The Burning of Bridget Cleary: A [partial] retraction

[Tree, or anyone triggered by mentions of graphic violence, don’t read this. Partial spoilers for Angela Bourke’s book about the Bridget Cleary incident. Edited for typos.]

We hadn’t heard about it in so long that I thought it was dead — and I made no secret that I had no regrets about that (as here, where I wondered if this project was part of a larger pattern for him). When the identity of the project became known, in June 2015, after being hinted at in a Cybersmile interview, I looked at the wikipedia entry and thought, uch. I was so uninterested in this project that I mostly didn’t follow the gossip about it (which you can read here). Herba read the book, but I stated I’d only read more about it once it was clear it was happening. Since Richard Armitage referred to it again this week in a way that suggested it’s still a possibility, and since I have more free time at the moment, though, I decided to borrow the book from the library.

“A man kills his wife in late nineteenth-century Ireland because he thinks she’s been taken by the fairies” was the version of the story in my mind. I taught a heresy / magic / witchcraft course in my last job, and I know quite a bit about the components of belief in fairies and the elements of social circumstance and popular culture that underlay them as well as the modern theories usually adduced to explain violence related to them; and since a lot of victims of magic / folk belief related violence were women, I’ve also had a full dose of the crude version of explanations of historical misogyny. In seven straight semesters of discussing this with students, I became and still am fatigued with the vulgar platitudes that people spew about this sort of thing: they didn’t know any better, they didn’t have science, women were subjugated in the past, and so on. All of these explanations rely on the galling sentiment that nowadays we have all this stuff worked out and we would never do such things today, the feeling of superiority that many people have when looking at the atrocities and miscarriages of justice of the past. After years of teaching this material, it was hard for me to see how any version of such a project wouldn’t descend immediately into anachronistic, annoying stereotypes.

So when I opened Angela Bourke’s book, I was expecting the worst. What I got was an excellent micro-history with which I only had one small methodological quibble (I felt her discussion of the reasons that she accepted much of Michael Cleary’s explanation for the events around his wife’s murder — taken from a petition made ten years later — needed more clarification), which is stunning for me. (Micro-history is genre with a lot of philosophical and political pitfalls; many professional historians view it with suspicion; and I tend to be a stickler anyway; but this book does really well with it.) The book is well organized and it does a fantastic job not only of presenting context but also of explaining and examining carefully both the testimony of the witnesses to / perpetrators of Bridget Cleary’s murder, in places line by line, critically and with an eye toward things that the modern reader and even people at the time were inclined to miss.

I encourage you to read it for yourself if you can stomach the story line; it’s a quick read. Among many of its particular strengths: First, it actually doesn’t explain why Michael Cleary killed his wife, Bridget — it tells the story, lays out the various contexts and surviving evidence, and lets the reader see how many factors intertwined to facilitate the homicide. Bourke’s explanation of the situation is highly complex and falls very far from stereotype. Secondly, Bourke explicitly rejects the modernist narrative about superstition — that people who hold some or any superstitious beliefs are backward and that progress eventually erases them. Rather, the book makes clear that while the content of certain beliefs may remain stable over centuries (for example, the folk belief that fairies stole butter or butterfat was held in basic form over several centuries), the reasons why these particular villagers and their surrounding culture in 1895 continued certain sorts of supernatural belief and superstition are strongly related to their varying experiences of modernization (in Ballyvadlea, the home economies that provided butter to the country were being eliminated by industrial production — which means that the superstition has to be understood in a different context). Third, Bourke is typically highly critical of the historical testimony she accepts, pointing out that a mere statement of belief in a superstition is not necessarily to be taken at face value (just as the statements of overwhelming percentages of Alabamans that Barack Obama is a Muslim can’t be understood literally), and that elucidating the reason one witness espouses such a belief does not explain it for everyone in a particular culture or time period. She explicitly rejects synecdoche on an evidentiary level, which is very smart.

As Bourke notes: Michael Cleary said he killed his wife because he believed she’d been replaced by a changeling — and the other witnesses / participants in the murder shared this account of events. Her detailed account makes clear, however, that the reason articulated in court and on the evening itself is only one facet of a complicated narrative that has to do with modernization, competing educational and social statuses, superstition, the Catholic / Protestant divide, the nature of landholding in the village in the wake of the Land War, family rivalries, and his outsider status in the hamlet where they lived.

So, yes, the book meets my need for subtlety in explaining things fully. Kudos to Angela Bourke and it’s possible she’s a great scriptwriter, too, although I am suspicious that the things that are best about this book — the detailed examination and explanation of the testimony of the witnesses — will get lost in a film.

Which brings me to the reason why my retraction is only partial. Bridget Cleary was tortured and brutally murdered by her husband with the assistance of some of her relatives, and the people who could have helped her (a doctor, her parish priest) failed to see what was going on and intervene. Apart from what is by our standards emotional abuse, her husband dosed her with folk medicines forcefully (threatening her, branishing a poker and a stump at her, holding her over a hot fire with the aid of friends until her nightgown scorched), deprived her of food and drink, and then when she seemed to be recovering on the next evening, threw her to the floor, struck her, covered her in paraffin wax spilled from a lamp and set her on fire.

Perhaps I lack imagination. But the story as it could be filmed will likely be much more about her brutal death and much less about the superstitious beliefs that provoked it. It’s relatively less disturbing, I suspect, to read all this stuff and just try to keep oneself from visualizing it. On the screen, however, it would be beyond unpleasant to look at. And I’m just … I don’t know how to put this. It may be a small consolation that it’s really not clear to me that Armitage would find a role in this film — I don’t see him playing someone with a strong Irish accent, for starters, but the only significant male role is Michael Cleary and somehow I don’t see him in that role. Graham McTavish, maybe, when he was a bit younger.

I guess this is the way to say it: film lends all violence a kind of pornographic quality (even if the point is to shock or revolt the viewer’s sensibilities). I was thinking this after reading that Adi Shankar had “promised” his audience plenty of violence for his Castlevania series. Some people are looking for precisely that; they want to see violence, and in our culture, that frequently means demeaning, horrifying violence against women. Pilgrimage has this vibe as well — let’s have some violence for the sake of violence, excusing ourselves with the platitude that the medieval period was violent, not thinking about how Norman Ireland would have drawn the cultural boundaries around violence, just going for the effect of shock. It was certainly true in Hannibal, not for violence so much but for gore.

And I don’t know how much of that I can really stand. I’ve been more aware in the last few months, as I get more exposure to it, of how out of synch I am with the Zeitgeist. I’d realized recently how much less contemporary TV I watch than most Armitage fans I know and frankly, that’s not accidental. I don’t miss it. I don’t like the violence and the sexism. I don’t get anything from filmmakers who perpetrate this particular kind of glance at women or at humans. Yes, Bridget Cleary’s murder is (as Bourke’s book makes clear in its subtitle) “a true story.” And the way Bourke puts the story together, it’s a story worth telling. I’m just concerned that a film about the murder of a woman will turn into what most films like this turn into — another excuse for graphic violence that excites our voyeuristic impulses while giving us nothing beyond sensation, a sensation that many of us not only avoid, but firmly repudiate.

~ by Servetus on July 1, 2017.