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Escalating Danger in Contemporary Legends
Western Folklore, Fall 2002 by Henken, Elissa R
Legends develop and change in relation to changes in the surrounding culture. That, of course, is part of their essence as folklore. Accordingly, legends get updated to reflect new styles: The spiders in the beehive hairdos of the 1950s and early sixties migrated to the hippies' long hair of the late sixties and early seventies, then inhabited the dreadlocks of the eighties and nineties and eventually the punk mohawk at the turn of the century, in each case with an implicit comment on the questionable hygiene of a marginal group. Legends kept pace with new technologies, as ill-fated pets moved from the oven to the clothes drier to the microwave and announced new perils when AIDS became part of our world. Going beyond material changes, legends present society's judgments (even if, at times, ambiguously) on behavior, and these, too, reflect cultural changes. The forms of change and the factors effecting those changes are many and varied, but here I will examine one type of change that I have observed in certain contemporary legends, namely an escalation of danger-both in the behavior that puts one in jeopardy and in the penalty.1
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Changes in punishable behavior appear clearly linked to changes in a group's morals. For example, in legends of a couple becoming stuck together during sexual intercourse, the ironic punishment has remained constant, but the "sin" has changed. In the fourteenth-century manual Handling Synne, a married couple is punished by becoming locked together when they have intercourse too close to a church (Mannyng, 1. 8937-9014; Lindahl 1999). Mere proximity to a church no longer offends our general sensibilities; it takes far more to incur retribution. Two modern (1990s) legends told by members of Black Baptist churches indicate how much more. In one case, rather than being married, the couple is gay and they are having sex on one of the pews inside the church. In the other case, the couple is heterosexual, but their behavior is one step more sacrilegious as they have intercourse on the altar. The punishment remains the same-the couple becomes locked together. The same punishment applies also to others who have crossed a certain boundary with their sexual activity. In the legendry of young teens and pre-teens, even necking is a big step; the kissing couple's braces become interlocked. In the legendry told by and about an older group, a couple in the back seat of a car become locked together when startled by a patrolling police officer, and they have to be taken to the emergency room for extrication. I have heard this latter one told about both married and unmarried couples; their offense appears to be in the misuse of public space. While Americans generally prefer that sexual activity, even the most sanctioned kind, be done out of sight, legendary punishment drags it into the public gaze, a matter ensured by the couple becoming locked in flagrante. There can be no doubting for what act they are being punished, since they suffer not only the discomfort of their unrelieved position but also of public shame. Thus the emergency room has become a place where shameful acts are brought to public light, not just for the couple in the parked car but also for the teenage girl experimenting with a coke bottle or a hot dog, or, of course, the man with a gerbil up his rectum. Perhaps, these last two offenders are just as stuck to their "partners" in the act as are the various couples. The behavior that places them in the emergency room, however, may be escalated in a variety of ways. A very specific updating of the imagery and ah escalation of the offending act occurs in the legend current today of the couple who get stuck when an ornamental ring piercing the boy's foreskin becomes tangled with the girl's genital rings. A legend collected from a white man in Georgia shows escalation of the offense taking place on several aspects-both sexual and racial-when a white girl (and preacher's daughter) has simultaneous vaginal and anal intercourse with two black boys in the boys' room at school. Her sphincter muscles seize up, trapping the one behind. The other boy escapes, but the remaining two have to be carried off to the emergency room (April 2002).
Another example of a legend family in which the punishment remains the same while the malfeasance changes will permit us to track the shifts in mores more precisely over time. The prevalent form of the Surpriser Surprised legend in the 1950s and sixties involved a young woman who, having decided to have sexual intercourse with her fiance, presents herself naked to him, only to find herself exposed in front of family and friends as they leap out of their hiding places to give her a surprise party (Brunvand 1981:143-146; Jansen 1979:64-90). In the 1980s, when premarital sex had become more casual than a virgin's gift to her future husband, the main character is a college girl home for her birthday and enjoying the company of her boyfriend (who is not a fiance) in what she thinks is an empty house, only to be caught in her nudity by her family's and friends' surprise party. By the mid 1990s, however, although not necessarily approved, premarital sex had become commonplace, carrying little shock value, and a new legend arose, the one sometimes referred to as the Peanut Butter Surprise. In this one, a single woman is caught by the surprisers when she appears nude, except for peanut butter spread on her genitals, and calling for her dog to come get his treat. The woman is described variously as having a fiance (finally acquired in later age), as being too busy with her career to date, and as being too hideously ugly to get a date, but in all cases she uses her pet to satisfy herself sexually.2 The revelation is serious enough that she has to leave her job and, sometimes, the town in which she has been living. In order to incur the penalty of public exposure, the misbehavior has been scaled up in two ways-the woman's finding sexual satisfaction without the help of a man and her doing it through bestiality. Both factors are important, but it is the latter, the involvement of the dog, that causes my students to go, "Ew, gross."3 In any case, in each of these legends, the punishment of humiliation before family and friends has remained the same while the misbehavior required to incur the penalty has necessarily become more egregious.
