The Devil’s Marriage: Folk Horror and the Merveilleux Louisianais
Abstract
:“Li couri dans so jardin, et dit fille la:—Resté avec mo moman. Quand djabe té bien parti, |
moman djabe dit fille la:—Ah, mo fille, to tombé mal marié. To marié djabe”. |
—Alcée Fortier, “Mariaze Djabe (The Devil’s Marriage)”, 18951 |
1. Enjeux de la Bizarrerie: A French and Southern Gothic
Likewise, in his seminal study The Philosophy of Horror, or, Paradoxes of the Heart, Noël Carroll provides a framework for inquiry into the field of horror, suggesting both that it is a temporally-bound genre, emerging in the 18th century, and that it is defined by the intended affect it seeks to arouse in its readership, questioning, “[W]hy, if horror is as it is described in the earlier chapters, anyone would subject themselves to it”, and seeing in this affective response the titular “paradox of the heart” (Carroll 1990, p. 10). This understanding of horror, however, proves somewhat insufficient when placed in dialogue with the works of this corpus; given the mixed audience of Louisiana’s folktales, the numerous languages in which they were written, and the span of time over which tales find new audiences, it becomes difficult to predict the expected affective response, and indeed, many of the tales under discussion in this corpus incorporate both didactic storytelling and humor, suggesting at the very least an emotionally mixed reader response.L’entrée des méthodes de l’exégèse renanienne dans le conte de fées est lourde de conséquence pour le merveilleux. L’application à un genre réputé léger, et de tradition orale, d’une critique textuelle jusque-là réservée aux textes de l’Antiquité sacrée ou profane, opère un double décalage. Traitant un texte ludique comme un texte sérieux, elle atteint à la fois l’un et l’autre. En remettant en question une tradition populaire que l’on croyait inébranlable depuis les Contes de ma Mère l’Oye, elle autorise toutes les variations, sur la lettre comme sur l’esprit.
2. Le Fashionable D’outre-Tombe: Yellow Fever Ghosts
Chaude terre du Sud, que tant de soleil dore, |
Tombeau brodé de fleurs, pour que le Minotaure, |
Le monstre, de la Mort horrible pourvoyeur, |
Cesse de fatiguer les bras du fossoyeur, |
On implore la glace et l’hiver et la bise… |
La mort ! Ah ! c’est ailleurs un bravo de Venise, |
Un spadassin de Dieu dans le monde embusqué, |
Présent dans tous les lieux, invisible ou masqué, |
Qui poignarde impassible, et qui, sans qu’on le paie, |
Fait d’un homme un cadavre en ouvrant une plaie. |
“La Fièvre jaune”, Alexandre Barde, 186710 |
It is against this background that the unnamed protagonist, caught in a summer storm, takes refuge in the Opéra, shuttered due to the epidemic.15 Drenched and surrounded by the darkness of the abandoned theater, he falls asleep in the seat he frequented when the theater was open: “Le dormeur se retourna, et quelle ne fut pas sa surprise en voyant une foule énorme de squelettes, grands et petits, se précipitant dans la salle par toutes les entrées, et s’emparant des places” (Mercier 2006, p. 121).16 Among the skeletal crowd is one who sits next to the protagonist:La ville était triste; on n’entendait parler que de malades, de mourants, de morts; on rencontrait plus de corbillards que de voitures de gens allant à leurs affaires ou à leurs plaisirs, et souvent dans les cabs et les carrosses qui passaient on voyait un cercueil d’enfant posé sur les genoux des parents.
There is an uncanny mixture of the undead and the dandy in this figure. The decay of the flesh from the skeleton reveals what was already false in life: his wig, false teeth, and diamond ring, satirizing the ritual of high society appearing in its finery at the Opéra to be seen rather than to watch the spectacle. This satirical note, however, undermines the inherent uncanniness of the walking dead, rendering what should be horrific a means of laughing at reality.Il portait encore sa perruque; seulement de noire qu’elle était le jour des funérailles, elle était devenue rouge. C’était un vieux dilettante, gentilhomme accompli, admirateur passionné du beau sexe. Il avait conservé toutes ses dents; les trente-deux, bien comptées, montées sur gutta percha rose, ornaient ses maxillaires. Un gros diamant brillait à sa main gauche, retenu par un gonflement goutteux de la première phalange de l’annulaire.
The dividing line between death and life, a troubled dichotomy which is not resolved by the end of the tale, allows Mercier a final stroke of satire: “Quoi ! vous avez la prétention de croire que vous n’êtes pas mort, parce que vous respirez. Vous respirez, la belle affaire ! il y a tant de gens qui respirent, quoiqu’ils aient cessé depuis longtemps de compter parmi les vivants” (Mercier 2006, p. 131).22 The spectral figure of yellow fever, in this formulation, is actually no more spectral than the people of the city themselves: Mercier has transformed the mundane into the disturbing. Mercier, in other words, makes the denizens of the city themselves ghosts, and in a literature that is haunted by the specter of yellow fever, appearing as a prominent feature of Mollie E. Moore Davis’ The Queen’s Garden (1900) and Under the Man-Fig (1895), the end of Lafcadio Hearn’s novel Chita (1886), Baron von Reizenstein’s Die Geheimniße von New-Orleans (1855), and numerous other works, Mercier’s tale brings the epidemic down to the level of another citizen of the city, making the endemic disease native to the Creole city and, in a sense, attributing more humanity to the disease than to the people she kills.Mais, my dear, la mort est une Héléna toujours sûre de vaincre. Elle s’est prise de belle passion pour votre métropole, cet été. Elle a revêtu un costume jaune qui lui sied à ravir. Elle ne se donne pas tant de peine que la belle danseuse chargée de séduire Robert; pour que quelqu’un soit à elle, il suffit qu’elle passe près de lui et le frôle du bout de sa robe. À peine vous a-t-elle effleuré, que l’on commence à prendre la couleur de son costume.
