Our Mother She Slew Us, Our Father He Ate Us, Our Family is Untethered from Our Community and so We Have No Restitution: Consequences of Familial Isolation in The Singing Bones
The Singing Bones (1895) is a late 19th century Louisianan variant of The Juniper Tree (ATU 720), that tells a drastically pared down yet still recognizable tale of a mother who slays her children and feeds them to their father. Compared to the nominal variant (Brothers Grimm, 1857) and the near contemporaneous English version The Rose-Tree (Joseph Jacobs, 1890), the brevity of The Singing Bones is notable and closer examination of the differences between these tales reveals an audience and teller operating within radically different social and familial landscapes than those of the aforementioned variants. Such a “[comparison makes] it possible to identify the peculiar inflection that the [teller] gave their stories, and their way of telling stories provides clues about their way of viewing the world”. (Darnton 50-51). What then do these differences reveal about the concerns and world of the raconteur and their audience? If “everything that is out-of-date and incongruous with new attitudes, tastes, and ideology [has been] discarded” or “reworked and supplemented” (Propp 501), then the America depicted by the teller of The Singing Bones’ is a land of insular, isolated families with the most tenuous of ties to their community. This atomized frontier society of 19th century Louisiana is most apparent in the differences in familial composition presented in The Singing Bones in comparison to its European cousins and exemplified by its supplantation of the blended family in favor of the nuclear. The resultant portrayal is that of a society whose families have been stretched thin by scarcity and in lieu of community has contracted inward to orbit around a paternal focal point who, while capable of dispensing furious justice in seclusion, without the support of his wider community is ultimately incapable of revivifying his shattered family.
The father in The Juniper Tree and The Rose-Tree, whether it is because he is a “rich man” (Grimm 245) or even just a “good man” (Jacobs 252) is able to – without difficulty-- find a second wife and remarry once “he began to feel better” (Grimm 246) and has finished mourning his first wife. The families of these tales are clearly situated within larger communities; communities in which a mother’s death and the father’s subsequent remarriage appears to be not uncommon and the resulting blended families not a rarity. In these tellings, it is from these marriages that the new “wicked stepmother[s]” (Jacobs 252), whose sinful nature -- be it plain hatred or her desire to “get her hands on the entire family fortune” (Grimm 246) -- that eventually leads her to murder the father’s first-born child and feed their remains to the family in an effort to conceal her crime. The blended family is not only the critical catalyst for the events of these tales via the stepmother but through her child, the stepsibling, as well. It is the strong ties between siblings and filial piety that sets in motion the events that lead to the eventual redress of the father and surviving child.
In both The Juniper Tree and The Rose-Tree, it is this child who ends up bearing responsible for the internment of the murdered child’s remains, lest they be discarded and their murder go unrectified. Distraught at the loss of their sibling, they gather their bones, bury them beneath the titular trees and weep over their grave. This refusal to allow their sibling’s death to be covered up brings forth, from their tears, the singing bird that proclaims the injustice done across town to the grocers, cobblers, watchmakers, goldsmiths and millers that make up the wider community to which the family belongs. It is these same community members, in turn, who provide to this bird the millstone that kills the stepmother and the golden chain and shoes that serve as reparations for the father and the dutiful, surviving child whose love for their slain sibling facilitated both the exposure of the crime and the resulting retribution and recompense the broader community later provides. The stepsibling provides a conduit for the community beyond the paternal orbit to recognize and intervene in the interfamily violence at the heart of these tales; a dynamic that is critical to the positive resolutions of these stories and without it, the murder of the child would go unreconciled and the perpetrator unpunished. The core themes of parental jealousy and sibling solidarity that these variants are concerned with are narratively dependent on the presence of the stepmother and her new child suggesting that this is a phenomenon that audience of these tales was not only familiar with but similarly concerned about: What will happen to my children if die during childbirth? How will my new mother and siblings treat me? Will my new wife be a good mother? These tales’ utilization of the blended family as focal point allow their audience and tellers to explore such anxieties. For the audience and teller of The Juniper Tree and The Rose-Tree, the blended family is an everyday reality that simultaneously brings with it both possible danger through the incorporation of new family members as well as crucial connection to an extended community necessary for life in 19th century Europe.
