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Essay on The Burning of Bridget Cleary - by Angela Bourke
Angela Bourke in her meticulous research demonstrates the danger of assumptions. The 1895 torture and murder of Bridget Cleary in Tipperary, Ireland represents the difference in the interpretation of colonial newspapers and oral recounts of the story. Oral recounts of her disappearance attributed her disappearance to abduction by fairies, an accepted cultural way of subtly dealing with social deviances or stigmas. Newspaper accounts before and after the discovery of her body reported on the rumors spread by word of mouth and lambasted an oral tradition which was perceived to be anti-establishment and a hindrance to the logical consequences of cause and effect.
In March 1895, when a twenty-six-year-old woman called Bridget Cleary was burned to death in her own kitchen in countryside Tipperary, her body was hurriedly buried and a story make-believe to account for her fading. Her family and neighbors, using the idiom of oral legend, said the fairies of nearby Kylenagranagh Hill and a changeling a nonhuman substitute left had taken her away in her place. Some of them claimed that it was this changeling and not the real Bridget, which had been burned. (FRASER Ken)
Over the preceding days as Bridget lay sick in bed the story of fairy seizure had been taking shape. Her husband, Michael Cleary, assisted by quite a few male neighbors, had touched her with a hot poker, drenched her with urine, forced her to drink concoctions of herbs in milk, and held her over the kitchen fire-asking insistently whether she was in fact Bridget Cleary or a fairy changeling. A magisterial inquiry held ten days later was told that this treatment was part of a traditional "cure" for fairy abduction and that it had proceeded in so orderly a manner that, although some people present had found it distressing, they had done nothing to stop it......