3. Lapé vini, Li Grand Zombi: Comedy, Color, and Social Critique
Zizi, Creole Zizi, |
This, yo’sel’f in de coonjine |
Lak a moccasin in de slime; |
Kunjur de ole man wid yo’ eye |
Fer de las’ endurin’ time! |
Den cry an’ mo’n in de mawnin’, |
In de midnight mo’an an cry, |
Twel de debble has you, han’ an’ foot, |
Den stretch yo’se’f an’ die! — |
Wanga! wanga! |
Mollie E. Moore Davis |
“Throwing the Wanga” |
The Ouachita Telegraph, 27 July 1889 (Davis 1889) |
With this, Castellanos offers a retrospective on a practice that had already been integrated into the mythology of the Crescent City for such a long time and to such an extent that he need not make any other preamble than to ask rhetorically who, indeed, had not heard of it. Indeed, in her analysis of this fin-de-siècle phenomenon, Violet Harrington Bryan points to (Lafcadio Hearn’s 1885) obituary for the infamous Marie Laveau, “The Last of the Voudous”, as a watershed moment where voodoo became a subject of fascination for Northern publishers and a Northern readership (Bryan 1993, p. 106). Voodoo, with its multiple spellings (vaudou, voudou, vodou, voodou, etc), reflects its fundamental, and indeed orthographical, uncanniness; it is both extremely foreign, and the variation in its spelling reflects this linguistic uneasiness, and fundamentally Caribbean, so familiar to the readers of the Louisiana newspapers that make references to it, be it in Louisiana or in Haiti, could be played for a laugh without the joke requiring any prerequisite information in order to be understood. The invocation of the concept, then, functions as a polyvalent signifier, attaching this linguistic uncanniness to whatever is coupled with it.23Who has not heard, in connection with the local history of New Orleans, of that mysterious and religious sect of fanatics, imported from the jungles of Africa and implanted in our midst, so well known under the appellation of Voudous?
Beneath the humorous characterization of any white men present as having “saved their bacon”, there exists an undercurrent of anxiety around the ways in which voodoo as a religious practice subverts the complex racial hierarchies of society. As Bryan has noted, “[W]hites joined the cult in New Orleans almost from the beginning, and at the largest gatherings of voodoos on the St. John’s Eve celebrations there were always many whites who participated” (Bryan 1993, p. 106).24 Nevertheless, the association within the article, and, it can be presumed, on the part of the readership, is that voodoo is fundamentally of African origin, and regardless of how syncretized it may have become in the New World, this heritage marks it as apart, a practice both eerily endemic to Louisiana and perpetually foreign: “Betsy Toledano, the chief priestess of the heathen temple, stoutly defended the ceremonies from any wrong construction; said that its signs and symbols were derived from the mother-land, and that the incantations were harmless” (Anonymous 1850, p. 1). While in this instance, if true at all, the suggestion by Mlle Toledano that voodoo was a benign religious practice serves as a protective factor, it does point to another existential fear called up by the notion of voodoo—that of the occult. While not an occult practice sensu stricto, the secrecy around voodoo practice, and the wide variety of practices that fall under its umbrella, is what ultimately gives voodoo so much of its power in the popular imaginary.The assemblage was composed of every grade of color, from the lightest tinge of the flat-nosed race to the brightest ebony that ever glowed in a cotton field. It is even said that a still whiter hue mingled with the daughters of Ham, but, if so, the fellow managed to save his bacon, with becoming alacrity.
