman whose abstinence from sex comes

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across as natural and unforced, looking all the better for Sylvester’s condemnation of her “prudery,” shows an unbiased, respectful concern for Gabriel’s and Onny’s wellbeing (448, 487, 406). The contradictory meanings in Onny’s name, elevated and otherworldly versus “low” and “verminous,” signals that she has been created by her world as a walking example of the extremes of scale to which Irish women have sometimes been forced. Gabriel, to those reading superficially, may seem to be the “moral” focal point of the book, but Onny is the one who changes first in the novel. Her attachment to a velvet box of colorful silk scraps and ribbons become linked in a scene where she values Sylvester’s paintings more than Gabriel does, showing an innate artistic bent in Onny that Gabriel lacks (434–6). Even Gabriel starts to notice how she “has assimilated the conversation of Sylvester” and his artist friends, although the reader receives demonstrations of this long before Gabriel fully realizes that Onny is growing intellectually (435, 375–6). Onny’s changes, and Gabriel’s inability to see those changes, together bring about their downfall. He refuses to understand that Onny wants to earn money and “earn enough to do a lot of things” (452). Gabriel won’t “allow” her to work as a model for money, and he assumes that she wants a “place of [their] own” to “fix up,” “decorate,” and make “a sort of home of” for them (452, 438). He wants her to have, ironically, “a room of her own that could be brought into greater harmony with such domesticity” as he thinks he sees in her when he spots her mending a stocking (437). Onny bursts out, “I thought you said when we left home that you were taking me away from drudgery!” (438). Onny eventually seems to link freedom from her old subservient life with the beginnings of sexual freedom from Gabriel and with the financial freedom she begins to see in her work as a model with her third lover, Telman. Gabriel, on the other hand, begins to long more and more for his old life and to yearn to fit Onny into the middle-class world he would regain through his “patrimony” (422, 497–9). Gabriel bends to the influences of his aunts, his friend Sylvester, and others for the whole of the book, and the only decision he makes completely on his own comes in the last two pages (499–500). The “room of her own” line reads as though Lavin is playfully signifying on a middle-class Irishman’s interpretation of what Virginia Woolf’s “room” might look like. In hiding the beginnings of Onny’s artistic sensibilities and her rebellion in amongst what appears to be Gabriel’s coming-of-age story, his thoughts, his futile yearnings to make Onny his Galatea (or an Irish Eliza Doolittle), Lavin covers a feminist text with sly civility toward the cultural status quo. If one mistakes the “blanket of pretension” in which Gabriel wraps himself for the actual texture of the novel, the reader has overlooked the ironic layers in Lavin’s fiction (Kelly 111). Upon closer inspection, beyond the window dressing of Gabriel’s propriety, one would notice Lavin’s mocking of this young man’s worldview. Kelly spots the “sly” element in Lavin’s writing, a word that features prominently in an early poem where the author compares her soul to a “sly,” “shivering,” but “leaping” fish (Kelly 15). Onny’s dawning ideas about how to maintain her freedom from subservience come to a climax late in the book when she screams that Gabriel has “no control over” her, “no rights over” her, and that she wants to keep it that way by not marrying him (Lavin, Clewe 452, 476). She had said she didn’t “belong” to him even on the


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train to Dublin; his response at the time was laughter (357). Just as she risks her life wading into the river to evade the poacher, Onny risks her life with an illegal abortion to evade marriage with Gabriel, and this time she loses everything. The vehemence and length of Onny’s condemnation of Gabriel’s plans for her comes across as strikingly ahead of its time for 1945 Ireland and especially for the turn-ofthe-century setting of the novel. Most statements that support “things” as they stand either come from Gabriel’s mouth or from thoughts clearly identified as his. Near the end of the book, Gabriel, not the narrator, pronounces the “value in the externals of religion” for “people of lesser moral fibre” needing such a “safeguard” (494). If Lavin intends readers to receive Gabriel’s pronouncements here as deeply held and well-thought out, Gabriel’s shallow understanding of “religion” earlier undercuts much belief in the depth of his epiphany. The narration seems to put in a more favorable light the sculptor Helen, who, though she attends mass and does not engage in sex, looks down on “the superstitious growths that spring up around religion and morality” while she still holds “respect for those codes” (407). Helen’s speech parallels other statements elsewhere by Lavin, in which she takes a dim view of “dogma” and “rubbish” she saw percolating out of some interpretations of religion (151, 152–3, 154, 155, 198, 234). At the same time, Lavin described religion as a cultural marker almost as important as “race” and as a source of inspiration for genuine spirituality (155, 198, 234). Onny, in contrast, quickly parts with going to mass once they move to Dublin, and she thinks that they will “be out of the way of the old interfering preachers that [they] were sick of hearing at home” (384–7, 395, 476). Religious belief in Onny flares up here and there in Dublin, such as when she seems overcome by guilt during the thunder storm, and she sees the storm as a sign of coming “punishment,” a feeling she puts behind her quickly (458). Only six days later, she rejects Gabriel’s proposal of marriage, and before she storms out to obtain an abortion, she declares, “Sin! There is no such thing as sin!” (477). This comes from someone who cries to God during the storm that she is “sorry for all my sins,” and in the next breath blames it on Gabriel, saying he made her “commit a terrible sin” (457–8). Between Gabriel’s attachment to propriety and, later, to moral codes, and Onny’s attachment to the material culture of religion and folk attitudes, spirituality as portrayed by the compassionate, calm Helen becomes lost. Onny experiences fear of retribution, a kind of brief passion that Gabriel does not experience. Lavin undercuts Onny’s brief religious passion as surely as she undercuts Gabriel’s dispassionate morality, for Onny immediately falls into a ridiculous lie to God, and Gabriel immediately falls into hollow, pedantry with Onny. Their beliefs part ways before the abortion, in a scene that plays comically while underscoring the religious issues in the novel. Religious themes in Lavin sometimes go unnoticed due to her subtlety in the face of public pressures and censorship. Richard F. Peterson mistakes religion as a major factor in Mary O’Grady’s life, based on a few Irish folk phrases, which even Irish atheists sometimes use; Mary’s praying the rosary in one scene; and saying a long prayer (mostly for her own emotional needs) in another (R. Peterson 69; Lavin, Mary O’Grady 55–6, 69). However, as noted before, Lavin treats religion from a cultural standpoint. Mary’s primary points

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of reference for why she does or does not want her children to do something relies more on “tales” she’s heard rather than verses or sermons (12, 65, 89, 95, 150). Like Mary’s vision of heaven as a family reunion, Lavin portrays Mary’s Catholicism more as a smattering of conjoined folk customs than a genuine religious commitment. Tellingly, the narrator refers to Mary’s phrase “‘God preserve us from all harm!’” as “her talisman against all evil” (18). A “talisman” literally refers to a folk charm, not a prayer as spiritual communion. Mary’s manipulation of everyone reveals that she leaves as little as possible to faith in her life. If anything, Mary O’Grady quietly undercuts the superficial religious commonplaces that Lavin seems to have disliked as shallow. In a similar way, Lavin undercuts two forms of superficial religiosity in The House in Clewe Street. Gabriel’s aunts show more attachment to obsessing over the details of preparing for mass and the surface details of Gabriel’s observances, than anything else of an actual spiritual nature (Lavin, Clewe 205, 385–6). Gabriel’s views about the reality of God waver according to whoever holds the most power over him at any point in his life: his aunt Theresa, then Sylvester. Childhood “tests” for God’s wrath to strike play for humor. Onny’s family, judging by Larry’s comments, tends toward stirrings of “spiritual fear,” that would “never, never utterly rout practical fears,” combined with folk practices such as hanging “holy pictures” everywhere to “bring a blessing on the house” (185, 204). Onny ends up trying to quash fears of God’s retribution, while Gabriel ends up trying to instill in Onny his fear of appearing “primitive” (459). Neither of these extremes has much direct connection to a religious commitment in the context of a community of believers, as a churchgoing life ostensibly entails. Lavin’s send-up of these extremes, the rational and the “primitive,” appears in a row over “holy pictures.” Although Lavin once called “all those stupid holy pictures and prayers” obstacles to belief, she makes a subtle point with it about the differences between Onny and Gabriel (Levenson 234). Onny values visual art much more highly than Gabriel does, as she spends time looking at art catalogs and becomes upset when he pretends to kick a painting (Lavin, Clewe 422, 434–6). He tells her to get rid of her holy picture, which happens to feature the Virgin Mary, and that her attachment to it is a “sin” (464). Yet Onny horrifies him when she cuts it up to line her shoe. Gabriel “preaches” at her for attaching “power” to the picture, degrading herself with “superstition,” then berates her again for “desecrating” it (464–5). He wonders why she didn’t use the art catalogs if she wanted the coated paper. Onny and the text do not elaborate. The narrative alludes indirectly to the basis of Onny’s different interpretation of what is or is not desecration. If one took into account Onny’s horror at Gabriel’s even joking about kicking in a painting, then an underlining point here is that Onny’s new set of values interpret “desecration” differently than Gabriel’s values do. For Gabriel to still want to “burn” the picture, on the basis of what it stands for, the text here hints, he is held as much in thrall to a kind of superstition as Onny was, only one coming from his middle-class sense of propriety. Lavin lets Gabriel do most of the talking, but how she stages the scene, building up on details slipped in earlier about Onny’s divergent criteria for desecration of visual materials, makes Gabriel look ridiculous. One could conclude that, with the spirit of correction hovering in the background and the “official” story


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of the novel in the foreground, Lavin employs a form of signifying here on “proper” middle-class types like Gabriel. If Onny feels some fondness initially toward Gabriel’s name because it reminds her of the holy picture of the archangel, her cutting apart the picture of the Virgin, besides signaling where she parts ways with Catholicism, signals the end of any thoughts of Gabriel as her guardian angel. Furthermore, Gabriel initially feels uncomfortable about not appearing married out of a fear of people “sneering” at Onny, not out of any moral sensibility (374). Later, Gabriel wants to marry Onny ultimately out of duty, not passion. At the end, he seems quite sincere when he refers to her threat to abort as a “most deadly sin,” and he shows a deeper understanding of “duty” at the end when a memory of Onny’s “glorious bold smile” inspires him toward the “path of honour” (477, 499–500). The narrator indicates that Gabriel’s sense of duty has changed to something beyond propriety when Gabriel then looks up and exclaims at the “loveliness” of the city, a city “resplendent” in the “triumphant testimony of man’s mighty struggle to cut through ignorance and doubt a path of sane philosophy” (500). If the novel’s undercutting of Gabriel as a moral compass were left in any further doubt, the next line should settle it: “Of this city he knew nothing: he had never seen it, never for one hour been a part of it” until then (500). In that nearly final line, Lavin seals the signifying on Gabriel’s purported idealism. It’s only when Gabriel turns his back on the possibility of returning to Clewe Street that he truly enters adulthood; he finally gets a “clue.” Onny, however, rejects Gabriel out of passionate longing for freedom from “drudgery” and aborts the fetus out of a misinterpreted “duty” to herself. She may die from the back-alley abortion, performed “too late,” and Gabriel may be the character to survive and stride “forward,” but it is Onny’s “glorious” face that prompts him and Onny’s raging speech that marks the novel as extraordinary. In a sense, Gabriel’s pronouncements and his survival hide the fact that Onny’s character changes most over the course of the novel, to the point where even Gabriel admits to himself, regarding skipping mass, that, “Once again, Onny had outstripped him in the courage of her convictions” (386). If Onny’s folkloric identity as a type of Irish mermaid serves as the mask to allow Lavin to put her characters into the moral borderland of the Otherworld, then Gabriel’s coming of age story, in what Peterson condemns as its “narrow conventions” and “mediocrity,” masks the story of Onny’s sexual and religious rebellion (R. Peterson 63). Lavin assigns Onny the most attention-getting speech in the whole book, declaring in the middle, “I hate you. I hate all men!” and ending with “I’m finished with that life. I’m never going back there! Never! Never!” (Lavin, Clewe 476, 478). Any reader with egalitarian inclinations would read the whole passage as an impassioned, long-overdo manifesto for a woman in Onny’s station in life. Gabriel expects to teach her and to have her follow his will; Sylvester expects Onny to return from the abortion “chastened,” needy, and “frightened”; and Onny defies those expectations by bowing to none of that (479–80). The problem remains that she dies doing so. That Lavin condones Onny’s desire for freedom from submission to men and middle-class matrons, but does not condone how Onny pursues it, may be inferred from the investigation of her disappearance by Gabriel, Helen, and a reluctant Sylvester. Helen rapidly deduces that Telman’s “selfishness,” his “temper”

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at having a planned picture delayed by Onny’s pregnancy, would lead him to divulge the location of an abortionist (481). The way in which Telman confirms this reveals what Lavin depicts as the root of a woman’s need to abort. Onny only comes to this “terrible state,” “crying and stamping her feet,” as Telman says, because he has just told her “that she wouldn’t be any more use to me as a model” (483). Scorn drips off the page when the dialogue assigned to Telman reads, “I pitied her so much” (483). Helen shows “distaste” toward Telman as well, especially when he warns that the abortionist is “no place to bring Helen” (485, 487). “‘It was no place for Onny,’ said Helen” (487). The narrator, separately from the thoughts of the characters, refers to it as “the evil place where Onny had gone in her degradation” (488). The desire for economic freedom, which Onny cites as her reason for the abortion, only leads her to death because it is the male dictates of the Dublin art world that send her there. Leah Levenson describes Lavin as having had conservative views about reproductive issues in her own life and that of her family, though she seemed to think that “virginity” was to be treated as an “ideal,” not as some faux heroic self-denial (Levenson 158, 197, 198). In the sixties, Lavin grew uncomfortable with “‘all the talk of sex and birth control’” (156). However, she hung the weight of those issues not on religion but on the moral codes described by her character Helen: “I think every moment of life creates its own moral decision, and each time a proper moral solution must be found’” (156). In other words, the decision-making here depends on a human being who consults an external code, but not necessarily a divine one. A.A. Kelly sums up Lavin’s position on sex, “A marriage of minds without physical contact is just as sterile as a marriage of lust without mental affinity,” that one should “regard sex through tenderness and altruism, not only by way of aberration and lust” (Kelly 83, 135). Her later works saw danger equally divided between prudery and “values based on expediency,” that “entropy results from glutted, not strangulated feelings,” as Kelly puts it, with “sex,” “religion in society, celibacy, abortion, free love and the female position” presented in “such an oblique and restrained way” that, for the lack of “being bludgeoned into awareness,” readers may overlook (171, 135). With such a nuanced response elsewhere, Lavin’s ambiguity in the The House in Clewe Street toward religion, abortion, and sex outside of marriage makes sense. Sarah Briggs goes further and sees that “Lavin is writing about marriage as entrapment ...” (Briggs, “A Man in the House” 101). The trap in which Onny finds herself, like the traps in the stories Briggs addresses, is “deep-rooted, having evolved from centuries of cultural construction of women as Ireland,” which “damages women, not just by demanding that they marry, but by refusing to value any alternative to marriage except religious seclusion” (101). It’s no wonder then, that Gabriel acts astonished when Onny refuses to bow to his will when he forbids her to model professionally, and it’s no wonder that Onny reacts with rage then and later, when she finds she’s pregnant (Lavin, Clewe 452). From his point of view, women cannot exist separately from domesticity. From her point of view, the men have blocked all her exits from servanthood. Except, as it turns out, one. The desperation with which Onny tries to escape these “nets” parallels the desperation of the mermaid in many Irish folk tales and legends (M. Murphy 36, 38). Maureen Murphy and Bo Almqvist see possibilities of reading mermaid legends as, in Murphy’s words, “a metaphor for the woman in an arranged marriage,” “only escaped by silence and distance or by


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madness and death” (M. Murphy 36, 38; Almqvist 37–40). Onny’s choices of escape in her situation reveal similar limitations. By Lavin’s development of the entrapped mermaid as the entrapped working-class woman, she elevates Onny in a way Gabriel cannot imagine and brings attention to difficult aspects of life for women in Ireland at that time. In Lavin’s sly civility, she submissively mimics, and then undercuts, a “conventional” male coming-of-age story that only seems to bow to convention. Without that sly civility, and without the mask of the folk-woman character that gives Onny artistic license to be “wild,” it is unlikely that Lavin could have gotten this narrative of sex, abortion, class strife, and women’s rights past the censors. The play on Onny’s name as both “Ondine,” a magical, elevated Otherworld woman of water, and “Honor,” the elevated quality that Gabriel thinks he should restore to her, fixes Onny at the border between worlds and at the border between social movements. In the end, Gabriel chooses not to run home to his aunts but to share with Onny the “dishonor” of her death (Lavin, Clewe 494–500). Gabriel may still feel attached to “duty,” but now it is Onny’s “glorious bold smile,” “effacing all else” that leads him to the “path of honour” (499). It may be a pun, yet it is Onny’s boldness, not Gabriel’s small town codes, that spur him to make up his own mind in the end. So, while a “dishonored grave” may reflect sexual attitudes of 1945 Ireland, Lavin’s privileging of Onny’s passionate drive toward freedom, though it misfires, indicates a more ambiguous reading of the sexual subplot than previously noted. For Onny could not have become Gabriel’s “glorious” vision without her “boldness” having first inspired him. Through Lavin’s use of Otherworld allusions, and subtle developments in Onny’s character, folkloric indirection in The House in Clewe Street complicates a narrow understanding of sexual politics and an “angel” versus “low creature” binary (419). Neither “vermin” nor “angel,” the former servant perhaps dies from the effects of her stranglehold on freedom. However, it is through this apparent failure that Lavin burns one woman’s fight for freedom into readers’ minds. One could call the undoing of this binary the offbeat apotheosis of Onny Soraghan. Ní Dhuibhne’s pub Mermaid Ní Dhuibhne’s own offbeat mermaid in “The Mermaid Legend” continues this theme of freedom. Freedom of sexual expression, even in 1991, still carries complications. Other stories, such as “Gweedore Girl,” in The Inland Ice and Other Stories (1997), and “Sex in the Context of Ireland,” in The Pale Gold of Alaska and Other Stories (2000), feature realistic portrayals of inequities in sexual relations between men and women in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Ireland. Abuse of power over women by men, church, and state preclude much personal expression of sexuality for the young female protagonists. For example, the young prostitute in “Sex” experiences little or no pleasure in her expression of sexuality, only danger and hypocritical pressure from those who claim to have concern for her. The young servant in “Gweedore” thinks she is experiencing a mutually happy love affair with the butcher boy, only to find she has been used. A more humorous

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portrayal of complications in sexual expression appears in “The Mermaid Legend.”1 Ní Dhuibhne’s unnamed Mermaid protagonist tells her story with a gusto shared by Ní Dhuibhne’s other folkloric, boisterous bartender in “The Wife of Bath.” Like the Wife, the Mermaid dresses to catch the eye, though the Mermaid is evidently younger, as her tight red clothes still “draw the eye” of male patrons (Ní Dhuibhne, “Mermaid” 169). The Wife of Bath makes clear, “Well, I like sex ... ,” and although the Mermaid in the pub indicates that she’s experienced with men, having not “blushed” since she was in “nappies,” she does not seem to be enjoying herself as much as the Wife (Ní Dhuibhne, “Wife of Bath” 97; “Mermaid” 170). No ecstasy of Erzulie here, nor any queenly retinue. The Mermaid in the pub is an ordinary, working-class woman, perhaps better off than Onny. Unlike Onny, this mermaid is English, not Irish, but the issues concerning sex reflect more on Irish culture. Binaries of an elevated, magical “wild” role versus a degraded “domestic” role, the “erasure” Mills speaks of; silence versus loquacity; male versus female; English versus Irish; innocence versus experience; and appearances versus reality, especially with regard to sexuality, run, mix, and mingle throughout the short work. The folk basis for the contemporary fiction introduces the binaries as preexisting assumptions, only to complicate them once the folk and contemporary aspects merge, with folkloric indirection paving the way to an unsettling ambiguity in the end. As Ní Dhuibhne herself has commented, continuing social pressures in Ireland affect how one writes about sex and the mores of Irish communities (Appendix). Since “The Mermaid Legend” takes a critical view of both, in how openness about sex can have negative and positive repercussions and in how some small Irish communities may not make independent women feel too welcome, Ní Dhuibhne does have need of folklore to negotiate these topics for her Irish audience. The folk narrative itself sets the stage for exploring, and exploding, binary extremes. Alternating with a retelling of the folk version of the mermaid legend, taken from “The Man Who Married the Mermaid,” the Mermaid in the pub explains everything that the silent mermaid in the narrative does not about the breakup of the marriage to the Irishman (Almqvist 5).2 The bartender in “The Mermaid Legend” loves the sea, calls herself a “sea girl,” but she shows a more humorous attachment to liquid; her livelihood depends on her keeping a different kind of fluid flowing (Ní Dhuibhne, “Mermaid 75). The humor of the juxtaposition of the pub Mermaid’s colloquial language and late twentieth-century clothes and manners with the more formal, timeless folk narrative draws attention to potential meanings in the folk narrative that stay in the background. The pub Mermaid, no shrinking violet, alerts readers to quiet allusions to attachment and unhappiness that a transcript of the mermaid narrative may obscure, while an individual storyteller may emphasize. Bo 1 Angela Bourke defines a “legend” as a story “purporting to be true,” to differentiate legends from “folktales,” which may or may not make a truth claim. By labeling the short story a “legend,” Ní Dhuibhne combines aspects of the magical with the real. Angela Bourke, “Legends of the Supernatural,” Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, Volume IV (New York University Press, 2002), p. 1284. 2 Coincidentally, Ní Dhuibhne’s spouse, Bo Almqvist, has written one of the more thorough folklore articles on mermaids.


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Almqvist writes that the folk versions already feature a “clear-cut binary opposition” of “human” versus “supernatural being,” “domesticated” versus “wild,” “land” versus “sea” (Almqvist 39). These binaries, while intact on first reading of the folk excerpts, come apart in the contemporary sections. The Mermaid in the pub may be “wild,” as she says, and her Irish former husband may call her “courageous” during their first night together, but he’s the one who suggests the “ramble” to the park, and she’s the one who admits that she is “up to that” (Ní Dhuibhne, “Mermaid” 170). They meet in the middle of their wild inclinations there in England, yet the “wild” becomes reserved for the husband back in Ireland, where he is the “wild” one, drinking at all hours, leaving her out (172). The “wild” of the “sea” gets mixed up as the supposed opposition, the man from the “domesticate” “land” reserves all the wildness for himself, via another kind of liquid. The pub Mermaid insists from the first page, “We were deep down different, like different species or something. Fish and fowl we were” (169). The kinds of oppositions the pub Mermaid sets up come across as cultural more than physical or elemental, yet goes beyond the “old English Irish bit, or the Protestant Catholic bit” (169). The Mermaid’s Irish mother-in-law sets the children to bothering her about not going to mass, another instance of the formalities of a religion being followed, not the spirit of one. Ní Dhuibhne implies that the mother-in-law cares less for her daughter-in-law’s soul than for an opportunity to sow division. The children, of course, can be set upon their mother by using their sincere fears for her spiritual well-being. The few references here to the religion question outline not so much a binary of two branches of Christianity as a solitary quagmire of the mother-in-law’s dislike for the Mermaid wife. The Mermaid alludes to additional cultural tension in her husband’s insistence on being called “Michael,” “never Mick,” perhaps to avoid having his British wife call him by a name once used as a slur (172). In spite of that, the protagonist emphasizes that it’s the “deep down” conflict between this man and woman, seemingly situated in their contrary expectations of the roles they will play in the marriage, which dooms the relationship. He expects her to stay home while he spends all his evenings in the pub, “never doing a hand’s turn in the house,” and this conflicts with the Mermaid’s own inclinations. The extreme division of labor, the rather sharp division of designated male and female spaces, may come from the Mermaid being plopped down in comparatively bucolic Spiddle, but the hiding away of women in domestic spaces seems an arbitrary rule embraced by Michael beyond any cultural influence. The Mermaid may blame the surrounding culture to a certain extent (“Blooming hell, I’m from the Potteries. Give us a break!”), but she ultimately claims Michael’s difference from her goes beyond culture, indicating that he must take some blame for the pressures he placed upon her. The folk mermaid may remain silent in her domestic captivity, but the pub Mermaid does not and breaks the binary of elevated magical mermaid versus erasure of the housewife. Like the mermaid in the folk excerpts, the pub Mermaid goes back to the “wild” (170, 173). The folk mermaid may belong to the elevated end of the scale, as an otherworldly being, but the pub Mermaid brings the role back to the middle ground of the day-today working world, and, perhaps, a little lower, owing to the nature of how she keeps her job. The Mermaid in the pub may escape servitude to Michael, but evidently not

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a type of sexual servitude in her job at the bar. In an indicator also that she does not take the same amount of pleasure in her sexuality that some of the other “mermaids” mentioned here have, the Mermaid in the pub compares her black and red clothes— and “garters”—to the aquarium that “draws the eye” of customers (169). She mocks the happy picture of cheerful sexiness her clothes are meant to draw by immediately adding, “Da-da-da, da, da! I’m singing in the rain, I’m happy again! Like hell I am” (169). She admits that she wears “black suit with the red blouse and those high heels” to get a job. Sex and monetary earning combine in a way that does not seem to please the pub Mermaid much. Rather, she tolerates this mix, a mix that also appears when Onny models for Telman and she fears that losing her figure will mean losing earning power (Lavin, The House in Clewe Street 497). Just as the elevated and magical meet in the middle of the scale with the mundane, the appearance of sexual exuberance in the pub Mermaid meets in the middle of the scale with the mundane of economic necessity. The Mermaid reveals a sadder reality behind her role of cheerful bartender, just as she reveals the not-too-charming underside of her life in Spiddle. The pub Mermaid makes further alterations to elevated, unearthly Otherworld woman in the folk excerpts by adding sexual reciprocity to the mermaid’s seduction by the mortal man. The man in the excerpts, Eoin Og (Young Ian) holds the folk mermaid in his power by stealing the cloak that will transform her back into her seagoing form (Ní Dhuibhne, “Mermaid” 171). In the contemporary retelling, the pub Mermaid describes a different sort of enchantment taking place. Michael’s insistent proposal comes between taking off her “halter top” and “whippin’ off [her] knickers. Red and black” (170–71). Pieces of clothing captured as part of sexual conquest have parallels in both versions, but the pub Mermaid adds her own pleasure to it. Missing from the folk version, where the mermaid simply trails after Eoin Og and becomes “very fond” of him, is the pub Mermaid’s admission that she still “go[es] to jelly” thinking of her first night with Michael on grass (171, 170). Bo Almqvist associates the mermaid’s “garment” with her “sexuality,” as well as the man’s sexuality with “earthy masculine metaphors,” such as Michael’s suggestion to have “a ramble” over to the “Green” (Almqvist 39). The removal of the garment as part of the courtship or capture may have some negative overtones, in some interpretations, as Almqvist acknowledges, in “the marital misery” the removal of the garment could cause young women (37, 38). The removal of the garment could represent the young women being “enticed into premarital sexual relations,” then pressured to marry due to pregnancy out of wedlock. It makes sense that some women retelling the story could put use that possibility to add to the sense of entrapment. Here, some folk interpretations insert ambiguity even into what seems the more appealing aspect of the mermaid “capture.” Packed into such a small space of text, the first-person account also pulls apart a binary of “innocence” versus “experience.” Part of Michael’s enchantment in his seduction of the Mermaid is that he makes her, a “woman of experience,” feel like blushing when he looks at her (Ní Dhuibhne, “Mermaid” 170). Paradoxically, the Mermaid refers to Michael’s seductive gaze, though, as “stripping [her] naked with his baby eyes,” while he is “knocking [drinks] back like all Irish babies” (170). The innocence of his compliments to her “lovely head of hair” and his invitation to “come for a ramble” also enchant her with their ring of “something you’d hear


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in a trad pub” where folk songs would be played (170). Thus, on their initial night together, the couple seems evenly matched, at a point where each person’s qualities of innocence and experience meet in mutual sexual attraction. The enchantment found in the contemporary story flows out of a mutual sharing to which the folk version only briefly alludes. Some variants do not even include the part about her becoming “very fond” of the man, for that matter. “The Mermaid Legend” emphasizes the theme of a female’s capture by a man into domesticity and escape that exists in the folk variations of the story. The story also draws attention to the possibility, brought up by Maureen Murphy, Bo Almqvist, and Angela Bourke, that the folk versions may have operated as a mask for women storytellers to contemplate “layer upon layer of attitudes and approaches to the problems involved” in male–female relationships, as well as to contemplate escape from marriage in a time and place where that could not happen (M. Murphy 38; Almqvist 40; Bourke, Burning 43). The contemporary Mermaid in the pub can openly declare why she has vanished from the man’s home. She can openly act out the ambiguity of the ending of each mermaid account, too, where being released back into the wild of the sea, or the wild of sexual freedom as a single woman, may be a painfully mixed blessing. The pub Mermaid asserts that she cannot go back to life with Michael, and yet she calls it “hell” “being without” her two daughters (Ní Dhuibhne, “Mermaid” 174). Again, the pub Mermaid elucidates why, despite the danger of recapture, some versions of the folk narrative feature the mermaid returning to check on her children. Variations of the folk narrative, Almqvist notes, can be interpreted as an “allegory on the destructive effect of divorce on children” (Almqvist 40). Where the folk version of the story hints at this dysfunctional element, the “sea girl” bartender emphatically declares. Where the folk mermaid in these excerpts can speak, other versions only show her laugh a few times, or else make no sound at all. The Mermaid in the pub, however, expresses the emotional subtext and draws out the ambiguities of the folk version that normally require individual storytellers to allude to with vocalization, gesture, or asides. Along the way, the contemporary mermaid underscores the difference between appearance and reality, where a buoyant, cheerfully sexual persona covers a longing for her children and a drive toward economic survival. The Mermaid in the pub, the story hints, may be using her black and red suggestive clothing as a mask for a more complicated sexual nature than her ex-husband, her patrons, or her boss acknowledge. There may be something bizarrely funny, too, in mocking the image of the aloof, silent Irish mermaid by having her portrayed with the chatty, bumptious charm of the British bartender. The two end up not so far removed, after all. By alternating the different portrayals of the mermaids, Ní Dhuibhne uses folkloric indirection to give exuberant, fleshly life to the folk mermaid’s muted sexuality and to give contemplative restraint to the supposedly “wild” bartender. Each character reflects complications upon the other woman that have been denied to them in other story settings. Sexual expression, regardless of its origins in alcohol-inspired or fairyenchanted encounters, carries with it difficulties best limned by indirect means. Even more indirect than the pub Mermaid’s exploration of sex, marriage, and religious culture clash, is Ní Dhuibhne’s allusion, via folklore, to abortion in The Dancers Dancing. The teenage Orla, studying Irish in at a summer program, mopes

