The Clever Girls

Told by Alice Lannon to Martin Lovelace and Barbara Rieti, October 10, 2001, in Southeast Placentia. (MUNFLA 2019-029)

Pius: “Peg Bearskin”

ATU 711 The Beautiful and the Ugly Twinsisters

ATU 328 The Boy [Girl] Steals the Ogre’s Treasure

AT 328 The Boy Steals the Giant’s Treasure

ATU 327B The Brothers [Sisters] and the Ogre

AT 327B The Dwarf and the Giant

Alice: “The Clever Girls”

AT 327 The Children and the Ogre

ATU 327B The Brothers and the Ogre

Comments

Folktales of Newfoundland (Halpert and Widdowson 1996) contains an extensive commentary on comparable international versions of “Peg Bearskin.” Tales 17 and 18 (215–29) are versions told by Elizabeth Brewer of Freshwater, Placentia Bay. Mrs. Brewer was married to one of Pius’s mother’s brothers and learned the story as a young girl at Southwest Clattice Harbour, where she lived from 1902 to 1966. Halpert and Widdowson comment in detail on the differences between her two tellings, one tape-recorded, the other written from dictation, with the manuscript version being “more conventional, pointed, direct, and clarificatory” (221) than the looser tape-recorded one. They note the “almost formulaic” phrases, such as “Peg(g) your word’s come true,” spoken by the witch, and the reference to the size of Pegg’s hand: “the full of one of Pegg’s hands was a hogshead [a 50- to 120-gallon barrel]” (226), and suggest the phrases and images gave a “focus for recall” (220). Pius also tells of Peg’s “very big hand / . . . used to hold a hogshead of salt,” and his witch likewise says, “Ah, Peg . . . / your words is comin’ out true.” These textual parallels and others are evidence of the working of aural memory in conjunction with visual imagery in the process of holding a tale together in the narrator’s mind. It is likely that Pius and Elizabeth Brewer heard the tale from the same person.

ATU 711 is a feminine tale type. Bengt Holbek places it among others that support his conviction that “women had a position of their own in folktale tradition: a considerable group of tales were specifically theirs” (1987, 476). Since few male narrators ever told feminine tales (though women often tell masculine ones), Pius showed an uncommonly thoughtful temperament by including “Peg Bearskin” in his repertoire. As in Mrs. Brewer’s story, there are three rejections: of Peg’s mother by her father, of Peg by her sisters, and of Peg by her husband, the Prince. Pius makes the domestic violence in Peg’s mother’s marriage explicit, while Mrs. Brewer elides it somewhat, saying only that “her husband was real nasty to her” (Halpert and Widdowson 1996, 215, 225).

Sometimes in communities things occur that people don’t openly talk about, like wife abuse. Psychological analysis suggests that fairy tales give conscious expression to complex unconscious fantasies about sexual wishes, anger, guilt, and fear of punishment within the family. It is unacceptable to consciousness for these to be explicit, so they are expressed symbolically. And yet wife abuse definitely happens—it is more than simply an unexpressed idea. Folklorists like those whose work appears in Joan N. Radner’s Feminist Messages (1993), in contrast, explore how some tellers use ballads and stories in coded fashion, employing the traditional content to let listeners know, without exactly saying, what is going on. Tellers protect themselves from negative responses because they can say, “It’s only a fairy tale” while letting their hearers know their feelings, attitudes, and ideas.

In “Peg Bearskin” a man beats his wife every day; the wife supposes it’s because they have no children. This information adds nothing to the story in terms of plot, but does offer the opportunity for Pius to make the comment: “Well, . . . / he can’t be a husband at all to beat his wife.” His commentary is quite explicit and uncoded. He registers his direct disapproval of the man’s actions and his own refusal to keep those actions secret. When Anita asked about this, Pius said he was not referring to any particular man, but that some men did beat their wives, in secret, and weren’t “fit to be called men” because they did so. Pius’s version introduces that idea to this particular story, while other versions from Placentia Bay do not. But Anita observed over the years she knew him how much Pius believed strongly in good moral actions and deplored poor treatment of women and children.

“Peg Bearskin” also demonstrates Pius’s belief that beauty lies inside people rather than outside, exemplified by their actions rather than their appearance. Like Pius’s wife and mother, Peg is beautiful on the inside. Like them, she takes charge. Like them—and indeed many a good woman in Newfoundland culture—she is generous, kind, smart, and extremely practical. She looks after her sisters, makes sure they get good husbands and, knowing that most people would not consider her a prize like her beautiful sisters, cleverly persuades the King to decree her marriage with the youngest Prince. In the end, her transformation is as much because of her own good nature as the purifying fire. The fire only burns off the ugliness, leaving the real Peg’s inner beauty to shine for all the world to see.

