Читать книгу In Search of the Swan Maiden - Barbara Fass Leavy - Страница 9

He would not write with imperfect materials, and to

him the materials were always imperfect.¹

—Lord Acton

My subject is the interplay between stories about a fairy captured by a mortal man and forced into a tedious domestic existence and, obversely, about a mortal woman courted by a demon lover who offers her escape from that same mundane world. Other paradigms in the mortal-immortal matings have been discussed in the preface, where the swan maiden tale was summarized. Its obverse, the demon lover story, frequently describes a trap the wife stumbles into in her flight from her traditional role, and the tale is thus more prone than the swan maiden one to be laden with themes of guilt and retribution. Both story groups contrast the pleasures of a magic realm with the harder facts of real life, which for woman include minimal (if any) autonomy in her existence. In folk narratives the dreams of a magic otherworld are given form. As Peter Kennedy and Alan Lomax have said about the ballads they collected in the British Isles, the “past speaks through their lips, but if you listen with attention you will discover fantasy patterns important to the present as well.”²

It is consistent with the fantasy elements in these stories that an important narrative motif attached to the winning and rewinning of the supernatural spouse is that of the so-called impossible task.³ A superhuman effort becomes a prerequisite for the union. Bereft or hopeful humans undergo arduous trials and attempt herculean feats to prove themselves: men must climb glass mountains, and Psyche and her sisters must carry water in sieves or wear out iron shoes to find some vaguely defined place, such as the country of beautiful gardens. In Apuleius, a Venus hostile to her daughter-in-law Psyche “took a great quantity of wheat, barley, millet, poppy-seed, pease, lentils, and beans, and mingled them all together on a heap,” ordering Psyche to “separate all these grains one from another, disposing them orderly in their quality” and demanding she complete the task “before night.”⁴ To win his father’s kingdom, a prince must rely on his enchanted frog wife to produce a fine cloth that will encircle the palace seven times.⁵

For the scholarly study of these themes, the motifs themselves become almost parodically autoreferential, for saying anything about the stories that will satisfy all those who have studied them becomes a truly impossible task. The cloth that encircles the palace is a reminder of the culture-specific nature of folklore and the importance of locating a tale in its social context. In contrast, the iron shoes that must be worn out and journeys to castles east of the sun and west of the moon, to what W. M. S. Russell calls an “indeterminate address,”⁶ suggest the universality of human predicaments. The stories of supernatural spouses, moreover, seem to be about the freedom from cultural necessity as well as about the requirement that such necessity eventually prevail. A collector of Bengali tales, for instance, puzzles over a female folklore character who terrifies her father with her insistence that she choose her own husband. So contrary to custom is her demand that the story collector feels compelled to explain that the prospective bride was a fairy and therefore was not bound by woman’s usual constraints.⁷ But demon lovers throughout the world seem to have an uncanny ability to single out those women in rebellion against patriarchal restrictions. Psyche’s need to separate heaps of grains and legumes seems, in addition, a task very much like that of the folklorist who endeavors to sift through matters of classification and definition. Indeed, Psyche’s is the easier task insofar as a lentil can be differentiated from a poppy seed. The problem for folklore studies, writes Holbek, is “not lack of knowledge, but lack of coherent knowledge. There are innumerable investigations of the origins, history, diffusion, variation and adaptation of motifs, themes, types and clusters of types, of genres and the relations between genres; of performers and of the art.”⁸ But even if all of these could be sorted out, the end to which the task should be directed remains a matter of controversy. Holbek has deplored the lack of significant interpretation of folk narratives that would make the prodigious efforts at theoretical clarity meaningful.⁹ In short, after years of folklore studies in an academic culture in which I have received, perhaps, my green card but not naturalization, I seem to be proclaiming the impossibility of my venture at the very moment that I begin it. But matters are perhaps not that bad. The husbands and wives who embark on journeys to find and win back lost spouses encounter not only hostile figures intent on thwarting them but also cooperative ones who help the searchers achieve their goals. And so have I.

Anthropologists can be both helpful and obstructionist for literary scholars endeavoring to interpret folk tales. They at least take folklore seriously, and treat folktales as legitimate “texts” for study.¹⁰ Moreover, their ideas about folklore’s function is often consistent with literary theories about how art acts as an emotional catharsis for artist, audience, or both. J. L. Fischer argues that folk narratives serve the needs both of the society that pragmatically allows its members outlets for subversive impulses, and also of the individuals who find themselves suffering keenly the discontents of civilization.¹¹ Anthropologists also have begun to pay close attention to woman’s role in the societies they study, and from their work it becomes obvious that terms such as “patriarchy” and “patriarchal culture” need qualification. Woman’s status varies from society to society; indeed, it has been argued that where her status is relatively high, she will be more likely to resist a demon lover than where her status is relatively low.¹² Nonetheless, “patriarchy” is a useful designation for male-dominated societies, and male domination was and remains a fact of universal life. Finally, from the commentaries of anthropologists has emerged an essential paradox: believed to be more quickly prone than man to revert to a state of nature, woman is nonetheless entrusted with the task of rooting man in culture and raising her children in such a way as to prevent behavior threatening to the society as a whole.¹³ This paradox is useful for interpreting woman’s role in swan maiden and demon lover tales.

