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Agency and Patriarchy in Carpatho-Rusyn Werewolf Stories

Author(s): Elena Boudovskaia

Source: Western Folklore , Spring/Summer 2019, Vol. 78, No. 2/3 (Spring/Summer 2019), pp. 151-192

Published by: Western States Folklore Society

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26864150

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https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26864150

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Agency and Patriarchy in Carpatho-Rusyn Werewolf Stories Elena Boudovskaia

ABSTRACT

This article investigates female agency in contemporary werewolf stories from a village in Transcarpathian Ukraine. I show that in stories told by women, female characters are mentally and verbally agentive. The patriarchal model of marriage is referenced by all female speakers; however, in certain werewolf stories agentive wives can get rid of their abusive husbands. The article shows the possibility of a gap between the generally accepted patriarchal model of marriage, and the speakers’ attitudes towards it. KEYWORDS: Rusyn Folklore, Werewolf, Agency, Patriarchy, Cultural Models.

Folklore is performative, and gender is an important part of who the performers are. Even in seemingly gender-neutral narrative genres of folklore, storytellers’ gender impacts the narration in an important way. Raby (2007), Mathews (1992,

Elena Boudovskaia is Assistant Teaching Professor of Russian at Georgetown University

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152 ELENA BOUDOVSKAIA

2005), and others have shown that a story may be told differ- ently depending on the gender (attitudes) of the storyteller. For example, Mathews gives a vignette showing that men and women in Oaxaca, Mexico tell the story of La Llorona dif- ferently, each gender to achieve their own goals. While the father-in-law uses the story to reprimand his daughter-in-law for lingering in the streets, his daughter-in-law uses a differ- ent version of the story to assert the possibility of supernatu- ral retribution against men who abuse their wives (Mathews 2005:109-110).

Folk supernatural stories are especially revealing of their tellers’ attitudes. There seems to be a connection across cul- tures between the gender attitudes of storytellers and the su- pernatural stories they tell. This connection is particularly worthy of attention if story characters are rigidly associated with gender, as in Transcarpathian werewolf stories, where only men become werewolves (as opposed to, e.g., German tradition where a person can transform regardless of gender if she or he possesses a “wolf belt”1). Kira Sadoja and I, in another project analyzing contemporary Carpathian werewolf stories from the Transcarpathian region of Western Ukraine and adjacent territories, have shown that there are two basic types of Carpathian werewolf stories: voluntary transforma- tion stories where the husband turns into a wolf, and forceful transformation stories, where a wife (or rarely the mother-in- law) turns her husband (or son-in-law) into a wolf. We also argue that the stories people tell depend on their gender at- titudes. In voluntary transformation stories, there is a confl ict between the ethical values of the culture: the male character is approved of for being male but disapproved of for being the bearer of evil magic. We only heard this story type from women. In forced transformation stories, cultural values do not confl ict: the woman is wrong both as a bearer of evil mag- ic and as a person of the subordinated gender. This type is told by both men and women. However, women are not uni- form in their tellings: some of them give a patriarchal twist to

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AGENCY AND PATRIARCHY 153

the story where the “husband becomes a wolf and attacks his wife,” while others manage to transform the plot from “wife turns her husband into a wolf” into a story of a woman defy- ing her abuser.

St orytellers’ varying attitudes toward gender in Carpathi- an werewolf stories are expressed not only through the stories’ plots and details, but also through discursive features such as speakers’ construction of agency for male and female charac- ters. Analyzing discursive and, generally, linguistic features is not a common avenue of analysis in folkloristics. However, I believe that the analysis of language and discourse in folklore studies is vital.2 Folklore texts have always been defi ned as variable; therefore, each particular rendition of a folk story has been considered “a version,” a token of larger oral tradi- tion, and therefore less worthy of close reading than a printed and unchangeable text of a known writer.3 Yet once recorded, a rendition of a folk story is an artistic text on its own, situated in (social) place and time, produced by a certain human being. In its unique wording a recorded folk story, like a writer’s cre- ation, is both a piece of art and a subjective refl ection of social reality. Both the artistic and the social part are intertwined and expressed in the language of the text. The analysis of both parts is possible only with the deep understanding of the cul- ture’s linguistic toolbox. Moreover, compared to a writer’s text, a recorded story has one more dimension: it is a compo- nent of oral performance, directed to a certain audience and shaped in real-time interaction with it. Therefore, a folk story can also be studied by various methods designed to analyze language-mediated interactions in society. Such methods in- clude conversation analysis, which examines a speaker’s turn- taking interaction with listeners, as well as each parties’ goals and the tools used to accomplish them), and various types of discourse analysis, which extract underlying ideologies, beliefs, attitudes, and power relationships from discourse4). In this paper, I employ linguistic methods to investigate how specifi c linguistic forms are used in folk narratives to

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154 ELENA BOUDOVSKAIA

highlight or deny agency to particular characters.5 In doing so, I seek to understand how examining expressions of agency can broaden our knowledge of the cultural models of gender in Carpathian culture.

B A C K G R O U N D A N D M E T H O D S : G E N D E R A T T I T U D E S I N T H E C A R P AT H I A N R E G I O N

The Carpathian mountains, a rural region in Eastern Europe, are located in the middle of the “patriarchal belt,” a part of the “Old World” (Europe, Asia, and Africa) with classical pa- triarchy (Kandiyoti 1988; Quinn 2015). The village my texts come from is situated in Transcarpathia, the westernmost region of Ukraine, close to the borders of Poland, Slovakia, Hungary and Romania. Concerning gender relations, Muk- hopadhyay describes a number of social features in India that mark it as dominated by “patrifocal family structure and ideology.” All these features apply to Transcarpathia as well. They include “the merging of individual goals and collective family welfare, structural features (patrilineality and patri- locality) that reinforce the centrality of sons versus daugh- ters, gendered family responsibilities, regulation of female sexuality (to maintain the purity of the patriline) through arranged marriages and restricted male–female interactions, and female standards that emphasize “homely” traits (e.g., obedience and self-sacrifice) conducive to family harmony” (Mukhopadhyay 2004:469).

Since the region is both economically poor and rural (most inhabitants engage to some extent in subsistence agriculture) (Magocsi 2015:201-205), traditional gender relations and atti- tudes have mainly been preserved.6 On the other hand, changes in population mobility during the Soviet and, especially, post- Soviet periods have allowed women more independence though mostly enjoyed at the price of leaving the village; at home, the old gender norms remain largely unchanged.

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AGENCY AND PATRIARCHY 155

T H E O R E T I C A L F R A M E W O R K

Models

Gender attitudes are analyzed in this article using a cultural models’ framework. In the branch of cognitive anthropology studying cultural schemas, cultural models are defined as “lo- cal models of how the humanly created, natural, supernatural, interpersonal, and wider sociopolitical worlds work” (Strauss 2015:391). They are called “cultural” because they are shared in a specific culture. Larger units may also be currently called cultural models (Quinn 2011b:36). Cultural models in a society are taken for granted, they are “understandings that are so gen- erally accepted that they form the shared presuppositions un- derlying different opinions about a topic” (Strauss 2015:391-2), though alternative models may exist as well (Quinn and Hol- land 1987:4). Models also serve as culturally accepted patterns for behavior since they have motives embedded into them; they “not only label and describe the world but also set forth goals … and elicit or include desires” (Strauss 1992:3; D’Andrade 1992). Models are not obligatory patterns for thinking and be- having, since they are mediated, and eventually subjected to change, by personal understanding and decision to act: in other words by personal agency. Models are expressed in discourse, and as such “lexicons or discourse are the primary data that researchers mine for category systems, explicit beliefs, and im- plicit understandings” (Strauss 2015:386).

