THE IRISH LITERARY REVIVAL of the 1880s and 90s, also known as the Irish Renaissance or Celtic Twilight, was largely inspired by an interest in folklore. While the best known Irish folklore collections remain those by key figures in this movement such as Douglas Hyde, W. B. Yeats, and Lady Augusta Gregory, the popular appetite for Irish folklore had in fact been strongthroughout the nineteenth century. This essay examines Thomas Crofton Croker's Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland (1825), the first collection of Irish folktales, and Jeremiah Curtin's Tales of the Fairies and of the Ghost World: Collected from Oral Tradition in Southwest Munster (1895). Both collections draw their material from the same region and focus on tales of personal experience with the supernatural, rather than on heroic legends or wonder tales. Yet their representations of women, and particularly of female storytellers, contrast sharply. The differences in their methodology and style, as well as in the content of the tales, reflect not only the quirks of the individual collectors but also the dramatic social changes in rural Irish life after the Great Famine of 1845 to 49. Curtin's tales illustrate a marked increase in conflict between the sexes, a phenomenon that historians such as Hasia Diner have attributed to the decline of marriage, the greater economic independence of women, and their tendency to emigrate alone or in all-female groups in the late nineteenth century. Whereas Croker treats female storytellers with an easygoing acceptance and respect, Curtin explicitly declares his bias against them; indeed, his dismissal of women's storytelling skills reinforces a prevailing motif in the tales he selects: that of women who are forceably silenced. Moreover, the supernatural women in Curtin's collection – fairy abductees or ghosts – are remarkably vengeful and violent. Tracing the representation of female storytellers and of women's supernatural experiences in specific tales from each collection, I argue that Curtin's tales encode intense social anxieties about marriage and the radical shift in women's roles in nineteenth-century rural Ireland.

Before examining each collection, however, I will briefly consider the role of women in Irish oral tradition, an issue Clodagh Brennan Harvey has described as “anything but clear” (Contemporary Irish 12). Harvey concedes that women most likely “participated less in the storytelling tradition than men,” citing their “preoccupation … with their domestic responsibilities,” which “limit[ed] their opportunities to hear and to learn new tales, and thus to participate more actively in the tradition” (12). At the same time, she suggests that women's storytelling is simply less well documented. Because “men and women usually went visiting separately,” and because most folklore collectors were males, they would not have had access to – or in some cases, interest in – women's social gatherings (48).¹

Lady Gregory, a member of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy and one of the leaders and writers of the Irish Renaissance, is a noteworthy exception to the predominance of male folklore collectors. Colm TÓibín locates Gregory among a number of folklore collectors in the second half of the nineteenth century, including “[b]oth of Oscar Wilde's parents,” and observes that “[h]er folklore collecting was not part of an unusual ambition” (37–38). But without the vast amount of material she collected among the rural peasantry, much of which she freely offered to Yeats to supplement his own, the Literary Revival would have been greatly impoverished. Although it did not appear until 1920, she began collecting material for what she referred to as her “big book of folklore,” Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland, “in 1896 under the impetus of Yeats's Celtic Twilight” (Coxhead 5; Kohfeldt 260). Gregory first heard Irish folktales from her Catholic, Irish-speaking nurse Mary Sheridan (Coxhead 6). In her dedication to her 1902 translation Cuchulain of Muirthemne, Gregory writes, “I have told the whole story in plain and simple words … in the same way my old nurse Mary Sheridan used to be telling stories from the Irish long ago, and I a child”; but TÓibín is suspicious of Gregory's construction of Sheridan as a pivotal person in her past (qtd. in TÓibín 41–42). Moreover, in terms of her social class, Sheridan was no typical Irish peasant: she had “avowed her loyalty to the landlord class,” and she could afford to send “part of her wages” to her emigrant children in America, rather than receiving money from them as most parents in Ireland did (Kohfeldt 23, 14). Riding her pony Shamrock out to visit the local peasantry in their cottages around her estate in Coole, County Galway, and eagerly collecting stories, as she says, from “stone-breakers and potato-diggers and paupers in the workhouse and beggars at my own door” (qtd. in TÓibín 36), Gregory has sometimes been an object of ridicule, but there is no question that she is a major folklore collector of the period.²

Most nineteenth-century collectors of Irish folklore, including Yeats and Lady Gregory, make ample references to women's storytelling powers and tend to associate women with tales about fairies and ghosts. As Harvey explains, “the category of tales traditionally considered the purview of women is known collectively as seanchas (literally, ‘history’), which includes shorter, more realistic narratives, such as those about encounters with supernatural beings, unusual local happenings, etc.” (“Women Storytellers” 111). In 1945, J. H. Delargy claimed not only that “[s]eanchas, genealogical lore, music, folk prayers, were, as a rule, associated with women,” but also that “they excelled the men in these branches of the tradition” (qtd. in Harvey 111). In contrast, the “preserve of men” traditionally has been the “longer, multi-episodic tales, known as scéalaíocht (scéal, ‘story’)”: these more “structurally complex” narratives include “hero tales or scéalta gaisce,” such as the tales about the Fenians (111).³

So while “most forms of Irish folklore have not historically been regarded as gender-specific …, the two main branches of traditional storytelling, scéalaíocht and seanchas, do in fact represent certain assumptions about gender roles” (111).⁴

Yet a number of nineteenth-century folklore collectors stress the precarious nature of women's storytelling, even of seanchas. In the foreword to his Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (1888), Yeats declares, “The old women are most learned, but will not so readily be got to talk [as the old men], for the fairies are very secretive, and much resent being talked of; and are there not many stories of old women who were nearly pinched into their graves or numbed with fairy blasts?” (xix). Yeats says it is more difficult to collect stories from women because they are at greater risk of being punished by the fairies for telling them. This theme of retaliation against female storytellers emerges in a number of folklore collections, but particularly in those from late in the century: it appears in Curtin, as we shall see, and in Lady Gregory's Visions and Beliefs, in which she refers to this phenomenon of punishment as the “penalty” (80–81). The penalty often forms a metanarrative or framing narrative in the collections. Wherever the gender-specific nature of this punishment is emphasized, it seems that the fairy lore merely naturalizes, and thus reinforces, already existing patriarchal constraints upon women. Yet because these constraints belong to supernatural law, which deals with what is over or above the ordinary – with what violates or exists outside of the natural world – the fairy lore also foregrounds the regulation of gender identity, which is as tyrannical and capricious as the fairies.