Anthropologists resist, however, the universalist approach to folklore, focusing instead on its culture-specific elements—especially since, again, folklore can supply data for the study of a particular group. For them, the relationship is reciprocal: the tale helps explain the group, the group the tale. For the stories to be discussed in this book, the work of James M. Taggart—particularly his book Enchanted Maidens—stands as an excellent example of an approach to folklore and gender that relies on an ethnological analysis of people and their stories. But as will later be seen, in order to explain some narrative motifs, Taggart is virtually forced to fall back on a generalized view that women per se are better able than men to sustain in marriage the illusion of love, and that this capacity can account for the supernatural strength of the female character who performs extraordinary feats in Tale Type 313 (The Girl as Helper in the Hero’s Flight). In chapter 6, it will be clear that I have a vastly different view of this story motif.

There is another, compelling reason to respect the uniqueness of the environment in which a version of a story flourishes. A people’s folklore is intrinsically bound to its culture and is therefore part of its identity and self-esteem, which some of the folk may not be ready to surrender to the abstraction of universal human problems. But to concede this is also to run into the theoretical question of what is or who are the folk? Linda Dégh and Alan Dundes have supplied similar answers, the former defining a group of “people united permanently or temporarily by shared common experiences, attitudes, interests, skills, ideas, and aims,” the latter invoking “any group of people whatsoever who share at least one common factor. It does not matter what the linking factor is—it could be a common occupation, language or religion—but what is important is that a group formed for whatever reason will have some traditions which it calls its own.”¹⁴

Can women per se constitute a group and hence a “folk”? Certainly the concept of uniquely female traditions that are being defined by folklore feminists implies an affirmative answer.¹⁵ Dundes’s reference to language and religion, however, is a reminder of how naive it would be to think that ethnic differences do not interfere with the idealistic notion of universal sisterhood. Still, occupation and tradition provide support for the idea of an exclusive as well as inclusive female folk. In her novel Up the Sandbox, Ann Roiphe’s female protagonist abhors her daily drudgery and wonders about the native women who had in earlier ages occupied her New York City neighborhood:

Eat, eliminate, prepare food, clean up, shop, throw out the garbage, a routine clear as a geometric form, a linear pattern that seems almost graceful in its simplicity. Despite computers and digit telephone numbers, nuclear fission, my life hardly differs from that of an Indian squaw settled in a tepee on the same Manhattan land centuries ago. Pick, clean, prepare, throw out, dig a hole, bury the waste—she was my sister.¹⁶

The difficult question is whether a native woman would recognize that sisterhood. As Coffin points out, different assumptions about the marital relationship would render different the meanings of tales that appear similar. So would vastly different expectations concerning personal happiness. Some common idiom would be necessary for Roiphe’s heroine and the women who narrated or were characters in the widespread star husband tales to share similar fantasies and secure some essential sisterhood.

But as Bynum has noted, human beings do communicate with each other “in a narrative manner”:¹⁷ Roiphe’s very novel extends the themes of old, widely told tales. One of my premises, arrived at inductively as I gathered these tales, is that folk narratives reveal feminist themes when their subject is woman’s role in culture and fantasies about escaping that role. And if a story with such a theme is told or heard by a man, it will probably reflect an anxious assumption that his wife does indeed strive to separate from him (see chapters 6, 7). Moreover, I have rarely encountered an anthropological analysis of a swan maiden or demon lover story that was not applicable to societies outside the one being studied.¹⁸ Bynum has criticized those social scientists who confine the interpretation of narrative traditions “to the immediate ethnic context where the traditions are found,” as if, for example, the “Oedipal typology of a tale indigenous to New Guinea” bore no relationship to “the import of the Oedipus story anywhere else.” There is, he argues, “no necessary contradiction between a comparative and an ethnically delimited approach to the criticism” of folklore.¹⁹

Originally part of an oral storytelling tradition, swan maiden and demon lover tales were later collected and translated by persons whose knowledge of folklore and fidelity to what they heard varied widely. Today folktales are gathered by rigorously trained fieldworkers whose methodology has become increasingly scientific, while artists unconcerned with methodology continue to render folklore into literature. But literary scholars and even some folklorists have been frustrated by the reluctance of most folklorists to go beyond the data, the ‘“what”’ of folklore, to consider the ‘“why”’ and thus enter “the ever treacherous area of interpretation.”²⁰ The matter goes beyond the clash of methodologies in disciplines that otherwise share interests. Literary critics can often trace their love for story to folk and fairy lore heard from others’ lips before the prized gift of reading was acquired. Stories were first read for the sake of story itself, meaning and power perhaps impressing themselves at some unconscious level before—much later—the task of analysis was begun and mastered. That story has meaning, whether that story be part of an oral tradition or written by a known author, is assumed by literary critics, who take for granted that some interpretation is already going on—consciously or otherwise—in any storyteller’s retelling of an orally transmitted tale. Fortunately, the gap between folklore studies and literary analysis shows signs of narrowing.

This does not mean, however, that folklore methodology is thereby rendered unimportant for interpretation. But rather than continuing to survey abstractly the problems of imperfect material, I will focus on one story collection to illustrate both the difficulties and the potential insight into a subject that can be gained when one knows what questions are being asked (even if the answers remain subject to debate), and will use that collection as a point of departure for further discussion and other examples. For those unfamiliar with folklore studies, my analysis of this collection is intended as an introduction. For those who need no such introduction, the example is intended to contribute to a developing subject among folklorists—the relationship of folklore to gender.

