A Fugitive Beast: puzzle of the unfallen pastoral myth

Clearly, it's not "The Twa Magicians" that needs rehabilitating so much as a realm of our sexual imaginations, specifically our "reading" of a power-laden erotic myth. It goes with the green world into which some of the old ballads lead us and, like that world, is doubtless far older than the ballads themselves. So Brownmiller refers to the "myth of heroic rape," while I prefer to speak of the "myth of the lady and the lusty smith," but I suspect that beyond the spectre of woman-as-prey in a "game" that isn't always "fair," 1 beyond the stomach-turning fictional violence that modern reviewers perversely praise2 (and the sophisticated sexual masochism that is also praised), Brownmiller and I are talking on the deepest imaginative level about much the same story. And I agree with her that it matters, that for better or worse myth can invest our lives with serious meaning. A "rapist" meaning? No matter that Child 44 is rarely heard outside of folk circles; its essential narrative is surely the stuff of so-called "rape fantasies" that once triggered calls for a vigilant self-censorship of the female imagination. Better "no fantasy life" than a "politically unhealthy" one, Robin Morgan once insisted, and if feminists (perhaps recognizing a losing battle) have relented on this matter of sexual fantasy, they have hardly rethought its basic terms. Jessica Benjamin3 thus analyzes with scholarly elegance the "master-and-slave fantasy of erotic domination," while a talk show psychologist refers to "women's S & M" as their "primary sexual fantasy." 4

I submit that a folk model of more puzzling "erotic domination" -- of what we may well call "rape fantasy" but with little rapport either to real rape or to sado-masochistic feeling -- is overdue for rethinking. Or rather for thinking about in the first place. For I seem to be defending something of a fugitive beast here. Even British balladry, celebrating human sexuality with a frankness rarely found in the more moralistic and sentimental American ballad tradition, reveals the unfallen myth only in fragments, not unmixed with conflicting social themes (as in the rare bridestealing ballad of "Eppie Morrie"). I note, moreover, that essentially trivialized forms of the myth do, in varying degrees, turn to the shape of sexual oppression, and that these "fallen pastoral" forms have proliferated for over two centuries, especially, it would seem, in America.

So Annette Kolodny (in The Lay of the Land) decribes an exploitative, distinctively American "pastoral impulse" identifying the land, as she says, with "the total female principle of gratification" -- i.e., woman as nurturer, woman as angel in the house, and woman naturally shorn of the provocative female power long celebrated in folksong (and great literature), however frowned upon by clerks and clerics. Kolodny traces this "pastoral impulse" back to Rousseau's romantic notions of "natural femininity"; she could also have looked at Goethe's uplifting "eternal feminine" (das Ewige-Weibliche zieht uns hinan, as the mystical chorus at the end of Faust II puts it) and, more interestingly, how his genius dealt with the flip side of that romanticized feminine image. (The epitome of this image, for me, is Lotte, in Die Leiden des Jungen Werthers, to whom the romantic hero never confesses his love because she's already betrothed to his best friend; he blows his brains out instead, which infuriated me in college and still does -- how dare he assume the hopelessness of his cause without letting her in on it!) Not, of course, that Goethe intentionally bestows on the devil what he withholds from submissive village maidenhood. But how intriguing that he should describe Mephistopheles (at the beginning of Faust I) as the naysaying spirit der reizt und wirkt und muss als Teufel schaffen ("who spurs [us] and acts and must, as devil, create") -- in other words, an embodiment of the provocative female principle that in the folk world of the unfallen pastoral seems as necessary to full human life as the principle of nurturing motherhood.

Of course, the sanctified (sanitized?) "feminine" also harks back to medieval notions of courtly love, made more accessible with the condescending twist of romanticized "village virtue" or "village simplicity." An invention of privileged visitors to the country scene? In any case, Goethe's icons of moral uplift, like the Lotte who lives on in German memory forever cutting bread and butter for her little brothers and sisters, suggest a more accessible sexual target than the high-born chatelaine of courtly romance, and so does the "sweet maiden"/"dear child" of sentimental German folksong. In "Guter Mond, du gehst so stille," 5 for instance, after six verses in gushing praise of the simple country maiden whom, alas, the singer cannot follow, he explains that he's already "bound" and unable to love her "without sin" -- in short, a married man -- going on to ask (or rather tell the moon to ask) "dem guten Kinde, ob ihr diese Lieb gefällt?" Never having looked at this last verse before, I used to think the song soppy but singable in German. But asking "the good child" if his illicit love "pleases her" -- well, that mixture of condescension and smarminess sticks in my throat,

And Michel Zink6 points to yet another centuries old, sweetly enfeebling confinement of the feminine: a movement of "pastoral enclosure," as he calls it, from medieval pastourelle to the 17th-century literary pastoral that made "love," purged of all "lustful heat," the focus of a green arena presided over by the "great god Pan ... thou that keep'st us chaste and free." So Fletcher (in The Faithfull Shepherdess) identifies an idealized pastoral realm and holds up for our admiration the chaste-true lovers Perigot and Amoret, as well as "the virgin of the grove" Clorin, eternally faithful to the ashes of her own lost love. Lustier, possibly more human characters include Cloe, who openly regrets "earlier times" when "dull and cold chastitie" did not hold sway, and who, left at the end of the play with "that modest shepherd" Daphnis, hopes "his heart and my behavior too, perhaps may teach him what he ought to do."

