Читать книгу In Search of the Swan Maiden - Barbara Fass Leavy - Страница 11

As their story develops in Sanskrit literature, the matter of why Purūraas and Urvaśī separate becomes ambiguous. The Rig Veda reveals an underlying and apparently gender-based hostility that splits the pair; the Brabmana emphasizes the Gandharvas’ plot to reclaim the nymph who dared to prefer a mortal. That triangular relationships may objectify internal strife can be seen in the development of a theme in three seal maiden tales. In the first, the captured wife escapes her mortal husband, after which she plunges into the sea “where a male seal came up by her side—he had all the time been lying out there waiting for her.”¹ A Shetland tale forges a stronger link between her discontent on land and the irresistible pull of the sea: the “lady would often steal alone to the desert strand, and, on a signal being given, a large seal would make his appearance, with whom she would hold, in an unknown tongue, an anxious conference.” Escape, however, does not fully resolve her dilemma and lingering conflict follows her to the otherworld: “before she dived to unknown depth, she cast a parting glance at the wretched Shetlander, whose despairing looks excited in her breast a few transient feelings of commiseration. ‘Farewell,’ said she to him: ‘I loved you very well when I resided upon earth, but I always loved my first husband much better.’”²

The third story dramatizes her conflict in a battle between her husband and the bull seal. Sensitive to his wife’s unhappiness, the man would take her to the sea, hoping she would derive solace from her natural element. On one such occasion he fights the seal, and after he staggers home weak with loss of blood, his wife confesses that although she left her seal mate for love of him, she often experiences an impulse to “return to her own kith and kin among the Seal-folk.” At such times the bull seal would seek her human spouse in order to kill him.³ Two important themes have been introduced in this version: that the otherworldly lover appears in response to an unvoiced signal from the troubled wife; but also that when she runs away, she does not so much desert her present family as return to an earlier existence she conceives of as rightfully hers.⁴

Ruth Benedict has argued that among the Zuñi it is believed that union with a supernatural being prepares a human for marriage. In Indian mythology, the Gandharvas are traditionally one of the “three immortal husbands of [a] bride before she marries a mortal.”⁵ But the return of Urvaśī to the Gandharvas and the seal maiden to her seal lover reverses the direction according to which unions with an otherworldly mate yield to the necessity of human marriage. The universal popularity of demon lovers in folklore and myth suggests the dialectical interaction between a fantasized transcendence of the mundane and the descent to reality. But triangular relationships produce guilt, the woman’s anxious dread being revealed when the supernatural mate is associated with the hellish. One of his ghastlier forms is the revenant, a specter returned from the dead.

In Cornwall, where there are many legends of drowned sailors who return to visit their lovers, one story depicts the protracted grief of a woman whose fiancé has perished in a storm. Rather than finding another man to wed, she instead cries night and day for her lover’s return. “Nothing would pacify her, until one night, when a storm swept the coast, she was aroused from her bed, believing that she could hear her name being called above the screaming of the wind.” Beholding the figure of her betrothed standing below, “soaking wet, with seaweed hanging from his boots and hair and his facing shining deathly white,” she runs out into the night to follow this specter, “no man of flesh and blood but a ghost returned from the sea.” No further word of her is heard in the area.⁶ In some of its narrative motifs, this story evokes one of the most widespread of the demon lover narratives, the ballad “James Harris (The Daemon Lover)” (Child 243). The number of versions, both in England and in the United States, where it is one of the most popular of the ballads brought from the British Isles,⁷ offers a rare opportunity to discern what Bynum calls the many logical possibilities contained in a narrative pattern constructed from multiple variants.

The ballad appears to have originated first in a printed broadside (Child A), subsequently giving rise to an oral tradition.⁸ Two major strains seem to have developed. As Burrison describes it, Child A crossed the border into Scotland where the revenant became a demon lover. In Child B, “The Distressed Ship Carpenter,” the seducer is not described in supernatural terms, and all that is reported is that the runaway wife and the mariner were drowned and never again heard of. It was usually version B, appearing more than a century after the broadside, that emigrated with settlers to America. Whether the supernatural elements of A combined with version B before or after the emigration is, according to Burrison, not clear. But in the United States the naturalized explanations for the wife’s flight and fate prevailed. The history of the ballad is significant because it supplies another example of how this world and the supernatural realm interact (even if the supernatural elements are expunged, their very absence remains significant by way of contrast with the supernatural versions) in the life of a woman who seeks elsewhere the satisfaction lacking in her domestic life.

The broadside was published as “A Warning for Married Women.” One Mrs. Jane Reynolds behaves in an exemplary fashion while her sailor fiancé is at sea and for many years after he is reported dead, but finally marries a carpenter. When her seaman reappears as a “spirit in the night,” but speaking “like to a man,” she follows him, to disappear as did the bereaved Cornwall woman:

And so together away they went

From off the English shore,

And since that time the woman-kind

Was never seen no more.