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around a desolate area of the nearby stream, tries to find firm footing in the damp clay, and finds it in a horrifying way. Seeking stones to stand on, “her foot strikes something very hard,” “harder and smoother than” rock, “shiny,” “white, smooth as a pearl” (Ní Dhuibhne, Dancers 202). Orla instinctually “knows what it is,” and, overcome by “curiosity,” not “horror,” she uncovers “Skulls. Half a dozen, a dozen, small round white skulls. Tiny skeletons, with bones as delicate as the pieces of Airfix model airplanes” (202). It seems unlikely that a burial ground for unbaptized or stillborn infants would be placed on the banks of a stream, in so shallow a grave, at that. The next line, beginning the following chapter, instigates Orla’s contemplation of the mechanics of pregnancy, based upon the limited information her mother has given her. Her first period has started. The dramatic juxtaposition of young Orla’s discovery of the suspicious grave of the infants with her first period becomes compounded by a dream a little later on. She dreams what she does “not know,” of a woman with her family’s name executed for infanticide in her family’s home town. The “old newspaper,” the manner of death by hanging, and the English names for the police and courthouse indicate that the tragic events took place before independence, at the turn of the century or earlier. Orla hears a witness describe the Aisling character as lying in a barn with a baby and firmly declining help. The description of a young woman hiding away behind a house, close to the elements, resembles the settings of real life cases of hidden births in Ireland in the eighties, discovered only when the bodies of the babies or the mother turned up. Orla dreams that the new mother looks like her attractive friend Aisling, named after the vision woman from Irish folklore. Orla sees her “long and fair” hair, common to folk aislings, and sees the vision woman leave the barn with the baby and drop him over the edge of a waterfall (211). She “drops him like a stone,” and “he smiles at her as he falls like a stone” (211). The scene seems to imply that this is how those infant skeletons arrived at bank of the stream, perhaps at the hands of different mothers. The number of skeletons raises the suspicion in readers’ minds that such desperation may occur more frequently than communities wish to believe. The contrast between the desperation and dreamy details startles. Ní Dhuibhne’s rhetorical use of the grotesque, tiny skulls being stepped on, or the bizarre, tiny skulls being like airplane kit parts, wedge ideas into readers’ thoughts they might not otherwise entertain. The picturesque dream of “Aisling” looks and moves, “lightly stepping,” like an actual aisling, but ends with infanticide. Vision women in folklore are capable of leading men to their deaths, only this time the male is a newborn and carried to his death. As will be examined in the next chapter, what Irish newspapers referred to as the Kerry Babies case opened up raw debates over whether to increase access to sex education, birth control, and abortion to prevent further incidents of infanticide in the future. Poetry, film, and fiction in Ireland have been examining the issues ever since, in conjunction with images of young women killing newborns. The more shocking the depiction, the more likely that the story comes encased in folkloric references. Ní Dhuibhne’s own stories rely on folklore, here with reference to vision women by streams, to explore the questions: how does a society address sexual expression and the results of sexual expression? What is the community’s responsibility to women in crisis pregnancies? The depiction The Dancers Dancing of the neighbor woman’s apathy, and the mother’s apparent ignorance that her


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daughter was about to give birth, therefore, mimic scenarios that emerged during the discussions of the real-life deaths. Where Ní Dhuibhne’s depiction alters the tone is that here, as with “The Midwife to the Fairies,” neither faction receives condemnation. Aisling (or Nuala Crilly, as the dream newspaper calls her) seems beautiful and tragic, but alienated. The aisling here is neither “angel” nor “monster,” although her actions seem chilling. The newborn “smiles,” which elicits sympathy for a murdered child, not a “byproduct” of reproduction, as he would have been if the aisling had gone to a clinic a little earlier instead. The only male in the picture resembles the kindly boy Orla has a crush on. He only stares “sadly at her as she walks” to the waterfall, concerned, but not concerned enough to do anything about it. The odd distanced effect of dreams blends with the odd apathy in the communities of the real life crisis pregnancies. The indirection of the folkloric vision woman, the watery borderland of the stream, with its Freudian “tunnel of foliage,” enables Ní Dhuibhne to introduce volatile issues dealing with reproduction to a mixed audience. Whether readers favored liberalization of abortion and birth control access or not, they might be disturbed, but not so offended that they stop reading. No one rhetorical position takes primacy in the dream sequence. Disturbing readers from all positions, though, to think deeply about the folkloric images of the aisling, the white-robed baby, and the water boundary between life and death can only help further refine their understanding of life, death, and reproduction. At the same time, the combined negative and positive allusions surrounding this unusual aisling disrupt the above/below binary that Irish society may apply to women pregnant out of wedlock. The indirection of the folk woman by the stream finesses this disruption of stereotype. “The Two Shall Be As One”: Morrison’s seaside duo, Celestial and L Combining elements of Hurston’s divine Erzulie with elements of Ní Dhuibhne’s and Lavin’s ambivalence, economic strain, and magical yet contemporary settings, Morrison’s folk women, Celestial and L, from her eighth novel Love, add their own psychological complexity to the mermaid story. Celestial’s ambiguity partners with Morrison’s L, an otherworldly wise woman who has a lot to say on the subject of all matters related to love and sex, with a few words on religion, too. The nature and roles of these characters in the novel becomes clear only toward the end of the book. Hints of each woman’s stories dot the book’s overall development, as do their importance to the main characters. The novel gives some details of each woman’s life as a human being, and it gives many more details of each woman that allude to them as more than human. In short, the details add up to this: L portrays agape to Celestial’s eros.3 Put together, the two bang apart the binary of “love” versus “lust” to complicate the greater concept of “Love” as a whole range of possibilities. For example, L comments directly on romance, relationships, and issues solely tied to reproductive activities, the nuts and bolts of the Sexual Revolution. In fact, what

3 “Agape” is the appropriate counterpart here, as that is the Greek form used in I Corinthians 13, the passage L identifies as the source of her name (p. 199).

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previous wise-women characters mutter or allude to, this watery ghost of a wise woman provides outrageous monologues on. Celestial, a strong but mute presence, has L to interpret for her. The memories of other characters further depict Celestial in ways that undercut the gleeful depiction of eros in Hurston’s Erzulie. Where land meets the sea, a boundary that L notes changes with “hurricanes following droughts,” two bifurcated folk women, a mermaid and her ghost and a wise woman and her ghost, combine to make one powerful Otherworld water being (Morrison, Love 9). The Cosey family and their associates see only hints of L’s and Celestial’s otherworldly identities; the narration, mostly through L, reveals much more of their magical qualities to the reader. To the Cosey family, L is not just the hotel’s head cook, she functions as “the only peacemaker around,” but she takes “no one’s side” (133). Readers never find out what Celestial thinks of L, her counterpart in the novel, as no direct interactions take place, although readers know what L thinks of Celestial. As it turns out, L has secret knowledge and influence on what kills Bill Cosey, her boss, in addition to holding secret knowledge on everyone in the town of Silk (201). It remains unclear when L becomes something other than a mortal woman, except that she dies in the middle of cooking smothered pork chops at Café Ria sometime in the seventies (189). She speaks for her mortal life and for her immortal identity with the complaint, “Anybody who remembers what my real name is is dead or gone and nobody inquires now. Even children ... treat me like I’m dead and don’t ask about me anymore” (65). Then she mischievously says of her old spot at Café Ria, “I glide there still” (65, 73). Despite this ambiguous position as a ghost, L in her lifetime also seems to have been a positive example of one of Morrison’s religious characters, not just going to church and tithing, but also acting out the “subject” of her name (65, 199). As a benign ghost, L sits next to Celestial, who sings by Cosey’s grave. But whether Celestial knows of L’s presence, not even L seems to know (202). This oddly limited interaction for the “two halves” of one otherworldly entity may mean that eros has a limited ability to encompass agape, although agape has no trouble keeping eros in her consciousness. In life, however, because of Celestial’s outsider status among the Coseys, L and Celestial rarely appear together. Even if L may or may not be an unknown entity to Celestial, L understands her like no other character in the book. As L presents it, Bill Cosey treats Celestial at first as only a prop in a story about his son, then he calls her the “pretty woman” who dispersed the “clouds” after his son died (101, 43). To his granddaughter Christine and his underage wife Heed the Night, Celestial is an icon, a woman whose approving wink gives them such a thrill, that her name becomes part of their private language for “bold, smart, risky” things (188). To Christine’s mother May, Celestial is a “sporting woman,” whom she warns her daughter to stay away from (188). To, L, Celestial is something more complicated, a peer, another otherworldly woman. Only in L’s narration does Celestial have a voice, though indirect. And, oddly enough, L. credits Celestial with giving her her own voice back. L cites her as the only being to scare off “with a word—or was it a note?” the monster clouds called Police-heads who normally bring calamity upon “desperate women and hardheaded, misraised children” (106, 201). L, for her part, once “could make a point strong enough to stop a womb—or a knife” (3). L claims that because of the state of world


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in the seventies, when she may have died, she has “shut up altogether” and just hums (3). It takes Celestial’s blues by Cosey’s grave to make L want to “join in” (202). Separated in life, as humans often separate spiritual, nurturing love from fleshly love, they come together in the Otherworld, although still in an ambiguous way. Other than the grave scene, all the scenes that feature Celestial take place close to the sea, as do many of L’s scenes, as well. All of Celestial’s scenes, except in death, take place by the ocean, making her seem like a water-being related to Hurston’s Erzulie and cousin to the West African Mami Wata. Despite the adult Coseys reduction of Celestial to only a sexual being in those settings, Celestial also acts as “agape” to Christine and Heed, in a brief, vivid moment of nurturing. For her part, L as agape nurtures, tells truths, and carries peace in all settings, yet by the ocean she acts as “eros.” “The ocean is my man now,” as L puts it, and then goes on to describe his personality and how patient and watchful she and he are with each other (100). Here, L has an otherworldly affair not just with a water being, but with water itself. This more physical love for L takes place after her death, but in both life and death L identifies herself and her mission with the book’s title. As she says, “If your name is the subject of First Corinthians, chapter 13, it’s natural to make it your business” (199). The “agape” versus “eros” binaries alluded to and contradicted by Celestial and L intersect most often by a beach, and once, by a grave. The silence of one and the monologues of the other reveal less obvious sides of the kinds of love humans sort into categories like family, friendship, religion, or reproduction. With their watery Otherworld connections, the folkloric qualities of both Celestial and L enable Morrison to indirectly critique the assumptions of her time, just as Erzulie, Onny, and the pub Mermaid enable their authors. Celestial’s actions and bearing break her character out of the degraded extreme into which her community, as represented by May, has set her. Despite the elevation of her name, and her divine attributes, Celestial does not stay solely at the “angel” end of the scale, either. A true contrarian in the book, much like L, Celestial cancels out the above/below binary that would make her either an “angel” (“goddess”) or a “monster” (“whore”). The character confounds both the “spiritual” end and the “voluptuous” end of the set of extremes Morrison describes in Playing in the Dark, the “demonizing and reifying,” too (Morrison, Playing ix, 7). As a prostitute who goes about her job with the “quiet, reserved way” of a “Red Cross nurse,” Celestial carries her “head held high,” “profile etched against the seascape” (Morrison, Love 106, 188). This description collapses the “nonsexual, devoted, demure” image that Claudia Tate and Ann Stavney notice was set out for African American women by male intellectuals during the Harlem Renaissance (Stavney 537, 551). Celestial is both sexual and demure. She comes from a “whole family of sporting women,” which indicates that her family’s poverty and influence over her may have given her little choice of career options (Morrison, Love 106). Celestial may have been placed in a degraded social position, but she indicates a scorn for the economic and class divisions of her town. L stops Cosey—the hard way—from leaving “everything” to the “one person who would have given it away rather than live in it or near it ... rather than let it stand as a reminder of why she was not permitted to mount its steps ...” (201). The allusion to “Celestial Cosey” in the linked C’s on the silverware worries L, and although Celestial has the power to “summon” Cosey “anytime,”

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she never becomes his wife (22, 79, 104). Celestial’s position as “the real sport” of Cosey’s fishing boat,” keeps her out of his hotel as patron or wife. Even if Cosey purchased Celestial’s time, and the silverware, to make himself her primary lover, L’s statements make it hard to determine how much more than just “sport” Celestial is to him. Not merely his “whore,” not his “friend,” not fated to be his “wife,” she plays the role of a long-time lover whose time he must purchase. The affair remains ambiguous, and readers only know of her love for Cosey on the last page when her ghost sings “‘Come on back, baby’” (202). Her ghost may sing “down-home, raunchy songs” to his grave, but she is still insulted enough by his tombstone’s inscription, “Ideal Husband. Perfect Father,” to cover it with the folds of her “red dress” (201). The contradictory nature of Celestial’s attachment to Cosey appears again when L acknowledges that “neither could break the spell” between Celestial and the rich man, yet her manner on his boat remains “aloof, sober, slightly chiding” (111–12). The references to love, “spell,” “songs,” and “Come on back, baby,” seem undercut by references to Cosey’s end of the relationship, described as “first ownership” of a “fish” caught “with a wallet” (112, 110). Sandler, Cosey’s sometime fishing guest and the husband of a woman who worked at Cosey’s hotel, makes the last two observations, but he makes them as a man who hopes that his grandson Romen will know what it is to love a woman with whom he can “mate for life” and “trust” (110, 112, 151, 154). Erzulie’s and Mami Wata’s connections between wealth and a woman identified with a fish’s tail come in here, but not the “ecstasy” Hurston describes. Sandler, as the teller of this part of the tale, privileges family, duty, romantic love, and monogamous sexual union instead. Observations from the point of view of a working-class man and a working-class ghost, who do not share Cosey’s appetites, reflect some positive and some negative qualities upon Celestial’s relationship with Cosey. Their views of silent Celestial present the concept of eros, which Celestial seems forced to represent in her life work, with ambiguity overall. The ability to summon a man anytime, the regal aspect of her profile, the wealth she inspires Cosey to give her, the name, and the power she has to command the otherworldly storm clouds hint at Celestial’s parallels with Hurston’s Erzulie. L remembers the night Celestial demonstrates what she can do. After massaging her head, Celestial gets up from a blanket on the beach, “naked as truth,” goes into the waves, and does not show any fear when the “Police-head” clouds threaten. According to L, “wayward” women are one of the clouds’ two primary targets, yet Celestial isn’t “afraid of them—or of anything,” because she make a perfect “arc” of a dive into the water anyway (106). The clouds remain, and Celestial issues a “sound,” “a word, a tune, or a scream” that moves L to want to answer (106). In the conclusion, L states that Celestial’s proper use of her “tongue,” while she “stood right under their wide hats, their dripping beards,” is what “scared them off,” “with a word” or “a note” (201). Celestial’s power over men and sea put her in close company with Hurston’s interpretation of Erzulie and the accounts of Mami Wata. Her sexual allure and “unstoppable good looks,” too, make her resemble the divine African and Haitian mermaids (106). It may seem that her lack of dialogue and peripheral influence on the storyline leaves Celestial as merely an icon of both ends of the extreme, a sex goddess


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masquerading as a prostitute. However, L’s observations of Celestial and Celestial’s interactions with the other characters take her out of the “rarified” realm. For example, a goddess does not need to “massage” her head “with both hands,” which means that the night she yells down the Police-heads, she is also experiencing a moment of human frailty, tiredness, and discomfort. The scar on Celestial’s face, running from “cheek to ear,” comes from a “bent nail,” a “homemade fishhook” that blows back in the wind and hooks her cheek when she is “nine or ten” (188, 101). Billy Boy, Cosey’s nearly grown son, extracts the nail. The little girl, Celestial, “grateful,” stands there “cupping her face without a tear or a moan” (101). In the story that her future lover tells repeatedly about his son, Celestial appears only as a stoic, impoverished child on the beach. The story reveals that Cosey meets Celestial in almost the same manner that he meets his next wife, Heed. A friendly act unites one of Cosey’s progeny with an impoverished girl, “about ten years old,” on the beach (101, 187). In each instance, Cosey picks the child out for sexual attentions, only he manages to wait a while with Celestial.4 The novel provides Celestial with moments that make her not only human, but also a model for and a counterpart to the little girls in Cosey’s life. L alerts the readers on the second page that prostitutes, looked up to for their “honesty,” have “always” served a type of role model. In addition to her function in the little girls’ lives. By the time Heed and Christine see Celestial on the beach, Celestial has grown to womanhood and, it seems, has taken on the family trade, for a man calls out “Hey, Celestial” with a “kind of private knowing along with a touch of envy” in his voice (188). The “envy” may mean that she has already become known as belonging to Cosey. Rather than turn to the man’s voice, though, she turns and looks at the two little girls: “Her eyes locking theirs were cold and scary, until she winked at them, making their toes clench and curl with happiness” (188). “Hey Celestial” becomes the little girls’ battle cry in the world, to encourage each other in acts that defy authority, and, in the void of other forms of spiritual and communal care, it becomes their form of the call-and-response “Amen” (188). In lieu of the African American oral traditions not passed down to them, except, significantly, through L’s few words, they create their own from the leavings of a disrespected but defiant prostitute, whom they will soon follow in parallel fates of sexual objectification. That little act of pseudo-worship creates another detail in common between Celestial and sexual worship of Erzulie. In one way the origin of the phrase seems a foretaste of from what and whom the girls will take their orders, because Morrison states that “they mimicked the male voice.” Regardless of what lies ahead, in contrast to the distance with which each little girl’s mother treats her, May, stiff and quick to send Christine to boarding school, Mrs. Johnson, absent and quick to give Heed up like a “puppy,” Celestial briefly gives the girls the kind of playful attention than not even L gives them in her nurturing (105). The stern demeanor with the playful wink enchants in a way magical to little girls. Even May’s disapproval of Celestial’s boldness enhances her image in 4 Cosey’s first significant encounter with an impoverished little girl is the child humiliated by whites who have taken away her father, apparently with Cosey’s help (pp. 44–5).

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their eyes. For lack of anyone more available to them, Celestial becomes Heed’s and Christine’s role model. This, like Celestial’s ambiguous affair with Cosey, will have positive and negative effects for the girls, as well as in L’s account of the history of womanhood in the late twentieth century. In one example of Celestial’s wink as a mixed blessing, the aspect of her life that prompts “Hey Celestial” to become the girls’ “Amen” is the same aspect that will prompt Cosey to neglect Heed. In another result of the girls having and choosing only Celestial for a model, a more advanced stage of suffering in Christine’s life begins when “into that aimlessness came Fruit” (163–4). This turns out to be a bleak sort of pun. The “fruit” of her family’s neglect is subordination to men who like to treat women like “dirt” (163). Andrea O’Reilly ties Love’s “loss and suffering that occurs” in the absence of mothering, “the devastation, both personal and cultural, that arises when children are not preserved, nurtured, or do not receive cultural bearing,” to similar depictions in all of Morrison’s other novels (O’Reilly 176–8). O’Reilly cites Christine’s “seven abortions” and Heed’s miscarriage as further evidence of the emotional and cultural sterility of the women’s background. During her adulthood, Christine’s mental image of her last fetus looking at her seems the most encouraging presence in her life at that time. Tellingly, Christine considers herself “irrelevant” when the “eye” of the fetus is “closed” by the Supreme Court ruling (167). The haunting presence of a would-be or altered child recalls the changeling losses in Beloved, Mary O’Grady, and “Midwife to the Fairies.” What should readers take away from this negative portrayal of what other novels, other stories, many other books refer to as a positive milestone in women’s history? When set beside the reactions of Morrison’s wise-women characters in the next chapter, some conclusions may surface. Paradoxically, L’s wariness of the “honesty” of prostitutes as a model for behavior bears “Fruit” in Christine’s emotionally and reproductively barren affairs. When Heed and Christine adopt Celestial as their apogee of womanhood, they take heart from her daring and her brief moment of encouragement. However, as O’Reilly notes, and as the text bears out, without other types of nurturing presences in their lives, the women fail to thrive. Regardless of her limitations as a role model, her encouragement of the girls, along with her own vulnerability as a child and her torn feelings over Cosey, makes her more human than sex goddess. Those aspects put her closer to the characterization of Onny and the pub Mermaid than to Erzulie. In an area of extremes constructed by money and racial privilege, Celestial’s presence contradicts the “counterfeit world invented on the boat” during parties where Cosey’s money and will briefly reverses the polarities of the town (111). The “women could dominate, men would crawl, blacks could insult whites,” but unlike the other women “stimulating” the “laughter,” Celestial holds herself above the false world on the boat (111). She doesn’t buy Cosey’s “counterfeit world,” though she may be emotionally bound to him even past “the grave” (106). Other than the “sound” that holds sea monster clouds at bay, the narration does not show Celestial speaking, which lends her the traditional silence of the mute mermaids and selkies. But the “wink” and L’s accounts of her still make this variation of a mermaid more human to the audience. Through her, Morrison crushes an above/below binary, by forcing images of a “goddess” and a “whore” to meet in the middle. Morrison’s


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use of folkloric indirection, via an adaptation of Erzulie/Mami Wata and European mermaids, to explore issues of sexuality will become clearer in Morrison’s depiction of the wise-woman character L. The alluring mask of Celestial as a seaside Venus lifts to reveal even further complications to sexuality in Love as it regards class and interracial relations. The negative views Celestial holds toward the Coseys’ wealth and power parallel Onny’s negative views toward the Galloway-Coniffe family. In each case, arrogant class-conscious women disdain the woman from the lower social and economic class, while the “Other” women themselves take an equally dim view of May and Theresa. The cases of Onny and Celestial also portray how more successful members of a subaltern group may replicate the dominant group’s false values toward others in their group. The “outlaw women” Morrison praises, like Celestial and, as it turns out, L, pull back the covers on the above/below binaries replicated within groups (A. O’Connor). L goes even further than Celestial in attacking the assumptions behind unseen binaries, and she may act as a mask for Morrison herself. As a woman from a bygone time, and a ghost at that, L lets fly with some of the most outrageous comments in a Morrison novel up to this point. (Chapter five will look closely at major and supporting wise-women characters in Morrison’s other novels whom she utilizes for similar shock value in their comments and other forms of indirection.) Considering that the mermaid, or naiad, Nereid, nymph, or other water-based Otherworld woman, has come across as a woman of few words, including Celestial, L joins the pub Mermaid in filling in the gaps for the other mermaid-type characters. In explaining why she no longer speaks, L claims it is because “back in the seventies, when women began to straddle chairs and dance crotch out on television, when all the magazines started to feature behinds and inner thighs as though that’s all there was to a woman, well, I shut up altogether” (3). The sentence structure implies that the new sexual openness of late twentieth-century culture has caused her to “shut up” rather than say anything more in a time where “barefaced” sexuality and conversations have become “the order of the day.” Only later in the book do readers piece together that when Heed refers to “L haunting Up Beach” that she means the phrase literally (73). Readers must piece together that L has died sometime in the seventies, and death usually keeps people from conversing, unless they die in a Morrison novel. In the time frame of the novel’s narration, however, L confides bluntly in the reader. By opening a novel with something as vehement as “The women’s legs are spread wide open, so I hum ... Standing by, unable to do anything but watch, is a trial, but I don’t say a word,” the author challenges readers to ask, first of all, does Morrison intend for readers to honestly consider what L has to say? (3). Secondly, why does the Sexual Revolution upset this woman so much? And thirdly, how has an openly sexual culture silenced this woman? Morrison doesn’t so much as write an introduction as fire a salvo. L may speak to the readers in this book more than the other mermaid-type folk women generally do, except for the pub Mermaid, yet she has no other conversations in the present setting of the book. Even her past utterances, peppered with folk sayings, “The streets don’t go there,” “Wake up, girl. Your oven’s cold,” sound limited but pithy, and she admits that her “nature is a quiet one, anyway,” one of “normal

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silence” (129, 174, 98). Christine sums up L’s character as “the only peacemaker around, whether glaring or shaking her head, but she would take no one’s side,” much to Christine’s dismay when her mother sends her away (133). L uses phrases that many readers might find off-putting such as “women up to no good,” “loose women,” “wayward women,” “wicked females,” “modern tramps,” and “sex—the clown of love” (5, 6, 67, 63). L ties nineties women, “dancing half-naked on TV,” to a style set by “prostitutes” (4). Readers accustomed to seeing Morrison’s works as generally feminist in nature, even sensual, may find it shocking to have one of her wise-women characters trace women’s objectification to free sexual expression. Beyond a level of condemnation that scarcely appears outside of religious publishing, L argues that this “female recklessness,” sexuality unhinged from any set of values, has its source in the abuse of women (4–5). She may be an “old woman embarrassed by the world,” “objecting to the how the century is turning out.” But she also sees and mourns the vulnerability of “wild women” who “can’t hide the sugar-child, the winsome baby girl curled up somewhere inside,” who “never could hide their innocence—a kind of pity-kitty hopefulness that their prince was on his way” (4). In one of the first references to fairy tales, L casts a history of abuse as “some tale about dragon-daddies ... each story has a monster in it who made them tough instead of brave, so they open their legs rather than their hearts where that folded child is tucked” (4–5). Here, Morrison seems to state, via L, that having many partners in one lifetime not only degrades women but also develops out of a timid, self-immolating response to childhood abuse. At the close of their story together, Heed and Christine seem to concur, “... it’s like we started out being sold, got free of it, then sold ourselves to the highest bidder” (Morrison, Love 185). Before assuming that Morrison has L mouth the words of convention, similarly to what Lavin does with Gabriel Galloway, one should notice that what L says here has not been in circulation as a conventional attitude for “some thirty years,” according to L’s estimate (4). The witty and compassionate notes in L’s little rant here, along with her saddened affection for the other characters, mark L as a sister to Morrison’s previous wise-women characters, and also marks L as a voice that Morrison intends readers to accept as—at least partially—valid. As James Phelan writes, each of a writer’s “choices,” such as L’s wit and compassion, “will affect the audience’s ethical response to the characters; each choice will also convey the author’s attitudes toward the audience” (Phelan 320). Phelan asserts, and many of Morrison’s interviews back him up, that this author wants us to “enter into each character’s consciousness” and to “recognize the validity of his or her feelings and judgments” (323). If accurate, then readers cannot dismiss L’s rage against the sexual mores of the late twentieth century as simply the meanderings of an “old woman.” Morrison, as noted by Maria DiBattista and Cheryl Lester, takes her “old women” quite seriously and sometimes borrows their personas (DiBattista 106; Lester 129). Therefore, the first answer is yes, readers should not dismiss L’s opinions out of hand. To answer the second question, the Sexual Revolution upsets L because she sees it as a “craziness” that holds down women, “making women hate one another and ruin their children” (Morrison, Love 5). When the apparent source of the “craziness” is an abuse “so deep” “no woe-is-me tale is enough,” L then blames “an outside evil” (5). Critics may debate what that “outside evil” consists of, or if L


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only means it as “trick” that “explains” what one cannot explain, like the folk legend she tells of the Police-heads (5). At no point does L rescind her judgment that sex between consenting adults does not constitute an unassailable benefit to humanity. L does have good things to say about “raunchy” songs and her relationship with her “man,” the ocean, but L does not elevate sexual expression to the uppermost end of a binary. Midway through the book, L states that how Celestial makes her living has “saddened” her (105). She states that what passes for “infatuation” has become only “selfishness,” that what passes for “love” has become something that “people with no imagination” feed “with sex” (63). She states at the end of the book that “wild” women are “needy,” “desperate,” and “disgraceful” (105, 200, 201). But in Morrison’s anti-binary manner of speaking, L’s line that there’s “no telling what this modern breed of junior woman is capable of” can also read as a compliment. Regardless of the times L alludes to the positive side of eros, she seems to argue against privileging the erotic over other aspects of life. The effects of the Sexual Revolution upset L because it harms women and children and, though “it’s all for them,” makes men feel “helpless” in the face of their desires (3, 4, 154, 195). Morrison has, in fact, stated that her interest in writing the novel lies with “the way in which sexual love and other kinds of love lend themselves to betrayal” (McKinneyWhetstone 206). With L’s condemnation of such suffering, Morrison seems to go merely voicing an interest in the link between different kinds of love and betrayal. The novel appears to question an above/below binary of “sexual expression” versus “repression,” or, closer to the terms of the novel, eros versus agape. As for the answer to the third question that L prompts with her opening comments, how a sexualized society has silenced her, it silences her because women themselves have “agreed to spread in public” (3). A later allusion to this comes when Christine acquiesces to Fruit, in part, by following one of his group’s rules of “never cross[ing] her legs at the knees” (163, 3). L silences her qualms because she interprets this acquiescence as the choice of those women. But not entirely, she seems to argue. Women operate their bodies under the influence of others who do not care about their well-being. “All” the magazines and TV promote a woman’s body as “all there is to a woman,” she says (3). L shuts up because the media and the younger generations have outshouted her, buried her world in a “craziness” that is “heaping up, holding down,” an avalanche beyond the power of an old (and dead) woman to stop (5). Later generations have ignored L into silence, in the context of her identity as agape. They have treated her like she’s “dead,” they “don’t ask” after her, they don’t “inquire,” and they have long since given up trying to know her “real” identity (65). The noise of sex that knows no boundaries drowns out “Love.” L opts for indirection now, no longer speaking directly. She opts for the “beauty of meaning much by saying little” and for becoming the “movie music” that plays in the “background” when “sweethearts” first meet, when a “husband” feels guilt, or when a mother sacrifices herself for her daughter in Mildred Pierce (4). L does not just identify with this indirect influence, she claims she is that influence: “I’m the background” (4). L “encourages people” and “frames their thoughts” toward behavior reflected in First Corinthians: “patient,” “kind,” without “envy,” not boastful, “not proud,” “not rude,” “not self-seeking,” “not easily angered,” always protecting, always trusting, always hoping, always persevering (I Corinthians

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13:4–5 NIV). The types of characters she lists in her “movie,” although they still reflect human weakness, allude to family and sex within the context of commitment: “sweethearts,” not lovers; a husband, not a good one; and a mother and daughter, though not too stable. Innocent, weak, and troubled, a wide range of humanity, but humanity as interpreted through commitment. L’s “hum” exists, she says, to help humans try to commit themselves to each other, even if they fail at it. The primary point where L proposes an alternative to the “craziness” of the culture of sex appears where she denounces “two-night stands trying to last a season,” where she describes “the real kinds” of love unknown to the unimaginative, “the better kinds, where losses are cut and everybody benefits. It takes a certain intelligence to love like that—softly, without props” (63). Other characters’ comments and actions hint at what such intelligence might look like. The marriage and parenting of Sandler and Vida, whose name means life, set a positive contrast. Sandler alludes to Vida having been the woman present in his “own maiden voyage” of sexuality, because he remembers it as a “ferocity that had never mellowed into routine pleasure” (109). Sandler remembers proverbs like “‘If she don’t respect herself she won’t respect you’” and “‘Don’t hang your pants where you can’t hang your hat’” (38, 146–51). At end of the novel, Romen runs away from that night’s tryst with Junior and runs to his duty of helping Heed and Christine (195). Chased and chastened by the memory of Sandler telling him he is “not helpless,” Romen berates himself for not understanding that the old Romen, saving an “unwilling girl,” “was hipper than the one who couldn’t help flinging a willing girl around an attic” (195). Narrative comments every now and then, ambiguously placed near characters’ thoughts, echo L as the classical chorus of the novel. In the end, whether or not L’s monologues have any connection to the main narrator, L, with the narrator and characters supporting her, ends the book with an outline of “something better” (10). She might start with only “an old folks’ tale to draw on,” but as in Bourke, the “interplay” of individual tellers and their communities allows for a continually renegotiation of values (Bourke, “General Introduction” 1195). L does not retract her lines about what upsets her, what has silenced her, but she softens them. Instead of “wicked females” and “unruly children,” the Policeheads hunt “desperate women and hardheaded, misraised children” (Morrison, Love 3, 201). Yet, L’s and Celestial’s actions appear all of one piece in defeating both Cosey’s “vengeance” and “hatred” of his kinswomen and in defeating the Policeheads, who wear the round hats associated with Cosey’s and his father’s cronies, the corrupt white sheriffs of Silk. Cosey’s power comes from the favor and influence curried with white authority; the symbol of white authority identifies the folk monsters. Celestial defeats both the Otherworld males and the mortal Cosey, as she seems to exemplify L’s phrase, “a dream is just a nightmare with lipstick,” while L, quiet in life, acts as Celestial’s troubadour in death (201). They make an effective Otherworld team, spinning the binaries of servanthood and whoredom into elevated yet humanly complex women of power. L takes on the role of love as agape, Greek for the Christian “love feast” (Oxford English Dictionary Online). This love encompasses the Christian sense of “charity” (caritas), in I Corinthians 13, brotherly and sisterly love, as well as the love of God, Christ, and other Christians, plus God’s love for humanity. No references to


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L having any sexual relationships appear in the novel, except for her sensuously described marriage with the ocean after she dies (101, 105). Her emphasis on the present in the line “my man now” indicates that either Morrison has simply chosen not to divulge any other of L’s liaisons, or that the ocean used to be someone else’s “man.” L’s earliest act of devotion appears when she witnesses “the sight of all that tenderness” when Cosey cradles his first wife Julia in the sea, indicative of the rest of L’s relationships as nurturing rather than carnal (64). Celestial, in contrast, sees the other side of Cosey, the one that makes a woman’s body the “real sport” of a boat outing. Celestial takes on the role of eros, earthly, erotic, or sexual love (Oxford English Dictionary Online). But the novel’s title is Love, and since Morrison never overlooks any binary, least of all one that large, she has the two women, as well as the concepts they play with, meet in the middle, where real women live. Celestial’s name puts her in the sky, not the earth, and she battles ethereal cloud monsters. L finds her Celestial “content” in death, and in comparing her to a Red Cross nurse, L puts her closer to the definition of love as “charity” (201, 106). L breaks with her own name once in a paradoxical act of devotion, when she poisons Cosey to keep him from the sin of throwing his “family out in the street” (Morrison, Love 201). Finally, L hopes Celestial has “forgiven” her, an act that also puts Celestial closer to agape, and she wants to hum along with Celestial’s “downhome, raunchy songs that used to corrupt everybody on the dance floor” (201, 202). Music holds back the Police-heads and beckons an earthly love that, as with Sandler and Vida, has the capacity to combine the “ferocity” of passion with the “cherishable” (109). When L sits “near” Celestial “once in a while,” the two types of love become one, simultaneously mourning “an ordinary man, ripped, like the rest of us, by wrath and love” and singing, humming, to “something else” than the Police-head story, “a story that shows how brazen women can take a good man down” (201, 10). Love does not completely triumph, in any expression of it here, because the Police-heads, the “unfriendly looking clouds” spotted by an unknowing Romen, after “forty years” have returned (198, 7). Only the windows of the Cosey women’s home “glint,” like the “eye of a determined flirt,” in the growing darkness of the Police-heads’ return (199). Their windows stay “peachy” with early morning light, an allusion to the picnics of “canned peaches” and other “emergency food” at their beach fort Celestial Palace, which both Heed and Christine in their memories prefer to sex (198, 190, 193). To turn “peachy” strikes one as a bizarrely cheerful and triumphant term, throwing the women’s renewed happiness in the face of the “bigheaded profiles,” in the face of death. Morrison adopts then alters folkloric references to smooth a path for her readers to her indirect critiques of society. L’s opening rant might seem direct. In fact, L as wise-woman-ghost who marries the sea masks Morrison’s criticism of the Sexual Revolution without drawing condemnation (101, 105).5 Sexual and emotional abuse may lie at the root of what L sees as the degradation of the seventies through the nineties, but sex itself has ended up abused as well, in its appropriation as a source of power. Morrison counteracts this other form of “sex abuse” with sensual details, 5 In reviews of Love, I have not yet run across any that attack Morrison over this aspect of the novel. If some do, they do not make up the bulk of the responses.

