Calumniated Wife

The Calumniated Wife is a motif in traditional narratives, numbered K2110.1 in Stith Thompson's Motif-Index of Folk-Literature. It entails a wife being falsely accused of, and often punished for, some crime or sin. This motif is at the centre of a number of traditional plots, being associated with tale-types 705–712 in the Aarne–Thompson–Uther Index of tale-types.

Overview

The mother falsely accused of giving birth to strange children is in common between tale types 706 and 707, where the woman has married the king because she has said she would give birth to marvelous children, as in The Dancing Water, the Singing Apple, and the Speaking Bird, Princess Belle-Etoile, Ancilotto, King of Provino, The Wicked Sisters, and The Three Little Birds.[1] A related theme appears in Aarne-Thompson type 710, where the heroine's children are stolen from her at birth, leading to the slander that she killed them, as in Mary's Child or The Lassie and Her Godmother.[2]

Stith Thompson remarked that the core narrative action of tale types ATU 705, ATU 706, ATU 707 and ATU 710 seemed so uniform as to transfer from one type to the other.[3] However, he glanced a possibility that these types may be further related to each other.[4]

In the same vein, scholar Linda Dégh suggested a common origin for tale types ATU 403 ("The Black and the White Bride"), ATU 408 ("The Three Oranges"), ATU 425 ("The Search for the Lost Husband"), ATU 706 ("The Maiden Without Hands") and ATU 707 ("The Three Golden Sons"), since "their variants cross each other constantly and because their blendings are more common than their keeping to their separate type outlines" and even influence each other.[5]

Tale types

ATU 706: The Maiden Without Hands

This tale type is also known in folkloristics as belonging to the Constance-cycle.[6]

Scholar Jack Haney stated that the tale type is "widely distributed throughout Europe", with forty-four variants found in Russia.[7]

Professor Jack Zipes states that the motif of the mutilation of a woman harks back to Antiquity, and the mutilation of a daughter by a father occurs in tales about incest.[8] As such, remark scholars Anne Duggan and D. L. Ashliman, in many variants of type ATU 706 the heroine is mutilated because she refuses her father's sexual advances.[9]

The female protagonist may lose her hands at the beginning of the story, but regains them due to the divine intervention of a holy character, such as the Virgin Mary.[10]

An early version of the tale type is said to be found in the compilation of The Arabian Nights.[11] Versions of the tale were also known in medieval European literature since the 13th century.[12] The tale's origins, according to the historical-geographical study of Alexander H. Krappe, point to Eastern Europe.[13]

Professor Linda Dégh stated that, due to the proximity of the tales, some versions of ATU 707, "The Three Golden Children", merge with episodes of type ATU 706, "The Maiden Without Hands".[14]

ATU 707: The Three Golden Children

Ethnologist Verrier Elwin commented that the motif of jealous queens, instead of jealous sisters, is present in a polygamous context: the queens replace the youngest queen's child (children) with animals or objects and accuse the woman of infidelity. The queen is then banished and forced to work in a humiliating job. As for the fate of the children, they are either buried and become trees or are cast in the water (river, stream).[15]

ATU 709: Snow White

This tale type is widespread in Europe, in America, in Africa and "in some Turkic traditions".[16] A primary analysis by Celtic folklorist Alfred Nutt, in the 19th century, established the tale type, in Europe, was distributed "from the Balkan peninsula to Iceland, and from Russia to Catalonia", with the highest number of variants being found in Germany and Italy.[17]

In regards to the Turkic distribution of the tale, parallels are also said to exist in Central Asia and Eastern Siberia, among the Mongolians and Tungusian peoples.[18]

ATU 710: Our Lady's Child

In this tale type, a poor peasant couple give their daughter to the Virgin Mary (in more religious variants) or to a kind fairy. When the girl is under the tutelage of the magical or religious character, the girl's curiosity impels her to take a gander inside a forbidden chamber, against her benefactor's wishes. Her godmother discovers the child's disobedience and expels her to the forest, where she is found by a king.[19]

In the second part of the tale, when the girl is found by the prince or king, she cannot utter a single word, either because she has made a vow of silence or because the shock of her experience with her caretaker has left her mute. Under this lens, the tale type shares similarites with ATU 451, "The Maiden Who Seeks her Brothers" (e.g., The Six Swans), wherein the heroine must promise to not say a word for a specific period of time as part of a spell to save her transformed brothers.[20]