Drawing on the imagery of “li Gran Serpan”, an actual incarnation of the supreme deity in Louisiana voodoo, Pa Bambara suggests that the “voodoo” of Federal Reconstruction is a stinking snake that, in a twist of irony, would not have merited much attention back in Africa. He even says explicitly: “Serpan Guinain pa samblai boucou cila yo péhi mélikin”.31 The machinations of the “Gran Serpan” are not only suspect to Pa Bambara, who has been by turns an African prince, a Haitian general, a slave, and now a freedman, but he flips the recent historical narrative on its head: “Tande com mo zonglé: si Rébail là yo te zamain bate, yé s’ré zamain gagnain la d’jière, et si yé té s’ré pa gagnain la d’jière, Linkorne té s’ré pa fé neg lib; ça fé mo di cé Rébail layo ki la koz nou zot yé lib. Vouzot zamé zonglé com ça?”32 Concluding this reiteration à rebours of the recent history of liberation from slavery, Pa Bambara summarizes his personal history and signs off, reiterating the relation to the personal folktale where personal and ancestral history are blended into what Jack Zipes calls the “timelessness of the tale”:Ya pé palé Zadikal: nou zot ossite nou té gaignain kom ça dan Sin Doming et pi dan Guinain. Oulé mo di ous: Voudou cé Zaddik-kal—Gran Serpan dan Guinain ki sanzé la po tou lé moâ et ki santi pi et ki gonflai boucou,—yé pélé Zaddik-kal;—kal, ou ouâ, kom ma pé di ou, ça oulé di: pouli, ça ki santi pi, et Zaddik, ki choge kom Serpan, ki mâché en ho so vante, ki fouré dan trou kan li fé kler, ki gagnain pair di fé, et fé poutan ouâ di fé à tou moune. Vré Voudou, so non cé Zaddik-kal.30
Aside from the political implications of putting this critic of Reconstruction in the mouth of a former slave, Haitian solider, and African prince, the invocation of voodoo draws a direct throughline among the loci in which he has lived. Intended or not, this article highlights the genealogy of Louisiana voodoo, tracing it as a shared cultural heritage with the Caribbean and Africa that, however unsettling that notion might be to the audience of this newspaper at the time, nevertheless points to the hybridity of culture and language at play.Moin cé neg Guinain. Dan Sin Doming yé té pélé moin Alcindor LeBlanc et dan péhi mo popa… na si tan lontan ké mo blié nette. Mé ça ké me pa blié sek ça fé kat foâ mo lib. Astère moin céPa Bambara33
Not only does the anonymous author employ a comedic poetic flourish for describing the women’s nudity, he does not refrain from suggesting an element of horror in their actions by invoking the mysterious brew and the “danse macabre” of their ritual. However, he creates further ambiguity by suggesting that this ritual was “une invocation ardente de l’intervention puissante du grand Simbé en faveur de la Confédération qui, sans son aide, court grand risque d’arriver prochainement au terme de son existence” (Anonyme 2019, p. 75).38 Remaining silent on the purported motives of these women, the author creates tension by subverting some expectations while reinforcing others. This tension, however, is mediated by a return to the comic:[C]es nymphes blanches, brunes ou noires qui se trouvaient, à ce qu’il paraît, dans le costume assez commode du reste pour la saison de la mère Ève dans le paradis terrestre, moins la feuille de vigne, et qui, tout en se levant autour d’un vase rempli de substances ou d’ingrédients mystérieux, [se donnaient] à une sorte de danse macabre avec une ardeur, une prestesse et une vivacité de mouvements.
By impugning the character of the white women participating in this scene, the author levies a critique at the ruling class of the time, reiterating the collapse of the Confederate government under Union occupation. These women “comme il faut”, or rather, “comme il en faut”, are thus presented as Louisiana’s ruling class resorting to the ‘superstition’ that was already present in their society but scorned until needed. The old guard of society, in an act of desperation, was making its own marriage with the devil.[L]es braves polices se sont avancées sur le théâtre même des enchantements, en tenant toutefois, par précaution contre tant de charmes nus, leurs mains ou leurs mouchoirs devant leurs yeux et ont réussi à s’emparer de vingt de ces pauvres effarouchées parmi lesquelles se trouvent plusieurs femmes blanches—comme il faut, dit-on, ou plutôt peut-être comme il en faut.
4. The Devil Is Watching You
You better be careful |
‘Bout what you do |
I just wanna’ mind |
The devil is watching you. |
“The Devil is Watching You”, Lightnin’ Hopkins, 1962 (Hopkins 1962) |
Where one might expect to find an American Babylon, one finds only a city in tatters, prey to corruption and segregation. Nevertheless, compared to the previous decade, things seemed to be looking alarmingly good for the city. When he last visited during Reconstruction, which led him to leave the city, the Devil remarked “They have no need of me in the State of Louisiana”, and yet the New Orleans of 1879 offers too many sights of virtue for his liking (Hearn 1924, p. 40). Indeed, the Devil’s handkerchief, which he uses to avoid the potentially virtuous odor of poverty, “bear[s] a pattern border of green skeletons and red cupids intertwined upon a saffron ground”, reiterating the association between the color yellow and death, particularly as the previous year had seen the summer epidemic that inspired Mercier’s “1878” (Hearn 1924, p. 41). Although the Devil himself is disgusted with the air of virtue permeating the city in the wake of both Reconstruction and plague, his usual position in the folktales of Louisiana is less haughtily disdainful; rather, the Devil as a folklore figure is marked by his banality, his prosaic role in quotidian society, as well as by the relative ease with which his machinations are overcome. It is perhaps here that the fantastic literature of Louisiana is most explicitly able to reappropriate fairy tale tropes in order to challenge European genre conventions and expectations. It is the contention of this paper that Louisiana folktales subvert the Devil as a figure from the European fairy tale tradition and use him to create a means of both exploring the illicit desires that lie beneath human interactions, as well as to symbolically control the presence of evil in the world. In some respects, the Devil in Louisiana folklore—and perhaps in the South more broadly—is reduced to the level of a country denizen so that he can be manipulated, outwitted, and ultimately subsumed, all the while being used to entertain a flirtation with breaking social codes.[I]s this, indeed, the great City of Pleasure, the Sybaris of America, the fair capital which once seemed to slumber in enchanted sunlight, and to exhale a perfume of luxury even as the palaces of the old Cæsars? Her streets are surely gray with mould; and her glory is departed from her. And perhaps her good old sins have also departed with her glory; for riches are a snare, and gold is a temptation.
