Copyright by Sarah Rebecca Wakefield 2002 Folklore-Naming and Folklore-Narrating in British Women’s Fiction, 1750-1880 by Sarah Rebecca Wakefield, B.A., M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin May 2002 In memory of Verda Faye Stiles 1917 - 2001 Acknowledgments I would like to thank the members of my dissertation committee, Gillian Adams, Betty Sue Flowers, Elizabeth Hedrick, and Elizabeth Richmond-Garza, for their support in the timely completion of the project, and especially my director, Carol MacKay, for her encouragement not only around this dissertation but my personal life. I also thank several other faculty members at the University of Texas at Austin, namely Sabrina Barton, John Farrell, and Lisa Moore, for their advice on early drafts of particular chapters. I owe debts to family and friends as well. My parents and my sister, Kristy, offered continual, cheerful observations that they were sure the finished product would meet both the deadlines and my own expectations. My friends in the LGC provided daily, moral reinforcement, and I would like to mention in particular my gratitude towards Michele LaCatena, who served as a much- suffering layperson reader for the Introduction, Elizabeth Andrews, who aided in French translation, and Jennifer Klein and Leah Lesnar, who offered literary advice whenever asked. My heartfelt appreciation also goes to Shannon Hanson for her friendship, her unconditional love, her unfailing support, and her patience with my problems with fairies. Finally, I must thank the students from my 2000-2001 “The Rhetoric of Fairy Tales” classes, whose insights made me reexamine my research and whose excitement about fairy tales helped keep me excited about this project. v Folklore-Naming and Folklore-Narrating in British Women’s Fiction, 1750-1880 Publication No. __________ Sarah Rebecca Wakefield, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2002 SUPERVISOR: Carol MacKay When an individual, usually a man, is attracted to another, usually a woman, from another country or lower social class, he deals with potentially dangerous desires by declaring her a supernatural creature, a strategy that I term “folklore-naming,” distinct from “folklore-narrating,” or telling stories about the fantastic. Many in nineteenth-century England feared that the Irish, Jews, working-class girls, governesses, spinsters and the insane were corrupting national purity. In response to such anxieties about the security of sexual, racial, class, and/or national status, a character employs folktale, fairy tale, or myth to alleviate discomfort. Yet terms like “fairy” are peculiar nicknames since these beings can be helpful and/or harmful. Using supernatural vocabulary to control females who occupy cultural boundaries, when the words themselves connote vi ambiguity and secret power, undermines the effort to put women in their place. This study draws attention to how instances of folklore, hitherto considered in structural and psychological manners, tie to uneasiness around race, class, sex, nation, and desire in selected genres of British women’s fiction from 1750 to 1880. I start with investigation of the place of fairy lore in Sarah Fielding’s The Governess and Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho, texts that introduce the concept of folklore-narrating to comment on the female condition. The English narrator of Sydney Owenson's The Wild Irish Girl folklore-names the “degenerate” Irishwoman he loves because she is unsuited to his nationality and class status. Next, the fiction of Charlotte Brontë offers a variety of folklore dynamics, from Rochester’s nicknames for governess Jane Eyre to Shirley’s folklore-narration on mermaids to Lucy Snowe’s folklore-naming of Paulina in Villette. By contrast, in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, Middlemarch, and Daniel Deronda, anxieties shift from colonial and working women to simply the Englishwoman, who can still seem strange and threatening at home. Finally, in mid-Victorian fairy tales by Jean Ingelow (Mopsa the Fairy) and Anne Thackeray, we see how middle-class Englishness becomes magical, both in domestic realms and in Fairyland. vii Table of Contents Introduction: Folklore as a Critical Tool……….…………………….………..1 What’s In a Name? The Difficulty of Defining the Fairy Folk………….5 Anxieties of the British Public, 1750-1880……………………………...19 The Role of Desire: Who Names, and Who Is Named?…………………26 Fairy Tales, Women Writers, and Feminist Criticism…………………...29 Method: Uniting Feminist Criticism, Folklore, and Cultural Theory…....35 Readings in British Women’s Fiction…………………………………...41 Chapter 1: “Things Totally Out of Nature”: Fairies and Fairy-Tales in Eighteenth-Century Fiction ……………………...