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for which critics have always given her credit, that roam throughout the novel. Her refurbishing of sex attempts to free of it from “overt” use, while she leaves some details off for readers to fill in for themselves, as part of her way of more fully engaging her audience (Weaver; Ruas 101). Making sex sexier by using less of it in a text parallels Love’s other reversals. Like the other characters in the novel, only more so, Heed and Christine act out the broken binary of agape and eros that L and Celestial reshape and meld together into one work of Love. Celestial and L share the boldness and allure of Erzulie, the disappointment in relationships of Onny and the pub Mermaid, and adds to these portraits their experiences as beautiful and smart women of color, denied access to a better life in either the Anglo society or the rich Black society of the day. Like Erzulie, Onny, and the pub Mermaid, Celestial and L stage their own rebellions, perhaps with more success in the end. As Morrison says in her interview with Anne-Marie O’Connor, “Outlaw women who don’t follow the rules are always interesting to me” (A. O’Connor). Onny’s reach for freedom seems more passionate and more spectacular as she fails, while Celestial establishes a separate peace in her divided society. Both characters face others in the books who degrade them as either a “slut” or a “sporting woman.” The Mermaid in the pub faces disappointment in her sexual relationships, as well as sexual objectification, with her love for her daughters as an extra, though painful, benefit. Only Erzulie rises completely above the fray of these sexual relationships, although that is because she does not bother with living with humans on a day-to-day basis. All the folk women from the watery end of the Otherworld work against binaries that set women at extremes. Erzulie reverses the “whore” stereotype to use sex as an act of divine power. Onny’s “warm” humanity presses together the binary of the name she is born with, bringing the elevated role of Ondine and the degraded role of Soraghan servitude into the middle of the world, where women have jobs, earn money, and try to guide their own paths in life. The Mermaid in the contemporary retelling brings a boisterous voice to a previously silent folk woman and obliterates any division between Irish “sainted motherhood” and “wild” bar women in her passion for her Irish daughters. Celestial, like Onny, confounds the extremes of her name and her position in society, raising a “sporting woman” to a “Red Cross nurse,” and lowering a sea/sex goddess to “wink” at little girls. Finally, like a mortal woman who marries a merman in Irish folklore, L’s marriage to her “man,” the “ocean,” provides a sympathetic, otherworldly context for her discussion of relationships (Murphy 30). Like the other mermaid-type folk women, Celestial and L team up to break the binaries so that the extremes come together in the middle where real women range.

Chapter 5

Reproducing Wise Women Folk women with “ancient properties” The categories of folk women, as set up in this book, work more as a general guideline, not as anything that places this character or that in separate rooms. Sometimes, as seen in the prior chapters, the more complex and more fascinating a folk-woman character is, the more likely she will bust apart multiple stereotypes and therefore reflect multiple folkloric references. Happily confounding any attempts at categorization, for example, Morrison often folds layers of magical power into the composition of her mortal wise women, as with Pilate and Thérèse, and blends wisdom into her otherworldly women, as with the immortal ghosts Circe and L. As a young woman, Pilate is even accused by a potential lover of being a “mermaid” because of her unnatural, navel-less belly (Morrison, Song of Solomon 148). As wonderful as her ambiguities are, in order to compare how her and the other authors’ folk women act out strategies of indirection, I have organized the Otherworld/Wise Women chapters to correspond to what the characters do and in what type of context they do it. On occasion this means that I must allow some characters to float like L between Café Ria and the cemetery. This chapter focuses on those instances where folk women in these four authors’ works function mostly as “wise women,” either in the folk forms of the Virgin Mary or in roles similar to that of the midwife. Some, like Lavin’s Onny from Clewe Street, Mary O’Grady, and Ní Dhuibhne’s Jenny from The Bray House, and to a smaller extent, Hurston’s Erzulie, critique issues of authority and sexual mores through the otherworldly allusions explained in chapters three and four. The Otherworld claims Onny, Mary, and Jenny in those instances where the fairy world impinges on their “real world” stories. These characters also alter binary extremes attached to the wise-woman folk character of the Virgin Mary. So much ink has been spent on the passivity of the Virgin Mary, her supposed lack of fleshly coherence with human life, her representation of women’s sexual repression, even her irrelevance, that no one voices surprise at Meisenhelder’s unquestioned acceptance of Hurston’s view of Mary as a “‘passive queen of heaven,’” or Gilbert and Gubar’s attempt to damn her as a “clear line of descent” to the “domestic angel” half of the binary (Meisenhelder 161, Gilbert and Gubar 20). Presented as a binary of herself, the “Janus-faced” interpretation of the Virgin Mary, as Elizabeth Butler Cullingford describes it, makes Mary “a source of power, peace and consolation for some, a repressive nightmare for others,” as a “political as well as religious icon” (Cullingford 257). Even when a reference to the “Queen of Heaven” appears as a compliment, such as when Augustine Martin praises Mary O’Grady, a compliment based upon a one-sided reading of the Virgin Mary turns into condescension (Martin 386). Such stereotyping over the

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centuries has forced Mary Magdalene into serving as the other end of the binary. Gilbert and Gubar likewise allude to her as part of Goethe’s binary in Faust of the “penitent prostitute to angelic virgins” (Gilbert and Gubar 21). Folk references to these two Marys that go deeper than the images appropriated for sexual and national stereotypes enable an author to break binaries for the folk woman herself as well as for womanhood as represented in the text. Other folk women, such as the mermaid, have managed to maintain an ambiguity fed by folklore’s flexibility. Some, like characters based on the wise-women Marys, of necessity must break the limited set of images fixed upon them as well as on the women compared to them. Exploring Morrison’s allusions to the Virgin Mary and to Mary Magdalene, then, creates an opportunity to break those folk women themselves out of their own “Virgin Mary” versus “Mary Magdalene” binary. The wise-women characters in this chapter reflect different interpretations of the Virgin Mary and the folk culture role of the midwife, sometimes from opposite angles. In those instances, wise women with well-developed personalities, frailties, frustrations, and a flesh and blood existence, impinge instead on the Otherworld. In the case of Morrison’s religious wise women, the Abrahamic God impinges via the women on a human world. Morrison’s and Ní Dhuibhne’s works recast Biblical and Otherworld stories as taking place in the seemingly mortal and human world. Because God works through humanity and because, in these works, the Otherworld has become human, these folk characters fall under the mortal wise-women category. With allusions to the Virgin Mary, Erzulie, Onny, and Jenny return to provide opposing commentaries on assumptions concerning sexuality. Mary O’Grady returns to hammer out the problematic conflation of the Virgin Mary with Mother Ireland. Morrison’s Mary Magna in Paradise offer yet another rewriting of the Virgin Mary as a wise-woman character. Consolata Sosa, too, reflects some qualities of the Virgin Mary as she undoes binaries connected to that folk woman. Midwifes or similar specialists appear briefly in a few passages from Lavin and Hurston, but more extensively in Ní Dhuibhne and Morrison. In each of those cases, the author brings up issues of reproduction, sometimes with indirect commentary on abortion. Unlike Ní Dhuibhne and Morrison, Lavin and Hurston likely faced similar censorship on the topic of abortion. Lavin got around the difficulty by not showing “blood and guts” depiction and by “killing off” the character who gets the abortion. Hurston proceeded even more cautiously. Some references to midwives appear in Lavin, but no longer portrayal, just a passing mention in Mary O’Grady to the “district nurse” (Lavin, Mary O’Grady 23). Hurston’s midwife-type characters do not appear to deliver babies. The one wise-woman character that shows up who treats topics of reproductive health is the “old woman” “specialist” who prepares virgins “for love” with husbands or rich men (Hurston, Tell 290–92). Hurston the anthropologist then proceeds to provide surprisingly lurid details, for the time, of the specialist training a virgin in “complete competence,” anointing her with arousing oils, and sexually stimulating the girl until she passes out. As with Erzulie as the sex goddess mermaid, Hurston makes an end run around the censorship of her time. A more subtle point here is that Hurston here avoids portraying her experts in folk medicine doing anything as common as bringing new life out of all that sexual tinkering. Hurston fights back limitations in expression by finding an almost unassailable position to write from, her

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research, and by excluding anything that would evoke the nurturing female stereotypes that Anne Stavney described as being pushed by the male intelligentsia of the Harlem Renaissance. Hurston uses the mask of academia, excludes “domestic” topics, and finds radically different folk models. Lavin uses the mask of apparent propriety only to undermine popular assumptions through folk references. She spends more time than Hurston examining the ancient trade of midwifery, but not much more. In contrast, the postmodern authors writing into the twenty-first century of test tubes, frozen embryos, and surrogates, Ní Dhuibhne and Morrison, seem to take delight in portraying the traditional profession overlooked by the earlier authors. Ní Dhuibhne’s “Midwife to the Fairies” navigates the volatile subject of Irish society’s struggle over how to assist women in crisis pregnancies. In all of Morrison’s novels, a wise-woman character, sometimes peripherally, sometimes at the center of the action, condemns the willed death of a child. No reader would think it unusual to see a wise woman, or anyone, angered over infanticide or murder. The surprise with Morrison lies with how often—and how vehemently—the narrative voice or wise women condemn abortion as the death of a child. Consolata offers an excellent example of the power and indirection of the folk women in the context of sexuality, abortion, and contested aspects of Christian traditions, thus she and her colleague Lone DuPres will close chapter five. Wise women take center stage in this chapter in their capacity as human beings trying to influence the attitudes and actions of other characters, even if only to implicitly argue for the recognition of differing views on reproduction and religion. Anti-Marys in Hurston and Lavin As the Hurston scholar Susan Edwards Meisenhelder and many Irish critics have already mentioned, criticizing popular perceptions of Christianity in the US or Ireland in the early to mid-twentieth century left authors vulnerable to censorship. For Hurston and Lavin to criticize any aspect along the “virgin” versus “whore” continuum of stereotypes, they had to use caution. Hurston could use the cover of anthropology to report folk practices that reversed the image of the Virgin Mary as sexually pure or “passive,” as she puts it. Lavin takes on the sexually pure image of the Virgin through the Clewe Street character of Onny Soraghan, a woman also associated with mermaids like Erzulie. Lavin disrupts the Irish popular conflation of the Virgin Mary with the nation-as-woman through Mary O’Grady. Between the two of them, Hurston’s and Lavin’s “anti-Marys” comment on sex, abortion, religious images, and nationalism. In her chapter “Erzulie Freida,” Haiti’s “pagan goddess of love,” Hurston takes aim at what she perceives as the negative sexuality and passivity of the Virgin Mary as a figure of adoration and as an implied model for women in Catholic cultures (Hurston, Tell My Horse 383). Wasting no opportunity, Hurston makes an unfavorable comparison with the Virgin Mary and female saints who receive praise for their abstinence: “Erzulie is not the passive queen of heaven and mother of anybody” (384). Images of the Virgin Mary may stand in for Erzulie, but no other similarity follows. Other characters, such as Consolata Sosa and Mary O’Grady, whose portrayals allude to the Virgin Mary, might contradict that image of complete

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passivity. Regardless of these contradictions with other interpretations of Mary, Hurston can avail herself of this opening to express herself on another censored topic, her religious beliefs, through the need to provide a cultural context for Erzulie. Lavin had to face a more diverse set of stereotypes attached to the Virgin Mary in her culture. Misapplications of the ideals evoked by the Virgin Mary forced women into not only sexual but also nationalistic symbolic roles. As Lia Mills and other Irish feminist critics have described it, the “virgin mother” became fused to other feminine icons in Irish culture, the enchanting maiden as “poetic muse” and the “Mother Ireland/Cathleen Ní Houlihan” (Mills 69; Coughlan 89, 90). Although Onny imports an otherworldly wildness into the novel, she has a potent scene where, thinking she is following Gabriel’s orders, she tears up a holy picture of the Virgin Mary. Onny used to cherish what Gabriel views as a “gaudy, cheap print of the Virgin and Child” that she says was bought for her “at the Mission stall the day [she] was confirmed” (Lavin, Clewe 463, 467). Here we have another, albeit peripheral, link between the Virgin Mary and a mermaid character, a link almost as distant from this mermaid character as Erzulie is from her Virgin Mary iconography. While Lavin urged her own daughters to remain celibate before marriage, she criticized what she saw as an extreme attachment to virginity, which she thought of as more realistically “an ideal” (Levenson 158, 197, 198). Onny as an “anti-Mary” also, through the portrayal of her desperate death, critiques the irresponsibility and callousness of men like Sylvester and Telman who abandon the women they use, along with their unborn progeny, to back alley abortionists (Lavin, Clewe 481, 483, 485, 487). However, with Mary O’Grady, Lavin hits her greatest target of undermining woman as magna mater, the identification of Irish women as the Virgin Mary, and the Virgin Mary as Mother Ireland. Mary’s power and turmoil as a folk-woman character seep through oral tradition-influenced manners of speaking and manipulative gestures. With these, Lavin turns the binary of the “sainted” Irish mother, as conflated with the Virgin Mary and Mother Ireland, on its head. Folklore presents itself in Mary’s mind and behavior as a portal to increased control as well as a portal to increased fears, both of which contradict other critics’ view of Mary as a woman who demonstrates an active faith, instead of a cultural connection. For example, Mary’s “talisman against all evil”— “‘God preserve us from all harm!’”—appears more than once in the book (Lavin, Mary O’Grady 18). Lavin calls the phrase a “talisman,” not a prayer or a literal exclamation to God. After speaking “crossly,” Mary excuses it with a proverb, saying that, “There was no use taking the good out of a thing once it was done” (217). Another combined reference to traditional culture and Mary’s lessthan-passive maternal authority occurs when Mary offers to get her dying husband “a drop of peppermint” for his death pangs (80). Those details further align Mary in those instances with maternal wise-women folk characters. In one of the more darkly humorous examples, Mary wonders, “‘Did they not think of me?’” during the news of the death of her daughters when they go up in a plane, the character exhibiting both a common sentence structure for Hiberno-English and the self-concern that lies near the heart of her apparent selflessness (159). Mary dominates her family utterly, with a few occasional exceptions. Only the youngest, Rosie, learns enough of her manipulative techniques to control Mary in


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her turn, as she effectively does when she succeeds in not going to college against Mary’s will. No other characters succeed in defying Mary’s will; even Patrick must passively accept spending the remainder of his life in a mental institution. There is a submerged rage in Mary that appears only at odd moments, such as special occasions, or moments of crisis, such as when Larry withers in the attempt to tell her of the plane crash. Instances of rebuke and sarcasm also appear. Mary’s pushing Larry away when, distraught, he tries to throw himself into her arms after the crash, also comes to mind as another instance of Lavin’s subversion of a magna mater versus monster binary. Lavin depicts Mary as neither the passive stereotype of the Virgin who shares her name, nor as a pre-salvation Mary Magdalene, nor as the “erased” Irish woman of the time. Her portrayal of this mother comes across as anything but one of a “madonna and child theme,” as Augustine Martin calls it in the Afterword, that supposedly “permeate[s] the heroine’s consciousness” (Martin 384). Overt depictions of Mary’s fury with Larry, occasional outbursts of anger with her daughters, and manipulation of Patrick—besides her unnecessary continuation of his stay in the mental hospital—does not reveal a woman who “has lived her role of mother and wife to the full,” who “has been true to her calling both in human and divine terms” (384). Such a depiction more than likely reveals doubt toward that calling. Evidence of rage, subsumed under Mary’s devotion to duty, makes me question Martin’s view of Mary’s “passiveness with which she accepts the day’s vicissitudes and society’s dictates” (386). Mary does accept her limitations, but rebels by taking an unusual emotional chokehold over her family’s lives. Even the love that she does share with Tom seems undercut by her sarcasm towards him when he complains of feeling poorly. She stalls him when he asks for a doctor, putting him off with a folk remedy more appropriate for stomach upset than cardiac arrest. He soon dies. Lavin returns us to another level of contradiction buried in the line “Did they not think of me?” Martin collapses the character of Mary with the woman she’s named for, the Virgin Mary, the “Queen of Heaven” (386). This conflation is neither “simple” nor “unselfish,” as some critics think (387; Peterson, Mary Lavin 75). Her tone and looks, which indicate Mary has other emotions in addition to devotion simmering below the surface, may not match the serenity of the Virgin, but her fierceness recalls in some ways other images conflated with Irish women. The “figure of sovereignty,” who alters into the “dream woman” (spéirbhean or aisling) appearing to male poets to demand “justice, restitution,” as a “symbol of dispossession and loss,” becomes “Poor Old Woman/Mother Ireland/Cathleen Ní Houlihan,” as Lia Mills combines her (Mills 73). Mills and Lisa Bitel trace the evolution of the sovereignty figures and queens of Irish oral tradition, such as Medb in the Táin Bó Cúailnge, to images utilized by male leaders (73; Bitel 233). In the later use of the sovereignty figure, the “Poor Old Woman” sends her young men to battle for her, to die, to sacrifice themselves. In the early twentieth century, the Ireland-as-woman triad shifts again to something seemingly more controllable by men. Heather Zwicker argues that the Irish Constitution of 1937 recasts the “trope of Mother Ireland” into the “concrete, material bodies of women produced as mothers, who move in domesticated spaces in order to direct their energies toward the nation-state” (Zwicker 249). As in the

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novels that Zwicker describes, Mary O’Grady also shows mothering in “resolutely materialist detail” to depict the outcome of “the Republic of Ireland’s production of women as mothers” (Zwicker 261, 262). There is another side to the image of “Mother Ireland,” however. If male leaders sacrifice ordinary women by collapsing them into an appropriation of the sovereignty goddess, then one might expect some women to interpret this role in all sincerity—and appropriate some humans to be sacrificed to them. Mary O’Grady, in a sense, takes social and political leaders at their word and performs this role with a vengeance. Perhaps literally. Reminiscent of the effect that Yeats’s Cathleen ní Houlihan has on young men who want her approval, Larry repeatedly shows an inclination to sacrifice himself for Mary. Patrick ends up sacrificing his freedom for her, by her will. In some ways, Patrick’s desire to become rich in America, and his voiced disdain for what he perceives as shabbiness in Ireland, could be read either as a sacrifice he makes to go away to earn money and glory for Mother Ireland, or as a rejection of her, for which he is punished terribly by his wandering-induced “illness” later (Lavin, Mary O’Grady 251–2). To return to Mary’s anguished question, her two eldest daughters and their young men, who would have been Mary’s sons-in-law, die in a plane crash. Even if the flight was meant to have been brief, there is something telling in that they die as a result of leaving the soil of “Mother Ireland.” Only Larry, as the least loved of the children, survives leaving the country and Mary, but only out of his own psychological sacrifice to keep Mary from seeing him as a “spoiled” priest (139, 327). Rosie stays nearby the whole time; she seems to begin Mary’s cycle of “martyred” motherhood all over again with “loneliness and friendlessness” (282). Believing herself heroically “alone,” Rosie resolves to “not give way” to the “greatest blow” of life, implied as the death of one’s mother, according to Rosie’s thoughts (282). Rosie resists the urge to grieve, even as Mary had resisted her own emotional needs, for the “sake of the child in her body” (282). The instinctual pressure Rosie feels to be “calm” and “bear [the blow] bravely,” without expectation of help, seems to signal that this lonely cycle of oppressed and oppressing motherhood will begin anew. Though not sacrificed through war as in Yeats’s play, the dead couples, the warehoused changeling, and Mother’s little missionary have become, indirectly, sacrifices to Mary-as-goddess. Only one child remains. In the end, she lends a kind of immortality to the role. Mother Ireland rises again? No mention of war insinuates itself into the novel, but the call to war of Mother Ireland on her behalf seems echoed in Mary’s “Did they not think of me?” as one her first responses to the plane crash. Her chiding tone recalls the chiding of Yeats’s Cathleen ni Houlihan in 1902 when she rejects as “friends” a family who kept their “strong sons” shearing sheep rather than send them off to war: “They wouldn’t listen to me” (Yeats 100). If Mary’s outburst of concern for herself at the time of air show deaths does parallel the Poor Old Woman’s chiding of neighbors who do not put her life before theirs, then Lavin may even be performing a form of signifying as folk speech under the noses of unaware censors and some condescending critics. The sacrificial nature of most of her children’s reactions to her, her aim of centrality in the household, her “official” status given to her by the government later in this position all point to a poisonous confluence in Mary with the officially manipulated images of the Holy Mother and Mother Ireland. Such images of “purity” and “motherhood” as


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conflated with nationalism appears, as noted earlier, have been documented by Anne Stavney and Claudia Tate as occurring in African American literature, as well, as part of male arguments that women “best” support a movement for self-rule by keeping houses, keeping up with babies, and keeping out of the discourse (Stavney 537, 551). Contrary to other readings of Mary’s beneficence, there is a strange sublimated revenge in Mary to this set of limitations, as though once fixed into this role, she bursts its seams. Set into a confining mold, Mary fulfills the role with a vengeance, breaking it from within. Mills sees more recent women poets posing “cultural and aesthetic challenges to a stultifying tradition” that arrests the “‘feminine,’ freezing it into a programmed political form, stilted, ‘pure,’ lifeless,” but Lavin’s Mary O’Grady has been challenging that frozen form as early as 1950 (Mills 74). The presence of rebellion and war during the years of the novel, approximately 1900 to 1938 or 1939, becomes glaring through its absence. We have only the most oblique hints that Mary fears more for Patrick in the night than pub carousing (Lavin, Mary O’Grady 150). When Patrick is “fourteen or fifteen” coming “home to her some night with the smell of drink on his breath,” it is close to the time of the 1916 Rising. However, if Mary O’Grady overdetermines the identification of woman with nation with motherhood, such that the character sees nothing outside the scope of her role as mother, and if Lavin takes her to that extreme, then an indirect commentary may be at work here. Such erasure indicates a reversal of the binary of “male as public and important” and “female as private and invisible.” If the government has collapsed the woman into the nation, the nation, like Mary’s children, now collapses into the woman. Without directly criticizing the Irish Constitution of 1937, Lavin mimics the fulfilled expectations of the assigned role of women in Ireland, and repeats with an unsettling difference (Briggs, “A Man in the House” 92). The literal submission of Mary, with the apparent submission of Mary Lavin, to this “angel in the house” end of the binary combines with the negative effects of Mary’s mothering and psyche to produce a slyly civil indirect argument. As Sarah Briggs writes, Lavin’s “strategies go some way towards deconstructing the usual gender binaries,” especially with a narrative focus that offers an “alternative role to that of man’s cipher—defined in terms of virgin, wife and/or mother, or whore” (Briggs, “Mary Lavin” 12). Lavin complies with the expectations of the authorities of the time to the same extent that Hurston does with the slyly submissive tribute she pays her patrons, and the lip service she pays her editors on sex, politics, and religion, only to leave enough insider information for “ears ... sympathetic and knowing” (Hurston, Mules and Men 178). From a different sexual angle than Hurston, Lavin does critique a culture that offers no other alternative to mothering other than the convent (Briggs, “Mary Lavin” 13; Briggs, “A Man in the House” 93). However, Onny’s sexual expression comes closer to Hurston’s Janie and her idealized Erzulie than Mary O’Grady obviously would. But quite in keeping with Hurston, the depiction of Mary’s power and rage also rejects the same “white definitions of the ideal female” and “passive and helpless role” that Meisenhelder describes Hurston as rejecting (Meisenhelder 155.) Like Hurston, Lavin also critiques political authority, although in this case that authority also belongs to the writer’s own cultural group. With a cooler tone, Lavin presents a cultural, not necessarily spiritual, Catholicism and an out of control “Mother Mary”

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as a more understated criticism of the enforced respect for religion that so bothered Hurston (Meisenhelder 167–70). Lavin struggled with her personal faith, not opting to give up Christianity to the extent Hurston did, but she took the same dim view of religious hypocrisy and kept the same strong cultural references in her works to the practices of the people (Levenson 234, 154; Kelly 111; Meisenhelder 169). If Mary’s “talisman” is “‘God preserve us from all harm!’” and if one of Hurston’s most potent folk sayings, of ears “sympathetic and knowing,” comes from Deuteronomy 29:4, among many other Biblical and folk religion references in their works, then neither author ever abandoned the folkloric influence of the Christian oral traditions in which she was raised (Lavin, Mary O’Grady 18; Hurston, Mules and Men 178). The folkloric aspects of Mary’s speech, cultural Catholicism, and behavior support this undercutting of nationalist-appropriated folk women. She taints the “purity” of the previous conflation of images with her sublimated rage and emotional manipulation. While Mary O’Grady as an anti-Mary implodes the “angel in the house” versus “monster” Irish nationalist binary, Erzulie and Onny undercut the social imperative in some groups to hold the Virgin Mary up as a model of celibacy or passivity, without looking at this folk woman more deeply. In later examples, Ní Dhuibhne and Morrison complicate this folk woman further. Jenny as a younger wise woman and Virgin Mary figure in The Bray House Jenny, one of the younger wise-woman characters in this set, appears in The Bray House as “virginal” yet pregnant, and Robin labels her from the start as a “madonna” figure (12–13). In contradiction of the dismissal of the Virgin Mary in Hurston and the introduction of rage in Lavin’s Mary O’Grady, not mention the ambivalent destruction of her image by Onny, Jenny is simultaneously part of a monogamous sexual relationship and a woman of faith. Moreover, Ní Dhuibhne depicts her character in a positive light. In the end, she comes across, not as passive, but assertive, self-possessed, and possibly the best hope for the future of feminism. With this set of qualities, Jenny-as-madonna undoes the “virgin” versus “whore” binary as well as the stereotype of a Virgin Mary folk-woman character as passive. Of all the crew members in The Bray House, Jenny maintains the most selfcontrol and is the most successful at repelling Robin’s overtures and influence. Although Jenny is young, her cunning application of folklore, her knowing ways, and her understanding of how to thwart Robin seem to make her the wise woman of the novel. Jenny, as a “maiden” and young mother liminal figure from an Otherworld adventure and a young wise woman rebelling against Robin’s authority, questions assumptions regarding sexual mores and religion. Ní Dhuibhne sets up Jenny as a madonna figure in the novel, both in the eyes of the narrator Robin and in the action of the story. Robin even states that Jenny looks “like a medieval madonna, wooden and serene” (12–13). Shortly after that statement, Robin dismisses Jenny as “the quintessential maiden,” sulky, taciturn, too lazy to speak (13). Despite making advances toward Jenny’s boyfriend Karl, Robin seems confused sometimes as to whom she is attracted. When Jenny actually shouts at Robin for driving another crewmate to tears, Robin smiles and says, “‘You’re


