Читать книгу In Search of the Swan Maiden - Barbara Fass Leavy - Страница 10

Not all swan maidens are swans; some are doves, or ungainly geese, ducks, or cranes.¹ Seal maidens abound in Scottish and Scandinavian tales, and in Russia the stolen wolf’s skin evokes werewolf legends.² Other swan maidens have no animal form, and are bound to their mortal captors because some other significant possession, such as a dress or secret name, has been stolen or discovered. The graceful swan has nonetheless characterized what has been called “one of the most beautiful stories ever evolved from the mind of man,”³ a story so affective that attempts to find meaning in the tale have no “power to detract from, but … serve only to enhance its elusive and poetic” appeal.⁴ These are romantic but hardly satisfactory explanations for the story’s wide popularity. Moreover, the swan is not an entirely attractive bird: it is frequently aggressive; its trumpetlike voice is raucous; and its snakelike neck can suggest evil or threatening sexuality. The ballerina who must dance the roles of both Odette and Odile in Swan Lake need only transform the submissive flutterings of the swan maiden into the sensuous undulations of a serpentine imposter to demonstrate the ease with which one animal can become the other.⁵ In an exotically strange short story, “The Enchantress,” a woman with a pet swan tests her lovers by daring them to make love to her while she is entwined by a serpent.⁶

Looked at closely, the swan maiden tale is only deceptively romantic, its power residing not in a love story but in its depiction of a fierce marital struggle. Its themes can be traced back to those attached to the story of what Doniger has called the “quintessential swan maiden,”⁷ Urvaśī, who, in the Sanskrit Rig Veda, lives on earth with the mortal Purūravas, returning to her home among the demigods when he betrays the terms of their relationship, impervious to his entreaties that she come back. Only in later renditions of this ancient tale is the couple reunited, Purūravas joining Urvaśī in the divine realm. Whether or not Urvaśī is, as some claim, the original swan maiden,⁸ from the story of her union with a mortal radiate virtually all the motifs found in the world’s animal bride and demon lover tales. For this reason Purūravas and Urvaśī will supply a point of reference for each chapter in this book. The mortal and his supernatural mistress are featured in what has been called the world’s first love story, one full of “deep feeling and real pathos,”⁹ in which the pair suffer deeply over their separation. The truth is, however, that the Sanskrit story, like the swan maiden tales that may have descended from it, requires the disconnecting of the superficially sentimental elements in the narrative from the deep and bitter conflicts actually portrayed.

Because no single source tells the whole story, a summary must be pieced together from different accounts:

(1) [Urvaśī] had to come down to the earth from the heavenly world on account of a curse and then on certain conditions [that she never see her husband naked] she agrees to stay with the king [Purūravas]. (2) On account of the breach in the promise to observe the conditions, [Urvaśī] leaves the king. (3) After a long search, the king turns mad in her absence, finds [Urvaśī] first in her transformed condition [swan], and then in the original form. (4) She refuses to go back with the king who requests her to return with him. (5) The king obtains a son born of her after some period. (6) The king is elevated to the position of a Gandharva after performing the sacrifice and enjoys [Urvaśī’s] company for ever, in the land of the Gandharvas, he himself being a Gandharva then.¹⁰

Purūravas’s inadvertent breach of his promise is the result of a plot concocted by the Gandharvas, demigods in the Hindu pantheon who want Urvaśī to resume her place among the heavenly nymphs who are their consorts. To this end, they arrange for the late-night theft of Urvaśī’s prized pet sheep, and when she laments their loss, Purūravas leaps out of bed to retrieve them, at which point the Gandharvas send to earth a bolt of lightning that illuminates his naked form.

That Purūravas and Urvaśī pine over their separation is not, however, obvious from either the Rig Veda or the Satapatha Brahmana, the main sources for the story. The Vedic hymn begins with Purūravas’s having located his lost wife, their dialogue consisting of his entreaties that she return and her resistance, of his reproaches and threat of suicide and her refusal to be swayed. If love is to be read into their exchange, it is a very different love from that espoused by romantically inclined readers of the tale.

To begin with, the Vedic hymn is ambiguous on the subject of why Urvaśī lived with Purūravas for four years. He reproaches her for having once been willing enough to accept his advances, for unlike the usually reluctant swan maiden, Urvaśī had (according to him) made a sexual game of his courtship.¹¹

[Purūravas] When I, a mortal man, courted these immortal women who had laid aside their veils, they shied away from me like excited gazelles, like horses grazed by the chariot.

[Urvaśī] When a mortal man, wooing these immortal women, unites with their group as they wish, make your bodies beautiful, like water birds, like horses biting in their love-play.

[Purūravas] She of the waters flashed lightning like a falling lightning-bolt and brought me the pleasures of love.

Urvaśī does not deny that she was receptive to his love-making. But the relationship between mortal and immortal is tenuous, and Purūravas’s invocation of lightning as an image of passion may foreshadow the later dissolution of their relationship.

It is the Brahmana that highlights the taboo motif, the prohibition that must be respected if the mortal lover is to retain the supernatural spouse. For Urvaśī imposes two, not merely one stipulation concerning their union. When she weds him, she says, “Thrice a day shalt thou embrace me; but do not lie with me against my will, and let me not see thee naked, for such is the way to behave to us women.”¹² This passage, which expresses Urvaśī’s demand for autonomy in their sexual relations, can be compared with a corresponding section of the Rig Veda, which suggests that despite Purūravas’s assertion that Urvaśī “came to his home across from her dwelling-place and took her pleasure in him,” she has been less compliant than he believes.

[Urvaśī] Indeed, you pierced me with your rod three times a day, and filled me even when I had no desire. I followed your will, Purūravas; you were my man, king of my body.

Even more discord emerges when Urvaśī, seemingly taken aback at Purūravas’s threat of suicide, intimates that he has misunderstood their relationship:

[Urvaśī] Purūravas, do not die; do not vanish; do not let the vicious wolves eat you. There are no friendships with women; they have the hearts of jackals.

Part of the obscurity in the Vedic hymn, and therefore part of the difficulty in interpreting it, has to do with questions of whether or not all lines have been assigned to the correct speaker.¹³ The antifeminism in Urvaśī’s words would seem to indicate a masculine point of view, although she may also be mocking Purūravas with the negative stereotype of woman created by mortal men. In any event, these words are somewhat softened when she compares herself to the wind, “hard to catch and hold.” Her portrait of herself is both winning and ominous, provocative and threatening. But such duality has been intrinsic to their relationship.

For however much Urvaśī feigns subservience to Purūravas, she employs feminine wiles to gain her way. After the Gandharvas steal her sheep, she goads her lover into action: if Purūravas were truly a man, she need not lose her pets. She appears, that is, to manipulate his image of his own masculinity, turning against him the power man ordinarily uses against woman. Urvaśī’s wiliness, however, sustains notions of woman’s cunning. Significantly, when Purūravas is provoked into proving his manhood, the Gandharvas are given their opportunity to reclaim Urvaśī. Tensions between the couple indicate that Urvaśī is ready to return to the otherworld, and she appears to have incited Purūravas to defy the very terms that she imposed on their union. Role playing more than love appears to inform this ancient story, less a romantic tale than the portrayal of a gender-based struggle for power within the love relationship and subversive of it—the woman yielding, at times reluctantly, to the man, but paying him back when he has lost her and she now holds the cards.¹⁴

In theoretical terms like those employed by evolutionary folklorists, the argument has been made that the enigmatic hymn in the Rig Veda can be explained by reference to a time when men were ritually sacrificed as the sequel to “some kinds of primitive sacred marriage.” Urvaśī would represent the powerful, unyielding woman to whom Purūravas futilely appeals for pity.¹⁵ The interest in this theory is not in its probably dubious claim, but in its rendering the hymn understandable in terms of a power struggle. For no interpretation could more effectively subvert the basis for a romantic explanation for the stories of Urvaśī or the swan maiden. Male dominance inverts matriarchal power, but, as will be seen, it is impossible to rid the swan maiden tale of the real and symbolic dependencies that underlie the struggle between man and woman.

