Fairies of New England: The Little People of the Hills and Forests

I recently came across a passage in the travel diary of Fr. Jacques Marquette (the first European missionary to travel down the Mississippi River), in which he describes how “men” who lived as women among the Illinois people of the seventeenth century occupied a spiritually elevated position in the community. Here’s the passage:

As you can see, Fr. Jacques claimed that members of the Illinois tribe who lived as women (being born biologically male) would pass for “manitous” or “spirits.” The word manitou has a wide range of meanings in Native American religion. It can be used when speaking about the Great Spirit or God, a life-force pervading nature, or individual spirits associated with natural features of the landscape. All these manitous were an object of reverence for the Native peoples, and although not exactly “fairies,” they could be nature spirits.

This inevitably raises the question: What is it about living as a woman that gave some people special access to the spiritual realm and caused them to become identified with spirits?

Is spirituality always feminine?

My first thought is that spirituality is the unseen, active force behind nature, giving life and being to all things. Masculinity, on the other hand, is the always-seen, active principle of human society, associated with activities such as building, hunting, and waging war. When the spiritual enters human life, it cannot take a masculine appearance because masculinity is always the outward expression of human life rather than its spiritual core. Think, for example, of Mary of Bethany, whose silence and passivity (in opposition to her sister’s activity) is held up as an exemplar of spirituality in the Gospel of Luke. One may also think of Jesus’s words, “There are eunuchs who have castrated themselves for the kingdom of heaven.”

If spirituality and femininity enjoy a special connection in human life, people in society who become identified with spirits (or fairies) must therefore partake in some kind of feminine manifestation (it’s ironic that Fr. Jacques, a man for whom spirituality was a vocation, was unable to recognize this, seeing femininity itself as “demeaning.” This is despite the fact that Jesus himself uses a metaphor of castration to speak about human spirituality and is sometimes even depicted in a feminized light himself, probably for the same reason).

The Illinois people seem to have taken this principle to its logical conclusion, allowing spiritually elevated individuals to live fully as women. The fact that these individuals renounced masculine expression only served to strengthen the special nature of their femininity, i.e., the fact that it was a sign of their participation in the spiritual, of being manitous.

Queer Elves

In terms of comparative folklore, a similar dynamic can be seen in the relationship between shamans of the Anglo-Saxon era in Great Britain and the elves with whom they may have consorted (see Alaric Hall’s fantastic Elves in Anglo-Saxon England).

Elves, according to Hall, were considered to be male, but writers described their maleness using feminine terms, especially when it came to their shining beauty. “Feminine” forms of magic such as divination and fascination arose from the powers of the elfin world. Hall speculated that men who drew their magic from the elves may have become identified with these magical beings (similar to a monk who, in his practice of celibacy, indirectly identified with genderless angels).

Hall further speculated that shamans may have dressed as women to imitate Odin who dressed as a woman in order to learn the magic of fascination. Are Illinois “two-spirit” people and Anglo-Saxon shamans comparable phenomena?

Fairies and Faeries

I can’t help coming back to the use of the word fairy as a homophobic slur. The Radical Faeries, a spiritual empowerment movement among gay men in the United States, have, of course, reappropriated this word, thereby underlining the connection between genderqueer identity and the world of the spirit. But what is it about this word in particular that lends itself to gender nonconforming people? For most people, it’s far from a given that fairies are personifications of queerness (possibly a result of heteronormative Victorian depictions of fairies), but to me it seems that’s exactly what they can be. Considering the fact that transformation is often central to stories about fairies, this should come as no surprise.

I see some work has been done on transgender fairies of the Early Modern Era (Ariel, for example, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, has male pronouns but has often been envisaged in a female form), but are there other instances of transgender or gender-nonconforming fairies from folklore? Or does anyone know of other individuals who’ve related to fairies in ways that call the naturalness of gender into question?

Fairy as a slur

Historian Rictor Norton claimed that the use of the word fairy to describe a gay man first appeared in the 1870s and was widespread by the 1890s. Other than that, we know little about the slur’s development. The dates, of course, place it firmly in the Victorian era, which means we probably ought to examine Victorian fairies if we want to know what the word implied about how people saw gay men.