Peg is the sole transgressive character. The King and the Princes act as expected, considering their place in society. The sisters are conventionally beautiful and their behavior is predictable. They treat the big, ugly, hairy Peg badly, even to the extent of throwing rocks at her, but she returns their actions with kindness. The witch also fits her role as villain. Peg, who is so different from the rest, outsmarts everyone. She understands and uses her magical gifts to the best advantage. Like her French-Canadian counterpart La Poiluse (the hairy girl), she combines expected traits and characteristics of male and female characters; she is both a clever maid and a fearless Jack-type person, with important gendered implications (see Greenhill, Best, and Anderson-Grégoire 2012).

There are some differences between Pius’s and Mrs. Brewer’s versions: the order in which the first two magic objects are stolen is reversed, with the light being stolen after the (de)canter in Mrs. Brewer’s telling. Peg takes the lantern in Pius’s tale after pushing the servant girl into the river, whereas she comes to no harm in Mrs. Brewer’s story. In her version the witch has a husband, who calls for his decanter after she has served him his dinner and who suffers Peg’s handful of pepper thrown at his face, but the witch does not cook the two murdered sisters, as she does in Pius’s version. Giants also tend to be cannibals in Pius’s tales.

In this feminine fairy tale told by a man some distinctively masculine perspectives might be expected, and there is more violence and less domesticity in Pius’s account of the witch and her household. Both narrators take us inside the feelings of the Prince, who is, given that Peg is the very active heroine, in the passive, trapped position suffered by so many female partners in other fairy tales. Pius takes his listeners into the quandary of a man who has married for duty rather than love and who experiences both guilt and relief when Peg offers him an escape by telling him to burn her away.

The action of throwing Peg on the fire is, of course, another version of the hero’s dilemma in “Jack Ships to the Cat” (above), which Pius told about in very similar terms. Both tales feature the “jeezly big fire,” the instant remorse and reflection on how good the Cat/Peg was to him, the knock on the door with its threat of public exposure, and the appearance instead of “the fairest lady that ever water wet or the sun shined on.” Pius was, as noted above, sensitive and humane, so it’s unsurprising that he told the tale in part as a woman would. The active partner, who behaves like a typical Jack in the tale, without misgivings or self-doubt, is Peg, the indomitable fixer of everyone’s problems.

Alice began her tale immediately after concluding “Jack and the Cat.” Perhaps she also knew about connections of the clever vanquishing of an ogre or witch with tales of a hero/ine’s magical transformation. “The Clever Girls”—again, our title, not hers—was another of her grandmother’s tales that Alice had not chosen to tell frequently. The escape from the ogre through the switched nightcaps can be a sequence in a longer tale, as it is in Pius’s “Peg Bearskin,” but it is a complete story in itself, particularly if it is recognized as a typical “children’s fairy tale” (Holbek 1987, 451): one based on opposition between children and adults ending in the children’s escape from mortal peril.

Alice tells her tale swiftly but surely, using the visual motif of a light seen in darkness to draw her listeners toward the girls’ arrival at the giant’s door. To the initial scene is added the sound of the giant’s approaching footsteps, followed by the account of the deceptive hospitality with which they are fed and put to bed. Alice remarks that it was a “comfortable bed,” a comment that chimes with her observation on the giant’s soup in “The Ship That Sailed,” below: “it was good, Jack enjoyed it.” No matter how outlandish the events in her stories, characters are never detached from the appetites of real life. Neither was any visitor allowed to go hungry in Alice’s home.

Perhaps because it was not a tale she told often, Alice does not follow the convention that it be the youngest girl who saves her sisters; it is just “one of the older girls,” not a named character such as Mutsmag or Maol A Chliobain (Chase 1948, 40–43; Campbell 1890, 259–64). She ended it abruptly with the giant’s suicide. Barbara’s comment that the giant’s wife didn’t live happily ever after brought out Alice’s joking reflection, woman to woman, that she may have been happy to get rid of him.

Leonard Roberts gives comparative notes on this tale type in South from Hell-fer-Sartin: Kentucky Mountain Folk Tales (1955, 219–20), with a text from eleven-year-old Jane Muncy. As Carl Lindahl observes, “Among the major collectors of American Märchen, only Leonard Roberts extensively recorded tales from children” (2001, 39). It is unfortunate that children have too often been considered only as passive receivers of fairy tales rather than as active narrators and reshapers of oral tales, passed child to child, which may resonate with their darkest fears.