Molly Ferguson is an associate professor of English and affiliate faculty member in women’s and gender studies at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. Her new book, Banshees, Hags, and Changelings: Feminist Folklore Transformations in Irish Writing is the newest title in our Irish Studies series and is available this February.
In Emma Donoghue’s 2010 novel Room, narrated by five-year-old Jack, his mother “Ma” attempts to explain her kidnapping and entrapment in an eleven-by-eleven-foot shed through a story that conveys her experience through a magical, folkloric framework. Ma tells Jack a tale of a selkie ( a woman who is a human on land but a seal in the sea), casting herself as the selkie/mermaid: “This mermaid is sitting on the rocks one evening, combing her hair, when a fisherman creeps up and catchers her in his net.” She continues, “He brings her home to his cottage and she has to marry him . . . He takes away her magic comb so she cant’s ever go back into the sea. She goes on to describe the mermaid giving birth to a baby and years later finding her hidden comb and slipping away into the sea to escape. jack, internalizing the story as one about his own life, objects to being abandoned and frets, “She shouldn’t be gone.” Ma revises the story, altering the part where the mother leaves her children behind: “I forgot to say, of course she takes her baby Jackerjack, with her, he’s all knotted up in her hair. And when the fisherman comes back, the cottage is empty and he never sees them again.” The traditional selkie tale of a woman abducted by a man for her beauty and forced into subservient entrapment is a fitting allegory for Ma relating her traumatic experience to her child. In the act of telling a feminist revision of the selkie tale, Ma tries to protect and empower Jack, previewing how she will engineer their escape from Room.
Ma’s story is portentous in the context of Donoguehue’s novel. It foreshadows the second half of the book, in which Jack and Ma escape but Jack feels abaonded by Ma, eventually discovering he is “half merman” and can adapt to what he calls “Outside” or “breathe [water]” in the language of the tale. The folktale casts Ma and Jack as magical and therefore strange or Other in the human world. Without explaining rape to young Jack, it makes clear though coed language that Old Nick/the fisherman has wrongly stolen his mother and thus has no rights to him. The gale also reveals both Ma’s and Jack’s anxieties about living in the “wrong” environment—Ma about surviving years of imprisonment in Room, and Jack about learning to live Outside. Ma’s description of the cottage as empty when Old Nick returns is a wish-fulfillment fantasy of the selkie finding a magic comb or sea-cap to transform and escape with. As this book will demonstrate, even this very brief inclusion of an Irish folktale in a contemporary novel by an Irish woman does feminist work; illuminating subversive ideas in the text about entrapment, escape, gender-based violence, and imagining alternatives.
Examining the ways in which contemporary texts by Irish women render such transfigurations, Banshees, Hags, and Changelings positions folkloric figures and symbols as entry-points for examining the gendered tensions within traditional Irish tales from a feminist perspective. each chapter coalesces around a cluster of folktales concerning, respectively, the changeling (a fairy replacement for a human child or woman), the mermaid (a woman/sea creature hybrid), the hag (an old woman who morphs into a hare), bees (the superstition to inform the hive of a death), the banshee (the death harbinger), and the stray sod (ground that wen trod upon leads one “astray”). These transformations both reveal the horrors of gender-based violence and also imagine alternative spaces for enacting an ethics of cate. Gathering and naming approaches to transformation is salient in an historical moment of collective grief and reckoning in Ireland regarding abuses women faced for decades under a Church-and-state-supported carceral regimen. Grassroots feminist movements are both demanding accountability for the past and turning to intersectional issues including gay rights, abortion services, treatment of asylum seekers, racism, and disability rights. Folklore scholar and historian Angela Bourke claims the power of stories in this regard: “As Irish society painfully confronts an avalanche of revelations of child sex abuse, incest, and teenage pregnancies hidden and repudiated, stories like [folktales] can perhaps offer the possibility of healing.” And as writer and folklorist Éilís Ní Dhuibhne explains, “The juxtaposition of motifs, or entire stories, drawn from the pool of traditional folklore with a new literary text written in the mode of realism, is one way in which contemporary Irish literature intersects with tradition.” I argue that the renewed richness found in the reinterpretation of folkllore demandsa assessment for its decolonizing, intersectional feminist political valence.
