THE USES OF ENCHANTMENT IN FRONTIER HUMOR
AND THE ROBBER BRIDEGROOM

Merrill Maguire Skaggs

Looking back on The Robber Bridegroom some thirty years after its publication, Eudora Welty told the Mississippi Historical Society, "I made our local history and. . . legend and the fairy tale into working equivalents. It was my firm intention to bind them together."¹ In citing two of Grimm’s tales as sources of her "double character of the title,"² she invited a comparison of her story to the folk tales of Europe. In stressing as part of her historical material the "legendary folk hero"³ of frontier humor, Mike Fink, she invited her audience to identify the similarities between fairy tales and tall tales. And in insisting that hers was a historical novel,⁴ she invited a look at the connections between historical facts and fairy stories.

One easily guesses what historical facts might have provoked a desire to escape into fantasy in 1942 when Welty published her novella. But Welty also hints at the kinds of events which might have triggered frontier tall tales when she sets her novella on the Natchez Trace. Most of her details about the Trace, once known as The Devil’s Backbone, can be found in Robert Coates’ popular history of 1930, The Outlaw Years. One can read in Coates, for example, that early innkeepers often had clipped ears betraying their former thefts ;⁵ or that Mike Fink, the hero of the flatboatmen, drank a gallon of whiskey a day;⁶ or that Fink’s habitual boast was, "I can out-run, out-hop, out-jump, throw down, drag out, and lick any man in the country!";⁷ or that berry stains were used to disguise a robber named Hare, who worked the Trace but was also known in New Orleans as a great dandy;⁸ or that robbers often congregated at Cave-in-Rock; or that the Spanish passports used by brigands to escape English authority could be obtained only through the recommendation of a respectable landed gentleman;⁹ or that Samuel Mason once obtained such a passport by conning a fellow traveler; or that the robber Little Harpe was finally apprehended when he tried to claim a reward by presenting another robber’s severed head, preserved in blue clay.¹⁰

In including Little Harpe as a character in The Robber Bridegroom, however, Welty provides the strongest evidence of the link she first imagined and then forged between the southwestern frontier and fairy tales. The historical Harpe brothers, Big Harpe and Little Harpe, taught other robbers that the most effective means

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of disposing of corpses was to disembowel them, fill them with stones, and dump them in the nearest body of water. And this was a practice Samuel Mason later emulated.

I, at least, first heard of similar acts in fairy tales such as "The Little Red Hen" or in some versions of "Little Red Riding Hood." But my happily limited experience suggests my first hypothesis: that the perverse impulse to disembowel an enemy and then sink his stone-filled body has usually been projected onto a creature imagined operating in a remote fantasy world. When such an event occurs in one’s own real world, however, its horror makes one wish to be an enchanted, superhuman, invulnerable power oneself—something like a half-horse, half-alligator, with a bit of snapping turtle thrown in.

In his recent study, The Uses of Enchantment, Bruno Bettleheim claims that if one takes fairy stories "as descriptions of reality, then the tales are indeed outrageous in all respects—cruel, sadistic, and whatnot. But as symbols of psychological happenings or problems, these stories are quite true."¹¹ Bettleheim argues that fairy tales function valuably to relieve "severe inner pressures" and to "offer examples of both temporary and permanent solutions to pressing difficulties."¹² They provide a cultural escape valve while they consistently encourage their hearers to engage in "the hazardous struggles without which one can never achieve true identity."¹³ The typical fairy tale promises "that if a child dares to engage in this fearsome and taxing search [for an identity], benevolent powers will come to his aid and he will succeed."¹⁴ Bettleheim feels that the most important ingredient of all fairy tales is the promise of success, of simpleton’s or everyman’s eventually inheriting the kingdom he lives in.

Against the background of the frontier’s horror, one can understand that many of the purposes Bettleheim identifies in fairy tales might be served by southwestern humor stories told by a "ring-tailed roarer." Both use extravagance or enchantment to confront basic fears and anxieties. Only in the age of the intended audience, in fact, do frontier roarer stories and fairy tales differ significantly, for roarer stories are fairy tales for adults. Their verbal humor—their rhythmic, sonorous, pun-filled language—satisfies adult tastes; but the fears of vulnerability they allay are as ageless as human life.