Clearly, however, the story of Purūravas and Urvaśī could not be interpreted as a love story at all were there not more in it than a contest for power between man and woman. Purūravas is not entirely wrong in locating a contradiction in Urvaśī’s attitude, in their push-pull relationship, in her seductiveness toward and retreat from him. Urvaśī conforms to—indeed she may be the best example of—the composite portrait of the swan maiden drawn by William Lessa in his study of the porpoise maiden of Oceania. Lessa says that the swan maiden is essentially “hyperfeminine, being shy and submissive, delicate and sensitive, loyal and affectionate, patient and dutiful,” but that even though she is a good wife and mother, she never gives herself entirely to her family. Being out of place in a world of aggressive and misunderstanding humans, she is “often ready to abandon both her children and her spouse without too much remorse as soon as she finds a way to escape from her forced detention.” Lessa describes the fairy wife as “slightly hebephrenic—torn between the mundane and the superphysical” life.¹⁶ Comparably, David Thomson reports on the Scottish folk for whom the seal maiden is a living legend: “it is given to them that their sea-longing shall be land-longing and their land-longing shall be sea-longing.”¹⁷

Similar conflicts are implied in the Volundarkvida, an ancient Nordic work of literature also held to be the source of the swan maiden tale.¹⁸ Three women fly up from the south and spin fine linen on a beach, and three men take them home as wives. But after seven years, the women long to fight in battle, and when the husbands return from a year’s hunting, their wives are gone. The activities in which these supernatural wives engage reflect a significant duality. Their spinning suggests both the magic powers traditionally associated with some goddesses as well as stereotypical female tasks. As female warriors (swan maidens are often likened to Valkyries),¹⁹ they differ from ordinary women, assuming a traditionally masculine role and intruding into space ordinarily occupied by men. Yet they had for years been wives to hunters. In this oscillation between subservience and dominance, they reveal the ambiguity of the seal maidens torn between land- and sea-longing.

To create his model of swan maiden and to emphasize the ubiquitous components of her personality, Lessa must confront a problem in folklore methodology. Ordinarily, he contends, basic elements in a folk narrative blur as they pick up local variants in the process of dispersion. Since Oceanic porpoise maiden tales do not essentially differ from swan maiden stories told elsewhere, Lessa suggests that rules governing folklore cannot be as precise as, for example, chemical reactions.²⁰ Swan maiden stories appear to rest more on constant elements than on variations, and Holbek wonders if this reflects a constancy in the narrative pattern or if the narrative is forever generated anew in a similar fashion because it reflects persistent human conditions. The matter is not subject to proof, but the themes in the swan maiden tale and the essential marital relationship portrayed in it support the latter position. Whatever its cause, the stability of the swan maiden tale allows Lessa to divide it into a series of recurrent motifs.

On the other side, Bynum contends that variants in a narrative are not departures from some otherwise constant pattern but pieces of the pattern itself. Bynum employs the term “complementarity” to describe the way in which a “given pattern may govern the composition of many individual tales without necessarily being complete” in any one of them, arguing that the “purpose in comparing variants of fables and extracting generic motifs from them is precisely to lighten the otherwise heavy work of deciphering variants, which, if taken one by one and without reference to each other, constitutes a truly insurmountable labor of decipherment.” The grandeur of an isolated tale would be “often bought at the expense of complementarity, whereby in oral fable multiforms of the same story-pattern are playfully combined with other patterns to demonstrate or explore the patterns’ logical possibilities.”²¹

To combine Lessa’s view, in which the meaning of the swan maiden story inheres in its stable elements, and Bynum’s, which suggests that variants are constituent parts of a narrative pattern that illuminate the constant features, is also to counter the idea of the so-called one-dimensionality of folk narratives as compared to literature.²² Folktales are only one dimensional when taken one at a time (and not always then); once the stable elements and variants of a folktale or related group of tales are understood to interact, they form layers of meaning that imbue the narrative pattern with complex significance. Even seemingly contradictory versions of the same story are enlightening, since the contradiction is likely to reflect the strife depicted in the narrative situation.

The following discussion will be organized along the lines suggested by Lessa, emphasizing stable elements in the swan maiden tale: the isolation of the swan maiden from her sisters as she is forced into domesticity by a mortal man, and her escape when she regains her prized possession or he violates some taboo. Her usually unambivalent relief in getting away challenges the romanticized view of love and marriage held by those who extol the tragic beauty of the tale. But beyond this basic story is Lessa’s portrait of a woman in conflict with herself, as well as the tension between two realms—this world and the otherworld from which the swan maiden comes. Variations in the tale make possible a deepening perception of her dilemma. Thus a Japanese swan maiden who barely pauses as she makes her escape²³ is complemented by an Icelandic seal maiden, who oscillates between earthly home and sea, until the call of the ocean proves irresistible and she plunges into her native element.²⁴ Different still is a Greek swan maiden who cleans house and cooks her family’s meal when members of her family are not at home, stealing away before they return in order to take up each night a carefree existence that contrasts sharply with her domestic life.²⁵ But Bynum’s emphasis on the variations that constitute a large narrative pattern leads to the realization that the more swan maiden stories known, the more rich Lessa’s portrait appears—less a composite than a multi-leveled creation at once stable and alterable. And as other narrative patterns attach themselves to the swan maiden story, stories of other animal brides and grooms, the complex themes in the swan maiden tale themselves proliferate, the growth not arithmetic but geometric.

To be aware of gender as a significant part of folklore narration is to become cognizant of the irony that the swan maiden is not ordinarily held to be the main character in her own story, usually considered a variant of Tale Type 400, which involves a man’s attempt to regain his lost wife. In elevating his search for her to a “quest” and making the husband’s journey the central point of the narrative, folklorists actually reenact the husband’s attempt to make his supernatural wife subservient to him. True, the meeting between the mortal man and the swan maiden frequently takes place well into the narrative,²⁶ which may begin with the man’s adventures, his fairy wife often being a prize for success in earlier exploits. In such versions of the swan maiden story, the initial winning and subsequent recapturing of the wife (if she is recaptured) appear to chart the husband’s progress toward maturity, at least as a male-dominated society would define maturity, and his domesticating the swan maiden is part of a rite of passage by which he proves his manhood. Still, the way the swan maiden is captured and the kind of life she leads in the domestic realm are hardly mere introductory elements in the tale; rather, they illuminate her escape and the tale’s denouement by defining the mundane world in which she is trapped and the ensuing struggle between her and her husband. If anything, the swan maiden tale proves a particularly difficult one to classify as a predominantly man’s or woman’s story. (Holbek points out that most folktales have two central characters.)

