WAG: You write that Bridget Cleary was a
stylish, literate woman who, in a small, tightly
knit community, seemed perhaps less interested in
fitting in than her neighbors might have liked.
How large a role do you think Bridget Cleary's marked
independence played in her murder and its subsequent
cover-up?
Bourke:
When other working-class women wore shawls,
Bridget Cleary wore a hat with a feather. Everything
we know about her suggests that she was articulate,
strong-willed and feisty. She was married, but childless,
and of course she earned her own money. She had
£20 in a coffee canister under her bed: much
more than a farm laborer could earn in six months
in 1895. That level of nonconformity would have
been enough to make people talk about her, and tell
stories about her. It's hard to list reasons for
her death, but certainly without the stories that
she was "away with the fairies," the scene
could not have been set. There would have been no
theatrical ordeal of interrogation, and she would
almost certainly not have died on that Friday night
in the way she did.
When questions were first asked
about Bridget's disappearance, the story that she
was in the fairy fort and would ride out on a white
horse at midnight on Sunday provided a wonderful
smokescreen. It was the sort of story many people
would have heard as local legend, but it also reflected
a kind of glamour about Bridget Cleary. Anybody
who didn't conform would have risked being isolated
by rumors about the fairies, but on the other hand,
someone who didn't want to conform might
encourage her neighbors to think she had fairy connections.
WAG:
You note in the book that there are several cases
in which individuals who had murdered a child thinking
it was actually a changeling were not convicted
of murder, on the grounds that they were insane.
You also note that, pointedly, Bridget Cleary's
death was the nineteenth century's only known instance
of an adult being murdered under the suspicion that
they were a changeling. How important do you think
Bridget Cleary's gender and age were in the criminal
conviction of nine people involved in her death?
Bourke:
The judge who tried Michael Cleary for
his wife's murder was certainly influenced by her
age and gender. He went on and on during the trial
about her innocence and trust, and how they had
been cruelly betrayed by the man to whom she would
have looked first for protection and care. It's
interesting too that although Bridget's aunt and
her cousin Johanna were arrested along with the
men after she disappeared, neither ended up serving
a prison sentence, as almost all the men did.
Almost all the supposed changelings
who were killed in the nineteenth century seem to
have been young children who were quite severely
disabled. I think stories about changelings gave
people a way to rationalize heart-breaking decisions:
if you were very poor and hungry, and your child
had no prospect of growing up healthy and self-supporting,
you might feel you really had no choice. Calling
someone a changeling was a way of denying that they
were a person, but that takes on a very different
complexion when you're dealing with a fully-functioning
adult, so it's not surprising that there was a criminal
trial. In fact, though, there was at least one other
case of an adult being killed as a fairy changeling:
what I say in the book is that Bridget Cleary was
the only one burned. Just a year later, in
County Roscommon, a disturbed and suicidal young
man was beaten to death by members of his family.
He had been observed visiting a local fairy-fort.
A murder trial was held in that case too, but the
killers were sent to a lunatic asylum, not to jail.
WAG:
You present Bridget Cleary's story as a powerfully
dramatic narrative that almost reads at times like
a well-documented True Crime story, and the dramatic
tension certainly enhances the book's popular appeal.
But I can imagine your thinking initially that this
was perhaps a risky decision, given the strong,
scholarly experience you have in the Irish literary
and oral tradition. Indeed, in the "Acknowledgements
and Sources" section, you write that the book
began life "as a chapter in a projected academic
work on Irish fairy legend." Why did you decide
to tell the Bridget Cleary story at least partly
in a more popular structure, and when were you sure
it was going to work?
Bourke:
I wanted to treat the story at length,
in a way that would give space for all the ambiguities
and the conflicting motives that I saw at work in
it, and I wanted to present a much more integrated
picture of the society and the landscape Bridget
and Michael Cleary lived in than most conventional
academic approaches allow. Most of my work has been
on Irish oral tradition, but in recent years I've
been approaching that material from a Cultural Studies
point of view. I didn't want to choose between disciplines,
therefore, but neither did I want to write a theoretical
work about the Burning of Bridget Cleary, because
to do that would be to lose the power that story
has. I realized that the nineteenth century novel
allows the author to break away from narrative to
address the reader, sometimes at considerable length,
and I thought that structure would suit what I wanted
to do. The book took shape gradually. At first I
was writing a straight reconstruction, leading to
an analysis of how the legends were interwoven with
the facts, but as I went on, and discovered new
sources, like contemporary weather records, the
details started to fill out with more and more color
and texture.
WAG:
Treating the story as either a dramatic narrative
or a socio-historical analysis might seem straightforward
enough, but you managed to weave the two divergent
approaches together into a single text. In terms
of the actual writing experience, how difficult
was it to make the historical record come alive
as a vivid drama while also examining the case's
broader ramifications (political, social and religious)?