The very act of ‘collecting folklore’ (indeed, their very literacy) set up the collectors as socially superior (a factor inherent in much folklore collecting, of course). But beyond that, the folk material itself could serve to reinforce identity by seeming to stress by its very nature the otherness of those who possessed it. The heavy dialect of the tales the members [of the American Folklore Society] published stressed that, as did the sense that the possessors of this lore, unlike its collectors, were superstitious—believing in ghosts and jack-o-lanterns and witches who shed their skin to become cats—or religious in any child-like way.
While the making of the sign of the cross marks this story as distinct from much of the folklore of the largely Protestant South, the transmogrification of the Devil fits into a larger trend where the Devil is not only a shapeshifter, but appears in the most mundane of circumstances as a way of swaying people, through his very banality, to evil.43 In this sense, the folklore of the Devil in the American South prefigures Hannah Arendt’s notion of the banality of evil by figuring evil incarnate not as a creature of horror and majesty, nor the Lucifer of Milton, but as walking amongst the mass of society.[A]nd when she seen him her heart she turned like ice inside her, yes. ‘Cause that baby wasn’t no pink-and-white baby like before, no, but a thing what was all black and shiny and ugly. And that black thing began to grow and get bigger and bigger every minute. That womans got so scared she almost died, her! All she could think to do was to make the sign of the cross quick. And she done found herself the right thing, too, ‘cause the Devil he didn’t like that; when he seen that sign of the cross, he let loose a yell like somebody hit him and he run off into them woods and that Cajun lady don’t see him no more, never!
This aspect of the story is remarkably graphic, particularly for this collection, but the abject horror of this scene not only aligns it with conventions of traditional fairy tale telling but also offers a contrast to the banality of the Devil’s association with New Orleans society. After this double murder, a fantastic transmogrification occurs: “From that time on the Devil’s head was fixed in the gable of that roof, bound there by the sticky flesh of the mortals he had eaten” (Saxon et al. 1945, p. 280). In spite of his intense power, the Devil finds himself bound to the physical building and transformed into stone by an infraction of a heretofore unknown rule: “You see, he had forgotten, in his jealous anger, that he must not work in the full of the moon, and was thus punished for his folly” (Saxon et al. 1945, p. 280). The Devil, bound by seemingly arbitrary rules to which the reader is not privy before the end of the tale, is ultimately defeated by his own mistake, rendering the presence of evil in this tale both horrific and incompetent—evil is rendered into a decorative feature, like the stone Devil on the gable of the mansion, to provide a frisson of fear but, ultimately, rendered relatively distant and harmless, fossilized in the city’s folklore.In a rage she rushed at her lover with a napkin, whipped it around his throat and strangled him to death. At that moment the Devil appeared, killed her and carried both the bodies to the roof, where he devoured them, all but the skins. These he gave to the cats wandering on the housetop.
Once more figuring as a petty denizen of rural society, the Devil not only acts as a public servant, but he recognizes, before the action of the story begins, the superior ability of a young boy, doubly reducing his power. In a similar way to “The Turkey Raiser”, the Devil of this story attempts the function of trickery as the first step towards reasserting his power over the boy, turning him into a horse. While this echoes the magical donor function seen in d’Aulnoy’s “Belle-Belle”, and is reminiscent of the horse in “The Turkey Raiser”, this tale more broadly serves as a counterpoint to a Grimm fairy tale, “The Peasant and the Devil”, in which a simple country farmer is able to outwit the Devil through his knowledge of farming practices. In Saucier’s tale, however, the Devil is also a rural denizen, a schoolteacher who is not distinguishable from the other locals except by virtue of being the Devil. This creates a distinct dynamic in which it is not the wits of a peasant being pitted against those of the Devil, but rather the coming together of two characters of equal social standing, although one is imbued with magical powers. Because of this, the transformation of the boy into a horse functions merely as a prelude to the battle that is to ensue:The devil taught school about a mile from the home of this old man. The little boy attended this school. He was so bright that he could become anything he wanted. He had learned this art from the devil. The boy told his father that the devil wanted him because he realized how bright he was, even brighter than his teacher.
This ongoing contest of transmogrification becomes almost comedic in its nonsensical sequencing of apparently unrelated objects and vignettes. This, however, serves almost as a distraction, leading the reader into searching for a throughline between these objects instead of seeing in them a material manifestation of the battle of wits between the Devil and the schoolboy. In the labyrinthine complexity of these transformations, the ending of the tale comes abruptly, undermining the power of the hero’s victory while, at the same time, disrupting the world that frames the story at its outset: “It [the ring] turned into a grain of corn and the devil turned into a rooster, the little boy turned into a wild cat (pichou) and ate the devil. That is why there is no devil today” (Saucier [1949] 1962, p. 40). Because this final line creates a massive shift in the metaphysical order of the tale—shifting it from the presumably Christian backdrop of folktales about evil to one in which the Devil, the physical embodiment of evil, has ceased to exist—the tale is rendered disturbing in an uncanny sense.45 The familiar milieu of the tale, especially within the context of Louisianian Devil tales, has been suddenly subverted to posit the cessation of the existence of the Devil, which, while presumably having massive philosophical implications, is left unaddressed.When the bridle was removed, the horse turned into a fish (patassa). He jumped into the river. The teacher turned into a larger fish (gar fish), and leaped after him. The little boy came out of the water and turned into a beautiful ring and dropped in front of a young lady, who was rocking in a rocking chair on the ‘gallery’. The old devil turned into a hawk and kept going beyond the place where the ring was. Then he returned.
