Review
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Title: Putting the Supernatural in Its Place: Folklore, the Hypermodern, and the Ethereal
Author: Jeannie Banks Thomas, ed.
Publisher: The University of Utah Press
Genre: Folklore Studies
Year Published: 2015
Number of Pages: 230
Binding: Paper
ISBN13: 978-1-60781-449-8
Price: $24.95
Reviewed by Harlow Clark for the Association for Mormon Letters
For there are more treasures than one for you in this city
–Doctrine & Covenants 111:10
My son and I were headed up to Salt Lake–Murray, actually, but anything in the other valley is Salt Lake–to see my mother. We had come around the fast-becoming pointless of the mountain and past the strip mine when we heard a thrashing noise under the hood. There was an exit coming up so we pulled off and Matthew called a tow truck. The driver told us a ghost story about doing some things in the American Fork cemetery with some friends as a teen. I listened to his tone to see if he believed what he was saying. He sounded quite sincere and included the kinds of details people include when relating personal experiences, including a sense of place.
Place is important in stories about the supernatural, as Jeannie Banks Thomas says in the introduction to her new essay anthology, *Putting the Supernatural in Its Place: Folklore, the Hypermodern, and the Ethereal.* We encounter the supernatural in particular places, not in generalized space. This book introduces us to seven location with supernatural connections, and considers whether cyberspace is a place and how legends and supernatural lore play out in online communities and spaces.
The first place we visit is a haunted house, of course. Or should I say, of corpse, as a co-worker did. Except this haunting is of ghosts, not corpses. Frank de Caro’s “The Lalaurie Haunted House, Ghosts, and Slavery: New Orleans, Louisiana,” talks about the LaLaurie mansion as a symbol of a big uneasy in New Orleans, the uneasy of slavery. Delphine LaLaurie was known as a cruel woman who beat her slaves, not even unlocking the door of their room when the house caught fire. Outraged locals forced her to give up nine slaves, though she bought them back through a relative.
One of the ghosts is said to be a twelve-year-old girl who fell off the roof when Delphine was chasing her with a whip after her comb caught a snag in Missus’ hair. De Caro wonders how accurate the stories are, noting that subsequent residents didn’t complain of ghosts. He argues that the story of the outraged locals ransacking the house after the fire and forcing her to give up the slaves began from the need to make New Orleans slavery look kinder than it was, and sees the ghost stories as metaphors for the way slavery haunts New Orleans.
The authors occasionally cite each other, and a comment on de Caro’s essay reminded me of the last section of *Uncle Tom’s Cabin*. I avoided it for years as a propaganda novel with a downer ending of Tom being beaten to death, then found a recording in the library, which I listened to pedaling between the Trax station and the building where I worked as a census worker. (Or was that *Vanity Fair*? *Vanity Fair*. *Uncle Tom’s Cabin* was the job after the census, where a bunch of us migrated a mile or so south, got insurance licenses, and started enrolling seniors in Medicare plans.)
The novel was better than I thought it would be, especially when I got to the part about Simon Legree’s–is affair the word to use?–with Cassy. Affair is the word some people use to describe Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemmings in Paris. Ongoing rape or sexual abuse might be better terms, but they suggest victimization, and Cassy is not exactly a victim. She has a great deal of power over Simon, and uses it. I was impressed by Harriet Beecher Stowe’s grasp of sexual politics. I could compare it to Henry James, if had read more of his work. Nor have I read *Phenomenology of Spirit*, but I suspect Stowe did or had heard of it because the way power flows between Cassy and Simon reminds me a lot of what I know of the master-slave dialectic.
At any rate, the part where Cassy haunts Simon, pretending to be a ghost, deserves to be known as a classic of the American ghost story / psychological horror genre.
Second haunted place: “Which Witch is Witch?: Salem, Massachusetts,” by Jeannie Banks Thomas
“I expected goth kids to visit Salem in quiet but intense hearseloads.”
Thomas’s essay is punctuated by witty turns of phrase combining personal essay and scholarly writing. She introduces a problem Lisa Gabbert takes up in her essay on legend quests. Once you’ve put folklore in its place and reminded it of its place, how do you keep it there, and who are the keepers?