Narrative an d Language

As Elinor Ochs and Lisa Capps state in their review article on personal narratives, the very point of a narrative is to make sense of reality, “to bring [one’s] experiences to conscious awareness”; narratives themselves are subjective versions of reality, “embodiments of one or more points of view rather than objective, omniscient accounts” (Ochs and Capps 1996:21). Narrators express their point of view through both the plot and

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156 ELENA BOUDOVSKAIA

the language of their narratives. Linguistic forms in the nar- rative are pivotal for sense-making. They “depict actions and stances and in so doing cast protagonists, narrators, and listen- ers in a certain light” (ibid., 28). That, in its turn, is necessary to transform a laundry list of actions into a coherent and meaning- ful story (see Labov and Waletzky 1967:34-5).

According to Jerome Bruner, in telling a story, a narrator develops simultaneously two landscapes: “one of action and one of consciousness” (Bruner 1986:34). As Ochs and Capps explain, “The landscape of consciousness categorizes and ra- tionalizes protagonists’ actions, beliefs, and emotions in rela- tion to norms.” (Ochs and Capps 1996:26). The structures that Bruner poetically labels “the landscape of consciousness” are similar to cultural models; they refl ect storytellers’ attitudes that are expressed through plot as well as language. I was inter- ested in both ways of expression. In my work with Kira Sadoja, we analyzed speakers’ gendered “landscapes of consciousness” as they transpired in the plots of werewolf stories. In this article, I focus on the emergence of cultural models through language, particularly through the lexical choice of verbs from the per- spective of agency.

Agency

I understand agency as “the socio-culturally mediated capac- ity to act” (Ahearn 2011:261), “the capacity of social beings to interpret and morally evaluate their situation and to formu- late projects and try to enact them” (Ortner 2006:56). Agency is “enacted and represented in (and through) language” (Du- ranti 2004:451). In narrative, a character may be characterized by various degrees of agency, through both plot and language. Languages have “resources that can be used to exercise, attri- bute, or deny agency” (Ahearn 2011:291).

My approach to linguistic expressions of (attributing) agen- cy is based on two theoretical frameworks. Deborah Schiffrin’s approach defi nes agency in narrative as “responsibility for bringing about concrete changes in prior situations” (Schiffrin

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AGENCY AND PATRIARCHY 157

2000:14). Agency can be expressed grammatically: if a per- son’s actions are represented by certain grammatical and lexi- cal means, such as through the use of irrealis, modals, agent- less passive (Schiffrin 2000:34), lexical verbs of thinking that describe person “not as performing an action, but as having a thought” (Schiffrin 2000:14), then this person is portrayed as less agentive. Conversely, a person described as perform- ing an action is positioned as more agentive. Modifying Schif- frin’s approach to fi t the grammatical features of the Carpathian Rusyn dialects in which the stories are told, I defi ned gram- matical agency as follows: agency of a person is presented as maximal when a person is referred to as a subject of a verb in the fi nite form, active voice and indicative mood, denoting an activity.7 Prototypically such activities are physical. Concern- ing mental and verbal activities, it is more complicated: while a person having a thought or experiencing an emotion may be non-agentive, a person mentally working on a plan of action, speaking up, or registering what she or he saw is quite agentive. I also noticed the prominence of mental and verbal activity in the characters’ portrayal in werewolf stories, and I wanted to see if mental and verbal activities constitute additional dimen- sions for characterization. Therefore, I have added separate cat- egories of mental agency, including verbs of perception, cogni- tion, volition, and verbal agency, containing verbs of speech and other communication (including such verbs as “greet” or

“scream”). Emotional agency is another dimension that was ex- plored, though in the stories examined here only one verb from this category occurred: bojá ty s’a (to be afraid).

The resulting classifi cation turned out to be close to the one known as transitivity system, developed within the framework of systemic functional grammar by Michael Halliday in the 1960s (Halliday and Matthiessen 2004). The transitivity sys- tem has been used to discover ideology behind the language usage in various texts, most notably in fi ction (Mills 1995:110- 116; Toolan 2007), but also in other types of discourse, such as court cases (Bartley 2018), doctor-patient interaction (Pane, et

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158 ELENA BOUDOVSKAIA

al. 2018), and folklore (Levorato 2003). The transitivity system offers tools for the scrutiny of “the precise wording of narra- tive reports” (Toolan 2007:239), allowing semantic labelling of clauses in a text so that the connection can be traced between the types of clauses ascribed to characters and other features of these characters. In the transitivity system, clauses (or, rather, the verbs forming clauses) are divided into six types denoting material, behavioral, mental, verbal, relational, and existen- tial processes (Halliday and Matthiessen 2004:260). Howev- er, most researchers using this system modify it by lumping together certain types of clauses. I examine four clause types: clauses denoting material processes (containing verbs of ac- tion), mental processes (verbs of perception, cognition, desid- eration), emotional processes, and verbal processes. I disre- garded relational and existential clauses8, and I split behavioral clauses between material, mental, and verbal ones.9 In this ar- ticle, I use the terms “verbal agency” and “verbal processes” interchangeably.

M AT E R I A L S A N D F I E L D W O R K

This article is based on stories I recorded in the village of No- voselycja, Mizhhir’ja district, Zakarpats’ka region, Ukraine. The idiom spoken in the village is a dialect of Rusyn, an East Slavic language acknowledged as a minority language in Slo- vakia and some other countries, but not yet in Ukraine (see Pugh 2009, vii-20, for the summary of the situation and the grammatical description of the version spoken in Slovakia). There is no space for a description of the dialect of Novosely- cja here; certain points will be briefly mentioned in the com- mentary for specific wording in stories. This article analyzes fi ve out of the seven werewolf stories I recorded in Novosely- cja between 1987 and 2018 and transcribed. Six of the stories were recorded from women and one from a man. All of the narrators were born between 1913 and 1931. Younger people in Novoselycja usually do not know werewolf stories, though in other villages of Transcarpathia I have recorded such stories

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AGENCY AND PATRIARCHY 159

from people born as late as 1946. Materials were elicited in the course of conversations or in loosely structured interviews with older people. I talked to people usually individually, rarely in small groups. If my interlocutors were willing, our conversa- tions could last up to three hours. The initial question I asked each was “Could you tell me what life was like in the olden times?” I added further questions about various aspects of vil- lage life and folklore as well, to gauge whether the speakers were interested in talking about specific matters. Werewolf sto- ries sometimes came up spontaneously when a speaker recalled one after telling some other mythological tale, but more often I had to ask a direct question: “Have you ever heard a story about a person turning into a wolf?” Most people had not.

