The Taunter: "right stuff" of the high folk pastoral

With the relentless, enthusiastic indecency of a village wedding feast, "The Twa Magicians" celebrates lovemaking as the "right" resolution of applauded sexual tensions. In this, it speaks for the many traditional ballads of sexual contest, which if sometimes begun as ballads of combat with the demonic (and sometimes translated into murderous human terms), are commonly perceived today as ballads of human courtship. And more often than not they show woman "winning." Indeed it’s she who stars in ballads that interlock, from both ends, with the action of #44. Multiple variants of "The Baffled Knight" (#112) thus celebrate the taunting triumph of a skinnydipping "lady gay" over the "modest lad" who lets himself be bought off with promises of sex and money -- only to earn her mocking laughter -- while the heroine of "The Knight and Shepherd’s Daughter” (as Child misleadingly entitles #110), "laid doon" in a wood, spends most of the ballad pursuing her ravisher and winning him in marriage; like the pregnant heroines of "Child Waters" (#67) and "The False Lover Won Back" (#217) who engage in the same chase, she’s applauded for what might be called defiant cleaving.

It’s a dramatic change of direction, from resisting lustful man to chasing him down the king’s highway, and many people see nothing erotic in either scenario. Yet as I sing these and other ballads of vigorously complicated courtship (using the term very loosely!) I find them sharing with Child 44 a not-quite-civilized structure of feeling that perhaps goes a good way toward explaining why "in the messy, emotionally ambiguous real world of dating, petting and sexual exploration, 'no' doesn’t always mean no." (In the October ‘98 Atlantic Monthly, "Unwanted Sex," Stephen Schulhofer thus summarizes results of surveys conducted from 1988 on at universities across the country.) Sometimes it simply means "try a bit harder"? At least. that ambiguous structure of feeling is one way of singing the songs -- a way of making rich imaginative sense out of what otherwise makes no sense at all, or an impoverished, purely political one.

These complicated female-centered ballads confirm what the male-centered ballad of "The Two Magicians" most directly enacts. Most directly and, I would argue, most misleadingly. For Child 44 dwells upon, but can only describe in magical terms, a power play of distinctively female erotic significance. A turning point in the extended female pastoral narrative and central to her suspect role in an erotically heightened world, it’s what we refer to -- but scarcely explain -- when we say that "she met her match."

In a mythology of primitive feminist force this means out-matched. And in balladry it leads back to a kind of primal sexual naysaying. Old versions of the "Elphen Knight" thus retain the explicit sexual stake and sexual boast no longer heard in its popular variant of "Scarborough Fair." But the "maiden boast," as I call it, of "my maidenheid I’ll then keep still, let the elphen knight do what he will," persists. We hear that boast, loud and fierce, in the ballad of "Eppie Morrie" ("There’s no a man... there’s no a man... there’s no a man... shall wedded be with me”) as we hear it, combined with insult and overtones of Victorian gentility, in "The Twa Magicians" ("I'd rather die .... than I'd have such a nasty, husky, dusky, musty, fusty, coal black smith...")

Naysaying combines with more imaginative insult in #219 or "The Gardener," which Bronson dismisses as "too little of a ballad, generating virtually no story"; the lady, he says, is simply answering the gardener’s "be mine" with "indeed not." A simple no? Say rather an embroidered, fIaunted "no." Indeed as I hear this strange song, consisting almost entirely of flowery compliments that the lady turns into a blast of ill wishing, it seems more than anything else a prelude to "The Twa Magicians." A tauntingly ambivalent invitation to more persuasive action. For I cannot but feel in "proud Maisrie"'s outburst a touch of impatience with her soft spoken romantic wooer. The same impatience that in Fletcher's literary pastoral The Faithfull Shepherdess (see my previous page) we saw Cloe exhibiting with Daphnis? Not exactly. Fletcher paints a realm of "chaste love" along with a paragon lover (Perigot) who never mixes "clean thoughts" and "foule desires" -- the polar opposite, that is, both of lustful Cloe and wanton Amarillis. No heroine of the literary pastoral in her unconflicted desire for sex, and no heroine of our high folk pastoral scene either (of ballads like "The Twa Magicians" or "The Baffled Knight"), but how very human Cloe (especially) appears when she rails against Fletcher's idealized pastoral! How human in her impatience with "that modest shepherd" Daphnis! "The Gardener" indeed brings 17th-century female impatience to mind, as it also brings to mind Schulhofer’s report of college women who "said they told a date no because they ‘want[ed] him to be more physically aggressive." Except that of course, "proud Maisrie" says a good deal more than "no"; she is, after all, a Scot, and so we are not surprised at her capacity for inventive insult (there's even an old Scots word for it: flyting).

Since you hae made a gown for me
amang the simmer flowers,
It’s I will mak a suit for thee
amang the winter showers, the showers, amang the winter showers.