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beautiful when you’re angry!’” (173). The supposedly passive maiden then looks “as if she might wring [Robin’s] neck,” yet Robin continues to see the pregnant, almostengaged Jenny through images that evoke the Virgin Mary. At the same time, Robin makes sure that the readers of her journal know how little she thinks of Jenny’s intelligence or drive. On one such occasion, Jenny comments that she desires marriage, criticizes the effects of the sexual revolution on children, and scorns Robin’s ideas about “Karlsharing” (51). Robin, who embraces every aspect of power she gains in this future, including the power to sexually harass men, berates Jenny as benighted, waiting for a man to do everything for her (13). “Brown cow’s eyes, full of guile,” Robin declares, contradictorily, of Jenny’s appearance and manner (29). As often as Robin describes Jenny in virginal or madonna-like terms, she ignores the implication of Jenny’s fainting on deck, and seems surprised to see Jenny appear at the murder trial “noticeably pregnant” to Robin’s “great amazement” (28, 251). Robin resents the obstacle the “bereaved girlfriend,” “pale and thin, in spite of the mound of her belly,” presents to her acquittal (252). As far as Jenny’s monogamy, Ní Dhuibhne has commented elsewhere on “destructive” kinds of “sexual love,” even as Morrison has (Morrison, “Rootedness” 344; Anne-Marie O’Connor 1; McKinney-Whetstone 206). Thus, Ní Dhuibhne creates leeway for readers to join in the story who may have their own critique of the excesses possible in contemporary sexuality (Moloney 112). When Karl says, “‘Who wants to get married?,’” and Jenny “pipe[s] up,” “‘I do!,’” Robin notes that “We all ignored her” (Ní Dhuibhne, Bray 31). In another scene demonstrating Jenny’s resilience, despite Karl’s death, Jenny chooses to continue her pregnancy, as shown by her appearance in court (252). Both scenes would help readers with more traditional views of reproduction feel “allowed” into the narrative, even as the respectful portrayal of the protagonist’s beliefs in “Midwife to the Fairies” may do so for Catholic readers. With Jenny in particular, Ní Dhuibhne engages with the overlooked discourses described in the theological writings of Linda Hogan and Anne Thurston, in which women’s spirituality and reproductive abilities do not war with each other, but act in complementary fashion (Thurston 692; Hogan 684). Overall, the characterization of Jenny, despite her occasionally flakey, fairy-taleswith-bikinis affectation, shows Ní Dhuibhne indirectly criticizing another exclusion of women by women, as well as welcoming readers with potentially different worldviews from her own. With the “mute” Jenny “piping” up, the “absence” of certain kinds of Irish women, the previously “ignored,” is undone along with the binaries of subaltern versus master, male versus female, heroine versus witch, life versus death, and maiden versus old woman. Appearing to grow more spiritually inclined over the course of the trip, Jenny embarrasses Robin with references to Jesus, a “name guaranteed to embarrass” (172, 220). She explains away Jenny’s “praying and meditating” as evidence of the “low sense of self-esteem” that she thinks drives women to “fanatically Christian, or Buddhist,” or other beliefs. However, both then and some other times Ní Dhuibhne shows Jenny standing up to Robin—and loudly (51, 172–3). On one occasion, “raising” her voice “unusually,” Jenny condemns the “alienation” of the “past fifty years” that designates the child as “the loser” (93, 95). She attacks the view

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that “pretends that children have no feelings” when adults, in pursuing their own interests, leave them alone (92). When Robin asks whether the woman has to be the loser, Jenny argues that neither should be, as both her parents were with her all the time while they worked on the farm (93). After Robin continues to trivialize Jenny’s concern, Jenny retorts that she knows she’s being labeled “a silly unrealistic reactionary, a crazy Green,” like those who saw the “danger” back in the Industrial Revolution were “labeled sloppy silly romantics” (95). Robin is the one, though, who kills herself in the end, after feeling that her work—so closely associated with her self—has been rejected. As Irish essayist Carol Coulter and President Mary Robinson have delineated it, feminists do have the capability of showing “arrogance” toward other women. This woman-against-woman tension is embodied in both the feminized, destroyed “breast” landscape of Bray and in the interactions of Robin and Jenny (Coulter, Hidden 54–5). The rhetorical effect of Ní Dhuibhne’s feminist and folkloric associations is not only to slip in a disquieting critique from a self-identified feminist author, in a more indirect way than Coulter could in non-fiction, but also to create a space for those female readers who might sympathize with Jenny’s questioning attitude. The implication here is that the survival of feminism itself may depend on the inclusion—and survival—of women like Jenny. Anticipating the dismantling of another binary scale, men versus women, The Bray House sets up Jenny against a female authority instead. Interestingly, although the sexual expression and rejection of religion may still meet with censorship in Irish culture, Jenny thwarts an authority identified not only as female but one identified with the Sexual Revolution and an exclusively positivist world view. In that way, the character makes an interesting counterpart to Ní Dhuibhne’s protagonists in “Gweedore Girl” and “Sex in the Context of Ireland,” which explore repression of sexual information and expression. Jenny’s form of sexual rebellion against Robin’s standards merely poses the question of repression from a different angle. Going even further, Jenny defies Robin’s adherence to “positivistic” “methodology” by openly referring to God and Jesus, despite Robin’s open disgust (Ní Dhuibhne, Bray 172, 220–21). Jenny’s subterranean battle against Robin’s authority and worldview highlights what Christina Hunt Mahoney sees as “a combination of unsatisfactory sexual encounters” among the characters in The Bray House and “truncated interpersonal relationships” (Mahoney 259). Ní Dhuibhne seems to use Robin the narrator as a model of excess, simultaneously as a caricature of feminist backlash and a caricature of what can possibly go wrong in some feminist assumptions. Robin’s sexual oppression of others connects with her intellectual oppression of other women in the novel. Her excesses here reveal additional indirect questioning. By portraying Robin’s dismissal of Jenny’s attitudes toward sex and faith as on a continuum with Robin’s equally arrogant dismissals of other characters, Ní Dhuibhne indirectly forces readers to question such dismissals themselves. The humor of Robin’s arrogance may mask the questioning, but Ní Dhuibhne’s portrayals here echo the criticism of Carol Coulter, Edna Longley, and Presidents Robinson and McAleese toward those who would exclude women of faith, and with them, women of more “traditional” sexual lifestyles, from feminism (Coulter, Hidden 41, 44– 5, 54–5; Longley 31–2; McAleese 14, 106). Jenny, as a postmodern “madonna”


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of a dystopic future, gives Ní Dhuibhne the folkloric indirection, and occasional zaniness, to pave a middle path that can welcome a wide variety of feminists, even non-feminists, into the experience of the text. Paradise—Morrison’s folk “Marys” Where Hurston completely distances her characters Janie and Erzulie from what she perceives as that “passive queen of heaven,” Lavin criticizes a too-religious adherence to the “purity” of the Virgin Mary as a sexual or national model for the women of Ireland, and while Ní Dhuibhne tries to pull the folk woman back from some of the later day backlash against the stereotypes associated with the Virgin Mary, Morrison does something altogether different with her. In what readers might think of as an oddly backward movement, contrary to expectation, the most negative portrayals associated with the Virgin Mary, at least in the scope of this study, are the oldest. From Hurston’s vitriol, to Lavin’s warning and critical distancing, then to Ní Dhuibhne’s respectful inclusion of a positive “Mary,” the rejection of a passive Mother Mary changes to a rejection of the assumption of Mary as passive. The culmination of this movement to reclaim the Virgin Mary as a wise-woman character comes with Morrison’s 1997 novel Paradise. Almost like an illustration of what Katherine Clay Bassard calls for as the integration of religious studies and humanities in “projects of renewal and reclamation,” Morrison refutes prior assumptions about a character like the Virgin Mary (Bassard, Spiritual 141). Where Ní Dhuibhne portrays Jennyas-madonna and Jenny as a Christian in a humorous, heroic, and inclusive way, Morrison goes one step further and weaves various Christian oral traditions back into the depiction. Morrison’s portrayals of the nun Mary Magna and certain aspects of Consolata Sosa demonstrate the lie of the assumption of passivity even back to the beginning of the original story of the mother of Jesus. To accomplish this, Morrison varies her strategies in a way that reappears in the next novel, Love. Paradise reflects both the ambiguity Morrison is credited with, and the bluntness of Judeo-Christian reference to which Philip Page refers (Page 646). The directness of some of the more controversial elements of the book can only come about, however, through the application of folkloric indirection, in this instance, through the agency of the Virgin Mary as a wise-woman figure. Morrison’s indirection obscures the readers’ comprehension of her position on certain topics while it redirects the readers’ attention toward pondering their own positions. Alternating direct address and indirection, ambiguity and bluntness, Morrison presents controversial views through characters toward whom the narration demonstrates respect. Although Morrison takes this bluntness to a new intensity in the character of L in Love, in Paradise, she dares to place similar views in the mouths of characters who live in this world, not the Otherworld.1 This section focuses on those characters who navigate difficult topics through their resemblance to the folkloric Virgin Mary. Potentially controversial examples include the depiction of 1 Even if one works with the theory that not everyone in Paradise is technically alive in every scene, the characters present themselves as ordinary living human beings, albeit a few have some otherworldly talents.

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Christianity as a source of compassion, non-abusive power, and healing, examples of some of its followers as admirable, and the depiction of lust mocked as “gobble gobble love” (Morrison, Paradise 250). Morrison alternates this bluntness of presentation with ambiguous details, juxtapositions, or phrasing incongruent with reader expectations. Such ambiguity frames the previously cited examples within contexts that may allow readers to attribute “traditional” phrases to some of the more fantastical elements in the novel. Consolata and Lone, and to a lesser extent Mary Magna, are “magical” old women, after all, and contemporary western audiences may grant them a certain latitude for saying “God” this and “God” that. Others might translate that latitude as condescension, however, and the narration seems well aware of that, too. For Morrison never lets her readers completely off the hook. At no point does the narration undercut or dismiss through tone or context the elder women’s comments, though they phrase them in Christian folk-speech traditions not generally used in educated secular society. Despite the suspension of some physical laws of the universe (the women bringing people back from the brink of death and witnessing miraculous visions), Morrison allows those character’s statements and beliefs to stand as “real.” Following Katherine Clay Bassard’s approach from Spiritual Interrogations and Danille Taylor-Guthrie’s approach to Toni Morrison’s work in “Who Are the Beloved?” this section will examine less frequently observed references in Paradise from African American Christian and broadly Christian oral tradition. Much of these include iconic representations and references that could be interpreted as distinctly Christian, and a few, depending on the character involved, as specifically Catholic. Over the years, Toni Morrison has continued to include an increasing number of references that could be seen as inclusive of Christian texts. A number of critics have spotted these and explored them in insightful works, including the references related to Consolata. Some have focused on non-Christian religious influences, overlooking some of the most intricate ambiguities and complexities in the Morrison oeuvre. Luckily, the number of readings on Morrison’s detailed use of Christian traditions, like those on Mary Lavin’s distancing herself from some Catholic traditions, has increased over the years. Mary Miller Hubbard cites numerous instances of “intertextuality between the Bible and Morrison’s novels” to support a theme of characters searching for redemption (Miller Hubbard 3). Marc C. Conner, Maria DiBattista, Patricia Hunt, Carolyn Mitchell, Peggy Ochoa and R. Allen Alexander (besides Mae Henderson and Danille Taylor-Guthrie), have commented on past uses of biblical parallels in Morrison’s novels, with varying reliance on Christian cultures as a basis for their interpretations of the use of those parallels. In Paradise, one might find parallels to New Testament stories and to folkloric traditions that have grown up around the figures in those stories. However, approaching the text from a different religious perspective, with different folkloric expressions, one might see other parallels with the scenes in question. Various critics have argued for interpretations centered on African and/or Afro-Brazilian traditions, African American Christian traditions, traditions based on goddess worship, or all of the above. The belief system that most influences a critical approach tends to lead the critic in question to “seeing” a certain tradition in operation in the text, sometimes to the specific exclusion of other traditions. In some instances, the tradition “observed”


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in a text may appear on one’s critical radar, or disappear from it, due to trends in critical thought. Katherine Clay Bassard has noted, in the “oversight” of biblical poetry by another African American writer, Frances Ellen Harper, that there has been a “general displacement of discussion of religious material onto the social, political and even aesthetic domains” (Bassard, “Private Interpretations”). In looking at religious folk references in Morrison’s works, it helps to bear in mind two pieces of advice. Lucille P. Fultz warns that “sometimes readers’ preoccupation with what is concealed may blind them to what is overtly expressed” (Fultz 25– 6). Further cautioning comes from Michael Wood, who speaks specifically to the “temptation” in Paradise to associate the views of characters with whom we agree to represent the views of Morrison herself (Wood 117). Instead, “she is asking us to think our principles and prejudices through to the point of whatever resists them” (117). I would add that at the points where the text “resists” our assumptions the most often represent the points where Morrison takes her greatest risks in losing her readers’ good will and continued attention. Her thematic tightrope act has become ever more astonishing as she sometimes stakes everything, rhetorically speaking, on the strength of her folkloric indirection, via her folk women and the figures of speech and images that make up their construction. For example, a Christ-like man approaches one of the main characters, Consolata, an elderly woman experiencing despair. The scene seems to allude to the New Testament stories of when Jesus speaks with the Samaritan woman at the well in John 4 and, after his resurrection, with Mary Magdalene in John 20 (Morrison, Paradise 251). Miraculous details of both Mary Magna and Consolata recall oral traditions that have grown up around the Virgin Mary, while others besides Consolata interact with a Jesus from African American tradition. This applies to the study of folklore and literature, because, as Walter Ong and as Alan Dundes have written “the Bible was originally in oral tradition” (Dundes, Holy 5; Ong 75). Patricia Hunt relies on this fact in her argument that it is precisely the “Christian parabolic form,” the lack of “pre-determined,” “either/or” structure in the parables of the Bible, that helps Morrison subvert “binary categorization,” which, Hunt argues, is produced as often by “certain secular misunderstandings of Christian theology” as by “fundamentalist” approaches (Hunt 445, 446, 452). When compared against the parallel scenes derived from Christian tradition, the scenes in question in Paradise appear influenced by that tradition. However, the same scenes, especially with regard to the character Consolata, receive different interpretations from critics relying on different traditions. Justine Tally, Michelle Cliff, J. Brooks Bouson, and Therese E. Higgins have pointed out parallels with African and Brazilian spirit worship in Paradise (Tally 16, Cliff 86, Bouson 208–215, Higgins 119–139). Michelle Cliff joins Brooke Allen and Jill Matus in emphasizing what, for them, is an important tradition seen in Morrison’s work, that which emphasizes female deities. Channette Romero goes so far as to say that Consolata “speaks to multiple deities” other than and excluding Christ, regardless of tradition (Romero 416). On the other hand, other excerpts from Justine Tally, and references in works by Philip Page, Marni Gauthier, John N. Duvall, Evelyn Jaffe Schreiber, and Joyce Irene Middleton indicate that Christian traditions, especially those appearing in African

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American, Latin American, and some European folk cultures may also explain the unusual folk flavors in Morrison’s Paradise. Rather, Morrison has designed these scenes to operate out of more than one tradition simultaneously. Even with selective readings, the range of inclusion of various Christian traditions in the novel has been off-putting to some critics. However, even as Song of Solomon simultaneously refers to the biblical Song of Solomon and to a folk song sung by children, Paradise also combines traditions in its references to religious practices. This simultaneity of reference and folklore’s own tendency toward rhetorical indirection allows Morrison to finesse certain aspects of her characters’ religiosity in Paradise. The fact that some reviewers did have negative reactions to religious topics in Paradise shows that Morrison sometimes does need to employ indirection in her references. Morrison herself alludes to the daunting rhetorical condition of writing Paradise when she describes it as “the only overtly religious novel” she has ever written (Donahue, USA Today. Jan 8, 1998). In an interview for Amazon.com, she seems aware that this might prevent some readers from fully engaging in the text. She states, “In the larger mainstream discourse, it’s always suggested that belief is a form of delusion,” and adds later that she “just wanted to tackle these subjects head-on, not pretending that there’s no such thing as belief” (Amazon.com). The topic of certain forms of religious belief belonging to that end of the binary where a dominant society places the ignored and the erased seems ripe for examination as an above/below binary. Philip Jenkins, a professor of history and religious studies at Pennsylvania State University, has observed a type of subaltern status to which certain religious traditions have been relegated. He states that it’s “not how topics are covered” in the media, “but rather the vast areas that remain off the radar ... A decision not to cover a theme or trend is, by implication, as statement of its insignificance” (Jenkins 11). In a more informal commentary, an excerpt intended as “person on the street” humor, a sampling of overheard conversation, is regularly featured in the San Francisco Chronicle. The entry for November 15, 2005 reads, “She says she’s found Jesus, and you know, it’s very off-putting” (Garchik E8). Both comments, from either end of the opinion scale, echo the types of comments heard through time regarding other ignored, erased parts of society. Observations in Morrison’s comments, as well as in Bassard’s, Christian’s, and Irish critics like Carol Coulter and Edna Longley, indicate that another grouping of women and men may be being silenced in different parts of western culture. People who choose, like Jenny in The Bray House, Mary Magna, Consolata, and Lone in Paradise, to live within a traditional understanding of certain forms of Christianity do not always appear on the critical radar screen. Morrison’s Paradise, like Ní Dhuibhne’s Jenny, addresses the binary that has placed those from certain Christian traditions in the “absence,” or “erased,” or “ignored” end of the scale. In the following examples, however, Morrison allows a wider inclusion of traditions at the table, while allowing those traditions to maintain their specificity. She allows the folk women themselves, as they break up the binaries attached to the Virgin Mary, Mary Magdalene, and others, to appear as worthy of a reader’s respect and even allows different expressions of Christian traditions to shine in a similarly beneficent light. Indirection via religious lore, as it injects peculiar details


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of perhaps familiar scenes into the novel, may ease some readers into accepting the worldview of these characters. If a mysterious cowboy who looks like Consolata can flirt and lighten her heart, if Consolata can then grow young afterward, cook up a feast, and take charge of the convent, then accepting an African American Christian oral tradition as an influence here cannot be that much harder for the readers. With that conditional acceptance, accepting these specific Christian traditions as valid poses less of a difficulty. Perceiving these wise women separately from the “passive Mary” versus “fallen Magdalene,” as well as perceiving them apart from the frequently unacknowledged binary of “Christian ignorance” versus “secular intellectual freedom,” may also become less of a hurdle. Ultimately, Morrison’s approach to depicting religion in Paradise gives us an example of diversity without dilution. In one of the pivotal scenes in Paradise, an unnamed man in a cowboy hat visits Consolata, an older woman who lives in an abandoned convent outside Ruby, Oklahoma. Immediately before this meeting, Consolata has reached a low ebb and has just said, with no one around, “‘I’ll miss You,’” she tells a character called “Him”: ...”She was afraid of dying alone, ungrieved in unholy ground, but knew that was precisely what lay before her. How she longed for the good death. “I’ll miss You,” she told Him. “I really will.” The skylight wavered” (Morrison, Paradise 251). The Abrahamic religious use of the pronoun “He” appears often in Paradise, as will be seen in further examples. Consolata, an observant Catholic who has spent her life as a lay worker at the Convent, despairs of losing her relationship with Christ (251). Her despair seems to come out of a conflicted conscience for having used her unusual powers to lengthen Mary Magna’s last days. But now that Consolata’s only friend and family in the world is dead, she has dropped into a long alcoholic depression. Until this scene in the dry, dead garden, Consolata has given up on life, love, and faith. A man appears in the garden in the next paragraph, exhibiting several Christ-like aspects in his identity: abundant hair, intimate knowledge of the woman, supernatural movement, a magnetic presence, and a paraphrase of something Jesus says to the woman at the well in John 4 (251). He asks for something to drink, she says one of the other women could bring it, and he replies, “‘Don’t you know me better than that?’ the man asked. ‘I don’t want see your girls. I want see you’” (252). In contrast to her previous state, Consolata responds to the man’s presence with happiness and the expectation of fun: “It seemed funny, comical really, the way he had flitted over to her from the steps and how he was looking at her—flirtatious, full of secret fun.” The man takes off his cowboy hat and his mirrored sunglasses, then he winks at Consolata, “a slow seductive movement of a lid. His eyes, she saw, were as round and green as new apples” (252). The Christ-like details of the unnamed visitor also recalls when Jesus surprises Mary Magdalene while she looks for his body in John 20:11–18. Only Mary Magdalene lingers by tomb after the others have left. Weeping, she never expects to see him again. Then a man whom she mistakes for a “gardener” reveals himself as someone who knows her well. Like the Samaritan woman at the well, Consolata seeks relief from her longings, construed as “thirst” in John and, earlier in the novel, as “gobble-gobble love” (Morrison, Paradise 240). Consolata has been drinking heavily to assuage her grief over the death of the nun who had raised her, Mary

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Magna. If one notes the sequence of events, after the visit from the Christ-like figure, Consolata no longer needs to go back to her well of wine bottles hidden in the cellar; that thirst is finished, in perhaps a parallel to the promise made to the Samaritan woman that she would “never be thirsty” (Morrison, Paradise 250–252; John 4). As in John 4, the man asks for a drink, the woman balks at him asking her, the man indicates that, no, she is just the woman he wants to ask, and better yet, as stated outright in John 4 and acted out in Paradise, the man can satisfy the woman’s deeper thirst and spiritual hunger. Besides the request for a drink, the other “thirst” in common between Consolata and the Samaritan woman is that they have both experienced longings expressed in sexual relationships. Both, too, receive subtle counsel against continuing relationships unsanctioned by their particular faith. Jesus unnerves the Samaritan woman with his knowledge of her “husbands” who “aren’t” husbands, while Mary Magna’s forgiveness and gentle urging reinforce Consolata’s acknowledgement of the end of her affair with Deacon. Morrison’s narrative voice itself seems to forgive, accept, and, with a gentle teasing, doubt the efficacy of Consolata’s previous solutions to her hunger for “home.” The narration describes the aftermath of the affair as Consolata picking “through the scraps of her gobble-gobble love,” then she “scuttle[s] back” into a spiritual comfort that represents a scene of Christian repentance that does not, nor ever did, separate the penitent and Lord from the context of a physical existence (240). The hunger for “home” that prompted her affair with Deacon, who reminded her of men from her childhood, is fulfilled instead by the Cowboy in the garden who resembles Consolata in appearance and speaks in her dialect. This indicates that Consolata’s longings cannot be filled by sexual expression, yet the Christ figure in Paradise acknowledges and feeds her emotional hunger. Morrison repeats the phrase of a love that “gobbles” later on when she describes in an interview the destructive envelopment of Bill Cosey’s love, a destruction she states could only be made possible by the women in his life allowing him to “gobble” them up (O’Connor). Like a “patriarchal” version of Hagar’s “anaconda love” in Song of Solomon, Morrison clearly takes a negative view of love based only on a hunger for another’s flesh (O’Connor; Morrison, Song of Solomon 137). Morrison’s language shows so much respect for the characters’ experiences, that, outside of the particulars of the text, the scenes also seem to redeem their Christian qualities for a secular audience. References to the Virgin Mary in the book begin with Mary Magna and end with Consolata. Mary Magna’s image with many in the audience, in particular, would appear less than trustworthy. The name “Magna,” usually translated as “great,” may also remind readers of the Magnificat—the Virgin Mary’s song from Luke 1:46–55—which begins with, “My soul magnifies the Lord,” but also includes descriptions of the lowly being lifted, the arrogant struck down, and the hungry fed: “For he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant ... He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty ...” (NRSV). Sally Cunneen explains the significance of Mary’s song in history as, “Mary has almost always and everywhere been both a comforter of


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the oppressed and a challenge to thought. As the most flexible of symbols, she has been able to escape constraint” (Cunneen xxi). The emphasis on food recalls that Consolata begins her healing work with the women of the Convent by first making a feast, with Morrison describes in glorified, succulent detail, evidence of the flesh and the spirit happily connected. When the ailing elderly woman complains of her poor eyesight, Consolata chides, “‘Disregard her,’ Connie told Mavis. ‘She sees everything in the universe’” (Morrison, Paradise 47). This forms a humorous paradox: Mary Magna is simultaneously a woman to be ignored and a woman to be revered. An unnatural light, like that around beatific figures in paintings, surrounds Mary Magna on her death bed, another sign of saintliness attached to a far from passive character. We might account for Consolata’s seemingly hyperbolic statement on the basis of her strong attachment to Mary, were it not for Mavis’s “trying to remember where, in a house with no electricity, the light in Mother’s room came from” (Morrison, Paradise 48). In other connections between the names for Mary and Mary Magna and Consolata, “Magna” may recall “magnanimity,” a quality that leads a person “to seek and achieve difficult and excellent works,” to be “open and frank,” and to remain “untroubled by the petty things that disturb others” (New Catholic Encyclopedia 70). The Modern Catholic Encyclopedia describes “magnanimity” as “associated with generosity, kindness, and moral fortitude. A gift of grace, it arises from an individual’s consciousness of the ultimate sanctity and worth of every person ...” (The Modern Catholic Encyclopedia 537). All of that could describe the “exasperated, headstrong,” “difficult nun,” Mary Magna, and what, she had aspired to in her vocation, especially in her “one of her singular accomplishments,” raising Consolata, the child she “kidnapped” (or “rescued”) from Brazil (Morrison, Paradise 223). When one takes a closer look at the folk images and meanings built up around the names and attributes of the Virgin Mary, we notice that, like Mary Magna, this folk woman’s personality ranges far from the “passive” end of the binary. Thinking of the headstrong, sometimes abrasive Mary Magna, makes one wonder if Mary O’Grady, with the freedom of this American nun on her own in Oklahoma, would have been less frustrated. While much has been made of the asceticism of the convent life Mary Magna has bequeathed to Consolata, the nun’s passionate care for the younger woman’s welfare as well as her ready forgiveness do not receive as much notice. For example, prior to Consolata’s receiving her supernatural gift, she repents of her affair with Deacon and receives from Mary Magna forgiveness and a tender welcome back: “Mary Magna came into the chapel, and kneeling with her, put an arm around Consolata’s shoulder, saying, ‘At last’” (240). The scene echoes an ancient interpretation of repentance, only with a prodigal (adoptive) daughter and mother (Luke 15). Just as the father, Mary Magna embraces Consolata (Luke 15:20, NIV). Morrison’s phrase “kneeling with her” emphasizes Mary’s empathy with her friend, not her judgment. As part of Mary Magna’s outsized portrayal as a bold nun, her generosity extends to her ability to forgive and encourage Consolata to renew her faith. Mary Magna welcomes Consolata back to their celibate walk of faith, substituting a motherly “sh sh sh” for the “sha sha sha” sound that first attracts Consolata to her former

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lover Deacon, the temporary object of Consolata’s longing for the home, family, and life lost to her in Brazil (Morrison, Paradise 241). Morrison portrays Mary Magna, the Mother of the convent school, as a representative of traditional Catholicism, and shows her giving Consolata not condemnation, but love. Mary Magna makes mistakes in the novel, but she is portrayed as honestly compassionate at times. Stretching from oral tradition to food ways, material folk culture stands close at hand. Morrison links both the elderly white nun and the less elderly African Brazilian lay nun Consolata to various positive folk traditions associated the Virgin Mary. By depicting the Virgin in many hues, Morrison wants readers to question assumptions that Christianity is a “white,” “western European” faith. Many works of material folk culture in Europe, Brazil, and Mexico depict the Virgin Mary as a black or native woman. In Sally Cunneen’s examples in her book on the Virgin Mary, the original black statues of Mary in France and Spain “were linked with the greatest number of miracles” (Cunneen 172). These parallel the material folk culture that rises around the “Black Mermaid” in Ireland’s abbeys and in Mami Wata and Erzulie carvings in Africa and Haiti, but with a completely different folk-woman reference. Higgins and Bouson provide excellent details about the older Black Madonnas in conjunction with scenes from Paradise. However, they de-emphasize the Christian influences on these scenes, Higgins referring only to the Black Madonna of the cult of “Mother Earth,” and Bouson referring to the Black Madonna only as a “healing figure” countering racism, with both descriptions avoiding references to Catholic iconography (Higgins 132–5, 139; Bouson 215–16). However, Dundes notes in his AFS Presidential Address that painters and patrons of Christian images across many different cultures have commonly portrayed and sought out Virgin and Christ figures who physically resembled themselves (Dundes, “Folkloristics” 400). The Black Madonna was such a significant movement for different Catholic communities, though, that “when black madonnas became the biggest miracle workers, earlier statues were repainted black” (Cunneen 176). In a folk practice analogous to the women dancing in the rain and Consolata’s healing meal, the Poor Clare nuns of Lilongwe, Malawi have a dance and song that they dedicate to the Virgin as part of their morning worship (284). One nun raises a large mortar and pestle up and down, while the others copy her movements, and they praise Mary for being “black,” “beautiful,” beloved of her “children of Africa,” even more loved than the “drum music of the evenings” (285). Their dancing gains in speed, and they ululate, in deep act of worship that springs from the heart of the Malawi folk culture, yet it remains just as deeply Christian as a Catholic tradition. The associations between movement, food, music, joy, and Christian spirituality in this religious folk tradition parallel the inseparability of the flesh and spirit portrayed in the Convent women’s dancing and celebratory feast. This seems all of one piece with Consolata’s leading them into their new life together, especially in her allusion to the Cowboy Jesus when she says that, if they stay, “Someone could want to meet you” (Morrison, Paradise 262). In further confutation of Christianity as “European,” in Mexico, the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe comes from the story told of Juan Diego, the Christian Indian who reported seeing her in 1531. He described her as having cast down green eyes, black hair, and olive skin. Her appearance, along with the colors and cultural


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references of her clothes, linked her to the mestiza community. It seemed to the native community that Mary had chosen to become physically like one of them, not like their white conquerors (Cunneen Plate 22, 220). Mary as a representation of God’s love for the oppressed, and Toni Morrison’s characterization of women who bless the lives of other oppressed characters find a parallel in the visual and spiritual traditions of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Consolata possesses the same “green eyes” as Our Lady of Guadalupe, as well. If the Black Madonnas of Europe and the Virgin of Guadalupe were not enough, there is also the patron saint of Brazil, Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception. The story follows that the primary image of this Mary was found in the Paraíba River, made black by the water. By appearing as a black icon, the Virgin seemed to the Afro-Brazilian slaves there to be identifying with them, not with the white slave owners, and seemed to be expressing her disapproval of slavery (Cunneen 224). After considering all of these parallels, one does have to wonder how much the image of Piedade at the conclusion and the miracles connected to Mary Magna, Consolata, and Lone may have been influenced by Marian references and iconography. The name Piedade itself resembles piedad, the Spanish word for “piety,” “pity,” or “mercy,” all attributes of the Virgin Mary (Castillo 182). Finally, Cunneen makes an observation that applies to Consolata’s own characterization that “Mary is not a goddess, for goddesses were not human ... Seeing Mary as only a stand-in for God—as cultural history has sometimes cast her—is as bad as limiting her to the role of the inimitable virgin-mother” (Cunneen 305). Bearing the echoes of the folk in mind, it would be best not to elevate Consolata, the elder female, to what Michelle Cliff calls “the source of power, of redemption, who is able to restore the four women who have found her” (Cliff 86). For Consolata herself may have found the source of her power elsewhere. Before Consolata performs the role of a healer resembling the Virgin Mary, in her resemblance to the Virgin of Guadalupe, in her emphasis on nurturing and food, and in her acts of praise, Consolata takes on the roles of those who have been healed. In the garden scene and the New Testament scenes with Mary Magdalene and the Samaritan woman, each situation ends with the woman running to tell others what she’s seen and heard. Especially in Mary Magdalene’s case, she becomes empowered to speak, even if she knows her listeners may not, and many do not, believe her (Luke 24:9–11, NIV). Consolata leaves her mysterious encounter as a changed woman, empowered to speak and to lead, much like Mary Magdalene and the Samaritan woman. Also like Mary Magdalene, Consolata was previously rescued from a dire situation, Jesus having “cast” “seven demons” out of Mary, and Mother Mary Magna having taken Consolata away from continued sexual abuse as a street child (Mark 16:9; Morrison, Paradise 228). Just as Mary Magdalene enjoys a restoration of her health and mind, Consolata leaves the encounter physically changed as well, with miraculously restored brown hair, and carries a new aura of power about her. Her former lover, Deacon, when he raids the Convent with the other men from Ruby, recognizes that he is not the person Consolata seems so happy to see. Is this because the person in her final vision is a “Him” and not a “him”? Morrison capitalizes the pronoun, in keeping with the convention reserved for references to the JudeoChristian deity.