As men as well as outsiders to the native peasant culture, both Croker (an Anglo-Irish antiquarian) and Curtin (a Harvard-educated Irish-American) bring their own gender and class assumptions to the project of folklore collecting. Croker (1798–1854), however, is decidedly friendlier toward women storytellers. In Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland, he sounds no ominous notes about the activities of female storytellers. He and various characters in his collection identify stories about the “good people” or fairies, and indeed any tales about the supernatural in everyday life, as “old women's stories” (Croker 17). Croker uses this gendering to authenticate his tales: in the preface to the second edition of Fairy Legends, he claims that “there is no story in [this] book which has not been told by half the old women of the district in which the scene is laid” (xxix).

Any study of Croker's text, however, is complicated by its controversial publishing history. Hultin and Ober claim that Dorson's “assessment” of Fairy Legends as “‘the first intentional field collection to be made in Great Britain”’ is, “strictly speaking … open to question,” as the “tales seem to have been collected primarily from, and written partially by, a group of expatriate Irishmen” (“O'Connellite” 62 n5). When it appeared in 1825, with illustrations by W. H. Brooke, “[n]o author's name was on the title-page; for Croker, who was responsible for the bulk of it, had lost his original manuscript, and Dr. Maginn and other friends, to whom the legends were already familiar, helped to rewrite it” (Biography 133).⁵

In the 1820s, however, folklore collecting was in its infancy; as Hultin and Ober point out, “William Thoms coined the label ‘folk-lore”’ only in 1846.⁶ Certainly the methodology of early collectors was notoriously lax. Even if collectors made an effort to transcribe tales from oral sources with some accuracy, many did not hesitate to “finish” these tales – to add their own stylistic flourishes, as did Croker and his fellow compilers of the Fairy Legends: “[T]hese men thought an editor elaborated and ornamented the mere framework of a story as told by the inhabitants of the province of Munster. In this respect Humphreys took the story, Maginn recast it, and Croker finished it – a procedure abhorrent to the folklorist but not unusual amongst nineteenth century collectors and one close to that practised by the Grimms” (Hultin and Ober, Introduction xxv).⁷ Despite the textual controversy, the tales in Fairy Legends “[n]evertheless … clearly spring from the popular narratives with which Croker and his associates were familiar from childhood” (Hultin and Ober, “O'Connellite” 62 n562). Francesca Diano also emphasizes this origin in oral tradition but gives Croker more credit for doing field work, however he may have dressed his findings: “[Croker's] stories, collected around the country, by himself or others, are altered just that much … to be printed, but they retain the powerful presence of the people that told them” (Introduction xxiii).

Although his final texts may be modified versions of their tales, Croker's forthright admiration suggests the importance of female storytellers in early nineteenth-century Munster and aligns him, at least in this regard, with the mores of the peasantry. In the tale “Fairies or no Fairies,” it is the vacationing students from Trinity who ridicule storyteller John Mulligan's fairy stories as “old woman's gabble” (Croker 138). Mulligan tries to establish his integrity by “insist[ing] that all his stories were derived from the most credible sources – nay, that some of them had been told him by his own grandmother, a very respectable old lady, but slightly affected in her faculties, as things that came under her own knowledge” (138). The urbane collegians visiting from Dublin dismiss the female storyteller, accusing her of senility and habitual exaggeration (138). Unfortunately, on his way home after a few too many drinks, Mulligan mistakes a mushroom patch for a fairy host, a blunder that destroys his credibility and, by extension, that of his grandmother. But in the native community, and within the narrative frame, Croker's storytelling women receive as much respect as their male counterparts.

Although Croker usually omits the details about storytelling contexts, he provides rare and amplified descriptions of two particular social situations in which women tell stories. The first, the preamble to the tale “Seeing is Believing,” concerns the storyteller Moirna Hogaune (Mary Hogan). One night at a public house, a man boasts that he doesn't believe in fairies. His “profane” denunciations alarm his listeners and prompt Hogaune, an old woman who “had been sitting in the chimney corner smoking her pipe without taking any share in the conversation,” to confront him (Croker 171). She is the voice of traditional belief in the supernatural, a belief system she nevertheless describes as a patriarchal inheritance:

To reinforce this spirited defense of fairy lore, she tells her own tale about a sunny June day during her youth, when, knitting in her garden and minding her beehives, she suddenly sees a cluricaune mending a pair of shoes.⁸ Following custom, she snatches him up and demands his money, but he denies that he has any: “So I pulled out a knife I had in my pocket, and put on as wicked a face as ever I could (and, in troth, that was no easy matter for me then, for I was as comely and good-humoured a looking girl as you'd see from this to Carrignavar), – and swore if he didn't instantly give me his purse, or show me a pot of gold, I'd cut the nose off his face” (173). He distracts her by claiming that her bees are escaping and disappears as soon as she takes her eyes off him. It is true that in these tales, fairies almost always outwit humans; however, it is noteworthy that the cluricaune, a figure often associated with degenerate leisure, tricks the young woman by making her think she is neglecting her beekeeping, which, like tending the hens and collecting eggs, was a woman's work in the agricultural economy of the time. The fairies traditionally police women's domestic activities, punishing careless housekeeping and lapses in personal hygiene. Trying to appear physically threatening is already contrary to Hogaune's “comely and good-humoured” femininity, and she hesitates to transgress further. Thus her anxiety about her gender role and domestic duties causes her to lose the fairy treasure.

Not everyone encounters fairies, as most folklore collections make clear. Similarly, fairies abduct only certain members of the community, usually those who are in a liminal state physically, emotionally, or socially – for example, new brides and nursing mothers. In her excellent body of work on gender and Irish folklore, Angela Bourke argues that tales about fairies are a code, “an intricate system of expression” that helps to explain disturbing and otherwise inexplicable events, such as sudden physical or mental illness (“Virtual Reality” 8). The loaded term “away,” for example, describes the place where those who are abducted by fairies have gone, but as Elizabeth Coxhead remarks, “We too are ‘away’ when the tension grows too much for us, though we call it by names like nervous breakdown and neurosis” (8). In recent years, Irish writers and poets have appropriated fairy lore, and elements of the seanchas tradition in particular, to depict traumatic events and explore social problems such as infanticide.⁹

Fairy lore helped individuals and the community to account for psychological states such as depression and anger, or social conditions such as marginalization and alienation. In “Seeing is Believing,” for example, the fact that the storyteller's adventure occurs late in her first pregnancy (“just a little afore I lay in of my first child,” Croker 171) suggests that the treasure might represent an unconscious fantasy of escape from the cycle of pregnancies and domestic toil that will now characterize her life. Such an interpretation might seem unlikely, as just before she spies the cluricaune she is feeling “so happy, that [she] hardly knew where [she] was” (172). But her description is telling: he is “a bit of an old man not a quarter so big as a new-born child” (172). Perversely reminiscent of a premature infant, it is the cluricaune who denies her the treasure that would free her from her responsibilities and give her a life of ease.

