Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers

by Sady Doyle

  The powerful hunger at the core of Lucy’s being, her need for something more than the rules allow, makes her hideous and threatening to the men who claim to love her. Yet it also makes her a magnificent danger to the society that tries to contain and repress her. She dies, but she dies fighting, striking terror into the hearts of men who prefer her small and meek and chaste. In a world this cruel, glorious defiance may be all we can ask, even of our monsters.

  Part IIWIVES

  3.

  SEDUCTION

  What does one tell a husband? One tells him nothing.

  —Cat People (1942)

  One Friday night, in March 1895, Michael Cleary of Ballyvadlea, Ireland, set fire to his wife for refusing to eat a piece of toast.

  Bridget Cleary had always been a bad fit for Michael. She was an exceptionally beautiful woman, and—thanks to her parents’ purchase of a Singer sewing machine—an exceptionally powerful one, too. Bridget taught herself to work as a milliner and dressmaker, which, along with keeping poultry, allowed her to live off her own income. That level of independence was rare in a married woman, and Bridget didn’t do much to downplay it: She had not moved in with her husband for some time after their wedding. She wore ostentatiously stylish clothes of her own design, in part as a walking advertisement for her business, but also for all the reasons beautiful women wear stylish clothing. She had a reputation for arrogance; “people speak of [Bridget] as being ‘a bit queer’ in her ways,” one local newspaper wrote, “and this they attribute to a certain superiority over the people with whom she came into contact.”1 There were rumors that she’d been having an affair.

  “She was not my wife. She was too fine to be my wife,” Michael said of Bridget after her death.2 It might sound like bitterness, a man venting his insecurity at a woman who made him feel small. But Michael was being literal. He also claimed the woman he’d killed was “two inches taller than my wife.” By the time he was on trial for murder, Michael was not framing the problem in terms of some flaw in Bridget. He claimed that the woman he’d killed was not Bridget at all.

  The thing that looked like Bridget, Michael said, was a changeling—a fairy that assumed someone’s appearance in order to disguise the kidnapping of the original person. Though they preferred to take children, fairies also stole adult women from time to time, especially pretty ones or nursing mothers. Like the vampires of New England, the changelings of Ballyvadlea were surprisingly noncontroversial. When Michael asked Bridget’s family to drive the changeling away, they were glad to help.

  In the days leading up to her death, Michael’s neighbors recalled hearing screaming coming from his house—“take it, you [bitch], you old faggot, or we will burn you” was one widely reported comment—and seeing Bridget tied to the bed, where she was doused and force-fed potions to repel fairy magic.3 Sometimes that meant herbs boiled in milk. Sometimes it meant urine. Fairies hated iron, so she was threatened and prodded with a hot poker; fairies hated Christianity, so a priest was called. Bridget was made to recite her name and her male relatives’ names; she had to describe herself as “Bridget Boland, wife of Michael Cleary, in the name of God” over and over, as if the spell could be broken by reaffirming the proper marital relation. When she was slow to answer, they held her over the kitchen fire.4 Johanna Burke, Bridget’s cousin, affirmed in her testimony that Bridget “seemed to be wild and deranged, especially while they were so treating her.”5

  Here’s the thing: it worked. After hours of counter-magic, everyone agreed that the real Bridget had been returned to them. But then, while the participants were recuperating by the fire, Bridget made the mistake that would end her life. She insulted Michael’s mother.

  “Your mother used to go with the fairies,” is what she said, according to Johanna. “That is why you think I am going with them.”6

  The toast was on the breakfast table. Bridget had eaten two pieces. When she refused a third piece, Michael knocked Bridget to the ground and began forcing the bread down her throat. He began demanding that she call herself “the wife of Michael Cleary” again.

