Women's Folklore, Women's Culture by Rosan A. Jordan Susan J. Kalcik

Author:Rosan A. Jordan, Susan J. Kalcik [Rosan A. Jordan, Susan J. Kalcik]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780812212068
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.
Published: 1985-03-01T00:00:00+00:00

TRICKSTER

The narratives discussed in the preceding section capture the image “Monster” so that concepts of order are outlined differentially for a significant number of La Porte residents according to their sex and age; narratives about the murderess’s possible escape from her farmhouse fire, however, cast her in the role of “Trickster,” with subsequent realignments of the order/disorder problem. Although the county coroner officially determined that the body of the decapitated woman found in the ruins of the Gunness home was that of the murderess,10 some official opinions and most unofficial opinions to the present day have it that Belle substituted another woman’s body for her own, set the fire, and absconded with the wealth acquired from the unfortunate suitors she first bilked and then murdered.

The “Belle Gunness is alive and well” tradition ranges from simple belief statements, such as the terse “She got away,” to detailed accounts of her flight which place the murderess in that legend category of famous or infamous characters who live on and on (motifs A570, Culture Hero Lives, and A580, Return of the Culture Hero). The number of La Porte residents’ personal experience narratives about encounters with the murderess after her supposed death was great enough for a skeptical reporter to headline his newspaper article “The Mrs. Gunness Very Numerous.” One such subtradition that I have labeled “Shamming Sickness in Flight” deserves attention, for it suggests that the narrators in the sample (both male) define “trickster” by correlating it with the stereotype of the woman who manipulates her own “complaints and disorders” so that her position of apparent powerlessness becomes one of power (see Ehrenreich and English 1973).

The first narrator, Jesse L. Hurst, was a cabman for a Decatur, Indiana, line in 1908. Hurst believed that he had seen the murderess bundled up and borne on a stretcher at the train station in Decatur the day after the fire. His account, extant only in the remaining copies of the chapbook The Mrs. Gunness Mystery, published in July 1908, outlines their meeting:

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