Her distraught husband commits suicide, and the ballad concludes by voicing concern for the fatherless (not motherless) children, suggesting a pervasive masculine point of view whether or not the broadside singer was a man. Jane Reynolds is a cautionary example of the havoc wreaked when women abandon their responsibilities in order to pursue their own pleasures. Still, the ballad allows its singers the possibility of following the thread of her fantasy in perceiving of her marriage rather than her flight as an act of infidelity—if not to her former lover then to a self-realization that domestic life denies her. The British Isles variants of “The Demon Lover” will from here on be referred to as the Child versions; there are eight of them. In the United States can be found hundreds of published versions, usually entitled “The House Carpenter.”⁹ Much has been made by commentators of the so-called rationalization of most American versions, in which a promiscuous seaman rather than a revenant lures the housewife away.¹⁰ Similarly, the ship on which the pair elopes sinks, a completely plausible event, even if implying some kind of divine retribution. In Child E, which introduces some of the most famous lines in the ballad, the so-called hills of heaven and hell stanzas, the woman’s damnation is made explicit. After she elopes, the runaway wife asks her lover to identify bright, shining hills in the distance. He replies that they are the hills of heaven, where she “shall never be.” And when she asks him about a black hill that looks “so dark” to her, he taunts her with, “‘O it is the hill of hell’” where “‘you and I shall be,’” thereupon sinking the ship in a flash of fire. The exchange reflects both religious and popular beliefs concerning the devil, but the woman’s inquiry also suggests that subjective and objective reality war with each other, both being reflected in the runaway’s uncertain perceptions of the landscape.

Whether the wife elopes with a sailor or the devil, the love triangle still places her between two modes of existence. Sailors, after all, represent that which is remote from the day-to-day life: they travel, journeying to exotic places, and are for long periods free of domestic ties. A restless wife could project onto the sailor’s life her own longings. Both natural and supernatural versions of Child 243, then, warn that wives are at peril if they act on their discontent. But the ballad may owe its power less to its threat of death or the runaway wife’s damnation than to its realistic depiction of her conflict and torment.

The ballad usually begins when the seaman appears, sometimes claiming to have sacrificed an advantageous marriage in order to return to his former love. The housewife at first proclaims her attachment to her good husband, but is unable to resist asking what her lover might offer to tempt her away. When he describes the ship luxuriously appointed to receive her, she kisses her children goodbye, instructs them to look after their father, dresses in her most splendid attire, and departs. Soon, however, she regrets what she has left behind, but her remorse comes too late and the boat sinks. What happens to her abandoned spouse and children provides the conclusion to the Child broadside but is only occasionally the concern of later balladeers. When codas do exist, they add a significant layer of meaning to an already complex story.

The demon lover often appears when the wife is particularly vulnerable to his appeal. The broadside relates that the carpenter is on a three-day journey from home, and that a “spirit in the night / Came to the window of his wife.” The link between her husband’s absence and the sudden appearance of the demon is more than a plot detail. For the broadside emphasizes the woman’s good character; she has never been known the “wanton for to play.” If, after she is married, mundane reality causes her to idealize her dead fiancé, it would seem that her fantasies have been ordinarily repressed. But without the presence of her husband, she is likely to give in to subversive impulses. Thus this warning to married women may be extended to husbands and perhaps entire societies, which seem to be enjoined to control their women.

That the demon lover subverts the wife’s good intentions is suggested in two versions from Virginia. In one, she admits to pent-up yearnings:

“Come in, come in, my own true love,

Come in, come in,” said she,

“I haven’t spoken a word to my own true love

In five or seven years.

I haven’t spoken a word to my own true love,

In five or seven years.”

In the other, “come in” is not so emphatically repeated, and the time of separation is shortened, but the effect is heightened urgency: “‘For it’s been over three quarters of a year, / Since I spoke one word to thee.’”¹¹

Other wives are less receptive and must be cajoled, the ballads depicting stereotypes of female weaknesses. In a version from New Hampshire, the lover exploits a seemingly peculiar female sentimentality, comparing himself to a bird mourning for the absence of its true mate.¹² And from Virginia comes a variant that depicts woman’s supposed propensity to lust:

“When I was a-lying across my bed,

And his hand across my breast,

He made me believe by the faults of his tongue,

That the sun rose in the west.”¹³

Here, physiological detail combines with metonymy to create an erotically ambiguous image of the demon’s lovemaking. Ordinarily, however, the seduction is more verbal than physical, pitched to latent discontent rather than sexual desire.

Whatever the sources of temptation, the housewife ordinarily remains concerned with practical matters: in Child B she asks what her lover could “maintain” her on if she leaves with him, and similar questions are posed in C, E, and F. Typically, he offers splendid ships and mariners to protect and amuse her. Although some narrators believe she is taken in by promises of prosperity, in one variant, as Tristram Coffin has noted, she tells her seducer she has no need of his wealth. This may be the variant in which she proudly proclaims, “Rest assured, I’m not so poor, / As to have to marry for clothes.”¹⁴ Her reasons for eloping are not simple and what it is that she does want has to be perceived across the ballad’s wide tradition.

For economic deprivation is insufficient to explain the runaway’s motives or the wide appeal of “The Demon Lover.” Nonetheless, promises of luxury do play an important part in the ballad, for such enticements have symbolic as well as literal meanings. Both British and American variants employ imagery that links the woman to the ship that carries her away, an association possibly influenced in part by the convention that assigns to boats a feminine gender. Sometimes the vessel and sometimes the wife is splendidly decked out. In Child F, the ship’s finery, sails “o the taffetie” and “masts of the beaten gold,” promise the fulfillment of the wife’s dreams. But they do not connect her inner and outer states as fully as do American versions that create out of her fine adornments not only a metaphor for what she seeks but also a moral judgment.

Perhaps these American variants are influenced by Child E, in which the ship’s luxury is paralleled by the portrait of the woman succumbing to the demon’s spells.

As they were walking up the street,

Most beautiful for to behold,

He cast a glamour oer her face,

And it shone like the brightest gold.

