The bride on the border

Abstract

From the medieval era to the present, the foreign bride has been stigmatized in the literatures of Europe as the bearer of ethnic contamination. While this practice has been consistent across time, the theories of ethnic reproduction that purport to justify it have not. This article argues that this stigmatizing practice does not derive from theoretical beliefs about ethnicity, but rather from paradoxes inherent in the concept of the ethnic boundary that must be understood as simultaneously porous and impregnable. The weird double sense of `impregnable' highlights both the duality of the boundary concept and its association with the reproductive bodies of women. The argument is illustrated with examples drawn from the borderlands of Ireland and Wales in the 16th century, a period when several competing theories of ethnic reproduction were in play. The English in this era claimed ancient Celtic kings as glorious ancestors, while simultaneously demonizing Welsh and Irish women as carriers of an ethnic taint. The paradox of the ethnic boundary was resolved by casting male and female bodies in different, power-laden relations to that boundary. The article concludes by suggesting that only a radical rethinking of the way ethnic and national boundaries are imagined can bring an end to the stigmatization of foreign women as threats to ethnic purity.