The scholars who study the swan maiden sometimes compare her with another kind of supernatural mate, the imperious Celtic fairy who traditionally demands a mortal man’s subservience as the price of consorting with her. Swan maiden and Celtic fairy are said to represent the “two different types of women found in real life in different stages of the development of the human race.” An extremely ancient social system is posited, in which “women exercised an astonishing freedom in the choice or abandonment of their mates” and from which came the domineering fairy of Irish folktale and myth. But under a “different social system, where marriage by capture was practiced or where marital bonds, once formed, were less easily severed, other-worldly maidens (like their mortal prototypes) were more skittish and could be induced to join their fortunes to those of mortal lovers only by guile.”²⁷ The theft of the swan maiden’s possession thus becomes a claim against her person; only when she retrieves what was lost can she assert autonomy.²⁸ But the theme can be inverted, highlighting the contrast between the different worlds inhabited by the hostile parties. An Eskimo story tells how, by means of alien human clothing, a man captures an ugruk: the man’s protective parka becomes his imprisoned mate’s straitjacket, human clothing constituting not only a trap for this swan maiden but also an explicit symbol of culture’s triumph over nature, here explicitly expressed as man’s control of woman.²⁹

The swan maiden’s stolen possession is a link not only to her freedom but also to her sisters, from whom she is separated precisely because they retain the outward signs of their precious identity while she loses hers. And thus her encounter with her mortal mate thematically links the war between the sexes with the controversial subject of female bonding. Relatively few stories depict the capture of a single fairy; usually swan maidens form groups, the kidnapping and isolation of the fairy invoking her despair and the helpless pity of her companions. In a story from Assam, the youngest of the sun’s six daughters must marry Harata after he steals her clothes and must confront a hard life whose most painful feature may be the absence of female companionship. She burst into helpless tears. She is being left alone by her sisters with an unknown man in an unknown place. The sisters are also in tears as they console her. The eldest sister says to her captor, “Harata, because you are so much eager to marry one of us, we are leaving our youngest sister with you. But she is the most beloved to us all. Never ill-treat her. Never tell her to cook. Never touch her hands and feet.”³⁰ Similarly, with more resignation than grief the sisters of a Philippine swan maiden abandon the search for her stolen garment: “We will have to leave you here because you are no longer able to go alone.”³¹ In contrast, a group of Japanese swan maidens seek in panic their own safety, peremptorily leaving behind the sister who has lost her freedom.³²

Female groups play more than one role in these stories, for women are also entrusted with the task of socializing their sisters and daughters, encouraging them to adapt to man’s world. Sometimes it is a rebellious woman’s chosen isolation from other women that marks her as a target for the unwelcome advances of an alien, predatory lover. An Australian aboriginal story of a female water bird that is not quite a swan maiden tale but that contains themes common to the captured bride motif tells how a young duck “used to swim away by herself in the creek. Her tribe told her that Mulloka, the water devil, would catch her some day if she were so venturesome.”³³ A Malagasy tale similarly relates how a mortal is undeterred by the wariness of three swan maidens afraid to swim near him because they perceive danger, eventually catching the one who carelessly moves away from her sisters’ protection.³⁴

Although such stories were probably cautionary, intended to discourage female independence or exogamous relationships, their depiction of female solidarity is also paradoxical: what the woman’s female companions prepare her for is her eventual separation from them, for after she passes into her husband’s control, their influence becomes potentially subversive. This pattern is ritually literalized in Morocco: Daisy Dwyer describes how a bride is no longer permitted to associate with her unmarried female friends, and their companionship during her wedding week is a prelude to a final farewell. Should the new wife persist in these relations, condemnation from her husband and mother-in-law will be harsh. “As in other things the route from virginity to adulthood is made irreversible, which breeds its sadness among those women.”³⁵ In the swan maiden story, marriage is characteristically a literal or symbolic capture, and the world to which the fairy wife later escapes is frequently depicted as one where she can recreate former ties to female companions.

In English, the word “rape” denotes either the kidnap or the forceful sexual violation of a woman, or both. And perhaps it is the rupture of female bonds as the swan maiden is torn from her sisters as much as the literal act of defloration that creates the essential image of rape in many swan maiden narratives. The inherent violence in the capture is rendered explicit in The Arabian Nights when Hasan of Basorah is instructed that when the swan maiden’s sisters see that her dress has been stolen, they will fly away, at which point he will be able to drag her by the hair to that subterranean place that is his private chamber.³⁶ Even more explicit is a native Iowan tale that combines elements of swan maiden and demon lover stories to depict a woman’s rape during which her helpless companions flee:

One day Ishji’nki [a trickster] was travelling [and] some of his playmates told him that there were some girls swimming down by the river bank. Ishji’nki went to the spot and saw a party of women swimming on the other side. He unwrapped his organ and thrust it under the water for a long way and finally captured the prettiest girl. The others cried and ran out of the water but the one that Ishji’nki had selected could not escape, but could only stand there and weep.³⁷

In a Ten’as origins myth, the capture and symbolically depicted rape becomes a necessary condition for marriage itself. A man dwelling in a society without women “went up quietly [in his canoe] and launched his spear, which passed through the parka of one of [the water women]. The rest turned into geese and flew away; but he captured this one and took her home. The rest of the men began to get women in the same way.”³⁸ As Doniger has noted, the “organ” of one story and its counterpart, the “spear” of the other, suggest an interesting symbolic transformation of nature into culture.

A male camaraderie predicated on the brutal overpowering of women supplies a theme in a Mikhail Lermontov poem. A prince captures a sea princess; pulling at her braid,

Strongly he holds her—her fingers are tight—

Letting her writhe on his saddle and fight.

Back to his friends he returns through the spray,

Eager to show his companions the prey.³⁹

Occasionally brutal drives for sex and for power are transformed by the rhetoric of romantic love, as in the florid prose of a Tibetan swan maiden tale, rendered by a narrator apparently unaware of the essential contradiction in imagery: “No sooner had the youth set eyes on [the swan maiden] than he was suddenly enchained by the bonds of passion—passion which, like the pure and spotless moon reflected in water, is, on account of its unstable nature, not easily to be grasped, and like a sea-monster in a billowy torrent, is not easily to be distinguished.”⁴⁰

These stories, then, not only raise questions about relationships between men and women but also about groups differentiated according to gender, relations to a same-sex person also being reflective of how men and women interact.⁴¹ An ideal of female bonding may itself depict a fantasy based on a harsher reality. Frequently woman’s role in male-dominated societies breeds discord and competition; or a bitter situation forces a woman—such as the Algonquin mother of a swan maiden—to send her runaway daughter back to the husband she had fled from.⁴² Women may live physically together because of the different occupations that isolate them from men, but occupying the same space does not guarantee spiritual togetherness. Stories about the captured bride’s separation from her sisters or companions may express some desired communion, even the depicted helplessness of swan maidens unable to protect their captured sister perhaps speaking to some longed-for emotional attachment.

This analysis of female bonding as a motif in the swan maiden tale presupposes that it is a woman’s story, the narrator identifying with the main character. But, again, the search for the lost wife after the swan maiden escapes her husband focuses on his plight and assigns to him the active role of adventurer in pursuit of a difficult-to-achieve goal. If the swan maiden’s husband is held to be the focus of the tale’s interest, then even female solidarity will be viewed from a male vantage point. For such communion has traditionally been viewed by men with distrust, and it is an ironic aftermath of discouraging women from bonding that it has come to be believed that they are not capable of doing so. Madonna Kolbenschlag, who has studied fairy tales from a feminist point of view, explains that “women are not so comfortable in groups—chiefly because it confirms and accentuates their identity as females, a class excluded from the dominant caste in our society. In part, these feelings are introjections of a traditional male paranoia about women in groups.”⁴³ If indeed such a paranoia exists and is traditional, it is reflected when swan maiden stories combine the capture motif with the separation theme, the maiden responding in desperation to a double catastrophe.

A dual perspective permeates swan maiden narratives, whose themes can reverberate in the conscious and unconscious awareness of both men and women. But so long as male and female needs are entangled, man’s are more likely to be met in reality if not in fantasy. That some people recognize that fantasy can serve social reality⁴⁴ is strikingly evidenced in the description by anthropologist Edwin Ardener of a Cameroon ritual in which woman’s rebellion against her role leads to “therapy” in the form of her experiencing exclusive female solidarity, after which she returns to what she has recognized all along as an essentially man’s world. What makes Ardener’s study illuminating for swan maiden tales is that during her short period of female togetherness, the rebellious woman is initiated into a group of mermaids, and mermaid tales frequently form subgroups among swan maiden narratives.

