Angela Bourke, "Reading a Woman's Death," and Lady "Speranza" Wilde, Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms, and Superstitions of Ireland.
Your blog comments will be due on Wednesday, May 30th by 7:00 am. Blog comments should be roughly 250 words in length and contain at least one quote from the text. You may use the questions below for inspiration or develop your own response if you wish.
1) On page 568 of "Reading a Woman's Death," Angela Bourke writes how fairy stories were "an articulation of recent painful events in the terms of a metaphorical or euphemistic discourse which had long been used in the close-knit communities of rural Ireland as a way of dealing with the marginal and the transitional." What does she mean by that statement, and how do you see this at work in the stories collected by Lady Wilde? Make sure to provide examples.
2) On page 569, Bourke writes how raths or "fairy forts" are "sites of avoidance, overgrown and undisturbed, metaphors for areas of silence and circumvention in the social life of the communities which tell stories about them. They are places out of place; their time is out of time." What does she mean by this statement and how do you see this at work in some of the discussions of raths in Lady Wilde's stories? Make sure to provide examples.
3) How do you see issues of social class at work in both Angela Bourke's story of the burning of Bridget Cleary and the stories collected by Lady Wilde? Provide examples for your analysis.
4) Bourke suggests that we should reread the discourse of oral tradition, "particularly as it reflects women's and children's lives, with the transitions, gaps, and contradictions they contain" (556). What sort of rereading of these fairy stories is she asking us to undertake and why? What do the fairy stories collected by Lady Wilde suggest to us about the lives of women and children in rural Ireland? Provide examples to support your answer.
By Kate Bruegmann
ReplyDeleteAngela Bourke states an incident that happened with a fairy in her text, and how fairies seem to not represent evil to people. On the other hand, when I first read fairies I expected them to be good fairies, as to the ones I read in fairy tales. After reading, “The Fairy Race,” it became clearer as to the types of fairies Ireland encounters. According to Lady Wilde, “Some fairies fell into sea and built castles, as to the demonical fairies fell into hell, and are sent on quests by the devil” (69). When I read the story, “The Fairies’ Revenge,” I found it to be a perfect example of a forth or rath. The neighbors warned Johnstone to not build his house on a gorgeous green land where the fairies loved to dance. It seems a bit like a story of beauty and the beast. The beginning seems to start out that way for me, as when Johnstone told the little old lady in the blue cloak to vanish. There are also similarities between Johnstone and the prince of Beauty and the Beast as to they are both rich, self-centered, and uncaring. It seemed like there were a lot of similarities between the two. I personally, thought that this story was before its time, if I understand what Angela Bourke is trying to say. Angela Bourke says that the forths of the fairies are supposed to be untouched because what they are capable of is not manageable in the hands of our time.
In the work of both Angela Bourke and Lady Wilde you can see the roles of social classes. In Lady Wilde The Fairy Revenge she talks about the Johnstone family. This family had plenty of money but they build their home on a fairy rath. This family did not believe in fairies. The fairies planned a way to get revenge on the family. They fairies sent an old women in a blue cloak to ask this rich family for milk and baking cakes, but the family would not share. The fairy caused their only child to get sick. He would say that he saw fairies. “As the clock stuck midnight he awoke, sat up and said the angels are here and then died” (Wilde 85). I think that this shows the classes of people and how the fairies look out for the poor. In both of the readings the rich people are the ones who the fairies cause harm to. Like in Bourke’s reading the Cleary’s seem to be better off than most they lived around. They tell about the night she died that “Michael handed her a coffee canister saying there was twenty pound in it which is about eighteen hundred dollars in today’s terms” (Bourke 576). I think that both Bourke and Wilde’s readings show that it does not matter where you are in the social ladder bad things can happen to you and also good things. They show how fairies are also used in the role of women and children. The fairies can use them in the way that they will talk about being abducted and dancing with the fairies.
ReplyDeleteBy Lynn Schambow