Bodies: sex, violence, disease, and death in contemporary legend

Abstract

Bodies: Sex, Violence, Disease and Death in Contemporary Legend. By Gillian Bennett. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005. Pp. xvi + 313, acknowledgments, preface, introduction, notes, bibliographies, index. $45.00 cloth); Organ Theft Legends. By Veronique CampionVincent. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005 [1997]. Pp. xii + 236, acknowledgments, introduction, appendix, notes, index. $45.00 cloth) In Bodies, Gillian Bennett examines six familiar contemporary legends, oudining each legend and then tracing its cognates and resonances through folklore, legends, history, and current events, aiming to have thrown light on it by doing so (xv). The legends that Bennett considers are winter's tales, not suitable for children or those of a nervous disposition, and all exemplify cultural clash of discordant categories and concepts that Bennett takes to be characteristic of contemporary legends (xv). In the first chapter, Animals Inside, for example, Bennett considers the Bosom Serpent legend, in which a person is said to have an animal growing inside her which steals her food and leads to illness and possibly death. Here the clash is between the animal's presence where it should not be (inside a body) and where it should be (outside) . In succeeding chapters, cultural clashes and discordances exemplified by legends are (by chapter) between Poison and Honey, between AIDS Aggressors and the belief that the sick should be passive, between Killing the Prodigal Son and welcoming him back, being Dispossessed of one's bodily organs rather than owning them, and and Babies. The chapters are self-contained, having their own endnotes and extensive bibliographies. (The volume has no general bibliography.) But Bodies is not merely a series of independent essays, for the author has skillfully constructed the book to bring out resonances and connections among the legends. For example, in her discussion of garments, snake women, and poisonous brides (61), Bennett draws from her previous discussion of Bosom Serpent legends to illustrate the connections that diese have with stories about lamiae (snake women) . She also looks forward to the next chapter, to show how die concern about being contaminated through skin-to-skin contact with someone or something unclean (either indirecdy, through a poisoned garment, or direcdy, by touching a poisonous woman) connects die poison-based legends to those that concern diseased persons deliberately infecting others. In addition to showing the connections between different types of contemporary legends, Bennett oudines similarities among examples of the same type of legend, both cross-temporally and cross-culturally. In Poison and Honey, for example, she compares Indian tales of poisoned robes to both contemporary and Hellenic counterparts, while in and Babies she connects the Blood Libel legend and accusations of ritual murder by Jews to contemporary accounts of Satanic ritual abuse of children. Resisting the common view that such narratives simply reflect the fears of the societies in which they are told, or are warnings of modern dangers (a view she holds to be too slick [120]), she provides nuanced analyses, both placing the legends within their historical and cultural context and recognizing that they could echo other forces besides fear (of, for example, death or disease) , such as medical or sexual politics. Some stories could have a basis in fact, as when certain Bosom Serpent stories describe the symptoms of gastric ulcers or infestations by liver flukes. …