The rebel enjoys with her fellow mermaids a life from which all male interests are excluded, even to the point of her learning a mermaid language that the men do not know. The initiate is secluded among women, participating in activities that act out symbolic defiance of masculinity. Her initial protest against female domesticity is recognized by her people when she symbolically kicks over a hearthstone. In effect, they acknowledge that only by allowing her to act out her discontent will they be able to reclaim her as an active member of society. It is striking that when in the Brahmana Purūravas finds Urvaśī after his search for her, she appears among a group of female companions (swans or water birds) from whom he cannot again separate her. For although it was the Gandharvas who conspired for her return to the divine realm, it is other divine nymphs who witness her obduracy in the face Purūravas’s pleas that she return to the world. A Cameroon man is, in effect, both Purūravas and a Gandharva in reverse, hoping to reclaim his mortal wife from the otherworld, tolerating her visit there and her pretense that it is her true realm because allowing her to enact such a fantasy may be the only way to get her back. As Ardener explains it, the men “feel a danger has been averted” because the woman “has been rescued from the wild,” that is, the natural world beyond the confines of village life, associated with such beings as mermaids, and is thus now “fitted for marriage with men.” There is, of course, a central paradox in the Cameroon ritual, one that Ardener acknowledges, but it is also a paradox intrinsic to woman’s relationship to her own sex. Men may distrust the influence of other women on their wives, but they also must rely on women to socialize children, particularly young female children, in accordance with the social structures men have created.⁴⁵

The implicit acknowledgment that women are strong, not weak, may account for versions of the swan maiden tale in which the captured maiden’s companions rescue their sister rather than abandon her to her fate. In a Siberian story, a bird woman’s mother-in-law defends her son’s interests by scolding his wife for joining other women to collect leaves (that is, for moving away from patriarchal culture). The older woman becomes a reason the captured woman “pined to return to her own land,” and went with her children behind the tent as some geese passed by.

“How would it be,” she [asked them], “for me to carry away my children?” The geese plucked their wings and stuck feathers on the children’s sleeves, and the wife and her children flew away together.⁴⁶

This is not the only mother-in-law who plays the swan maiden’s adversary, either by representing masculine concerns, by enslaving the younger woman out of spite for her own earlier bondage, or by viewing the younger woman as her rival.⁴⁷

The mother-in-law’s role in the story, furthermore, highlights a question concerning a so-called woman’s folklore: a female voice does not guarantee a feminist voice, any more than a woman can be counted on by another woman for protection. For example, in societies that practice female circumcision, it is usually a close female relative who comes to fetch the young girl, forcing her to submit not only to pain but also to a loss of capacity to experience sexual pleasure. By ensuring her fidelity to her husband, the older women, of course, may be realistically acting in what they perceive to be the young girl’s own long-range interests; the uncircumcised woman may not be able to marry or assume any other status among her people. With equal plausibility, a female storyteller may instruct a female audience in how to conform to patriarchy. The mother of an Algonquin swan maiden has already been cited in this regard:

[A] hunter, returning [from the hunt] saw a very beautiful girl sitting on a rock by a river, making a moccasin. And being in a canoe he paddled up softly and silently to capture her; but she, seeing him coming, jumped into the water and disappeared. On returning to her mother, who lived at the bottom of the river, she was told to go back to the hunter and be his wife; “for now,” said the mother, “you belong to that man.”⁴⁸

No wonder, then, that the captured swan maiden may utter wails of despair or may in tears lament her bondage. A hunter in an Icelandic story steals a sealskin because it is valuable, but, economic needs met, he returns for the woman whom he finds “stark naked, and weeping bitterly.”⁴⁹ This hunter’s greed is paralleled in one of the best-known of the Japanese Noh dramas, The Robe of Feathers, in which a swan maiden deplores her union with the mortal whose avaricious coveting of her garment stands in sharp contrast to the spirituality of the dance she performs when she wears the robe. In a Japanese folktale, the swan maiden similarly descends from a spiritual to a grossly material world: “she felt the cold because her clothes were thin, and she also felt pangs of hunger. So she had to go down the mountain to the village and ask a farmer for some food.”⁵⁰ He becomes her husband because she has little choice but to depend on him for protection.

Not that all male captors are indifferent to the swan maiden’s grief. Keightley recounts a “Mermaid Wife” story from the Shetland Islands, in which the hunter who has stolen the seal skin returns to find his prospective bride lamenting “in most piteous tones” not only the “loss of her sealskin robe” but also the result of that loss. She never could “hope to rejoin her family and friends below the waters, but must remain an unwilling inhabitant of the region enlightened by the sun.” In Western thought, it was once traditional to draw parallels according to which the sun dominates the earth, rationality controls instinct, and patriarchy triumphs over matriarchy, an ordering the romantic age often deliberately strove to invert. No wonder then that the mermaid recoils from the upper regions of the earth. But her captor has steeled his heart, representing to her the impossibility of her return to the waters, convincing her of what she probably suspects, that “her friends would soon give her up.” After these coercions, he softens and offers her “his heart, hand, and fortune,” indulging in a courtship that barely conceals the force behind it. The sea maiden is not deceived, however, but “finding she had no alternative, [she] at length consented to become his wife.”⁵¹

Keightley’s version infers an erotic pleasure to be derived from the swan maiden’s resistance. Not even a hint of such perverse enjoyment can be found in Thomas Croker’s analogous tale of a sea wife, in which one Dick Fitzgerald needs someone to clean his house and mother the children she will bear him. The storyteller’s sympathy lies entirely with the man left bereft when she escapes him. Ironically, the narrator elicits pity for the destitute man by establishing from the outset a soft heart that shrinks from the necessity of capturing his bride by stealing the cap that sustains her in water:

When the merrow [mermaid] saw that her little diving cap was gone, the salt tears—doubly salt, no doubt, from her—came trickling down her cheeks, and she began a low mournful cry, with just the tender voice of a newborn infant. Dick, although he knew well enough what she was crying for, determined to keep the cohuleen driuth, let her cry never so much, to see what luck would come of it. Yet he could not help pitying her; and when the dumb thing looked up in his face, and her cheeks all moist with tears, ‘twas enough to make anyone feel, let alone Dick, who had ever and always, like most of his countrymen, a tender heart of his own.⁵²

In the Malagasy story discussed above, one Adrianoro forthrightly asks his swan maiden what it is about him and his world that repels her, and she has two responses. First she doubts her husband can match her father in power and ability to protect her, “for if father speaks the thunder-bolt darts forth”; second, she seems to fear abuse: “I do not drink spirits,” for if “spirits even touch my mouth I die.”⁵³ This swan maiden is not rejecting the dominance of man so much as expressing doubt that the man’s obligation to care for her will be honored, especially if he is under the influence of alcohol. It will be seen later that a frequent constraint placed upon men in animal groom and animal bride tales is that women not be in some way mistreated. When she accepts Adrianoro’s assurances, this swan maiden willingly consents to be his bride.

Frequently the swan maiden can anticipate new pleasures and security in marriage, and these benefits will soften the capture motif. In a Welsh tale, the Lady of the Van Pools agrees to wed the man who had tossed her gifts of cheese and bread (images of genuine sustenance), and in return she brings to him her own dower of flocks and herd,⁵⁴ an exchange that symbolizes her acceptance not only of his culture but also of culture itself. Sometimes the swan maiden’s husband coaxes the fairy into submission, or she allows herself to be seduced—although, again, by concealing what is often force, romantic courtship remains a symbolic capture, the stories reflecting a modern predicament. For, the lies of individuals aside, the line between consensual sex and rape has become a legal conundrum. In one story, the aggression and violence intrinsic to a male hunter cannot be separated from the affectionate blandishments of one who would rather court than capture the swan maiden, and it is difficult to distinguish the vulnerable woman from his animal prey.

The happy hunter now exerted himself to assuage the terror of his beloved prize. Gently leading her toward his lodge, he recounted his adventures in the chase, dwelling at the same time, with many endearing words upon the charms of life upon earth. His incessant kindness so won upon her delicate nature that she consented to become his bride.⁵⁵

In a tale from Australia, a man uses rhetoric rather than weapons to lure fairy bathers out of the water, but the capture motif concealed by his method is finally unmasked.