For this article, the fi ve stories I selected represent a gamut of speakers’ stances on a woman’s role in society. My goal was to investigate how the verbal expressions correlate with the stances of speakers conveyed in the plots of the stories.

W E R E W O L F S T O R I E S F R O M N O V O S E L Y C J A

Two Stories About Voluntary Transformation: Dangerous Husbands and Smart Wives

Below is a story of voluntary transformation, recorded in 1987 from Anastasiia Zavadiak, a woman born 1913.

Story 1. “He Became a Wolf Forev

[…] there was [a husband] and a wife, and somehow… somehow that man, into wolf… he transformed into a wolf, into a wolf. And she didn’t know and didn’t know where her husband was. He could go somewhere, and was absent, and then he

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160 ELENA BOUDOVSKAIA

would come back. Once she went to rake hay in the field, and a wolf came running, and it is running towards her, and she defends herself with the rake, but it grabbed her dress, and it is pulling, and it tore her dress, and she is hitting it with the rake, and chased it away, and it went… it fled. Sometime later when he came… he already turned back into a man, he came, and they sat down to lunch. She looks—but he has such a piece of cloth between his teeth, a cloth from her dress. How come? Yes. And when she told him that, he went, and never ever came back again, he became a wolf forever.

This story from Novoselycja is one of two main werewolf story types in the Carpathian tradition that I recorded between 1987 and 2018.10 I label this story type “A Piece of Cloth.” The plot may be outlined as follows: a married couple collect hay in the fi eld; the husband leaves, a wolf comes, tries to attack the wife, and gets chased away. The husband comes back, and the wife notices a piece of cloth from her skirt between her hus- band’s teeth. Often, the story has an ending where the husband leaves forever, turning into a wolf.

In this story’s orientation (Labov and Waletzky 1967:32- 41), the husband is shown as more agentive than wife: he repeatedly turns into a wolf (“(used to) turn into”) and habitually

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AGENCY AND PATRIARCHY 161

comes and goes (“will go,” “will return”), while the wife is only subject of a negated verb of mental activity (“didn’t know”). In the complication part, both the wolf-husband and the wife are agentive: the husband is the subject of action verbs or, in Halliday’s terms, the subject of clauses denoting material pro- cesses: he “runs” (twice), “grabbed,” “pulls,” “tore,” “went,” and “fl ed.” The wife is the subject of the verbs “went,” “pro- tects herself,” “hits,” and “chased away.” The wife, however, is the subject of much fewer verbs of action. In the further narrative, the husband is again more agentive than the wife: he is the subject of the verbs denoting action: “came” (twice),

“turned himself,” and then in the coda “went, fl ed” two times. The wife, however, is the subject of two verbs, one express- ing mental activity, and the other, verbal activity: “looks” and “said.” Within the story, the husband is the subject of twelve verbs of action, while the wife is the subject of only fi ve; how- ever, she is the subject of two verbs of mental/verbal activity, while he is the subject of none. Overall, the husband is shown as more agentive by far, but totally closed mentally. His high agency is consistent with the “voluntary transformation” type of the story, in which the husband turns into a werewolf at will. The obscurity of his psyche in the story is also understand- able: the storyteller does not want to show that she understands how a fi end’s mind works.11 The wife, however, is depicted as someone with more agency in the sphere of noticing and talking. Moreover, the story’s pivotal element, the recognition of the husband as a werewolf, is a mental action (cognition) performed by the wife, though it is not expressed by a verb.

In another story of the same type, the wife’s mental agen- cy can be seen even more clearly. This second story was also told in Novoselycja in 1987, by Anna Pyrynets’ (AP), a woman born 1920. This story has an introduction stating that the hus- band used to beat the wife.12 Then this story develops very simi- larly to the previous one, up to the point when the wife sees the cloth between the husband’s teeth and realizes he is a werewolf. However, the story develops further: the husband is pleased to

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162 ELENA BOUDOVSKAIA

see his wife’s fear and offers to demonstrate his transformation for her. He tells her not to say the words “may you become a rock” (skamẹ́n’í w bys’); then he transforms. She, wishing to get rid of him, says the forbidden words, so he cannot turn back into a human. He starts attacking her again, but people who are making hay nearby chase him away, and he leaves forever.

Story 2. “I Will Teach You”

I know how it was, [she] also was my kin, the one who had made her husband into a wolf [lit.: werewolf]. It was like this. A couple got mar- ried, they got married, but… but he beat her, he constantly beat her, and she says: “I will teach you, I will show you,” and then he goes to the for- est, and a wolf comes back, to the woman, and he pulls her… they went to the field to make hay. I will tell it how it was. They went to make hay. First they went to make hay… no, that was later… no, it was first. So they went to the field to make hay, and he went to the woods, and from there, a wolf comes, and people beat it and barely chased it away, because that wolf, it totally tore her skirt. And he went from there back from the forest, he already turned back [into a man].

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AGENCY AND PATRIARCHY 163

He came: “Why did you cry, what was it, what?”—

“But there was a wolf, she says, hey, man [lit: God’s man], it was here, and, she says, it very nearly ate me.” So what then… And they already… sat down, ate lun… ate lunch, and they sat down, they wanted to eat, they had a lunch, and he says to her: “check my head for lice, check it.” And she looks at his head, she looks at the teeth, and exactly there were the exact threads from her skirt, that one makes a skirt with (?), in his teeth there were threads from her skirt. She says: “Listen,” she says, “Vasyl’, listen, but you,” she says, “but you have, from my skirt, there are threads between you teeth.” And he says, “Ah, did you get scared?” “Oh how I got scared,” she says, “I got scared.” And he says, “if you want,” he says, “to see…” “But how will you do that?” she started saying to him,

“but how you will become, you are a man, and you will become a wolf? and you will immediately come back

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164 ELENA BOUDOVSKAIA

as a wolf? and you are a man?”—see, he mowed the hay. “Oh, he says, I am afraid, I would tell you,” he says, “but you…” he must have been stupid (?) because he said: “only don’t say I wish you become a rock.” He says: “I will go…” and he… she… he already made the haystack a little higher, because she was afraid. She thinks to herself: “Damn you, if you are like this, I don’t want you in the fam- ily; you say that I should not say “I wish you become a rock,” and there, and she already… and then he… she saw (?) he rolled [or: made a somersault?] like that three times, and he became a real wolf. From where did he get wolf’s hair, everything—a wolf, a real wolf. And she already said… he started rolling back, but she said, “I wish you become a rock,” and it happened… he started jumping onto the stack (?), he would have eaten her already. And he went away forever, he became a wolf forever. And then, she started crying there, on that… there… on that… she started

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AGENCY AND PATRIARCHY 165

crying—“Oh, she says, a wolf is eating me. Me… people…” and she cries, and people around see that, and people came, one with a pitchfork, another with a scythe, everyone brought something, and [the wolf] fled. Yes.