5. The Devil’s Bride
As previously argued, in Louisiana tales the Devil functions as a means of engaging with forbidden desires. Nevertheless, the Devil in “Mariaze Djabe” is summarily drowned, reestablishing the order of the world at the outset of the tale and dismissing this flirtation with forbidden desire that the text indulges. As with “The Man and His Son”, the Devil is not so formidable a foe as he is in Europe; whereas he may return to Hell enraged at the end of some of the Grimms’ tales, he is very much alive and retains his power. In Louisiana, however, the denizens of Acadiana seem to have comparatively little trouble disposing of the Devil for good. Perhaps one is to interpret this as a statement on the relative power of human evil versus supernatural evil. What is certain, however, is that the folk traditions of Louisiana provide a new means of both engaging with evil and restoring the social status quo in a way that transcends theological metaphysics. In the aftermath of the Devil’s uncanny disappearance in “Mariaze Djabe”, the tale offers an unusual glimpse into the girl’s fate. Far from her world being upended because of the metaphysical implications of the death of the Devil, the story, although resolved with a “happily ever after” for all parties, cleverly subverts function of the wedding in the European fairy tale tradition: “Fille la descende, li bo so choal et so moman, et resté avec so moman. Li té plis oulé marié encore, pasqué li té marié djabe” (Fortier 1895, p. 74).47 The only effective change in this post-tale life is that the girl no longer wishes to marry; while on the one hand this provides a nice complication on the traditional fairy tale ending of marriage, I would suggest that it also offers a broader reflection on the context of the stories of this corpus. When Fortier’s book came out in 1895, both French and Louisiana Creole were in decline and would fall off precipitously after the state banned the teaching of French in 1916. The reluctance of the Devil’s bride to remarry comes in the context of massive social upheaval changing the landscape for Louisiana’s folklore.Djabe oua magnière filla la té gagnin pou traverser, li dit; cocodrille la:—Traversé moin, cocodrille, traversé moin. Cocodrille dit:—Monté on mos dos, ma traversé toi. Rendi dans milié fléve li calé, li calé en bas dolo et li neyé djabe.
Funding
Conflicts of Interest
1 | “The Devil entered his garden, and said to his wife: ‘Remain here with my mother’. As soon as he was gone the mother said to the young lady: ‘Ah! My daughter, you have taken a bad husband; you have married the Devil’.” Fortier’s own translation, printed in the same volume. (Fortier 1895, pp. 70–71). |
2 | “The importance of the marvelous and its developments at the turn of the century is manifestly linked to a desire for a reaction against the hegemony of both science and realism”. (Unless otherwise noted, all translations are the author’s). |
3 | It is of note that, on the eve of the Civil War, not only was New Orleans a wealthier city than New York, but Louisiana was also home to some two thirds of America’s millionaires. Furthermore, in spite of laws prohibiting the education of blacks, the free people of color of the city had the highest literacy rates and owned some 30% of the property. For further information see James Nagel’s Race and Culture in New Orleans Stories: Kate Chopin, Grace King, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, and George Washington Cable (Nagel 2014, p. 13). |
4 | Although a periodizing literary history of Louisiana has yet to be written, with perhaps the exception of (Catherine Savage Brosman 2013’s) Louisiana Creole Literature: A Historical Study, this periodization is the author’s. For more details about the “dark Romanticism” period in Louisiana, see the author’s introduction to Rodolphe de Branchelièvre (Doherty 2023). |
5 | “Perversions of the marvelous”—“another marvelous, a marvelous tale for adults”. |
6 | “[B]ooks and brochures written in the French language were published profusely; newspapers, weeklies, and reviews appeared out of the earth like mushrooms and fell like flies”. |
7 | “The entrance of the methods of Renanian exegesis into the fairy is weighty with consequence for the marvelous. The application of a textual criticism previously reserved for texts of sacred or profane Antiquity to a supposedly lighthearted and traditionally oral genre creates a double shift. Treating a playful text like a serious text forces a reconsideration of both. By calling into question a popular tradition that was thought to be unshakable ever since Mother Goose, it authorizes variations, both on the letter and the spirit of this ‘law’”. |
8 | For further discussion of the role of repetition in horror, Carroll suggests that people “desire that the same stories be told again and again”, all while enjoying variations on a theme (Carroll 1990, p. 98). |
9 | “Most of its works are bizarre”. |
10 | “Hot earth of the South, that the sun gilds so, Grave embroidered with flowers, for which the Minotaur, The monster, horrible purveyor of Death, Ceases to tired his gravedigger’s arms, One implores ice, winter, and draughts… Death, O, elsewhere it is a Venetian bravo, One of God’s swordsmen hidden in the world, Present in all places, invisible or masked, Who stabs impassibly, and who, without being paid, Changes a man into a corpse by opening a wound”. Kress, Dana, Margaret E. Mahoney, & Rebecca Skelton. 2010. Anthologie de poésie louisianaise du XIXe siècle. Shreveport, Éditions Tintamarre, 148 (Barde 2010). |