In the 1930s, Ethel Stefana Drower, daughter of a clergyman, educated at home and in private schools and married to the British adviser to the Iraqi minister of justice,²¹ decided that after a residence of more than ten years, she wished to contribute to the world’s knowledge of her host country, whose folklore she had long been in the habit of recording. Her Folk-Tales of Iraq was published in a scholarly form, including notes and explanations of language and culture, and appeared under the pseudonym E. S. Stevens.²² Because of her self-consciousness as a woman story gatherer with an ambiguous relationship to the Iraqi women she collected tales from, and because her pseudonym suggests a deliberate vagueness concerning her identity, I will refer to Stevens by her gender-emphatic title, Lady Drower.

For an amateur folklorist, Lady Drower was quite knowledgeable about methods of research, aware, for example, that nuances of language could not survive translation. She assures her readers that she has striven for accuracy even though some Arabic words have no connotative equivalents in English and, in addition, differ in meaning depending on whether they are used by Moslem, Christian, or Jew. She says that when a story was told slowly enough, she took it down verbatim; however, this was not always possible and she was necessarily dependent upon memory. On the subject of editing she remains silent and does not acknowledge that even rendering a story grammatically correct is effectively another kind of translation.

Lady Drower was sensitive to the relation of tales to tellers, providing information about whom she heard each story from as well as brief descriptions of those who supplied variants. As her informants varied from illiterate servants to educated teachers and government officials, she acknowledges that the way they told the same stories might differ according to their position in society. She recognizes, moreover, that some are better tale tellers than others and that gesture, voice intonation, and facial expression are very important. These qualities, of course, are not described or reproduced in her written texts, which as a result cannot include the meanings that narrators can convey through extra-verbal signals. For it is presently acknowledged that even the most scrupulous verbal transcription does not convey a story in its entirety, does not provide the “ideal folklore text,” which “must record the aesthetic transaction (manifested through observable behaviors) between the performer and audience.”²³

That performance conveys meaning is not a new idea. More than fifty years ago, a collector of Tibetan folktales described how, “Notebook in hand, I would sit on the ground with my little Tibetan maid [her interpreter] beside me and watch the face of the one who was telling the story. Watch every shade of expression that flitted over his features—Tell me why he laughs and is amused there. Why does he look sad here? Why does he speak seriously now? What prompted that action? What prompted that thought?’—and so on; and I would make careful notes.”²⁴ To what specific end, however, is not revealed. Roger Abrahams has argued that individual performance is actually a rhetorical tool in the hands of the storyteller, folklore thus able to serve as an instrument of social change instead of a medium through which traditional values are perpetuated.²⁵ It can be added that the imprint of a unique personality also helps expand a narrative pattern, which enlarges not only by an accretion of story detail but also because of the differing perspectives of individual storytellers. Lady Drower was particularly interested in the relationship between her tales and their culture; she stood, that is, closer to anthropology than to literary criticism. Her introductory material was also influenced by comparative mythology, she being well aware that a tale told by the Iraqis could be found not only in other Middle Eastern countries but also throughout Europe. She notes that it is useful to see how tales can vary from culture to culture, but useful for what she does not say, thereby avoiding some of the knotty issues raised above concerning the culture-specific and internationalist contexts for folklore. Lady Drower’s vignettes about her narrators are, moreover, insufficiently detailed to allow her reader to discern an interplay between the culturally determined and individualistic elements in the telling of a story narrated over a wide geographical area.

A significant example of such interplay is supplied by Clementina Todesco, the narrator of a collection of Italian-American folktales. She looks back at herself as a rebellious young woman whose emigration to America fulfilled a dream in which she was freed from poverty as well as the oppressive aspects of Italian village life, part of which may have been the patrilocal marriages in which a woman was “carried like a bundle of logs” to her husband’s family, to be taught by her mother-in-law how to behave as wife and mother. But in the United States she had to endure a seven-year separation from her husband (a symbolic number in fairy tales) and also missed the strong connections with other women she enjoyed in Italy. She compensated for these lacks by forming attachments to adoptive sisters in America. In her swan maiden tale, a young man leaves his poor mother to make his economic way in the world; his swan maiden bride is an enchanted being awaiting the man who will free her from tyranny and provide a better life; but as his wife she must adapt to her mother-in-law’s household; and when she runs away, it is not to flee her husband’s world but to fulfill promises to her sister swan maidens, other women to whom her ties are very strong. There is a tight fit between Clementina Todesco, whose biography is told in detail, and her tale. It is noted, moreover, that she moves among folklore genres, frequently employing narratives to relate personal experiences, thus shifting “from a communal experience represented in traditional tales to an individual experience represented by personal memories.” In her retelling of the swan maiden tale, she has indeed combined two essential patterns: the story of the captured fairy wife who escapes bondage as soon as she can; and the enchanted human who awaits a prince to release her from her swan form, from her captivity by some evil enchanter. It has already been noted that some scholars attribute these variations to differences in genre.²⁶

