Rewriting a Mythic Nation: Welsh Women Writers Recovering Welsh Myth and Folklore
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REWRITING A MYTHIC NATION: WELSH WOMEN WRITERS RECOVERING WELSH MYTH AND FOLKLORE BETHAN LOUISE COOMBS A submission presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the University of South Wales/Prifysgol De Cymru for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy September 2015 ABSTRACT This thesis examines the function of Welsh mythology, fairy tale and folklore in a selection of works by twentieth- and twenty-first-century Anglophone Welsh women writers who choose to engage with such source material. Its aim is to provide a critical response to those recoveries through feminist and postcolonial theoretical readings. Spanning a century, between 1914 and 2013, its chapters discuss novels by two canonical Welsh writers – Hilda Vaughan, whose work belongs to the first half of the twentieth century, and Alice Thomas Ellis, writing in the second half – followed by two further chapters analysing relevant material drawn from the short story and poetry genres. The final two chapters interrogate novellas by women contributors to Seren Press’s recent series, New Stories from The Mabinogion (2009 – 2013) and thus provide an inaugural critical response to that series: I examine contributions by Gwyneth Lewis, Fflur Dafydd, Trezza Azzopardi, and Tishani Doshi. Throughout this thesis I argue that in the act of recovering and retelling the source narratives, these writers both draw out issues of gender and nationhood embedded in the originals and explore contemporary issues of gender and nationhood emerging from within their socio-historic contexts. When Welsh women writers select Welsh myth, fairy tales and folklore as mediums through which to comment on those issues as paradigms of gender and nationhood, those paradigms are doubly interrogated. They are examined in the source material and they are woven into new narratives which explore the writer’s contemporaneous experience of Welsh womanhood. Further, Welsh women writers who actively choose to draw on and recover Welsh myth are, in so doing, rejecting the veracity and prestige of Classical myths and canonised fairy tales as exemplar narratives par excellence. Their choice may be an aspect of a deeper interrogation of discourses of power which underpin all myth and fairy tales. CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS INTRODUCTION....................................................................................................1 CHAPTER ONE Theoretical Contexts..............................................................................................28 CHAPTER TWO Welsh Myth and Folklore in the Work of Hilda Vaughan.....................................69 CHAPTER THREE Supernatural Wales in the Work of Alice Thomas Ellis......................................109 CHAPTER FOUR Welsh Myth and Folklore in Anglophone Short Stories......................................148 CHAPTER FIVE Welsh Myth and Folklore in Anglophone Poetry................................................196 CHAPTER SIX Welsh Myth in Gwyneth Lewis’s The Meat Tree................................................238 CHAPTER SEVEN Welsh Myth in the Work of Fflur Dafydd, Trezza Azzopardi, and Tishani Doshi ..............................................................................................................................273 CONCLUSION....................................................................................................313 WORKS CITED...................................................................................................319 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Substantial thanks are due to Professor Diana Wallace whose unyielding support, kind patience, and insightful comments, have enabled me to realise this project. I am grateful to Professor Jane Aaron for her encouragement and recommendations which were always extremely helpful. I would also like to thank Dr. Kirsti Bohata for discussing the early stages of this project with me and for providing a copy of ‘The Black House’ by Margiad Evans. Dr. Lucy Thomas alerted me to the existence of Hilda Vaughan’s personal correspondence with Rosemary Sutcliffe and kindly supplied a transcript of an original letter in which Vaughan discusses her use of the Welsh fairy tale, ‘The Fairy Bride of Llyn y Fan Fach’. Thanks are due too to Professor Christopher Meredith whose useful comments on translation assisted my readings of texts, particularly of Zoe Brigley’s poetry. I am expressly grateful to Penny Thomas, Seren Press’s commissioning editor of their New Stories from The Mabinogion series. Penny agreed to be interviewed for this study and provided vital contextual information about the series. I have appreciated the patience of senior librarians Lynne Lloyd and Lowri