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Victorians and Fairy Brides Author(S): Carole Silver Reviewed Work(S): Source: Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, Vol University of Tulsa "East of the Sun and West of the Moon": Victorians and Fairy Brides Author(s): Carole Silver Reviewed work(s): Source: Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, Vol. 6, No. 2, Woman and Nation (Autumn, 1987), pp. 283-298 Published by: University of Tulsa Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/464273 . Accessed: 30/12/2012 12:36 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. University of Tulsa is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded on Sun, 30 Dec 2012 12:36:50 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions "East of the Sun and West of the Moon": Victorians and Fairy Brides Carole Silver Yeshiva University Once upon a time, in a land east of the sun and west of the moon, there lived a race of women who were powerful and free. They dwelt apart from ordinary mortals, for they were of a differentstock from humans, standing between them and the angels. And, despite suspicions that these women had no souls, all acknowledged their extraordinary skills: they could lengthen or shorten time, change size and shape, and, when they chose, become invisi? ble. Theirs was the power of "glamour" or illusion; they could see visions and foretell the future. They could bless or curse, cure or destroy humans, animals, and the land itself. Commanding respect from all who encountered them, these fairywomen valued courtesy and deference. Like the natural aristocrats they were, they lived by their own code, outside the morality of men. They were often amorous, caring little for the ordinary laws of marriage or the canons of respectability; they chose love and pleasure rather than monogamy and constancy. Regal rather than nurturing, they were not consistently maternal. They were known both for stealing human children and for bearing fairyor mixed offspringwith great difficulty;yet, they were willing to leave children they had borne with their mortal fathers. Sometimes, one of these creatures of more than human beauty, power, and stature was captured by a mortal and hence became a fairybride. In the most popular European account of this occurrence, the fairy was depicted as a Swan Maiden. Spied upon while bathing or dancing with her sisters, one of the maidens would find her swanskin plumage stolen. Unable to flee, she would be forced to accept the embraces of her captor. Whether the fairy's animal disguise was that of a swan, dove, partridge, or other bird, whether she appeared as a seal, a mermaid, or a lamia, her fate was essentially the same. Deprived of her own magic realm, she was obliged to lead a different and less glorious existence in the mortal world. Yet, even in captivity, she kept her separateness and power. Though, in general, she was a tractable wife, she prohibited her husband from certain speech or action and retained the right to leave him?with or without the offspringof the union?if he violated the taboos.1 283 This content downloaded on Sun, 30 Dec 2012 12:36:50 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions These, then, were fairybrides or Swan Maidens (as Victorians frequently called them)?the figuresnot derived from romance or literary fairy tale? but from English and continental folklore and the works of the numerous Victorian amateur and professional foikiorists who collected, chronicled, and analyzed materials about them. For though fairies were of both sexes, Victorian foikiorists were particularly drawn to the female of the species. At the beginning of the period, collectors made available many tales that indicated the nature and power of female fairies, especially in their relations with mortal men. As early as 1828, Thomas Keightley, whose book, The Fairy Mythology, was reprinted frequently, retold the tales of fairy brides, ranging from the French "Legend of Meiusina" (a famous lamia or serpent- woman) through the Shetland tale of "The Mermaid Wife" to the Welsh account of "The Spirit of the Van" (called by others "The Lady of the Van Pool").2 In the 1850s, Scandinavian accounts of Swan Maidens became widely known in England through such popular works as Benjamin Thorpe's Yule-Tide Stories (1853) and George Webbe Dasent's Popular Tales from the Norse (1859).3 By the 1890s, the author of a popular Introductionto Folk-Lore could assume that "some of the many European versions of the swan-skin story are probably familiar to all."4 Throughout the period, fairybrides led at least three connected lives, one in folklore itself,another in literature, and a third in the theoretical studies produced by a burgeoning group of foikiorists. Indeed, between the 1840s, when the term "folk-lore"was invented, and the beginning of the First World War, the study of folklore proliferated; the collecting of material, the methodology by which to analyze it, and the theoretical grounds on which to base such study were developed and disseminated. At the end of the 1880s, Victorian foikiorists were particularly preoccupied with fairybrides. They focused their concern on the marriage relations of fairies and mortal males found in Swan Maiden tales and on the social and cultural explana? tions of this phenomenon. That the 1880s should be especially fascinated with the marriage of fairies is not surprising: this was the era of the Married Women's Property Acts and of the "New Woman," of the rise of the "Marriage Question" and the fail of Parneii, and especially of the arrival on English shores of Ibsen's Nora, herself an "eif" who promised to "dance in the moonlight" for her husband.5 Although Swan Maiden tales offeredother and new perspectives on the questions of marriage, they did present some of the same issues that were plaguing those who read them: the imbalance of power between the sexes, the nature of female sexuality, and the right of females to leave their mates and children. The foikiorists' responses to the tales, the theories they formulated to explain them are more telling than the tales themselves. In effect,they constitute a socio-cultural history of the spectrum of Victorian 284 This content downloaded on Sun, 30 Dec 2012 12:36:50 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions attitudes toward women and marriage. As the foikioristsfirst articulated and then deflected or rationalized questions of female power and sexuality and of the rights of females to divorce (ail questions implicit in the tales), they exposed some of England's underlying assumptions about gender, race, and social evolution. Significantly, foikiorists ignored part of the material available to them. Only a few argued that all fairies were female or that they existed as a separate, somewhat Amazonian, community of women, although the folk traditions on which to base such speculations?Celtic materials including Conla's voyage to a fairyland entirely composed of women and the rule of Irish fairy hills by queens instead of kings?were widely known. The traits that female fairies shared with Amazons were equally evident: both groups were nonmonogamous, nonmaternal, outdoor creatures who favored hunt? ing, riding, and wandering where and when they would. But the kinship between Amazons and fairies was deemphasized, and the more militant aspects of elfin nature and behavior were carefully neutralized. When a society of solely female fairypower was postulated, it was dismissed, even by the folklore theorist who propounded it, as the result of confusion in the primitive mind.6 In the literaryworld, it formed the stuffof comedy. In W S. Gilbert's lolanthe (1882), for example, a subversive cabal of Peris yields to the love of Peers, while their proud Fairy Queen must solicit the hand of a lowly but manly sentry. It was still possible to dismiss or defuse through laughter the idea of female separation latent in Gilbert's folklore sources. Yet, even without the specter of Amazonism, foikiorists found the subject of fairybrides wed to mortal men disturbing. Swan Maiden tales, as a genre, suggested the possibility of the superiority of women, thus overturning the prevailing hierarchy of gender. Consciously or unconsciously, Victorian male foikiorists rewrote seditious tales by reinterpreting them.7 How a given foikiorist viewed female fairies depended, in the firstplace, upon his general view of fairy origins. Most of those interested in the questions of marriage and superioritywere historicist-naturaiist (euhemerist) and comparativist-anthropoiogicai foikiorists; both groups agreed that there was a substrate of historical evidence beneath the fiction of fairyexistence, that fairies were derived from actual, usually prehistoric, peoples and that, as comparativists argued, traces of fairy belief remained as "survivals" in the primitive cultures known to the nineteenth century.8 How a given foikiorist saw fairy brides in particular depended, in the second place, on his view of the development of marriage. After 1860, most Victorian foikiorists were social Darwinists, intent on tracing the precise evolution of societies and institutions. They placed such institutions as marriage, its stages of development carefully distinguished and categorized, 285 This content downloaded on Sun, 30 Dec 2012 12:36:50 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions within an evolutionary scheme of progressive development or regressive decay.
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