Genre criticism is playing an increasingly important role in folklore studies, but as Alan Dundes has argued, “not so much as one genre has been completely defined,”²⁷ Dégh and Vazsonyi also conceding that this may be particularly true of the legend, a “capricious genre” that is not easily delimited “from other forms of folk prose.” Like myths, legends are deeply rooted in the “social reality” of specific cultures;²⁸ as Jan Brunvand has described legends, they are a “unique, unselfconscious reflection of major concerns of individuals in the societies in which the legends circulate,” and the stories people believe to be true “hold an important place in their worldview.”²⁹ But Wendy Doniger has dismissed what she deems false distinctions among genres, in this case between myth and folktale, arguing that the “most one could hope to do would be to postulate a kind of continuum, with stories located all along the line, some more ‘folk’ than ‘myth,’ some the reverse.”³⁰ Swan maiden stories seem to appear all along that continuum, but, again, one feature of the story strongly differentiates versions in legends and myths from the fictions of fairy tales. As Christiansen describes it,

The essential difference between such legends and the folktale is that according to the latter the husband, having lost his wife, succeeds in finding his way to her castle and in winning her back, while the legends end on a tragic note with her disappearing for ever. Both folktale and legend are, undoubtedly, very old, and even though the question of the relative antiquity of each type can never be determined satisfactorily, the most reasonable explanation would appear to be that the international folktale has its origin in local legend.³¹

But the implications of tracing the historical development of the story and defining its genres are nowhere near as arresting as the point made by Christiansen and Hartland about the connection between the presumed truth of the swan maiden tale and the way the story ends: veracity is related to the wife’s resistance to resuming her role in the domestic realm. And this feature of the story crosses international boundaries.

Lady Drower, both recognizing an international family of folklore characters³² and also acknowledging the importance of individual cultures and even individual narrators, does not speculate about the conflict inherent in these two approaches to folk narratives. What she argues for is the historical importance of Iraqi tales in terms of how a narrative develops and is transmitted. In this she is influenced by a now-discarded theory expressed, for example, by John A. MacCulloch, who writes in The Childhood of Fiction that folktales “are the earliest form of romantic and imaginative literature, the unwritten fiction of early man and primitive people” seeking to “clothe their impressions of the universe, their ideas and beliefs” in the form of a story.³³ While not specifically engaging in a hunt for the origins of individual folktales, Lady Drower implies that since the country she is living in is the cradle of civilization, the Iraqi stories she is collecting must be, if not the originals, close to the first versions told.

This evolutionary theory is no longer held by folklorists, the theory itself having been relegated to the history of the discipline. Yet this book will invoke the views of the evolutionists. The writings of MacCulloch, Hartland, Lang, and others are replete with fascinating discussions of the fairy otherworld and its inhabitants. And even if their theories can be discredited, their insights are often significant, and, even when incorrect, more provocative for the discovery of meaning in folk and fairy tales than many of the scientific studies that succeeded theirs. Some folklore, moreover, has been traced to real (rather than hypothesized) cultural practices, and these have illuminated the stories. And finally, it is difficult to dismiss Hartland’s conception of how the swan maiden story changes over time: “We might expect to find that as advances are made in civilization, and marriage becomes more regarded, the reason for separation would become more and more complex and cogent.”³⁴ It is Hartland who focuses attention on the relationship between reality and the conclusion to the swan maiden story, on the husband’s characteristic failure to win back his wife.

In any event, from the purist’s standpoint, Lady Drower’s theories are either antiquated or incompletely developed, and her tales contaminated. They are, first of all, translated, and despite assurance that she has aimed at fidelity to her sources, grammatical correctness alone belies her claim. But as Stith Thompson has written in The Folktale, it “is impossible to make a complete separation of the written and the oral tradition.”³⁵ The Italian-American swan maiden tale described above comes from a collection in which stories were orally related by mother to daughter, and hence followed traditional lines of folktale transmission. But the daughter who transcribed the tales for a published collection made “stylistic changes and additions which transformed the natural cadences and tones of the folk artist into something more closely resembling a literary text (in the familiar fashion of the Brothers Grimm).”³⁶

Whether this is to be deplored is a matter that will be taken up again at the end of this introduction. Meanwhile, it can be noted that Richard Dorson’s description of the methods followed by the Irish collector T. C. Croker is probably at least partially true of many from whom folklorists must recapture the folk narratives of the past: at that

early date [1860s] Croker did not, as his accusers make plain, observe the precise methods of the modern folklorist. He inflates a kernel of spoken legend into a full story. Hence the sighting of a mermaid by a country fellow, which could be related in a few sentences, becomes a sketch of the stage Irishman sportively conversing with the sea beauty and plighting his troth before a perplexed priest.³⁷

Dorson’s use of the word “accusers” reveals how seriously the folklorist takes such contamination of the original oral rendition (which itself may be suspect because it is often impossible to know whether it has been corrupted by literary analogues transmitted, for example, by missionaries or teachers who worked among the “folk”). But his argument may be tinged here as elsewhere with irony: “the purist approach to defining and collecting folk tales by the touchstone of oral currency is gradually being refuted by poaching literary historians.”³⁸ Rigorously applied, the purist approach would insist that Lady Drower’s Iraqi tales border on “fakelore”³⁹ despite her scrupulous intentions. Like countless other collections, hers would be consigned to some netherworld, excluded from serious study as neither true folklore nor created literature.