Scholarship suggests that the ambivalent character of the Virgin Mary, "both as a guardian and a merciless punisher of a girl", may be due to Christian influence, which superimposed Christian imagery onto the role previously held by fairies and other supernatural beings.[21]

ATU 711: The Beautiful and the Ugly Twin Sisters

ATU 712: Crescentia

Scholar Ulrich Marzolph points that the tale type ATU 712 is often connected with tale ATU 881, "Oft-Proved Fidelity".[22]

Studies
  • Aarne, Antti; Thompson, Stith. The types of the folktale: a classification and bibliography. Folklore Fellows Communications FFC no. 184. Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 1961. pp. 240–248.
  • Bawden, C. R., 'The Theme of the Calumniated Wife in Mongolian Popular Literature', Folklore, 74 (1963), 488-97 doi:10.1080/0015587X.1963.9716922
  • Dan, Ilana. "The Innocent Persecuted Heroine: An Attempt at a Model for the Surface Level of the Narrative Structure of the Female Fairy Tale". In: Patterns in Oral Literature. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 1977. pp. 13-30. doi: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110810028.13
  • Jonathan Stavsky, '“Gode in all thynge”: The Erle of Tolous, Susanna and the Elders, and Other Narratives of Righteous Women on Trial', Anglia, 131 (2013), 538-61.
  • Jones, Steven Swann. "The Innocent Persecuted Heroine Genre: An Analysis of Its Structure and Themes". In: Western Folklore 52, no. 1 (1993): 13-41. doi:10.2307/1499491.
  • Orazio, Veronica. "La fanciulla perseguitata: motivo folclorico a struttura iterativa”. In: Anaforá. Forme della ripetizione, a cura di I. Paccagnella et al.. Padova: Esedra. 2011. pp. 77-97
  • Pephánes, Giórgios P. "Διακειμενικά και ανθρωπολογικά στοιχεία στην Ευγένα του Θεόδωρου Μοντσελέζε". In: Ελληνικά: φιλολογικό, ιστορικό και λαογραφικό περιοδικό σύγγραμμα. Vol.54, No.2, 2004, pp. 273-309.
  • Wood, Juliette, 'The Calumniated Wife in Medieval Welsh Literature', Cambridge Medieval Celtic Studies, 10 (1985), 25-38.