To cast a glamour is deceptively to allure, and the wife’s very appearance speaks to the fantasy that grips her.

In other versions, how she looks reveals her disregard for the society that will judge her: dressed in her very best, she “glistened and glittered” as “proudly she walked” to the banks of the sea.¹⁵ In one variant, she “dressed up all so gay, / Just to leave her house carpenter,”¹⁶ while yet another ballad makes clear that her ostentatious “richery” reveals how improper a wife she is: as she “shined and she glittered,” she boldly walked the “streets of Purity.” While “richery” has been explained as a contraction of “rich array,”¹⁷ this does not contradict the singer’s possible intention to contrast purity with greed and corruption.

Colors often denote the wife’s fall from decency. One housewife dons a “scarlet robe” to walk “the downward road.”¹⁸ But other narrators soften this judgment: from Arkansas comes a ballad in which the color green is associated with the wife’s dressing herself “all neat and clean.”¹⁹ In another version, however, color is used to signify the runaway’s and perhaps the balladeer’s ambivalence.

She dressed herself in scarlet red,

Her waist with maiden green.

The contradictory colors are joined in a version from Missouri:

She whirled herself all in her room,

And she dressed herself in scarlet-green.

She shone as bright as a morning star

As she walked the streets alone.²⁰

Coffin has noted that as a ballad’s narrative tradition develops, plot details are diminished in importance, yielding to lyric intensity.²¹ As the woman dresses in colors that contrast purity with hedonistic impulses, her very isolation emphasizes how, in her conflict, she has placed herself outside the boundaries of her society. Alone, she is rendered thus both deviant and pitiful. Even the vessel that carries her away has become less a symbolic wonderland than a vehicle that conveys her towards freedom; but what it is she longs to be free of must be discerned in other versions of the ballad.

Some clues to what the runaway wife seeks can be found in the destination to which she believes herself bound. The hills of heaven and hell stanzas depict her error in confusing an earthly with a heavenly paradise. But the eloping lovers’ destination varies from ballad to ballad. Often local geography or the requirements of rhyme will convey a promise that the wife will be taken to, for example, the banks of Tennessee or Maree.²² Maree, evoking a more generalized word for the sea,²³ begins to substitute symbolism for geography. When in another version the demon lover promises that they will go to “‘where the grass grows green, / On the banks of Italy,’”²⁴ the ballad moves closer to the real point of the wife’s departure from her husband and babies. Italy implies a journey to a more remote and exotic land than localized rivers could suggest, heightening the contrast between what is imagined and what is left behind. A perceptive narrator from Maine bypasses geography altogether and gets to the heart of the matter, describing no particular place but rather the “isle of sweet liberty,”²⁵ and another singer tells how the wife is promised she will reach the “banks of sweet relief.”

What she seeks relief from may be suggested by another version in the same collection in which the wife asks not how her lover will keep her from poverty, but rather how he will protect her “from hard slavery,”²⁶ a word that denotes enforced labor but at the same time connotes a personal identity swallowed up by a role not necessarily of her choosing, the woman’s drudgery being matched perhaps only by monotony. For in Child F the wife is promised not only luxury but diversion by “four-and-twenty bold mariners, / And music on every hand.” A narrator from the Southwest similarly depicts a respite from tedium and seems willing to sacrifice the ballad’s logic to make the point. For the wife asks not what her lover will “maintain” her on, but what he will “entertain” her on, to keep her from slavery.²⁷ Perhaps the singer’s memory was faulty; the linking of “entertain” and “slavery” is nonetheless not so illogical.

Her desire to escape home conflicts, however, with the security the wife is often reluctant to give up, and she may seek assurances from her demon lover that she will be safe with him. He understands her very well and in Child B, as well as in a version from Maine, the demon promises that his mariners will not only row her along in the ship but “keep [her] from overthrow”²⁸—a pledge that implies not only physical but also spiritual safety. In Child E the demon manipulatively conveys the false assurance that the need for both luxury and security will be met:

“I’ll build my love a bridge of steel,

All for to help her oer;

Likewise webs of silk down by her side,

To keep my love from the cold.”

And in a ploy to keep her quiet when she repents her flight with him, the seducer in an American ballad offers the ultimate deception, that her elopement is revocable, and that she will soon enjoy the comfort of her “own happy home, / On the banks of old Tennessee.”²⁹ As a point of destination Tennessee may not be compelling; as a place to return to, it may be very much so.

For the runaway wife’s essential attachment to the mundane is reflected in the broadside and in subsequent versions by her concern for her family, almost always her children: in the broadside (Child A) she asks, “If I should leave my children small, / Alas! what would they do?” She also expresses guilt over her husband’s disgrace. A “carpenter of great fame,” he would experience a loss of status (she does not infer any emotional loss, any tie to herself). Although the wife cries “for the man [she] left behind” in Child E, and in other variants asks her children to look after their father, it is rare that she regrets the loss of her spouse. When asked by her seducer if she weeps for her husband, she corrects him and expresses remorse over her deserted baby.³⁰ Atypical, then, is a ballad from North Carolina in which the lover asks if she weeps for her children and learns that she misses her house carpenter.³¹ Perhaps an error in memory has caused this reversal, but it is more likely that different balladeers have varying conceptions of what first drives the woman to flight and then to repentance.