Moreover, fakelore—often the product of a literary imagination schooled in folklore—does a great deal to elucidate a complex folklore pattern studied in its variety and multiplicity. The literary scholar who turns to folklore may wish to reverse the inquiry’s direction, to move from supposedly sophisticated literature back to folk tales, acquiring an increased respect for the folk’s insight, to discover in early, anonymous narratives the complexity and ambiguity in human motives that later writers would consciously recognize and draw upon.⁴⁰ Without dissenting from Bengt Holbek’s distinction between genuine folklore and collections such as The Arabian Nights,⁴¹ I will frequently move among different fields of story for the mutual illumination they supply. Again, folklore characters and narrative motifs constitute an idiom that many unschooled storytellers understood as well as their literary successors.

Lady Drower was a self-conscious folklorist when she put together her collection of tales. Moreover, despite her considerable talent and education, she was keenly aware of being a woman in a country where the separation of the sexes was extreme, and of being identified as the wife of an important man—that is, a woman who did not find it easy to feel productive in her own right. The first of these awarenesses is explicit, the second implicit in the very opening of her introduction:

Realizing one day that I was in the second decade of my sojourn in ‘Iraq, I asked myself if I could make any useful contribution, however slight, to the sum of knowledge about the country. I have an advantage in being a woman, since my countrymen in ‘Iraq are for the most part workers employed in official or commercial activities, and therefore with limited time and often little opportunity, to devote themselves to matters not vital to politics, business, history, or science. Moreover, as men, they are shut off from the family life of a large part of the community. As a woman I can enter where they could not, and so am free to study the country from an aspect denied to them.

She thus turns to advantage what must have been the irritating disadvantage in which, as an educated, energetic woman, she found herself. Almost half a century later, a female anthropologist married to a diplomat would analyze a similar situation: “unlike the housewife (which she often is as well) the diplomat’s wife experiences the presumption that she is committed to an institution from whose central operations she is necessarily excluded.”⁴² In the realm of folklore collection, however, the disadvantage would attach to the man, who would be as excluded from the world from which Lady Drower gathered stories as she was from the world in which he worked. Nonetheless, her pseudonym, E. S. Stevens, seems to indicate not only the attempt to mask her identity but also the need to infer a male persona.

The folklorist Linda Dégh has noted that “researchers are split in their opinions about which sex is prevalent among storytellers.”⁴³ And in an early and theoretically influential collection, Ruth Benedict described how different a story may appear when told according to a male or female point of view, especially when, among her subjects the Zuñis, the tale had to do with marriage or sex roles in general.⁴⁴ In addition, Marie-Louise von Franz, who has written widely on fairy tales from a Jungian perspective, has contended that it is difficult to distinguish between a genuinely female point of view and that of a man expressing some aspect of his personality traditionally deemed feminine: the mere existence of a female character does not prove either.⁴⁵ Such considerations may be joined to recent concerns about women and language. It is known that in some societies, women and men literally speak different languages, and that in some cultures, folklore genres themselves are divided between the sexes, men relating tales in verse, women in prose, for example.⁴⁶ But even when men and women speak the same language, this in itself is not “sufficient evidence that both sexes stand in the same relationship to that language.”⁴⁷ And it remains possible that some female narrators may have so thoroughly internalized male views of reality that they transmit them as if they were the only possible views.

Ingrid Bengis has written eloquently about the impossibility for women to separate themselves from considerations of their role as women:

All men’s understanding of the “female condition” is separated from the condition itself, separated from the daily monotonous and repetitious occurrences which reinforce that condition. And as soon as they stop talking to the woman they “understand,” they are able to go about their business thinking about something other than the condition of women, whereas the moment I attempt to go about my business, I am obstructed in some way and am forced to deal with that condition simply because I am a woman.⁴⁸

If it has indeed always been true that even in woman’s seemingly exclusive space, her otherness and relationship to man cannot be evaded in any self-awareness, then this might explain the narrative phenomenon Holbek reveals about the Danish tales he has studied: that men tell stories with male protagonists, whereas women tell stories with both female and male protagonists.⁴⁹ In the next chapter the question will be raised of whether the focus of interest in the swan maiden’s tale is on the captured wife or on the husband who, having lost her, undertakes the search to bring her back to his world. Unfortunately, most variants came into print without any knowledge of the storyteller, without the kind of biographical information supplied about Clementina Todesco. It will, nonetheless, be possible to make generalizations about how the story’s basic outlines would appeal differently to male and female interests—both as constituted in the world and as imagined in fantasy.

Lady Drower’s consciousness of being a woman and of how her otherness in male-dominated Iraq benefited her endeavors as a folklorist coincides with her very attempt to go beyond the role of a woman as British and Iraqi society would define it (if to varying degrees). She is very explicit on this point. But she does not extend such self-consciousness to a consideration of how her very collection of stories—her choices as well as the stories themselves—might reflect the conditions under which she gathered them.

