Angela Bourke’s work in Irish folklore primarily explores the use of fairy phenomena and women’s roles within the Irish public and private landscape. Her book, The Burning of Bridget Cleary, is, at the moment, one of my prime texts for the work I’m pursuing. However, throughout this book and within her individual essays and articles, I have found very little theory. I have read nearly all her published materials at this point and I tend to finish them feeling frustrated by a mysterious abscess which I was not able to specifically identify. Paying particular heed to the work of Jeana Jorgenson, I honed in on the two forms of feminist folkloristics she posits: political and theoretical. I believe that I can now settle on the version in which Bourke works and it is overtly political rather than theoretical. This reflects the activist and informative aspects of feminism and this work is important.
I admit that reading the introduction to her essay and noting the marked triviality in the reported voice of Alan Dundes left me irritated by his inability to engage or observe what was present at the time. While I appreciate his contributions to the field, I did not enjoy his suggestion that feminist (and potentially by extension queer) folkloristics provided little theoretical methodology and rather persisted as a call to action and sirens for the wrongs against women. All of this aside, many folks within the field have cultivated room for the production of theoretical methods in folkloristics.
This week’s work was especially important to me. I am a bi woman working in what has previously been a highly patriarchal discipline. I feel very strongly about the space beyond which queer and feminist folkloristics evolves and grows and believe that ultimately these modes of theory and activism will benefit and improve folklore methods and humanity at large. I’m aware that such grandiose visions might be a little silly. I also seek to make fewer statements like the previous one. I believe that folklore today is and will be a space for exploration of difference and similarity in positive ways. I believe that activism and theory can together encourage communities to grow and expand for the better together. I am aquarius; hear me blow the wind your direction in the most positive of fashions.
Anyway, after I got through my emotions of frustration with our lad Dundes, I moved into a text which I wish I could have read from start to finish and shared with the entire class. I wish I could have just assigned this text on its own. I’m still working through its articles, but I’ll name it now. Unsettling Assumptions: tradition, gender, drag separates its articles not into sections or groups. It focuses on the fluidity of gender and then positions the articles within it by suggesting topics that connect some pieces to one another rather than setting them within the strictures of imposed groups.
From these readings, I began to reconsider the story of Bridget Cleary. What of Bridget’s barrenness, her lack of children after years of marriage, her occupations, her income which may have exceeded her husband’s, etc.? What of the nature of her narrative? Is it a fairy tale? If it were to receive a tale type, under what category would it fall? Would it fall under the category of Maiden-Killer (AT 312)? No, her husband, Michael, has not married multiple times and Bridget is the only woman whom he murders. But, must one be a serial killer to fulfill Bluebeard’s role? The story possesses what I believe to be the necessary components of an earlier fairy tale. Additionally, the gruesome death of a young woman who fails to produce children and portrays a sense of otherness within her community is the making of a local witch as Kay Turner’s “Neighbors and Witches in Times of Conflict: Afterthoughts and Aftereffects of Doing a Workshop at ‘Thinking with Stories’” leads one to believe. Certainly, Bridget does not intentionally set out to produce a version of self that is presented as feminist (in the activist or political sense), but unintentionally her positionality leads contemporary observers to see the markers that would designate Bridget as an outsider, an other, and, potentially, a witch. In fact, in 1895 the journal Folklore reports the events surrounding her death and address the changeling narrative. However, the article appears entitled “The ‘Witch-Burning’ at Clonmel” suggesting that, while this is a síofra/changeling case, the notion of the feminine Other appears here coded as witch. I’m left stewing over the implications Bridget as witch and síofra, maiden and married woman, modern and traditional.
Word Witch 