…...52 “Innocent Diversions”: Fairy Tales in Fielding's The Governess………..65 Fairies and the Female Condition in The Mysteries of Udolpho………...77 Chapter 2: “Syren Lure”: Folklore as National Rhetoric in The Wild Irish Girl……….……..……………………………………98 Horatio’s Irish Fairy…….……..……………………………………….101 “My English Ossian”…….……..………………………………………118 viii Chapter 3: Governesses, Émigrés and Fairies: Implications of Fairy Lore in the Novels of Charlotte Brontë…………...…..………134 Jane Eyre, Fairy Tale, Folktale: A Close Reading……………………..140 Shirley: Folklore between Female Friends…...…..……...…..…………161 Villette: Folklore Goes to the Continent…...…..……...…..……...…….177 Chapter 4: George Eliot's English Water-Nixies and Sad-Eyed Princesses……..……...………………………………….....207 “A Small Medusa with Her Snakes Cropped”: Maggie and Folklore on the Floss…...…..……...…..………….213 The Mermaid of Middlemarch…...…..……...…..……………………...226 Daniel Deronda’s Demonic (un)Englishwomen…...…..………………237 Chapter 5: Domesticating the Fairy Realm: Anne Thackeray Ritchie and Jean Ingelow……………..………………….266 “Not Only in Fairy Tales”: The Magic of English Living According to Thackeray………………………...…...…..……..271 Captain Jack Forced from Fairyland…...…..……...…..……...…..…….291 Afterword……………………………………………………………………...314 Works Cited…………………………………………………………………...322 Vita …………………………………………………………………………….345 ix List of Figures Figure 1. Illustration of Maimoune and Danhasch, Les mille et une nuits, Paris (1839-40)...…………. ……………...……...…….12 Figure 2. Robert Smirke, illustration of Maimoune and Danhasch, The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, trans. Foster (1847)…………...12 Figure 3. Daniel Maclise, male fairy on a dragonfly, Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland (1826)………..13 Figure 4. Daniel Maclise, female fairies at play, ibid…………………………...13 Figure 5. George Cruikshank, illustration facing page 20 in “Cinderella and the Glass Slipper, ” (1854) ……………………....14 Figure 6. William Thackeray, initial to Chapter 16, Pendennis (1848-50)………………………………………………….38 Figure 7. George Cruikshank, detail from the bottom of the frontispiece to The Fairy Mythology, new ed. (1878)………………...38 Figure 8. “Rémy’s Leave-Taking,” Cornhill Magazine 13 (June 1866)…………………….. …………………………………...290 Figure 9. Maria L. Kirk, "She Learnt Nearly All of Them that One Evening," Mopsa the Fairy, Lippincott (1910)…………. …………299 x Introduction Folklore as a Critical Tool Toward the beginning of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Ruth (1853) a curious scene occurs. The hunchback Mr. Benson appears on the scene like some magical gnome and, throughout the rest of the novel, proceeds to act as a fairy godfather to the heroine. Ruth and Benson discuss the beauties of the Welsh countryside, and the kind parson explains that the locals believe the fox-glove to be a favorite flower of fairies: “Its Welsh name is Maneg Ellyllyn– the good people’s glove; and hence, I imagine, our folk’s-glove or fox-glove.” “It’s a very pretty fancy,” said Ruth, much interested, and wishing that he would go on, without expecting her to reply.”1 His observation associating the plant, a cardiac stimulant and poison, with fairies rings true for Celtic folklore in the nineteenth century. As late as 1895 Irish parents were advised to put juice from the plant in the ears and mouth of a child suspected to be a changeling (Bourke 81). When Ruth’s seducer, Mr. Bellingham, hears of the forest encounter, he seeks out the stranger. Curiously enough, his reaction to Mr. Benson refers to fairies as well: 1 “Ruth,” said he, when he returned, “I’ve seen your little hunchback. He looks like Riquet-with-the-Tuft. He’s not a gentleman, though. If it had not been for his deformity, I should not have made him out from your description; you called him a gentleman.” (70) This joking allusion to the malformed but good-hearted prince of Charles Perrault’s eponymous fairy tale masks irritation. Bellingham chides Ruth for describing Benson as a gentleman – he uses the term twice to highlight her error – since someone with such a dilapidated wardrobe and lodgings cannot be anyone of rank. The parson cannot be a prince. The passages’ interest for me stems neither from parallels between the story line of Ruth and that of Perrault’s tale (there are none) nor from Mr. Benson’s status as a homely hunchback like the fairy tale hero. The significance of these conversations lies in the fact that in these few pages of the novel, the two men both refer to fairy stories. When the parson educates Ruth on local folk tradition, she listens and, conscious of her botanical illiteracy, hopes he will not expect her to respond in kind. Bellingham invokes not oral lore but a classic, literary, French tale to