The milk-white snaw shall be your sark
an’ lie your body neist,
An’ the murk black rain shall be your coat
wi’ a wind gale at your breist, your breist , wi’ a wind gale . . . .

The horse that you shall ride upon
shall be the winter snell [severe];
I’ll bridle him wi’ some nor’land blast
an’ some sharp showers o’ hail, o’ hail, an’ some sharp showers . . . .
(from the singing of Ewan MacColl)

A call to bolder courtship? I submit that a call to courtship is implicit in the single, telling physical detail we’re given of "proud Maisrie" at the start of the song:

Proud Maisrie stands at her fayther’s door,
as straight’s the willow wand
An’ syne there cam a gardener chylde
wi' a red rose in his hand, his hand, wi' a red rose in his hand.

Which is also, in the older version of "The Twa Magicians," the single physical detail we’re given of the lady:

The lady sits at her own front door
as straight as the willow wand,
And by there came a lusty smith
with his hammer in his hand.

Her back, straight and slim, is indeed a kind of maiden boast. A taunt in the bone, as it were, at once sexually arousing and promising stiff-necked sexual resistance, which is to say, the same implicit double message that the skinnydipping "lady gay" of #112 puts into mocking words.

At twenty, still fiercely resistant to man-in-the-flesh and fascinated with him in fuzzy erotic fantasy, I sang those words with glee, though I often skipped a verse along the way. It didn't seem to me that the lady was making altogether the right sort of conversation as, riding along the country lanes "like sister and like brother" with the man who found her "dipping in the brook," she comes out with "Oh say, wouldn’t this [field of haystacks] be a very pretty place for boys and girls to play." So I didn't sing those words, but I sang loud and clear the taunt that is a constant in every variant of the song (also known as "The Shepherd Lad," "Clear Away the Morning Dew" or "A Lady’s Policy"). The taunt caps an action-packed moment when the lady reneges on the deal she made with lustful man, and I sang it with even greater glee, I suspect, as I knew how it discomfited a marriage-minded boyfriend:

And when they came to her father's gate
The lady jumped in.
She said, "there stands a fool without,
And I'm a maid within."

I liked the artful "instruction" that follows too:

There is a flower in our garden,
we call it marigold;
And if you would not when you might,
you shall not when you would.

or more plainly:

Good morrow to you, modest lad,
I thank you for your care,
But if you had been what you should have been,
I would not have left you there.

And I didn’t even mind the man getting in the last word. It evened things up a bit:

The shepherd’s doffed his shoon,
my feet they will run bare,
But if e'er I meet another pretty maid,
I rede that maid beware.
(from the singing of George and Gerry Armstrong)

So was I asking to be raped? Clearly not, for my response to "pushy men" was immediate and unequivocal. But I wondered, when the object of my sung taunts said he didn't want "to take advantage" of me: did he really think he could? Because if he had the power I half-wanted him to have -- if he had something, well, more compelling than U of Chicago style sweet reason -- then it wouldn't be "taking advantage," would it? -- and why wasn't he using it, then, instead of hiding behind semantic chivalry? Clearly, I'd bought into a structure of feeling that's hard to talk about without sounding as if you wanted to be raped, so I simply sang the song, shivered with wicked delight when told I conformed to the definition of a coquette, and defended my "outmoded" virginity with "very poor arguments."

Today he says I was "romantic." And he insists that "The Baffled Knight" has nothing to do with the "gameplaying, romantic mystery" of "The Twa Magicians" -- that "the 'lady gay' isn't romantic at all... she isn't grown-up at all... she’s like a little girl going ‘nyah, nyah, nyah!’"

Why, yes, that’s just what she’s doing! (And isn't some of that "nyah, nyah, nyahing" going on in "The Twa Magicians" too?) Of course, the "lady gay" isn't "romantic," which is to say, she lends no support to chivalric notions of "love" as a thing quite apart from carnal desire. Of love unconnected to lust. Instead, she perversely supports Zink's "pastoral function of carnal desire in the pure state," or, as Greer would put it, she keeps "sex in the air." For whether her slanging of the opposite sex is altogether "grown-up" or not -- and it does indeed seem typically pre-courtship behavior -- it surely has sexual meaning. As practised by Shakespearean heroines as well as by grubby little girls, and polished to a fine art in the old flyting tradition of Scotland, the namecalling betrays both interest in the opposite sex and a desire to keep him at arm’s length. And I say "him," for if boys and girls both indulge in the sport, with girls it would seem to go to the conflict-ridden heart of the folk or "vernacular pastoral" -- that is, to the lovemaking which in the absence of contraceptive technology is naturally assumed to be babymaking. Even "low stake" folk pastorals are thus freighted with the sense of sexual consequence -- the sense of babies (who do have a way of bringing us out of the grotto of love and into the world of money and messy diapers) -- that is so conspicuously lacking in Virgil’s "Eclogues," so muted in the literary pastoral which once split female images of "pure love" and "lewd lust" even as early novelists (obsessed with rape and seduction themes) a century later carefully separated the keeper of the hearth from the sexual disturber of the peace, a Mme de Tourvel from a Mme de Merteuil....