A little persuasion succeeded in causing them to listen, each moment lessened their dread, and admiration of the stranger so quickly succeeded fear that they seemed all at once to have forgotten their life-long hatred of men, and to yield to the witchcraft young eyes possess over their fellows…. And when he took out a large soft rug of emu skin for each of the girls, and threw them on their shoulder over the dreaded wings, there did not remain one thought of flight in their hearts.⁵⁶

The stolen clothing motif has once again been inverted: human garments, possessing the power of culture, are contrasted to the wings that later in the story promise the wife her chance for freedom. Once again, the love motif has yielded to the practical requirement that the man be able to restrain his bride.

If swan maidens are portrayed as having sexual desires, these merely provide their would-be husbands with another opportunity to capture their brides. In a story from Assam, the swan maiden at first hides in a cave, resisting an apparent symbol of her natural inclinations:

But she could not hide herself for long. There was a very clever man called Nongriji Kongor. He decided to catch the mysterious girl. So he took a flower with him called “U tiew-jalyng Kteng,” and stood in front of the cave. The flower bears a very strong and charming scent. The girl was attracted by the scent and she came out to take it. But Nongriji Kongor was not such a fool that the flower could be snatched away from him. The girl tried to catch the flower but she could not. It was always at a distance from her. She could no longer resist the desire to have the flower. She came out in the open from her cave. That is what Nongriji Kongor wanted. As soon as she came out in the open he caught her. He brought her to his house and married her.⁵⁷

That surrendering to her own desires may prove the swan maiden’s undoing is a theme highlighted in a tale from Sutherlandshire that juxtaposes the submissive swan maiden type character with the traditionally treacherous siren, the former actually being defined by the male character as the latter:

A mermaid fell in love with a fisherman of Lochinver. Her lover was enamoured, but he had heard how youths ensnared by mermaids had found a watery grave. It became necessary then to make his own terms, and to arrange matters so as to assure himself. To rule a mermaid it is necessary to possess yourself, not of her person, but of the pouch and belt which mermaids wear.⁵⁸

Some swan maidens even take the initiative in courtship, again embodying both the aggressive and submissive fairy. Lessa has pointed to this feature in some Oceanic tales, which distinguishes them from what he calls the “classic version.” Rather than being transformed into a helpless and hapless being when her clothing is stolen, the supernatural woman “comes to the man of her own free will and makes amatory advances toward him, although she is seized by force.” Appearing to long for the usually mundane features of earthly life—to “disport themselves like human beings”⁵⁹—such swan maidens may desire integration into the imperfect mortal world. Such a theme makes it only that much more tragic that a debacle rather than a happy ending is characteristic of what Lessa calls the classic swan maiden tale. As Holbek points out about the versions of the stories he knows, they are more likely to end happily if the swan maiden is lost before marriage takes place and children are born; once domestic life has been firmly established, the otherworld becomes that much more threatening to the union, and the supernatural wife is unlikely to be won back.

But there has been a recent shift in how “woman’s work,” despised alike by most swan maidens and feminists, is perceived: once seen as the slave labor wives must engage in, domestic tasks (for example, the weaving done by swan maidens in the Volundarkvida) can be exalted as being among the few surviving skills that get passed from parent to child. Moreover, the domestic realm has provided space separate from that dominated by men and thus supplies women an opportunity to participate in an exclusive female community (quilting bees are an example). Thus women can “celebrate the unstoried pattern of Hestia, goddess of the hearth.”⁶⁰ This celebration of the mundane characterizes the Oceanic swan maidens singled out by Lessa, who freely choose human life; and they find their counterpart in mortal women who rebuff demon lovers who promise freedom from domesticity or those who choose a mortal husband when a divine mate is theirs for the asking. But these examples will have to await the concluding chapter of this book. Most swan maiden tales paint a dreary picture of domestic life, one that makes readily understandable the reluctance of the escaped wife to return to her husband’s world.

The Cameroon rituals described by Ardener tie the discord between man and woman to the mundane conditions of their everyday lives. The Bakweri world is divided into the village that represents their agriculturally based society, and an area outside of this fenced-in enclosure, which for them is nature and thus the “wild.” This is the natural realm of their “mermaids,” as it is the natural habitat of the swan maidens. It is into the wild that the Bakweri women venture each day to labor, “returning at evening with their back-breaking loads of wood and cocoyams, streaming with rain, odds and ends tied up with bark strips and fronds, and screaming with fatigue at their husbands.” They have returned to face additional chores, for the “Bakweri men wait in their leaking huts for the evening meal.” It is no wonder, adds Ardener, that “the women seem to be forest creatures, who might vanish one day for ever.”⁶¹ Man’s security traditionally lies in restricting his woman’s space if he can, and where he cannot, increased tension between them will result. Ironically, however, the natural world that to the swan maiden (e.g., Bakweri “forest creatures”) often spells freedom, spells to the Bakweri women only more drudgery as they forage for wood. In their exclusively female mermaid rites, during which the rebellious woman is freed from the hearth whose stone she had symbolically kicked over, Bakweri women may be invoking a more symbolic female relationship to the natural world, separating nature from culture more definitively than their lives actually allow.

But swan maiden tales raise questions concerning why men render themselves vulnerable by taking supernatural wives in the first place—even if only in their imaginations. Perhaps it is because of man’s acknowledged tendency to split the female image, attaching himself symbolically to two kinds of women inhabiting different worlds, in this way participating in a generally human rather than gender-based conflict between life as it is and life as it can only be imagined. Keeping conflicting realms separate may represent a pragmatic approach to the ensuing conflict, and some people encourage customs in which men at least have this privilege.⁶² But to marry a swan maiden and then try to domesticate her may be to set up what Hartland calls the catastrophe inherent in the swan maiden story. As will be seen, swan maidens venture or are dragged protesting into the mundane world, and then are trapped in or driven from it. Perhaps this is what Hartland implies, if not necessarily intends, when he says that the swan maiden must return to her own domain.⁶³ Yet it is difficult to believe there is not a deep meaning to the Faroese proverb reported by Thomson—“She could no more hold herself back than the seal wife could when she found her skin.”⁶⁴

Swan maiden narratives depict the tension between the wild with which woman is traditionally associated and the domestic space to which she is nonetheless assigned—in part to subdue nature. But usually the narratives leap from the capture of the wife over years to the time just before her escape, and details about the intervening years are rare. Enough variants, however, depict this time period to make it possible to recognize an emerging pattern of female drudgery and anger on the wife’s side, and sullen fear and vulnerability on the husband’s—the very situation Ardener described as the roots of the Bakweri mermaid rites.

Sometimes the swan maiden initially adapts to the mundane world and is for a time even ambivalently content in it, her children binding her to a person she will come to perceive as their father rather than her husband. A gypsy folktale poignantly tells how Russalka, the wind maiden, is captured by a mortal whom she later leaves to follow the wind, only to be recaptured when she returns for her son. Resigned, she remains with her family: “And so she Russalka, the Wood-nymph, forgot the forest for the sake of her fine son; she forgot the forest, Russalka utterly forgot the forest.”⁶⁵ Forgetfulness, virtually bordering on amnesia, is often the only means by which the captured maiden can adapt. After her clothing is stolen, a Japanese swan maiden “forgot all about the heavenly world where she had lived, and became an ordinary human girl.”⁶⁶ But not all captured brides experience such fortuitous losses of memory. An Eskimo husband is not confident that if he leaves his swan maiden wife in order to ride his kayak, she will be there at his return: “and thus it happened that he gave up kayaking altogether, until one day she declared, ‘Now thou mayest leave me without fear, for I do really love thee, and thou mayest depend on me.’”⁶⁷ Some storytellers interpret the swan maiden’s assurance as wiliness, a way of disarming the vigilant man. Her feigned contentment within the marriage is held to conceal a mere waiting period during which she calculates her means of escape:

