Childbirth: the ultimate power trip?

"The Knight and Shepherd’s Daughter" supports the myth by dwelling on a chase immediately consequent to an unplanned sexual encounter, while "The False Lover Won Back," dwelling upon a similar, if somewhat less immediate, chase (she’s had time, at least, to realize that she’s pregnant) doesn’t specify just what it is consequent upon (other than sex). For all we know -- at least, for all that #218 tells us -- the man could be fleeing a long-term, deeply "caring relationship." Except that that isn't the language of balladry. As ballad singers would put it, he's simply a "false true-lover" who needs rather a lot of reminding. And while the strong female action may not actually arise from "pastoral encounter" as a spontaneous act of lovemaking belonging to a green "world apart," it clearly springs, as does the unborn child, from what balladry calls "careless love."

The folk commonplace covers more ground than the myth, allowing for at least the fiction of "love" to precede lovemaking. Still, it focuses our attention on unthought-out sexual action, brought into public view by its sexual consequences, as indeed any "world apart" is inevitably bought into a more rule-bound (and far messier!) world by babies. So songs of "careless love," especially from an era less tolerant of unwed motherhood than ours, are often laments or warnings, which is how our third "chase ballad" -- perhaps the parent of #218, for it, too, features a pregnant heroine -- begins

I warn you all you ladies fair that do wear red and brown,
That you don’t leave your father’s house to run with a boy from town.
("Child Waters," as sung by Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger)

In the same vein, our heroine addresses the baby she delivers in the stable at the end of the ballad as "thou pledge of careless love," Yet "Child Waters" (#63) is no lament. Though the play for sympathy is there, so too is the invitation to applaud a hard won female triumph to which the chase is but prelude -- a triumph of hard "travail" (as older texts put it) bringing the man to a belated sense of commitment even as it brings brings the extended romance of the female body to a kind of closure and, as we shall see, a curious theatrical parity....

To be sure, the ballad requires a large suspension of disbelief, especially when it comes to the chase -- one that this heroine undertakes while "big wi' bairn" and yet supposedly disguised as her lover's footpage. Borrowing freely from #110 to describe the ensuing action (or is it the other way round?), older texts may also include a lively debate between fleeing man and pursuing woman; indeed they convey, in general, a stronger picture of her curiously defiant loyalty than the ballad as now sung, as if 20th-century singers have agreed with Bronson about the "too cruel old ballad of Child Waters" and wanted to soften it with sympathy and implied regrets. Version 'B' (from which the Seeger/ MacColl version appears to derive) thus begins with an almost identical warning ("that ye dinna leave your father’s house to follow young men frae town") but goes on to reject that warning; instead of the response now sung ("for here am I a lady fair... and I did leave my father's house..."), we find:

O here am I, a lady gay that wears scarlet and brown;
Yet I will leave my father’s house and follow Lord John frae the town.
(Child 63, version 'B,' from Mrs Brown’s recitation, italics mine)

We are given no initial reason for the man’s flight; Lord John only says he is "bound to ride," and Burd Ellen annouces her intent to run by his side, while the ballad as now sung simply cuts to the chase:

He’s mounted on his big white horse and fast away rode he;
She dressed herself like a little footboy, she ran at the horse’s knee.

We soon learn, however, that he's riding toward another woman in the castle ahead, presumably a better match; and our heroine reacts to this news with fitting sadness, at least fitting for a "careless love" lament:

There is a lady in that castle. who will part you and me.
She will eat the good white bread, you will eat but corn,
And you will sit and curse the hour that ever you was born.
"If there’s a lady in that castle that will part you and I
The day I see her," Ellen said, "That day I will die."

But in the earlier text, she reacts, more stubbornly, with

"There is a lady in that castle will sunder you and I":
"Betide me well, betide me wae, I sal go there an’ try."
(version 'B'....)

As she refuses to give up on her purpose, she also denies that she will "sigh, and say, alas! that ever ye was a man" or "curse the heavy hour that ever your love was born." Instead, as our unrepentant heroine continues the literal running debate:

An' I hope to live an' bless the day that ever ye was a man.....
An' I ay sall bless the happy hour that ever my love was born..
(version 'B'...)