References
  1. Stith Thompson, The Folktale, p 121-2, University of California Press, Berkeley Los Angeles London, 1977
  2. Stith Thompson, The Folktale, p 122-3, University of California Press, Berkeley Los Angeles London, 1977
  3. "The main action of the four tales which we have just examined—the discovery of the persecuted maiden in the woods or a tree, her marriage to the king, the slander concerning the birth of her children, the loss of the children, the abandonment of the queen, the eventual discovery of the truth, and the reunion of the family—is so uniform that there has been much transfer from one tale to the other". Thompson, Stith (1977). The Folktale. University of California Press. p. 123. ISBN 0-520-03537-2
  4. "...if, indeed, they are all essentially different stories." Thompson, Stith (1977). The Folktale. University of California Press. p. 123. ISBN 0-520-03537-2
  5. Dégh, Linda. Narratives in Society: A Performer-Centered Study of Narration. FF Communications 255. Pieksämäki: Finnish Academy of Science and Letters, 1995. p. 41.
  6. Leek, Thomas. "On the Question of Orality behind Medieval Romance: The Example of the "Constance" Group". In: Folklore 123, no. 3 (2012): 293-309. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41721561.
  7. Haney, Jack V. The Complete Folktales of A. N. Afanas'ev. Volume II: Black Art and the Neo-Ancestral Impulse. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. 2015. pp. 536-556. muse.jhu.edu/book/42506.
  8. The Robber with a Witch's Head. Translated by Zipes, Jack. Collected by Laura Gozenbach. Routledge. 2004. pp. 215–216. ISBN 0-415-97069-5.CS1 maint: others (link)
  9. Ashliman, D. L. and Duggan, Anne E. "Incest. Various Motifs in A (and T)". In: Jane Garry and Hasan El-Shamy (eds.). Archetypes and Motifs in Folklore and Literature. A Handbook. Armonk / London: M.E. Sharpe, 2005. p. 435.
  10. Lajoye, Patrice. “Panagia Tricherousa. A Celtic Myth Among the Slavic Popular Beliefs?". In: Studia Mythologica Slavica 13 (October). 2010. Ljubljana, Slovenija. 252. https://doi.org/10.3986/sms.v13i0.1651.
  11. Haney, Jack V. The Complete Folktales of A. N. Afanas'ev. Volume II: Black Art and the Neo-Ancestral Impulse. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. 2015. pp. 536-556. muse.jhu.edu/book/42506.
  12. Marzolph, Ulrich; van Leewen, Richard. The Arabian Nights Encyclopedia. Vol. I. California: ABC-Clio. 2004. p. 452. ISBN 1-85109-640-X (e-book)
  13. Leek, Thomas. "On the Question of Orality behind Medieval Romance: The Example of the "Constance" Group". In: Folklore 123, no. 3 (2012): 293-309. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41721561.
  14. Dégh, Linda (1996). Hungarian Folktales: The Art of Zsuzsanna Palkó. New York and London: Garland Publishing. p. 249. ISBN 0-8153-1337-3
  15. Elwin, Verrier. Folk-tales of Mahakoshal. [London]: Pub. for Man in India by H. Milford, Oxford University Press, 1944. pp. 189-193.
  16. Haney, Jack V. The Complete Folktales of A. N. Afanas'ev. Volume II: Black Art and the Neo-Ancestral Impulse. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. 2015. pp. 536-556. muse.jhu.edu/book/42506.
  17. Nutt, Alfred. "The Lai of Eliduc and the Märchen of Little Snow-White". In: Folk-Lore Volume 3. London: David Nutt. 1892. p. 30.
  18. Bäcker, Jörg. (2008). "Zhaos Mergen und Zhanglîhuâ Katô. Weibliche Initiation, Schamanismus und Bärenkult in einer daghuro-mongolischen Schneewittchen-Vorform". In: Fabula. 49. 288-324. 10.1515/FABL.2008.022.
  19. Ashliman, D. L.. "Tabu: Forbidden Chambers. Motif C611". In: Jane Garry and Hasan El-Shamy (eds.). Archetypes and Motifs in Folklore and Literature. A Handbook. Armonk / London: M.E. Sharpe, 2005. pp. 118-119.
  20. Šlekonytė, Jūratė. "Lietuvių pasakų tyrimų šimtmetis: nuo tradicinės komparatyvistikos iki šiuolaikinių metodų" [Hundred years of the Lithuanian folktale research: from the traditional comparativism to the modern methods]. In: Tautosakos darbai, t. 49, 2015. p. 130. ISSN 1392-2831
  21. Šlekonytė, Jūratė. "Švč. Mergelė Marija lietuvių liaudies pasakoje "Dievo Motinos augintinė".". [Blessed Virgin Mary in the Lithuanian folk tale "Our Lady's child"]. In: Virgo venerabilis: Marijos paveikslas Lietuvos kultūroje / sudarytoja Gabija Surdokaitė. Vilnius: Lietuvos kultūros tyrimų institutas, 2011. pp. 125-244. ISBN 9789955868361
  22. Marzolph, Ulrich; van Leewen, Richard. The Arabian Nights Encyclopedia. Vol. I. California: ABC-Clio. 2004. p. 167. ISBN 1-85109-640-X (e-book)

Further reading
  • Duggan, Anne E. "Persecuted Wife. Motifs S410-S441". In: Jane Garry and Hasan El-Shamy (eds.). Archetypes and Motifs in Folklore and Literature. A Handbook. Armonk / London: M.E. Sharpe, 2005. pp. 409-416.
  • Hansen, William. "The Protagonist on the Pyre Herodotean Legend and Modern Folktale". In: Fabula 37, 3-4 (1996): 272-285. doi: https://doi.org/10.1515/fabl.1996.37.3-4.272
  • Raufman, Ravit. "The Affinity between Incest and Women's Mutilation in the Feminine Druze Versions of “The Maiden without Hands”: An International Motif in a Local Context". In: Marvels & Tales 32, no. 2 (2018): 265-95. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.13110/marvelstales.32.2.0265.


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