Folklore in Literature

Session Coordinator: Genevieve West

Department of Languages and Literature

Ferris State University

Big Rapids, MI 49307

231-591-5899

westg@ferris.edu

Family Tales: Genres of Folklore in Lee Smith's Fiction

In her preface to the stories accompanying Shelby Adams's photographs in Appalachian Portraits, Lee Smith writes, "These stories are based upon interviews that Shelby Lee Adams has conducted over the years in Kentucky and upon interviews and conversations I have had with people where I grew up in southwest Virginia. These stories are not 'real,' but they are as true as I can make them, as true as I know how to write" (13). For Lee Smith, the "true" experience is what is important to the reader. Many of the genres of folklore Smith mentions in one novel receive full treatment in subsequent novels: Letter writing and journaling are explored in Fair and Tender Ladies (the title of which is taken from a ballad mentioned in Oral History.); the ballad is explored in The Devil's Dream. Smith's fiction often focuses on family life, and the genres of folklore Smith explores are also tied to family experiences. Smith does not limit folklore to oral narratives, ballads, and songs but instead recognizes the spectrum of traditions that provide meaning in cultures, such as healing. Nor do Smith's stories rely solely on imagined experience. Instead, Smith grounds her fiction in personal interviews, intimate photographs, recording sessions, folklore archives, academic research, and multiple forms of ethnographic data to spin stories that provide her fiction with an authentic folkloric voice. This paper will explore the multiple folklore genres present in Smith's fiction and the roles they play in her work.

Reinhold Hill

hillr@ferris.edu

The White Tiger Mythology: Reincarnated Chinese Folk Heroine in The Woman Warrior

Through contesting the publication and popularity of Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts (1976) as well as the critical engagement it prompted, this essay examines how the author defines her ethnic identity through incorporating and reinventing Chinese folklore of Mulan. In particular, the second chapter of Kingston’s book, titled “White Tigers,” has proved to be a highly controversial cross-cultural representation of the woman warrior, using the Chinese folk heroine as the prototype. I argue that Kingston employs some elements from Chinese folklore yet reconfigures the heroine to represent the intersection of gender and ethnicity in her upbringing as a second-generation Chinese American daughter.

Drawing upon the interactive discussions of female agency and cultural origin, this essay addresses the power of storytelling and retelling in Kingston’s recreation of the Chinese legend of Mulan. I argue that the unique image Kingston invents – a pregnant woman warrior dressed in male garments with tattooed carvings on her back – demonstrates the author’s efforts to construct a Chinese American heroism emphasizing female empowerment, drawing inspiration from the valiant tradition in Chinese culture. In addition, the discussion contextualizes Kingston’s writing with Disney’s animated feature film Mulan (1998) and other adaptations published in the United States that also transform Mulan’s story in a transnational context.

Lan Dong

University of Massachusetts Amherst

ldong@complit.umass.ed

The Folklore of Urban Migration in the Short Stories of Zora Neale Hurston

In Canaan Bound: The African American Great Migration Novel, Lawrence R. Rodgers suggests that Zora Neale Hurston’s fiction ignores the massive population shift that took rural, black southerners to the urban northern centers. Little-known short stories by Hurston from the late 1920s and early 1930s, however, challenge that assumption. “Muttsy,” “She Rock,” “The Country in the Woman,” and “The Book of Harlem” all follow Florida migrants on their journeys North. The best known story, “Muttsy,” takes a serious approach to the dangers awaiting female migrants and reflects perils similar to those faced by King Solomon Giles in Rudolph Fisher’s well-known “City of Refuge.” Hurston’s other three stories, however, take a much more humorous approach to the life changes wrought by relocation. These three appeared in The Pittsburgh Courier, suggesting that Hurston imagined an urban audience of migrants. They allow relocated southerners to recall their own clumsy attempts to adapt and make explicit the ways in which changing one’s location means changing one’s life. Much existing scholarship on Hurston’s fiction explores the ways in which she extends and revises established traditions, particularly folkloric ones. This paper takes a similar approach by examining the ways in which Hurston invokes and revises the folklore of migration for her urban readers.

Genevieve West

Ferris State University

westg@ferris.edu