Even sorrow is expressed argumentatively. So, once arrived at the castle, seated at the "bye-table" among the other foot-men and bidden, "O eat an’ drink, my bonny boy, the white bread an’ the beer ... the whie bread an’ the wine," she can answer back: with.

Then never a bit can I eat or drink, my heart’s sae full of fear.....
O I canna eat nor drink, master, my heart’s sae full of pine.
(version 'B'...)

Now all this arguing between our heroine and her lover has been dropped--but not the exchange of words between Lord John and his old mother, who tells him flat out that "the bonny boy who looks sae sad on thee" looks more like a "woman big wi’ bairn" ("a woman deep in love") whereupon her son, laughing off the comment as blatantly absurd -- this is obviously a man in deep denial! -- tells the "little footboy" to go feed his horse some hay.

"Oh, that I will, my master dear, as fast as ever I may."
She took the hay in her soft white hands, she ran out from the hall.
She ran into the great stable and into the horse's stall,
And there she did begin to weep, she did begin to moan,
For even among those great horse feet, she had to bear her son.

Or as the older text (version 'B') puts it:

‘O room ye roun', my bonny broun steeds, O room ye near the wa’;
For the pain that strikes me thro my sides full soon will gar [make] me fa’;
She's leaned her back against the wa’; strong travail seized her on;
An' even amo the great horse feet, Burd Ellen brought forth her son.

Now there's a power picture! In contrast to "Mary meek and mild" giving birth in company with the peaceable beasts of the field (the ox and ass) this heroine gives birth among the great feet of the traditional beast of battle; and the "warrior" note in that scene goes to the heart, I think, of why ordinary people find "saintly submissiveness," as preached by clerks and clerics, so unattractive -- why so many women, I suspect, hearing the Bible story of Abraham and Isaac, wonder if Sarah was as willing to obey "God's will" as her saintly husband. The Bible wisely doesn't show her colluding in the proposed sacrifice, but medieval clerics, preaching "wifely submissiveness" held up for admiration the "patient Griselda," whose willingness to give up her own children to be killed without a murmur of protest was supposed to show the perfect "troth" she bore her lord and master (i.e., her husband, who, as she learns years later, was only "testing" her!). "Ne I desire no thyng for to have,/ Ne drede for to leese, save oonly yee," she says in Chaucer's "Clerk's Tale" (taken from Boccaccio's Decameron). And indeed, in a terrible, clerkly way, she echoes the passionate loyalty we hear in a Jacobite song of rebellion ("Over the Water"):

Once I had sons, and now I've got nane;
I treated them a' sae sairly;
But I would bear them a' again
And lose them a' for Charlie.

Or in the old ballad of "Geordie"

It's six little babes that I have got;
The seventh lies in my body,
But I'd freely part with them every one,
If you'd spare me the life of Geordie.

"If....." In folksong, the sacrifice is only imagined as a last-ditch, heroic act of love, the heroine of "Geordie" concluding her angry lament with,

I wish I were in yonder grove,
Where times I have been many;
With my broadsword and my pistol too
I'd fight for the life of Geordie.

These women are fighters. The saintly Griselda isn't. The closest she comes to protest of any sort is to faint when her lord's "new bride," whom (as a final "test") she has been asked to make welcome, turns out to be her own long-hidden daughter! The "happy ending" enthralls few readers today, as I suspect it enthralled few ordinary folk at any time, Boccaccio himself making an ascerbic comment about what any man who chooses to so "test" his wife might expect (and richly deserve) to get in return. But I wonder just what any man who chooses so "perfect" a love thinks he is getting anyway. Never having fought against her "lord" in the smallest way -- never once having told him "no" -- would she ever fight for him? Griselda would sooner die for the odious Walter, uselessly and unresistingly, as she believes she has let her children die, and, while the clerk applauds it, most of us are repelled by such life-betraying submissiveness.