The agencies of the husband and wife are diametrically op- posed here. The husband is agentive in the sphere of material processes (19 verbs); however, his mental activity is non-exist- ing, even looking is alien to him. He is characterized by eleven verbs of speaking though. The wife is characterized with only two verbs of action: “made (her husband into a wolf),” used at the very beginning of the story, in the abstract, and “looks for lice” in the complication. However, she is also characterized by three verbs of mental activity. Also, she is given at least two in- ner monologues, six clauses, representing her inner speech; the storyteller shows the wife’s inner monologues apparently align- ing with her thoughts and calling on the listeners to do the same. Concerning the overall number of verbal processes, the wife ini- tiates eighteen of these, which is almost twice more than her hus- band, who initiated eleven. Finally, she pronounces the words of highest possible agency: the spell she utters turns her husband into a wolf forever. This is the climax of the story, and the sto- ryteller considers this moment so important that she narrates it twice. On the textual level, the wife’s agency is also high be- cause she can carry out her plans, while her husband’s plans (not to let his wife say the forbidden words, to transform himself back into a human after the demonstration, and then to punish the wife for making his transformation irreversible) fail miserably.

In this story, therefore, we see an active man, who is dan- gerous in two ways, naturally and supernaturally, being a wife

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166 ELENA BOUDOVSKAIA

abuser and having a gift of magical transformation. However, he is does not evoke listeners’ sympathy, being totally closed psychologically. He is also not very successful in his endeav- ors even though he is a person with supernatural abilities and a performer of many physical activities. He is overpowered by a female who initiates fewer material processes, but is more talkative, smarter, better able to plan, and eventually more successful. The success of one’s plans is portrayed by the speaker as an important component of agency. The female storyteller presents the female character as more agentive in two out of three areas than the male character (mental ac- tivity, speaking, and achieving one’s goals), and thereby the storyteller positions herself as someone not very respectful of the patriarchal order or male dominance. In her story, both the plot (a clever woman getting rid of a dangerous abusive husband armed with magic) and the agency characteristics show her siding with the female heroine in disregarding pa- triarchal family values such as “obedience and self-sacrifi ce… conducive to family harmony” (Mukhopadhyay 2004:469). The cultural underpinnings of the story also support listeners’ siding with the female character. The wife in the story is not a magical person, and the magic words she uses against her husband have been given to her by the husband himself. In the traditional Carpathian culture, bearers of magic are disap- proved of because that might give them an unfair advantage over a non-magical opponent (Boudovskaia 2018). Here, the evil werewolf is a man, and the simple person who uses mag- ic, but who is untarnished by the possession of supernatural gifts, is a woman.

Two more observations seem to be in order. First, one of the reasons why the wife in this story is less agentive physically is that the action of chasing away the wolf, performed in the previous story by the wife herself, is here delegated by the wife to the neighbors making hay. The village community is an im- portant actor in this story, defi nitely agentive, performing both physical and mental actions, and successfully achieving results

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AGENCY AND PATRIARCHY 167

(the people chase the wolf away successfully both times). The wife’s effective communication with them is part of her success, which makes her verbal agency still more important.

Secondly, the wife and the husband together, as a fam- ily, are also a collective actor in the story. They are charac- terized with fi fteen verbs in plural denoting physical activity, and one verb of mental activity. These verbs describe their family history (they got married) and their physical activi- ties in the course of a normal working day (they went to the fi eld to make hay, they wanted to eat, they had a lunch break). Performed in a subsistence economy, normal family activities are aimed at the continuation of the physical life of the family and contrast with the destructive actions of the husband, who breaks the family unity not once, but twice. The fi rst time he breaks this unity is when he repeatedly abuses his wife, the second time is when he becomes a wolf and attacks her. Liv- ing and working as a family is part of the cultural model of a family in this region, but now the family in the story deviates from this norm, and the speaker makes it clear that the person to blame is the husband.

To sum up, in the two stories of voluntary transformation, both told by women, the husband-wolf is more agentive than his wife in terms of physical actions, but less agentive by far in mental activity and in the success of his enterprises. In these two stories, the female character is also more agentive in the verbal area, though in the further stories we will see that it is not always the case. In addition, one of the stories also presents the community as an important actor, agentive physically, mentally, and in terms of carrying out its plans. The family (consisting of the husband and wife) is also presented as an actor; the family is agentive physically and even mentally in its work. However, if the family is dominated by an abusive husband, there is no way for the wife to protect herself, short of turning him into a wolf forever. The community is able to defend her against a wolf, but not against her husband.

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168 ELENA BOUDOVSKAIA

Story of Forced Transformation: Smart Husband, No Wife in View

The next story, recorded in 2012 from a man, Mykhailo Chupa, born 1927, belongs to a different story type. I have labelled this type “Stick”; in it, a man, turned by someone into a wolf, comes to another person and shows him an injured foot, usually pierced by a stick. The helper takes the stick out of the wolf’s paw, the wolf bites the helper and leaves a mark. Much later, an unknown man tells the marked person that he recognized him by his injury and that it was he, in his wolf skin, who had bitten him.

Story 3. “Wolf Thanked Him and Left”

BB: I don’t quite remember, the guy who… he was turned into a wolf by his wife…

MC: nu | MC: right

BB: to jomú toj is | lá bŷ | ščó vŷ́jn’aw ?|

B: what was it that that man took out from its paw?

MC: a stick. Such a stick got stuck there [in his paw], a stick… He was jumping around somewhere, and he landed onto a sharp stick that [someone] had cut from a fir-tree.He landed… onto it, and his paw got pierced all the way through. [It was] such a stick.

BB: mhm | а tó j ho vŷ́t’ah ?| BB: mmhm, and that man pulled it out?

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AGENCY AND PATRIARCHY 169

MC: It was the guy who guarded potatoes, the one who guarded his potatoes so that wild boars wouldn’t get them. So he [the wolf] came to that guy, and that guy got scared and wanted to shoot him. He had a gun, some kind of a gun. And the wolf raised its paw, because it was lame. So it raised its paw, and this guy saw that the paw was pierced with that stick right through it. The stick, how to say…

BB: nó rọ zumí ju rọ zumí ju BB: yes, I understand

MC: and [this guy] took hold of it, pulled it out, tore it out from there. And then this [wolf] bit his finger off, because he was in such pain, and this [guy] ban- daged it up for him, [he] put some bacon on the wound. [He] bandaged it with a rag, bandaged it well and let him go, and [the wolf] left. He bowed, thanked [the guy], andleft. And later he went to the salt springs at Solotvyno to get brine, and they recog- nized each other there. He asked that guy whose finger he had… who had a finger

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170 ELENA BOUDOVSKAIA

bitten off [missing] if he would take him in for a night, to let him spend the night, because you don’t get brine at night, only during the daytime. So the guy let him in, and they started talking— how he lost his finger, what happened to his finger—and that guy told him, and this one …. what wolf came, and how… And he says, “It was me. I bit off your finger.” I heard that from my parents, and from others. And now there are nothing like that… no such tales.