We reasonably infer from the number of references to screamers or roarers that outlandish boasting was frequently heard in the taverns or gathering spots along the Mississippi River or in

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backwoods areas. In Georgia, according to Longstreet, the boast was inverted: "I’m a leetle the best. . . ."¹⁵ But frontier humor suggests that such boasting was a standard feature of backwoods life throughout the lower South during the years of its settlement.

When writers sketch boasting characters ironically or satirically, they obviously shape more realistic stories. Only when the roarer is allowed to talk without a narrator’s undercutting him do we have pure American fantasy. And surprisingly few examples exist of such fantasy undiluted by irony or distancing literary form. The number of roarers mentioned, ironically or not, however, suggests the enduring appeal to readers of such flights of fantasy and exuberant language as roarers emitted. In fact, the roarer reappears at least once in 1975, as John Sayles’ mysterious trucker, who boasts on his CB transmitter:

I’m Ryder P. Moses and I can outhaul, outhonk, outclutch any leadfoot this side of trucker’s heaven. I’m half Mack, half Peterbilt, and half Sherman don’t tread-on-me tank. I drink fifty gallons of propane for breakfast and fart pure poison, I got steel mesh teeth, a chrome-plated nose, and three feet of stick on the floor. I’m the Paul mother-lovin Bunyan of the Interstate system and I don’t care who knows it. I’m Ryder P. Moses and all you people are driving on my goddamn road.¹⁶

By asserting his invulnerability, his undauntable survival power in places which are alternately deadly dull and full of deadly surprises, the roarer, whether confronting forest threats or highway conspiracies, has delighted American readers. He asserts in his flights of rhythmic rhetoric that he can, and habitually does, overcome and conquer. He, then and now, fulfills a need to believe that humans can fashion everyday triumphs in unpromising places, with a minimum of elitist skills. He leaves a reader reassured that "everyman" living in "anyplace" can win his personal kingdom. When an audience both needs and is willing to entertain this reassurance, such stories are popular.

A good example of a frontier roarer story which functions as fairy tale is the familiar sketch, "The Big Bear of Arkansas." The roarer here has recently felt "neglected, rejected, degraded"¹⁷ in New Orleans, from which city he is returning home on a steamboat. He crows loudly to attract the audience his battered ego needs, and his prospective auditors immediately identify him as a "horse" or "screamer."¹⁸ Thereafter the "Big Bar" can rely for dignity only on his language, his character, and his lifestyle. Thus he magnifies each, discarding fact for hyperbole. He describes an enchanted homeland which produces forty-pound turkeys so fat they drop when shot to

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spread tallow all over the ground. He locates his virtue, as fairy-tale heroes do, in his simplest qualities and possessions—the air, soil and mosquitoes of his state, his dog, gun, cabin, bear-skin mattress, and his reputation as bear-hunter. As in a fairy tale, this roarer is both uniquely individual and also commonplace, a frontier everyman who speaks for all Arkansans. As his story unfolds, he endures the usual three-part trials of fairy tales. In the process of hunting a great bear he finds that his horse, then his gun, then his ammunition supply fail him. Thereafter he loses his pup, his energy, and his reputation in the neighborhood.

The bear itself, more a creature of enchantment than of nature, can apparently change sexes like the Devil and can outrun any pursuers. But when the hunter is so frustrated that he begins to waste away and to contemplate running to Texas, the magic animal, the "creation bear," comes to his aid. The animal, who can walk a fence or loom like black mist, presents himself to the hunter to be killed. The hunter’s conclusion, however, is that "that bear was an unhuntable bear, and died when his time come.