Now childbirth can be seen as the ultimate act of female "submission" (or in feminist terms, as the ultimate proof of male oppression). Child himself, who greatly admired "this charming ballad [of "Child Waters"], which has perhaps no superior in English, and if not in English perhaps nowhere," may well have seen it in this clerkly light, for he describes its heroine as "enduring all things" -- a phrase also applied admiringly to the submissive heroine of "Fair Annie" (#62). She, too, (after bearing her lover seven sons) is told to welcome his new bride home, the bride turning out to be a long-lost sister, who, of course, willingly cedes both husband and dowry to "fair Annie"... A humanized Griselda story? For "fair Annie" is never asked to accept the test sacrifice of her children (nor indeed is her lover intentionally "testing" her; he's simply going for "gold and gear," as ballad "false true lovers" often do, and as the fleeing man in all three "chase ballads" would seem to be doing). And she sings her sorrow (thus attracting the new bride's attention). So she engages my sympathy, as the "patient Griselda" does not. Yet compared to the heroine of #63, "fair Annie" still seems remarkably compliant, and her way of "enduring all things" hardly excites my admiration

"Child Waters" invites us to applaud a more valiant and willful way of enduring. A warrior way. If an older version of #63 includes stanzas disagreeably reminiscent of both "fair Annie" and the "patient Griselda" story (ballads have a disconcerting habit of acquiring these narrative warts), and if the ballad as now sung shows a softened, less argumentative heroine, it still builds to childbirth "among those great horse feet,." The ballad still invites us to applaud, I think, not victimhood but valiance -- to applaud a woman winning through with warrior strength and stubbornness.

Hers is, in fact, a double triumph. First, as any birth is a triumph, but also as it brings our mythically dimwitted hero to his senses with (in the older texts) a gratifying display of quite unnecessary violence (and of course, the announcement that the wedding and the baby's "churching" will be on the same day). In one text, the news of "a bairn’s greet [cry] and a lady’s moan" reaches him at the banquet table, whereupon he hits the table, sending silver cups and spoons flying to the floor, and covers the fifteen steps to the stable in three. In others, his mother rouses him from sleep with the news, and, staying "neither for hose nor shoon," he runs to the stables and smashes the door open, flinging iron locks and iron bars to the floor. Or as an Aberdeenshire man put it,

He gae the door wi' his fit,
And keppit it wi' his knee,
Till iron bolts and steel staples
On the fleer he gart them flee.
(as sung by Alexander Robb, Aberdeenshire)

It is almost as if the man needs this show of force to win audience attention -- the attention that was focused on him nine months earlier when he "starred" in the folk vision of erotic delight, as the woman now "stars" in a vision of heroic childbirth. Not that it has to be heroic for her to grab our attention; childbirth is naturally high drama. And not that balladry assumes a happy outcome; on the contrary, pregnancy looms large as a dangerous enterprise for ballad heroines, who are usually unwed and often forsaken by their lovers or even murdered (by disapproving kin as well as nervous lovers), to say nothing of the dangers of childbirth itself...

The happy outcome to pregnancy, as part of the whole romance of the body, is simply what happens when things go right. And of course they don't have to go heroically right for us to applaud; the complication of "belated male commitment" is just that -- a complication. With "the lusty smith became her love" (and, of course, there's nothing automatic about this linking of sex and love either!), "The Twa Magicians" gives us the deep/simple happy ending, while "The Broom of Cowdenknows gives us a complicated one that the pregnant heroine cannot be shown to have "won," as least not with the dramatic flair of our three "chase" heroines. Yet the "bonnie lass" of the Cowdenknows endures her unwed pregnancy with a kind of "valiantness" too, and it no longer seems to me altogether fair to say (as I once did) that she "lucked into a happy conclusion to the story that she is no help at all in explaining." No help at all? The gentleman who came riding by made love to the "bonniest lass that e'er I've seen," but he returns to wed a lass grown "thick around the waist." In other words, the unborn child would indeed seem to have "persuaded" him to a belated commitment. At the very least, it has grabbed his attention. And to a cynical assessment of his "patriarchal" response -- to the charge that a deepened commitment to the mother of one's child means looking upon her as a good brood mare -- I can only cite my mother's response to the story of "Child Waters" (with which I hadn't expected her to make any personal connection at all): "Well, dear, your father did seem more committed to me after Dickie's birth." And I well remember how she sounded as she said this: not "used" but well loved.