Bourke:
Dialogue is the key to dramatic narrative,
I think, and the greatest gift to me as a writer
coming to this story was the verbatim court record,
as published in the newspapers in 1895. Some of
the people who gave evidence were educated professionals,
but many were illiterate or barely literate working
people, and the ways they used language were very
different. People who don't write tend to express
themselves in stories, not in abstract argument,
and they also tend to reproduce direct speech, rather
than summarize it, so the evidence given in court
was full of vivid reported speech, which I could
simply use as dialogue in appropriate places. I
was very familiar with the kind of language being
used--words from Irish, archaic usages and the like--so
I could integrate it into my own writing without
too much difficulty.
Where I did have to work hard
was in balancing that kind of vividness with scholarly
standards of accuracy. I couldn't draw unwarranted
conclusions, and I couldn't make anything up.
WAG:
In addition to writing The Burning of
Bridget Cleary, you've also published a collection
of short stories. How did translating the Cleary
story from the historical record to a dramatic narrative
compare to writing fiction?
Bourke:
I suppose writing fiction made me acutely
aware of the value of details of how things looked,
how they sounded, who was present, so that although
I didn't make anything up, I think I did retrieve
information from the record that a writer of straight
history might not have—like the names of Bridget
Cleary's dog and cat, for instance, or the garment-by-garment
description of her clothing. I also reconstructed
quite a lot of visual and other detail from statistical
records. There is one very big difference, though,
between writing fiction and writing this kind of
non-fiction. When you write fiction, you have total
authority: you can go inside the minds of your characters,
and say what they think, or hope, or fear, and I
couldn't allow myself to do that. I gave people's
words when there was documentary evidence for them,
and only said they had done something if more than
one source said they had. That ran the risk of sacrificing
some drama, so I had to compensate with the rhythm
of how I told the story, and the way I framed the
pieces of dialogue given in the court record. It
was a very interesting writing exercise!
WAG:
Another book attempting to unravel the mystery
of the Bridget Cleary burning came out at roughly
the same time (at least in the U.S.) as yours did.
Of course, you began working on the story in 1993,
seven years before its American publication, but
I'm curious: did you know another book was being
written while you worked on your own account? And
if so, did you worry about the market not being
able to sustain two book-length accounts of Bridget
Cleary's death?
Bourke:
In fact I'd been working on the story
long before 1993: that was when I began seriously
to research and write a book on the Burning of Bridget
Cleary. I had done almost all the research and quite
a lot of writing by 1997 when I heard that someone
else was working on the story, so it wouldn't have
occurred to me not to go ahead. I'd also given quite
a number of lectures about it, in Ireland and in
the US, and set out some of my major ideas about
the story's political repercussions in a long article
in the American academic journal Feminist Studies,
in 1995.
There's always the possibility
that more than one book will be written on a subject
as fascinating and important as this one. I wrote
in my Epilogue that "I hope...my telling of
this story will be seen as a positive contribution
to a discussion which will certainly continue,"
and that's still true. I'm gratified and delighted
that my book has been so well received: I was so
honored that writers and scholars of the caliber
of Roy Foster and Marina Warner selected it among
their Books of the Year after its London publication,
and that really knowledgeable and thoughtful reviewers
have taken the time to praise it and engage with
its ideas. For me, one of the most reassuring things
has been that people in County Tipperary, around
the area where all this happened, have been so positive.
The local newspaper, the Clonmel Nationalist,
has a columnist called Michael Coady who is also
a poet. He used words like "dazzling intelligence"
and "meticulous scholarship," which of
course I don't mind reading about my work, but what
meant most to me was that he felt I had shown respect
for local sensitivities. He wrote "To her telling
of the story the author also brings uncommon qualities
of cultural comprehension, sympathy and respect
for people and place, then and now."
WAG:
How rich do you think the Irish historical
record of the nineteenth century is? Do you think
there are stories as compelling as Bridget Cleary's
still waiting to be found and recounted? Or is her
story uniquely riveting because it brings together
a plethora of watershed issues at a critical point
in Irish history?
Bourke:
Of course, there are more stories. The
nineteenth century was a time of huge change, and
Ireland is a country of long memories. There are
public records in the National Archives of Ireland
(www.nationalarchives.ie), there are dozens of newspapers,
and there's a tremendously rich folklore archive,
as well as all that's already been written in history,
biography, local studies. The real challenge, though,
is to find the meaning of a story. It's not enough
simply to say what happened—apart from anything
else, it's boring—you have to know why you're
writing about it: what it means now. I think when
you find a set of events that illustrates and illuminates
a set of ideas, you're really in luck, and then
the need to be faithful to the verifiable truth
is a terrific discipline.
WAG:
Are you presently working on a book-length
project?
Bourke:
I'm joint editor of The Field Day
Anthology of Irish Women's Writing, which is
due from Cork University Press next year. It's a
very large, two-volume work which has been in preparation
for a long time and includes lots of oral material
as well as literature and historical documents.
I also have a new writing project, but it's too
early to talk about it yet.
|