The subtitle of this book, Feminist Folklore Transformations in Irish Writing, refers to the woman-identified characters in the contemporary texts analyzed here who shape-shift and/or undergo a psychological transformation. In some texts, this is rendered in a fantastic way—a woman’s body morphs int a hare—while in others the transformation is internal. These are alluded to through references to folk stories in which women who are “bad” mothers, who don’t keep house properly, who are queer or who abandon the home are suspected y the communities of being “away” or “astray.” The reinterpretations rely on coded knowledge of folklore to subvert misogynist or limiting views of women’s options; the legend backdrop acts as a jumping-off point for the reader to understand why the protagonist seeks freedom. Male characters can also transform, as will be explored with the narrators of In the Woods and Small Things Like These in chapter 5, though that transformation too, is facilitated by women and in response to witnessing gendered injustices. Feminist transformation is fluid and ongoing rather than a one-way, completed process.
Folklore and legend are particularly rich sources for feminist revision. Joan Radner and Susan Lanser assert that folklore and myth have the capacity to encode gendered anxieties and express subversive resistance. They explain, “Coding occurs in the context of complex audiences in which some members may be competent and willing to decode the message, but others are not. If the production of coded messages is a sign of oppression and censorship, the deciphering of such messages may be the very process through which liberation becomes possible.” Cristina Bacchilega, In Postmodern Fairy Tales: Gender and Narrative Strategies (1997), joins oral tradition and feminism to the postmodern in a way that speaks to my analysis of the texts in this book. Bacchilega reads similar postmodern transformations of fairy tales as “doubling and double: both affirmative and questioning, with out necessarily being recuperative or politically subversive.” She reinforces her point: “In every case, though these postmodern transformations do not exploit the fairytale’s magic simply to make the spell work, but rather to unmake some of its workings,” that only those rewritings that “Expose or upset the paradigms of authority inherent in texts they appropriate” are “disobedient.” Indeed, the double nature of folklore and its embedded transformations are rich for both adaptation and scholarship that connects altered forms to contemporary sociopolitical conditions.
Women’s bodies are particularly suited to narratives of transformations as they are overdetermined by societal norms and sexualized by the male gaze. During pregnancy, women’s bodies shape-shift in order to give birth, and at other times in the life cycle women are harshly judged for whether their bodies are thin enough, youthful enough, or feminine enough. As Claire Bracken describes Ireland’s social milieu during the Celtic Tiger economic boom of 1997-2007, “dictates of body regulation . . . intensified during the Tiger period” disproportionately impacting girls. For example, the protagonist in Deidre Sullivan’s short story “You Shall Not Suffer . . .,” explored through the hag-into-hare tale of chapter 3, becomes a target for her father’s violence once she undergoes puberty, and her body grows larger than he deems acceptable. Rather than become smaller, she grows a magical carapace, retreats to the woods, and feeds outcasted children from her gingerbread house. In chapter 1 on changelings, in Emma Donoghue’s The Wonder, young Anna’s response to sexual violence in the family is to starve herself to purge her own guilt and shame, invoking changeling legend. Feminist scholar Susan Bordo, inspired by Michel Foucault, delineates how women conform their bodies to an ideal that renders them docile: “Through the pursuit of an ever-changing, homogenizing elusive ideal of femininity- . . . female bodies become docile bodies—bodies whose forces and energies are habituated to external regulation, subjection, transformation, ‘improvement’.” While this type of bodily transformation is dangerous and demoralizing, she advocates for a positive-oriented “transformation (or, if you wish, duality) of meaning, through which conditions that are objectively . . . constraining, enslaving, and even murderous, come to be experiences as liberating, transforming, and life-giving.” The writers profiled in this book capture an awareness of how changes in women’s bodies stimulate anxiety in others by aligning their characters with tradition of supernatural shape-shifting in folklore yet it is those anxieties that make the transformation a method of claiming their bodies in new, chosen forms.