  “I said, ‘Mike, let her alone, don’t you see it is Bridget that is in it,’ ” Johanna said, “meaning that it was Bridget his wife, and not the fairy, for he suspected that it was a fairy and not his wife that was there. Michael then stripped his wife’s clothes off, except her chemise, and got a lighting stick out of the fire. She was lying on the floor, and he held it near her mouth.”7

  Fairies hated fire. So Michael held fire to his wife’s mouth, telling her to take back what she’d said. Some of the witnesses remembered her crying out for Johanna—“oh, Han, Han”—and Johanna remembered Bridget saying, “give me a chance,” but then her head hit the floor, hard, and she stopped talking.8 So it may have been the blow to the head that killed her. We can’t know. Somehow, in the struggle, a spark got loose, and Bridget’s chemise caught fire. Over the screaming of her assembled family, Michael reached for a lamp and poured the burning oil over Bridget’s body, stoking the flames.

  James Kennedy, her aunt’s brother-in-law, recalled trying to stop him: “For the love of God, don’t burn your wife,” he shouted.

  “She’s not my wife,” Michael said. “She’s an old deceiver sent in place of my wife. She’s after deceiving me for the last seven or eight days, and deceived the priest today too, but she won’t deceive anyone any more…. You’ll soon see her go up the chimney!”9

  The assembled family, believers all, may well have looked for the miracle. But the body of Bridget Cleary stayed where it was.

  Women from Another World

  It’s difficult to tell what motivated Michael in those final moments. It wasn’t just his belief in fairies; the other participants believed in them, too, but by the time Michael killed Bridget, everyone else knew that she was a real person. It may have been that Michael believed in fairies a little more than the others. It may have been mental illness; one popular theory places the blame on Capgras syndrome, in which sufferers are afflicted with the delusion that a loved one (“usually a spouse,” as per one Irish doctor) has been replaced by an identical duplicate.10 Or, given what we know about the other men, the obvious pride Bridget took in herself, and the financial power she wielded—say it plainly, the fact that Bridget was not under her husband’s control—it may have been a lie, and a way to justify killing her. Men kill women every day to assert their authority. Bridget wouldn’t have been the first.

  But if Michael was lying, it was a lie with deep roots. Ireland and the other Celtic countries have a long folkloric tradition of fairy wives. Like Bridget, they were women who were hard to keep in one place—women who asked for more than was normal.

  In the typical story, as per W. Y. Evans-Wentz, “a man catches a fairy woman and marries her. She proves to be an excellent housewife, but usually she has had put into the marriage-contract certain conditions which, if broken, inevitably release her from the union, and when so released she hurries away instantly, never to return, unless it be now and then to visit her children.”11

  Among the conditions, ironically, is the right to leave an abusive husband; in one story, collected by Evans-Wentz, the man learns “that he must not strike the wife without a cause three times, the striking being interpreted to include any slight tapping, say, on the shoulder.”12 Other fairies are disquietingly independent; a selkie, for instance, will come into her new husband’s home with a trunk, which he is not to open under any circumstances. If he disobeys her—suspecting treasure, or just not wanting her to have any secrets—he will find that the trunk contains only a sealskin, which the selkie will use to transform herself back into a seal before disappearing into the sea. In the Welsh Mabinogion, we have the story of Rhiannon, a fairy woman pursued by the human Prince Pwyll, who was struck by her beauty as she rode through his kingdom. Pwyll chased Rhiannon for days, unsuccessfully, until he became so tired and hungry that he begged her to stop. Only then
did Rhiannon turn around: “I will stay gladly,” she told him, “and it were better for thy horse hadst thou asked it long since.”13 Rhiannon had been in love with Pwyll from afar, and had come to propose marriage, but she wasn’t going to let him grab her off the road and call it conquest. To be with a fairy woman, even one who loved him, a man had to get her consent first.

  The ur-myth here is probably the French story of Melusine. When she married Count Raymond of Poitou, her only demand was that he leave her alone in her own room on Saturdays. Raymond agreed, and for many years, they were almost happy. Yet each of their children was born strange and frightening—with claws or tusks, or too many eyes, or too few. Though the maladies varied, “all were in some way disfigured and monstrous.”14 The problem defied explanation, and in time, Raymond grew suspicious of his wife. One Saturday, he peeked through a crack in the door and saw Melusine taking a bath, with the lower half of her body transformed into a long, snaky tail.