The heroic complications help us understand what balladry is inviting us to applaud: a stubborn, enduring feminine strength that, yes, I do associate with my mother, and I think my father did too (his pithy reply to Schopenhauer's "On Women," from which I once quoted to him a short passage -- perhaps the statement that "woman is not meant to undergo great labor, whether of the mind or of the body" -- was that Schopenhauer obviously "never knew a real woman"). This strength, or more precisely, this "valiantness," seems intrinsic to the high mystery of "The Twa Magicians" -- the strong spirit of the "lady" who may be said to have created the "lusty smith" living on, not just in these "chase ballads," but in lighter-hearted songs like "A Wee Bird Cam' tae my Apron":

It fell on a morn, a morning in May,
My fayther's cows, they a' went astray,
And I louted me doon, an' the heather was gay,
An' a bird stuck tae my apron,
wi' a ri-do-a-dum, an' a ri-do-a-day, a ri-a-do-a-dum an' a ri-a-do-a-day;
wi' a ri-do-a-dum an' a ri-do-a-day, a wee bird cam' tae my apron.
(as sung by Jeanne Morrill of Arlington, Mass.)

To be sure, you really have to hear the lilting "ri-do-a-dum, an' a ri-do-a-day" to appreciate the jaunty spirit of this "low folk pastoral," which manages to sound as blythely self-confident about a "braw lad rowed in my apron" as songs of flaunted sexual resistance are about maiden "within-ness." From cocky virginity to cocky pregnancy? And why not? Both imply a visceral body pride; both lead up to what can be the enormously satisfying and yes, triumphant, experience of having a baby, though, as as "The Foggy Dew" warns us, after a baby or two the euphoria can start wearing pretty thin...

So yes, a disparity in serious sexual consequences exists. The cocky resistance that fuels the magical ballad of the lady and the lusty smith (and, in its simple, "right" outcome, presumably moves the smith to timely commitment) is based on a kind of biological inequality. It is based on the childbearing power that is also a vulnerability, though not, I think, quite the vulnerability that haunts both the modern mind and the language of polite society. Not the easy vulnerability to violence that balladry has so much trouble distinguishing from rape in the fantasy pastoral scene, nor an easy vulnerability to violence in my own experience either -- in unsought field experience that I hope never to repeat, that I was told must be excised from any scholarly work and that a local women’s group insisted I was telling, in any case, "all wrong."

"You can’t think that way," they chided me.

But I do think that way. I still think I was no victim. And I still find my experience, however scary, ultimately reassuring. For this myth of "the lady and the lusty smith" would be a pernicious one indeed were the risk of crossing from mock combat to the real thing, from the sexually heightened game that Virginia Woolf called one of life’s "great delights" to sex-dead, all-out struggle, woman’s risk alone -- were it true (as Brownmiller claims to have "proved" with the aid of a cooperative male friend!) that man's sexual force is irresistible. But of course it isn't. At least, men had better not count on it! Yet an image-conscious age gives short shrift to women’s unschooled, so-called "passive" resistance, in large measure, I think, because that action plays so badly. The witty triumph-by-trickery practised by pastoral ballad heroines is better theater by far than resisting without weaponry or karate kicks or even the show-off words of an Eppie Morrie, who of course wouldn't be a ballad heroine if she simply "turned to the wall." And yet aside from spitting and weeping (and boasting) that's all she actually does. In a sense it’s all I did in a story that is instructive, I think, for being indeed "all wrong" -- for being myth-gone-wrong as well as terrible theater. Indeed I cannot but feel that I am breaking a more than theatrical taboo in the next chapter -- telling what ought not to need telling... except that today, perhaps, it does.