11 | Alfred Mercier (1816–1894) was one of the luminaries of the francophone Louisiana literary scene, particularly in the post-bellum period. He founded the Athénée louisianais in 1876, as well as its literary journal, Les Comptes-Rendues de l’Athénée louisianais. Author of several novels, short stories, poems, and plays, he ranks not only among the staunchest defenders of French in Louisiana, but also as one of its most innovative writers. |
12 | “But the relationship between this supernatural and nature is equally ambiguous. It seemed, as has been stated, incompatible with Naturalism and a reaction against it. One can obviously decide to reverse the basis of the question and to see the marvelous in reality’s place, to see reality as a degraded marvelous”. |
13 | “We were in the worst of the epidemic”. |
14 | “The city was saddened; one only heard talk of sickness, the dying, the dead. One met more hearses than carriages of people going to work or to play, and often in the cabs and the coaches that passed one saw a child’s coffin laying on the parent’s laps”. |
15 | Mercier makes liberal use of the pathetic fallacy to establish weather as integral both to the local color of the city and to the ominous and uncontrollable nature of the plague. See for instance (Mercier 2006, p. 120). |
16 | “The sleeper turned around, and what to his surprise should he see but an enormous crowd of skeletons, large and small, filing into the room by all its entrances and taking seats”. |
17 | “He was still wearing his wig, only it had become red instead of the black that it was on the day of his funeral. He was an old dilettante, an accomplished gentleman and a passionate admirer of the fair sex. Il had kept all his teeth, all thirty-two, precisely, mounted in pink gutta percha, ornamented his jaws. A large diamond shone on his left hand, held in place by a gouty swelling of the first knuckle of his ring finger”. |
18 | “We take advantage of the absence of the living to put on a little theater. We have three shows each week; the dead from every cemetery attend in turns”. |
19 | “When I tell you that all is dream and appearance, am I not right?” |
20 | “If the living knew how enviable our situation is, they would all grab a pistol and blow their brains out without hesitation”. |
21 | “But, my dear, death is a Helena always certain of success. She has taken a passion for your metropolis this summer. She has donned her yellow gown, which suits her beautifully. She does not take as much trouble as the beautiful danser charged with seducing Robert; for someone to belong to her, all she has to do is pass closely by him and brush him with her gown. After the slightest of contacts, one begins to take on the color of her dress”. |
22 | “What! Do you have the pretention to believe that you are not dead just because you are breathing? Yes, you are breathing, for what that is worth! There are plenty of people who breathe although they ceased a long time ago to count among the living”. |
23 | According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word voodoo in English comes from the French Caribbean, and provides the following etymology: “French vaudou, †vaudoux (1797 denoting a powerful supernatural being and a dance apparently of a religious nature; 1846 or earlier denoting the religion and its practitioners) < Fon vodun (non-Christian) god, deity”. Noting the variation in spellings for the word, it also offers the following entry for the variant “vodun”: “Originally: a religion practised in parts of the Caribbean (esp. Haiti) and the southern United States, combining elements of Roman Catholic ritual with traditional West African magical and religious rites, and characterized by belief in sorcery and spirit possession. Later also: the West African religion of which this Caribbean religion is a development”. Thus, appearing first in French in 1797, its trajectory through the literature of Louisiana in the 19th century is of particular importance for understanding the role the concept of voodoo has come to play in both francophone and anglophone popular culture. The word voodoo—or one of its equivalent spellings—began to enter common American English parlance later in the 19th century. For example, chapter IV of (Charles Dudley Warner 1889’s) Studies in the South and West (1889) is entitled “A Voudoo Dance” and details his observations of voodoo practices in New Orleans a few years previous. In terms of popular American culture, the first book to bring voodoo to the popular imagination was William Seabrook’s The Magic Island (Seabrook 1929), and Robert Tallant, co-editor of Gumbo Ya-Ya, wrote the book Voodoo in New Orleans (1946), which went far in establishing voodoo as a popular association with the Crescent City. |
24 | For example, see the section “A Strange Mixture of Races” in Michelle Y. Gordon’s article “’Midnight Scenes and Orgies’: Public Narratives of Voodoo in New Orleans and Nineteenth-Century Discourses of White Supremacy” (Gordon 2012). |
25 | Carolyn Morrow Long’s article (Long 2002) “Perceptions of New Orleans Voodoo: Sin, Fraud, Entertainment, and Religion” takes the opposite view of Hurston, seeing in popular views of voodoo a tool of white domination, whereas Hurston finds it comical because of its ignorance and misunderstanding. |
26 | “Laughter comes from the idea of one’s own superiority. A satantic idea if ever there were one! Pride and aberration”. |