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The joyful response Deacon sees in Consolata seems to indicate a romantic ecstasy in keeping with how one greets a lover, or how saints reportedly greet apparitions of the Lord. The Shulamite Bride from the Song of Solomon, to whom Mary Magdalene is compared, is “dark” like Consolata herself. Peggy Ochoa explores the “hope” and potential for reconciliation inherent in the image of the “black bride,” as expressed in the beloved in Song of Solomon (whom she identifies as the Ethiopian Queen of Sheba), the church as the bride of Christ, and the character of Beloved herself (Ochoa 110–13). If Mary Magdalene is, as Haskins calls her, the “companion of the saviour,” then Consolata may be seen as the companion of the character in the book who may represent the savior (Haskins 51). After that, the narration refers to Consolata as a “new and revised Reverend Mother” (265). The power of Consolata’s visitor extends beyond his salvific effect on her, and expands and builds up all those who come in contact with her thereafter, in another parallel with Mary Magdalene. When Consolata prepares a feast to announce her new self and her new role, she tells the women, “If you want to be here you will do what I say. Eat how I say ... And I will teach you what you are hungry for” (Morrison, Paradise 262). Before now, Consolata has tried to fill her emotional hunger and thirst with sex and alcohol. In one form or another, most of the younger women have tried and failed to fill their emotional needs with sexual relationships. As in the redemption scene with the gently mocking phrase “gobble-gobble love,” Morrison examines where Christian belief and sexuality intersect. Her ambiguous reading of sexual expression seems to imply that it’s not an unmixed blessing. This writer never says, “it’s all good.” But neither does she say, “it’s all bad.” Instead, Morrison depicts an alternative view of sexuality separate from both the Platonic “flesh versus spirit” binary and the contemporary binary of “sex-as-sacrament versus repression.” The self-value discovered by the convent women in Paradise, under Consolata’s leading, does not rely solely on the body as a site of spirituality. Morrison’s portrayal of the implications of sexuality in Paradise and Love, as well as in Song of Solomon and elsewhere, reflects her awareness of simultaneously interacting sets of criteria for living. The body’s urges do not cancel out some characters’ conflicting spiritual needs, and vice versa. She negates the perceived divide and renews concepts of sin, repentance, and resultant healing sometimes barred from discussions of sexuality. Her characters are not all one or the other, just as women are neither all body nor all spirit; Morrison’s characters act out, then cancel out, the false dichotomy between Eve and Mary. The novel’s Catholicinfluenced celebration of godly—and celibate—women indicates that Consolata’s dictum, “Never put one over the other. Eve is Mary’s mother,” does not part ways with traditional forms of Christianity, especially as presented in the Bible originally. Contrary to some perceptions, neither the Apostle Paul, nor Jesus, nor any other figure in the New Testament set up the Platonic duality, the binary of flesh and spirit. The “Word” becomes “flesh” (John 1:14); Paul argues that “our struggle is not against the flesh and blood, but against ... the powers” of the world (Ephesians 6:12); and after Jesus’ resurrection, he eats with the disciples on the beach (John 21:12, 15) (NIV). In those and many other examples, the bearers of Christian oral tradition do


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not separate flesh from spirit, and neither does Morrison in her allusions to African American and Brazilian Christian traditions. With their drawings and conversations, Consolata helps the women learn the true sources of their longings and their fulfillment. Consolata hints at the latter part with the phrase, “Someone could want to meet you” (262). The possibility that she is referring to the Christ-figure visitor seems confirmed by the scene of “holy women dancing in hot sweet rain,” where Consolata is “fully housed,” filled by the “god who sought her out in the garden” (283). In the context of this “holy” baptismal dance, the line from the narrative point of view of the shooters, “bodacious black Eves unredeemed by Mary,” seems contradicted by the women’s merging of flesh and spirit, Eve and Mary, under the leadership of Consolata as the new “Mary Magna” (18). Morrison may have referred to Consolata’s “ritual” drawing and dancing as having “echoes of New Age,” but the expressive arts of women from multiple Christian traditions, such as that of the nuns of Lilongwe, Malawi, would indicate more orthodoxy that Morrison lets on here (Amazon n.p.). Consolata’s religious folk practices echo points from critics Marc C. Conner, Maria DiBattista, R. Allen Alexander, Jr., Mary Miller Hubbard, Michael Wood, Marni Gauthier, Peggy Ochoa, Evelyn Jaffe Schreiber, and Trudier Harris stating that there is no separation between either flesh and spirit or African American culture and Christianity in Morrison’s work (Conner 73; DiBattista 122; Alexander 327; Miller Hubbard 161; Wood 122; Gauthier 404; Ochoa 108; Schreiber 151; Harris 169). Some of these critics have argued that unity between spirit and flesh is, in fact, a Christian cultural attribute in Paradise. Cultural references—scriptural, traditional, folkloric, popular, or of ambiguous origin—abound and may confuse in Paradise, just as they do when encountered in life. Morrison’s winding of biblical parallels and references into scenes where Consolata gains healing and power strikes me not so much as an appropriation, straight adaptation, or purposeful misreading, but as a “fleshing out” of concepts not easily apprehended by contemporary readers. Influences from the New Testament help Morrison stage an unconventional drama of flesh and spirit. But from whatever tradition one examines Consolata, from the Afro-Brazilian belief system of candomble (as cited by Michelle Cliff in The Village Voice) or from various interpretations of Christianity, her power in this text makes her a hero of folkloric proportions (Cliff 86). Ultimately, readers do not have to choose. Morrison herself does not cut one tradition in favor of another. More than one or two traditions, many more, make up the richness of her characters’ lives, as do the myriad traditions in the real lives of African Americans. Ní Dhuibhne’s midwife: Delivering ambiguity In Ní Dhuibhne’s “The Search for the Lost Husband” the plot refers to lost babies in a situation where the young mother does not know whether her children are dead or alive. Her otherworldly, and rather callous, enchanted goat-husband orders her to acquiesce with his taking her newborns away from her. Not only must she acquiesce, she must do it stoically, without a “tear,” without emotion of any kind, or else she would lose

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him, her husband” (Ní Dhuibhne, “Search” 43). All three babies are “snatched” from her, with the goat watching her closely to make sure she does not show her emotions.2 “Haven’t you me for company?” is his shallow reply. The narrator ends this with the formulaic phrase, “That’s how it was.” The impossible bind into which the goathusband places the young woman reflects the pressures some women face from male partners who demand they abort, an emotional double-bind every bit as destructive as Onny Soraghan’s double-bind in The House in Clewe Street. In Bacchilega’s terms, this rewriting of a tale and a type of fiction “unmakes” some of the “workings” inherent in many retellings of folk tales and modern stories of power struggles between men and women. Likewise, in “Midwife to the Fairies,” Ní Dhuibhne combines contemporary news stories, of a two dead newborns found within one year in the same rural area in Ireland, which would have sparked discussion on murder and crisis pregnancies, and another example of Irish folklore, Christiansen’s migratory legend type ML 5075. At the same time, another subtle reworking of the Virgin Mary appears in the context of the main character’s life. Her name is Mary, too, and her husband is Joe, but no mention is made of any children of their own, and this Mary dislikes working in maternity wards. The contrast between the Virgin Mary’s successful welcome of the Christ child, despite the awkwardness her pregnancy posed for her, and this Mary’s failure to help another awkward young mother keep her child alive prompts readers to consider the difficulties Irish women have had living up to oversimplified images of Mary. For the most part, the allusion to the Virgin Mary, either as an oversimplified ideal or as a more vibrant folk woman, stays in the background while the story focuses on the midwife’s adventures. Ní Dhuibhne recasts the folk tale in a chatty, colloquial tone, from the point of view of a thoroughly contemporary midwife, who doesn’t like having her “‘Late Late’” show interrupted (Ní Dhuibhne, “Midwife to the Fairies” 25). One of the first details of the tradition that Ní Dhuibhne rewrites, besides mentioning TV shows, is that “the legend is seldom, if ever, bound up with the personal experiences of any one storyteller,” as it is here (Mac Cárthaigh 140). However, in taking into account what Sw. Anand Prahlad and other performative theorists have noted, the question of the dearth of personal detail may indicate more a popular (and academic) oversight. Details that performers through time inserted into their stories, via gestures, tone of voice, as well as wording, may have tipped off their listeners to such specifics of characterization and subversion, specifics that contemporary transcripts, to my knowledge, have begun to document only in the late twentieth century, as evidenced by Ní Dhuibhne’s translation in the Field Day Anthology of “The Story of the Little White Goat” (Ruiséal 1219–32). In addition, instead of using the narrative beginning, intermittent, and ending formulas of the storyteller, here Ní Dhuibhne inserts a more traditionally worded text at different points of the story. She contrasts humorous details of missing the Late Late Show, a banged up “old Cortina,” “questioning” on the “telly” of babies found in “rubbish dumps,” and humorously exaggerated speeches like, “And I’m telling 2 This bears some similarity to Macon Dead’s attempt to punish Ruth Dead by attempting to take away Milkman before his birth, although the goat husband only relocates his wife’s babies to foster mothers in the Otherworld.


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no lie when I say I was on my way to the doctor for a prescription for Valium,” with the more timeless images of “the rider,” “the mare,” and the fair, where the inset folktale ends, with the midwife’s eye poked out by the fairy husband (Ní Dhuibhne, “Midwife” 29, 34). The contemporary midwife’s lineage ties her to the midwife of oral tradition. Mary states that her mother was also a midwife, “and her mother before her,” a woman whose personal history stretches back into the time of oral culture (29). Ní Dhuibhne juxtaposes eerie references to the fairy folk, in italicized segments taken from oral tradition, with humorous references to eerie settings from popular culture, such as television shows and horror films. The most odd detail is that six or more of the family all sit in front of the TV, neither moving, nor speaking, and resistant to telling her anything about the young mother giving birth: “It was a funny set up, I could see that as clear as daylight, such a big crowd of them, all living together. For all the world like in ‘Dallas’” (30). Mary the midwife’s description appears with contemporary Hiberno-English touches, such as, “A big room it was” (30). After the italicized folk tale section, she tells the events of the birth and further describes the family as “sitting like zombies” who give her “the creeps” (31). The mother seems quite young, and oddly unaffected by the event of her child’s birth, smoking a cigarette afterward (31). What we think of as the contemporary juxtaposed against what we think of as the ancient may lead readers to see beyond the artifice erected around the fairy tale in contemporary times. The contrast of language directs us to the timelessness inherent in the “modern” side of the story. Perhaps the questioning of the contrast may also be seen as further evidence of the postmodern qualities of Ní Dhuibhne’s retelling. The “questioning” that this strategy of indirection allows appears in hints throughout the story. Each point of questioning raises tension. In one example, the midwife wants to “scream” when the eerily still people make no move to take the underweight child to the doctor. In another, she wonders whether to go to the Garda (police) after the child is found dead. Later, when the father threatens her with a knife, “like a gangster in ‘Hill Street Blues,’” and she sighs, “Well, I’d had my lesson,” we know the lesson is not over. She says “nothing,” yet ends the story thinking of the baby: “She might have had a chance, in intensive care. But who am I to judge?” (31, 33, 34). The Pontius Pilate-like hand-washing of “who am I to judge” cannot undo Mary’s discomfort knowing of the “chance” the baby has been denied, by her parents, by the isolated family, and perhaps by the government that cut the funding for the local maternity ward. The priest to whom she confesses, whom she doesn’t know, speaks words of comfort, but they contain an error in theology. The priest claims that God “does not ask of us that we put our lives in danger,” when the Bible is rife with examples of people of faith putting their lives on the line to tell the truth (34). Ní Dhuibhne’s characterization of the priest is simultaneously gentle and unsettling, further underlining reader sympathy for Mary’s uneasy conscience: readers may want to waive her, and their own, sense of responsibility, but ultimately cannot. The common criminality of the fairy father, as well as the Mary’s efforts to bury her “niggling” conscience, transgress the boundary of the old story to bring in the new of the real-life cases, forcing the reader to examine his or her own reactions to similar situations (32).

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Ní Dhuibhne admits that she has “counterpointed” the folktale of “Midwife” with “a contemporary story in the news in Ireland,” the Joanne Hayes baby case, which she calls “a story of infanticide which was very common in Ireland” (Moloney 108). In April 1984, Joanne Hayes, a 24-year-old woman from Abbeydorney, County Kerry, was accused of double infanticide. Without discussing her situation with her family, with whom she lived in Abbeydorney, she gave birth to a boy in a field behind their house, and left the baby, dead, in a pool there. The state pathologist testified that there was no way to be certain whether the Hayes baby had survived independently of the womb, as the child’s lungs did not fully inflate (Hayes 1442). This led to two possibilities, that the child arrived stillborn, or that Hayes had killed it in a panic immediately at birth (McCafferty 72, 174, 153). The next day, the body of another baby boy was found in Caherciveen, a two-hour drive away from Abbeydorney (66). Suspicion was eventually thrown on Hayes after she was treated for heavy bleeding at a local hospital, showing evidence, though she denied it, of having given birth. Even after her own baby was found in the field, the authorities persisted in their belief that she had given birth to and killed both babies, despite biological evidence which made that farfetched. What made the case a particular scandal was that after Hayes was cleared of murder, a long tribunal commenced anyway. Supposedly to determine police malfeasance in the Hayes family’s forced false confessions, the tribunal instead pored over every detail of Joanne Hayes’s private life, including all the details of her affair with a married man, who received much less attention. Many people from all walks of life, many citing their religious beliefs, protested her public humiliation. Shortly before the Hayes scandal, in January 1984, fifteen-year-old Ann Lovett was found dying near a statue of the Virgin Mary, in a grotto, in Granard, County Longford, her own dead baby boy beside her. Moira J. Maguire describes the difference in public reaction to the two cases as between a “vocal, outspoken, antitribunal reaction to the Kerry Babies case, and the sensitive, self-conscious and uncomfortable soul searching resulting from Ann Lovett’s death” (Maguire 354). These three dead babies, and the public examination of their mothers’ lives, followed on the heels of the 1983 Eighth Amendment of the Constitution, in which the Irish “‘State acknowledges the right to life of the unborn,’” “‘with due regard for the equal right to life of the mother’” (P. O’Connor 52). The silences surrounding taboo subjects such as sex outside of marriage, abortion, contraception, and single motherhood were broken by these events. The Lovett and Kerry cases carry importance, Maguire writes, “because they created a space, for the first time in Irish history, of a wide-scale discussion of the issues that increasingly divided Irish society into ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’ camps” (Maguire 338). Examination of male actions in these cases still remained shrouded, as McCafferty notes. “‘You can never say somebody is the father. There are things nobody wants to talk about,’” she quotes Professor Robert Harrison, an expert witness at the tribunal (McCafferty, Goodnight 70). That example shows censorship at work on behalf of those empowered by silence, as well as at work against those who will suffer from it. The implication taken by many from the public humiliation of Hayes was that “unmarried women were still subject to official control of their sexual and reproductive activities” by male authorities (Maguire 351). Feminist writers such as Maguire, Ailbhe Smyth in The Abortion Papers (1992), and Nell McCafferty in Goodnight Sisters and A Woman To Blame:


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The Kerry Babies Case (1985) wrote directly against the abuses, as they saw it, of the government against women’s reproductive rights. But, as Maguire ascertains in her two “camps” statement, what was once taboo is now polarized. Subjects that have become polarized still remain difficult to discuss. Ní Dhuibhne addresses this difficulty when she discusses why the midwife has one eye put out in the traditional version of the tale, and why the midwife is threatened with a knife in the contemporary version: “She has made a mistake after her visit to the fairy hill of recognizing the fairies who ought to be invisible, and so she is seeing and talking about what she should not see or talk about” (Moloney 198). The blinding of the midwife is, therefore, “a symbol for censorship, to see the secret thing” (198). The blinding refers also to “turning a blind eye, being silent, which would have been the general attitude,” she feels, in the earlier periods of the oral tradition of tales of infanticide (198). “Midwife to the Fairies,” in the threat and assault against both versions of the midwife, as well as the contemporary midwife’s silence in the end, brings together issues of society’s enforced censorship and self-censorship. The self-censorship, here, is fueled possibly by indifference, a “blind eye.” Ní Dhuibhne alludes, too, to indirection in folklore when mentioning how infanticide comes up so casually in folk tales, but “would never, of course, be referred to directly” (198). Her reliance on the preexisting indirection in the tale, combined with an extension of its symbols into the contemporary story, takes advantage of the strategies possible in folklore and fiction to address volatile subjects such as infanticide and related questions of abortion legislation and teen pregnancy. Where Ní Dhuibhne depicts the midwife characters as either risking censorship, in bodily harm, or risking self-censorship, in turning a “blind eye,” she portrays the young mother and her family in a less ambiguous light in the story. As though they are dwellers of the Otherworld, “zombies” to the midwife, the characters seem unconcerned with the birth, and even with the young woman, leaving her alone in an unheated room (Ní Dhuibhne, “Midwife to the Fairies” 31). The only concern they show over her condition is to call in a midwife. If the story had been inspired in part by the Hayes case, it is interesting to note how singularly unsympathetic these characters seem. In recording the details of the actual case, McCafferty portrays the Hayes family in a sympathetic light, as a hardworking, loving rural family who did the best they could by Joanne Hayes, and Hayes herself as an innocent caught in the Irish legal system. Other than perhaps Hayes’s poor choice of a selfish, already-married lover, the only fault McCafferty finds with the family is that they “seldom discussed anything”: “A thing would happen, and be mentioned, and if there was nothing to be done, or the thing was very painful, they moved on to other matters. Abbeydorney was as far removed from California consciousness-raising as it was possible to be” (McCafferty 85). McCafferty records these observations but does not explore further what she seems to imply is a culturally influenced self-censorship in the family, a hesitation to discuss not only sexuality but also a wider range of emotional issues. Their hesitation, coupled with silencing of topics of reproduction in their community, endangered Hayes, and the implication is clear that it led to the newborn’s death. Only this unsettling silence from the fictional “fairy” family carries over to the human family of historical record. Yet, even then, McCafferty locates a sympathetic vulnerability in the withdrawn Hayeses.

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Ní Dhuibhne has said in her written interview with me that she does consider abortion, sex, and “anything which seems to be critical, even mildly, of Irish communities, of their values and mores” to be “difficult” topics to broach (Appendix). The Hayes and Lovett cases did reawaken pro-choice arguments that liberalized abortion laws would have prevented these situations, while pro-life arguments would simply see infanticide on a continuum with abortion, not as something that would be necessarily alleviated by liberalized abortion laws. If the “fairy” family in the story were depicted as isolated from the community, readers would not perceive the community under attack by the author. If the main character is depicted as taking risks to help the “abducted” young mother and her baby, yet is shown withdrawing at the end, this more sympathetic portrayal may encourage the type of self-reflection similar to that produced by the Lovett case, as Maguire noted. The emphasis on the “zombie”-like qualities of the fairy household also underscores that the denizens within, in both the traditional and contemporary versions, live under a spell. Whether the “spell” comes from the despair of family dysfunction or from the entrapment of the Otherworld, readers may decipher for themselves. Either way, Ní Dhuibhne coordinates the audience’s sympathies to align them with the character who could be interpreted as both a liminal figure, the “hag” folk character or midwife, the woman who stands at the crossroads of life and death, and as an upright representative of the community, a “nurse’s aide,” a more institutionalized form of the “district nurse” who acted as midwife to Mary O’Grady (Ní Dhuibhne, “Midwife to the Fairies” 27). The character Mary as the point of entry for the sympathies of the readers evokes identification, which helps the author engage the audience’s emotions. Another reason for weighting the sympathies with the midwife instead of with the young mother or family would be to leave the issues of infanticide and neglect of women in crisis pregnancies to stand on their own as powerful subjects, unclouded by the persuasion of personality. By filtering the point of view of the story through the eyes of someone who would not be as sympathetic to the plight of a family living outside the community, isolated and distant as they are in the contemporary version and isolated and non-human as they are in the traditional version, Ní Dhuibhne can position the audience to gain insight as the protagonist gains her own insights. Ní Dhuibhne starts Mary the midwife off as particularly unsympathetic to certain kinds of crises for women, as she states on the second page that she has “no belief in that pre-menstrual tension and post-natal depression and what have you,” preferring the male patients as “easier than the post-natals” (26). Mary’s consciousness of the suffering of some women in childbirth changes over the course of the story. She evolves from acting relieved that there is no longer a “maternity unit” in her hospital to voicing regret over the lack of “intensive care” attention for the “dawny little” thing who dies (26, 34). Lack of services for women becomes an issue of concern for Mary. From showing scorn and disbelief toward mothers suffering from post-partum depression, Mary alters her understanding to acknowledge that she cares about Sarah’s condition, who, with her wooden demeanor, may or may not have been suffering from something similar herself. Mary would also have a hard time dismissing depression after she experiences it herself. Mary, “who was never depressed before in [her] life,” blurts out, “depressed, that’s what I was” (26, 32). Her initially cool assessment of Sarah, the mother, changes to remembering her


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“round baby face, big head of red hair,” and to admitting that the young mother and baby were on her mind often (31, 32). Although the midwife of the traditional tale loses half of her sight at the end of the tale, Mary gains in insight. Mary will remain haunted by her inaction with the police, but one hopes that the dramatization of her regrets from having turned a “blind eye” will provide a warning to readers. By recasting the characters inspired by the Hayes case as less sympathetic than McCafferty portrays them, Ní Dhuibhne enables her story to reach an audience the more direct feminist treatises on the subject could not. Ní Dhuibhne’s awareness of readers who “deal or do not deal with conflicts of desire,” of readers who represent the whole spectrum of the “tension between the acceptable and the unacceptable,” while causing her to use “caution,” also enables her to write for a wider audience than authors who may, as Eve Patten and Katie Donovan put it, speak to an already “converted audience” (Appendix; Patten 12; Donovan 5). Ní Dhuibhne’s indirect approach to the sensibilities of a mixed audience, those who fall in under the categories of “conservative,” “liberal,” or in-between, answers Patten’s argument against meeting the “economic and sexual constraints on women” “head-on” (Patten 15). While directly feminist essay writing accomplishes much in voicing the issues, the strategic indirection of fiction such as Ní Dhuibhne’s might affect even more broadly “the attitude-changes [feminists] desire” (Donovan 5). Ní Dhuibhne’s evolving protagonist can therefore engage both feminist readers who might applaud her growing consciousness of women in vulnerable positions and more traditional readers who might applaud her consciousness of maternal and unborn lives. Locating works to advocate one side or another is relatively easy; locating works that welcome a diverse audience is harder. Ní Dhuibhne’s “Midwife to the Fairies” allows prochoice, pro-life, as well as undecided readers to enter the story and engage with the protagonist. A more recent parallel of the ambiguity and “safe ground” provided by folklore appears in a later folk occurrence, the moving of the statues of the Virgin in Kerry and elsewhere in 1985. People were reporting that the statues of the Virgin had moved; the reasons why remained ambiguous. Elizabeth Butler Cullingford writes that “Conservative religious commentators argued that this phenomenon proved that Our Lady was grieved and angered by the terrible events of 1984, as well she might have been, but on what score?” (Cullingford 239). If believers saw statues of the Virgin move, and felt she was aggrieved, and if feminists—who could also be believers—took note of the potential for her grief, this basis for a folk legend was creating a middle ground for discourse. Cullingford’s reading of the ambiguity of the statues does prompt readers to wonder about the basis of that “score.” On the basis of the death of Ann Lovett before such a statue? On the basis of the deaths of the infants? But whether believers and non-believers see the movement as a projection of the Virgin’s disapproval of promiscuity and murder, of curtailed reproductive rights, or of neglect of vulnerable women doesn’t matter. What matters is that this folk observance/germ of a legend can accommodate this wide range of interpretations. The movement of the statues reflects folklore’s capacity to embrace the whole range of human expressive need. Likewise, Ní Dhuibhne’s application of the ambiguity of folklore as allots space for a wide range of positions on the issues behind the Kerry and Lovett cases.

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Regardless of Ní Dhuibhne’s own feelings on the subject and her own discomfort with the internalized censorship still evident in Irish writing, she does not lock out readers because they do not side with her position (Appendix). She identifies her own concerns with that of many other feminists when she states in another interview, “We have a legacy of a rigid, illiberal, punishing society which kept women and children down and was frightened of every sexual impulse and of writing” (Moloney 115). However, her own writing tends not to approach these concerns so directly that it cuts out readers who may differ. She enables them to view her creative, inner world with sympathetic eyes because she has not alienated them or closed them out of the rhetoric of her fiction. In another improvement for feminist writing in Ireland, Ní Dhuibhne’s fiction leaves rhetorical breathing room for readers from the two groups some feminist critics have noticed have often been left out of their discourse: those from Christian or pro-life backgrounds. Ní Dhuibhne has told me that she is, “in fact, quite critical of the Catholic Church” and considers her fiction as “deliberately reflecting the secular society” she sees around her (Appendix). In spite of this, her “religious” characters do not appear in an entirely negative light, such as Mary the midwife, her significantly named husband Joe, or the well-meaning but error-prone priest in the story. This “Mary and Joseph” pair falter in helping the unsought child make it into the world, but even Joe’s discouraging Mary to go or to speak may be interpreted sympathetically as Joe caring for her safety. They fail, but readers can identify with the intentions that leave them at the uncomfortably ambiguous ending. The ambiguity of the characters and the folkloric influences in “Midwife to the Fairies” allows pro- and non-pro-choice readers entrée into its world. This represents one of the most important aspects of indirection in fiction: welcoming the reader. Indirection cuts both ways; it enables one’s voice to be heard and it enables one’s audience to listen, even when dangers to freedom of expression threaten the exchange. Anything in a story such as this one that might appear critical of secular or religious authority, while not as much of a danger to a writer in the eighties as it was in Mary Lavin’s time, might receive a less open reception from some readers in a country still engaged in dialogues on religious differences and issues of authority. Questions regarding how much control the fairy husband’s “wife” or the “real world” young woman may have over their conditions as mothers lead to questions regarding the availability of opportunities for women in Ireland. These questions may be raised more smoothly in this blend of tradition and modernity, fantasy and grim reality, tragic circumstances and broad humor. Her humor and the “trivial,” “cozy” mistaken public image of folklore enables Ní Dhuibhne to successfully approach an audience with subjects that have remained volatile in early twentyfirst-century Ireland. Due to the volatile nature of the Hayes and Lovett stories, as with others like it in the US, enticing readers to further examine their own values regarding these issues would have been harder to do with a realistic portrayal. Pulling the readers closer with details of verisimilitude, then pulling them back, Ní Dhuibhne unsettles her audience’s assumptions in ways that realism alone may not, allowing them to access the potentially painful, final “questioning”: “... who am I to judge?”