Sometimes, the remorseful runaways of “The Demon Lover” ballads drown themselves or otherwise express despair. Their dismay is comparable to the expressed ruefulness of women who in recent years perceive that in a man’s world, their husbands fare better than they do when they leave their homes.³² From North Carolina comes a ballad that could speak to their predicament:

“Well, my house carpenter is still at home,

And living very well,

While my poor body is drowning in the sea,

And my soul is bound for hell.”³³

The husband’s importance is heightened when the ballad singer’s attention turns to what happens to him after his wife departs. For ironically enough, despite the ballad’s various titles, “James Harris or the Demon Lover” and “The House Carpenter,” neither the husband nor his devilish rival is the ballad’s focus of attention.

If the argument holds true that when the ballad came to America, both old world signifiers—“Demon Lover” and “James Harris”—were inappropriate, since the latter is not mentioned in the ballads and the former is based on supernatural motifs,³⁴ so might it be contended that “The House Carpenter” is also a misleading title, since the husband is more often talked about than active in the narrative. Moreover, all of these titles obscure the ballad’s real interest, the conflicted wife whose neglect in the ballads’ titles parallels her lack of personal identity in the domestic realm. In the broadside, the four concluding stanzas emphasize her diminished importance, being given over instead to her husband’s suicide and the plight of the children left, significantly, without a father. But usually the husband and father survives, to curse (as in Child B) all seafaring men: “They ruined me, a ship-carpenter, / By deluding away my wife.” The husband thus remains oblivious to his wife’s discontent and, in a piece of psychological realism, evades any responsibility for the catastrophe. It may be asking more than even a vast ballad tradition could yield that the husband evidence any self-awareness of shortcomings that would cause his wife’s flight, but his lack of insight heightens his wife’s predicament.

Two variants from West Virginia provide sharp contrasts about the husband’s life after his wife’s elopement. In one, she is drowned, her baby is dead, and its “father roams all over the world,” unable to foresee any “pleasure” in his existence. In the other, however, he and his children easily get on with their lives:

O now her child is growing up,

Her husband doing well,

While this fair lady lies in the bottom of the sea,

And her soul is doomed to hell.³⁵

The husband’s role becomes truly problematic, however, when the question arises of just what that role is. For although the ballads remain fairly stable from version to version, borrowings from other ballads have been noted, and one of these suggests that some ballad singers were interested in developing themes surrounding the father left alone to care for his children. In order to do so while remaining within a ballad tradition, they drew on other songs for additional material.³⁶

In one version, the runaway wife pauses at home to wonder about her child’s well-being.

“But who will shoe your pretty little feet,

And who will glove your hand,

And who will kiss your sweet little lips,

When I’m in a foreign land?”³⁷

Her question proves no less than an inquiry into the relative importance of mothers and fathers in their children’s lives, into the extent to which women are necessary to their children’s welfare.

In four versions that contain the borrowed stanzas, there is a crucial difference in response to this inquiry, and, significantly it is a difference related to just who is answering the wife’s query. In two instances her child replies to the question, and the mother alone is conceived of as supplying its emotional needs. The father is credited only with the economic welfare of his family, shoeing his baby’s feet and gloving its hand. In one instance, the child tells its mother that “no one shall kiss my sweet little lips, / When you’re in a foreign land,”³⁸ and in the other version her baby looks forward to her kisses when she returns, perhaps indicating some disbelief that she plans to be gone forever.³⁹ Each time, the child makes a blatant appeal to its mother’s love as well as to her conscience, but these are the very ties to her old existence that she seeks to break.

When, in the other two versions, the demon lover picks up the question, he assures the mother that her husband can supply all the child’s needs, that he “will kiss its rosy little lips”⁴⁰ when the woman is gone. The father, that is, can adequately supply both economic and emotional sustenance:

Papa will kiss its little cheek,

And also shoe its feet,

And also sleep in its lily-white arms

While we’re sailing for dry land.⁴¹

The seducer’s assurance that her family as well as she will be safe is part of his deception, or so the ballad’s audience could probably be counted on to understand. But a listener would need to pay close attention to perceive that it is the lover, not the narrator, who responds to the critical question. Like the wife, the ballad’s audience must confront this challenge to the traditional belief that only a mother could adequately raise a child.

Whose voice is heard in the “The Demon Lover” ballad significantly affects its themes. Again, the husband’s imprecations concerning the bad morals of sailors reflects his lack of self-awareness, as well as his inability to comprehend his wife. In a profound sense, he does not know who she is. Frequently, however, the wife herself speaks the final curse, either as she and the boat sink or as a voice from the dead. In such versions, it is possible to distinguish between wives who are as deficient in insight as their husbands, and those who recognize that their fate reflects their choices. One wife damns “all sea men” who have robbed her of her family and taken away her life,⁴² whereas another identifies a curse on all women who “would their baby leave / And sail the raging sea.”⁴³ The turbulent ocean provides an apt metaphor for the woman’s plight: as suggested earlier, the ballad’s power lies less in the outcome of its plot than in its depiction of the wife’s conflict, the two men who lend the ballad tradition its names being symbolic projections of the worlds she must choose between. In delivering the ballad’s final lines, some narrators perceive this essential dilemma, others are more obtuse. A singer from Maine cautions mothers against selling their babies “for gold,”⁴⁴ and one from Virginia warns young girls not to leave their house carpenters to “go with a man on sea,”⁴⁵ portraying the popular stereotype of the sailor with women in every port. A survey of the ballad’s endings suggests that where the conclusion picks up complexity, it is because the narrator grants wife and/or husband some self-awareness.

