Faery: Tales of Madness, Illness, Loss & Confusion
an essay by BERRI L. BEATTY
Contemporary novelist Susanna Clarke (“Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell” & “Piranesi”) is adept at crafting accurate historical worlds imbued with the specific magical realism of Faery. Likewise, Neil Gaiman often dabbles in this kingdom of the seen and the unseen, the bizarre and the charming, which so characterizes the Faery Realm. Yeats, Rossetti, Shakespeare, Achebe... literature is filled with parables and takes on the beings who live just beyond the boundary of our world. Authors pull on stories heard in their own youth, their own cultures, no matter where they hail from, and it’s interesting to observe that Faery permeates generations—in fact, centuries—of story, superstition, and parable from nearly every continent on earth.
I often think of Faery beliefs as a way to make sense of sudden illness and death, of which our ancestors and even more recent forebears nearly constantly experienced. With very few treatments for mental and physical illness, it is hard to imagine people made sense of the frequent loss inflicted upon loved-ones—in particular, children.
Faery stories exemplify the malign play of supernatural creatures which could make people sick and die, as well as livestock keel-over, crops fail, and indeed any catastrophic weather event happen. The solution to these problems was one that could be grasped and practiced: the appeasing of, and catering to, faeries.
Anorexia, Thinning or Wasting Sickness (whether due to mental health issues, lack of nutrition, or disease of the bowels or lungs, such as tuberculosis) could be explained by the patient’s incessant dancing with the faeries at night, leaving them exhausted and drawn during the day.
Children homebound because of childhood illness were often plagued with visions and visitations from Faery. Their tie to this earthly world was flimsy, giving them a nice view into the Otherworld (or Tír N’a nOg), the veil between these two worlds thin for those just hovering between them.
Yaksha, faery-like creatures usually characterized as having dual personalities, are found in Southeast Asian Hindu and Buddhist mythology (as well as in Japan as yasha, in China as yèchà, and in Tibet as gnod-sbyin). A Yaksha is as likely to be an inoffensive nature-fairy, associated with woods and mountains, as it is a dangerous and dark one: cannibalistic, ghostly, or like a demon that haunts the wilderness and waylays, and devours travelers.
W.B. Yeats, and Lady Wilde (mother of Oscar) recount several types of Irish faeries who straddle this unnerving line between benevolent and predatory, helpful and terrifying. It’s not a far reach to apply such traits to someone with Bi-Polar Disorder, Schizophrenia, or Borderline Personality Disorder, before these diseases were properly identified.
Susanna Clarke’s characters are often sent back and forth into Faery not on their own accord—that is to say: without their consent or control. In the case of her recent novella Piranesi, not even the reader is certain which world or reality her characters inhabit and, more importantly, why they inhabit them. For Trauma, like other mental health challenges, may also be assuaged by a willful (or dissociative) inhabiting of a place outside of one’s body or mind. In this way, Faery is a refuge as well as a Hell.
Many readers of all ages may know the beautiful and—in the case of the pop-ups— gorgeously-constructed “Flower Fairy” books by Cicely Mary Barker. Barker was born in Croydon (where my sister was born, incidentally), in 1895. In ill-health as a child, she was a self-taught artist, encouraged by family and members of the Croydon Art Society (she was only sixteen when she had her first work accepted for publication). Like the Pre-Raphaelite painters she admired, she believed in recreating the beauty of nature in art and in drawing from life. Her plants and flowers were rendered with botanical accuracy, the fairies in her works captured from children, whom she used to sketch in her sister's school.
It is in “How to Find Flower Fairies” that Barker’s dive into Faery grows deeper, skirting close to that of those other famous fairy-hunters, the cousins Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths of York, who claimed to have witnessed and photographed faery folk. Like Frances Hodgson Burnett’s “The Secret Garden,” the natural, exterior landscape in Barker’s books becomes a parable for unearthing secrets (perhaps even cures), gaining happiness, health, and a sense of hope and possibility.
“If I were young as once I was, and dreams and death more distant then,” Neil Gaiman says in his poem “The Fairy Reel.” The poem deals with lost love, wasted time, and aging. Gaiman once commented on it, saying he wrote it in the rhythm of a reel (or fairy dance): “Proper fairy tunes can fill your mind and your feet with their tune and their rhythm so there's no room left to think of anything else and you dance and move to the beat of the song until you collapse, exhausted, and never move again. Don't set it to one of those tunes."
Gaiman seems to be hinting at the fact that Faery is not merely a fantasy of pretty nymphs playing wonderful tunes and throwing twinkle-lit parties amongst the flowers. It is also a dangerous, haunted realm that preys on human heartache, tragedy, and the painful reality of mental and physical illness. There is perhaps no better illustration of this than Yeat’s famous poem “The Stolen Child,” a gorgeous yet chilling recounting of the Changeling myth.
Changelings are perhaps Faery’s most notorious species of Little Folk, the product of childhood illness and death, poverty and loss of all sustenance or luck...
“Away with us he's going,
The solemn-eyed:
He'll hear no more the lowing
Of the calves on the warm hillside Or the kettle on the hob
Sing peace into his breast, Or see the brown mice bob
Round and round the oatmeal chest. For he comes, the human child,
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than he can understand.”
Berri L. Beatty is the author of the Gothic Regency Romance series, The Millsborough Sisters (Briar Press NY).