The Incest Theme and the Authenticity of the Percy Version of "Edward"
The Incest Theme and the Authenticity of the Percy Version of "Edward"
by James Twitchell
Western Folklore, Vol. 34, No. 1 (Jan., 1975), pp. 32-3
[Proofed once- footnotes moved to the end.]
The Incest Theme and the Authenticity of the Percy Version of "Edward"
JAMES TWITCHELL
Although Francis Child claimed that the Percy "Edward" was "unimpeachable," considerable doubt has since been cast on its trustworthiness. First, Archer Taylor has shown by the Finnish method that the ballad was never orally transmitted, as was the Motherwell version (Child 13A).[1] Next, independent of Taylor, Bertrand Bronson, on the basis of a close reading, claimed it had little of the characterization, logic, climax, word choice or narrative structure of the folk ballad, and hence was ersatz. And finally, following Taylor's example, Margaret Blum has shown the Percy text to be almost stagnant-having had almost no effect on the folk tradition.[3] But so far no one has been able to marshal any real thematic reasons for suspecting the Percy version.
However, if we review the Percy version in the context of the other Domestic Tragedy ballads, we see how different it is from other works in this subgenre. The Scottish ballad in toto has very few themes. It deals, as John Speirs has noted, "almost entirely with the circle of the life of the body, with birth, instinctive action, death, and the decay of the body."[4] By and large the Domestic Tragedy ballad has as its theme "instinctive action," and that "instinctive action" more often than not is incest. It is an incest so cataclysmic to the folk that the lex talonis is called into operation and a death-revenge is enacted.
But the ballad community seems to respond only to a very special kind of incest-sibling incest (T 414; Type 933). Rarely is there mention of parent-child or other family incest. So in "Lizie Wan" (Child 51, which shares an obvious intermingling of the "Edward" stanzas and tune) the brother commits incest and must kill the sister rather than allow their progeny into the world. In "Bonnie Hind" (Child 50), the sister kills herself and her unborn child after she realizes that her mysterious lover is none other than her brother. And in "The King's Dotcher Lady Jane" (Child 52), the girl-- depending on the version you read-- either commits suicide or is killed by the brother. In each of these ballads there is a very delicately implied ambivalence-- the ballad community sympathizes, but recognizes the need for punishment (Q 242); hence, the lex talonis. So the sister must die and the brother must mourn, not because of their illicit love, but rather because of the family's repulsion, the breaking of the moral code (C 114).
There are a number of other sibling incest ballads in which the theme is better disguised, but the paradoxical "emotional core" remains the same. Here is one of the few instances where the ballad makers are willing to be symbolic. In "Sheath and Knife" (Child 16) the brother kills the pregnant sister, but it is not until one of the later versions (Child, Vol. II, No. 6) that we find out that incest is the cause. This may also be the case in "Babylon" (Child 14) in which the brother unknowingly "kills" his unsuspecting sisters, or again in "The Cruel Brother" (Child 11), where Brother John "stabs" his sister, ostensibly because he wasn't notified that she was marrying another man.[5]
Thus the overt mention of sibling incest is quite common in the Domestic Tragedy ballad, as is its symbolic discussion. But there is no such mention of maternal incest. It is only by the farthest stretch of the imagination that one could conjecture Oedipal relations developing in ballads like "Sir Hugh or the Jew's Daughter" (Child 155), or in "Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard" (Child 81). The folk seem quite willing to admit that sexual passions exist between brother and sister, but not between child and parent. Either that, or they have sublimated child-parent incest too deeply to discuss.
When we compare the Percy and Motherwell versions of "Edward," we find something rather peculiar. In the Motherwell version (A) the son confesses to his mother that he has killed his brother because of a fight. Why the fight? Because of something that "began about the cutting of a willow wand/ That would never be a tree." Now Phillip Barry and Tristram Coffin have concluded from various field studies that "the breaking of a little bush" was a kenning referring to an incestuous relationship between a brother and a sister.[6] Hence in the brother's jealous battle for the sister's affection, one brother is killed. The twig motif, plus the melodic similarities between "Edward" and an obvious sibling incest ballad "Lizie Wan," has led Coffin to the almost inescapable conclusion that Motherwell's version has an implied sibling-incest theme. However, in the Percy version (B) the son has killed the father, not the brother. And aside from the father substitution, two other interesting variations have been made. First, as Bronson has noted, there is the mother's hint that there is some deep emotional bond between herself and her son (not suggested in the Motherwell version). For instead of the impersonal "What will you do with your halls, wife, bairns?" we have this: "And what wul ye leive to your aim mither deir?" And secondly, the son's response is equally shocking for its candor and use of the personal pronoun: "The curse of hell frae me sall ye beir,/ Sic counseils ye gave to me." This is especially stunning when compared to Motherwell's relatively tame ending:
'What wilt thou leave to thy mother dear,
Son Davie, son Davie?'
'A fire o coals to burn her, wi hearty cheer,
And she'll never get mair o me.'[7]
In Percy's "Edward" the mother is implicated in the killing of the father; she advised him, conspired with him. In Motherwell's, she did not. Could there be a better textbook example of the Oedipus complex? Mother's and son's sexual desires blocked by the father, father killed by the son at the mother's urging, then the recognition of the awful act by the son and his displaced blame of the mother-- this sounds as if it might have been lifted word for word from Freud's Totem and Taboo. And this might be true, that Percy's "Edward" is an Oedipal ballad of the folk, if only there were other similar ballads on the same subject, ballads less artificially designed, less tampered with by the artist's hand.
But there are not. Percy's "Edward" seems to be sui generis. Its House of Atrius is its own. Hence, its lack of transmission. In the almost one hundred American texts I have checked it is always the brother or brother-in-law who is killed, never the father. So what we may learn from a study of "Edward" is that the Oedipal impulse is not as strong as the "instinctive desire" for sibling incest. Or it may be that the Oedipal impulse is too strong to be mentioned. If this is the case, it might be feasible to conjecture that the Ur-ballad, the proto-ballad, was a maternal incest ballad and that it was sublimated by the folk. If this is true, the Percy "Edward" might be the last vestige of that tradition. But as far as its being a recent ballad expressing the community's current concerns, Percy's "Edward" is definitely not a song of the folk.
University of Florida
Gainesville, Florida
Footnotes:
1. Archer Taylor, "Edward" and "Sven i Rosengard" (Chicago, 1931) passim; and "The Texts of 'Edward' in Percy's Reliques and Motherwell's Minstrelsy," Modern Language Notes 45 (1930): 225 if.
2. Bertrand Bronson, "Edward, Edward, A Scottish Ballad," Southern Folklore Quarterly 4 (1940):1-13, and "A Footnote to Edward, Edward," SFQ 4 (1940): 159-161; both are reprinted in The Ballad as Song (Berkeley, 1969), 1-17.
3. Margaret M. Blum, "'Edward' and the Folk Tradition," SFQ 21 (1957): 131 if.
4. John Speirs, "The Scottish Ballad," Scrutiny 4 (1935): 45.
5. Here incest may not be the theme. Willa Muir in Living with Ballads (New York, 1965), 170, claims that the killing is a complicated result of inheritance paths in a matriarchal society.
6. Phillips Barry, Bulletin of the Folk-Song Society of the Northeast, Nos. 5, 6 (1933), as mentioned in Tristram Coffin, "The Murder Motive in 'Edward'," Western Folklore 8 (1949): 314 ff.
7. Bronson, The Ballad as Song, 9.