The most memorable female storyteller in Croker's collection is Peggy Barrett, the narrator of the frequently anthologized tale “The Crookened Back.” Barrett, a widow “upwards of sixty years old” who lives with her eldest son's family, “tells stories to the family and their neighbouring friends, who often collect round her son's fireside to hear them during the long winter evenings” (296). Croker supplies Barrett's tale in first-person narration with the entire text inside quotes. But first he remarks on her rhetorical skill: “Peggy, like all experienced story-tellers, suited her tales, both in length and subject, to the audience and the occasion” (296). Because people are less likely to believe in tales of the supernatural “in broad daylight,” Croker says, Barrett's daytime tales are “brief, very particular as to facts, and never dea[l] in the marvellous” (297). She saves her most powerful stories for around the hearth at nighttime; only then does she “give full scope to her memory, or her imagination, or both” (297). Croker frames the tale with distinctive details of the storytelling scene in Barrett's son's house on a Christmas evening. While he embellishes the context with his own touches (“[T]he winds of ‘dark December’ whistled bleakly round the walls … reminding its inmates, that as the world is vexed by elements superior to human power, so it may be visited by beings of a superior nature,” 297), the point of view and language of the narrative are remarkably natural and seem close to the oral source.

In “The Crookened Back,” Barrett relates how her back became “bent nearly to a level” after her encounter with a pooka (púca), a malevolent fairy that appears in the form of a large black dog, goat, or horse, and which is often considered to be the devil (295). Her story takes place when she is in her fifties, ten years before the time of the frame narrative. It is May-eve, and the young people are all preparing for the next day's May-day festivities, which include sports and courting rituals. But Barrett's husband has died only weeks before, and she is deeply depressed. Fleeing the cheerful bustle in the house, she goes out to the garden to weed potatoes:

Her self-imposed isolation is not due entirely to her reluctance to dampen the spirits of the young; there is also a suggestion of envy: “The truth is, I hated to go and sit silent and mournful among the people in the house, that were merry and young, and had the best of their days before them” (299).

On May-eve, the barrier separating the human and fairy worlds is weak, and it is dangerous for humans to be outside at night. Distracted by depression, Barrett stays out in the potato field too late. When it grows dark, she realizes her mistake and hurries to get indoors, but on her way she is attacked by a black goat “as tall as the tallest man” and with great horns (300). The pooka jumps onto her back, clinging to her with its forefeet on her shoulders and its “hind ones fixed in [her] gown, that was folded and pinned up behind [her]” (301). Terrified, she heads mechanically homeward, somehow able to walk with the pooka's weight on her back. She cannot speak, turn her head, or cry out for help. When she finally arrives at the house, the door and windows are all shut to keep out evil spirits:

This scene literalizes the loneliness of bereavement, particularly its sense of powerlessness and remoteness despite the proximity of other people. Somehow she manages to cross herself, however, and when she does so three times, the pooka “springs off [her] back,” the door crashes open, and she is thrown headlong onto the floor of the house – literally over the threshold, back into her community. When she tries to stand up, her back is permanently bent. Despite this deformity, she remains healthy and active.

Barrett's account of her separation from the community when the pooka attacks her, and her reincorporation into it when she is released, is an emotional and social rite of passage depicted as a terrifying supernatural encounter. Her experience forces her to get through the worst stage of her grief. In the tale, when she is standing outside the door, she no longer wants to dwell on the past or on her own depression: all she wants is to return to the community. “The Crookened Back” is one woman's story about how her identity changed after the death of her husband, and how she was forced to accept a new social role as a widow going into old age. Because fairies typically abduct humans whose identities are in a transitional state, Barrett's newly widowed status is crucial to her tale.¹⁰

While she is not taken “away” to a fairy fort, her experience resembles fairy abduction tales in a crucial aspect: “Anyone who enters a fairy fort will emerge changed, if at all, and here gender differences are underlined: men who return to ordinary life possess new musical or medical abilities, while, with the exception of midwives, women who return or are rescued are usually mute, injured, or mutilated” (Bourke, “Reading a Woman's Death” 569).

Emphasizing her own antisocial and transgressive behavior on the night of the attack – her desire to indulge in private grief rather than to help the young, and her carelessness about the May-eve prohibition – Barrett implicates herself in her fate. Disturbingly, this sense of culpability, like her description of the attack and her ensuing shock, suggests the trauma of rape: “I could barely roll my eyes on each side, and then I could see, as clearly and as plainly as if it was in the broad light of the blessed sun, a black and cloven foot planted on each of my shoulders. I heard a low breathing in my ear; I felt, at every step I took, my leg strike back against the feet of the creature that was on my back” (301–02). The physical details are notably intimate and realistic; one would like to know to what extent the description might be Croker's. While the level of descriptive detail varies within the seanchas form and from storyteller to storyteller, however, the inclusion of such details in these short tales is not uncommon. Now that she is a widow, Barrett is marked as no longer sexually desirable, and the process of de-sexualizing her is itself described as a kind of sexual violation. She is punished for her jealousy of the young and for dwelling on memories of her courtship with her late husband (299, 298). Croker introduces Barrett by recalling that she “was once tall, well-shaped, and comely,” and that “in her youth” she was known as “the best dancer in her native village of Ballyhooley,” but the supernatural world reprimands her for engaging in this same nostalgia (295). She cheerfully accepts her physical deformity as the price of returning to the community and lives only to make herself useful in her son's house – and to tell stories, many of which include self-deprecating humor about her back, which, she jokes, is “mighty convenient” for domestic labor such as sweeping the floor, making the fire, and washing the potatoes (295–96).