This story is the speaker’s response to my attempts to elicit a story that he told me already, but that, for some reason, did not get recorded. He starts the story from the middle, and the woman who turned her husband into a wolf does not get a men- tion at all. Apparently, the woman’s role is not as important to the storyteller as another man’s help to the wolf, or the self-re- vealing of the former wolf to his former helper. From my point of view, such a hideous deed as turning a man into an animal should surely get some attention, and its being left beyond the limits of the story needs to be explained by certain discrepan- cies between my own culture and that of the storyteller (Hill 2005:158). It seems that the storyteller places the wife’s ac- tions into the category of something not worth telling.13 I am not quite sure why this is so; one explanation is that it was a story known both to the storyteller and his audience; another possibility is that for a male in this patriarchal culture, female agency is non-existent or not as important as male agency.14

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AGENCY AND PATRIARCHY 171

Since the wife does not appear in this story, her agency is not expressed in verbs. In contrast, the two men, the werewolf and his helper, are quite agentive, at least physically (eleven verbs characterizing the wolf, eight for his helper). Mentally, the wolf is again closed, while the helper gets two verbs of mental agency (“wanted” and “saw”). Emotionally, the helper is characterized by one verb (“got scared”), but this is too little to make any conclusions. Concerning verbal activity, the wolf is the subject of four verbs, his helper—one verb. The were- wolf is to a large extent a closed entity, his inner life a mystery; however, unlike the werewolf in the two previous stories, he is agentive both physically and verbally, similarly to a non-mag- ical male, the helper. His ability to attain goals is also much higher than in the previous story: beyond the scope of the story he becomes a human again; in the story, he reveals himself to his former helper, and for this purpose he invites himself to his house. Here, in a story told by a man, the male protagonist and the male helper are both agentive on three counts: physi- cal agency, verbal agency, and successfulness. The woman who caused the protagonist’s transformation is absent from the story; her agency in attaining results is dubious: she did turn her husband into a wolf, but he managed to transform back. In any case, the man in this story is much more agentive than the woman. Also, neither the family nor the community are in the fi eld of the storyteller’s vision.

Story of A Mixed Type: Agentive Husband, Quiet Wife

The next story is a cross between the “Piece of Cloth” and the “Stick” types. It was told in 2012 by a woman, M, born 1936.

Story 4. “She Didn’t Tell Him”

M: já vam sesé ne kazá la ja vam s’ak bŷ́lo u ná s | u | užé mí j tá to kazá w | tam pó le s’a klý kalo pid … | čertẹ́ž’i

M: I didn’t tell you that, I … to you… It was like that in our village. My father told me so. There was this field,

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172 ELENA BOUDOVSKAIA

called …under [unclear]… It was called čertẹ́ž’i. And a husband said to his wi… “I am going to make a pole,” well, whatever her name was,

“I am going,” he says, “to make a pole” [for a hay- stack]. And he went to make a pole. He went to make a pole, and he tied a stick [to a tree], and it kept banging. He tied it so that wind moved it and it banged. Well, and she thinks that he is making a pole, because it is time to put hay in a stack. And she is sitting there, where they ate next to the bags… and she waited. He isn’t coming, isn’t coming, and then he comes. And he was a man with two souls, that husband. And he comes… And long ago, they say… And when the wife was sitting there, and he came, and this… It was a wolf who came, a wolf who came, that husband of her came [as a ] wolf, and he injured his paw, and gave it to her, so that…

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AGENCY AND PATRIARCHY 173

And the fire was burning, and he put his paw there— already as a wolf—and put his paw out so that she would bandage it for him, and she didn’t bandage it be- cause she did not have a rag. And he [got] mad, and tore— For example, now we say “skirt,” and long ago we said svý ta. It was in back, and in front there was an apron. So, he tore a bit from that skirt with his teeth. And [he] tore [it] and left, and didn’t say anything to her, just tore the skirt and went, he was angry because she didn’t bandage his paw. And so he left, he left. And she thinks that her husband would come, but her husband is not coming, not coming. And after he al- ready went somewhere, and did his business, he comes to his wife—as a man. He comes… and when he came, [she says] “Take [some food] and eat, and where is the pole,” and this and that, and maybe he

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174 ELENA BOUDOVSKAIA

really brought this pole, you see, I don’t know ex- actly how it was. So they sat down. And then, long ago… She was sitting and he put his head this way, [so that she can] look [for lice] in his hair , because long ago there were lice in people’s hair, have you heard about it? And he put his head [in her lap] so that she could look for lice in his hair. So she looks, and she didn’t know at all that he was like that. See, the wife didn’t know that he was a man with two souls. And then, when she was looking for lice, and he, you know, like that, just the wa y I am yawning now, he started yawning, and she saw that her… from her skirt… be- tween his teeth… that piece of cloth, a red one. Then she realized that her husband was a man with two souls. Like this, there were people with two souls. Yes, it was like that.

BB: a wná mu ščọ s’ upọ wí la ščọ wná zná la ?

BB: Did she tell him that she had figured it out?

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AGENCY AND PATRIARCHY 175

M: a ný č mu ne kazá la | na e ný č mu ne kazá la bo wná s’a bojá la lys’_ s’ak užé de ̣ ́s’ | abo

M: She didn’t tell him any- thing. No, she didn’t tell him anything because she was afraid. Only that, maybe

svọ́ji má mi kazá la abo tá tovy svọ́mu abo kọ́muz’ no ta znaé te to uže s’a ros… rozŷjšló no ta já k ká ty tak jak bŷ ja vá m pọ wí la a vŷ́ dá le a vŷ́ dá le taj tá k totó s’a rozŷjšló | no ta s’á k bŷ́lo |

she told her mother or her father, or someone else, and, you know, it all spr… spread, how to say, as I tell you, and you tell someone else, and they tell someone else, and it went around like that. Yes, it was like that.

In this story, the husband and wife are making hay; the hus- band goes to the forest and comes back as a wolf. His paw is injured; he offers it to the wife to bandage, she doesn’t do it because she has no bandaging material. The wolf-husband gets angry, tears a piece from her skirt and leaves. He comes back as a man, they have a meal, the husband requests that the wife look for lice in his hair, and she sees a piece from her skirt between his teeth. The wife realizes her husband is a man with two souls; the story ends there.

In the Carpathian culture, a man with two souls is worse than a werewolf. A werewolf might have been transformed against his will. A man with two souls has chosen to be wicked. He leaves one soul in his body and sends the other one to roam around and do evil; there is no doubt about his ill intent. For a woman to be married to a person with two souls is alarming. I have tried to ask M for a continuation of the story, hoping to hear, as in other versions, the liberating ending that the husband turned into a wolf and fl ed. However, here it is not the case. M says that the wife does not tell her husband about her discovery because she is afraid of him, though M thinks that the wife might tell her parents. People have told me that traditionally, if a husband behaved too badly, i.e., beat his wife “more than she

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176 ELENA BOUDOVSKAIA

deserved,” she could complain to her parents and they might try to reason with him. However, parents did not have any real power. The story corroborates that: the wife’s parents are not agentive, grammatically they are not in the nominative case, as clause subjects, but in the dative, as the recipients of the news, and in the plot there is no mentioning of them coming to help their daughter.

As in previous stories, the husband is agentive in the physi- cal sphere (31 verbs), and opaque regarding his inner life (0 mental activity verbs); he is the subject of two verbs of speak- ing, and one emotional adjective (“angry/mad” 2x). The wife is characterized with several negated verbs, of actions (“didn’t bandage [his paw]”), states (“didn’t have [cloth]”) and speak- ing (“didn’t tell him” 2x). She is also the subject of several stative verbs (“sitting” 3x, “waiting”). Otherwise, she has only two verbs of physical activity (“seek for lice”), though she is a subject of four verbs of mental activity and one verb of speak- ing. She is non-agentive to such an extent that it irritates her husband. She also speaks much less than he does. That was not the case with wives in other voluntary transformation stories.