In contrast to Lady Drower, who was admitted as folklore gatherer into a female world closed to her husband, C. G. Campbell took his stories from Iraqi tribesmen. They are replete with overtly sexual themes not made explicit in Lady Drower’s collection. Would the tribesmen have told her different stories, no stories, the same stories transformed? It is difficult to know. For the vicarious expression permitted by storytelling may tear down conventional inhibitions that adhere to social discourse. Some early collectors admitted to being troubled by what they perceived as indelicacy on the part of both male and female storytellers. William McCulloch, gathering Bengali folktales from what he calls “a very intelligent young Brahman,” notes that he “found no reason to doubt his often repeated assertion that he told me the stories exactly as he had heard them. For one thing, his stories varied widely in quality, some of them being both coarse and dull, whereas he, himself, was of a decidedly refined and distinguished type of mind, and was, besides, quite competent, when he let himself go, to make a good story of almost anything by his way of telling it.”⁵⁰ Alice Dracott, who also collected Indian tales, relates how in “one or two instances I was asked if I would allow a Paharee man, well versed in local folk-lore, to relate a few stories to me; but, for obvious reasons, I was obliged to decline the offer, for many Simla Village tales related to me by women, and not included in this book, were grotesquely unfit for publications.”⁵¹ How much worse, she implies, if told by a man. Perhaps the only hypothesis to be drawn from these scattered samples is that gender is an important factor down the line, from the telling of the tale to the reading of the book that the gatherer creates out of what she or he hears—that gender supplies keys for the interpretation of folktales, but that no single key fits all locks.

One way to approach the matter of gender is to consider the inclusion or exclusion from Stevens’s and Campbell’s collections of the swan maiden and demon lover stories. Campbell’s volumes include no example of the Cupid and Psyche tale, whereas Lady Drower includes two variants of this story, which is claimed by folklorists to be favored by women. The story of the swan maiden, attached to a narrative group presumably favored by men since its main narrative line (at least according to folklorists) depicts the husband’s search for his lost wife (see my chapter 7), can be found in neither collection. Lady Drower at least feels the need to explain the omission: the well-known tale of Hasan el Basorah (from The Arabian Nights) was too long for her purposes. Campbell, in contrast, does not mention the swan maiden story but his collection includes tales that reflect one of its most widespread and erotic motifs. The swan maiden is frequently captured while bathing, her magic skin or garment left on shore and stolen by the man who then lays claim to her. For some scholars, this motif links the universally told swan maiden story to one of the most popular Hindu myths, the love between Krishna and Raidha, Krishna having seduced the cowherd women by taking their clothes while they bathed and by forcing them to reveal their nakedness. C. G. Campbell, who, again, either did not hear from Iraqi tribesmen or did not choose to include in his collection a variant of the swan maiden tale widely told in Moslem countries, nonetheless does recount more than one tale in which a man spies on bathing naked women, or pays a woman to remove her clothing or the veils on her face.⁵² I am not suggesting that these story motifs have been lifted from the swan maiden tale by a lascivious male imagination that chooses to dispense with the other, more problematic motifs in the story, those in which a man holds his woman through coercion and then loses her in the end, although I am not rejecting the possibility either. Rather, I am pursuing the idea that gender both affects and reflects the relationship between the informant and the gatherer of tales, and between the gatherer of tales and the audience for which collections are prepared. For some folklorists, this shifting relationship can end in the intrusion of an alien element into a pure folklore tradition;⁵³ I will treat the relationship as paralleling some of the story motifs themselves.

There is, for example, an interesting correlation between what Lady Drower has revealed about herself and how she came to collect her Iraqi tales, on the one hand, and certain elements within the Cupid and Psyche tales she retells, on the other. In the basic form of the story, a mortal woman enters into a union with a mysterious supernatural man, who imposes on her a prohibition whose defying means the termination of the relationship: for example, she may not see him or ask any questions about who he is or where he comes from. The reason why the Psyche character commits the forbidden act varies from story to story. In the versions collected by Lady Drower, “Psyche” is prodded by idle townswomen, whose gossip not only reflects their curiosity about the heroine’s lover but also their malevolent intentions as well.⁵⁴

The issue here does not concern what the reader may learn about the specific culture that retains such variants, although such knowledge is interesting in itself and may aid interpretation as well. Rather, as Raymond Jameson has argued, universal folklore themes present “the lowest common denominator of human nature, the nuclei of human aspirations and human terror,” and once the material is collected, the task of the comparative folklorist is “to examine the variations of symbol and to determine the reasons for these variations.”⁵⁵ It is the common denominator itself that brings variants into sharp relief, and the reasons why Psyche characters break the taboo, although differing from tale to tale, combine to increase understanding of the significance of the act. But there may have been a reason why the Iraqi Psyche, pushed into betraying her mate by idle townswomen (rather than the envious sisters of Apuleius’s famous version), might have impressed herself on Lady Drower’s particular imagination.

The nature of Psyche’s revolt may vary according to the degree of passivity expected of her in her strange union. Such passivity may itself be highlighted in her relations with others, these relationships impinging on any assessment of her character. Do the troublemaking, gossiping women of Iraqi versions mirror a social hierarchy in which a certain portion of the population has the leisure in which to cause trouble? Does the enforced isolation of Arab women foster envy and dissension rather than bonds among them, or is their mischief making the view of a lower-class narrator critical of a privileged group she remains outside of? Does the storyteller disapprove of these gossiping females, and would her voice and gesture have made her contempt clearer than the text itself? Or do the trouble-making women reflect a male view of woman’s behavior, her propensity to gossip and thus cause trouble, transforming the Cupid and Psyche story into a nasty version of the Pandora theme, any subsequent narration by a woman indicating just how capable women are of internalizing negative images of themselves?