In his almost idiosyncratically vivid contextual frame of “The Crookened Back,” Croker lingeringly details the impact of Barrett's tale on her audience, in effect recreating the long pause that follows her voice. He emphasizes the “serious and solemn feeling” of “[t]hose who had heard the story before,” and describes how “[t]hose to whom it was before unknown still retained their look and posture of strained attention, and anxious but solemn expectation” (303–04). The audience's reflective, even reverent, response registers not only their awe of the supernatural but the moving and intensely personal nature of this particular tale. But given the controversial origins of Fairy Legends, can we trust Croker's delineation of the storytelling scene? Can we even be sure that Peggy Barrett was a real person? The only evidence he offers is that her native village is Ballyhooley, and that she is now living in her eldest son's house (295). In his notes to “Seeing is Believing,” Croker tries to allay such suspicions by directing doubting readers to Moirna Hogaune, who will share her tale herself, along with “many other even more wonderful tales from her own lips; as Moirna is well known, and is, or at least was living within the last six months, not far from the ford of Ahnamoe” (177). But later nineteenth-century collectors, including Curtin, rarely provide more than the name and general residence (usually the parish or townland) of their sources; Lady Gregory altered the names of all her sources and their relations who were still living. So while Croker's documentation may not be rigorous, and while he embellished tales, the few but striking details we do receive suggest that his storytellers are at least based on actual people.

Yeats wrote that Croker's style reflects the complacency of the Anglo-Irish as a class in the early nineteenth century: “Croker and [Samuel] Lover, full of the ideas of harum-scarum Irish gentility, saw everything humorised. The impulse of the Irish literature of their time came from a class that did not – mainly for political reasons – take the populace seriously, and imagined the country as a humorist's Arcadia; its passion, its gloom, its tragedy, they knew nothing of” (Introduction xxiii). Yeats's charge is largely true, but in certain respects it may be too harsh: Croker's treatment of Peggy Barrett's tale is itself, like her audience, ultimately “solemn,” suggesting a residual sympathy if not an abiding sense of tragedy (Croker 304). The narrative frame closes with Barrett's nine-year-old grandson “cling[ing] closer and closer to the old woman's side,” and crying as he asks, “Granny, what was it?” (304). (This detail also demonstrates the consistency of the frame: because the boy is “not the child of the son with whom she lived” [304], he would not have heard his grandmother's tale before.) Barrett's stories not only teach the young about the dangers of the supernatural but also remind them about the injustices of agrarian life. Hultin and Ober argue that “even in these legends so obviously designed for the popular market, the skull may be discerned beneath the grin, especially when the tales are read against the background of O'Connell's agitation for [Catholic] emancipation in the 1820s,” and that the text is “haunted by the specters of unjust taxations, rack rent, and poverty” (“O'Connellite” 69, 70). In Croker's frame we can discern this skull of political discontent – and of famine: he reports that Barrett “is fond of relating how, on a certain day, at the close of a bad harvest, when several tenants of the estate on which she lived concerted in a field a petition for an abatement of rent, they placed the paper on which they wrote upon her back, which was found no very inconvenient substitute for a table” (296). Barrett enjoys telling this anecdote because it stresses her usefulness. While such stories are intended to be humorous, they foreground the desperation of the rural tenantry, who suffered from periodic famine long before and after the devastation of the 1840s. Barrett makes smart political use of her disfigurement, which, as her “favourite” storytelling subject, not only produces “various anecdotes of droll or awkward incidents,” but also demands the disturbing tale of its origin (296). Her repertoire thus centers around the social marginalization of elderly women, particularly of widows. Although a mysterious force literally shaped her to fill a “convenient” social role (296), she uses this traumatic experience to create another role for herself: that of a respected storyteller.

In 1852 William Wilde lamented the loss of many Irish rural customs and aspects of the oral tradition in the wake of the Famine: “When now I enquire after the old farmer who conducted me, in former years, to the ruined Castle or Abbey, and told me the story of its early history and inhabitants, I hear that he died in the famine” (Preface v–vi). Other storytellers have “gone to America,” or, like “the old woman who took [him] to the Blessed Well, and gave [him] an account of its wondrous cures and charms,” they are “[l]iving in the Workhouse” (vi). He says that “the emigrant has carried [away] the fairy lore of the mother country” to America, and so to nineteenth-century folklore collections, “but, above all, to the Munster legends, embalmed by Crofton Croker, must the enquirer after fairy lore refer, who would seek for information on such matters in Ireland twenty years to come” (17).

But far from being “embalmed,” fairy lore continued to exist in remote areas of Ireland at the end of the century. By then, methods of collecting and documenting folktales had become more exacting. Among those working during this fruitful period was Jeremiah Curtin (1835–1906). Born in Detroit to Irish immigrant parents, he was educated at Harvard and became a leading linguist and folklorist, collecting Russian and Native American as well as Irish folktales. According to Sean O'Sullivan, Curtin's field work “advanced over” that of earlier collectors in Ireland “in two ways: he had collected not recollected [folktales] and in Gaelic not English” (Folktales of Ireland, Foreword xi). Although Curtin was a brilliant linguist, most critics agree that his Irish was not very good; he made a strong effort to be accurate, however, and received his tales from an interpreter.¹¹

Curtin “pioneered in collecting methods, recognized the importance of collecting from Irish speakers, and brought current folklore theory to his analyses of Irish oral tradition” (Murphy 94).

Curtin certainly would have been familiar with the popular and influential Fairy Legends. In his preface to the first edition of Curtin's Tales, Alfred Nutt remarks that “the present-day belief of the Irish peasantry in the extra-human world” is a “class of Irish folk-lore” that has “attracted attention from the first, and forms the staple of the earliest collection, Croker's Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland, drawn largely, by-the-bye, from the same districts as those which have yielded material to Mr. Curtin” (Nutt viii). Both collectors draw their material from the province of Munster; Croker's stories come from various parts of Cork, while Curtin gathered the material for Tales in the neighboring county of Kerry during visits to the Dingle and Iveragh Peninsulas in the early 1890s.¹²

While Curtin had collected scéalaíocht or hero tales on previous trips to the West of Ireland, his aim this time was to gather tales from everyday life that reflect a belief in the supernatural. Unlike Croker, Curtin includes information about his own role in soliciting such tales. We do not usually find “contextual information … about the storytellers and the situations for storytelling” in “most of the early collections of folktales,” but Harvey cites Curtin's Tales as a “notable exception” to this problem (Contemporary Irish 51 n23).¹³ O'Sullivan also praises the collection for the “immediacy and conviction” of “the storytelling scene and the delineation of the group [of storytellers]” (Folktales Foreword xii).