The family of The Singing Bones is not a blended family but an isolated couple and their children. The anxieties around blended families that form the foundation of The Juniper Tree and The Rose-Tree are absent and superseded by a different concern: poverty. The family of The Singing Bones has become a solitary entity, distinct and distant from any wider community, no longer looking outward for continuity and conciliation but turning inward. The scant connections to society outside of the family unit limited to a dubiously affordable (and doubtfully existent) butcher and a distant grandmother. (Fortier 255). Unlike the evil stepmothers of The Juniper Tree and The Rose-Tree, the murderous matron of The Singing Bones is not motivated by greed or her hatred of her husband’s first born: she is simply “very poor” (Fortier 254) and “ugly” (255), her wickedness nebulous and undirected in comparison to her cross-Atlantic counterparts. She is a woman who has been driven to commit unspeakable act through poverty’s desperation, cannibalizing her children to sustain her family until it is ultimately destroyed and it is this same desperation that preoccupies her husband and obscures her crimes until it is too late. There is no instantaneous paternal recognition of the absence of his child as in The Juniper Tree or the suspicious “very strangely” (Jacobs 253) tasting stew of The Rose-Tree, only a tired man returning from work each day who offers a half-hearted inquiry as to why the stews lacks bones easily satisfied by the sobering economical answer that “meat is cheaper without bones. They give more for the money” (Fortier 255). The steady disappearance of his children is an unconcerning footnote in the face of poverty’s deprivation until they have vanished entirely, and the weight of their absence finally felt.
The disappearance of the blended family doesn’t ameliorate the threat of parental violence. For the teller and audience of The Singing Bones, this shape of violence is still a very real and salient concern, but the anxiety of parental hatred arriving in the form of a new parent as part of a blended family present in the other tales has been transformed to a fear of helpless abandonment to fate in the face of maternal monstrousness. Without reliable community outside the family to draw on, the story of The Singing Bones folds in around the family itself and reorients itself entirely around the distant father. Lacking the community connection beyond the nuclear family that the blended family enables – represented in The Juniper Tree and The Rose-Tree by the surviving stepsibling – there is no one to bear witness to the violence taking place within the family and no one to intervene until it is too late. The responsibility of repatriation, revelation, and remuneration are shunted from the members of the blended family and the wider community and condensed solely onto the father. There are no Little Marlenes who “[gather] up [the] bones [and] tied them up with silk” (Grimm 248 – 251) or a “little brother whom [they] love” that sits in vigil at their grave (Jacobs 253 – 254), just the restless dead relentlessly lamenting that they are “not in a coffin” and “not in the cemetery” (Fortier 255) in the hopes the parent that was unable to protect them in life will provide them with peace in death.
In the ending of The Singing Bones, the public proclamations of transgression and subsequent communal provisioning of reparations and pseudo-divine retribution that make up the resolutions of The Juniper Tree and The Rose-Tree are replaced with grim, personally administered paternal justice and penitent seclusion. When the opportunity for remarriage and with it a renewal of the family does present itself at the end of The Singing Bones, unlike the families of the other two variants who are enmeshed enough within their community for the recently widowed husband to be able to find a new bride if he so desired, the father of The Singing Bones ends up “alone at his house” (Fortier 255), entirely isolated from the community, the possibility of remarriage feeling as remote as the cabin in which he spends his remaining days. The teller of The Singing Bones is not concerned with soothing their audience’s anxieties about blended families or encouraging filial devotion. Instead, they bring a warning of the consequences of familial seclusion. Isolation does not protect from the dangers intermarriage brings but instead deprives one of the indispensable associations it creates. For the sequestered family disconnected from the wider community, there is no restoration in the wake of tragedy: what’s done cannot be undone, the damage cannot be repaired. There are no grand gifts or resurrected children, only the cold consequences of insularity and the bitter taste of memory.
Works Cited
Darton, Robert. “Peasants Tell Tales: The Meaning of Mother Goose.” The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History, Basic Books, New York, 1984, pp. 50-51.
Fortier, Alcée. “The Juniper Tree” The Classic Fairy Tales: Texts, Criticism, 2nd ed., W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 2017, pp. 254 - 255.
Grimm, Brothers. “The Juniper Tree” The Classic Fairy Tales: Texts, Criticism, 2nd ed., W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 2017, pp. 245 - 252.
Jacobs, Joseph. “The Rose-Tree” The Classic Fairy Tales: Texts, Criticism, 2nd ed., W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 2017, pp. 252 - 254.
Propp, Vladimir. “From Folklore and Literature”. The Classic Fairy Tales: Texts, Criticism, 2nd ed., W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 2017, pp. 498 – 502.