The Finn [seal] women were said to make good housewives. Yet there was generally a longing after some previous attachment; if ever a chance occurred of recovering the essential dress, no newly formed ties of kindred could prevent escape and return to … former pleasures. This was assiduously guarded against on the one [man’s] side [and] watched on the other [woman’s].⁶⁸

Other versions are related by narrators who sympathetically recognize genuine conflict or the sad plights of swan maidens unable to adapt to the mortal realm. In a Lithuanian tale, even marriage to royalty does not assuage the swan maiden’s distress, for her husband’s world is fundamentally alienating: “Even in the king’s palace the young woman would not cheer up. She kept walking up and down, wringing her hands and weeping. She would not smile even when her daughter was born.”⁶⁹ An Icelandic seal maiden comes genuinely to care for her husband, “but did not get on so well with other people.” Often she would sit alone and stare out to sea.⁷⁰

Some mortal husbands mistakenly believe their children are guarantees that the swan maiden will not leave. A Korean man is advised that if she has at least three children, his wife “can’t fly away whereas with two she can take one under each arm.”⁷¹ It is, of course, a classic feature of the swan maiden stories that children rarely, in fact, deter the fairy’s flight. In a Visayan tale, it is precisely as she is swinging her child in a hammock that a swan maiden accidentally discovers her stolen magic wings and flies off without the infant. The narrator wonders at this flight, for she apparently had no reason to complain about her life. While she had rocked her child, her husband had been making rice soup, and thus child care is implied to be her only responsibility.⁷² In another version, a specified male narrator not only minimizes but also idealizes the swan maiden’s responsibilities: “It wasn’t many years when this wife gave birth. The baby was a girl. Indeed the child was the image of her mother. And now the mother is busy sewing and embroidering dresses for her child.” When she escapes, her husband succeeds in winning her back through a test common in folklore, picking her out from a group of seemingly identical women. The characteristic that allows him to recognize her is a sign of her mundane and domestic life: “This one, Chief, is my wife because I recognize the tiny mark of a needle here in the center of her smallest finger.” “You can take her,” says the chief, “for she is indeed your wife.”⁷³

To think that swan maidens can be content in the mundane world points to male insensitivity or obtuseness—or so a Bulgarian story suggests. The Samodiva—as the swan maiden is called—escapes from the very party that celebrates the birth of her son. When she retrieves her magic clothing, she taunts her husband:

Hear my words, O Stoian; seek not

For thy wife a Samodiva—

Samodivas are not thrifty,

Know not how to tend the children.

Said I not to thee, O Stoian,

Samodivas are not housewives?⁷⁴

Nor will heaping praise on his fairy wife for her housewifely duties keep her content, as the aforementioned Dick Fitzgerald learns, dumbfounded when his wife departs in spite of her customary way of busying “herself about the house,” nursing the two boys and girls she had given birth to.⁷⁵

In choosing one swan maiden bride from among her companions, the men in these stories characteristically pick the youngest or most beautiful, an erotic motive triumphing over practical considerations. But this is not always the case. A Welsh swan maiden’s domestic skills attract the mortal’s attention, for he seeks not so much a sexual partner as a convenient maid: “And such a servant she turned out to be! Why, she was wont to milk the cows thrice a day, and to have the usual quantity of milk each time, so that the butter was so plentiful.” Although she “was so charmingly pretty,” he stresses that it was because she was “so industrious, so skilled in every work” that he offered to make her his wife.⁷⁶ That wife equals servant is a reiterated theme when the narrator chooses to depict the couple’s domestic life. Few existences, however, are as bleak as that of the swan maiden trapped in Sutherlandshire, and those commentators who have found great beauty in the swan maiden tale could hardly have stumbled over this version. It relates how a young man “by fair means or foul” gets hold of a mermaid’s pouch and she became his “bride and bondswoman.”

There was little happiness in such a union for the poor little wife. She wearied of a husband, who, to tell the truth, thought more of himself than of her. He never took her out in his boat when the sun danced on the sea, but left her at home with the cows, and on a croft which was to her a sort of prison. Her silky hair grew tangled. The dogs teased her. Her tail was really in the way. She wept incessantly while rude people mocked at her. Nor was there any prospect of escape after nine months of this wretched life. Her powers of swimming depended on her pouch, and that was lost. What was more, she now suspected the fisherman of having cozened her out of it.⁷⁷

This was the mermaid whose captor perceived her to be a dangerous siren—that is, endowed her with traditional qualities of feminine evil and used his perceptions as an excuse for retaining power over her. The symbolism of the pouch in the context of nine months of wretchedness is hardly subtle, but it is an ambiguous symbol, for it denotes not only a female but also an individual identity that is lost with the swan maiden’s capture. The specific details in this narrative emphasize the connection between the swan maiden and ordinary housewives. The loss of beauty, moreover, points out what is dreamed of about fairyland, for there women’s lives do not degenerate into pedestrian misery. In the story of Hiawatha, it is said that in the spirit world every woman “shall also change her state and looks, and no longer be doomed to laborious tasks. She shall put on the beauty of the starlight, and become a shining bird of the air. She shall dance, and not work. She shall sing, and not cry.”⁷⁸

Essential to the otherworld’s appeal, then, is that it allows the wife to retain or somehow preserve her youthful beauty and to enjoy freedom from onerous chores—the supernatural realm, in short, reflects a life that might have been and thus once was. In “Lady Featherflight” a fairy wife hides in a tree over a spring to observe the life she sees enacted there:

Now this spring was used by all the wives of the townspeople to draw water for breakfast. No water was so sweet anywhere else; and early in the morning, they all came with pitchers and pails for a gossip, and to draw water for the kettle. The first who came was a carpenter’s wife, and as she bent over the clear spring she saw, not herself, but Featherflight’s lovely face reflected in the water. She looks at it with astonishment and cries, “What! I, a carpenter’s wife and I so handsome? No, that I won’t,” and down she threw the pitcher and off she went.⁷⁹

The townsmen, who first miss their breakfast and then their wives, want to hang Featherflight as a witch. Quickly, however, they reject the value of their wives and bid them good riddance—a comic but hardly adequate response to the situation. It has often been claimed of American folklore that it naturalizes the supernatural elements of the narratives brought over from the old world. Rather than being a mournful captured bride, Lady Featherflight represents the ordinary discontented and complaining housewife. To reduce the story to one of bickering spouses is also, however, to minimize a larger symbolic conflict, and the men whose point of view is so well represented in this tale do not have to confront a metaphysical anxiety harder to deal with than domestic squabbles.

The depiction of a magic world in which a woman need never experience drudgery leads to significant ambiguities about how these essentially human fantasies affect the telling of swan maiden stories. Is woman’s plight being sympathetically portrayed, or is her supposedly tenuous hold on cultural reality being criticized? Are men who themselves entertain erotic fantasies splitting the female image into the housewifely and maternal on one side, and the erotic on the other, experiencing their own dissatisfaction with reality but projecting their disillusionment onto the wives they do not satisfy? The disappearing swan maiden can symbolize the fleeting nature of male visions of the perfect domestic life. In the Dravidian Nights, a male storyteller uses narrative to instruct his wives about how to create a bower of bliss in their home. He relates how a young man has the ambition to be emperor of the world so that he can realize his dream of reclining on a “sofa with the daughter of Indra giving [him] betel-leaf rolls to chew, the daughter of Agni shampooing [his] legs, the daughter of Varuna singing [him] sweet songs, and the daughter of Adiseshna fanning [him] with white chauries.” Indra’s daughter is explicitly portrayed in this story as a swan maiden who must be convinced of the advantages of marriage to him, but it is difficult to perceive what benefits she would receive beyond the satisfaction of serving him. Through his divine mate, the man wins great fortune and, moreover, secures her acquiescence and help in attaining as other wives the daughters of the gods of fire, the seas, and the serpent world.⁸⁰ In this pleasure dome, there is no need to transform his female partners into household drudges.