The Arkansan, like many simpletons in Grimm, willingly undergoes the ordeals necessary to prove himself but triumphs only after being seasoned by failure. After identifying himself with simple, natural things—in this case, the need to defecate, which leaves him with his pants down and therefore totally vulnerable²⁰—he is aided by a magic animal who sacrifices himself for the preservation of human life. "The Big Bear of Arkansas" seems rather straightforwardly to do what a fairy tale should: assure its audience that "everyman" can conquer heroically in an inauspicious place.

While such frontier humor as "The Big Bear of Arkansas" appears to fall without conscious design into a fairy tale pattern, The Robber Bridegroom includes fairy tale events which Welty uses deliberately and self-consciously. She describes her story, in fact, as a "Fairy Tale of the Natchez Trace." Welty mentions as sources for her work two Grimm’s fairy tales, "The Robber Bridegroom" and "The Fisherman and His Wife," as well as the Cupid and Psyche story (which Bettleheim also treats as a fairy tale). Upon pursuing her fairy tale sources further, we notice that Welty’s central female character also resembles Rapunzel (in being occasionally locked up by her wicked guardian, in having long golden hair, and in singing songs which attract a lover). Rosamond further resembles a large number of fairy tale heroines who own magic tokens (here, a locket which protects her from extravagant harms), who receive messages from magic animals (here, a raven), who marry ominous husbands

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(here, a berry-stained robber), and who drop symbols which characterize them (in this case, lies) from their mouths when they speak. In many ways Welty’s novella serves as a digest of standard motifs in Grimm’s fairy tales, for as she explained long ago, the story grew from "a lifetime of fairy-tale reading."²¹

When we look at Welty’s fairy tale with Bettleheim’s analyses of her sources in mind, however, we are in for some surprises. For Welty’s rambunctious story is anything but straightforward. Bettleheim suggests that "The Robber Bridegroom" of Grimm deals with an adolescent girl’s suspicion that the groom her father has chosen will rob her of her "life" as she understands it. Bettleheim identifies in the Cupid and Psyche story a young male’s need to escape being "known" by the female he sleeps with. And Bettleheim relates the disguised groom stories to the female’s ambivalence about sexual pleasure: she consequently finds her lover’s "animal nature" disgusting during the day, however satisfactorily human her lover becomes in bed at night.

One is struck by the extent to which Welty has reversed the implications of those older plots. In writing for adults she not only discards what Bettleheim has labeled childish or adolescent anxieties; but she also signals her readers of what she is up to. As she stated in 1975, when she used the word "innocent" to describe her planter Clement Musgrove in the first sentence, she expected the word to shine "like a cautionary blinker to what lies on the road ahead."²²

Welty’s father figure here is not concerned with finding a proper heir for his kingdom, but rather with the nuisance value of building a kingdom at all. The wicked stepmother who has replaced his be-loved first wife, he comes to suspect, might be his first wife after all, whom he now perceives as a demanding usurper because he has grown tired of her. His beautiful daughter, far from being pure and innocent, survives by habitually lying. Her concern is not about losing her virginity but about finding somebody to give it to. Her robber "gets" her because she goes out to find him. And having "had" her, the robber disguised with berry stains suits her vastly better than the dandy Jamie Lockhart, whom her father introduces as a prospective husband. When Rosamond cleans Jamie’s face while he sleeps, identifies him correctly only to lose him, and pursues him until she finds him again, she can settle down to affluence in New Orleans only because Jamie’s business as merchant so nearly resembles his former profession of robber. Jamie therefore preserves his antisocial impulses while becoming respectable. And

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in adding to Mike Fink’s traditional boast, "I’m a lover of the women like you’ll never see again," Welty supplies the twentieth-century, adult ingredient to her roarer’s speech which is pointedly missing in nineteenth-century versions.

Fairy tales please us, Bettleheim says, not because they inculcate moral lessons like fables, or teach painful wisdom like myths, but because they deal with our common predicaments and desires, and then promise that we can win psychologically satisfactory solutions for them. He does not claim that the need for such reassurance is limited to children or adolescents but merely that the amoral folk stories we label fairy tales usually deal with the anxieties of early life.