One example Thomas sites is the controversy over erecting a statue in Salem commemorating the TV series *Bewitched*. Sites like Salem are often pilgrimage and legend quest sites–which have a fair amount of commerce and gaiety thrown in. (This is nothing new. See Marilyn Brown’s description of holy days in 600 BC in *The Fires of Jerusalem*.) But despite the high spirits what happened in Salem was a human rights tragedy, and locals try to find a balance between commemorating the tragedy and catering to people who come there because the tragedy made the place famous.
It occurred to me that part of Salem’s attraction is its proximity to large metropolitan areas, and I wonder if a pilgrimage site like Mountain Meadows were easier to get to, closer to Cedar City or St. George, would there be more traffic there, a museum with a gift shop, perhaps. And how would the Fancher wagon train descendants feel about that?
Third haunted place: “Tradition and the International Zombie Film: The Movies,” by Mikel J. Koven
“A corpse is a corpse, of course, of course and nobody talks to a corpse of course unless of course the talking corpse is the famous Mr. Dead” — A co-worker’s song
Koven’s essay begins with the question, How does everyone know “the only way to kill zombies is to shoot them in the head”? Borrowing a term from Italian film criticism, filone–tradition–Koven traces the history of the genre in its descent from George Romero’s *Night of the Living Dead*, and its sequels, remakes and offshoots. He examines how a tradition develops and spreads to many different countries and languages. He examines the various type and subtypes including Zombie Slaves and Zombie Vengeance, Zombie Army, Zombie Revenants and Nazi Zombies, Zombie Apocalypse and Demonic Possession Zombies.
Like science fiction in general there’s a lot of social comment in zombie films but not much explanation of how the zombies became zombies, or came to life or why. Three subtypes that do talk about where the zombies for the apocalypse come from also involve sharp satire, the Pollution/Chemical Spill Zombie subtype (Accidental), the Chemical/Biological Weapon Zombie subtype, and the Medical Experiment Zombie subtype.
The essay includes two appendixes listing zombie films by country of production, and by category. But I found something else especially poignant after reading the essay, when I got a notice from OneClickDigital that a book I had reserved in August, after finding that my library had a subscription so I could finally listen to Stephen Wright’s *The Amalgamation Polka*, had come available.
In Nagazaki: Life After Nuclear War, Susan Southard follows the lives of several survivors of the bombing. In Chapter 2 I heard a description of blast survivors walking dazedly, arms held out in front, apparently to keep their hanging skin from dragging on the ground.
Fourth haunted place: Twihards, Buffistas, and Vampire Fanlore: The Internet by Lynne S. McNeill
“Who is there who believes in vampires?” –Rousseau to the archbishop of Paris
Who indeed? and why not consider it as a research question? And if vampire lore doesn’t make some kind of claim on our beliefs, what purpose _does_ it serve? McNeill uses such questions as a springboard for exploring participatory culture, including fan fiction. She also applies the concept of ostension, mentioned in some of the earlier essays, to virtual worlds.
A simple definition of ostension is reenactment, and it applies as well to things like Comic-con and cyberspace as to Civil War reenacting. Again, there’s a dark side reenacting requires a certain emotional distance. There were no 50th anniversary treks across the plains because in 1897 many people who had walked the plains were still alive and didn’t have nostalgic feelings for the 111 day trek. In 1947 there wasn’t an interstate freeway system to make a reenactment convenient. In the next 50 years pioneer treks became common enough as youth activities that a full length trek became feasible for the sesquicentennial of the entrance into Salt Lake Valley.
But I doubt we’re likely to see Mountain Meadows Massacre reenactments any time soon. We don’t have the emotional distance for it, and I’m not sure we want to develop the distance.
Fifth haunted place: Legend Quests and the Curious Case of St. Ann’s Retreat: The Performative Landscape, by Lisa Gabbert
Gabbert expands on the idea of performative spaces, and the space is of particular interest to Mormons as St. Ann’s Retreat is up Logan Canyon, and the performers are mostly Mormon young adults. Before falling into disuse St. Ann’s retreat was heavily used by nuns, so it was the object of Mormon anti-Catholic lore.