But even in the practical world of mundane marriages, the advantages in the union appear to remain with the man. In the United States it is forthrightly argued that “married men and single women [are] much better off than married women.”⁸¹ Husbands of a growing number of runaway wives⁸²—contemporary swan maidens—prove surprisingly obtuse when asked by detectives to describe the runaway, revealing how long it had been since they had truly looked at their wives as persons, “really seen” them. One wife reported that she felt like nobody, only a “service station.”⁸³ Yet an abandoned man will usually perceive himself as his wife’s victim rather than a contributor to her unhappiness. One version of the swan maiden tale highlights this masculine point of view: a Shetlander who marries a seal maiden loves her but finds that “she made but a cold return to his affection.”⁸⁴ Here it is the man who is portrayed as suffering in the marriage, and suffering even more when his wife runs away.

Swan maiden stories supply a wide range in depicting the life of the mismatched couple: if the fairy appears content, her mortal husband will be suspicious; if she is obviously discontented, he will remain wary; if she evidences conflict, he will try to ignore her plight until the final catastrophe. As a woman’s story, the tales reflect women’s conscious awareness of why they married, and at the same time reveal that a central feature of female fantasy is that a wife has options, since few societies have allowed women choice in their roles. Indeed swan maiden tales suggest that romantic love constitutes not only a literary tradition but also a universal dream resulting from the human imagination’s capacity to imagine a better life. Woman’s supposedly greater capacity to love than man’s has been argued to be one of her strengths,⁸⁵ but it is a capacity that often redounds to man’s benefit more than her own. It has been argued, moreover, that cultures “use their myths of love in much the same way as do individuals their central sexual fantasy: to express their deeper wishes which are utterly at odds with the accepted ideologies of the man-woman relationship.”⁸⁶

Rather than being a love story, the swan maiden tale exposes such myths of love to uncover cultural reality. The fairy bride’s abandonment of her mortal husband parallels a real woman’s abandonment of expectations for happiness. But her husband will be convinced that in her search for happiness, his wife is insatiable, too unstable to ground herself in reality. For as a man’s story, the swan maiden tale speaks to a deeply rooted male fear, perhaps going back to a young boy’s separation from his mother, that his wife will leave him and that his hold on her is precarious. What these stories also portray is the man’s incapacity to distinguish among and then integrate the motives that led him to desire a swan maiden wife, because to confront his own dependencies would subvert his position as the dominant partner in the relationship. Ultimately, rather mundane concerns prove overwhelming, and he seems incapable of grasping the possibility that merely providing for them is not enough to satisfy his spouse.

It sometimes happens, though, that swan maiden tales reflect a human fantasy that goes beyond gender differences. It is implied that the conflicts that beset the mismatched pair could be evaded altogether if the couple lived in the swan maiden’s world. Thus in the Brahmana Purūravas ascends to dwell with Urvaśī among the demigods; and swans that can soar above the mortal world evoke what Kinsley describes as a metaphor for the complete transcendence of the “limitations and imperfections of the phenomenal world.”⁸⁷ It is not unusual for the swan maiden’s husband to join her in the otherworld. Such versions have been explained as survivals of matrilocal cultures,⁸⁸ the bride’s unhappiness on earth being an expression of her anguish at being plucked from a protective family and thrust into the essentially alien environment of her husband’s people. The story can thus be read as a protest against the supplanting of matrilocal by patrilocal structures. Putting evolutionary theories aside, what may have survived is essentially human and timeless: a symbolic regression from the reality principle to pure wish fulfillment may account for the married pair’s escape to the swan maiden’s world. For if hers is a place where people are freed from the pains of both the human condition and their socially defined roles, it would not be illogical to conceive of the swan maiden’s husband as a potential Tannhäuser who follows his goddess to some fantasized realm.

In a story from South America, the supernatural otherworld offers release from the greed and injustice of the human world. One Juan Martin hears how once a year seven beautiful ducks appear on a lake, capable of being caught with a rosary. This admixture of paganism and Christianity suggests that worldly and unworldly paradises have combined to offer a sanctioned escape from the mundane. As one of the enchanted water birds explains,

Once there was a great temple here where the Indians worship their god. But when the white men came and wanted our gold and emeralds, and even our lives, my father put a powerful magic on us, and we went under the water. We come up only once a year, for one day, as golden ducks. Then we go back down to our palace at the bottom of this lake. But now that you have broken our magic with your rosary, we cannot go back. We will all be unhappy.

Instead of retaining the water bird by force, converting her to the values of his world, Martin follows her into the lake. The story ends with a suggestion that such a magic realm might entice anyone who could gain access to it: “Where is that lake? I mustn’t tell you. It’s not good for you to know. [Too] many boys and girls, and even grownups, might leave their homes” to find it.⁸⁹

Puzzled commentators on the swan maiden story wonder why swan maidens leave, and among their answers lies a conviction that the fairy wives are just obeying their nature⁹⁰ as supernatural beings—as if the laws governing narrative were self-referential and had no basis in actual life. Again, Hartland contends that as civilizations advance, marriage itself becomes more complex, as does the reason for the separation. Yet he can think of no other cause for the star maiden to return to the sky except that she is homesick, adding that “homesick heroines are not very interesting.”⁹¹ In fact they are quite interesting, being the antithesis of those occasional swan maidens who are drawn by the human world rather than imprisoned by it, and homesickness figures as part of a significant conflict. The resulting tension seems to have appealed to the ironic imagination of some storytellers, who have conceived of the very life that restricts the swan maiden as providing the means for her escape.

In a Melanesian version, Tagoro takes the swan maiden to weed his people’s garden, a symbol of culture and social communality that renders threatening the swan maiden’s essential rootedness in the natural, that is, asocial, world. (One manifestation of the supernatural is, paradoxically, nature conceived of as totally untouched by human culture.) Her husband’s people remain guarded and hostile, ever ready to protect themselves against this perceived intrusion into their lives: as she weeds and touches the yam vines, ripe tubers come into her hand. Tagoro’s brothers think she is digging the yams before their time and scold her; she goes into the house and sits weeping at the foot of the pillar, and as she weeps her tears fall, wearing away the earth pattered down upon her buried wings. She hears the sound, takes up her wings, and flies back to heaven.⁹² The Jesup of North America similarly relate how a people who benefit from the swan maiden nonetheless destroy their good luck: a man “lived with his Goose wife for some time; and when the people were starving, her father sent them food. But one day something was said that offended her, and she flew away.”⁹³

An equally foolish husband from Java ignores the swan maiden’s prohibition that he never look into the pot where their rice is boiling. One day, while she is at the river washing clothes (perhaps a variation on the bathing woman’s stolen garments), he

accordingly … raised the lid, but saw nothing in the pot except boiling water and a single grain of rice; and so, replacing the cover, he awaited his wife’s return. When she came, she hurried to the pot and looked in, only to find the single grain of rice, since the magic power by which she had hitherto been able to produce food miraculously had been destroyed by her husband’s curiosity. This, of course, made her angry, because henceforth she was obliged to labour and to prepare rice for every meal in the usual manner.⁹⁴

It is when she comes to the bottom of their food store that she finds her missing garment and escapes her husband’s world.

