P64: Nature, gender, and love

Nature’s rhythms, fairy storytellers, and writers’ craft provoke the family life of partners Henry Beston and Elizabeth Coatsworth. World travel and quotidian observation mark their creations from the Firelight Fairy Book and The Outermost House to The Cat Who Went to Heaven and Personal Geography.

Paper long abstract

In 2028 we celebrate the centennial of Henry Beston’s ode to the Great Beach of Cape Cod, his book The Outermost House. About a decade before Beston devoted a year to observing and writing about nature, he wrote two fairy-tale collections, The Firelight Fairy Book (1919) and The Starlight Wonder Book (1923). Beston selected both topics, the beach and fairy tales, in search of solace from his World War I ambulance-driving experience in France. Elizabeth Coatsworth, who married Beston in 1929, initiated her writing vocation with children’s books, including the 1931 Newbery-Medal-winning The Cat Who Went to Heaven, that begins “Once upon a time, far away in Japan.” This paper explores how and why fairy tales relate with the rhythms of tides and seasons, of farms and neighbors in the writings of this literary couple. The enchanted view and critical inquiry extend to the writings of their daughter Kate Barnes, the first poet laureate in the US state of Maine. What dreams, ambition, and perfectionism threaten to break mends along with care, words, a starry sky, and a family plot.

Please consider this paper for a Folk Narrative, Literature, and Media (FNLM) panel

The Melancholy Merman: Gender, Nature, and Eroticism in Helena Nyblom’s “Agneta and the Sea King” (1910)

Elizabeth Howard

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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how the supernatural figure of the sea king, in Swedish author Helena Nyblom’s 1910 fairy tale, “Agneta and the Sea King,” complicates traditional gender dynamics and offers an ecocritical critique of human dominance of the natural world. [Please consider this paper for FNLM]

Paper long abstract

Helena Nyblom’s 1910 Swedish literary fairy tale, “Agneta and the Sea King,” is a retelling of a well-known Scandinavian ballad (A47), which tells the story of a mortal woman who is kidnapped by a supernatural sea king and lives with him at the bottom of the sea, bearing him seven children, until the day she hears the sound of church bells and returns to her life on land, refusing to return to the sea king and her underwater children.

While there are several notable literary rewritings of this ballad, Nyblom’s is of particular interest for the way her tale complicates the gender dynamics we tend to associate with mermaid tales, and for how she uses the hybrid figure of the merman to depict the troubled relationship between humans and the natural world. Nyblom represents the sea king as an erotic yet sympathetic figure, which is made all the more apparent in John Bauer’s evocative illustrations which accompanied the original publication of the tale. Bauer and Nyblom’s depiction of the sea king as highly eroticized yet deserving of sympathy exists in tension with Agneta’s character, whose ultimate escape from the sea king and abandonment of her maternal role, also present her as a compelling counterexample to dominant narratives of womanhood, for which maternal self-sacrifice was a defining characteristic. Ultimately, this paper will examine how Nyblom’s rewriting of the traditional ballad challenges conventional gender roles, while simultaneously posing an eco-critical critique of human dominance over the natural world.