One hopes that, for Cloe's sake, this "modest shepherd" is less implacably wedded to an ideal of "chaste love" than Perigot -- a paragon of virtue who says he never mingles "clean thoughts" with "foule desires" and whom the wanton Amarillis (magically taking Amoret's physical form) finds impossible to seduce (indeed enraged at her "betrayal" when he finally catches up with the real Amoret, he tries to kill her). Clearly, Cloe is no heroine of Fletcher's nor, in her unconflicted desire for sex, is she a folk pastoral heroine. Yet her words resonate in the folk pastoral world, and her advice -- "let men that hope to be belov'd be bold" -- sounds very much like the "lesson" of "The Twa Magicians."

So the fallen -- or perhaps I should say the "enclosed" -- myth has a long and twisted history. It has hoary Old World roots, and 20th-century American ones too, in the "little girl" voice of so much American pop music. At least, that's what I hear when I try to explain the unfallen myth to a group of "feminist" men (i.e., loudly proclaming their own victimhood) and one of them, in a pinched obviously "put-on" voice, breaks into explanatory song:

Johnny get angry, Johnny get mad,
Give me the biggest lecture I ever had;
I want a brave man, I want a cave man;
Johnny, show me that you care, really care, for me.

"Oh, is this what you mean?" Good grief, no! Barbie is hardly an improvement over Lotte. Infantilized or maternalized, the female image that Kolodny’s fallen "pastoral impulse" evokes is an enfeebled one, and I cannot but think it part of an enfeebled erotic myth from which mystery has largely disappeared. For it isn’t just the combative spirit of "The Twa Magicians" that I miss. It’s the contradiction between female "defeat" and female triumph, which ballads sharing the same "sexist" erotic assumptions as Child 44 nonetheless manage to celebrate. A collective contradiction, in other words, between the image of woman-as-victim we might well expect to find in ballads openly inviting us to applaud masterful male force and the boastful, headstong female images that we, in fact, find there.

I call these ballads of high-conflict, high-stake erotic encounter "high folk pastorals," and I see them as part of the same puzzle that confounded Harvard professor W. P. Jones7 over half a century ago. The "theme of the baffled knight," he called it, for in his 1931 study of the pastourelle, Jones found it "highly significant" that poems depicting the love adventure of shepherdess and courtier (or poet-knight), and sung by the courtier-poets themselves, contained an "essential and often successful" element of sexual resistance. This "bafflement," Jones thought, along with the strangely high-spirited femme d'esprit, must flow from a vernacular source, and noting how both have persisted into contemporary French folksong -- into what he calls "a kind of folk pastourelle" -- he explains both, in the end, or rather declines to explain them, as products of a peculiar "French folk psychology."

How firmly he keeps his puzzlement focused on foreign shores! In truth, a "folk psychology" that breaks with both Victorian and modern feminist images of correct womanhood emerges even more strikingly from the "high folk pastoral" of the British Isles (which may or may not share the pastourelle's rural trappings), and especially from a ballad of cocky virginity entitled "The Baffled Knight" (#112). Small wonder that Jones ignores its gleefully irresponsible "lady gay." I suspect she is indeed better understood in countries like France that haven’t undergone what Natalie Davis calls the "protestant desexualization," i.e., sexual equality through sexual sameness.8

To be sure, French philosophy once championed sexual equality through the rule of reason and the triviality of sexual diffeence; woman was equal, said Condorcet, because it really made very little difference that she was a woman -- an argument exciting little enthusiasm among Frenchwomen, who rallied instead (as Concorcet had feared) around Rousseau's banner of female feeling. But did they indeed choose "empire" over "égalité"? French feminist Elizabeth Badinter9 thus interprets their sudden conversion to "natural motherhood" and breastfeeding their own babies, but I wonder if ordinary Frenchwomen (who did not follow Rousseau's sillier suggestions and who have long won practical government programs for child care and family assistance) didn't understand some things better than the philosophers. They understood, I think, that sexual difference was worth celebrating even if it did muddy the argument for equality. I think they have always understood our contradictory folk pastoral heroine; and it comes as no surprise to me, then, that the courtship narratives of both #44 and #112 are especially popular (according to Prof. Child) in the Romance-speaking (Catholic) world.

Yet it is English and Scottish songs, playing upon the theme of taunting sexual resistance (as well as defiantly disobedient loyalty) that empower the woman and heighten the sexual issue with a reversal of conventional pastoral roles. And it is these songs that scholars have largely ignored. Helen Cooper10, for instance, says that the stock figure of shepherdess in the English "vernacular pastoral" is commonly replaced with that of milkmaid -- an accurate observation for low folk pastorals like "Two Maids went a-milking" or even "The Broom of Cowdenknows"; yet she fails to note how instead of knight and shepherdess in songs sharing the high erotic tension of #44 and #112 -- that is, in my "high folk pastorals"-- we find shepherd lad (or gardener or forester or blacksmith’s son...) and lady. A lady, I submit, who hasn’t lost touch with her peasant roots. A lady who confounds any simple answer to the question of just what it is we're meant to be applauding on the other side of masterful male force.

But the ballads do suggest a complicated answer, preserving a core sexual contradiction.