Janet L. Langlois

The Belle Isle Bridge Incident: Legend Dialectic and Semiotic System in the 1943 Detroit Race Riots

ALTHOUGH TAMARA is one of those cities Italo Calvino encounters in the fabled East of Marco Polos 14th century, and Detroit is its antithesis in almost every way, his proposition linking city, sign and discourse connects them. The question, shared by many anthropologists, folklorists, literary critics, semioticians and sociologists, of whether or not every culture or every era has characteristic communicative forms, has been pulled into a circumscribed urban space in the constricted time span of a visit. What is the citys discourse? How does it name itself?

Otherwise Destined for Eloise: Dread, Contentment, and the Public Alternative to Private ‘Relief’ in Old Age

The horror of the poorhouse “cast a wide shadow” in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s. Almost everyone was afraid of ending his or her life in an institution that was ostensibly designed for public relief, but which occasioned fear since colonial times, never more so than in the beginning of the Great Depression. We build a case that the specter of the Wayne County, Michigan poorhouse, popularly known as “Eloise,” influenced Luella Hannan Memorial Home (LHMH) administrative decisions and the life courses of its aged applicants and clients, primarily women, in a number of crucial ways that relate to broader national issues concerning aging.

Introduction: Emerging Legends in Contemporary Society

This JAF special issue is based on a double forum, “Present State and Future of the Contemporary Legend and its Research,” held at the 2002 annual meetings of the American Folklore Society in Rochester, New York. The forum, chaired by Linda Dégh, Distinguished Professor Emerita, Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology at Indiana University, featured fourteen speakers (not “twelve disciples” as the folklore of this forum has since asserted!) who were asked to participate because we had been, as Dégh reminded us, among “the first” to work with her on legend study. We had all been graduate students who had taken a seminar with Dégh at some point in what we might fondly call the “Golden Age” of legend study at Indiana in the 1960s through the 1980s. Some of us had served as editorial assistants on the journal Indiana Folklore, founded by Dégh in 1968 for the publication of field research data and critical discussion of the genre that ran until 1984, and all of us had pursued legend research individually in one way or another over the intervening years as academic folklorists.1 On that October day in the fall of 2002, we came together in a mood that was both somber and joyful. Five weeks before, Americans had observed the first anniversary of the attacks on September 11, 2001. Because the previous year’s AFS meetings in Anchorage, Alaska, had been disrupted by the attacks, those of us involved in the forum were especially happy to see each other and to celebrate the publication of Dégh’s magnum opus, Legend and Belief: Dialectics of a Genre (2001), an important synthesis of years of ground-breaking scholarship that would be the springboard for our presentations that day and would receive the University of Chicago Folklore Prize for that year. In deciding to put together the special issue, we coeditors shared a double goal with the other three contributors who developed articles from their forum discussions. First, we wished to honor Dégh, whose legend scholarship has fused European and American approaches to narrative analysis in ways that have influenced, and will continue to influence, our own research. Second, we wished to do her the higher honor of moving in other directions as well that reflect both the diversity of our own research interests and the scholarship of others in the field. We agree with her that legend study, like the legend itself, is a dynamic, evolving process.

Belle Gunness, the Lady Bluebeard: Symbolic Inversion in Verbal Art and American Culture

In Women Who Kill, Ann Jones notes how carnival blossomed in the tracks of turn-of-the-century mass murderess Belle Gunness of LaPorte, Indiana (1859-1908?).1 The disinterment of the decomposed bodies of the men who had answered the immigrant farm womans matrimonial advertisements and were now buried in her farmyard became a tourist attraction in the spring of 1908. Excursion trains from Indianapolis and Chicago brought sightseers with picnic lunches to join the crowds of local residents who had walked from town or from surrounding farms to watch the excavations. Food vendors, hawkers of picture postcards, and sellers of the paperback thriller The Mrs. Gunness Mystery: A Thrilling Tale