This story twists the “Piece of Cloth” plot to show that the wolf-husband only attacks his wife when she disobeys his re- quests, for which he, as a husband, is fully entitled to get angry and punish her. M, the female storyteller, is a widow heading a large patriarchal family. She exemplifi es a situation that Kan- diyoti (1988) describes as a patriarchal bargain: M achieved a position of power (as mother of adult sons) promised by the pa- triarchal order, so she is an ardent supporter of patriarchal val- ues. Thus, she would not tell the “Piece of Cloth” story where the wife is an innocent victim, and the husband is punished for his act of magical aggression. Starting with the “Piece of Cloth” plot, she switches to the “Stick” plot, where the man is not an aggressor. When she returns to the “Piece of Cloth” story, she constructs the woman as disobedient, and the husband as in the right. In M’s world, the husband is always right, even if he is a man with two souls. He properly punishes his wife for insubor-

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AGENCY AND PATRIARCHY 177

dination, while the wife is less agentive and more silent than in other “Piece of Cloth” stories.

The wife’s parents are also described as inagentive. How- ever, the wife cannot help telling the story to them, and to un- named “someone [else].” Because of that, the husband eventu- ally gets revealed as an evil bearer of magic as the story spreads; describing the exact mechanism of gossip spreading, M uses a fi nite, agentive verb (“it spread”). The subject of the verb is not the community (which she does not mention), but the news. It looks almost as if the piece of gossip were an agentive entity by itself. However, while the gossip spreads in the village, the husband still must be served and obeyed in his own family. If the man with two souls needs to be revealed or punished, his wife is not entitled to the agency to do so.

“I Mauled a Sheep”: Husband’s Doom and Storyteller in the Role of the Wife

This story was told by a 92-year old woman, Hafija Klovanych (HK), in 2018. It is not the “Piece of Cloth” type because it does not contain either of its pivotal elements, “husband trans- formed into wolf attacks his wife” and “wife recognizes a piece of cloth from her skirt between her husband’s teeth.”

Story 5. “I Mauled a Sheep”

BB: i | ščý jenn ó | ne bú lo takọ́ji ká sky jak žoná čọ lọ ví ka | na vọ́wka | obernú la ?

BB: And one more thing. Was there by any chance a tale where a wife turned her husband into a wolf?

HK: I don’t know if it was the wife that… whether his wife turned him into [a wolf], or maybe he was like that to begin with, so that he

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178 ELENA BOUDOVSKAIA

was, he was like a wolf. I’ve heard that… A husband was mowing hay, and then he dis- appeared. His wife brought him some food or something, but I don’t know if… she didn’t see her husband there, or… maybe her husband had already come… Then her husband comes home… [to great-grandson:] Slavik, turn on the light.

BB: mhm | BB: Mm hm

HK: He comes… yes, his wife came there to the hay, she is raking the hay or something, so her husband came; he sat down there a bit uphill from her, on a field boundary. And there he is sit- ting. Well. And his wife says: “Where have you been?” And he probably didn’t say anything, but he took such a [stick] somehow, and picked his teeth. Well. And his wife says: “Why are you picking your teeth, what is wrong?”, and he says: “I,” he says, “I bit and killed a sheep there.” Have you heard this? no? [laughs]. “How? How—his wife asks,—how did you bite and kill a sheep?” And then

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AGENCY AND PATRIARCHY 179

he started telling his wife. Well. That “I, it is destined that I…” or how was it… “so that I must go there and bite and kill a sheep.” And he said to her: “I—he said—I am half person and half wolf, so that… like… a person one week and a wolf the next.” Yes. So… And… That I heard. And then I don’t know how it… how it was after that, after he said that to his wife, what she thought after that, and if she was… if she was afraid or not, that I don’t know. Well. That is how it was, yes. I have heard that. Well. Oh God. I would never, never in my life [laughing, words unclear]

BB ščó bŷ vŷ ný gda ? BB: What would you never do?

HK: he ? HK: Huh?

BB: ščó ká žete vŷ́ bŷ ný gda ščo ?

BB: What did you say you would never do?

HK: I would never stay with that husband, I would be afraid. And I would [laughs] leave him right then and there. How is it possible, to [live with a husband who is] half person and half wolf?

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180 ELENA BOUDOVSKAIA

I asked HK if she knows of the story where a woman turned her husband into a wolf. She told me that she knows the story but disagrees with the wife’s role. Then HK tells the story, fi rst authenticating it by putting it into the context of previous tell- ings, and thus traditionalizing it, i.e. “endow[ing it] with a di- mension of traditional authority in a Weberian sense” to prove its truthfulness (Bauman 1992:137). In the story, a husband goes to the fi eld to make hay, but when his wife comes, he is not there. Later he arrives picking his teeth and tells the wife he has mauled a sheep. He explains that when he feels an urge to become a wolf, he must do it, because he is by nature half man half wolf. As in the previous stories, the husband is the subject of nine physical activity verbs (“mowed” (2x), “comes” (3x),

“sat,” “took,” “picks,” “mauled and killed”); his mental life is opaque again (0 verbs), he is only characterized by six verbs of speech. However, unlike in the previous stories, he is also described by several non-agentive constructions: he disappears (čọ lọ ví ka ne stá lo, where “husband” is in the genitive case of absence), he was like this (mẹ n’í tak dá no, literally “to me, it is given like this,” fi rst person personal pronoun in the dative of recipient), he had to (mú s’iw) go and kill the sheep. That high- lights the involuntary character of the husband’s disappearance and transformation, partially taking the blame off him.

The wife is a subject of only three physical activity verbs. Her mental agency is expressed by one verb, her verbal agen- cy—by three verbs. The wife is not devoid of emotions, but they are presented as potential ones, as the storyteller allows us to guess (“I don’t know how that… how it was there…. what she thought later, whether she… whether she was afraid or not, I don’t know that”).

In natural story-telling settings in Novoselycja, after the story is told, the listeners and the storyteller usually discuss the reported events and their implications. HK does that deputiz- ing for the wife. Before speaking up in her new capacity she uses a lot of hedging, and then laughs so that I cannot hear her words and must ask her to repeat them. Both her hedging and

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AGENCY AND PATRIARCHY 181

her laughter mark her self-consciousness and embarrassment at putting such radical conclusions into words.15 HK is usu- ally a very mild person, and rarely dares to express her opinion directly; she often uses the phrase “I don’t know.” Knowing that her opinion differs from the generally accepted patriarchal view, HK nevertheless speaks her mind in no uncertain terms: she would immediately leave a husband who has turned out to be a wolf because she would be afraid. She points out that generally it is unheard of to live with a dangerous shape-shifter.

The wording of this conclusion is much more decisive than when HK describes the wife’s potential emotions; there, she guesses (“I don’t know if … or whether…”), while here she is speaking about her own actions with certainty. Even though the wolf-husband is not as dangerous as in the prototypical “Piece of Cloth” story (not attacking his wife, and possibly having no evil intent), the threat of magically magnifi ed abuse has more weight for HK than the patriarchal ideas that a woman needs to endure everything from her husband for the sake of preserving the family. In face of such a threat, she is resolved to implement the most radical measure existing in the culture short of the for- bidden divorce. In this hypothetical situation, she is prepared to behave in a quintessential agentive way.