But it is in this contextual delineation that Curtin denies the legitimacy and value of the female storyteller. One of the most important aspects of gathering oral material, whether in the nineteenth century or later, is the collector's attention to the naturalness of the storytelling context. Even folklore collectors who are condescending and rely on stage Irishry, such as Wilde in his Irish Popular Superstitions (1852), generally admit the necessity of coaxing tales from the storytellers delicately. Curtin certainly appreciated this principle: as his descriptions of the scene at Maurice Fitzgerald's inn in Ventry attest, his male storytellers tell their tales in the comfort of a traditional fireside setting. But in his efforts to get tales from Maggie Doyle – the only female storyteller in his collection – he disregards the rules of Irish oral tradition. Having “heard of” Doyle before, he says he “tried to secure [her] services,” an observation that suggests she was well known as a storyteller in the area (Tales 132). Because the sexes tended to socialize separately in late-nineteenth-century rural Ireland, Doyle either is not invited or will not come to the inn where Curtin is staying to tell her stories. When he meets her during the day, she is reluctant to tell stories. Croker's Peggy Barrett likewise refuses to tell supernatural tales “in broad daylight” (Croker 297). Curtin says, “The old woman speaks English only when forced to it, and then very badly,” adding later that she “was unwilling to tell tales in the daytime. It was only after some persuasion and an extra reward that she was induced to begin” (Tales 132). Whereas the traditional storytelling situation requires subtle linguistic play and the repetition of words of encouragement, Maggie Doyle is “forced” or “induced” to perform during a casual daytime encounter, using a second language with which she is uncomfortable (132). (Curtin does not address why he did not wait for his interpreter.) An “old woman leaning on a staff,” accompanied by a lame and blind companion, Doyle accepts Curtin's “reward,” most likely money, and breaks a cardinal rule of her culture. At the end of her third tale, Curtin observes:

In the coda to the only group of tales told by a woman, she is punished by supernatural forces for having told them. Her clear violation of the laws of storytelling, and the reinforcement of those laws in Curtin's closing sentence (“it is not right”), suggest that she deserves her illness. Curtin does not speculate about or even acknowledge his own part in Doyle's disgrace.

Conversely, Lady Gregory writes of her visit to “an old woman” in Mayo whom she asks about “Those”¹⁴

: “I could see she was unwilling to speak, and I would not press her, for there are some who fear to vex invisible hearers” (80). Instead, they discuss America, where the woman “had lived for a little while,” and she eventually brings up her fairy encounter of her own accord. But just after telling the tale, the woman “gave a cry and took up her walking stick from the hearth, burned through, and in two pieces, though the fire had seemed to be but a smouldering heap of ashes” (80). The woman believed that she “‘paid the penalty”’ for her storytelling through the loss of her cherished walking stick, which she says had been to “‘America and back with me, and had walked every part of the world”’ (80–81). Gregory describes this visit as one she has “always been a little remorseful about” (80).

In sharp contrast to Croker and many other nineteenth-century folklorists, Curtin absolutely dismisses women's narrative abilities. This dismissal introduces the next group of tales following the revelation of Doyle's strange sickness:

Curtin's assertion is puzzling, not only in light of Croker's view of female storytellers, but given the conclusions of modern folklorists about gender and seanchas. Despite his reservations about the “quality” of women's storytelling, he includes three tales from Doyle: “Maggie Doyle and the Dead Man,” “Pat Doyle and the Ghost,” and “The Ghost of Sneem” (132–43). The first, which he refers to as “an incident in her own experience” (132), is structurally the same folktale that J. M. Synge heard in Wicklow a few years later and which provided the basis for his play The Shadow of the Glen.¹⁵

Curtin's selection and organization of the tales subtly reinforce his bias against female storytellers and underscore the notion that women should be silent. In “Tim Sheehy Sent Back to This World to Prove His Innocence,” a tale told by William Keating and placed shortly after Doyle's tales, a dead man publicly excoriates a woman for daring to interrupt him. After being falsely accused of an agrarian crime, Tim Sheehy dies of grief; during his wake, he sits up and tells what really happened in order to clear his name. As the crowd eagerly waits for him “to say a deal more” about life after death, an old woman rises from her corner and asks him if he has seen her mother in the next world. Sheehy responds “fiercely”: “‘Bad luck to you, you hag,’ said he, ‘I did, and she is now what she was in life, a tale-bearing disturber, and dishonest ….’ Tim Sheehy turned then to the people: ‘I can say no more, as I was interrupted by this woman.’ With that he dropped back dead and speechless” (149–50; emphasis mine). Consequently, “[a]ll the people” at the wake “were cursing Nancy Brady because she wouldn't stop quiet till they could hear what Tim Sheehy had to tell about the other world” (150). In addition to being “a tale-bearing disturber,” Nancy Brady's mother is “dishonest,” an accusation that links female storytelling with lies. A good man falsely accused of a crime and thus killed by a lie, Tim Sheehy comes back to this world only to “drop … back dead and speechless” at the words of a woman. Ironically, the only person who speaks up to defend him before he dies is a woman, Kate Pendy (148). Yet public speech acts such as those recorded in Croker – e.g. Moirna Hogaune's exoneration of fairy belief – occur nowhere in Curtin's collection.

Women's speech is restricted not only in the frame but also in the action of the tales themselves. Most of Curtin's tales are about vindictive, ferocious female ghosts and changelings. While they possess great physical agency, these women are usually silent. The ghosts in particular tend to express themselves through violence, attacking and even killing those who have wronged them in life. The changelings are women who have been spirited away to the other world and who cannot return without help. They have the power to paralyze, maim, or kill by using the fairy “stroke” or “blast.”¹⁶

Curtin's supernatural women display an exceptional malice toward the living, particularly husbands, family members, or neighbors who have neglected or betrayed them. His collection is an invaluable and fascinating work for many reasons, but especially because the tales in it register late-nineteenth-century cultural anxieties about women's social role and power in rural communities, functioning both to express and to contain these anxieties.