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When it comes to this interrelationship of author, narrator, audience, real life, and history, Éilís Ní Dhuibhne has her own critique. In an essay she wrote for Béaloideas, on “the craft of the storyteller and the writer,” she states: Fiction and folklore are free countries, I suppose, and there is no moral issue at stake. But as a folklorist, one tends to take a critical stance and to look askance at writers who continue to reinterpret and mystify folklore with scant regard for the attitudes of the folk who originally created it. (Ní Dhuibhne, “Legends of the Supernatural” 148–9)

Judging from Ní Dhuibhne’s shorter works, she has made great strides in bringing the two “countries” together in ways that better respect the uniqueness of each form. Morrison’s Midwives: Freedom from the binaries within Although she enjoys far more freedom of expression than Hurston or Lavin did in their day, Morrison has alluded to some remaining limitations. Unlike the more overt limitations that Ní Dhuibhne has spoken of, the ones Morrison cites seep in from the general category of “belief.” The discussion of some topics remains limited because discourse on “belief” is cut off from serious consideration: ... In the larger mainstream discourse, it’s always suggested that belief is a form of delusion. If I approached the people in this book [Paradise] with that notion, I wouldn’t be worthy of them as an author. In any case, all of the subjects that are on the menu today—abortion, for example, or divorce, marriage, child abuse, and criminal justice—have their roots in some form of moral structure and religion. All the things that we worry about, and are appalled by, are not merely crimes—they’re also sins. In that sense, then, we’re not that far apart. I just wanted to tackle these subjects head-on, not pretending that there’s no such thing as belief. (Amazon.com)

The folk women who mirror the Virgin Mary and other religious figures from Christian oral tradition bond seamlessly with the issue of belief, but so do Morrison’s midwives. Some characters, like Pilate, Consolata, and Lone, serve as actual midwives in the text. Others, like Claudia in The Bluest Eye, Eva Peace in Sula, Thérèse in Tar Baby, Baby Suggs in Beloved, and Alice Manfred and, to a lesser extent, the Narrator in Jazz work to preserve unborn or young lives in folkloric ways that echo the wisdom of midwives. In Paradise, the destruction of the binary of “flesh versus spirit” leads to the battle of two midwives, Consolata and Lone, against contrasting forces that try to separate life from flesh. These flesh and blood wise women, though possessors of superhuman talents, represent the latest in Morrison’s cantankerous folk women. If it can make a child, bring a child into the world, keep a child out of the world, or hurt a child, the potential pitfalls of reproductive topics create a portal for Morrison’s wise women to critique their culture. Wise women characters in Morrison often seem to use the topics of sex, abortion, infanticide, child murder, or abuse as the opening by which they haul another character into self-awareness. Running parallel and sometimes foreshadowing Morrison’s midwife and midwife-type wise women are examples from Morrison’s public speaking events. In 1979, Morrison spoke before Barnard’s graduating class, and Ms. magazine

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later reproduced the speech. Morrison took on the role of a griot for the graduates by retelling the story of Cinderella from the point of view of how tragic it would be for privileged young women like themselves if they were to become like the evil stepsisters. Her gentle warning against oppressing their sisters extends into an exhortation that, as daring and liberated women, they should view bringing a child into the world as a daring and liberated thing to do: “Nothing is safe” (Morrison, “Cinderella’s Stepsisters” 42). In her Nobel Prize acceptance speech, an “old woman, blind but wise” stands in for Morrison when she exhorts youths who stand in for the Nobel audience (Lester 129; DiBattista 106). The fictional griot of the Nobel speech has grown out of Morrison’s earlier performance as a griot to the young graduates. In either instance, a mature older woman corrects the assumptions of real and surrogate young people. In a fateful variation on this folkloric character, Morrison embodies the role of a caring older woman in her 1989 Time interview Morrison tells Bonnie Angelo, The child’s not going to hurt them [the teenagers]. Of course, it is absolutely time consuming. But who cares about the schedule? What is this business that you have to finish school at 18? They’re not babies ... The body is ready to have babies, that’s why they are in a passion to do it. Nature wants it done then, when the body can handle it, not after 40, when the income can handle it ... They can be teachers. They can be brain surgeons. We have to help them become brain surgeons. That’s my job. I want to take them all in my arms and say, “Your baby is beautiful and so are you and, honey, we can do it. And when you want to be a brain surgeon, call me—I will take care of your baby.” That’s the attitude you have to have about human life. But we don’t want to pay for it. (Angelo 260)

Tellingly, when Morrison occupied the wise-woman role in her own persona in an interview, without the cover of the Cinderella or blind old woman folk tales, New Republic editorials excoriated her offer of “babysitting” and argued that her opinion was “something worse than silence” (The New Republic 9–10; Hulbert 21, 23). It is hard not to read a subtle form of social censorship into a statement that declares “silence” superior to a difference of opinion. The intent to silence an opinion opposite your own leads to the continuation of convenient, binary stereotypes that allow groups who have influence to conveniently ignore anyone whose opinions do not match up. The attempt at calling down “silence” on Morrison’s head bears a resemblance, in fact, to Gerardine Meaney’s dismissal of pro-life Irish women that not only entraps other women into a “virgin” versus “old mother” binary, but also blames those women for its continued existence (Meaney, Sex and Nation 189). It seems odd that one binary, the “virgin” versus “whore” one that Mary Lavin combated in her design of Onny Soraghan, a victim of an illegal abortion, should then rise in another form by a pro-choice advocate to label women different from herself. Between this suppression of opinions in the US and Ireland one finds some efficient recycling. Morrison’s use of folkloric wise women, the folk “Marys” earlier and the midwives here, however, offer a conduit to freedom of expression, much like Lavin’s Mary and Ní Dhuibhne’s Midwife. No editorial calls for “silence” will hold back the “ancient properties” of the midwives. In fact, Andrea O’Reilly interprets the 1979 Barnard address as one of many examples where Morrison “insists upon the contemporary value and relevance of


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the ancient properties,” borrowing Morrison’s phrasing from Tar Baby (O’Reilly 22). Tracing the character back in American literature and society, the older African American woman did not historically receive proper respect outside of African American society. Like Janie’s grandmother Nanny, Morrison seems to use a similar lingering “insider/outsider” binary to allow her novels to explore assumptions about crisis pregnancies, out of the glare of the critics’ gaze (Bassard, Spiritual 9). While the editorial writer at The New Republic stated openly that “silence” was to be preferred over Morrison’s call to communal support, her novels have received no such backlash. As with the older female personas in her speeches, Morrison’s fiction allows audience members to identify with the wise-women characters and to identify the characters as, in fact, “wise” in numerous instances before they notice that they do not share certain assumptions. The distancing Morrison creates between the generations of the women and many of the readers allows, too, for the women to “get away with” certain inflammatory statements. The older wise women of the novels follow the pattern of the old woman from the Nobel speech; they, too, make mistakes. That they gain awareness of their own fallibility, and gain additional understanding as the novels progress, only reinforces their ability to draw readers into their world view. That their world view beckons readers via the pleasures of oral tradition is also no surprise. The comfortable distance allotted her audience by the “once upon a time” formulaic phrasing that Morrison employs in both the Barnard and Nobel speeches is played to even better advantage in the folklore of the novels. Before her wise-women characters fully emerge, Morrison starts with a wise child narrator in The Bluest Eye. Evelyn Jaffe Schreiber notes the negative view Morrison’s novel takes toward a community who wishes Pecola’s baby, a product of incestual rape, dead (Schreiber 92–93). Claudia declares, “I felt a need for someone to want the black baby to live,” and she and Frieda decide to fight the negative communal attitude with a financial sacrifice and a ritual planting of marigolds, to fight for “the “baby that everybody wanted dead” (Morrison, Bluest Eye 148; Schreiber 93). Before Morrison ever conceived of her larger than life midwife characters, she sketches out a very young version, when Claudia and her friend try to perform a ritual to help Pecola’s baby make it into the world, just as Pilate will do with more success in Song of Solomon. Young Claudia, the narrative focal point of the novel, is described as needing “recognition of worth for Pecola and her baby” as intimately tied to her own need to see her own black body cherished (Schreiber 93). When their efforts prove insufficient, and Pecola seems to search the garbage for “the thing we assassinated,” the narrator Claudia delivers judgment on her community’s failure to nurture, “we acquiesce and say the victim had no right to live. We are wrong, of course ...” (160). If the status quo, as perceived in the Barnard speech and in The Bluest Eye, dictates the rejection of those unborn who stand in the way of economic progress or who may emphasize uncherished aspects of a community’s identity, then the dichotomy set here appears to favor giving birth. Revelations about the death of a child continues into Morrison’s second novel to mark a turning point in a character’s development. Eva Peace in Sula, though frail and not as powerful a matriarch as before, ambushes Nel Greene, “Tell me how you killed that little boy?” (Morrison, Sula 168). For the first time, Nel must face that her watching the boy go into the water carries guilt as much as Sula throwing him

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in did. As usual for Morrison, her wise women do carry on with the Otherworld, despite their mortal identities, for the son she burned to death, Plum, she says with a “giggle” told her (169). Eva’s pronouncement that Nel and Sula are “just alike” opens a “bright space” inside Nel’s head so that “memory seeped into it” (169). While not a midwife character, per se, Eva Peace carries on the recurring scenario of the older wise woman concerned, at some level, with dead or endangered progeny. In Song of Solomon, the wise woman as midwife takes on her full form in the character of Pilate, the sister of Macon Dead and aunt of Milkman Dead. When Milkman catches his mother Ruth visiting her father’s grave, she admits to him that his father Macon, upon finding out that Pilate had conjured him to impregnate Ruth, had told Ruth “to get rid of the baby.” Macon forces Ruth to drink “castor oil,” sit on a “hot pot,” take a “soapy enema,” use a “knitting needle,” and when she fails in these applications, Macon punches her in the stomach (Morrison, Song of Solomon 125, 131). When Ruth remembers visiting Pilate to seek protection from Macon’s pressure to abort, Pilate orders her, “don’t ram another thing up in your womb,” and years later reminds Ruth, He come in the world tryin to keep from getting killed. Layin in your stomach, his own papa was tryin to do it. And you helped some too. He had to fight off castor oil and knittin needles and being blasted with hot steam and I don’t know what all you and Macon did. But he made it. When he was at his most helpless, he made it. (140)

What seems unusual about these references is that not only does Morrison have the most admirable character in the book pronounce the abortion a “killing,” she also ascribes agency, at least from Pilate’s view, to a pre-born Milkman. Abortion had been legal for less than five years by the time this novel saw print. Morrison’s writing receives some its most vocal support from among readers coming from what might be considered politically progressive, and often “pro-choice,” viewpoints. For Morrison to depict abortion as a practice in such a dim light would put her at risk of alienating some of her supporters in publishing and academia. Morrison, however, buries the abortion passages in the folkloric details of Milkman’s conception and birth, with love potions, rose petals, and blue silk wings, such that any rhetorical points made about abortion as “killing” become camouflaged amidst the colorful images, much as when Morrison buries other alternative feminist critiques in the middle of a Cinderella retelling in the 1979 Barnard speech. After Song of Solomon, the comments become more pointed but more buried, as the wise woman in Tar Baby appears as a supporting character without Pilate’s extensive influence. In Tar Baby, Thérèse, a “lying crone with a craving for apples,” a wise woman with “magic breasts” that can still give milk, shocks Son by asking, “‘Is it true? American women reach into their wombs and kill their babies with their fingernails?’” (Morrison, Tar Baby 93, 92, 96, 249, 129, 128, 130, 132). Thérèse’s previous career as a wet nurse places her in a similar role in supporting reproduction as a midwife. She seems obsessed with condemning American and French women for having abortions and buying Enfamil, all of which adds up to why she almost starved to death: no babies to feed (132). Thérèse’s stories of blind horsemen and swamp women masks the harshness of her condemnation. Regardless, Thérèse has


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“her own views of understanding that had nothing to do with the world’s view” (130). That last line should clue in readers that Morrison never dismisses what blind old women have to say, not in her Nobel Speech, as noted in the next chapter, not ever. Maria DiBattista recognizes a family resemblance between Thérèse and the “blind, shamanistic old woman” from the Nobel speech, and she cites Tar Baby, “like many of Morrison’s fictions,” as where one of her “surrogate” “storytellers” surface (DiBattista 106). Many have written on the “sacred properties” of Baby Suggs, Holy, in Beloved, and her efforts to bless the former slave community with the ability to treasure themselves (Morrison, Beloved 87). In the end, though, her efforts, her passion for life, and her folkloric understanding find completion in the wise women of the community. Baby Suggs possesses folk knowledge of food and herbs and material culture, similar to a midwife of her time would have. Baby Suggs demonstrates a midwife’s knowledge when she assists Sethe in her recovery from birth (93). In her passion for the nurturance of the most vulnerable of the African American community, her confusion and rage at Sethe’s actions seeps through Baby Suggs’s shock. Condensed, yet powerful emotions surface in her short outburst against Sethe when Sethe starts to breastfeed Denver with blood still on her breast (152). The midwife wisdom shown when Sethe is taught how to “comb” her breasts to enhance milk giving reappears in twisted form when Baby Suggs chides Sethe’s twisted attempt at nurturance. In spite of her commitment and wisdom, the faith of Baby Suggs fails her in the aftermath of Sethe’s capture and murder of Beloved. If you can only have the “grace” you can “imagine,” the novel perhaps implies here, that may not be enough to get you through the hardest times (88; Taylor-Guthrie 123). Despair at the killing, compounded by the white men hunting Sethe and the Black community’s momentary lack of care, takes Baby Suggs down, into a craving for “color” in her drained world. Baby Suggs’s mission, as it were, of physical protection, spiritual salvation, and psychological rescue must be completed by other wise women in the novel. The folkloric women who do save Sethe in the end, the wise women who surround Sethe’s house, must call on a grace they cannot completely imagine: “They had no idea what they would do once they got there” at 124 Bluestone Road (Morrison, Beloved 257). They sing, and some bring charms, relying on African and African American traditions. Joanne M. Braxton calls this the “spiritual strength,” “whether Christian or derived from African belief,” of the “outraged mother” (Braxton 300). They do not know quite what that will do to relieve Sethe’s house of its “devilchild,” but a grace they have not yet imagined does come, with the unimaginable “chewing laughter” finally coming for Beloved (Morrison, Beloved 261, 257, 274). In a strange way, the women of the community assist Sethe in a way that mirrors how Baby Suggs helped her heal after the birth of Denver. Their wisdom and faith help another of Sethe’s babies complete her journey in the opposite direction, toward death instead of life, and in so doing help Sethe come back to her own life. The respect afforded Baby Suggs by the narration means that her moment of anger in the shed and potent despair should contribute to how readers regard the loss of the baby’s life. Baby Sugg’s reaction of horror has not always been calculated into critical readings of that scene. For example, Judith Wilt cites Beloved as deflating

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arguments against maternal choices that resemble Sethe’s (164, 166). Wilt repeats the assumption that “a woman’s freedom to abort a fetus is a monstrous, a tyrannous, but a necessary freedom in a fallen world” (italics in original) (Wilt xii). Andrea O’Reilly, on the other hand, argues against a reading of maternity as leading inevitably to Julia Kristeva’s “identity catastrophe,” that the catastrophe instead spills out of a denial of maternity in a community (Wilt 157; O’Reilly 20). As O’Reilly interprets it, something as harmful to a woman’s and a community’s identity as denying the possibilities of maternity actually divides and withers identity, then so withers the “freedom of choice within which to make [one’s] soul” (Wilt xiii). Ultimately, Morrison’s continued portrayals of the reactions of wise women like Baby Suggs and of the negative consequences following the rejection of reproduction, illustrated in emotionally sterile sexuality, abortion, infanticide, and even ill will towards the young and vulnerable, contradicts common assumptions regarding identity, loss, and choice (O’Reilly 178). Furthermore, in the dialogue held by Christian, McDowell, and McKay, the concept of freedom in general for all human beings appears threatened when one human, the mother, insists on the ownership of a child’s life (Christian, McDowell, and McKay 214). Looking at these discussions, a new binary challenge materializes in the pages of Morrison’s fiction. If, as O’Reilly argues, the division between a woman’s identity as a human being and her identity as a mother or potential mother presents an artificial conflict, then another binary extreme falls to Morrison’s folkloric indirection, that of a “woman” versus “child.” Which half readers think represents the “above” and which represents the “below” depends on the point of view of the individual reader, because partisan groups have consistently the more vulnerable “below” position as either “woman” or “child,” based upon which type of damage to which life form the group argues against. Regardless, Morrison does not at any point negate the difficulties of a crisis pregnancy and the culture’s tendency to induce claustrophobic restraints on family women, her muddying of the “woman” versus “child” binary becomes all the more complete. No opposite binary takes its place; only a more expansive imagining of possibilities for women’s identities. The multiple points of view with which Morrison allows readers to enter a text may provide the necessary openness and flexibility to accommodate readers coming from multiple points of view themselves, but the ambiguity produced by this technique only goes so far. At some point, despite so many well-rounded characters and balanced portrayals of different attitudes toward sexual expression, the repetition of wise-women’s commentary on reproduction, abortion especially, leads one to think that Morrison draws a line here. She may use the popular phrases to refer to cultural “problematics of governing and controlling women’s bodies,” but her wise-women characters act out an indirect negative critique of prevailing assumptions about reproductive “choice” (Morrison, Race-ing Justice xix). After the backlash following her comments about “babysitting,” her characters have increasingly taken up the mask of the humorously cantankerous ancestor, whom some readers may tolerate as “charming” and “folksy.” Cheryl Lester has noted this tendency earlier, regarding the Nobel Speech, that Morrison “elaborate[s]” on her themes “speaking in the voice of the old woman” (Lester 129). Lester adds later that Morrison includes among those themes, with reference to her high regard for


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Lincoln’s Gettysburg address, “above all,” “deference to life” (132). That may strike one as a general deference to human life in all forms. The wide sweep may take account of some overlooked life forms, which, of course, often develops into the goals of writers committed to reversing binary strictures and speaking for the erased Other. With the mask of her folk-women characters, though, Morrison has free rein to let rip the comments that many in her audience would find offensive in the context of reproduction. After the head-on collision with infanticide in Beloved, Morrison picked up the thread of Tar Baby’s and Song of Solomon’s critique of sterility in reproductive attitudes. Like the wise-women team effort Morrison stages between Baby Suggs and the other women of the community, the vivid persona of the Narrator teams with Alice Manfred to ponder issues related to sexuality, sometimes with less wise-woman assurance, other times with more. Sarah Appleton Aguiar sees Alice as a member of that line of “symbolic midwives,” like Consolata and Baby Suggs (Aguiar 517). Alice Manfred in Jazz seems the wiser of the women in the novel and reluctantly helps the protagonist Violet sort through tragic events. Joining Alice, the Narrator makes pronouncements about sex, then reverses her position in the end, all the while speaking as though she considers herself the only “knowing” female presence in the novel. Alice tries to protect her niece Dorcas from life lived “below the sash,” but, like Ondine, Jadine’s non-otherworldly aunt, she fails to connect with her orphaned charge (Morrison, Jazz 56, 58). The readers receive her observations instead, filtered through the omniscient narration, that the sexual license of the age she fears “had something to do with the silent black women and men marching down Fifth Avenue to advertise their anger,” that she hears “a complicated anger in [jazz music], something hostile that disguised itself as flourish and roaring seduction” (56–7, 59). She considers the extremity of a life filtered through sex as rising from suppressed rage. Simultaneously, Alice looks at sexually conservative clothing and behavior, especially moving “anywhere to avoid a whiteboy over the age of eleven,” as ways to avoid an abusive white society (54–5). The extreme cultural consequences of these attitudes, a hypervigilance against sexual threatening whites, a stifling of a positive recognition of one’s fertility, or Dorcas’s limited view of sex as the only “thing worth doing,” leads Alice to “thinking war thoughts” (63, 77). The personage of the Narrator provides the words for Dorcas’s urge to get to a “Paradise” of “the frail, melty tendency of the flesh” (63). At the end of the novel, however, the Narrator claims she doesn’t “believe that anymore” and seeks instead “something rogue” (228). With the confident tone of a wise woman, more confident that Alice Manfred, the Narrator declares a preference for a third sexual option: “It’s nice when grown people whisper to each other under the covers. Their ecstasy is more leaf-sigh than bray and the body is the vehicle, not the point,” a “whispering, old-time love,” with “no stud’s eye, no chippie glance to undo them” (228). Violet and Joe Trace’s reborn marriage inspires the Narrator, who also envies “them their public love,” to declare her love to the reader (229). No “war” of Alice’s at the end, no “burning girl” lit by a “bright wood chip” from the St Louis fires, only that “enclosed” “kept together” love (77, 228, 60–61). Finally, it is the Narrator who provides the phrasing, in a tart wise-woman tone, that refers to Violet’s lost mothering opportunities. The Narrator voices Violet’s

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speculation of “the daughter who fled her womb”: “Washed away on a tide of soap, salt and castor oil. Terrified, perhaps, of so violent a home ... had she braved mammymade poisons and mammy’s urgent fists, she could have had the best-dressed hair in the City” (109). When seen only from Violet’s point of view, the losses appear simply as “all those miscarriages—two in the field, only one in her bed—were more inconvenience than loss” (107). Violet’s miscarriages, her “rejection of motherhood,” as Andrea O’Reilly calls it, “were in fact self-induced abortions” (O’Reilly 156). Violet’s baby “longing,” years later, becomes an “unmanageable craving,” and she keeps imagining “how old that last miscarried child would be now,” a symptom that reportedly occurs with post-abortion syndrome (Morrison, Jazz 108). The “motherhunger” leads up to the sentimental horror of “mammy’s urgent fists” (108–9). The Narrator’s womanly sarcasm does not read like a promotion of the benefits of access to abortion. O’Reilly interprets Morrison as denying an opposition between “motherlove” and “self-love” (O’Reilly 138). In fact, O’Reilly goes further and states that Morrison’s works argue that a woman obtains self-love “through motherlove,” and that even a community’s failure to care and nurture mothers and children will lead to a “displacement of the funk and ancient properties” (128–39). The “disconnection or disruption of the motherline” appears in Hagar’s lack of a “chorus” of kinfolks as a partial reason for her death, in the alienation of the orphan Jadine from her “sacred properties,” and in the orphan Dorcas’s obsessive relationship that leads to her death (139). Women and girls cut off from family sustenance fill the pages of Paradise and Love, as rejection by or loss of parents open the plotlines of all the women in the Convent, and family rejection haunts Heed, Christine, and Junior throughout their distrustful relationships with others. If selling your daughter to a resort owner is rejection, then abortion may be categorized as such in O’Reilly’s listing: “The bareness, abortions, miscarriages, sickly children, and dead babies, as well as maternal abandonment and neglect, motherlessness, mother loss, mother-daughter estrangement described in Paradise represent Haven’s and later Ruby’s inability to sustain community” and “serve as metaphors for the denial and repression of the ancient properties and funk” (139–40, 178). “Motherless and unmothered children” carry through to Love and the extent of “failed reproduction,” O’Reilly continues, “in Love also signifies loss” (176, 178). The pursuit of sexual partners to find that one “Big Daddy” also stems from the “absence of maternal love” in the characters’ lives (179). A lack of nurturing leads to sterile sexual relationships in both senses of the term in that novel. Andrea O’Reilly’s tracing of Morrison’s implied positions on reproduction in her novels stands as the first sustained argument that her fiction portrays the denial of maternal opportunity in a negative light. Midwives in Paradise and a fetus named “Che” Paradise and Love reflect both indirect and direct references to less seen aspects of Christian traditions and reproductive attitudes. Especially in Paradise, Morrison’s indirection not only obscures the readers’ comprehension of the writer’s position, but also redirects the readers’ attention toward pondering their own positions on these subjects. In one strategy, Morrison presents, quite bluntly, some controversial views,


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conveyed via internal and external dialogues of characters toward which the narration demonstrates some level of respect. Potentially controversial examples include the depiction of a self-induced abortion as the action of a “rapist,” desire for sexual fulfillment mocked as “gobble gobble love,” and a wise old woman’s faith in Christ as an essential part of a rescue mission (Morrison, Paradise 250, 240, 280). Even as Consolata serves as a combined Mary Magdalene, Samaritan woman, Virgin Mary, and prodigal daughter, she also serves as a midwife to Arnette’s baby and as a source of gynecological advice for other women in the novel. The town’s official midwife, Lone DuPres, the adopted Native American daughter of the town’s previous midwife Fairy DuPres, reflects on the religious aspects of her wise-women role. Lone and Consolata, who the text also implies is part Native American as an Afro-Brazilian, sometimes act as counterparts. At the novel’s climax, each woman relies on their faith, African American Protestant for Lone and blended Afro-Brazilian Catholic for Consolata, as they try to save lives. As the examples below demonstrate, Morrison portrays the religious cultures of these women in a positive light, and she portrays another character’s reproductive choice in a less obvious but clearly negative light. Morrison’s reputation for indeterminacy of point of view cannot hide a controversial narrative aside later in the book. Arnette, a pregnant sixteen-year-old from Ruby, comes to the Convent, and Consolata sees in her A revulsion so severe it cut mind from body and saw its flesh-producing flesh as foreign, rebellious, unnatural, diseased. Consolata could not fathom what brought on that repugnance, but there it was ... The girl, sharp in her refusal to have the midwife attend her, waited sullen for a week or so. (249)

The point of view switches to the omniscient narrator at this point: The five- or six-month baby revolted. Feisty, outraged, rigid with fright, it tried to escape the battering and battered ship that carried it. The blows to its delicate skull, the trouncing its hind parts took. The shudders in its spine. Otherwise there was no hope. Had it not tried to rescue itself, it would break into pieces or drown in its mother’s food. So he was born, in a manner of speaking, too soon and fatigued by the flight. But breathing. Sort of. (250)

The rest of the paragraph describes the Convent women’s ministrations to the premature infant before he “surrender[s] himself” to his death”: “Grace called him Che ... [Consolata] had murmured Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi: miserere nobis over the three pounds of gallant but defeated life ...” The last phrase, which, like the description of Che’s reactions above, grants the fetus agency as a character, and attributes a certain nobility not usually associated with a terminated fetus. The passage seems to extend the agency attributed to Violet’s fetus in Jazz, when she is described as fleeing her mother’s blows (Morrison, Jazz 109). In another unusual token of respect, since Gigi seems like a revolutionary herself, it may be safe to assume she is naming the boy after Che Guevara (Ernesto Rafael Guevara de la Serna) (1928–1967), the Argentine-born Marxist revolutionary, Cuban guerrilla leader, and hero revered by Third World socialist revolutionaries (Morrison, Paradise 68, 310).

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This adds weight to Morrison’s suggestion back in 1979 that having a child could be a daring “not safe” thing to do in the face of the status quo. Yet Arnette’s intent not to carry her child to term also echoes Morrison’s rhetorical question to Betty Fussell in 1992, “‘When does the community own your egg?’” (Fussell 286). Fussell interprets this as a comment that “deftly invokes slavery,” admitting, though, that Morrison states that African Americans “have their own reasons to be distrustful of” abortion (286). Arnette’s rejection of Che may simultaneously reflect her rejection of the townspeople’s hold over her life and the townspeople’s rejection of their duty to nurture Arnette, in the sense that O’Reilly describes (O’Reilly 139–40, 178). The result of the broken relationship between Arnette and the people of Ruby comes down to an identity so broken that Morrison portrays the girl as raping herself: “ ... the mop handle inserted with a rapist’s skill— mercilessly, repeatedly—between her legs. With the gusto and intention of a rabid male, she had tried to bash the life out of her life” (Morrison, Paradise 250). It almost appears in this scene that Arnette, in fact, destroys her own identity as a woman. Regardless of these multiple levels of rejection, the naming and description of Che recalls the “creation of historical agency” that Bhabha observes in Morrison’s recognition of the “spite” of 124, the house in Beloved (Bhabha 199). Furthermore, that phrase, “gallant but defeated life,” does not match Consolata’s manner of speech or private thoughts; it matches the narrator’s voice instead. The following line returns to something closer to Consolata’s internal speech: “Just as well, thought Consolata. Life with that mother would have been hell for Che” (Morrison, Paradise 249–50). But, who is comparing the abortion to a rape? Not Consolata, because “she did not know.” Not Arnette, because she was “not anxious, as might have been expected, but revolted by the work of her womb” (249). Only the omniscient narrator and Che observe the blows as an attack. Many readers, noting Morrison’s previous attribution of agency to trees in Tar Baby, and other fantastic characterizations, might find the attribution of agency and bravery to a fetus simply more of the same. The wrapping of folkloric expression around this scene may add to that camouflage, as “Merle and Pearl,” Mavis’s dead infant twins, are reportedly present in the Convent, and the “flitting” cowboy visitor arrives on the next page (249). The ambiguity of Morrison’s fine line between realism, as interpreted in western literature, and African American oral tradition hides the fact that the baby is named after a Latin American revolutionary, and that the narration describes abortion as an example of Platonic division between mind and body. Such division receives condemnation elsewhere in the book: “So I wondering where is the spirit lost in this? It is true, like bones. It is good, like bones ... Hear me, listen. Never break them in two. Never put one over the other” (263). If this represents Consolata’s great revelation to the women of the Convent, first inspired by the visit in the garden, then it reflects poorly on Arnette’s choice to abort, since it represents a “revulsion” cutting “mind from body” (249). In addition, the description of death in the womb precedes the description of Consolata’s despair and her subsequent “rescue” by the Christ-figure cowboy. The order of events lend them significance that may belie their ambiguity. These events in the novel, as well as narrative asides, also suggest that the “mother” versus “child” binary presented in some discussions of reproductive


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rights is only another variation of the “flesh” versus “spirit” binary that Consolata dislodges. If the binary of “flesh” versus “spirit,” alias “mother” versus “child,” ring false after Consolata finishes with it, then so does the binary that separates intelligence from adherence to Christian oral traditions. The acts of healing that Consolata performs after the garden scene and Lone’s race to save the women all spring from the characters’ active relationships with God. The characters in the story whom the narration depicts as wise and humane do follow a Christ-based model for actions based on their faith. Morrison portrays Lone DuPres, as a woman raised in one of the African American Christian traditions, and shows the character insisting that “God had given her the task” of trying to save the Convent women from the townsmen, that she is “traveling in His time, not outside it” (273). As with Consolata, the narration provides that same honorific pronoun in the depiction of Lone’s thoughts. Lone bases her efforts to rescue the Convent women on guidance from God: “‘Thy will. Thy will,’ she whispered, convinced that what she had heard and surmised [of the men’s murderous plans] was no idleness” (280, 282, 273). “‘Thy will’” as folk speech also represents Christian oral traditions derived from the Lord’s Prayer (Matthew 6:9–15, Luke 11:1–4). Like Lone, Consolata also refers to an external being as “You” and “Him,” both capitalized, in the context of faith (251). When readers come across lines associated with certain characters’ thoughts, they see “God” and the related pronouns capitalized. By the same token, when Morrison leaves the point of view more diffused, such as when the narration encompasses all the women dancing, the narrator refers to “Consolata, fully housed by the god who sought her out in the garden,” with a small “g” (Morrison, Paradise 283). Thus, Morrison preserves enough ambiguity for readers while she maintains the cultural specificity of her characters’ inner worlds. The double-consciousness, or even “multi-consciousness,” that compels Morrison to draw on a variety of African American, Christian, and other folk traditions results from what Heinze terms “transenculturation” (Heinze 149). Heinze sees “Her affinity for fantastic forms—myth, folk tales, fairy tales, and biblical stories” coming from “not only from Africa and black America, but from Euro-America, Europe, and Greece” (Heinze 149). At the end of the novel, though, Morrison’s narrative rests upon characters who claim the multiple heritage of both Africa and the New World, two women, one “black as firewood” and one in whom “all the colors of seashells—wheat, roses, pearl—fuse” (Morrison, Paradise 318). Multiple heritages, multiple states of consciousness, multiple readings of spirituality and sexuality all fuse in Morrison’s strategies of indirection with which she expresses what has gone unsaid in much of contemporary fiction, and welcomes that wider range of readers who have sometimes gone unwelcomed. Like Morrison’s defiant Lone, Consolata, and Mary Magna, Ní Dhuibhne’s heroines brim with disrespectful humor toward their folkloric situations. Mary the midwife’s exclamations and television references, the young wife’s sly capture and rejection of her goat-husband, Robin’s sublimely oblivious statements, and Jenny’s “bikini-clad” “fairy tale” reveal the indirection of the bizarre at work. Access to issues surrounding the Kerry Babies cases, “destructive kind[s] of sexual love,” the advancements achieved by feminism perverted by some into imperialism, and

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alternative “Green” feminists like Jenny carving their own way all find a smoother path into readers’ minds because of the humorous, folkloric ways in which Ní Dhuibhne frames these scenarios. Although this chapter began with Hurston’s dismissal of the Virgin Mary and along with her much of Christianity, moved toward Lavin’s polite but sometimes searingly cold distancing of the nationalistic interpretation of the magna mater, in the final assessment, Ní Dhuibhne and Morrison revive the liberating possibilities of this folk wise woman. After Hurston and Lavin skim over the folk woman of the midwife, paradoxically, Ní Dhuibhne and Morrison revive her, too. Some suggestions on what this reversal of times and generational understanding may signify will follow.