The "lady gay" of #112 makes serious sense only if we can see her as both "pure" and "lustful," in other words, as conflicted on the subject of lovemaking as cultural feminists (alternately extolling a "dyadic intimacy" and resenting the "intruder in the flesh") have shown themselves on the subject of babies. As conflicted as I suspect many young women still are, and not because they’re ignorant of contraceptive technology either. So I take seriously the lady’s figure of irreducible sexual contradiction, which Jessica Benjamin's analysis of "master and slave fantasies of erotic domination" does nothing to illuminate, though it fits like a glove to her "case study," The Story of O. In other words, it fits a sexually sophisticated world (some people might describe the art-porno film in unkinder terms!) that has come a long way from any notion of lovemaking as babymaking. And a long way from the central taunt of #112. "There stands a fool without, and I’m a maid within" isn't perhaps, an altogether grown-up taunt, and certainly not a very sophisticated one, but it was nonetheless an intensely satisfying line to sing. So gleeful! So challenging! So downright cocky!

It's even more in a variant of #112 from the lowlands of Scotland. Here the peak moment comes after "Logie's daughter" suggests to the shepherd lad who "vowed to hae his will o' her" that they seek shelter in a farm shed or "bothy." She doesn’t promise him any money; sex in marginally more comfortable surroundings is evidently a sufficient bribe. And she pulls the gate trick:

She snecked and barred the bothy door
an' merrily did shout,
"Noo,I’m a maiden here within
an' you a fool without.”
(from the singing of Cilla Fisher of Fife)

I didn't sing this version at twenty only because I didn't know it. At least, I think I'd have sung it, though the lovemaking that has already been initiated -- and come to a standstill of sorts -- in the second verse might have given me pause:

He couped [tumbled] her on a grassy bank,
the lassie for to please,
But aye she sighed an' sweetly cried,
but wouldna' pairt her knees.

Now this isn't a verse that can be dropped, but at least the action is faintly disguised in dialect (a great resource for the shy folksinger). Yet one doesn't have to be all that modest to want to move on from a sexual standstill of a very unsatisfactory sort, and it isn't just that the action is so inconclusive and, on the woman's side, so confusingly ambiguous but that it's ambiguous in such a prosaic manner. She "wouldna pairt her knees" -- how unpoetic, and more to the point, how untheatrical! For clenched knees convey no sense of showy out-doing (and no call to further contest); they may be laudable, but they're no motive for applause. And the lassie surely courts it. However ambiguous her actions -- downright irresponsible, some might say! -- she surely "stars" in this song, as she would have great difficulty in doing were the action of the second verse merely prolonged (as in "Eppie Morrie," in a sense, it is).

So #112 invites us to applaud taunting triumph by trickery. And the taunts are especially forthright here, in a song that makes no pretense of the artful "moral instruction" -- the if-you-would-not-when-you-might sort of thing -- which in any case was always more taunting than teaching. "Be bold" was always the gist of it: "be irresistibly, magically bold." But inevitably, to teach that kind of "irresistible boldness" -- i.e., to spell out the means of meeting the sexual challenge -- is to trivialize it. So it pleases me that the barnyard jibes which "Logie’s daughter" tosses off after slamming the bothy door shut and shouting her defiance at the "fool without" -- merrily shouting the jibes too, we may presume -- are sheer sexual insult. They go on for three verses, beginning with

You’re like a cock my faither had
that crowed an’ waved its kaim, [comb]
An' ne’er a hen trod in the yard,
an' I think you’re just the same.
(from Cilla Fisher of Fife)

Here, surely, is the "right stuff" (as I think Tom Wolfe would agree) of the unfallen pastoral myth! The taunting sexual troublemaker in her rude state! We applaud her too -- if our principles don't get in the way -- as we applaud her feisty ballad sisters. The pretty maid in "Lady Isabel and the Elf-Knight," who turns the tables on a Bluebeard lover and caps her exploit with a witty jibe. The "Farmer's Curst Wife" (as scholars know her) whom generations of singers have found wonderfully emblematic of "what a woman can do -- she can outdo the devil and her old man too." We applaud both maid and wife, and I suspect that they aren’t so far apart after all; that the wife’s brawling energy would be seen as "sexy," were she but younger (a "devilish Mary," say). So the "disorderly woman" whom Natalie Davis identifies as a "vital player" in the village festival life of early modern France, would seem to have entered into the folk imagination of the British Isles, where she sounds a clarion call both to, and from, sexual strength.