What the boastful stories of frontier humor do, and what Eudora Welty does in The Robber Bridegroom, is reassure adults that the crises which typify adult life can turn out satisfactorily. Roarer stories counteract feelings of physical vulnerability and inadequacy, of personal insignificance or remoteness from "important issues," whereas Welty’s fairy tale pays more attention to the distressing ambiguities of simple facts and to the drawbacks of socially imposed roles and sexual relationships.

According to Bettleheim, fairy tales are important to us not in times when we feel secure but in times when we feel profoundly threatened. Perhaps the revival of scholarly interest in frontier humor during the last decade and the recent revival of "The Robber Bridegroom" as a Broadway musical may say something about the times in which we live. But whether our recurring interest in such fairy tales tells anything about our historical times or not, the stories still allow us to re-experience a buried part of ourselves which continually relishes its splendid triumphs—killing with one shot every wild animal (or ferocious colleague?), stepping safely through hordes of sleeping Indians (or faculty meetings?), avoiding the bungles of dense but well-meaning fathers (or university presidents?), outwitting the malicious designs of jealous stepmothers (or college deans?). At the end of the stories we emerge, our vices as well as our virtues intact, to live happily, if not forever, at least for a long, long time.

DREW UNIVERSITY

NOTES

   ¹Eudora Welty, Fairy Tale of the Natchez Trace (Jackson: Mississippi Historical Society, 1975), p. 13.
   ²Ibid., p. 11.

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   ³Ibid., p. 10.
   ⁴Ibid. p. 7. The presence of these ingredients had been previously noted by Ruth ‘Vande Kieft, Eudora Welty (New Haven: Twayne, 1962), p. 172, and Alfred Appel, Jr., Season of Dreams (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1965), pp. 36, 72, 182.
   ⁵The detail is included in an account of an early journey down the Ohio River written by Thomas Ashe and quoted by Robert M. Castes, The Outlaw Years (New York: Macaulay, 1930), p. 46.
   ⁶Coates, p. 111.
   ⁷Ibid., p. 112.
   ⁸Ibid., p. 89ff. In her speech to the Mississippi Historical Society, Welty identifies this detail with Samuel Mason, who was like her Jamie Lockhart in conning a passport but not, as she says, in using berry stains.
   ⁹Samuel Mason, who used Cave-in-Rock as a hideaway, also secured a passport from a gullible fellow traveler. Coates, p. 124.
   ¹⁰Welty says in her Mississippi speech that Little Harp is correctly identified as possessing the head of Big Harp (Welty drops the finale of the names). Big Harpe’s head was severed and posted in a tree fork on the Trace (as was Little Harpe’s, eventually). Big Harpe’s head also eventually disappeared. The head Little Harpe had in his possession when apprehended, however, was Mason’s, according to Coates. The passage of thirty-two years may have slightly blurred Welty’s memory of several historical details.
   ¹¹Bruno Bettleheim, The Uses of Enchantment (New York: Knopf, 1975), p. 155.
   ¹²Ibid p. 6.
   ¹³Ibid., p. 24.
   ¹⁴Ibid.
   ¹⁵Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, "The Horse Swap," Humor of the Old Southwest, Cohen and Dillingham, eds. (Boston: Houghton Muffin, 1964), p. 30.
   ¹⁶John Sayles, "I-80 Nebraska M.490-M.205," Great Action Stories, Kittredge and Krauser, eds. (New York: New American Library, 1977), p. 234. The story originally appeared in The Atlantic in May 1975.
   ¹⁷Bettleheim, p. 58.
   ¹⁸Cohen and Dillingham, p. 269.
   ¹⁹Ibid., p. 279.
   ²⁰James Cox has recently emphasized the salacious joke at the end of the "Big Bear." "Humor of the Old Southwest," The Comic Imagination in American Literature, Louis D. Robin, Jr., ed. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1973), pp. 101-112.
   ²¹R. Van Gelder, "An Interview with Eudora Welty," quoted in Vande Kieft, p. 166.
   ²²Welty, p. 9.

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