Commentary on “The Demon Lover” ranges from the rather naive view that it depicts “man’s errant way with women,”⁴⁶ or that it portrays a “foolish, faithless wife,”⁴⁷ to Lomax’s complex analysis of the ballad. He contends that the folk songs most popular in the backwoods were “a selection from that lore of vehicles for fantasies, wishes, and norms of behaviour” that corresponded “to the emotional needs of pioneer women in America.” For, says Lomax, “no fantasy could have been better calculated to reinforce the Calvinist sexual morality of our ancestors” than this story of the demon lover who leads a wife to temptation, transgression, and punishment for sin. He contends (without documentation, however) that “The Demon Lover” is among those ballads that were “women’s songs, attached to the household and the fireside.”⁴⁸ Significantly, a collector of Texas folklore has described how he recognized Scott’s version of “The Daemon Lover” because as a child he had heard his mother sing it so often,⁴⁹ and it is fascinating to speculate about the psychological impact on young men of such an early exposure to “The Demon Lover” ballad—sung not only by the first woman in their lives but also the symbol of secure hearth and home.

In both “The Demon Lover” ballads and swan maiden tales, a woman marries reluctantly. The swan maiden is constrained by the loss of her feathers, by the symbolic absence of choice in her life; the wife of the ballads marries after the death of a lover who in her dreams comes to represent a paradisal alternative to her actual existence. In both instances the woman runs away when the opportunity presents itself, and in both both the ballad and some versions of the swan maiden tale, a former lover speaks not to the woman’s infidelity but instead to her fidelity. That the swan maiden is returning “home” rather than running away from it suggests an even higher level of fantasy than exists in “The Demon Lover”; in any event, children as well as husband are left behind. The swan maiden usually (but not always) lacks remorse for her abandoned children. In contrast, guilt supplies an important phase in “The Demon Lover,” where the discontented wife has internalized and thus cannot easily discard her society’s values. But the stories are alike in that both provide examples of Ethel Person’s “imaginative split-object triangle”;⁵⁰ a longed-for existence is realized in a realm outside woman’s usual domestic space, a lover rather than sanctioned spouse promising relief from the mundane. And in both stories psychological reality wars with fantasy. Some earlier hopes and dreams have been thwarted or at least not realized within the marriage, and the runaway is attempting to find what has been taken from her. Like all humans she can imagine life better than it actually is, only one more step being needed to imagine that that is how it once was.

Admittedly, there are corresponding stories that tell how a fairy summons a mortal man to the otherworld and similarly offers him freedom from responsibilities to the world. (I have written before on this subject.⁵¹) But such stories not only resemble but also differ sharply from tales that tell of women who leave their homes for the promised pleasures of an otherworld. Both men and women dream of bowers of bliss in which they may evade the human condition, but women flee not only the plight of generalized humanity but also a specific gender-based predicament as the second sex in a world dominated by men. Still, like men, women are firmly rooted in their societies, and it is more than guilt that causes the runaway to regret her elopement. Frequently the wife in “The Demon Lover” desires not so much to evade reality as to transform the one she knows. Her demon lover is then not so much a separate character as a symbolic personification of her fantasy concerning what her husband might be.

In Child A, the wife goes with the demon because there is something essentially comforting and familiar about him:

When he had told her [his] fair tales,

To love him she began,

Because he was in human shape,

Much like unto a man.

It is indeed the revenant’s origin in and connection to the mundane that provides the seeming reassurance that what is safe in her life will be retained after she runs away. In the New Hampshire variant, the wife in a similar spirit not only admits to missing both husband and children but also rejects the demon: “I am tired of thee!” There is a wide body of folklore and myth into which these ballad versions fit, stories of women (they will be met again in later chapters) who prefer mortal husbands to otherworldly suitors. Their demon lovers sometimes masquerade as their real-life suitors or spouses in order to seduce them. In the Western tradition, Zeus’s seduction of Alcmena is perhaps the most renowned version of this story pattern.

Once again, the titles of the ballad can supply a clue to its meaning. If “demon lover” evokes images of forbidden desires and exotic realms, the enticer’s name, James Harris, is inconsistent with his promise. For it would be difficult to find a name more comfortably familiar than James Harris, and if the anonymous house carpenter, who stands for the stolid comfort of a secure place in society, were given a name in the ballad, it might very well be that of his devilish rival.

The paradoxical juxtaposition of “James Harris” and “demon lover” informs Shirley Jackson’s fictional adaptations of Child 243. The seducers in those stories she based on “The Demon Lover” ballad are the seemingly ordinary Jim or Jimmy or Mr. Harris, shadowy figures who touch the lives of Jackson’s female protagonists, both married women trapped and helpless in wedlock, and single women yearning to be brides in a world of couples. James Harris tempts them with the realization of their hopes and then cruelly abandons them to their desperation.