27 | For example, a parodic article about King Faustin I of Haiti, published in Le Patriote of Saturday morning, 3 January 1857, (Anonymous 1857) projects the fears of racial violence of the Southern U.S. by means of voodoo, suggesting that the king had difficulty governing because it is, “Besogne assez difficile pour un nègre redoutant les zombis portant des gris-gris, croyant au Vaudoux et ne sachant ni lire ni écrire” [A rather difficult task for a Negro who fears zombis and wears gris-gris, and who believes in Voodoos and knows neither how to read nor write]. Lampooning the perceived ignorance of the Haitian government thus shows itself a powerful tool to employ laugher as a way to dissimulate existential threat; what is intriguing, however, is that this laughter is attached to the italicized paraphernalia of voodoo practice. This ‘joke’ about Haiti only functions if the readership of the article finds these words risible—caricatured superstition, rather than supernatural threats. The word “zombi” first appeared in a book printed in the French Antilles in 1697 called Le Zombi du Grand-Pérou, ou la Comtesse de Cocagne by Pierre de Corneille Blessebois to refer to the idea of an invisible, malicious spirit (see for instance de Corneille Blessebois 1862, p. 17). |
28 | [Gallows humor] is the ideal mortal ennemy of that sentimentality which perpetually has a beleagured air—sentimentality always set against a blue background—and of a certain short-term fantasy”. |
29 | Thus, in another article, “Blessed are the faithful”, from 1860, the superstition of voodoo is turned, via a misunderstanding, to a scene that would either be horrific or repulsive, if it were not for the pun at the heart of the tale. It is reprinted here in full: Blessed are the faithful!— Speaking of faith in matters of superstition, we are enabled to offer an admirable instance. A man named F. M. Audet, who keeps some sort of a stand in the Soraparu Market, Fourth District, was arrested on Wednesday night for cooking in the market, in violation of the market ordinances. He was boiling something very carefully in a pot; and the mess, it was discovered, consisted of a lot of young puppies, which he was boiling in sweet oil! Being arrested, he succeeded in explaining that he had been to a Voudou doctor to get a prescription for the rheumatism, and that he had been directed to use a decoction of poppies well boiled in sweet oil. Having faith in anything prescribed by the oracles of Voudouism, no matter how monstrous or absurd, and mistaking the word “poppies” for “puppies”, he ran around till he succeeded in finding and purchasing a fresh and tender litter of baby dogs, which he proceeded to boil in sweet oil, as directed, when the police interfered with him. What ought or ought not to be done with such a man? Ought he not to be compelled to eat the puppies he was cooking so carefully? (The New Orleans Daily Crescent of 26 October 1860, Anonymous 1860, p. 1). The grotesqueness of the scene is lightened by the misunderstood instructions from the voodoo doctor, both subverting modern expectations about the nature of voodoo and the contemporary reader’s potential outrage. The conversational tone of the story—employing phrases such as “speaking of matters in…” and the rhetorical questions that bring it to an end—calls into question its verisimilitude as a newspaper article but firmly inscribe it in the tradition of folktales. |
30 | “They’re calling [it] Radical. We also had something like that in Saint-Domingue and even in Africa. Let me tell you: Voodoo is Raddic-cal—the Great Snake in Africa, whose skins changes every month and who smells bad (worse) and who swells up—is called Raddic-cal. Cal, you see, as I have said, means “rotten, what smells bad”, and “Raddic”, something like a snake, which crawls on its belly, which buries itself in a hole when it’s light out, who is afraid of fire and yet makes people see fire. The name of the true voodoo is Raddic-cal”. I wish in particular to thank Dr. Dana Kress and Jonathan Mayers for their assistance in translating this particularly difficult passage. From the article/story “Michié Ma Chik au Bec” in Le Meschacébé on 13 July 1867, (Bambara 1867), p. 1. The following quotes are from the same ‘anonymous’ article. |
31 | “The African Snake doesn’t look much like this one in America”. Author’s translation. |
32 | “Listen to what I’ve been thinking: if the Rebels hadn’t gone to fight, there would never have been a war. And if the war hadn’t happened, Lincoln wouldn’t have freed the black man; thus, I say that the Rebels are the reason we’re free. Have any of you ever thought of that?” Author’s translation. |
33 | In his article “The Changing Function of the Fairy Tale”, Jack Zipes suggests a utopic quality to the timelessness of the wonder tale: “The tale begins ‘once upon a time ago’ or ‘once there was’ and never really ends when it ends. The ending is actually the true beginning. The once upon a time is not a past designation but futuristic: the timelessness of the tale and lack of geographical specificity endow it with the utopian connotations—utopia in its original meaning designated no place, a place that no one had ever envisaged” (Zipes 1988, p. 10). “I am a man from Africa. In Saint-Domingue, I was called Alcindor LeBlanc, and in my father’s country…but it’s been so long that I’ve completely forgotten. But I haven’t forgotten that this makes the fourth time that I’ve been free. Now, I’m Pa Bambara”. Author’s translation. |
34 | The Louisianian, 6 July 1872, (Anonymous 1872), p. 1. P. B. S. Pinchback (1837–1921) was the second African-American to act as lieutenant governor (1871–1873) and later governor (1872–1873) of Louisiana. |
35 | “The comedic can only be absolute in relation to fallen humanity, and it is thus that I understand it”. |
36 | For further information about the black newspapers of New Orleans, see Clint Bruce’s Afro-Creole Poetry in French from Louisiana’s Radical Civil War-Era Newspapers (Bruce 2020). |