Chapter 6

Final Indirections Whether otherworldly and immortal, or wise and ancestral, the two categories of folk women in these works repossess images that societies have attached to women and restore some life-like ambiguity to them. Therefore, to picture African American and Irish authors working in parallel to demolish the above/below binary of women in western literature is not merely an exercise of the imagination. The unusual parallels between the cultures allow this pairing to reveal more of the inner workings of folklore and indirection in literature than observing one culture alone could. Furthermore, a comparative approach, whether with literature, folklore, or a combination of both, prevents scholars from accidentally falling in lockstep with the expectations of their individual social group and thus opens them up to new readings. Proverbs scholar Wolfgang Mieder asserts that it is the “comparative analysis of folklore that safeguards” folkloristics “from being misappropriated and manipulated as it was during Nazi Germany” (Mieder 16). Cross cultural comparisons reveal the underlying structures of rhetorical indirection, as seen in previous chapters, reveal new ways for future authors to succeed in ushering their visions into print, and reveal the interrelatedness of expressive forms, genres, cultures, and generations. Both Morrison and Ní Dhuibhne have depicted their art as part of something larger, less an act of a lone individual and more an act of creation that takes place in community, although that community may or may not always support the artist’s goals (Morrison, “Rootedness” 342; Appendix). Variations in levels of acceptance in each authors’ social milieu affects differences in these authors’ forms of indirection. The differences stem from the needs, in a sense, of each woman’s audience. Hurston had to use surprising amounts of sly civility to get into print, but once she catches the eye of the reader, she sometimes delivers a shock to his or her sensibilities, such as the pointed criticism of western mores delivered via Erzulie. Where an audience has completely ignored other possible points of view, the author may need to use shock effects ranging from the incongruous to the grotesque or bizarre. First, Hurston displays the subtlety of the scholar’s mask, of sly civility, of mimicry, then the jolt of a female goddess “married” to all the men in Haiti. Although writing from a different religious sensibility, Hurston might have agreed with Flannery O’Connor’s point that When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs as you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock, to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind, you draw large and startling figures. (F. O’Connor 1)

The needs of an audience not already hardened to ignoring a subject, an audience already entrenched in debate, requires an indirection that emphasizes mediation. On

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some subjects, Ní Dhuibhne and Morrison seem to proceed “with caution,” as Ní Dhuibhne states, depicting characters coming from opposing sides with respect, in a way that does not arouse a culture’s open wound. Ní Dhuibhne’s “Midwife” story mediates between violently opposed positions on reproductive issues in Ireland, while Morrison mediates more in the beginning of her writing career and builds up to more shocking moments later on with her wise-women characters. The severity of censorship in Lavin’s time, coupled with that era’s hardened attitude toward opportunities for women, caused her to step so lightly sometimes that her shocks take some effort to reveal. As seen before, for Lavin, as well as for the others, the opportunity to tell truth to power or to awaken readers to unconsidered possibilities has come most reliably through the auspices of folklore. With folkloric indirection, the order of “above” and “below” get mixed to the point that a reader may not be able to know which one is “up” and which one is “down.” Since signifying, whether it’s Gates’s Signifyin(g) or Atkinsons’s Signifyin, sly civility, masking, mimicry, and the grotesque or bizarre exist rhetorically in order to disorient some portion of an audience, their use creates a natural opportunity for authors to employ either shock or mediation (Atkinson 16, 17) Folkloric indirection, via the portal of the Otherworld, leads readers away from the binaries that “other,” sometimes without them knowing it initially. After examining wise women and mermaid-inspired characters who disrupt the binaries of their time and place, the point comes where readers need to ask where the disruption is leading. Looking over the tracings of the different binary sets, different patterns appear. The patterns do suggest changes between the earlier twentiethcentury writing of Hurston and Lavin and the later twentieth/early twenty-firstcentury writing of Morrison and Ní Dhuibhne. An examination of the pattern of divisive subjects in the four authors may reveal a future discursive landscape. The overall pattern here appears as though the further the writing goes back in the twentieth century, the more it looks to the future, and the closer it draws readers to “forward-thinking” younger characters. The closer the writing comes to the twenty-first century, however, the further the authors are sending their readers back in time. The earliest author, Hurston, undermines what would have been the conventional wisdom of her time as embodied in Janie’s grandmother, whose memory Janie learns to hate. Lavin, for her part, will more likely elevate a younger woman to a position of wisdom, like Lally in “The Will,” or at least to a position of speaking truth to power as with Onny, than she will with an older female character. Some older Lavin women, as in “The Nun’s Mother,” even look a bit foolish, and some come across as wrong-headed to the point of death, as in “The Will” and “The Widow’s Son.” Many more wrong-headed older women line up behind Mary O’Grady, even if they do draw reader sympathy in their portrayals. Despite differing circumstances, both Hurston and Lavin occasionally reflect the tendencies of their modernist era; out with the old, in with the new. Reason trumps “superstition” in Lavin’s The House on Clewe Street (Lavin, Clewe 407). Hurston celebrates her culture’s lore and practices, and she casts a critical eye on the world “as it is,” but she poetically embraces a worldview spun out of the Enlightenment and modernism. She writes of a “God withdrawn somewhere beyond the stars in space,” and that “the Sun, sired [her] out of the sea,” being “like all mortals,” “shaped by the

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chisel in the hand of Chance ...” (Hurston, Dust Tracks 782, 795). Hurston shows no especial attraction to the knowledge of older people in general, or to those who “worship” the “gods of the pigeon-holes” and slap the child who asks “the elders” for “proof” (581). Contrary to the works written in the modernist period, Ní Dhuibhne’s older women, as do Morrison’s, remain fallible, but capable of observing life and traditions in ways that the younger people cannot, as with Mary the Midwife, Maggie the Changeling, and Morrison’s army of older women. The “younger” women of the twenty-first century elevate characters who do not receive as much honor in the writings of the “older” women. The further into the future we go, and the further into freedoms barely imagined and rarely grasped by Hurston and Lavin, the further back Ní Dhuibhne and Morrison carry us into almost forgotten traditions—that just happen to contain exemplars of radical womanhood. How do we account for this unexpected development? Two fields of study put the pieces together for us, folkloristics and postmodern theory. As Alan Dundes has repeated over time, the “folk” never leave us, no matter how many advanced degrees they attain. The folk stay, but the modernists seem to fade. The excerpts from Hurston and Lavin above do demonstrate a leaning toward a modernist worldview that accepts the “Enlightenment narrative,” one which argues that “the ‘positive’ sciences represent the general mode of knowledge” (Lyotard xxiii, 39). Nonetheless, the works of Ní Dhuibhne and Morrison show a number of aspects in keeping with a postmodern outlook, as many critics have already noted. Ní Dhuibhne’s and Morrison’s works resist closure and resist only one reading of an event. Their fiction offers multilayered narratives and embraces a worldview that tries not to privilege the knowledge of one era over another, as seen by the respect their narration shows toward older and traditionally folkloric characters. Even the fuller embrace of folklore in the works of Ní Dhuibhne and Morrison demonstrates a resistance to the metanarrative of “proof” and “reason” that seems favored by Hurston and Lavin. Where Lavin alludes to folklore mostly on those occasions where the scene will not disrupt what readers might think of as the natural order of things, Morrison insists on pushing readers a little past their empirical comfort zones. Mary O’Grady only seems to hear the voices of her dying daughters; Morrison’s characters really do hear dead people. Yet the later fiction still makes “sense,” most of the time, to readers who insist on a certain amount of adherence to physical reality, as many westerners understand it. Ní Dhuibhne and Morrison do not discard this attachment to physical reality, of course. Rather, they reflect Jean-Francois Lyotard’s support for questioning the basis of claims of “legitimacy,” the metaquestion, “What is your “‘what is it worth’ worth?’” (Lyotard 54). Lyotard elevates “the preeminence of the narrative form in the formulation of traditional knowledge,” which sets “narration” at a “distance” from the state of knowledge “in the scientific age” (19). This, too, comes across as a postmodern project in Ní Dhuibhne and Morrison. The effort to make one’s interpretation “legitimate” through “special procedures to authorize” one’s narratives, Lyotard states, does not exist to the same degree in the “narrative tradition” of “popular sayings, proverbs, and maxims” (21–2). He never uses the word “folklore,” nor does he refer to Ní Dhuibhne’s and Morrison’s specific types of fiction, but he describes

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some of their functions and significance. With these postmodern writers who can evoke the past and the present, in what Lyotard calls “the ephemeral temporality inhabiting the space between the ‘I have heard’ and the ‘you will hear,’” their stories do not need to answer the western “question of legitimacy” (22–3). This explains why their folk-women characters can seemingly argue without arguing against binaries, why they can disrupt assumptions by presenting a world that does not accommodate those assumptions. They establish their legitimacy, not by depending on the “language game known to the West as the question of legitimacy,” not by making their premises acceptable to their audience on the basis of science or reason, as Hurston and Lavin do to a certain extent. Instead, “the only claim to competence” of these postmodern narratives is that they simulate the claim that the narrator has heard the story for herself, just as Morrison and Ní Dhuibhne’s narrators do when they open with “Sth, I know that woman,” or “We were looking at the ‘Late Late.’ It wasn’t much good this night ...” (Lyotard 22; Morrison, Jazz 3; Ní Dhuibhne, “Midwife” 25). Lyotard values this “property of traditional knowledge” in which the narrator has the “right to occupy the post,” the authority to declaim, because he or she has already become part of the story from having been a previous listener or referent of the story itself (21). Unlike the contested form of the metanarrative that assigns the authority to speak to those few who qualify according to certain institutionalized criteria, the simultaneously traditional and postmodern story passes from person to person, or restages that process (20). Lyotard’s criteria for narration that sidesteps the narrow language games of western modernity is, indeed, part of the same criteria for distinguishing folklore from mass-produced narratives. Morrison constantly recreates this process in her characterization and in her persona of the griot, as when the old woman, “blind but wise,” tells the youths, or rather, audience, “Look. How lovely it is, this thing we have done—together,” or when the Narrator in Jazz tells the reader, “Say make me, remake me ... Look where your hands are. Now” (Morrison, “Nobel” 273; Jazz 229). Morrison sets up the same person-to-person basis for legitimacy with the Barnard graduates when she says, “Women’s rights are not only an abstraction, a cause; it is also a personal affair. It is not only about ‘us’; it is also about me and you. Just the two of us” (Morrison, “Cinderella’s Stepsisters” 42). While her folkloric references recall Aristotle’s advice to use fables and to put one’s hearers “into the right frame of mind,” the person-toperson intimacy of traditional narrative also enable her to evade social strictures that hamper a critique of power (Rhetoric, bk. II, ch. 1, 1377: line 23; ch. 20, 1396: line 2). This succeeds in reaching the ears of an audience filled with people who hold a variety of worldviews, some in conflict with each other and with the rhetor, some guilty of ignoring into erasure other worldviews. Her approach succeeds because, in Lyotard’s words, “the speech acts relevant to this form of knowledge are performed not only by the speaker, but also by the listener, as well as by the third party referred to” (Lyotard 21). Ní Dhuibhne similarly points out that while folklore is “perceived as floating free of its sociological and historical context,” in reality, folklore “is entirely dependent on social support for its survival: if a folklore item ceases to have relevance to society, it ceases to exist, since it depends for its existence on being listened to by groups of people” (Ní Dhuibhne, “International” 1215). She echoes Morrison’s and Lyotard’s

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person-to-person criteria also when she states that stories survive because they are “in some kind of vibrant and essential interaction with social values, attitudes and mores” (Ní Dhuibhne, “International” 1215). Ultimately, because Ní Dhuibhne and Morrison can establish legitimacy by taking their discourse out of the grasp of language games that continually demand certain kinds of “proof,” they do not need to show favoritism between the “old folks” or those supposedly young, forward-thinking types (Lyotard 45; Hurston, Dust Tracks 581). If, as Lyotard states, postmodernity imposes a “severe reexamination” on “the thought of the Enlightenment, on the idea of a unitary end of history and of a subject,” then these twenty-first-century writers do not have to be beholden to the script of early modernism that dictates, despite world wars and famines, that humanity is always improving (Lyotard 73). In this situation, younger characters do not necessarily have the edge over their elders, and Morrison and Ní Dhuibhne therefore can reintegrate “ancient properties” into their fiction. Lyotard warns that we should not “universalize” his observations on the functions of traditional narrative, for that form, too, can be appropriated for hegemonic projects of influence (21). Nevertheless, his point that the “similarity of condition” of storytelling “allows for the possibility that the current narrator could be the hero of a narrative, just as the Ancestor was” reflects the inclusiveness inherent in Morrison’s and Ní Dhuibhne’s fiction as well as its appeal of continuity with the best elements of our past. If the metanarrative of the perfectibility of mankind has been proven false, and if there is no narrative of the “future” which will satisfactorily replace the narrative of the past, what Hurston calls the worship of “pigeon-holes,” then some readers may feel bereft of any narrative at all. It seems that for Hurston and Lavin, the reason why Nanny, Aunt Theresa, and Mary O’Grady do not reflect the aura of “ancient properties,” which Morrison grants her wise-women characters, is because for many modernists there were no ancestors to trust. Readers are led to identify more with Janie, Ellie, and Gabriel and Onny because, in the world of those novels, knowledge of opportunity, metaphysics, reproductive options, or male–female relationships does not rest with the older women. Morrison and Ní Dhuibhne, however, by reinstituting the person-to-person folkloric basis for legitimacy in the rhetoric of their fiction, reestablish human continuity among the past, present, and future. At the same time, the folkloric basis for legitimacy provides benefits of indirection that enable successful communication in a world full of competing values. This is why Morrison can promote both feminism and the “ancient properties” of womanhood; women can be both “the ship’ and ‘the safe harbor’” (Wilson 135). If the future no longer corners the market on human betterment, if “new” doesn’t always accompany “improved,” if institutions and science cannot save us, then authors and readers may become more open to alternative understandings, from any era, personage, or context. By opening the rhetoric of fiction to a greater “variety of language games,” and putting the basis for authoritative narrative back into the legitimating hands of a person-to-person transmission, or at least evoking that form of transmission, Morrison and Ní Dhuibhne can also create openings in their fiction for readers with differing worldviews than their own to enter and feel at home in their stories (Lyotard 20). This welcome can extend to differing religious backgrounds, even if some postmoderns equate religion, especially Christianity, with metanarrative, because

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the oral traditions of many faiths flow out of the person-to-person transmission that Lyotard promotes. The story heard by many congregations, depending on how individuals act out the retelling with their lives, is a story of how a people came to be, a rehearsal of what God has done for them, even as the Hebrews were enjoined to tell and tell again of their rescue from Egypt. That model carries through to African American and Irish histories, where individuals rehearse how he or she “got ovah” or how one’s city came to be named Baile Átha Cliath before it was known as Dublin (Smitherman, Black Talk 124). The catch is, who gets the credit? In the spiritual narrative, does God always receive the credit for the rescue? In the cultural narrative, do individuals get the credit? Once a culture isolates the “post of the narrator from the others in order to give it a privileged status,” questions of who has the “right” to tell the story, and subsequent struggles to establish legitimacy and authority, follow (Lyotard 22–3). Even in the smallest families, struggles exist over whose version of a story should become canon, so no narrative process can be entirely safe from the “No money, no proof—and that means no verification of statements and no truth” language “game” (Lyotard 45). Thus, religious oral traditions may be as vulnerable as the folkwomen’s tales to abuse by those who bend tradition to their desires, as illustrated by the families of Ruby in Paradise. Comparison, like Mieder says, helps to protect. It helps, too, to remain open not only to the idea that humanity is not getting better and better every day, but that among the wildness of possibilities represented by folklore, some good will survive. Reflecting this potential, G.K. Chesterton links the folkloric with the theological, when he claims that “fairy tales” led him to Christianity. From the tales he drew the conclusions that: “‘This world does not explain itself’; ‘There was something personal in the world’; ‘This purpose is beautiful in its old design, in spite of defects, such as dragons’; ‘The proper form of thanks to it is some form of humility and restraint’; and ‘All good was a remnant’” (Marshall 20). The advantage for the four authors in this is that folkloric potential does not equal a fixed, human-defined reality. Those who see the postmodern period as despairing of the perfectibility of mankind miss its big advantage: we’re no longer chained to story of success. To admit that humanity, especially western culture, does not and will not have all the answers widens openings for different narratives, ones that “we” may not always control. Openings left for the readers, and a folklore-influenced ambiguity taken toward divisive subjects, welcome readers who may come to a narrative from another angle of understanding. Some authors who write consciously from the margins, having been left out of discourses themselves, seem more forgiving of readers who may themselves come from another margin, another edge of the discourse. That welcoming, that sense of forgiveness of difference coming from the narrative voice of a text, is one of the most powerful gifts of the authors analyzed here. Sometimes this appears in how the writers leave readers with ambiguous endings and in how their texts demonstrate a certain ambivalence toward their difficult topics. One may not know exactly how they stand, as they avoid the “soap-box polemic” criticized by Eve Patten in some Irish feminist approaches (Patten 13, 15). This technique meliorates the drawback of print that Walter Ong perceives as encouraging “a sense of closure, a sense that what

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is found in a text has been finalized, has reached as state of completion” (Ong 132). Besides the greater flexibility of the folkloric influences in their texts, the way these authors navigate difficult subjects in ways that allow multiple—but not infinite— interpretations leads to this sense of forgiveness of difference in the reader. Using a phrase like “forgiveness of difference” here helps in criticism because although various texts allude to differences of opinion on matters of religion and reproduction, it seems that “tolerance” amounts to little more than a teeth-gritting silence between those who differ. To differ on religion, sexual expression, or abortion with some audiences requires a stronger tonic than tolerance, which rarely offers more than a “live and let live” approach, not actual listening. Since to differ can be interpreted as the same as opposing one’s efforts, one may need to “forgive” the perceived affront, more than simply “tolerate” an opposing position. Even if only for the space of a story, to enable a temporary forgiveness of difference may achieve more openness to difference than a form of tolerance that barely seems to go past ignoring an alternate position. Marc C. Conner sees the theme of forgiveness running through all of Morrison’s novels as an element which “may seem out of place in this ‘postmodern’ era,” but one that “makes Morrison’s work so compelling at this very time” (Conner 72). Morrison’s and Ní Dhuibhne’s strategic indirection may now pull readers deeper into their subject matter, rather than deflect them. Yet at no point do readers catch Morrison or Ní Dhuibhne endorsing the views of their more controversial characters, like L or Jenny. In fact, as her interview reprinted here shows, Ní Dhuibhne at times indicates the opposite. Likewise, for all of her wise women’s statements, one would be hard pressed to pin Morrison down to a specific set of beliefs. Just as she tells Nellie McKay in their 1983 interview that she loves all her characters with an emphatic “Always!,” she told me the same thing in 1990 (McKay 149; Morrison, personal communication). She followed by opening her hands and saying one of two phrases, “I’m Catholic” or “I’m catholic” (Morrison, personal communication). As her previous comments had dealt with religion, I wondered whether she meant to indicate a capitalized “c” or a lower case one. An e-mail in 2001 relayed Morrison’s correction: “‘Catholic’ is meant as in wide ranging and universal—small ‘c’” (Morrison qtd. by Boatman, e-mail to the author). The exchange demonstrates that much of Morrison’s artistry stems from her resistance to closure in any form. The possibility of inclusion does not entail acceptance or endorsement. But, in the case of these authors, resistance to closure equals, too, a resistance to silencing. The welcome that broadened with the years, as it passed from the early twentieth century to the twenty-first, signals the presence of an inclusivity that furthers the projects of feminism, African American literature, Irish women’s literature, postcolonial studies, and other as-yet-unnamed movements to come. As Hurston once wrote, “ ... the opening wedge for better understanding has been thrust into the crack” (Hurston, “What White Publishers Won’t Print” 954). Morrison and Ní Dhuibhne have further widened the portal to expression which Hurston and Lavin were among the first to crack open. Writers here began by breaking the silences of subjects close to their own worldview, and the later writers have progressed even to breaking the silences of others. Humanity may not be perfectible, even in its fondest fantasy. This, though, reads like an improvement.


Appendix

Correspondence with Éilís Ní Dhuibhne “RE: A few questions,” 5 December 2001 On Wednesday, 5 December 2001, I received the following initial answers to questions posed to Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, the details of which I include here, as they might be of use to readers of her works. Dear Ms. Ní Dhuibhne, ... I just have a few random details of a sort that are hard to track down: What are “butter boots and paper hats”? ... Next, are “Mills and Boons” (in “The Shapeshifters”) the equivalent of Harlequin Romances? The context makes them sound rather like the romance paperbacks that my college roommate used to receive in bulk every month at our apartment. What is a ghost train? RE the tourist attraction (?) in Bray that Michael wanted to take Robin to, but that she dislikes (pg. 72). Éilís Ní Dhuibhne answers on the same day: Many thanks for your kind comments, Jacqueline! I will look at the questionnaire and respond over the next day or so. The immediate questions in the e-mail I will just answer now: Butter boots and paper hats: nonsense, I think, the message being that the storyteller got nothing at all (i.e., no material gain) for the story ... Mills and Boon: yes you are right. Formulaic romances for women, extremely numerous and common on this side of the Atlantic. A “ghost train” is a popular amusement at fun-fairs and the like here and in England. You must have them by another name in the States. People sit in a car, on a sort of train, and enter a chamber of horrors—dark and spooky, full of nasty surprises ... Eilis “Re: Optional Questions,” 11 December 2001 On Wednesday, 12 December 2001, I received the following answers from Éilís Ní Dhuibhne (posted Tuesday, 11 December 2001) to questions posed to her via email. She has sent other equally gracious and helpful replies at other times as well, but this particular mailing contained answers pertinent to my research. Her answers confirmed my understanding of the rhetorical strategies inherent to her writing style.

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In addition, her perception of the obstacles that Irish women writers have had to face, and face even now, is revealing. For clarity, I have changed some conventions for punctuation and formatting, especially those used with e-mail, to those of standard US usage, but have retained other writing conventions. JF: EN:

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Have you ever read Toni Morrison’s works? Did you find any aspects (and what) of her approach or style influential? I have read Beloved. I have also read an essay or article by Toni Morrison on the situation of the woman writer. I am not aware of being influenced by her approach or style. I was impressed by her account of the difficulty of a woman having a writing life, and her comments on that situation have always stayed with me, as a sort of encouragement to keep going. What would you consider difficult topics to broach with an Irish audience? Abortion is difficult. Anything which seems to be critical, even mildly, of Irish communities, of their values and mores, can easily cause offence within those communities. Irish language issues. You always stub some sensitive toe. And sex. Do you foresee any differences between the home audience and other English-speaking audiences elsewhere, such as England, the US, Canada, or Australia and New Zealand? (How far have your publishers gotten with those markets?) One difference of which I am aware is of course that those outside audiences cannot understand Irish language, and various other culturally distinct phenomena. If I use a few words in Irish e.g., basic greetings, it would be patronising for me to offer translations to Irish audiences. It is part of my artistic purpose to refrain from doing that in a novel such as The Dancers Dancing. Clearly when this is sold abroad problems of comprehension arise, quite understandably. I do not know how I can do anything about this. I write what I must write (within limits—I would quite like to write a truly bi-lingual book or story but of course that would be unacceptable to a general Irish audience too). I am writing from within this culture for the most part (sometimes I write material which is not at all culture specific, though). I don’t think I can change my approach in the interests of people outside, and in fact I think that its cultural specificity resides much of its value. My last few books have been published in England, and in Australia. A few are translated to German. I am not aware of problems. What aspects of life, or of human relationships, have you felt drawn to write about, but with which you proceed with caution? I am interested in writing about the tension between the acceptable and the unacceptable especially in terms of sexual love (e.g.,: marriage acceptable, adultery unacceptable) and the way people deal or do not deal with conflicts of desire, sexual and other (such as the desire to stay at home versus wanderlust, the desire to conform versus the desire to be individualistic, the desire to be in versus the desire to be out etc.). Do

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I proceed with caution? Perhaps but only when I feel I have no choice. I suppose for a writer who is in the average human situation, i.e., lives in a family, in a community, in a small country, rather than a recluse, a hermit or an anonymous writer, there are restraints. I am aware of having broken rules and in Ireland there are a lot of them. Somebody told me the other day that even though we have no official censorship any more, that silent censorship is constantly imposed. “People think within four walls” he said. I think this is true. And if you overstep the boundaries you are pushed out, an attempt is made to silence you. Not long ago an Irish woman could not have written in any overt way about sexuality, about sex, for instance, and survive socially in this country. Edna O’Brien’s early books were publicly burnt in her home parish. Kate O’Brien, as an old lady, was snubbed by the Irish ambassador to England at a function honouring Irish literature. It is still much easier for an Irishman to write about sexual matters and “get away with it” than it is for a woman. The old burqa mentality is not that far away: if women are not modest even in their writing we don’t want to know them, thank you. Being too feminist is also unacceptable to a lot of Irish people. You don’t have the same sort of allergic reaction to religious topics that some contemporary writers have. You do show critical angles, certainly, but I like how your fiction possesses far less of that bitter edge that sometimes crops up in response to past (or present) difficulties with the church. Would you like to comment on how you view faith as a presence or absence in the world views of some of your characters? I’m not sure which characters you mean. It is true, however, that for many of them I simply don’t mention formal religion as playing any part in their lives, and this is deliberately reflecting the secular society I see around me now. I notice that even in The Dancers Dancing, which is set in the early 1970s and which describes much of life in the Gaeltacht, I don’t mention the weekly Mass, or just very briefly. The children would have attended Mass but it wouldn’t have meant a thing to them, so I ignored it. I am in fact quite critical of the Catholic Church, of its attitude to women, of its cruelty to Irish children in its orphanages and schools in the past. My feeling is however that the whole of Irish society colluded with all of this ghastly misbehaviour, that the society had the church it wanted. It was at certain stages a deeply sadistic, cruel society, of which the Catholic Church was a part, and which the Protestant Churches ignored, maintained their position on the margins, looked on and said nothing. So I am deeply critical of the Catholic Church, but more critical of the governments and society which allowed it to influence legislation, education, and the entire ethos of Ireland, for so long. And I am critical of the other churches for not protesting louder against the unhealthy collusion of the Irish state with the Catholic hierarchy for so long. I respect the religious impulse, the desire for spirituality, in people. I enjoy being in church (apart from the sermons, which drag the banal into the transcendent). I like the sense of peace that prevails in churches

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in Ireland, and the fact that people will sit for about half an hour a week praying, thinking of how to be good. That is positive. I would like a new form of global ethic, to replace the old religions, but we don’t seem to be near acquiring one. I would also like new forms of spirituality and there are more of them, but in fact I think the old ways are quite beautiful anyway. The sense of history, of layers of time, in some of the rituals, is enchanting to me. I admire Jesus Christ tremendously although I am an agnostic. Not much of this is apparent in my writing! I write about very secular Irish people. In researching African American women’s fiction and past Irish women’s fiction, I’ve noticed that censorship has appeared in the literary histories of both bodies of writing, in either overt or more subtle versions. While it’s been a while since Irish writers have had to navigate around that obstacle in any official way, are there any unspoken boundaries in contemporary fiction? See above. Sometimes a subtle note of criticism of various ideologies lurks in your writing, even of some feminist and other progressive points of view when they are not being more self-aware. Have you faced criticism for any aspect of your fiction that touched some ideological nerve? No. You are right, it is there. I am critical of dogma in any form. But I don’t think people notice much. From what corners of the publishing world might unofficial censorship, or mild pressure, arise today in Irish literature, especially for writers who are women? I think I have been lucky with my publishers, and sometimes with my readerships too. In the end my books seem to find attentive, good readers (like yourself!). I would say, though, that I perceive a pressure on women to be accessible, to write easy fiction, even to write commercial fiction. I do not think they are expected to be artists, experimenting with form, and if they do so it is not noticed, the books are read as simple romantic stories that have gone wrong. In short, women writers of fiction are not regarded as artists, by a lot of people. Are you occasionally aware of a need to write around these obstacles? How do you see yourself doing that? I just proceed. As I say, I have very understanding editors. And recently I have had some wonderfully perceptive, endorsing readers, encouraging me to go right on being myself and developing as I want to. My work addresses discourses of indirection, that is, how writers might address unpopular subjects, or address them from unpopular angles, without making direct references to those touchy points. What do you see in your style that you might consider indirect? I suppose the use of folktales to emphasise feelings and ideas which are touchy. Metaphor or symbol can distance writer and reader from an idea while simultaneously deepening its impact and meaning. There is much in language, and in the heightened language of folktales, that doesn’t translate

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directly into simple abstractions. We can say “a glass mountain means this or that, means sexual problems, means social distance between partners, means insurmountable obstacles.” But we all know that it conveys even more than all of these meanings; these symbols, from dreams and folktales, carry resonance, like music. They speak to us in a language we understand in our hearts and imaginations but may not find possible to translate. I find that folk tales, and other aspects of folklore, have wonderful potential for opening the minds of listeners and readers to consider points of view they might not otherwise consider. As a writer with a background in folklore studies, do you ever see something similar occurring? See above? I think folktales are extremely powerful, and I think the technique of using them alongside other tales, contemporary fiction tales, works in a way which I can’t even explain. I think one of the things that happens is that people see the same story told in very different ways, and begin to understand that the form the story takes affects its eventual impact (that “meaning” is a fluctuating quality). If you do, have you ever been conscious of utilizing that aspect of folklore yourself in fiction? If so, which instances would you cite as examples? Clearly in “The Inland Ice.” In stories such as “Midwife to the Fairies,” and a few others. The Bray House has at its heart a legend. Last year (1999), I asked Katie Donovan (Irish Women Writers: Marginalised by Whom? Letters from the New Island) if anybody else was writing women’s literary criticism on modern Irish women writers [I had stressed “fiction” in our e-mails], and she said it’s pretty thin. Is there anyone, or any particular journal, you would recommend? Who do you read these days? I have recently attended a few lectures on Irish fiction at the Irish Writers Centre, where the speakers, Dr. Derek Hand and Professor Declan Kiberd (UCD) claimed that there is very little critical engagement with Irish fiction on the whole, let alone women’s fiction. The Irish University Review, Spring 2000, was devoted to fiction and contained items on several women writers. That would be worth consulting, you should have it in your library. There is a book by Christine St Peter, which you probably know. It came out last year too, I think. The Kiberd and Hand lectures may come up on the Irish Writers Centre website sometime soon, if they do I’ll e-mail them to you (they were mainly about men writers, but they mentioned me quite a lot!). There was a big conference here last autumn, IASIL, and several papers referred to Irish women. Maybe the proceedings will be published? Check IASIL on the net! Then next year there will be the Field Day Anthology Vol. 4. I will forward you my list of references to my own writing. Not a lot. There is very little on Irish women available, as Katie said.

