Pauline Greenhill has carved a niche from studying cultural processes that tend to lie at the margins of what folklorists and, to an even greater extent, the practitioners themselves would call “folklore.” In True Poetry: Traditional and Popular Verse in Ontario (1989), she focuses on local specially-composed verse in community newspapers and similar ephemeral media, rather than on a ballad or monologue tradition. Ethnicity in the Mainstream (1994) examines English-Canadians as an ethnic group, a perspective that initially startles those who—consciously or not—equate ethnicity with alterity. So as one approaches Make the Night Hideous, one expects a more conventional read, given how charivari—the rowdy and disruptive night visit to a newlyweds’ home to express community disapproval of an “unconventional” marriage, ending in either a payment or some other display of hospitality by the visited—has long been part of folklore scholarship. And indeed, much of the content, illuminating though it might be, adds to the store of examples from which future charivari scholars may draw without providing anything breathtakingly new.
What is new, and what makes this a significant work, is Greenhill’s methodology. As her subtitle suggests, the case studies are in the distant past: the specifics of only one of her examples exist in any form of oral tradition. She has little recourse but to rely on archival sources, court records, and newspaper accounts. (This inverts the narrative of her research, of course: she begins with archival searches to find suitable case studies, as they are not otherwise presented to her.) Relying on the historical record raises the question: what makes it into the historical record? The contemporary ambivalence about and hostility toward charivari meant that it was not “collected” as a cherished practice: one of Greenhill’s approaches is that she “[knows] well that a traditional practice that wasn’t seen as folklore was a healthy, active one” (15, emphasis in original) and that “it’s almost axiomatic that whatever is popularly understood as folkloric is also moribund” (29). If they were not deliberately sought out by folklorists of the time, how do reasonably quotidian events break through their ordinariness and become marked in some way, particularly when the activity is something one hopes, through a policy of studiously ignoring it, would just go away? Her answer is that it is precisely the exceptional occurrence that makes it into the record. Three of her four studies were accessible through court records: two of these were extensively covered in the newspapers of the time.
Her first, from Ottawa in 1881, ended in the death of the groom, with four young men brought up on murder charges. At trial they were found not guilty: despite its condemnation as “wanton malice” and “a disgrace to our civilization” by the newspapers of the day, and woven through with temperance arguments and class-based constructions of innate criminality, the jury was not convinced that charivari itself was an unacceptable practice. Indeed, the victim’s unwillingness to enter into the spirit of the event was seen as the cause of his own demise, so that the accused were not even charged with manslaughter. For the second, from 1909 Brookdale, Manitoba, one of the charivariers died from a gunshot wound, and the groom was accused of manslaughter, charges that never made it past the grand jury. The right to defend one’s home when threatened, even within the context of a traditional merriment, was assured and confirmed. The rhetoric against charivari in the newspapers was less polemic than in the Ottawa case, in part stemming from not wishing to blame the victim for his own demise by virtue of his willful participation.
The third case, from 1917 in Springfield, Nova Scotia, is perhaps the most fascinating of the four, as the trial was brought forward not solely on the basis of the actions of the charivariers (breaching the peace, unlawful assembly, the firing of weapons within town limits) but on what those actions connote, namely a public accusation of inappropriate behavior. The plaintiff, Irene Hayden—a young, married woman whose husband was fighting in the First World War—was returning from visiting her father-in-law in the nearby community of New Germany, having been driven there and back by her neighbor, a married man thirty years her senior and the local temperance officer, when they were confronted by six men of the community, ranging in age from twenty to sixty. The message of the charivari was clear: that this couple was engaged in illicit behavior and should be publicly shamed. Hayden sued for defamation, as being the subject of a “saluting” (the emic term for charivari) was by its very nature damaging to one’s reputation. The ensuing trial and subsequent appeal hinged both on whether a performance can qualify as an act of defamation if it is neither textual (libel) nor verbal (slander), and on whether there was indeed any damage to Hayden’s reputation or whether her reputation was already damaged. The former is of interest to the folklorist and the ambiguous complementarity of folk law and official judicial systems, while the latter is a harrowing account of what in twenty-first century parlance would be called slut-shaming and victim-blaming. Hayden was successful in her cases but not without the majority of justices making a point of holding her partially responsible.
In the fourth case, from Avonlea, Saskatchewan, Greenhill provides a bit of an anomaly: three photographs labeled as charivari where the celebrants were all adolescents and children and which took place in the day time. Apart from the photos themselves there is no other evidence, as there was no breach to bring it to the attention of the written record, nor was it significant enough to have even registered in community memory. Consequently, Greenhill seeks to locate it in the context of the specifics of what was known of the couple and the overall (positive) connotation of charivari in central Saskatchewan. Rather than an exercise in social control and rebuke, by this time and in this self-reflectively rural community, it was seen as a form expressing welcome and hospitality. At worst, it was a mild annoyance when pranks resulted in extra chores to restore the homestead to rights, but overall it was practiced precisely because it was part of a cluster of expressive performances which underscored the tight social bonds of the small town in explicit distinction from the urban. A respected couple was charivaried on their wedding day, during the daytime, by adolescents and not by peers, in part because this was September of 1940 and so many of their peers would have been at war, and in part because, despite (and maybe because of) this palpable absence in the community, charivari was still how one honored a new couple.
Greenhill concludes with a summary of the charivari as contemporarily understood by academics, by community members where it is no longer practiced, and by those from communities where it is still a lived performance. Make the Night Hideous is published in the Canadian Social History Series of the University of Toronto Press, and concessions to that audience include introducing aspects of “what the folklorist does” that would be well-trodden territory to the readers of this review, yet Greenhill does it well and demonstrates an advocacy for the discipline to this new(-ish) audience. Moreover, the context grounds this study in the particularities (peculiarities?) of the English diaspora intersecting with the various settings—urban, rural, and burgeoning suburban; ethnically diverse and strikingly homogeneous—that Canada provides, but with Greenhill all the while setting the scene and adducing patterns and insights that would be applicable elsewhere. This is a contribution to the study of custom that would work as a supplementary text in upper-level undergraduate or graduate-level courses, or in courses about folk law and the negotiation of custom and the state.
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[Review length: 1292 words • Review posted on December 5, 2017]