From:
StoneOx17@aol.com
Message-ID: <122.160adf50.2a9a3b34@aol.com>
Date: Sun, 25 Aug 2002 09:52:52 EDT
Subject: (urth) PEACE: the tale of the banshee
To: urth@urth.net
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Hello,
Despite all the effort spent analyzing many of the embedded stories
in Peace,
there seems to have been relatively little written in this forum
about the
banshee story. I think that the participants in this story can
be identified
with some of the main characters in Peace, and that this story
answers the
question of "what went wrong?" with Wolfe's relationship
to Margaret. Roy
Lackey gave much of the same answer to this question already,
without relying
on the hints hidden in the banshee tale, in
but the banshee story fills in a few more of the details.
My identification in the story is:
Den Weer is Jack,
Margaret Lorn is Molly,
Carl Lorn is Molly's father,
Julian Smart is the banshee.
Let's review the banshee story.
Molly's father owns a big farm and Molly is his only child, so
whoever
marries her inherits the farm. Jack and Molly are in love, but
Molly's
father doesn't want Molly to marry Jack, "because Jack had
nothing to bring
to the wedding but his own two hands and a smile."
In the "what went wrong?" speech, Weer says "I was
intelligent and
industrious; Margaret and I loved one another deeply."
But when he comes
back from college, the Depression has wiped out all of his fortune
and made
jobs very hard to find. How is he to make a living?
One possibility would be for Weer to marry Margaret and move to the
Lorn's
farm. The Lorns likely still have their farm, since they
wouldn't have had
large bank loans, because the farm has been in their family for
years and
Carl Lorn is naturally frugal. Even though the income from the farm
has been
greatly reduced, they can at least grow enough food to feed
themselves. It
would be reasonable for Weer to help on the farm if he is to marry
Margaret;
she is the Lorn's only child, and so will inherit the farm. Later in
the
book, the farmer delivering potatoes to the factory says "When
I was a boy,
there wasn't anything anybody could have that was better'n a
farm. If a
doctor or a banker could marry a widow that had a good one, they'd
stop what
they was doing and work it." This farmer is ten or twenty
years older than
Weer, but taking this and the banshee story together, I conclude
that when
Weer was about to graduate, he and Margaret proposed that they get
married
and that Den move out to the farm and help work
it.
&nb
&nb
&nb
&nb
From the banshee story, we see that Carl Lorn didn't want Weer to
marry
Margaret. He disapproved of selling the egg, and he's tight
with money
("only Daddy never gets nothing at the store if he can find
something else
that'll do") so Weer has two strikes against him, being
Olivia's nephew and
being penniless. In the banshee story, Molly's father tells
Jack he'd have
to spend the whole night in the barn haunted by the banshee and not
be thrown
out; in Weer's real life, Carl probably told Weer that he wouldn't
let
Margaret marry him unless he could support her. So Weer has to
take the job
at the factory (the real-life parallel of the barn); unfortunately,
the
coldhouse prank kills somebody, and Julius blackmails him into
staying at the
factory until Julius dies. In this scenario, it doesn't even
matter whether
Margaret knows about the coldhouse prank. Weer can't marry her
unless he
finds another job which pays better, and he can't leave this job
because of
Julius' blackmail. Eventually, Margaret gets fed up with
Weer's inaction and
marries Mr. Price (whom we suspect, from his surname, has sufficient
money).
There are some interesting differences between the banshees in Peace
and the
banshees in Irish folklore. Looking on the web, it seems that
in Irish
folklore, the banshee is a woman sidhe who wails before somebody is
going to
die (and most important families have an associated banshee that
predicts
deaths in that family). In some versions of the legend, if you
catch the
banshee, she has to tell you who is going to die. However, she
only
foretells deaths, unlike Wolfe's banshee, who causes them.
Note that Wolfe
is playing off the folklore banshee: when his banshee is caught, she
does
tell Jack "who's to be born," although one might suspect
that she's lying out
of spite.
Wolfe's banshees are ghosts (quite fittingly for Peace) who are
"the spirits
of midwives that have killed the baby because someone gave gold to
them to do
it that it might not inherit." This gives grounds for
identifying the
banshee as Julius: in
I speculated that Julius may have killed Mr. Tilly so as to inherit
the carny
business, which, while not an exact parallel, is certainly
similar.
Jack stays in the barn haunted by the banshee three nights.
The first two
times, the banshee forces him to speak the name of someone whom she
later
kills, first "the meanest man [Jack] can think of, a man that
robbed
everybody and never gave poor folk a penny," and second,
"a real old lady
that was goin' to die anyway." The third time, he defeats
the banshee. If
we identify the banshee with Julius, this is reminiscent of Weer's
comment
that he recalls uncle Julius clearly "only at three stages of
his life." The
first stage is when Julius tells the story of Mr. Tilly. The
second stage is
at aunt Olivia's funeral. And the last is when Julius is an
old man and the
president. This seems a little strange, because Den lived with
Julius for
quite a while, and this period doesn't seem included in either of
these
stages. However, if we take these three stages as
corresponding to the three
nights in the banshee story, then we are led to suspect that Julius
killed
both Mr. Tilly and Olivia for their inheritances. We know
(since Wolfe has
confirmed it) that it was Peacock who actually ran Olivia over in
his car,
but there are at least two reasons to suspect that Peacock might
have
conspired with Julius: first, Julius Smart and Professor Peacock
were good
friends, and second, there's the mysterious letter from Peacock to
Julius
that Weer is unable to read.
Is there any more evidence for this correspondence between the
banshee story
and Weer's life? In the other stories in Peace that we know
have parallels
(the princess and her suitors, and the marid), there is a
correspondence
hidden in the characters' names. The link from Molly to Mary
to Margaret
seems obvious, but I don't see how to get from Jack to Den.
Any ideas?
- Stone Ox
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