Hope this helps ... Best Éilís


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Index Abbey Theatre 44 abolition 41, 48 Abrahams, Roger 13, 26, 36, 38, 59 African American critical theorists 7, 47 African American folklore 9, 40, 51, 54, 74 Brer Rabbit 96 conjure 11, 15, 75, 160 dozens, the 55. 36 griot 77, 158, 172 High John de Conquer 56 Monkey 36–8, 50 root doctor 100; see also folk woman characters, fairy doctor and conjurer African American religious oral traditions 15 call/response 37, 121 witness/testify 36 Africanist presence 4, 28; see also Playing in the Dark (Morrison) Afro-Brazilian traditions 140, 147, 149, 165 candomblé 149 spirit worship 141 Almqvist, Bo 110, 112, 114–15 ambiguity 11, 14, 24, 27, 29, 59, 74, 77, 79, 85, 110, 112, 114–15, 117, 120, 130, 139–40, 155–6, 162, 166–7, 169, 174 Anglo American 2, 4–6, 8–9, 19, 31, 33, 40–41, 43–4, 46, 50, 53, 55–6, 58–9, 75, 121–2, 126, 135, 146–7, 161, 163, 175 Aretxaga, Begoña 36, 38 Aristotle 1, 19, 22–3, 172 Arnold, Matthew 6 Atkinson, Yvonne 28, 32, 37–8, 42, 77, 170 Austen, Jane 24 Bacchilega, Cristina 13, 27, 78–9, 82, 84, 150 Baker, Houston A. 54, 59, 75 Bakhtin, Mikhail 29–30, 34, 84 “Banana Boat, The” (Ní Dhuibhne) 2 Barnard Address, 1979 (Morrison); see “Cinderella’s Stepsisters” (Morrison)

Bassard, Katherine Clay 9, 13, 30, 74, 92, 139–42 Beloved (Morrison) 28, 34, 51, 75, 122, 157, 161, 163, 166, 178 Baby Suggs, Holy 75–7, 157, 161–3 Beloved 51, 148 Sethe 51, 161–2 Bhabha, Homi K. 13, 28–9, 33, 61, 66–7, 92–3, 166; see also Strategies of Indirection, sly civility Bible 19, 21, 41, 140–41, 148, 151 Ephesians, the Book of 148 Isaiah, the Book of 20–21 John, the Book of 21–2, 141, 143–4, 148 Samaritan Woman 141, 143–4, 147, 165 binary relationships false dichotomy between Eve and Mary 148–9 “female” Celts 6 sub-human/elevated 5, 7–8, 11, 103–4, 106, 111 woman versus child 122, 162, 164 above/below dichotomy 5, 7, 8, 10–11, 14, 43, 49, 51, 54–5, 60, 71, 74, 76, 87, 94–5, 97, 104–5 117, 119, 122–3, 125, 142, 169 An tSeanbhean Bhocht (Shan Van Vocht) 3 angel/monster 2–3, 6, 8, 14, 49, 54, 76, 82, 105, 111, 117, 119, 136 castrating/sainted mothers 3, 71 demonizing and reifying 4, 119 docile/savage 5, 50, 76 hag/maiden (aisling) 3, 7, 50, 60, 76, 78, 89 Platonic division between mind and body 146, 148–9, 157, 166 Poor Old Woman/Young Queen 3, 8, 51, 60, 94, 133–4 virgin/whore 3–5, 50–51, 119, 131, 135–6, 158 Black English 32, 40 Bluest Eye, The (Morrison) 37, 157, 159 Claudia 157, 159 Pecola 159

200


Boas, Franz 57–8 Boland, Eavan 3, 7–10, 47 “A Kind of Scar” 3, 47 Bourke, Angela 8–10, 13, 48, 68, 72–3, 85–6, 91–3, 96, 112, 115, 126 The Burning of Bridget Cleary 10, 73 Bouson, J. Brooks 141, 146 Bowen, Elizabeth 46 “Bray House, The” (Ní Dhuibhne) 61, 77–80, 85–96, 129, 136–8, 142, 181 Jenny 87, 89–92, 94, 129–30, 136–9, 142, 167–8, 175 Maggie 87, 89–94, 96, 171 Robin 86–7, 89–94, 96, 136–8, 167, 177 Robinson Crusoe (Defoe) 93 Briggs, Katharine 91–2 Briggs, Sarah 3, 13, 50, 62, 69, 101, 110, 135 Carlson, Julia 46–7, 57 Carroll, Lewis 6; see also images of Irish women, Tenniel, Sir John Catholicism 17, 41, 52, 95–6, 108–9, 113, 131, 135–7 140, 143, 145–6, 148, 156, 165, 175, 179; see also Christian oral tradition censored topics criticism of authority, secular or religious 2, 4, 20, 22, 63, 156, 172 gender conflict 2, 61, 63, 92, 111 marginalized religious communities, religious beliefs 14, 40, 132, 142 racism 47 sexuality 14, 16, 40, 46, 63, 78, 95, 97, 98, 101, 111, 116, 127, 138, 152–3, 155–6, 175 women’s limited sphere of activity 2, 4, 44–5, 61, 63, 66 censorship 14, 16, 19, 22, 25–6, 29, 32, 37, 40, 43, 45–7, 51, 53, 57, 63–4, 78–80, 95, 100, 103, 107, 130–31, 138, 152–3, 156, 158, 170, 179–80 ban 46–7, 62, 95, 101 Banned in Ireland (Carlson) 46, 57 Censorship Board 46, 63 duress 29, 40–41 editorial pressure 36, 43, 50, 57–9, 63, 95, 97, 135, 158–9 ignored subjects 4, 62, 74, 87, 92, 94, 125, 137, 142, 169, 179

obstacles to expression 19, 25, 29–30, 38, 40, 42–3 oppression 2, 40, 57 patrons 36, 50, 57–60, 135 publishers 2, 43–4, 46, 48, 52–3, 63, 99, 175 self-censorship 46, 56, 153 silencing 13, 44, 57, 92, 153, 175 slavery 39, 41 subjects deemed uninteresting 44–5, 64, 129 Chatman, Seymour 23 Che Guevara (Ernesto Rafael Guevara de la Serna) 165 Chesterton, G.K. 174 Christ; see Jesus Christian, Barbara 13, 48, 92 Christian characters 52, 138–49, 165, 167–8 Christian oral tradition 8, 16, 136, 139–40, 143, 148, 157, 167 Abrahamic religious use of the pronoun “He” 143 agape 97, 117–19, 125–8 Black Madonna 146–7 call/response 37, 121 Mary Magdalene 8, 141, 143, 147–8 Virgin Mary 8, 50–51, 129, 136, 139, 141, 144–7 witness/testify 36 “Cinderella’s Stepsisters” (Morrison), 157–60, 172 civil rights 1, 11, 29, 49, 56, 74 Civil Rights Movement, US; see US, history Cliff, Michelle 141, 147, 149 colonialism 7–8, 11–13, 28, 32–3, 40, 57, 67, 77, 87, 89–94, 96 Conner, Marc C. 44, 140, 149, 175 Coulter, Carol 138, 142 cross cultural comparisons 12, 169 Cullingford, Elizabeth Butler 32, 131, 155 Cunneen, Sally 144, 146–7 Curtis, L. Perry, Jr. 6, 43 Dancers Dancing, The (Ní Dhuibhne) 77, 95, 97, 115–16, 178–9 Derrida, Jacques 28 dialect 30, 32, 40, 44, 55, 59, 68–9, 83, 144 DiBattista, Maria 32, 124, 140, 149, 161 Dickinson, Emily 19 Disney, films 55, 98 Disraeli, Benjamin 43

Index Donovan, Katie 61–2, 64, 155, 181 double consciousness 31, 34, 167 double vision 31, 66 Drewal, Henry John 98–9 Du Bois, W.E.B. 31, 34–5 Dundes, Alan 3, 8–9 13, 26, 36, 141, 146, 171 Dunsany, Lord 62–3, 67 Dust Tracks on a Road (Hurston) 50, 53–6, 95, 171, 173 Eating Women Is Not Recommended (Ní Dhuibhne) 77–8, 88 ecology 87, 93, 138, 168 Edgeworth, Maria 32, 62 Castle Rackrent 34 Éire; see Ireland Ellison, Ralph 8, 33, 60 Enlightenment 170–73 eros 97, 117–20, 125, 127–8 Ethiopia 148 European–American; see Anglo–American fairies 3–4, 10–11, 68–9, 71–2, 79–82, 85, 87, 89, 90–91, 93–4, 96–8, 101, 104, 150–51, 153–4, 156–7 fairy fort 3–4, 79, 90, 94; see also Irish folklore, lís fairy stroke 68, 72 fairy tale 2–3, 9, 27, 55, 67–8, 76–9, 81, 90, 124, 137, 151, 167, 174 Fanon, Franz 32 Fauset, Jessie 43 feminism 2, 7, 9–10, 13–15, 38, 45, 47–9, 57, 61, 63, 65, 77, 79, 81–2, 84, 87–8, 92, 94, 106, 124, 132, 136, 138–9, 152, 155–6, 160, 167, 173–5, 179–80 feminist criticism 2, 9 Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, The, Volume IV and V 9, 48, 61, 83, 150, 181 figures of speech 19, 22, 26, 35, 38–9, 97, 141 film 7, 116, 151 Florida 3, 53, 100 folk woman characters 11, 13–14, 39, 51, 52, 80, 111, 129, 132, 136, 163, 172 aisling 3–4, 7, 50, 78, 97, 116–17, 133 An tSeanbhean Bhocht (Shan Van Vocht) 3

201 banshee 82, 102–3 Black Mermaid 99, 146 Cinderella 9, 49, 53–5, 98, 99, 158, 160, 172 conjurer 11, 15, 75, 160 Erzulie 95–100, 104, 112, 117–23, 128–32, 135–6, 139, 146, 169 fairy doctor 11, 15; see also conjurer; African American folklore, root doctor hag 3, 7, 15, 60, 76, 78, 88–9, 90, 154 healer 147; see also conjurer; fairy doctor; African American folklore, root doctor ghost 15, 76–7, 90, 91, 94, 118, 120, 123, 127, 129 goddess 3, 4, 50, 81, 82, 98, 103, 119–20, 122, 128, 130–31, 134, 140, 147, 169 helpers 75–6 maiden 3–4, 76, 78, 89, 92, 94, 99, 132, 136, 137 Mami Wata 98, 99, 119, 120, 123, 146 Medb, Queen 81, 133 mermaid 15, 80, 85, 87, 89–93, 95–102, 109–15, 117–20, 122–3, 128–32, 146–7 midwife 79, 82, 97, 129–31, 150–51, 153–61, 165, 167–8 Naiads 101, 123; see also folk woman characters, mermaid Nereids 101, 123; see also folk woman characters, mermaid “Old Woman as Hare” (Ní Dhuibhne) 88, 102 Ondine 102–3, 111, 128, 163; see also folk woman characters, mermaid outlaw women 123, 128 Poor Old Woman 3, 8, 51, 94, 133–4 queen 3, 8, 50–51, 60, 81–2, 100, 103, 112, 129, 131, 133, 139, 148 seal woman; see folk woman characters, selkie selkie 15, 85, 87, 92, 96, 98, 122 sí 15, 81–2 Undine 102; see also folk woman characters, mermaid Vanishing Hitchhiker 76 water nymph 101–2; see also folk woman characters, mermaid

202


water spirit 98; see also folk woman characters, mermaid wise woman 8, 10–11, 13–17, 39, 49–55, 60–61, 64, 75, 77, 88–9, 94, 97, 117–18, 122–4, 127, 129–32, 136, 139, 143, 157–63, 165, 168, 170, 173, 175 witch 3, 6, 15, 75–8, 80, 87–90, 94, 102, 104, 107 woman of the lís (lios); see folk woman characters, aisling folk, the 26, 171 folklore 8–10, 22, 24, 26–7, 40, 42, 65, 69, 84, 86, 93, 141, 157, 169, 171–4 abduction; see folklore, changeling changeling 10, 50, 69, 72–3, 77–8, 85, 87, 89–91, 94, 96, 122, 134, 171 customs 26, 73, 108 fables 172 folk medicine 2, 100, 130, 160; see also African American folklore root doctor; folk woman characters, conjurer and fairy doctor folk practices 15–16, 25, 27, 30, 32, 35, 38, 40, 42, 47, 50, 53, 60, 73, 78, 92, 97, 98, 108, 131, 136, 146, 149, 170 folk speech 1, 25, 28, 30–31, 35, 37, 51, 58, 68, 134, 140, 167 folktales 2, 9, 14–15, 26, 39, 54, 58–60, 70, 75, 79–81, 83–5, 90, 96, 99, 110, 112, 150–53, 158, 167, 180–81 food lore 2, 47, 144–7, 161 ghost stories 67, 76, 90–91 legend 2–3, 8, 10, 15, 26, 68–9, 73, 76, 81–2, 85, 87, 91, 93, 95–6, 99, 102, 110, 112, 125, 150, 155, 157, 181 motif 22, 26, 39, 55, 69, 80–83, 85–6, 89, 91–2, 96 myth 3, 10, 15, 24, 36, 50, 67, 69, 80, 167 Otherworld lore 3, 11, 15, 26–7, 39, 49–51, 56, 67–74, 76, 78–82, 85, 87–92, 94, 96–7, 100–106, 111, 114, 119, 123, 150, 153–4 superstitions 85, 105, 108, 170 taboo 19, 28, 37–8, 82, 88, 152–3 tale types 55, 80–81, 85, 96, 150 trickster 29, 50, 53, 56, 58–60, 76, 88, 94 folkloric characters 16, 26, 86, 158, 171

folkloric indirection 12, 14, 16–17, 83, 89, 111–12, 115, 123, 139, 141, 162, 170 folkloristic expression 19, 77, 82, 85, 90; see also folkloric indirection folkloristics 22, 169, 171, Aarne-Thompson tale type (AT) 55, 80–81, 85, 96, 150 Christiansen’s migratory legend type (ML) 69, 96, 102, 150 forgiveness of difference 174–5 free indirect discourse 12, 29; see also free indirect style; style indirect libre free indirect style 12, 25 Freud, Sigmund 3, 28, 117 Fulford, Sarah 7–9 Fussell, Betty 166 Gaeltacht 1, 179 Gates, Henry Louis 12, 29, 31–3, 35–8, 50, 53, 56, 92, 170 Gilbert, Sandra M. 2–3, 8–9, 16, 74, 129–30 God 14, 20, 48, 54, 68, 96, 101, 107–8, 126, 130, 132, 136, 138, 140, 147, 151, 167, 170, 174 goddess worship 89, 131, 134, 140, 147 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 102, 130 Faust 130 Gramsci, Antonio 48 Gregory, Lady Augusta 3, 45; see also Yeats, William Butler (W.B.) Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm 76, 79, 98 Gubar, Susan 2–3, 8–9, 16, 74, 129–30 “Gweedore Girl” (Ní Dhuibhne) 111, 138 Haiti 53, 98–100, 120, 131, 146, 169 Hand, Derek 13, 85–6, 92–3, 181 Harlem Renaissance 44, 48, 119, 131 Harris, Joel Chandler 5 Harris, Trudier 51, 74–5, 149 Hayes, Joanne 152–6 Hebrew culture 1, 20 Heinze, Denise 31, 167 heteroglossia 30 Hiberno-English 36, 40, 44, 68, 83, 132, 155 Hill-Thomas hearings 5 House in Clewe Street, The (Lavin) 54, 61, 95, 97, 100–111, 114, 129, 131–2, 150, 170, 173 Aunt Theresa 102–3, 108, 123, 173 Gabriel 101–11, 124, 132, 173

Index Onny Soraghan 54, 95, 97, 100–112, 114, 119, 122–3, 128–32, 135–6, 150, 158, 170, 173 Howes, Marjorie 45–7 Hughes, Langston 52 Hurston, Zora Neale 1–2, 9–10, 12, 15–16, 20, 22, 26–7, 29, 32–33, 35–6, 43–6, 50–64, 66–8, 75, 93, 95, 118–20, 129–31, 139, 168, 170–73, 175 folklore, research of 15, 33, 35–6, 52–3, 55–60, 68, 75, 93, 95, 97–100, 119, 130–32 vodun, research of 15, 52, 58, 60, 97–100, 130 images of African American and Irish women 5, 8, 10, 43–47 queen 3, 8, 50–51, 60, 80–82, 99, 112, 129–30, 133, 148 servant 6–7, 41, 49–50, 53, 75–6, 101–5, 110, 111 images of African American women 4, 9, 44, 53, 60, 74, 98, 119 crone 75, 160 fish 6 librarian 62 mammy 6–7, 160, 164 mule 5, 53 nurse 62 Sheba, Queen 148 Shulamite bride 148 teacher 8, 62, 158 images of African Americans and the Irish 5–8, 43 images of Irish women 6–7, 43, 78 aisling 3–4, 7, 50, 78, 97, 116–17, 133 An tSeanbhean Bhocht (Shan Van Vocht) 3 Brightest of the Bright 3 Cathleen ni Houlihan 3–4, 50, 132–4 Medb, Queen 80, 133 Mother Ireland 3–4, 7, 71–2, 74, 94, 130, 132–4; see also nation, woman as Róisín Dubh 3–4 Tenniel, Sir John Alice in Wonderland (Carroll) “Duchess” 7 images of the Irish 5–8, 43, 78 dung 7 “female” Celts 6

203

pigs 7 potatoes 7 images of women 3, 10, 12 angel 2–3, 5–9, 14, 43, 49, 50, 54, 74, 76, 82, 105, 111, 117, 119, 129–30, 135–6 angel in the house 2, 6, 8, 50, 135–6 castrating mothers 3, 71 cave 3 cow 3, 65, 80, 137 docile 5, 50, 76 Eve 148–9 fallen woman 51, 143 goddess 3, 4, 50, 81–2, 98, 103, 119–20, 122, 128, 130–31, 134, 140, 147, 169 hag 3, 7, 15, 60, 76, 78, 88–9, 90, 154 icons 4, 7, 10, 69, 94, 99, 118, 120, 129, 132, 140, 146–7 insanity 5, 43 irrational 8, 43, 73 maiden 3–4, 76, 78, 89, 92, 94, 99, 132, 136, 137 monster 2–9, 43, 54, 117, 119, 133, 136 mother 3, 4, 7, 10, 15, 44–7, 50–51, 60, 64–6, 71–2, 74, 94, 99, 128, 130–36, 139, 147, 158, 161–2, 164, 166–7 muse 132 sainted 4, 10, 51, 60, 64–6, 71, 74, 128, 132 sow 3, 52; also see images of the Irish, pig virgin 3–4, 5, 7–8, 50–51, 60, 75, 99, 108–9, 129, 130, 132–3, 135–7, 158, 165 Virgin Mary 3–4, 7–8, 50–51, 60, 75, 99, 108–9, 129, 130, 132–3, 136–7, 139, 165 whore 4–5, 50, 119, 120, 122, 126, 128, 131, 135–6, 158 womb 3 Imitation of Life (Douglas Sirk) 7 In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens (Walker) 47 India 28 indirect discourse 29 Innes, C. L. 12, 39, 42–3 Ireland, history 2, 4, 6, 10, 12, 32–3, 41–2, 45–7, 51, 80, 92, 103–5, 116, 150, 152 Abortion Information Act 46

204


Articles 40, 41, 45 45; see also Constitution (1937) Constitution (1937) 4, 45, 62, 82 Constitution, Eighth Amendment of the, (1938) 152 de Valera, Eamon 45, 72, 82 famine 42 Free State 32 hedge schools 42 Magdalene homes 4 National Schools 42 Penal Laws 41–2 tinkers 103–5 Irish Censorship of Publications Act 45 Irish folklore 52, 69, 81, 83, 116, 128, 150 Cathleen ni Houlihan 3–4, 50, 132–4 Danann, Mother Goddess of Irish mythology 81, 85, 90–91, 96 Daoine Sidhe 81 lís (lios) 3–4; see also fairy fort Róisín Dubh 3–4 Táin Bó Cúailnge 81, 133 Tír na n-Óg (Land of the Young) 71 Irish Renaissance (Irish Revival) 42, 44–5, 83 Jazz (Morrison) 77, 157, 163–5, 172 Alice Manfred 157, 163 Dorcas 163–4 Narrator 157, 164–5, 172 Violet 163–5 Jesus 20–22, 137–9, 141–4, 146–8, 180 Joanne Hayes baby case; see Kerry Babies case Joyce, James 33, 62, 67 Kenner, Hugh 30, 102 Kerry Babies case 116, 152–3, 167 Kiberd, Declan 6, 32–4, 52, 62, 78, 181 “Kind of Scar, A” (Boland) 3, 8, 10, 47 Land of Spices, The (O’Brien, Kate) 46 Larsen, Nella 32, 47 Lavin, Mary 33, 35, 39, 46, 49–52, 57, 61–9, 73–4, 95, 105–7, 109–10, 135–6, 171–5 legitimacy 171–4 Lloyd, David 7, 10, 27, 29, 32–3, 78 Locke, Alain 44, 62 Lomax, Alan 52 Longley, Edna 138, 142

Love (Morrison) 22, 97, 117–29, 139, 148, 164 Bill Cosey 118–22, 126–7 Celestial 97, 117–28 Christine 118–19, 121–2, 124, 126–8, 164 Heed the Night 118–19, 121–4, 126–8, 164 Junior 125–6, 164 L 126–9, 139, Police–heads 120, 127 Vida 126–7 Lovett, Ann 101, 152, 154–6 Lyotard, Jean-Francois 171–4 McAleese, President Mary 138 McCafferty, Nell 152–3, 155 McDowell, Deborah E. 51, 162 McKay, Nellie 15, 162, 175 Mahoney, Christina Hunt 47, 61, 78, 81, 86, 138 marginalized communities 14, 29–30, 34 Martin, Augustine 129, 133 Mary O’Grady (Lavin) 50, 60–61, 63–74, 80, 91, 97, 104, 107–8, 130–36 Ellie 64, 68, 104, 173 Mary 50, 60, 63–74, 80, 97, 107–8, 130–36, 171, 173 Patrick 64, 68–73, 91, 133–5 secret rages 50, 64, 73–4, 133, 135–6 Tom 64–6, 70, 73, 97, 133 material culture 42, 47, 99, 107, 161 Black Madonna 146–7 canning 47 quilting 47 Meisenhelder, Susan Edwards 9, 29, 51, 54–5, 57, 98, 129, 131 “Mermaid Legend, The” (Ní Dhuibhne) 95, 97, 111–12, 115 metanarrative 171–3 Mexico 146 “Midwife to the Fairies, The” (Ní Dhuibhne) 79, 117, 122, 131, 137, 150–56, 181 Mieder, Wolfgang 169, 174 Mills, Lia 4, 7, 69, 74, 78, 112, 132–3, 135 misapplications of religious ideals 4, 132 Mishkin, Tracy 12, 39 “Miss Holland” (Lavin) 62 Mitchell-Kernan, Claudia 13, 31, 35–8 modernism 170, 173

Index Morrison, Toni 2, 4–6, 10–11, 14–15, 28, 31–2, 34, 43, 48, 52, 67, 77, 93, 95–7, 117, 119, 122–4, 127, 139–43, 157–60, 162, 165–8, 172–3, 175, 178 motherhood 7, 66, 71, 74, 128, 134–5, 152, 164 mounds; see fairy fort Mules and Men (Hurston) 9, 21, 36, 50, 52–3, 57–60, 95, 100, 135 Narváez, Peter 68, 70 Natanson, Maurice 24 Nation, woman as 3–4, 6, 50, 131, 133, 135 nationalism 14, 33, 39, 41, 50, 78, 131, 135 New Republic 158–9 New Testament; see Bible Ní Dhuibhne, Éilís 1–2, 10–11, 14, 16–17, 24, 48, 56, 61, 77–9, 84–5, 87–9, 94–5, 102–3, 112, 136–8, 152–4, 157, 170–73 Nobel Lecture 1993 (Morrison) 158–62, 172 Northern Ireland 38, 72 Northern Irish Civil Rights Movement 29 “Nun’s Mother, The” (Lavin) 100, 170 Oates, Joyce Carol 61 O’Brien, Edna 3, 45, 101, 179 O’Brien, Kate 46–7, 95, 179 O’Casey, Sean 4, 74 O’Connor, Flannery 34, 169 O’Faolain, Nuala 63 Ong, Walter J. 34, 79, 141, 174–5 Opper, Frederick B. 7 oral culture; see oral tradition oral tradition 2, 4, 8–10, 12 19, 21–2, 26, 30, 32, 36, 48, 50, 60, 68, 133, 136, 139–41, 143, 146, 148, 167, 174 abuse of 4, 8, 174 aphorism 30 ballad 4 curse 3, 84 epithets 27, 30 hyperbole 36 joke 2, 30–31, 57, 60, 65 legend 2–3, 10, 15, 26, 69, 76, 81–2, 85, 87, 91, 93, 96, 99, 102, 110, 112, 125, 150, 155, 181 malapropism 36 naming 7, 19, 36, 50, 92 parable 16, 20–22, 141

205

performance 9, 37, 81, 83, 158 poetry 3–4, 42 proverb 2, 16, 26, 28, 30, 36, 39, 54, 126, 132, 169, 171 punning 36 ritual 35–6, 73, 149, 159, 180 saying 26, 30, 39, 65, 70, 73, 93, 123, 132, 136, 171 Signification, signifying, Signifying, Signifyin, 16, 19, 25, 28–9, 31, 35–9, 56–60, 97–9, 106, 109, 134, 170 song 2–4, 26, 53, 65, 115, 120, 125, 127, 142, 144, 146, 148 storytelling 24, 26–7, 38, 47, 48, 60, 78, 83, 173 word play 2, 42, 55 O’Reilly, Andrea 13, 122, 158, 162, 164, 166 Ortner, Sherry 3, 8 Page, Philip 139, 141 Pale Gold of Alaska and Other Stories, The (Ní Dhuibhne) 77, 111 Paradise (Morrison) 22, 67, 79, 130, 139–49, 157, 163–7, 174 Che 164–6 Consolata 130–31, 139–49, 157, 163, 165–7 Cowboy 143, 144, 146, 166 Lone du Pres 131, 140, 142, 147, 157, 165, 167 Mary Magna 130, 139–49, 167 Piedade 147 Patten, Eve 155, 174 Peig: The Autobiography of Peig Sayers of the Great Blasket Island (Sayers), 48, 56 Persuasion (Austen) 24 Peterson, Richard F. 64–5, 107, 109 Plato 24, 148, 166 Playboy of the Western World (Synge) 44 Playing in the Dark (Morrison) 93, 119 Africanist presence 4, 28 Robinson Crusoe (Defoe) 93 Poor Clare nuns of Lilongwe, Malawi 146 Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, A (Joyce) 62 postcolonial criticism 13, 31–2, 38, 49, 77, 92, 93, 175

206


postmodernism 27, 51, 78–9, 82, 85, 131, 138, 151, 171–5 Prahlad, Sw. Anand 36, 150 Pritchett, V.S. 31, 66 Propp, Vladimir 75–6 Protestant 96, 113, 165, 179 Race-ing Justice, Engendering Power (Morrison), 5, 50, 162 rape 41, 44, 91, 93, 159, 166 reader expectations 16, 140 religious oral traditions 8, 15–16, 174 Revival, Irish; 42, 45; see also Irish Renaissance rhetorical conditions 12, 39, 40 rhetorical figures 31, 34–5, 38 rhetorical goals; see goals for expression rhetorical indirection 12, 13, 16, 19, 20, 24, 27, 29, 34, 38, 40, 56, 142, 169; see also folkloric indirection rhetorical strategies; see strategies of indirection; folkloric indirection Robinson, President Mary 138 Ruiséal, Máire 83, 150 “Sarah” (Lavin) 100–101 Sayers, Peig 48, 56 “Search for the Lost Husband, The” (Ní Dhuibhne) 61, 78–82, 89, 149 second person address 25 sexuality 2, 4–6, 14, 16, 40–41, 44–6, 63, 78, 84, 90, 92, 95–101, 103–6, 109, 111, 112, 114–17, 119–21, 123–32, 135–9, 144, 147–8, 152–3, 155–6, 162–5 167, 175, 178–9, 181 abortion 14, 16, 46, 48, 95–7, 107, 109– 11, 115–17, 122, 130–32, 152–4, 157–8, 160, 162, 164–6, 175, 178 Abortion Information Act 46 infanticide 16, 97, 116, 131, 152–4, 157, 162, 163 reproduction, reproductive issues 14, 16, 30, 48, 52, 63, 95–7, 100, 110, 117, 119, 122, 130–31, 137, 152–3, 155, 157, 160, 162–6, 170, 173, 175 sexual and emotional abuse 41, 44, 91, 93, 121–2, 124, 127, 147, 159, 164, 166 sexual exploitation 41, 109–10, 114, 122, 124–5, 128, 132

sexual expression 2, 16, 40, 63, 95, 97, 100, 105, 111–12, 115–16, 124–5, 135, 138, 144, 148, 162, 175 Sexual Revolution 117, 123–5, 127, 137–8 unwanted pregnancy, crisis pregnancy 100, 162, 153 “Shapeshifters, The” (Ní Dhuibhne) 177 Signifying Monkey, The (Gates) 12, 29, 36, 50 Smitherman, Geneva 13, 31, 35–6, 38, 42 Smyth, Ailbhe 8, 14, 79, 152 Socrates 24 “Some Hours in the Life of a Witch” (Ní Dhuibhne) 87 Song of Solomon (Morrison) 75, 79, 129, 142, 144, 148, 159–60, 163 Circe 75–7, 79, 88, 129 Hagar 76–7, 144, 167 Milkman 75–6, 150, 160 Ruth 76–7, 150, 160 speech act 35, 37, 97, 172 Spenser, Edmund 43 spirituality 2, 16, 43, 107, 137, 146, 148, 167, 179, 180 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 40 “Story of the Little White Goat, The” (Ruiséal), 83, 150 strategies of indirection 1, 12–14, 16, 19–22, 25, 28–9, 31, 35–9, 41, 43–4, 48, 51–2, 57, 61, 67, 77, 78, 82, 97, 151, 167 bizarre, the 16, 25, 28, 31, 34, 38, 65, 79–80, 89–90, 97, 115–16, 127, 167, 169–70 carnivalesque 34 double entendres 35 double-voiced 31, 35, 59 feather-bed resistance 58, 93 grotesque 16, 25, 28, 31, 34, 38, 97, 116, 169–70 half-meanings 35 humor 9, 10, 27, 30–31, 34–5, 37, 54, 65–7, 74, 79–80, 82, 84–5, 87–90, 94, 108, 111–12, 132, 138–9, 145, 150–51, 156, 162, 167–8 irony 33, 46, 58, 64, 84 masking 16, 19, 25, 28–9, 31–3, 38, 57, 170 mimicry 25, 28, 31, 33, 34, 38, 97, 169–70

Index mocking 33, 106, 115, 148 parody 34, 65 “play toy” 158–9 satire 60, 80, 94 sly civility 16, 25, 28–9, 31, 38, 61, 66–7, 74, 77, 92, 97, 102, 106, 111, 169–70 stereotype 3, 5–6, 9, 14, 32, 43, 48, 49, 50, 53, 55, 56, 60, 65, 75, 80, 82, 85, 95, 98–9, 117, 128–33, 136, 139, 158 style indirect libre 12, 25 subaltern 5–8, 11, 13, 29, 30–33, 39–40, 43, 48, 92, 105, 123, 137, 142; see also marginalized communities subaltern expression 30–31 Sula (Morrison) 157, 159–60 Eva Peace 157, 159–60 Nel 159–60 Sula 159–60 “Sunday Brings Sunday” (Lavin) 100 Synge, John Millington (J.M.) 44, 58, 68, 93 Tar Baby (Morrison) 32, 75, 77, 157, 159–61, 163, 166 Jadine 163, 164 Thérèse 75–7, 129, 157, 160–61 Tate, Claudia 44, 119, 135 Tell My Horse (Hurston) 52, 95, 97–8, 131 Their Eyes Were Watching God (Hurston) 5, 51, 53, 95 Janie 49–51, 53–5, 60, 95, 99, 135, 139, 159, 170, 173 Joe Starks 54–5 Nanny 5, 49–50, 53–5, 60, 159, 173 theory of suggestion 24 Todd, Loreto 35–6, 42, 68–9 tropes 30, 33, 35, 133

207

Ulysses (Joyce) 33, 62 Dilly 62 uncanny 34; see also Freud, Sigmund US, history Civil Rights Movement 29 slavery 5, 39, 41, 76, 147, 166 veil 32, 46, 59 vernacular; see dialect; oral tradition Virgin Mary 4, 8, 50–51, 60, 75, 99, 108, 129–33, 136–7, 139, 141–2, 144–7, 150, 152, 157, 165, 168 Virgin of Guadalupe 146–7 vodun 15, 52–3, 56, 58, 60, 97–8, 100 Walker, Alice 14, 47–8; see also womanism Wall, Cheryl A. 32, 52 Walters, Keith 57, 59 Weekes, Ann Owens 46–7, 61 West African folklore 99–100, 119 Esu 36, 50 56; see Signifying Monkey, The (Gates) Mami Wata 98, 99, 119, 120, 123, 146 “What White Publishers Won’t Print” (Hurston) 43, 46, 175 Wheatley, Phillis 41, 47, Whitman, Walt 24 “Widow’s Son, The” (Lavin) 2, 170 “Wife of Bath, The” (Ní Dhuibhne) 88–9, 112 “Will, The” (Lavin) 170 womanism 13–14; see also Walker, Alice womb 90, 118, 152, 160,164, 166 Woolf, Virginia 2, 106 Wright, Richard 44–5, 64 Yeats, William Butler (W.B.) 3, 32, 134 Yolen, Jane 55

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