In “Elizabeth,” a young woman comes to the city to find herself eleven years later with faded looks and prospects, her hopes sustained only by fantasies of one “Jim Harris,” a “gallant dark man with knowing eyes who watched her across a room,” a stranger but nonetheless someone who loved her, “a quiet troubled man who needed sunlight, a warm garden, green lawns.” Like Elizabeth, the female protagonist of Jackson’s story “The Demon Lover” is a woman in her thirties with a monotonous job and a bleak life. She is jilted by James Harris on their wedding day and begins the frantic search for him throughout the city that is a commentary on her life, not her love. With sardonic irony, Jackson seems to be warning young wives to be content with their house carpenters if they are lucky enough to get them.⁵²

However, her wives fare no better, terrified as they are and desperate to escape what they perceive as a domestic prison. Their very panic probably reflects the rage of women in what can now be recognized as a preliberation era in the United States.⁵³ In one story, a wife loathes her husband, and when he forgets to read a letter from someone named Jimmy, who never appears in the tale, she gives vent to an unexplained fury and imagines bashing in her spouse’s head and leaving him under the cellar steps: “and it’s worth it, she thought, oh it’s worth it.”⁵⁴ In “A Day in the Jungle,” a wife leaves her husband while he is at work, thinking back to the humiliation of her wedding and the ensuing “hideous” intimacy. Checking into a hotel, she is drawn to a quite ordinary man around whom she spins fantasies that echo the “Demon Lover” ballad; he becomes “some vaguely glimpsed stranger” asking her “to dine, to dance, to go off to Italy.” But like the runaway wife of the ballad, she has second thoughts and experiences “a convulsive, brain-splitting terror,” which drives her back in relief to the man she had married.⁵⁵ In “The Tooth,” a housewife’s life appears symbolized by her excruciating toothache, and after the anesthesia is administered so that the tooth can be extracted, reality is no longer separable from fantasy. Jim Harris is a stranger she meets on a train, and she does not find it strange that he offers her another destination than her home, one “‘farther than Samarkand,’ “with” ‘the waves ringing on the shore like bells,’ “with flutes playing all night and stars” ‘as big as the moon and the moon … as big as a lake.’” Like the carpenter’s wife, she gives up her domestic life as she had already given up the aching tooth and follows Harris to an unspecified future.⁵⁶

The story that most exploits the seeming ordinariness of James Harris is Jackson’s “The Beautiful Stranger,” in which the revenant motif from the “Demon Lover” ballad finds its deepest thematic significance. The narration begins with a quite ordinary scene of a young woman and her children waiting at a train station for the man of the house, who, the story later suggests, may be dead (a revenant), a reality she may be vehemently denying by meeting the train. But what she feels when he arrives is less relief than resentment over a now lost independence: “when Margaret got in beside him she felt a little chill of animosity at the sight of his hands on the wheel; I can’t bear to relinquish even this much, she thought; for a week no one has driven the car except me.” But soon her resentment gives way to wonder, for she decides that this man is not her husband but rather a stranger who is impersonating him, restoring to her existence the passion that had given way to the tedium of ordinary life.

Once Margaret has transformed her husband into a demon lover, she becomes content with the routines of her life. “She laughed while she did her housework and dressed the baby. She took satisfaction in unpacking his suitcase, which he had abandoned and forgotten in a corner of the bedroom, as though prepared to take it up and leave again if she had not been as he thought her, had not wanted him to stay.” But as her fantasy takes a deeper hold on Margaret, she cannot maintain her already fragile equilibrium, and the familiar has become so strange that after leaving her house one day, she cannot find her own home among the many in her suburban neighborhood. “The evening was very dark, and she could see only the houses going in rows, with more rows beyond them and more rows beyond that, and somewhere a house which was hers, with the beautiful stranger inside, and she lost out here.”⁵⁷ Like the wife in the “Demon Lover” ballad who cries to return to land and to home, Margaret’s imagined existence has become the source of her exile, and she is trapped by her own unreality. The woman in the ballad who follows her demon lover because he is so very like a man—that is, a husband—and Margaret, who can only bear her husband if she pretends he is a demon lover, reflect the same impulse. Reality and fantasy are irrevocably split, and what each woman longs for is a reconciliation of conflicts raging within. Jackson’s drawing on “The Demon Lover” as a source for her fiction lays bare the complex meanings already in the ballad, which speaks to more than a wife’s economic deprivation or the narrow conventions of a Calvinist ethic: the runaway wife longs to be free of cultural reality itself, and it sometimes hardly seems to matter what the specific details of that reality are.

The themes in the “Demon Lover” ballad recur in folktales found throughout the world. Women are haunted by their imagination’s ability to create a better existence than the one they actually have. In an African tale, the children of the Thunder Spirit and his mortal bride are taught “how to travel through the air on flashes of lightning, and they had a much more exciting life than the children of the earth, who could only walk and run.”⁵⁸ In contrast, both wife and children in a Norwegian folktale suffer after she rejects a demon suitor to marry a cotter: the couple “had lots of children, so it was hard for them to make ends meet.” One night, when she is working in the fields, she is taunted by the demon: “You could have chosen me, you could! Then you wouldn’t have had to toil and struggle the way you’re doing now!”⁵⁹

But swan maidens who need do no more than embroider their children’s clothing are as anxious to escape their earthly homes as captured brides turned into household drudges. What women want from their demon lovers is universal and timeless, as the novelist Gail Godwin recognized when she drew on folklore to portray a woman artist, Violet Clay, whose very name evokes the tension between ethereal beauty and the mundane. Violet is engaged in an affair with a fellow artist—by her description, a parodic “demon lover who went flapping through the daylight world disguised in his funny-fitting clothes.” When Violet refuses her lover’s “practical offer of a ‘real life,’”⁶⁰ she becomes in effect a Psyche who refuses to turn on the light to look directly at her situation. For marriage in the daylight world seems to have little to offer women.