C O N C L U S I O N S

Jane Hill formulated the goal of a researcher striving to discov- er cultural knowledge hidden in a story as the need “to identify these covert—yet publicly available—presuppositions, so that we can make the same kinds of inferences that speakers must make when they find meaning in narratives.” (Hill 2005:157)

A larger corpus of texts I have accumulated but could not quote here for space considerations shows that Carpathian vil- lage women organize their experience and thoughts exclusively in the form of stories. They use no argumentative discourse or explanation: fi rst a point is stated and then arguments in its support are given (Quinn 2005:8). Their stories are also de- void of emotion words, as can be seen from the cited excerpts;

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182 ELENA BOUDOVSKAIA

emotion words are extremely rare in Carpathian stories, and the only two emotions mentioned are negative: fear and anger.16 It seems that emotions as motives for actions are either implied or considered not worth talking about. It is especially striking for us to see that love is not mentioned once in stories concern- ing marriage. If I were telling AP’s story, where the wife is repeatedly beaten by her husband, I would probably mentioned that she might have loved him at the beginning, but eventually her love for him ended; however, AP only quotes the wife’s words “I will teach you, I will show you.” It seems that in this culture, love, together with other (positive) emotions, is not in the framework of marriage (unlike, e.g., contemporary Ameri- can marriage described in Quinn 2011a). What is important for the culture is work the husband and wife do as a team in the household and in the fi eld, achieving the survival of the family and, if they are lucky, accumulating wealth. On the other hand, the patrilocality and patrilineality of the culture support the su- premacy of men over women, the need for a wife to be obedi- ent and enduring, and the freedom of husbands to abuse their wives. A church marriage is considered sacred, and divorce, impossible. This is the main, patriarchal, model of marriage in the Carpathian village culture.

Mentioning marriage in life stories, women normally tell stories corroborating the main model, in order to construct their identity as good wives. They show themselves serving their husbands and enduring everything from them. However, in werewolf stories they talk about the situations that poten- tially justify leaving one’s husband, though the leaving is de- scribed as metaphorical (turning the husband into a wolf) or hypothetical. Apparently, werewolf stories open a whole dif- ferent perspective on the traditional marriage, as oral tradition sometimes does.17 Werewolf stories allow a speaker to con- struct and discuss her views without appearing too bold, and while hiding behind the story’s traditionality. In a way, these stories themselves are a way of speaking up, in other words, an instrument of agency.

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AGENCY AND PATRIARCHY 183

I would like to comment also on the two out of the three types of agency expressed linguistically in these stories: physi- cal agency (or clauses denoting material processes) and verbal agency (verbal processes).18 Below is a table showing the dis- tribution of these expressions:

Story AZ: man

AZ: woman

AP: man

AP: woman

MC wolf

(male)

MC helper (male)

M man

M woman

HK man

HK woman

Physical 12 5 19 2 11 8 (+2) 31 2 9 3

Mental: cognition perception desideration

1 3 2 4 1

Mental: emotion 1 1 1 1

Verbal 1 11 18 4 1 2 1 6 3

In the examined stories told by female tellers, male were- wolf characters were characterized by more verbs of action, but female characters were without exception more active in the area of mental agency, i.e. perception and cognition. The dif- ference between the husband and wife characters in these two areas could be caused either by gender or by the fact that the husband had magical abilities. In the story told by a man, how- ever, there were two male characters, the wolf and the helper, and there was almost no difference between them regarding the number of physical agency verbs (11 and 8). Apparently, both men and women consider men more physically agentive than women. Regarding mental agency, however, in the same sto- ry told by a man, the werewolf had zero mental agency verbs, while his male helper had two. The mental opacity of the were- wolf obviously is caused by the fact that he is a bearer of evil magic, and not by his gender.

Concerning verbal agency, we have three stories where the husband is characterized at least by one verb of verbal

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184 ELENA BOUDOVSKAIA

agency: AP’s story (man 11 verbs, woman 18), M’ s story (2 and 1), HK’s story (6 and 3). The number of stories and verbs in them seems not enough for reliable conclusions, but they might suggest a tendency. A wife in the “liberating” stories by AZ and, especially, AP tends to speak more than her husband, using speech in a variety of agentive ways, from casting a spell to calling neighbors to help. In the “patriarchal” story by M, the two-soul man’s wife tends to be less verbal than him- self. Interestingly, however, her speaking is nevertheless pow- erful because it causes her husband’s exposure. HK’s story might not be a good example of a “liberating” story because without the conclusion “I would have left him” that belongs to the storyteller, the story is not “liberating,” it ends with the status quo.

Discourse analysts who use transitivity system for reveal- ing the ideology of authors mention that men are commonly described as the ones who act physically (initiate material pro- cesses), and women as those who act physically to a lesser ex- tent and are more engaged in mental processes and/or speaking (e.g., Mills 1995:115). This difference is often interpreted by analysts as the difference between activity/power and passiv- ity/powerlessness. Female characters in texts may be labelled as active/powerful if they initiate a lot of material processes and as passive/powerless otherwise.19 While this point of view is valid, it is possible that it is only a part of the picture, and that in other cultures it might not be so. In Carpathian werewolf stories, physical agency does characterize men, while mental agency is a feature that distinguishes a human from an evil su- pernatural being. Verbal agency, however, operates differently from both previous types. Unlike physical agency, it is cultur- ally available to both genders, and women storytellers describe it as a weapon female characters wield to achieve victories over their werewolf husbands.20 One should not underestimate the power of the word.

Concerning the overall woman’s agency in the stories, it appears as a continuum between the patriarchal model and the

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AGENCY AND PATRIARCHY 185

“rebellious” worldview of certain speakers. In the patriarchal model, the woman is expectedly non-agentive: in the story told by MC, a man, she is not present at all; in M’s story, the woman is such an ideally non-agentive wife that even her husband gets annoyed with her. On the other end of the scale, in AP’s story, the wife is so agentive that she gets rid of her wolf-husband; in HK’s story, the radical decision is delivered by the speaker herself, though in a hypothetical mood. All, even the radical storytellers, are aware of the patriarchal model and reference it in some way, even if it is through HK’s framing of her atypical stance with hedging and self-conscious laughter.

Finally, though all women in female stories are presented as mentally and verbally agentive, the outcomes of their agency are different, depending on their values and motives. While M’s female character, paralyzed by fear, sides with the view that a woman should obey and serve men, and thus remains with her two-souled husband, AP’s and HK’s female characters back the view that a woman can and should protect herself from her hus- band, at least under extreme circumstances. AP and HK’s char- acters act, and, in doing so, they achieve freedom from abuse. The patriarchal model, though pervasive, turns out not to have a total effect on women, even in the cohort born in the 1920s (AP and HK); much depends on the views and personal choices of the speaker.