You know the stuff, if you went through seminary in the mid-70s (or a lot earlier or later). I never quite believed those stories about tunnels between monasteries and convents filled with the bones of the murdered offspring of their trysts. A few years later it occurred me that such stories were Reformation propaganda and I savored the irony of Mormons adopting the propaganda of the groups that denied their right to call themselves Christian.
Several years later, browsing Barbara Tuchman’s *A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Thirteenth Century*, I came across the comment that in the thirteenth century clerical celibacy was a joke, and it occurred to me that licentious licentiate stories grew from popular anti-clerical sentiment and likely predated the Reformation by centuries.
So Mormon teenagers of the past few decades are not the only ones mystified by what goes on inside the walls of a convent.
Gabbert suggests another reason for the connection between convents and sexuality, their roles as sanctuaries for raped pregnant women. (She captures complex cultural feelings in repeated use of nunnery, Hamlet’s word for a whorehouse.)
One way Gabbert expands on the concept of ostension is by noting that certain places invite ostension, and I came across an interesting example while writing this review, in John 4, Jesus’s conversation with the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s Well. It’s clearly a courtship type-scene replaying Abraham’s servant’s search for a wife for Isaac, which takes him to a well. As Robert Alter points out in his commentary on Genesis 24, wells were ideal places for such courtship because they were natural meeting places. Jacob’s Well would be a natural place for Jesus, courting peoples’ belief, to re-enact his ancestor’s courtship.
I’ve been exploring the idea for years that our lives follow archetypal and folkloric patterns and that the patterns of our lives shape our stories more than the archetypal patterns shape the way we tell stories. This is particularly important in thinking about those other stories of the supernatural we call scripture, which often follow archetypal patterns.
It’s useful, also, to think about Joseph Smith’s trip to Salem in search of treasure (See D&C 111) as a legend quest, and the Lord’s comment on that quest as a gentle reminder that there are more kinds of treasure than one. (Incidentally, in *The Angel and the Farmboy* Carl Carmer says Joseph spent time in his childhood recuperating in Salem, where one of his playmates would have been Nathaniel Hawthorne.)
Sixth haunted place: Messages from the Dead: Lily Dale, New York by Elizabeth Tucker
Like Gabbert and Thomas, Elizabeth Tucker combines scholarly writing with an account of her own legend quest, to Lilly Dale. The essay deserves more comment than I have time for here, so I’ll simply mention that it’s an apt reminder that there are more spiritual traditions than one arising from the ashes and oaks and pines of the burned-over district.
Seventh haunted place: The Haunted Asian Landscapes of Lafcadio Hearn: Old Japan, by Bill Ellis.
This essay also deserves more space than I have time for. It brings the book full circle, back to Louisiana, where Hearn did groundbreaking work, decades ahead of his time conceptually. Eventually he ended up in Japan and became a Japanese citizen. Ellis looks at three stories from Hearn’s Japanese collections. Hearn’s work is available on Project Gutenberg, and it’s worthwhile to take a few minutes and read the three. The third is an account of Hearn’s own legend quest, a river trip through a cave inhabited by spirits of children.
The problem that stalled my son’s car was v-belts breaking. He replaced them, then decided to replace the car. A month or so later he was driving his new used car around the Point of the Mountain when he heard a similar noise, and pulled onto the shoulder at the same exit as before. But it turned out to be much worse, the engine throwing a rod or something like that. I was originally going to end this essay with a comment like, “That exit must be a haunted place, or blessed.”
But after considering what the various writers have to say about the supernatural inhabiting liminal spaces I realized the Pointless is a liminal space as border between Utah and Salt Lake Counties, and the Draper exit is a liminal place as the exit to the state prison, the space between the hang-gliders, the mining affecting their currents, and the prisoners who can’t go out whenever they want and look up at the hang-gliders, let alone snap themselves in.
Reading this book it’s hard to escape the feeling it was written by a bunch of folklorists who met in a sideroom at a conference, said, “This is great stuff. We should collect it, do some publishing about perishing and introduce people to some folklore concepts.” Such enthusiasm is welcome, as is Jeannie Banks Thomas’s portrait of the zombie family “at the Logan, Utah, Zombie Walk, which is a benefit for the local food bank” (p. 3) I suppose the motto is “Eat the humans, feed the humans.” This book is a feast. Belly up.