Owen of The College at Merthyr Tydfil who have offered technical assistance over many years. Most importantly, my greatest debts of gratitude are owed to my parents, Jeanne and Eddie Coombs, and to Gerwyn Phelps. Without their unquestioning and tireless support this thesis would not exist; it is as much theirs as it is mine. Finally, this thesis is dedicated to my children who are my Welsh princes. For Rhys and Macsen 1 INTRODUCTION Throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries Anglophone Welsh women writers, such as Bertha Thomas, Hilda Vaughan, Alice Thomas Ellis and Gwyneth Lewis, frequently engage with and recover Welsh myth, fairy tales and folklore to interrogate concepts of gender and national identities. How these writers interweave these aspects of Welsh culture into their writing is suggestive of how they experience Welsh culture and traditions. Myth, fairy and folk tales are often exposed as conduits of hegemonic discourses and so narratives which re-imagine source materials also signal how Welsh women writers critically engage with concepts of gender and nationhood. Such concepts are often renegotiated to present more gynocentric representations of Welsh womanhood. In reconstituting representations of gender, the Welsh women writers selected for analysis in this thesis are addressing androcentric/gynocentric paradigms as they were positioned at the start of the twentieth century and as they have evolved, both in Wales and other cultures, through to the early twenty-first century. Bertha Thomas, Margiad Evans, Ellen Lloyd-Williams, and Hilda Vaughan, for example, have re-told Welsh myth, fairy and folk tales to comment on the specific condition of Welsh women’s social status and Welsh nationhood, as they were experienced at the dawn of the 1900s (which saw the failure of the Cymru Fydd Welsh Home Rule movement in 1899, and the inception of Plaid Cymru, the Party of Wales, in 1925). Short story writers such as Dorothy K. Haynes, and Hazel F. Looker, published folkloric intertexts just before Wales voted against a version of home rule in its first Referendum (1979) with such fictions suitably exploring contemporaneous notions of ‘be careful what you wish 2 for’. Brought up in North Wales by a Welsh mother and Anglo-Russian father, Alice Thomas Ellis publishes her novels after that failed Referendum. She chose not to engage with wider concepts of Welsh nationhood or feminism. Ellis ‘sees fairy mythology as an influential part of the perceived “otherness” of Celtic cultures in Britain’ (Armitt, Contemporary 133): however, she differs from the Welsh women writers discussed in this thesis because she presents a wholly idiosyncratic engagement with Welsh folklore. With an insider/outsider gaze her approach to Welsh nationhood is problematic and she is often antagonistic to second-wave feminism. This could account for the relative lack of critical response to her works, though scholars such as Lucie Armitt, Sarah Sceats, Peter Conradi, Marion E. Crowe and Katie Gramich do provide literary critical comments on it. Later Welsh women writers, such as Imogen Rhia Herrad, Catherine Fisher, Gwyneth Lewis, Anna Lewis, and Tishani Doshi, present more radical engagements with Welsh myth and fairy tales as they consider Welsh women’s status and Welsh nationhood in a new millennium and within the era of Welsh devolution. Such a focus on gender and indigenous culture necessarily suggests that feminist and postcolonial readings are applicable to the texts selected for study. Accordingly feminist and postcolonial theory will underpin my analysis of the function of Welsh mythology, folklore and fairy tales enabling a discussion of the power balances between the genders in a specifically Welsh context; an expansion of this discussion will include an analysis of how Welsh women writers engage with the evolving power relations between the genders on a wider level. Similarly, within a postcolonial context, how Welsh women writers explore the complex 3 issue of power relations between Wales and its immediate/domestic neighbour, England, is analysed. This thesis contends, then, that Anglophone Welsh literature written by Welsh women writers who engage with their nation’s mythology and folk belief systems often works to present re-focussed gender positions and reconstituted notions of cultural identity, as befits a twentieth- and twenty-first century readership. When a Welsh woman writer provides a rewritten narrative for a modern- day readership she is also recovering the source material for a contemporary audience. By working with myth, legend and folklore as intertexts in her own narrative she is making those myths, legends and folkloric tales available to a readership potentially ignorant of them. Alerting her reader to the existence of Welsh mythology, legend and folklore, the writer is encouraging the reclamation of Welsh