  Melusine loved Raymond, and initially forgave him for spying on her. It was only when Raymond publicly called her a “serpent” and blamed her for “contaminating” his noble line that she dropped the act, transformed into a sea dragon, and flew away.15 The legend says that she came back in the dead of night to nurse and hold her children, proud Mama Snake cuddling her little monsters to her clammy breast. Melusine could forgive her husband for curiosity, or even for being afraid, but not for turning on their children; she may have been a hideous, recently divorced hell-snake, but she was not a bad mother.

  “Fairy wives” behaved less like inexplicable creatures of the spirit world and more like women who’d figured out how to have long-term heterosexual relationships without ceding their dignity or autonomy. So if Michael Cleary had a wife who was more beautiful than ordinary women, who wielded more control than ordinary women, who acted “too fine” for him or anyone, who had a habit of disappearing—well, he knew what to call her. If tradition had taught him anything, it was that a woman who insisted too much on being treated like a person was probably not a person at all.

  Beauty and/or the Beast

  “To pose Woman is to pose the absolute Other, without reciprocity,” Simone de Beauvoir once wrote, “denying against all experience that she is a subject, a fellow human being.”16

  Women’s adult sexuality—the kind that comes attached to female experience, agency, power in the world—is even more heavily demonized than the adolescent variety. An adolescent girl’s sexuality is frightening because it’s a way for her to slip out of her parents’ control. But once a girl slips her chain and becomes a woman, her sexuality stops being merely worrisome and becomes a threat. Sex is a valuable resource that men can never entirely alienate her from because it resides within her body. She can promise and deny it to whom she pleases. You can look to Michael Cleary to see how well men handle being denied.

  De Beauvoir was probably not thinking of fairies when she wrote that men refused to see women as human. But she was correct that humanity, for most of recorded history, has been defined as male. In the West, white men have told our stories, written our laws, made our definitions, dominated our arts and academies; when female experience has been accounted for at all, it has usually been a man doing the accounting. Women are defined from the outside, in terms of how they seem to men, rather than from the inside, as thinking, feeling subjects. They are not fellow people, not even a different or worse variety of person, but simply the opposite of men, and hence, the opposite of human.

  Which leads to the question of how you can have sex with something that isn’t human. In many myths, heterosexuality is portrayed as a kind of legalized bestiality, and attractive women are alluring, predatory, half-human monsters: fairy wives, snake-women, Others whose beauty is a thin veneer over their dangerous and alien psyches.

  Some creatures, like the selkies, are just too self-possessed for a man to possess them. But male terror of unleashed female sexuality runs deeper than that, and gives rise to bloodier fantasies. Think of mermaids drawing sailors out into dangerous waters and drowning them, or the leanan sídhe, a fairy in Celtic folklore who transforms her male lovers into great artists, but only at the cost of their souls, giving them a few brief years of earthly brilliance before dragging them away to entertain her in the Underworld. For that matter, think of Dracula’s famous Brides—triple-teaming and sucking the juices out of poor, trapped Jonathan Harker, over his unconvincing attempts to resist them—or the urban legends about traveling salesmen who are lured into hotel rooms by foreign seductresses, only to wake up alone in a tub of ice, missing a kidney. To this day, our word for a famously seductive woman is shared with the monster that nearly lured Odysseus’s ship onto the rocks, and with the sound of impending danger: all three are sirens.

  These creatures feel no desire for sex, or feel it so intensely that they devour their male partners; rather than acquiescing to men’s sexual advances, they use men’s desire to lead them on, exploit them, and destroy them. They seem beautiful and human at first glance, but when you examine them, their bodies are never quite right; they always bear some mark of the animal or the otherworldly. You can never fully understand these women, never fully pin them down, never love them; they are elusive, incomprehensible, practiced deceivers. You can live with one for years and still not see the snake that lives inside her skin.