My first thought is that the word fairy, when applied to a man, must have carried with it an implication of effeminacy. However, this is actually far from obvious: did the Victorians always associate fairies with femininity? Many Victorian depictions of Oberon, the fairy king of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, portray him as perfectly masculine. Furthermore, most male fairies shown in paintings inspired by Shakespeare’s play are hardly effeminate. Of course, Victorian painters may have had a rather different impression of fairies than the people who originated the slur, but the slur’s origin is so shrouded in mystery, we just don’t know whose understanding of fairies it reflected.

We do know the Victorians loved to paint fairies, and based on the paintings featured in the blog post here, it looks to me as if they painted them nude, dancing, gesturing outlandishly, and possibly engaged in promiscuous sex (there’s a lot of embracing, anyway—mainly heterosexual).

So my question for any experts on Victorian culture out there: should we assume that the word fairy—as a Victorian-era slur—mainly referred to effeminacy, or did it have other, more complicated associations, including, presumably, behavior that was considered outlandish or non-normative, especially when it had to do with bodily enjoyment?

A more-than-human desire

In Evans-Wentz’s The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries, we find the example of a fairy whose inordinate desire cannot be satisfied by normal human means. The story concerns a Scotsman called Lachlann who lies every night with a fairy woman until his attempts to satisfy her demands leave him feeling exhausted. Beginning to fear her, he moves to Nova Scotia but finds she’s followed him there.

While engaged in a heterosexual relationship of sorts, the fairy appears queer because she belongs to a different race of beings and exhibits a more-than-human desire. As this desire shows itself through a series of nightly demands, her lover becomes exhausted, weakened, and afraid, almost as if he’s the victim of a type of vampire. The most important characteristic, then, of this fairy-vampire-woman is a desire experienced as inimical because it overflows normal human exchange. One sees a similar dynamic played out in humans who attempt to dance with the fairies and find themselves exhausted but unable to stop: fairy desire always vanquishes human attempts to satisfy it.

What does this say about the relationship between queerness and fairies?

Based on the Lachlann narrative, one may draw two conclusions, which really mean the same thing: 1) fairies can never be properly integrated into “normal” human relations, and 2) humans drawn into the world of fairy are pushed beyond their human nature. If fairies are an embodiment of queerness, as I seem to suggest above, this is because queers and fairies are marginal figures (not properly integrated into human systems of exchange) while also being excessively desiring/demanding. Nevertheless, some humans do appear to have occupied the place of fairies in society, with varying degrees of integration, including those mentioned above (two-spirit members of the Illinois tribe, Anglo-Saxon shamans, Radical Faeries, Mary of Bethany, and “eunuchs” who castrate themselves for the kingdom of heaven, etc.). This leaves me with the question of how such a special status can be achieved, whether through the bestowal of a spiritual role on such individuals (signified through the renunciation of masculinity) or separation from society in a sacred space.

Proliferating demands

I’d like to point out another reading of the story of Lachlann and his fairy lover, for I find it to be a rather apt allegory for the current situation unfolding between the LGBTQ community and conservatives:

Exhausted by the demand to recognize proliferating pronouns and an ever-more-complicated acronym, conservatives and reactionaries seem to have concluded that the demand issues from an infinite desire and is therefore unnatural, inimical to their wellbeing, and worth protesting. They justify this protest by arguing that the demand has never been seen before in the history of humanity; the desire that propels the demand must be inhuman, they say, or, if possessing a human form, perhaps fairylike. Of course, they can never escape the demand itself because LGBTQ people aren’t going away and, by existing, they follow conservatives wherever they go.

Running away didn’t work for Lachlann, so what can be done to resolve this conflict? It seems to me that either the human is transformed into a fairy, thereby opening himself to infinite desire, or the fairy, giving up the politics of demand, returns to the transcendence of desire.

Read more about fairies in my book New England Fairies: A History of the Little People of the Hills and Forests.

Cover painting by August Malmström (Dancing Elves, 1866). Public domain.