37 | Reprinted in Contes et récits de la Louisiane créole (2019). “These white, brown, and black nymphs who were found, so it appears, to be in the rather fitting costume of Eve in garden, but without the fig leaf, and who, standing around a vase filled with mysterious ingredients or substances, gave themselves over to a type of danse macabre with an ardor, agility, and vivacity of movement”. This insistence on social miscegenation is a running current in the voodoo stories throughout the 19th century. See for example the following, from the Daily Picayune of 26 June 1870 (Anonymous 1870): “It is said that in these secret conclaves they have practiced the horrible rite of human sacrifice. Whether or not it is true, no one knows, but there is little doubt they indulge in incantations that would make the blood curdle with horror. In the meantime the dancing and merriment is kept up on the outside. Groups of yellow females are surging through a parti-colored dance with white and colored men, as illiterate and almost as superstitious as themselves”. |
38 | “an ardent invocation for the powerful intervention of the great Simbé in favor of the Confederacy, which, without his aid, was running a serious risk of soon reaching the end of its existence”. |
39 | “The brave policemen moved into the very theater of enchantments, holding all the while their hand or their handkerchiefs in front of their eyes as a precaution against so many naked charms, and they succeeded in getting ahold of twenty of these poor frightened women, amongst whom were found many white women—women who are as they should be, so it is said, or rather maybe as they should appear to be”. |
40 | Interestingly, this recalls how Tzvetan Todorov defines the fantastic in his Introduction à la littérature fantastique. While scholars disagree on the exact relationship between Todorov’s fantastic and other definitions of the marvelous, or even of the horrific, it is intriguing that Todorov’s concept mirrors the word chosen by Hearn for his type of writing. |
41 | The Devil appears as a prominent figure in many of the tales collected by the Grimms in both volumes of Kinder- und Hausmärchen: tale 29, “The Devil with the Three Golden Hairs” [Der Teufel mit der drei goldenen Haaren], and in volume II: tale 100, “The Devil’s Sooty Brother” [Des Teufels rußiger Bruder]; tale 125, “The Devil and His Grandmother” [Der Teufel und seine Großmutter]; tale 148, “The Lord’s Animals and the Devil’s” [Des Herrn und des Teufels Getier]; and tale 189, “The Peasant and the Devil” [Der Bauer und der Teufel], this last of which involves a simple country man outwitting the Devil. For further analysis of the figure of the Devil in the Grimms’ tales, see Henry Carsch’s “The Role of the Devil in Grimm’s Tales: An Exploration of the Content and Functions of Popular Tales” (Carsch 1968) and Maria Tatar’s 1987 study The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales. |
42 | Ancelet has suggested that many of these 20th-century studies show a particular bias because they are focused on searching for “the vestiges of French tradition” rather than seeing Creole Louisiana’s folktales as a distinct tradition (Ancelet 1994, p. xxv). As he suggests, “While it is true that interesting parallels can be drawn between the Old World and Louisiana, it would be a mistake to neglect the other quite active aspects of the Cajun and Creole cultural blend” (Ancelet 1994, p. xxv). In a similar vein, Violet Harrington Bryan discusses the work of the Louisiana Federal Writers’ Project of the 1930s and 1940s, particularly the work of Robert Tallant, author of Voodoo in New Orleans (Tallant 1946), in contrast to that of Marcus Bruce Christian and Zora Neale Hurston, African-American writers who offer different perspectives to the largely white WPA staff (Bryan 1993, p. 9). |
43 | For more on this, see (O’Connor’s 1970) essay “The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South”, collected in the volume Mystery and Manners (1969). See also Thomas F. Haddox’s Fears and Fascinations: Representing Catholicism in the American South (Haddox 2005). |
44 | See the story in Contes de fées by Madame (d’Aulnoy 2020). |
45 | For a more detailed analysis of the literature that portrays the death of the Devil, see chapter XI, “The Devil’s Death”, in Maximilian Josef Rudwin’s The Devil in Legend and Literature (Rudwin 1931). |
46 | “The Devil saw in what way the girl had crossed the river, so he said to the crocodile: ‘Cross me over, crocodile; cross me over’. The crocodile replied: ‘Climb on my back; I shall cross you over’. When he reached the middle of the river, he dived under the water, and the Devil was drowned” (Fortier 1895, p. 73). |
47 | “The girl soon reached her mother’s house. She got down from the horse and kissed him, then she kissed her mother. She remained at home after that, and did not wish to marry again, after having had the Devil for her husband” (Fortier 1895, p. 75). Fortier’s translation, although often quite exact, is rather loose here. The first two sentences of the translation do not particularly appear in the original for some reason. |
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Doherty, R.A. The Devil’s Marriage: Folk Horror and the Merveilleux Louisianais. Literature 2024, 4, 1-21. https://doi.org/10.3390/literature4010001
Doherty RA. The Devil’s Marriage: Folk Horror and the Merveilleux Louisianais. Literature. 2024; 4(1):1-21. https://doi.org/10.3390/literature4010001
Chicago/Turabian StyleDoherty, Ryan Atticus. 2024. "The Devil’s Marriage: Folk Horror and the Merveilleux Louisianais" Literature 4, no. 1: 1-21. https://doi.org/10.3390/literature4010001