A PC Sexual Dare: the feminine in feminist clothing?

Is that central sexual dare, implicit in the lady's flaunted sexual resistance, already a quaint bit of cultural history? Am I a dinosaur?

We may smile, to be sure, at the lady's litany of protest in #44 as I first met it in Gould and Sharp's English Folksongs for Schools. How well her epithets for the "nasty, husky, dusky, musty, fusky, coal black smith" avoid the word so obviously meant! And was it in concession to "the requirements of the Board of Education" that the lady is said to be defending her maiden name? Or was it an earlier singer who who simply found it impossible to say "maidenhead," especially perhaps to distinguished visitors? We may smile today at that shy Victorian sensibility as we smile at the maidenly mythologizing of male sexuality, which went so far among 19th-century literary women, says Ellen Moers, as to seek the "masculine" in scruffy household pets. As she explains it, "with their rough, shaggy coats, their deep senseless voices, their stupid affection and their dirty habits, surely dogs supplied the want for all that is precious in masculinity to literary spinsters."

Put into this "spinsterish," faintly ridiculous context, it would seem hard to take seriously the conflicted maiden response to strong masculinity, let alone see it as a wellspring of strong lovemaking. But an amorphous American folksong betrays the conflict with appealing feminist force. At least, it appealed to me fifty years ago; and I can well imagine women at bastions of political correctness like Oberlin College, in full flight from modern "femininity," still singing "I don't need no man, I don't need no man" -- in other words, still betraying a resisted eroticism, neither trivial nor pathological, in the very excess of showy sexual defiance with which "Who's Gonna Shoe Your Pretty Little Foot?" concludes. (I call it by that name, though this "relic" from a ballad that took root in the southern Appalachians generations ago, "The Lass of Roch Royal," has many names and as many forms).

First posing the question, "Who's gonna shoe your pretty little foot; who's gonna glove your hand; who's gonna kiss your red ruby lips, and who's gonna be your man?" the song answers it with:

Papa’s gonna shoe my pretty little foot;
Mama’s gonna glove my hand;
Sister’s gonna kiss my red ruby lips;
I don’t need no man.

and a re-enforcing chorus of

I don’t need no man,
I don’t need no man;
Sister’s gonna kiss my red ruby lips,
I don’t need no man.

Now the relic can go in a very different direction: toward a sentiment that once found expression in medieval chansons de toile or women's "weaving songs" -- that is, of yearning for a distant love, as the "fair Alda" presumably yearned for her heroic Roland. "The Lass of Roch Royal" is all about that yearning love (and abandonment); it has "lord Gregory’s love" sailing across the sea and knocking at his door on a freezing wet night, "her young son in her arms," only to be turned away by his "ill mother" and found by lord Gregory in the morning, stone dead. So verses in the old ballad about "who will shoe my bonny feet, and who will glove my hand," going on to "and who will kiss my rosy cheek 'till you come home again" or "who will be my bairn’s fayther 'till you come home again," convey a very old message of profound poignancy. And faint echoes of that message are heard in some of the floating relics (as Doc Watson sings "A-Roving in the Wintry Night," for instance).

But at the University of Chicago in the 50s, we sang the relic transformed into another old message, whose taunting intent needed no narrative to be instantly understood. I do not think anyone mistook it for a lesbian love call, and defy any woman to sing it, believably, with that purpose in mind. Why sing so insistantly about no man, no man, no man, if you're not interested in men at all? The unmistakable sexual message here -- and the distinctively feminine message -- is confirmed, moreover, in the fact that while men may sing the song, they never put it into male terms. At least, the sexual dare is never put into male terms. Yearning love, in Doc Watson's song, is convincingly transgendered, but singers surely know without even thinking about it that the dare, so transgendered, would lose its sexual force, turn "sissy" instead of "sexy" (as does a cross-dressing man, in striking contrast to the effect of a Marlene Dietrich, say, in trousers and top hat).

The I-don't-need-no-woman songs that men do sing. of course, are songs of social irresponsibility, i.e., of escape from a controlling, "Aunt Polly" image of woman -- escape from the feminized home into rambling, gambling and drinking. And if the "rambling, gambling man," like the "soldier laddie" who once offered an equally poor marriage bet, has a certain rakish sex appeal, that appeal has nothing to do with "cocky virginity." However applauded the male virgin may be, and however much some women may see him as a "challenge," men themselves never flaunt their virginity as a sexual come-on; indeed the "rake" presents an exciting sexual image to the degree that he is not a chaste "Sir Galahad" figure.

To be sure, the sexual dare does not demand virginity. College women singing "I don't need no man" today are probably making no such claim, and Marlene Dietrich in Blue Angel, who leads a respectable professor to degradation and disgrace, is clearly an experienced "siren" or female rake. Yet the sexual challenge they pose is not so far from the taunt of "I'm a maiden here within..." There's still a special feminine "cockiness" in the showy declaration of independance, as in Dietrich's blatantly masculine garb. Rake or maiden, she's still a formidable taunter, still sending a very old, very mixed message.