The virtual segregation of the sexes in rural Ireland toward the end of the century helps to account for the pervasive gender conflict in Curtin's Tales. The Great Famine made large-scale emigration from the countryside a way of life well into recent years, instigating drastic changes in rural marriage patterns. As Hasia Diner and other historians have observed, the post-Famine taboo against subdividing the land to support numerous families led to a cultural emphasis on delaying or avoiding marriage. The resulting plunge in marriage rates, Diner notes, was accompanied by an increasingly separate social existence for men and women, which created “an ethos of gender hostility, where each sex had an elaborate rationale of the faults of the other. This became in the end a vicious cycle, as men and women deprecated each other and existed apart from each other” (20–21). In late-nineteenth-century Ireland, the Church also took on a more active role in the day-to-day lives of its parishioners. It contributed to the estrangement of the sexes by policing traditional pastimes such as crossroads dancing, thus further limiting opportunities for social interaction (23). Peggy Barrett's reminiscences about her handsome young husband belong to the kind of “positive light-hearted portrayals of male-female socializing” that could now only be expressed as “nostalgic remembrances of earlier times” (24). But if Croker's Ireland represented a “more romantic, merrier” age, it was also a “significantly less prosperous” one (24). By the late nineteenth century, the Irish peasantry enjoyed better housing and experienced less poverty. The economic lives of Irishwomen in particular had become very different. Increasingly they were emigrating, often by themselves or with other women, and they were now accustomed to the idea of an independent existence outside their rural communities (24).¹⁷

Both despite and because of these advances, rural life in the 1890s was in certain important ways more circumscribed and competitive. Its often cruel social realities are reflected in the violence and perversity of Curtin's tales. After the Famine, owning land was seen as the only form of security, but few could obtain enough land to live the life of the middle-class farmer. For a woman, land ownership was possible only through marriage. Marriage to a landed farmer was thus a coveted opportunity, as the only other choices were dependence on the charity of a male relative, domestic service in a local town, or emigration. But a woman's marital options were often limited to an arranged union with a much older man who owned land. Angela Bourke explains,

To combat a system in which they were reduced to objects of exchange, Irishwomen began “to define themselves in strikingly economic terms,” seeking to earn as much money as they could through such activities as “knitting, weaving, lacemaking, and sewing” and by doing “seasonal work” of all kinds, which provided them with both “a social life and money” (Diner 26). Before marrying, more women were also spending time away from their communities in domestic service. Women contributed significantly to the household income, and as Bourke points out, “[M]arried women above the poorest class had a high degree of decision-making power and financial independence in rural Ireland” by the late nineteenth century (“Reading a Woman's Death” 566). This new economic power and greater “assertiveness” of women certainly would have stoked the tensions already existing (Diner 24).¹⁸

Curtin's Tales reflect this historical context in striking ways, often depicting parasitical elders and cutthroat competition for marriage and land. In “The Blood-Drawing Ghost,” for example, a young man, undecided about which of three women he should marry, leaves his blackthorn stick on a grave and says he will marry whichever woman is daring enough to retrieve it. Two refuse, but the third, Kate, accepts his challenge. At the grave she is attacked by the ghost of an old man, a terrifying vampiric spirit who forces her to carry him on her back to a house where there is “neither clean water nor holy water” (Tales 183). There, to punish the careless parents, the ghost draws the blood of the “three young men sons of the man of the house,” literally draining the masculine lifeblood of the rural economy. He then mixes the blood with oatmeal and eats it, forcing Kate to do the same. But the resourceful young woman has only pretended to eat, hiding the noisome food in a handkerchief. She learns from the ghost that only this food can “cure … the young men whose blood was drawn,” and she later saves them. The ghost makes Kate carry him back to his tomb, along the way sharing with her the location of hidden treasures. His goal is to get Kate into his tomb before the third cock-crow, but he fails: “Ah, my girl, that cock has saved your life for you. But for him I would have you with me in the grave for evermore” (186). Like so many young women, Kate could have ended up spending an eternity literally entombed in a perverse marriage to a repulsive old man. Instead, she wisely bargains with the distraught father of the three young men killed by the ghost, claiming that she can bring them back to life if the father will give her “the eldest son to marry” and a particular field “as [her] fortune” – to all appearances a stony, useless piece of land, but actually the site of the buried gold (188). She even asks for “the field in writing … whether the son will marry me or not” (189). The father agrees and she puts a bit of the food in each of the sons' mouths, resurrecting them. Significantly, when she meets the young man whom she originally wanted to marry, she tells him, “Find your own stick, … and never speak to me again” (190). Kate and the eldest son marry, excavate the treasure, and are “very happy” and “very rich,” buying “several farms and buil[ding] fine houses,” and leaving “property to make their children rich to the seventh generation” (191). It is the acquisition of land, not just of money (and certainly not of companionship) that defines the happy ending. Like Croker's Peggy Barrett, Kate is forced to carry a supernatural burden on her back; but she can turn this experience to her economic advantage. One of the most significant aspects of this odd tale is that Kate is willing to do anything to marry a young man with land. She not only saves her future husband's life but rescues his entire family, narrative elements that reflect the values of “a society intensely focused on … the stem family – the male line” (Bourke, “Reading a Woman's Death” 574).

Despite such examples of heroic women, most of the women in Curtin's tales are victims of supernatural forces, their own communities, or both. The bitter sexual politics in his tales reflect a social crisis in relations between men and women, even as they accord with his own bias against women as storytellers. The supernatural world likewise restricts female speech: in the tales themselves, the majority of female ghosts and changelings say little or are mute. Instead they perform silent acts of accusation and revenge, subverting patriarchal authority. Yet they do not escape the effects of this authority: the only form of self-expression available to these women is violence, and to exercise it, they must die or disappear into that “other” world, which unleashes but ultimately traps their desire and anger.

One of the most fascinating tales, told by John Malone, is “The Fairies of Rahonain and Elizabeth Shea,” a story about a female changeling.¹⁹

Bourke explains, “Central to the repertoire of fairy-legend tellers is the idea that the fairies take people away into [fairy] forts, that they abduct healthy, happy members of the community and leave sickly, withered, cantankerous changelings in their place” (“Reading a Woman's Death” 569). These changelings are most often women and children (569). The belief in changelings or fairy substitutes could explain why wives, husbands, or other family members might suddenly became intolerable to live with. For example, Curtin relates the experience of a father who claims that his daughter, “a quiet, honest girl,” has been stolen by the fairies and replaced with a creature who has “the tongue of an attorney” (Tales 158). The question is, of course, which is the real woman? To her father, her verbal precocity implies that she must be an impostor. In a contrasting case, Curtin recounts in his Memoirs a visit to the home of an old storyteller in Cahirciveen, a village in South Kerry: “By the fireplace sat [the storyteller's] daughter; she was perfectly helpless. Her father said: ‘It is not the maid that is here at all, but an old fairy in her place.’ He sincerely believed this” (468). Here the problem is not that the young woman is too outspoken, but that she seems to be absent altogether. Changeling tales that focus on adult women emphasize extremes of excessive verbal license or “helpless” passivity, perhaps reflecting the culture's own ambivalence about what constitutes an acceptable level of agency for women. Either way, invoking the changeling legend to explain such behavior is potentially dangerous, as the traditional method of banishing a changeling is to burn it. Bourke mentions “several factual accounts of child-changelings being placed on red-hot shovels,” at least one of which occurred in the nineteenth century (“Reading a Woman's Death” 571). Moreover, in The Burning of Bridget Cleary, Bourke investigates the murder of a young woman in Tipperary in 1895: accused of being a changeling, Cleary was killed by her husband and close relatives, who claimed that they did so in order to restore the real woman.