  Faery Serpents and Lizard People

  Myths have odd half-lives. Names change, beliefs change, but as long as a certain underlying anxiety persists, its myth tends to survive as well. John Keats—a prime candidate for visitation by the leanan sídhe—seems to have channeled some of Melusine into his Lamia, a “smooth-lipp’d serpent” from the world of Faery, who is possessed of a disgusting, distinctly female hunger: “Her head was serpent, but ah, bitter-sweet! She had a woman’s mouth with all its pearls complete.”17

  Given that Lamia’s mouth (so to speak) longs for pretty young men, this obviously will not do. She asks the god Hermes to transform her into a woman, so that she can seduce the human Lycius. It actually works out fairly well, until Lycius’s friend Apollonius publicly reveals Lamia’s true identity at their wedding, thus causing “the tender-person’d Lamia [to] melt into a shade.”18

  It’s a lovely poem. The famously lush description of Lamia’s scales alone—“[e]yed like a peacock, and all crimson barr’d; / And full of silver moons, that, as she breathed, / Dissolv’d, or brighter shone, or interwreathed,” etcetera, etcetera—is enough to send a sensitive type into a swoon.19 The twenty-first century, of course, does not really do swoons. We don’t really do fairies, either. We still have magical kidnappers, not-quite-human imposters, and inexplicable visitors from another world, but we call them aliens. Which is why, of all the many misfortunes and insults to befall poor Keats, one of the worst is the 1995 erotic thriller Species, starring Natasha Henstridge as a shape-shifting snake-alien who screws a dude to death in a swimming pool.

  To call Species a terrible movie is not enough. It is luxuriantly, gorgeously terrible. Ben Kingsley, playing a scientist who inexplicably spliced alien DNA with hot lady DNA (to make the resulting half-alien “more docile and controllable,” he says) visibly chokes down every line of dialogue with a barely contained rage that says “I played Gandhi, damn it.” Forest Whitaker plays a psychic who does things like walk up to a gorily mutilated corpse and announce, using his psychic powers, “Something bad happened here!” Henstridge, as the hot lady alien in question, goes from not knowing what a TV is to convincingly faking her own death using nothing more than pliers and a stolen car, within about twenty-four hours. There’s a scene where Kingsley says the word protocol roughly thirty-six times in succession, like so:

  BEN KINGSLEY: I can’t let them out! It’s protocol!

  MICHAEL MADSEN (who is also in this): What protocol?

  BEN KINGSLEY: Protocol! Protocol!

  Maybe you think I am exaggerating. Maybe it’s not actually that stupi
d. To which I reply: no. Whatever you are imagining, Species is much, much stupider than that. Here is the climactic piece of dialogue, the message we are left to chew on as we exit the theater:

  LADY SCIENTIST: She was half-alien, half-us. I wonder which was the predatory half.

  MICHAEL MADSEN: The dead half!

  (All laugh.)

  What.

  And yet, precisely because it is brought to you by the geniuses who thought “the dead half” was a classic cut-to-credits zinger, Species contains more uncomfortable truths about how men view women than a smarter story ever could. It is an artless, timeless, accidental blueprint of all the ways men fear female sexuality.

  The alien (her name is Sil) begins life as a sort of extraterrestrial riff on Regan from The Exorcist; she’s a frightened child, haunted by night terrors and acne-like worms that keep protruding from under her skin, another girl whose body is being filled up by a malevolence beyond her power to control. But when Sil manages to break free of the government lab that created her, she transforms herself into a gigantic, reptilian, wall-mounted vagina, and from said vagina rebirths herself as a naked Henstridge. From this point forward, Sil—who haunts nightclubs and devours the men therein, who sprouts tentacles and slitted pupils when aroused, who impales a man’s head with her H. R. Giger–designed tongue—is nothing but a monster.

  The extreme badness of the screenwriting makes this misogyny more blatant, and therefore much, much funnier. When the freed Sil hits Los Angeles, the first thing she does is buy a wedding dress, despite the fact that she supposedly doesn’t know what “money” is; when her conquests reject her, she yells things like “don’t go—I want a baby!” (If that ever works for you, let me know. I myself have not had much luck.) At one point, Marg Helgenberger, as the intrepid lady scientist, wipes down the bloody edge of a toilet seat to prove Sil is—gasp!—on her period.