One could argue that the modern lyric is simply a feminist call to the workplace. And, yes, that's in there too -- a rejection of the "Aunt Polly" image for woman herself as today's singer prepares to "out-do" man in business or politics or courts of law just as heroines of popular folksong have long been applauded for "so exceeding" him in the rigging or proving his overthrow with a double barreled pistol.... We have noted that these other songs of sexy female "out-doing" contain no explicit sexual taunts. But how can we hear the reiterated "I don't need no man, I don't need no man," especially in conjunction with "sister's gonna kiss my red ruby lips," as anything but sexual taunt? I hear it as a taunt reaching back to the primitive maiden boast of "my maidenheid I'll then keep still, let the elphen knight do what he will" -- a taunt only strengthened by a declaration of social and economic independance. Clearly, the feminist is part of the feminine here in a message that I cannot believe is altogether dead. "Try me," it still seems to say; that is, "woo me, and win me if you can."

Now old ballads place a heavy emphasis on that crucial "if," which to modern ears may appear strained and even fraudulent. For the maiden is almost always seen to triumph by enchantment or guile or witty words. In short, by some sort of trickery. Yet as we have seen, her boast can be a fiercely primitive thing, recalling more of Shakespeare’s warrior hero, Coriolanus, and his absolute, unbending integrity -- his "body’s truth," as he calls it -- than of Richardson's Clarissa and her middle-class "niceness." We have seen how both "proud Maisrie," who opens the sexual hostilities with gratuitous insult, and the proud lady of #44, engaged in a more magical and apparently more "reactive" sexual struggle, are introduced with the same descriptive detail, "straight as the willow wand," which would seem to speak for both a stiff-necked posture and a slim virgin body -- for setting the sexual stakes and setting them high, I think, out of "mightier pride" than any simple pride of class.

"I'm a maiden here within..." The taunt has proved so enduring, I submit,, because it isn't just saying "within my father’s walls" and postulating a father who is also the privileged possessor of high walls. Beyond narrative strategy, it would seem to be saying something much more satisfying, indeed to be anticipating a preoccupation of modern psychosexual theory, except that in the folk statement of the matter, "within-ness" sounds as feminine strength. That the taunt (very roughly!) anticipates the way post-Lacanian French feminist Michele Montrelay has plumbed a feminine psychology of the body -- a femininity that she says evades any defining discourse to the degree that it remains "in the wild state" -- does not, of course, mean that I impute any conscious cleverness to the folk imagination. The taunt has no doubt seemed wonderfully witty to generations of singers, been honed and polished by them without any analysis of the way in which, by happy accident perhaps, it first "hit home." It was surely enough that it seemed to go to the heart of fabled maiden resistance and attraction, integrity and inaccessibility. And in truth, this folk "within-ness" is a much simpler, or at least more comprehensible thing than either Lacan’s or Montrelay's "interiorite" which I confess to not fully understanding in either French or English.

But I think I understand what the taunt is all about. I understand a sense of bodily power, linked to babymaking and, yes, of intense "within-ness." It took me a long time, for instance, to realize that the secret pulsations I could make happen inside of me, all on my own, were what the sexual revolutionaries of the 60’s were making such a fuss about (the confusing thing was the way they kept talking about hands, when I thought it was just a matter of muscles and, of course, being in the right frame of mind). As a matter of far greater narrative consequence, of course, balladry focuses on the babymaking power itself. And I understand about that too -- about not wanting any more babies, not here and now, and yet not wanting to shut the door on the possibility, somewhere, sometime, of another baby, not wanting to shut the door on a kind of magic....

Balladry would seem to focus on that magic, indeed on a heightened "maiden magic" that at least some modern men actively resent. The group I sat in on in Seattle proposed a dating "boycott" to cut down the "unfair" sexual power of young women. They explained this power to me as part of a plot women have hatched to create a "seller's market" -- i.e., withholding sexual "goods" so as to artificially inflate their value -- and I almost wondered if they hadn't been listening to that "sophisticated," 18th-century version of "The Baffled Knight"! (They hadn't, of course; they simply saw society in those conspiratorial terms.) But the unsophisticated taunt suggests something very different to me. It suggests that woman's "unfair advantage" (that is, the young woman's advantage, and it doubtless comes as news to many young women today that they enjoy anything of the sort!) reaches a long way back, beyond dating codes and codes of chivalry, sexual harassment lawsuits and strategies for "catching a man," to a primitive female sexual power. The power to make babies, but first being able to withhold from it -- a power "within" and stubbornly withheld, which imaginatively would seem to require the "irresistible wooer" (or at least a high-energy syle of wooing for which some liberated modern men evidently have little taste).