Tales about changelings and fairy abductions function to account for numerous common but disturbing problems: “sudden infant death, failure to thrive, birth defects, and a variety of congenital disabilities correspond to the descriptions of babies taken away, ‘swept,’ and replaced by mute, wizened, hairy creatures, or lifeless images” (Bourke, “Reading a Woman's Death” 571). Bourke adds, “Many societies practice infanticide in such cases, often with some sort of belief narrative to absolve adults from guilt” (571). Women who are said to be abducted by fairies may actually be suffering from “a variety of physical and mental illnesses, from anorexia to tuberculosis to postnatal and other [forms of] depression,” especially given that they are usually either recently married or in some stage of the reproductive cycle (571). The pervasiveness of changeling tales in the late nineteenth century may also be related to the aforementioned prevalence of arranged, economically driven marriages, “as expressions of the loneliness and alienation of young women married by the decisions of older men” (571).

In “The Fairies of Rahonain and Elizabeth Shea,” Elizabeth Shea marries a man named Kivane, becomes a mother, and is abducted by the fairies to nurse a fairy child. Usually when the fairies steal a “marriageable” or married woman, they leave a corpse in her place (Curtin, Tales 23). In this case, the substitute is a dying woman, who is bedridden for over a year with a painfully swollen foot. The family suspects that the sick woman is not really Elizabeth Shea, but they care for her and bury her when she dies (25). Later a neighbor of the Sheas, attending a cattle fair further up the county, is approached by a man who claims he has a message from Elizabeth Shea to her parents. He reveals that for the last nine months she has been living in a fairy fort on his land, coming to his house after sunset to eat some potatoes and drink some milk, for if she eats fairy food she can never return to the human world. She tells the farmer, “‘[A]t the end of seven years I’ll be forced to eat and drink unless somebody saves me; I cannot escape unassisted”’ (26; emphasis mine). She requests that her friends come to meet her outside the fairy fort at Lismore, even specifying that they bring “four men and a horse and car” (27). She explicitly asks for assistance from her own family rather than from her husband, which suggests that she suspects she no longer has a claim to his support.

But two obstacles stop her male family members and neighbors from coming to rescue her, as storyteller John Malone relates:

Once Elizabeth Shea has gone to the fairy realm, she is anathematized: she knows too much “of the other world,” and at the advice of the priest, she is abandoned. In contrast, in a tale discussed earlier, everyone at Tim Sheehy's wake (presumably including the priest) waits breathlessly for him to tell “what [he] had to tell about the other world” (150). The priest is afraid that Elizabeth Shea will tell compelling tales and that her new knowledge will challenge his authority. Just as Curtin denies the role of women in the oral tradition, the priest and the local men conspire to keep a changeling from becoming a storyteller.

Malone refers throughout his tale to “Elizabeth Shea,” even though she was Mrs. Kivane when she was abducted; it was common practice in rural Ireland for a married woman to continue to use her maiden name.²⁰

This designation is especially appropriate for Elizabeth Shea, as her entrance into the fairy world nullifies her marital and social status. Unlike many of the silent supernatural women in Curtin's tales, she finds ways to communicate by sending messages with passersby: she “knew that her husband was married the second time, for she sent word to him that she didn't care, she would live with her father and child” (27). But her repeated attempts to clarify her situation and arrange a solution are dolefully ineffective. All her entreaties are ignored, not only because of the priest, but also because relatives of her husband's second wife intervene, bribing anyone who is tempted to help her. While Malone claims that these events took place “[a]bout thirty years” before, in the early 1860s, the tale emphasizes issues that were even more urgent in the context of its telling; the late-nineteenth-century marital rivalry among rural women resonates in this important detail about the second wife. As Malone says, after the new wife's interference, “the people cared no more about [Elizabeth Shea]” (28). The seven-year limit passes, and then it is too late for her to return. One evening, her father, one of the men who failed to rescue her, sees his daughter as he is coming home from market: “She walked nearly a mile with him, but didn't talk. At parting she gave him a blow on the face. On the following day he had to take to his bed, and was blind for seven or eight years” (28). Elizabeth Shea then kills her own child and the second wife's daughter. The usurping wife becomes a bedridden invalid, unable to perform her domestic duties: “She has no pain and is not suffering in any way, but is dead in herself, as it were” (28). Forever trapped in the other world, her rescue deliberately left unaccomplished, Elizabeth Shea refuses to be forgotten. While appearing to her father serves as a kind of accusation, once it is too late to be saved she becomes mute. Her power is limited to fairy strokes of revenge. Her first seven years in the other world represent a period of social estrangement accompanied by the kind of ostracism that would be the fate of any woman in an ambiguous marital state. She cannot return because there is no place in her society for her to go. Indeed, Elizabeth Shea is forgotten because her community wants to forget her. In this case, Bourke's observation is especially apt: “by their very obliqueness [fairy legends] offer a possibility of expressing things that are generally unspeakable” (“Virtual Reality” 8).

While Elizabeth Shea is a living woman trapped in the fairy realm, most of the supernatural women in Curtin's collection are dead. Lady Gregory claims that ghosts (or “the dead”) are often to be found among the fairies and are generally harmless, even friendly, toward the living (10). But Curtin's ghosts are “mainly malignant and nearly all women” (Tales 180). These ghosts are “represented as partly under fairy rules and partly under Church punishment. Their position is not fixed so definitely [as that of fairy abductees]” (180). They are marginalized, sentenced, and imprisoned by a collusion of these belief systems. Like Elizabeth Shea, the female ghosts in Curtin's tales can only be rescued from eternal torment by living men.