Sometimes the swan maiden’s husband appears more careless than heedless. In an Icelandic story, he goes to church alone (that she does not accompany him is a sign not only of her resistance to society but also of the essential threat the seal maiden’s origins in nature pose to a Christian world), leaving in his everyday clothing the key to the place where he had hidden her animal skin.⁹⁵ That the husband of another swan maiden had not thought to destroy his wife’s feather robe is treated as equal carelessness—if the “foolish man” had burned or otherwise destroyed the wife’s skin, she could never have fled⁹⁶ (the destruction of the animal mate’s skin is an important motif that will be taken up again in later chapters). But other husbands are portrayed as merely naive, such as the Eskimo husband who takes his wife at her word that it is all right to leave her alone in their house,⁹⁷ or the Polish husband who trustingly returns the swan maiden’s wings after their church wedding.⁹⁸ In a Korean tale, the husband remorsefully contemplates his wife’s capture: “I stole her person and I stole her heart. See how sometimes her rosy cheeks turn pale with sad thoughts about her dress. I must tell her about it now. Perhaps it will bring peace to her mind.”⁹⁹ All of these men discover their swan maidens have fled, and such outcomes might reinforce for a male audience the need to maintain a forceful grip on an ever potentially faithless wife.

When a husband is obtuse or insensitive to his wife’s needs, less sympathy is evoked for him than when he blunders—however stupidly. A significant example is the Polynesian legendary hero Tawhaki, whose offense highlights the role gender itself plays in the tension between the fairy wife and her mortal husband. Tawhaki forfeits his entire family when he is repulsed by the birth of a female child, for he had promised his fairy wife that a daughter would be treated exactly as a son. It is common for male children to be valued over female, and some societies actually mourn the birth of a girl. But Tawhaki’s disappointment is so offensively expressed that both spouse and child flee to the otherworld. His search is in fact for his daughter, not his wife, his ability to win back his spouse perhaps being the result of his new ability to value woman.¹⁰⁰

For a man to devalue woman is also to give himself permission to be unfaithful to her. A man’s mistress follows him home in one story, confirming his fairy wife’s fears that he has broken an essential taboo in their marital relationship.¹⁰¹ But the wife’s vulnerability in the face of a rival also illuminates a striking feature in some versions of the swan maiden tale, which often makes clear that in entering the human realm, the fairy is as subject to mutability as any human woman. The Sutherlandshire mermaid is not the only captured bride to lose her beauty in marriage or to worry about her fading looks. The stolen garment or skin can symbolically represent a youth sacrificed in the service of a man. A seal maiden extracts from her husband an agreement that although he may hide her skin, he must keep it in good condition, wet and supple. On the day she makes her escape, she finds it as fresh as the day he took it from her on the beach.¹⁰² A goose girl who “dried [her] goose-skin and put it away” after being captured cannot prevent her husband from hiding it; but when she later finds it, “she chewed it till it was soft as when first removed.”¹⁰³ In contrast, a runaway porpoise wife throws herself into the sea, frustrated, however, because her tail has become so dried out it has lost its buoyancy and she cannot maneuver as she once could in her natural element.¹⁰⁴

In short, the swan maiden concerned to regain some previous attractiveness or power can be conceived of as middle aged by the time she manages to free herself from her mortal ties, and it would appear that part of the fantasy embodied in at least some of these tales is that even in her stay on earth, the effects of time have been evaded. This theme suggests another way to read a swan maiden story from Greenland: “the woman does not recover her original feather-dress, but she collects feathers and makes new feather-dresses for herself,” after which she flies away.¹⁰⁵ Doubtless, her skill and ingenuity in escaping her husband reflect the important role Eskimo women play in the survival of their group, especially in fashioning protective clothing, but the new feather dress seems analogous to the well-preserved sealskin or the renewed gooseskin. But probably no swan maiden goes as far as the Bulgarian Samodiva, who, having exercised her ingenuity by tricking her husband into returning her stolen dress, returns to her own land, where her virginity is restored during a ritual bath and the birth of her child is quite literally canceled out.¹⁰⁶

Still another way that a man undermines his marriage to a swan maiden is to manifest the violent aggression that subdued her in the first place. An Algonquin story relates how two captured water fairies witness the hostility between their mortal husbands and resolve to escape the murderous behavior of human beings.¹⁰⁷ A Musquakie bird wife is similarly frightened by her human husband, and her concern extends not only to herself but also to her people. Although North American tribes frequently tell stories that link the acquisition of an animal wife with success in hunting or special luck in acquiring a seemingly endless food supply, in this case a hunter’s brutal destruction of a duck wife’s people is mirrored in the way her husband commands her to obey him:

The girl was a good wife. She could not talk. He said: “Don’t go to the river.” She did not go. One day a hunter went there. He had many dead ducks. He said: “Cook these ducks.” She was scared, and ran to the river and swam away. The young man could not find her. He never liked any wife he had as well as that duck-girl.¹⁰⁸

In this version, hunter and husband are at first separate characters, but they merge to form a generalized aggressive male figure who first prevents the woman’s contact with water, her native element, and then commands her to turn against her kind. In this combined persona, he comes to represent a particularly brutal form of patriarchy.

Whatever the source of the husband’s blunder, his wife gains the opportunity she has awaited to escape the marriage. Ancient folklore motifs are frequently reflected in contemporary accounts of runaway wives, such as the one who develops an aversion for the husband who refers to her only as “‘the wife,’” and who uses the car he buys for her convenience as a vehicle in which she can embark on another life.¹⁰⁹ Feminine duplicity is a given in some swan maiden tales, such as the one that describes how “female curiosity and cunning were always more than a match for male care and caution; and the [seal] woman always got the slip.”¹¹⁰ Greek swan maidens are depicted as equally wily, and men are enjoined not to think that it is sufficient to capture them. The sequel to the Greek swan maiden narratives is held to be discouraging, for although the fairy is a good wife in the “commonplace estimation,”

though her skill in domestic duties be as proverbial as her beauty, she either turns her charms and her cunning to such account as to discover the hiding-place of her stolen kerchief, or, failing this, so mopes and pines over her work that her husband worn down by her sullenness and persistent silence decides to risk all if he can restore her lightheartedness.¹¹¹

A Chinese husband is similarly manipulated: the swan maiden “often asked him where he had hidden her fairy dress. He would never tell her, until one day she asked so often and so caressingly that he eventually betrayed his secret. Then she seized the dress, jumped onto a cloud, and flew away.”¹¹²

Not all swan maidens count on wearing their husbands down. Again, an Eskimo wife uses the time when her husband is away to fashion new wings to replace her hidden ones;¹¹³ others trick their husbands or other members of the family who have access to the stolen garment or animal skin. It is possible to compare versions in which the swan maiden plays an active part in retrieving her clothing with those in which her discovery is purely accidental. Sometimes there is a correlation between woman’s status in a society and the swan maiden’s exercise of ingenuity in effecting her escape. Bulgarian Turkish women may supply an example, for according to Lucy Garnett, their work in the fields makes them valuable to their fathers, and they marry later in life, leading a “freer life, not only than that led by the Bulgarian townswomen, but by the generality of Greek peasant women.”¹¹⁴ It is not surprising, then, that their swan maiden, the Samodiva, takes the initiative to secure her own release by exploiting the egotistical weakness of a husband who treats her like a mere possession. It will be remembered that the Samodiva escapes the day he celebrates the birth of their son. Carousing with his male companions, he boasts of his wife’s ability to dance and, like Ibsen’s Torvald Helmer, offers her performance as entertainment for his friends’ pleasure.¹¹⁵ When the Samodiva argues that she dances best with her magic dress, he unwittingly or perhaps dull-wittedly returns it, and she leaves him with the taunt that she had warned him Samodivas are neither good housewives nor mothers.¹¹⁶

It has already been noted that for some folklorists, the wife’s flight from her family is actually the beginning of the story, the capture and the couple’s life together constituting introductory elements even when lengthy. And it is true that some swan maidens leave hints or even clear instructions about how they may be found, virtually guaranteeing a reunion with their human spouses, the reconciliation eliminating what some storytellers find the most disturbing element in the tale, that the runaway wife usually leaves behind not only her husband but also their children. Her return to her family allays concerns about what will happen to the children, or to the man who cannot care for them without her, or to a society undermined by runaway wives. The problems surrounding the runaway are also features of complementary stories about mortal women who enter the swan maiden’s domain by eloping with what is often the consort she left in the otherworld—a demon lover.