Lady Drower’s motivation for selecting this tale may illustrate Henry Glassie’s argument that in gathering tales, the gatherer will of necessity experience the distance that “opens between the writer [collector] and the storyteller” and that “confusions arise from the different motives that writers and storytellers have for telling their tales to others.”⁵⁶ Once again, the question is whether among women some kind of basic sisterhood will transcend such confusion. Reporting on his work in Morocco, Crapanzano describes how one of his informants, Mohammed, “preferred to keep [himself] aloof” in order to function as an informant on his culture, whereas Mohammed’s wife Dawia “looked for the similar in [Crapanzano’s] wife—in their common womanhood. Theirs was a relationship of sharing.”⁵⁷ Lady Drower seems to have both identified with and differentiated herself from her female informants, thus perhaps from the female characters in the stories they told. Biographical information suggests that she might be particularly sensitive to the provocation that causes the Iraqi Psyche to defy the taboo. The daughter of a clergyman would have been encouraged to be industrious, if not necessarily in the areas she turned to. Her need in her second decade in the Middle East to make some “useful contribution” to the world would contrast her with the idle and gossiping townswomen of the story she collects. It is striking to contemplate the layers of complexity that have been added to the story through but one variant in it. Claimed by folklorists to be a favorite among women (see chapter 4), the Cupid-Psyche tale recounts its heroine’s rebellion against her passive role, although the rebellion in this instance is instigated by other women who wish her ill. These idle mischief makers, in turn, appeal to the storytelling impulses of one who fights against idleness, while, at the same time, as a collector of tales Lady Drower shares with Iraqi women a self-conscious awareness of their basic sisterhood, of the boundaries between man’s and woman’s space.

And to add another layer to these relationships, I am a woman trying to analyze women’s importance in the narrating and collecting of stories. Not unlike the diplomat’s wife, I am married to a businessman and attend many social gatherings at which I meet women most of whom are not employed outside the home. Almost invariably they ask me if I am still working, as if it is some insufficiency on my husband’s part or some oddity on mine that makes me want to earn a living. And when the tensions that arise from my attempt to balance family and other domestic responsibilities with my teaching, research, and writing overwhelm me, I sometimes think longingly of what appears to me other women’s leisurely existence. I supply this brief biographical information because of my awareness that this book, more than the others I have written, is in part my own narrative; that my speculations about Lady Drower’s collection arise in part from my own self-consciousness; that I am, as I claimed in my preface, participating in the storytelling process, not merely recording others’ stories; that fantasies of an otherworld that promises relief from woman’s role are ones I sometimes share rather than observe from a scholarly distance.

In the following pages, it will not always be possible to identify whose fantasies and whose fears—the man’s, the woman’s, the storyteller’s, or the collector’s—are the most operative in a story. Active fieldwork is helpful in such identifications, as folklorist Dov Noy has pointed out, for the folktale gatherer can talk to women informants about where they learned their stories and can trace the genealogy of tales and the genders of the storytellers who passed them down from generation to generation.⁵⁸ Moreover, swan maiden and demon lover tales involve wish-fulfillment, often invoking forbidden fantasies; but they also lay bare the down-to-earth issues upon which the relationships between men and women are based. Gender relations themselves are crucial elements in their themes, and to consider (if not always to know) how gender affects the transmission of narrative from storyteller to listener to collector to reader is to achieve increasing insight into the very meaning of the stories in question. If the patterns that emerge from multiple variants of written folklore texts do not substitute for fieldwork and the ability to question the informant, such patterns nonetheless supply such an extraordinarily rich and multilayered depiction of the relations between the sexes as to make possible an almost inexhaustible study.

In this regard I have, as I noted earlier, borrowed from Bynum’s theories, from his argument that single variants of a tale belong to a larger narrative pattern that is rarely completed in one version. What he calls generic and nominal motifs make up the pattern, and

story-tellers know what plantings or substitutions of motifs are possible, because they know what … motifs have thriven before on a given tract of story, and they make their choices accordingly. Distributed in separate stories, their choices complement each other in such a way that a single narrative pattern may have much greater power to organize logically the diverse data of a people’s real world … than any one text of a story alone would suggest.⁵⁹

Following this argument, one thinks of the collecting of variants as the reconstruction of a narrative pattern that becomes clearer as stories are added to it. In this way, the process could be likened to the assembling of a jigsaw puzzle when no box cover exists to reveal what the completed picture should look like. Such a metaphor can help explain how this book has been assembled. First, the more pieces are added to the puzzle, the clearer the emerging pattern will become. At the same time, the same picture could be cut into fewer or more pieces. This book was originally about twice its present length, and even then I had omitted intriguing story variations. But the practicalities of book publishing as well as the tolerance of my readers obviously necessitated cutting. My readers will hopefully take my word for the existence of unmentioned tales that support my interpretations. They may also take up my search for the swan maiden by pursuing more examples of tales that catch interest or pique curiosity. Indeed, stories that challenge my reading may emerge: I am only too conscious that the pieces of my puzzle are almost infinite and realize that even the vast number I have thought about must constitute but a fraction of what is available for study. The patterns that have emerged from my reading are, nonetheless, persistent and contribute to what I consider a clear picture.