There have always been women who refuse such a life, writes Germaine Greer, who describes “the most notorious” of the devil’s brides, the witches, who “withdrew from ‘normal’ human intercourse to commune with their pets or familiars,” making their own living by exploiting their knowledge of “herbal medicine and the credulity of the peasantry.”⁶¹ Greer’s witch (who may be as much Greer’s conception as a figure from history) is not a victim of a vengeful society intent on eradicating the devil, but rather the self-chosen exile, the adventurer, actively choosing Satan rather than passively being chosen by him for perhaps no less reason than Faust entered into his infamous pact. But there are scholars who reject such a romanticized portrait of the witch because it suggests that female identity could be chosen and thus denies the misery visited on many vulnerable women who hardly understood what was happening as they were tried and punished for sorcery: “For whatever witches might have been, one things is certain; they always lost.”⁶² And they lost because a strong antifeminist tradition usually demanded that women live under male control and because few women who chose to defy this cultural imperative had the power to protect themselves from retribution.

The discussion of the devil’s bride here and of the incubus visitation in chapter 5 will invoke the complex world of debate surrounding the European witchcraft craze that began in the Middle Ages and reached its height in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. For feminist critics, recent historical accounts have been welcome, for they expose the plight of women likely to be tried as witches, and focus on often rabidly misogynistic witch hunters prone to exploit age-old traditions of feminine evil, making use of the fantasies of disturbed or just unhappy women to prove that they worshiped the devil at unholy sabbaths. Women (just how many is not clear, but some historians argue for female genocide) were subject to psychological force or were the agonized victims of torture, their confessions constituting attempts to pacify their persecutors. But strong qualifications to this approach have exposed the absence of attention paid to the accused. Because they focus on the misogyny and paranoia of the inquisitors, argues Carlo Ginzburg, contemporary historians ironically duplicate (if inversely) the tendencies of the witches’ accusers: the inquisitors turned fantasies and popular beliefs into real events; most historians not only dismiss the witches’ confessions as lies or fantasies, but as a result also ignore what the witches actually believed about themselves (or, Hans Peter Duerr would add, what they actually practiced).

Ginzburg notes that it is now generally accepted that folklore and learned beliefs combined to create the demonologists’ conception of the diabolical sabbath. But, he argues, the rich symbolism of the witches’ admissions cannot be accounted for solely by the pressures exerted on the accused, who acknowledged practices deemed heretical; these confessions, “made by male and female witches [remain] shrouded in darkness.” It is Ginzburg’s exploration of elements of shamanistic origin that unites his work with Duerr, the latter arguing that some persons could through drugs (the witches’ salve) experience the passage beyond the boundary between civilization and wilderness. Both of them analyze what Ginzburg calls the “deep resemblance that binds the myths that later merged in the witches’ Sabbath. All of them work a common theme; going into the beyond, returning from the beyond.” For Duerr the trip is essential to human adaptation to culture, and he conceptualizes a complex therapy (akin to deep psychoanalysis) undergone by those who understood that members of society who “wanted to live consciously within the fence [that delimited culture] had to leave the enclosure at least once in their lives”:

In contrast to our own culture, the societies possessing what we called “archaic” cultures have a much clearer idea about the fact that we can be only what we are if at the same time, we are also what we are not, and that we can only know who we are if we experience our boundaries and, as Hegel would put it, if we thus cross over them.

For Ginzburg there is an essential story embedded in the myths that describe such a passage: it is “not one narrative, but the matrix of all possible narratives.”⁶³

Folktales, to repeat Darnton’s emphatic assertion, are historical documents. As such they can supply a bridge between analyses such as Ginzburg’s and Duerr’s and feminist-oriented studies of witchcraft. Shapeshifting animal brides and grooms, fairy emissaries from another world, and demon lovers are about nothing if not about the boundary between culture and that which lies outside it. The image of the wild man and the wild woman is embedded in fairy lore and demonology, and appears in other folklore characters that pervade the world’s narratives.⁶⁴ Like Shirley Jackson’s short stories, folktales about the devil’s paramour are, moreover, about woman’s role, about her dissatisfaction with domesticity, or, conversely, about her desperate attempt to find a place within the narrow sphere allowed her in society. Folktales, in short, portray just what kind of woman is likely to become the devil’s bride.

A commonplace assumption is that woman is more “natural” than man. And so long as the “natural” in human beings is denigrated, so will woman be seen as more irrational than man, more ready to succumb to basic drives. As Nicholas Remy wrote in his notoriously antifeminist Demonolotry, it was “much easier for the Demon to impose his deceits upon” women.⁶⁵ It has even been argued that the connection between woman’s natural baseness and witchcraft extended to woman’s failure in etiquette at a time when refinement was increasingly valued as a triumph of culture.⁶⁶ If women are, as Bruce Kapferer argues, the “linch pins of culture,” occupying a central position in the “nature/culture dialectic and in the cultural order,”⁶⁷ it is paradoxical but not surprising that as culture begins to prevail over nature, there is more, not less, stress on keeping woman in her place.

And her place was in the domestic sphere where she lived as someone’s daughter, wife, mother. Some historians thus contend that witchcraft was likely to flourish wherever marriage patterns left a large number of women unmarried, the argument being that “witchcraft accusations can best be understood as projections of patriarchal social fears onto atypical women, those who lived apart from the direct male control of husbands or fathers. These defenseless and very isolated women became the group most often exposed to charges of witchcraft.”⁶⁸ John Lindow has said of the importance of marriage in Swedish folktales that because “marriage implied economic respectability and a measure of independence, it was regarded positively, and bachelordom or spinsterhood were regarded negatively,” and the “strongest symptom of this point of view concerns witchcraft, which tended to be laid at the door of unmarried or widowed older women.”⁶⁹ This view is essentially echoed in Kinsley’s description of goddesses’ place in Hindu mythology. Marriage not only completes a woman but tames her, “channeling her dangerous sexual energy in acceptable ways.” Human men as well as gods constitute a “civilizing, calming, ordering presence,” whereas alone, not only women but also goddesses are “perceived as powerful and dangerous.”⁷⁰ Folklore can help address the historians’ query about why it was that so many women paid with their lives for what can be described as a transformation of popular belief into demonology (see chapter 5).