N O T E S 1 See, for example, Kuhn and Schwartz (1848: 18-19, no. 22) and

Lyncker (1854: 107-108, no. 163). 2 One very important study in this regard is Levorato 2003. It analyzes

literary versions of Little Red Cap, fi nding connections between the plot and linguistic expressions of the authors’ stances on gender. My goal in this article is in many regards similar to this, though I am ana- lyzing oral stories. It is interesting that we both chose (were)wolf sto- ries as an extreme example of gender relations refl ected in folklore.

3 In Boudovskaia 2018:24, note 1, I analyze two models of collecting and publishing Rusyn folk texts in the late 19th and 20th centuries. I

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186 ELENA BOUDOVSKAIA

observe that the pre-Soviet “ethnolinguistic” model is more attentive to the textual and linguistic features, and that the “literary” model is tantamount to a summarization of the text by the folklorist. However, neither model preserved nor presented the text verbatim, even though that may be essential for defi ning the structure of traditional tales. Similar practices, when folklorists decide what belongs in the tale and edit out what they deem extraneous, are common in older pub- lications of other traditions’ folk tales, see, e.g., Almqvist 1999:24-6, on Irish Mélusine legends. Such practices doubtlessly affect the pos- sibility of stylistic or linguistic study of folk stories. See, for example, Josserand 2016:18, about the initial statements in Mayan tradition attributing a story about to be told: “Since … evidentiality statements are made prior to the actual telling of the tale, they are often edited out in published versions. A reader of much of the published litera- ture would have no idea such things were common, even required, in a proper telling. We ourselves did not recognize this fact at fi rst and inadvertently began our transcriptions of texts with the actual event line, disregarding the necessary introductory material.” The same, Josserand states, is true about other essential elements of tradi- tional stories, such as listeners’ intervention and feedback. Keeping or omitting these elements depends a lot on editorial choices, which in turn depend on the intended audience, publication goals, or other factors (Josserand 2016, 31), while in older editions these features used to be edited out by default.

4 As Gilbert and Mulkay state in their seminal work at the beginning of discourse analysis, data in the form of narratives or interviews can- not be taken at face value since it is variable and context dependent, and therefore “discourse analysis is a necessary prelude to, and per- haps replacement for, the analysis of action and belief” (Gilbert and Mulkay 1984:190).

5 Discussing gendered agency in folk narratives yields interesting re- sults as to the culture’s understanding of gender; see the fi ndings in Ortner 2006:139-142, about female agency in Grimms’ tales as some- thing a woman needs to be cleansed from before achieving marriage.

6 See a similar state of affairs in geographically adjacent areas: in Eastern Europe generally (Gal and Kligman 2000:45), in Roma- nian Maramureş (Kligman 1988:38-73), and further, in the Bal- kans among several nationalities (Denitch 1974:247). The changes in gender attitudes induced by the Soviet and post-Soviet devel- opments in the Carpathian area are a large topic by itself, mostly unexplored (for other areas in Eastern Europe, see, e.g., Gal and Kligman 2000; Pine 2002; Kligman and Verdery 2011, especially 301-307) However, my understanding is that in the Carpathian area

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AGENCY AND PATRIARCHY 187

the traditional subsistence lifestyle in villages has been practiced, with certain changes, since pre-Soviet times, and the family struc- ture and corresponding attitudes traditionally associated with this lifestyle have largely continued until now. Generally, gender atti- tudes can linger for at least one generation even when the lifestyle has radically changed (Alesina, Giuliano and Nunn 2013).

7 I also disregard verbs under negation, in questions, or in the sub- junctive mood and/or imperative, since they do not refl ect actual actions. In addition to fi nite verbs, I include verbs in infi nitives into the count if they denote real, not potential action (e.g. the phrase “she started to scream” counts as containing two verbs,

“start” and “scream,” while “he wanted to shoot him” contains one verb, “want”). I also had to exclude all the verbs in the direct speech of characters from the count. Finally, the verbs in the orientations of stories, especially the ones in the imperfective aspect, denoting habitual actions in the past prior to the beginning of the narrated events, are also excluded from the count.

8 See Toolan (2007). 9 Cf. Levorato (2003:60); Halliday and Matthiessen (2004:251). 10 This article has developed as an offshoot of a larger folklore research

project on Carpathian werewolf stories that Kira Sadoja and I are conducting. The project is based on excerpts from interviews and free conversations on the topics of traditional stories and beliefs car- ried out in Carpathian villages between 1987 and 2018. Together and separately, Sadoja and I recorded a number of werewolf stories in villages in Ukraine both north and south of the Carpathian ridge; the overall estimated number of stories is over forty items of various length and levels of detail. The material from Novoselycja has been recorded, transcribed, and analyzed by myself, both for this article and for the broader project.

11 Levorato also notices the lack of verbs denoting mental actions in the characteristics of the wolf in literary versions of Red Riding Cap, and interprets it: “Since the lack of mental processes amounts to a denial of one’s own identity, this is a sign of the wolf’s inferiority, despite his physical superiority” (Levorato 2003:90). However, in the Car- pathian culture, in its specifi c attitude toward magic and its bearers, the mental opaqueness of the werewolf signals the distancing of the speaker from the magic in the werewolf character to a larger extent than the wish to create suspense, which is the main and only goal in a literary version.

12 The text of the story with English translation is published in Bou- dovskaia 2018:9-11.

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188 ELENA BOUDOVSKAIA

13 This case seems different from a teller telling a “cryptic” version of a tale and being “unwilling to commit publicly to a particular interpre- tation” (Mathews 2005:120).

14 In our larger research, Sadoja and I found another story of this type, from a different village. In this version, there were two males co- telling the story and each of them mentions the woman only once, their main attention being on the male character’s actions.

15 Hedging and laughter are pre-emptive remedial actions that speak- ers “often do before they have performed any self-infl icted face dam- age out of fear of not coming up to scratch.” (Partington 2006:97). L aughter signals “signals a speaker’s awareness of his or her own gaffe and acts as a prelude to some excuse or account paving the way for a return to normality” (Partington 2006:92). See also Goffman 1981 and Brown and Levinson 1987:116.

16 That appearance of exactly these emotions in narrative might be a universal corroborated by the ontogenesis of emotions in children’s narrative. Quinn cites research showing that fear and anger were also the fi rst two emotions appearing in a narrative of American four-year old children (Quinn 2011a:272).

17 Cf. Quinn (2005:13) about Skinner’s Nepalese informants talking about painful sides of marriage with collectively composed songs of hardship, and Mathews’ Oaxacan interviewees, with the help of La Llorona morality tale.

18 It turned out there was not enough material for conclusions about emotional agency.

19 See, for example, Levorato (2003:68): “Grandmother appears abso- lutely helpless, as she only initiates three processes, none of which is a material process:”

20 Though I only analyzed here the stories recorded in one Carpatho- Rusyn village, I have also looked at the types of agency in were- wolf stories from other Carpathian locations included in Hnatiuk 1904:175-177. The distribution of the agency types seems to be very similar to the stories presented here. It would be interesting to examine other recordings and literary versions of Carpathian werewolf stories recorded from, and by, men and women. Another promising direction for future research would be to compare the agency in Carpathian werewolf stories to other stories of marriage to a supernatural spouse.

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AGENCY AND PATRIARCHY 189

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