The absence of a puzzle piece or the dull shadings of others will not drastically alter the emerging picture. As I noted in the preface, storytellers vary widely in narrative ability and intelligence, and this is also true for collectors of tales. It was often obvious that a version I chose to cite because it contained an important motif was either badly told or was narrated with the literary embellishments of the collector. But because I have merged collectors and informants as participants with me in the construction of a narrative pattern, my choices were not based on the quality of tale telling. And, again, in published collections of folktales, genres are rarely kept distinct: myth, legend, and fairy tale combine as pieces of the same overarching narrative.

Puzzle pieces are constructed so that a single piece links more than one other piece. Sometimes I had to decide whether a story should be discussed in one or another chapter: for example, a male horse lover belongs to the animal groom stories but also merges with the female horse to play an important role in incubus tales, the “mare” in “nightmare” having become embroiled in etymological as well as folkloristic confusion (see chapter 5). And I have sometimes had to repeat in one chapter a story already discussed in another, because the narrative motifs could not be neatly separated; but I have tried to keep such repetitions to a minimum. For the same reason, I have also not attempted a subject index for this book. Despite my efforts at separation, classification, and organization, the items such an index might contain involve narrative themes that weave themselves through all the stories in this book. A subject index would virtually duplicate the notes.

My analogy is of course not exact: obviously a real jigsaw puzzle can only be correctly assembled in one way, and the presence of the cover picture is only an aid to the assembler. But the idea of reconstructing a large narrative pattern from pieces found in variants has the additional advantage of complementing the premises of reader response theorists. Holbek has claimed that, ultimately, the meaning of a story resides in the mind of the person who receives it; and Susan Suleiman has noted a problem that is easily applicable to the audiences of tales originally transmitted orally: “Obviously it is not easy to study variations within audiences and their reception of literary works in the distant past.”⁶⁰ But the variations within a narrative pattern, reflective of choices among motifs made by individual narrators, have the benefit of revealing the ways that different tales could be received. Most of this book involves prose narratives with occasional references to ballads, whose development and transmission involve special considerations, such as how individual variations must meet (or can be explained by) the requirements of song, including rhyme and rhythm, such requirements also being dependent upon a singer’s memory, which could fail at any given moment. But I have engaged in an analysis of Child ballad 243, “The Demon Lover,” for two reasons. For a book in which demon lovers play so important a role, it seemed unthinkable to omit this very popular ballad. Also, because of the many variants that exist in the British Isles, and because “The Demon Lover” was, of the ballads brought to America, one of the most widely sung and disseminated, thus being available in many versions, it forms by itself a potential jigsaw puzzle and therefore a microcosm of the effort to reconstruct an overarching swan maiden/demon lover tale. Even allowing for Tristram Coffin’s caution about the random lyrics and themes that float among ballads,⁶¹ and even admitting that I may be attributing to an individual singer more insight than that singer deserves, I discovered in collecting versions of Child 243 that I eventually located every version of the story that I could imagine, every variation in plot and human motivation that my own mind began to conceive of as I read.

Jameson wrote nearly half a century ago that the “study of folklore is a dangerous adventure.”⁶² It appears particularly hazardous when one comes to it as a lover of narrative itself rather than as a trained folklorist. One way to undertake the perilous journey is to carry the most scientific equipment available, treading cautiously. Another way is fearlessly to plunge into the territory to be explored, transforming the terrain if necessary. In his Grandfather Tales Richard Chase describes how in his collection he has “taken a free hand in the re-telling.” He describes how he “put each tale together from different versions” as well as from his own experience in telling them. “I have,” he writes,” told the tales to all kinds of listeners, old and young; and only then, after many tellings, written them down. This spontaneous telling process is really important for you, too, the reader. After you have read these tales, put the book away and try telling one.”⁶³ It is arguable that Chase is still perpetuating an oral tradition, but is it really the case that to commit the tale told to print is to destroy the integrity of the folk tradition? Italo Calvino invokes and explains a Tuscan proverb—the tale is not beautiful if nothing is added to it—to explain how he put together his collection of Italian folktales. “In other words,” argues Calvino, the story’s “value consists in what is woven and rewoven into it,” and he unabashedly announces his willingness to recreate his material without admitting for a moment that he had violated its spirit: “I selected from mountains of narratives [and] enriched the text selected from other versions and whenever possible did so without altering its character or unity, and at the same time filled it out and made it more plastic. I touched up as delicately as possible those portions that were either missing or too sketchy.”⁶⁴

This book, too, will tell a story—or rather, retell it in chapters that represent parts of a complex narrative, which overall depicts the enforced capture of the fairy wife, her husband’s lonely search for her when she has escaped him, the woman who elopes with her demon lover, and the one who willingly spurns him to live, like Damayanti or Etain, in the world of domestic relations. Woven of countless tales, the story tells of Psyche, who first rebels against and then accepts her role, and the animal groom whose humanization is dependent upon her doing so, as well as the animal bride whose disenchantment depends upon a male strength that too often fails her. These tales, thematically unified, tell of weary drudgery and of erotic dreams, of relationships that tragically are more often thwarted than fulfilled, or partially fulfilled at a price that modern interpreters of the tales have yet to fully evaluate. To conceive of a unified narrative may involve an audacious act of interpretation, but despite the dangers involved, it will be clear that the tales are so fraught with significance that what astonishes most is the extraordinary degree to which their meanings have been neglected in commentaries upon them.