Swan maidens are often likened to witches, as in the Polish gypsy tale in which the swan maiden is a sorceress’s daughter.⁷¹ And the Passamaquoddy tell a story in which to be a swan maiden is to be a witch.⁷² Similarly, women who consort with demon lovers are likened to witches, whose sabbaths are made to resemble the otherworldly revels at which folklore husbands discover their kidnapped or runaway wives. Monter argues a less psychologically complex variation on Duerr’s thesis, speculating that some accused witches used drugs, and hence acquired from a “fund of arcane knowledge of herbs and special formulae which could be used to cure as well as to harm” the means to achieve “in a drugged sleep, some excitement into their monotonous and wretched lives.”⁷³ Effectively, if the nightly visit of a woman to her demon lover’s revels were not just a dream, drugs were deliberately used to convey her to the swan maiden’s realm of magic delights.

However it happened, folklore and demonology merged, and the fairies of popular belief were identified as agents of evil. Katharine Briggs tells how in many of the witch trials of northern England, Scotland, and the Isle of Man, “fairies and witches were believed to work together,” how in the seventeenth century “the fairy ladies of Holinshed turned into witches,” but also how when “the witch fever abated,” the “fairies went back to their old places in the popular regard.”⁷⁴ Jules Michelet similarly marks the end of the belief in witches: “The Sorceress has perished for ever, but not so the fairy. She will appear afresh under this form, which is immortal.” She would have to, according to Michelet, for when the bourgeois housewife finds her life unrewarding or harsh, it will be of the fairies’ life that she dreams.⁷⁵ Such a sanguine view does not prevail everywhere. Wentworth Webster contemplates why “witches and fairies are so often confounded,” why in Basque legends the witch is often a fairy, and the fairy a witch. He concludes that the reason for such confusion “is not that the belief in witchcraft is extinct among the Basques, but because it is so rife.”⁷⁶

Not only are witches and fairies confused in folklore, but so also are two kinds of witches, those who practice magic for diabolical reasons, and those who practice magic as a healing art that nonetheless makes them suspect,⁷⁷ perhaps because such white witches, as they are sometimes called, were also self-sufficient and therefore as threatening to a male-dominated order as their more malevolent sisters. Moreover, it has been argued that magic spells were often used as a means of revenge by those incapable of using ordinary forms (physical violence or litigation), and thus any group that had reason to feel vengeful would fall under suspicion.⁷⁸ Among such groups would be those who lived only on the fringes of society, frequently older women beyond childbearing who posed potential economic burdens or women who placed themselves outside society by not marrying, or by defying the authority under which they should have placed themselves.⁷⁹ Folklore depicts all of these female types as consorting with or forming erotic liaisons with the devil.

Folklore motifs concerning the devil’s paramour correspond to almost all the theories of witches advanced by contemporary historical, sociological, and psychological investigation. The popular narratives appear to vary widely in their purposes, although in most instances gender relations form significant themes. Sometimes antifeminism is presented humorously (if with questionable benignity) in stories that play a variation on the song about the devil who stole a man’s shrewish wife, only to return her in dismay, complaining that although he had been a devil all of his life, he had never known hell until he met the man’s wife. Straparola tells such a tale of how the devil tries marriage to test accusations against women, finding them true: “rather than set eyes on [my wife] again,” cries the demon, “I prefer to depart for the nethermost hell.”⁸⁰ But most stories about marriages to demons are anything but funny.

Some are clearly intended as cautionary exempla for young women. In a Mexican tale, a young woman defies her mother to attend a dance, and on her way meets a demonic character whose ominous warnings prove accurate when two young men at the festivities quarrel and accidentally kill the disobedient daughter.⁸¹ This didactic story narrated by a fifty-year-old woman conceivably harkening back to her own rebellious youth has thematic ties to widespread legends of a demon dancer,⁸² or the tale type of the “Danced-out Shoes,” a famous literary version being Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Red Shoes.”⁸³ In Norwegian lore, the young women often die of their folly, and a French version tells how some frivolous girls actually invite the devil to a party, their compulsive dancing being described in horrific detail:

And still they must dance, and dance, higher and faster, though they were foaming like spent horses. Someone held them by their hands, their waist, their neck, drove them, flung them hither and thither—someone who was either laughing or grinding his teeth, and both were terrible. They spun about, their hair clung to their wet cheeks, their eyes stood out of their heads, faster and still faster, turning like a wheel.

They are given a second chance when the demon’s power is temporarily exorcised by a priest, but one of the young women has not learned her lesson and her fate is a a macabre one. Seizing her by the wrist, the demon drags her to “deep roaring waters,” and on a flat rock in the middle of a stream, he strangles her. “The water runs rusty by there, as though it were stained with blood. You can still see the marks, graven upon the stone—those of her head, her body, her heels. On each side of her there are the marks left by the demon, and they are those of hooves, those of a beast.”⁸⁴

Sometimes spiritual or medical healing proves successful. But the question of why women are more often than men the subject of exorcism rites⁸⁵