For who else can win her? "The Bonny Lass of Anglesey" (Child 220) paints a picture of maiden invincibility that can end on a note of peculiar feminist bleakness, peculiar erotic deadness. It can also end (in the expanded form that Cindy Mangsen and Martin Carthy have brought to life) on a note of sexy victory -- a victory at once feminist and intensely feminine in the flaunted "winnings" of its maiden heroine.

It's a strange ballad (and might have come into Child's collection earlier, he says, if "I had known what to make of it"). For the "bonnie lass" is called in to save a frightened king from fifteen lords who are said to have "come down to dance and gain the victory ... to dance his gold and his lands away." Dancing, in other words, as a test of valor? Dancing here apparently refers both to combat pure and simple (i.e., male-to-male, between frightened king and invading lords) and to a more complex form of the thing, a kind of "courtship combat" in which the "bonnie lass" enthusiastically engages.

There he stands at the castle high,
and so loud, so loud, I heard him cry,
"Go saddle your horse, and bring to me
the bonnie lass of Anglesey."
Up she stands as white as the milk
between the king and all of his company,
Crying, "what is the prize I have to ask,
if I do gain the victory?"
(as sung by Mangsen and Carthy)

The king promises "fifteen plows, a house and a mill," as well as "the fairest knight in all my court, to take your husband for to be"; and though the lass (in this version) promptly rejects the prize as inadequate, beefing up her rejection with "there is no knight in all your court that shall have me as a wife," she nonetheless takes on the challenge:

Up she starts as white as the milk,
she dances light as a leaf on the broken sea;
Fifeen lords all cried out loud
for the bonnie lass of Anglesey.
She's taken fifteen, one by one
saying, sweet kind sir, will you dance with me?
But e'er it’s ten o'clock at night
they gave it o'er right shamefully.
But up and rose the fifteenth knight
and O, what an angry man was he!
He laid aside his buckler and sword
before he strode so manfully.
He’s danced high, and he’s danced low,
and he has danced the livelong day.....
...... But e’er it’s ten o’clock of the morn
he gave it o’er right shamefully.
(as sung by Cindy Mangsen and Martin Carthy)

Long unsung, older and starkly shorter versions of the ballad (Child’s A & B texts) end abruptly on that reiterated note of male shame and female invincibility. In the ballad as now sung, however, the "bonnie lass" not only dances with theatrical grace, "light as a leaf on the broken sea"; she not only flaunts in advance her rejection of the proffered prizes, including all the men (for whom she herself clearly poses an irresistible sexual target) but claiming a richer prize, she asks the king himself to dance and takes from him just what the fifteen lords would have taken (as well as taking "their bucklers and swords ... their gold and their bright money from the fifteen lords!). For

... e'er the king had gone one step
she danced his gold and his lands away ...
And away she’s gone with his treasure,
the bonnie lass of Anglesey.
She’s taken their bucklers and swords;
she’s taken their gold and their bright money,
And back to the mountains she’s away,
the bonnie lass of Anglesey.
There’s fifteen lords come a swaggering down
to dance and gain the victory.
There’s fifteen lords and one high king
go ragged and bare today.

Now there is a sexy feminist ending! An intensely feminine one too, as flaunted folk femininity distinguishes itself from the merely female (or as Virginia Woolf distinguishes one of life's "great delights," a kind of "showing off" in the company of ordinary straight men, from her gut reaction to the company of much more intelligent gay men), it sounds a sexual dare in the very boldness of the heroine’s final "takings." Much like the ending to "The Maid on the Shore" (whose heroine sings to sleep the lustful sea captain who lured her on board, and who then robs him before rowing herself back to shore "with the riches, the jewels and the wear, O"), it swaggers.

No one could describe Child's two earlier texts of "The Bonny Lass of Anglesey" as swaggering. Replete with encoded sexual politics, yes; indeed Buchan describes his own contribution to the collection as "altogether a political piece" (a comment that "quite frightens one," says Child). With their focus on shameful male defeat and their theatrically under-developed heroine (who neither rejects nor accepts the proffered marriage prize) they convey a combative sexual politics of peculiar erotic bleakness. To be sure, that the fifteen lords she outdances are said to be English in these earlier texts opens a loophole of hope, for Anglesey is inWales, which surely counts, in the split between southern wealth and northern vigor that imbues British balladry, as an honorary Celtic "northland." Perhaps the "bonnie lass" may yet meet her match in a man from her own magical land? But it’s not much of a hope in texts that say nothing about her returning to her mountain home or starting from "the mountain high" either -- or more importantly, texts that cannot seem to get past the moment when "she made all these lords fifteen to gie it up right shamefullie." Texts that play down the sexual dare.

In the implicit sexual terms of the ballad, they come to an erotic dead-end. And the rare bridestealing ballad of "Eppie Morrie" (#223) could finish on the same unsatisfying note, were it not for a lover who appears at the end as a kind of Adonis ex machina and, more interestingly, were not its invincible maiden heroine developed in a way -- at once unrealistically "swaggering" and deeply truthful -- that merits another whole chapter.