This dependency is especially prominent in William Keating's tale “John Reardon and the Sister Ghosts.” In this story an evil stepmother turns her husband against his only son. The weak father sends his son John to have their plough chains mended, knowing that on his return from the forge he must pass by a place haunted by a ghost who “never let any man go without killing him” (127). This female ghost attacks John, who fights with her “for two hours,” at which point he defeats her by “put[ting] the plough chain round her. She could do nothing then, because what belongs to a plough is blessed. He … dragged the ghost home with him, and told her to go to the bedroom and give the father and stepmother a rough handling, not to spare them” (128). The ghost beats the pair until they cry for mercy. At the ghost's request, he agrees to return to the haunted spot the next two nights to conquer two more ghosts – her sisters – who are “a deal more determined and stronger than what herself was,” the “youngest and strongest” being the most terrifying, with “red lightning flashing from her mouth” (128, 130). Each ghost is mute until she is vanquished; then she not only speaks but helps to subdue the next, more intimidating sister by throwing the plough chains around her just when John is about to lose the fight. Following John's orders, the second sister beats the stepmother, leaving her barely alive; at the sight of the third sister, the father and stepmother die of fright.

In the end, the eldest sister ghost tells a story, a sordid and tragic history in which marital ambition has a prominent part. She and her sisters lived long ago in a castle, and she “was in love with a young man unknown to her father” (131). After her father's death, she cuts her sisters' throats while they are sleeping because she wants all the family treasure for herself and her projected husband. Stricken by remorse, she then kills herself. The eldest sister's desire for a good fortune or dowry to bring to her desired marriage drives her to murder her family and results in her own suicide; we do not learn the fate of her lover, or whether he conspired in her plan. As a result, “The sentence put on them was that none of the three was to have rest or peace till some man without fear would come and conquer them, and John was the first to attempt this” (131). To reward him, the sister ghosts take him to the ruins of their father's castle, where they reveal the site of the treasure, transform into three doves, and fly away. In spite of their supernatural strength and their clear determination during the fight, the ghosts want to be conquered. They cannot be free and at peace until they are literally chained by a man. The tale also associates domestic discord and greed with women, from the stepmother (another interfering second wife) to the eldest sister ghost. Even the two murdered women who were victims in life must suffer in the afterlife for their older sister's crime, whereas John Reardon – who opportunely uses the female ghosts to rid himself of his parents – is rewarded with riches beyond imagination.

In most of Curtin's tales, violent beatings tend to be associated with marital strife. He witnessed pre-Lent matchmaking rituals during his visit to Cahirciveen in 1893 and commented on the unfortunate way in which many marriages were arranged: “During the month preceding Lent there were many marriages and naturally much gossip. I found that it was not unusual for a couple to marry without being acquainted with each other; or what is worse, hating each other and loving someone else” (Memoirs 469). He continues:

Curious about the community's outrage over the widow's marriage to a younger man, Curtin asks a passerby about her motives; but he gives no indication of having sought the married couple's side of the story. Indeed, he is satisfied with and even “amused” at the harsh judgment of their families and neighbors – including the community-sanctioned corporal punishment of the woman (469).

As this anecdote from Curtin's memoirs reminds us, real women were often victims of domestic violence, and the female ghosts in his collection, far more physically powerful than ordinary men, could reflect collective guilt. Domestic violence is a major motif in the folktales collected in the 1890s, including those from Yeats. In Curtin's tales, however, the woman tends to be the aggressor, and only after she dies. As in the case of Elizabeth Shea, many of these ghostly women are angry because they feel that their lives have been forgotten and that they are too easily replaced. For example, storyteller Diarmuid Sheehy tells the tale of Tom Moran, whose wife dies in the first year of their marriage and then returns to kill him when he remarries too soon (Tales 197).²¹

Marriage is of course a recurring theme in fairy tales and folktales; what is remarkable is that so many of Curtin's stories depict the vengeful fury of women who believe that their husbands and communities have failed to live up to the minimal obligations of the marriage contract and the social status it is supposed to convey.

The female ghost in “Tom Connors and the Dead Girl” is neither verbal nor violent, yet she is the most memorably chilling ghost in Curtin's collection. Like “Elizabeth Shea,” this tale is a poignant depiction of a woman's frustrated attempts to communicate. Set fifty years before, and thus just before the Famine, the tale relates how Tom Connors, a “young and unmarried” man, is followed by a woman one night on his way to a dance: “Thinking that she was some girl going to the dance, and that he could chat with her, he waited till she was near; he saw then that she was a girl who died some time before” (Curtin, Tales 59–60). Connors tries to elude her, taking shortcuts and walking faster, but she remains “always close behind”; however, she does not speak to him because she is “waiting for Connors to speak to her” (60). When he reaches the house where the dance is being held, she follows him through the crowd and passes “so near him that her clothes brushed his breast and her eyes looked into his eyes”; but even then, the storyteller is at pains to point out, “[s]till he didn't speak to her” (60). She finally goes “away across the field and disappear[s]” (60). Because she is dead, of course, her presence itself is a form of communication, but she beseeches only Connors for attention and seems to be visible only to him. His unwillingness to speak to her goes beyond ordinary fear and suggests a curiously guilty reaction. Why is he the object of her relentless pursuit? We know only that “he had danced with her often while she was in this world,” but whether this familiarity resulted in a courtship is left ambiguous (60). The poignancy of this short tale derives from the ghost's unspoken, or unspeakable, desire: lingering at the dance and waiting for Connors to speak first, what she seems to want from him is another dance. In all the other tales, we are told explicitly why the ghosts return and what they desire. But we remember the nameless “dead girl” only for what she does not say, and for what did not happen between her and Connors in life – namely, marriage. When he denies her a word of recognition, she disappears, as if male speech is her only lifeline to the human world.

In the opening pages of The Celtic Twilight (1893), the folklore collection whose name became synonymous with the Irish Literary Revival, Yeats describes his desire, “like every artist, to create a little world out of the beautiful, pleasant, and significant things of this marred and clumsy world, and to show in a vision something of the face of Ireland … ” (1). For Yeats, art perfects this world, but the folktales discussed here, appearing at opposite ends of a century of turmoil and upheaval in rural Ireland, are fascinating precisely because they reflect a “marred and clumsy world.” Croker's and Curtin's divergent philosophies about the role of women in Irish oral tradition illustrate how that role, at least in its documented form, has itself been shaped by the gender politics of folklore collecting. Croker's tales are full of women's voices and reflect a less misogynistic social milieu. In Curtin's tales, however, the supernatural world is a realm in which women express their deep resentment of domestic and social injustices. Despite the physical agency that these female ghosts and changelings enjoy, their overwhelming silence and the rules of their imprisonment within this other world reveal the limits of their power. Even these supernatural women remain chained, waiting for rescue – or mere recognition – from mortal men.