Michael Goss | Letters to Ambrose Merton # 7, 1996
Satan is stylish, sexy, fashion-conscious. He likes to wear sharp suits and to dance all the latest dances – and know these are what the young ladies like, as well. He catches their eye in a Texas dance hall by rigging himself out as a handsome young man in a dashing vaquero cowboy outfit; selects as his partner the prettiest, proudest girl in the room and struts out a master-class version of the polka. She is completely captivated until she notices that his flying feet do not belong on a human being. They are the feet of a chicken. At this point the Devil vanishes (into the men’s room) leaving behind him a cloud of smoke, a sulphurous smell and his unhappy partner fainting prostrate on the floor.
This is how Jan Harold Brunvand represented “The Devil in the Dance Hall for a brief section of his The Vanishing Hitchhiker. His closing and prophetic comment on the legend was that:
“Next, I suppose, we could hear of “The Devil in a Disco” if this Hispanic tradition should enter Anglo folklore.”
Which is precisely what happened, of course. Judging from the existence of an unsigned short story in Chamber’s Edinburgh Journal for 3 July 1847, however, the Devil had stepped into Anglo folklore and out onto the dance-floor long before he considered cutting a few polka fancy steps as a Texas vaquero.
“The Stranger Of The Ball is the earliest version of the “Devil in Dance-Hall” type that I have found so far; which superficial honour aside, it impresses by virtue of its confident subversion of the expected plot. Set in a small country town on the west coast of Scotland in the “time when our respected grandmothers were young ladies”, the tale opens with those same young ladies jostling for the services of the only available hairdresser. A ball was to be held and, as the narrator explains, on such occasions it was inevitable that women should experience more anxiety over the state of their heads than about what they put on their feet.
So great was the demand that the local barber had to take on a temporary assistant This individual was a “smart, vain, ignorant young Cockney” and he soon fell foul of the story’s heroine, who much resented having to wait her turn for his attentions;
“Now Miss Bella, though an angel in beauty, was the very opposite in temper. She was proud, arrogant, and imperious…”
In addition, as the next paragraph informs us:
“She was not at any time very condescending to her inferiors in station; but on the present occasion she discharged all the vials of her pride upon the unfortunate young man, till she nearly sent him crazy, vanity and all.”
When the ball commenced, Bella’s temper did not improve for the lack of eligible dancing partners. The few present consisted of her former discarded or rejected suitors “and these, either in spleen or mortification, kept out of her way”. But when her friends plagued her with their sympathtic concern, she replied “wih a gay fierceness” that:
“I will dance tonight if my partner should be the –.”
No-one could tell how Bella meant to finish the sentence, declares the narrator… but surely we can. Here is what happend next:
“…there was a wild gleam in her eye while she spoke which frightened her audience, and they drew back with a faint scream. In drawing back, some of them nearly trod on the toes of a gentleman who had just entered the room at least no one had observed him till that instant. He was a young and handsome man, with the most exuberant curls and whiskers in the world, of a jetty blackness and contrasting strangely with the waxen colour of his cheek. The eyes of the stranger…were fixed admiringly upon the beautiful Bella; and walking straight up to her, he asked her to dance. He had not been presented to her; she did not know his name; and yet – with an obliviousness of conventional rule quite foreign to her character – she at once accepted his arm, and in another moment they were whirling together through the dance.”
The spectacle of this handsome couple – and the narrator stresses that they make up the handsomest couple in the room – excited considerable comment, most of which took the form of speculation about who the stranger was and where he came from. We cannot help but notice the dangerous departure from “conventional rule” here; Bella has shown marked favour to someone unknown to herself and to everyone else, emphasizing her lapse by continuing to dance with him when social mores warned that a young woman dancing successively with the same partner was giving him amorous encouragement. So it isn’t surprising that when Bella’s uncle made his belated appearnace, he insisted on knowing the identity of this stranger.
“‘Niece,’ said the old gentleman, ‘I shall request the pleasure of being introduced to the gentleman you have danced with.’
‘I did not catch his name,’ replied Bella; ‘the master of ceremonies will doubtless do what is necessary, unless the gentleman himself – where is he?'”
The gentleman had vanished completely, just as we – just as readers of Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, too – must have expected he would So far the plot has taken a famliar and very moral course, promising to conform with the popular mode wherein pride and vanity are reproved by a Satanic stranger in the sable but alluring guise of a handsome young man. And we are told that, thanks to Rumours way of embellishing simple facts, this is precisely how a good many of the folk presen~ at the ball interpreted events.
“.. at last it was reported and believed that Bella, in despairing of a partner, had summoned up a certain very old young gentleman to dance with her, who had come at her bidding, and at length vanished in smoke.”
The Old Gentleman has neither horns nor hooves – and certainly does not have chicken’s feet such blatantly diabolical detail would have closed off the story, making only one interpretation possible. The author does not want nor permit that to happen. Having undermined the Satanic element slightly by treating the clearest expressions of it as mere rumour or “report”, he or she proceeds to give sceptics in the audience a way out of the dilemma. Not long after the ball, ‘another wonder’ captured the attention of the small town. The Cockney barber had vanished from thc neighbourhood and prominent on a wax display bust in his temporary employer’s window was a set of jet-black curls and whiskers – an artificial hair-piece, in other words – which was “said to bear an astonishing resemblance to the decorations of the stranger at the ball”‘
Plainly enough, we are being invited to think the dancing devil was none other than the Cockney hairdresser in false wig and whiskers, bent upon avenging himself for all the insults that too-proud Bella had offered him. Of course, there is the inconvenient detail of how he could arrive at the ball and (more particularly) vansih from it without anyone registering those facts. The writer ignores such awkward questions, pretending that the real marvel is the permanent alteration wrought in Bella:
“Some old ladies…were still diposed to adhere to the supernatural theory; for how otherwise was it possible to account for the change which took place in the haughty beauty? Miss Bella became, from that day, an absolute personification of meekness and gentleness; and acquiring a perfect horror of the vanities of fashion, ever afterwards appeared in a plain crop of curls!”
In general stylistics – in refusing to endorse “the supernatural theory”, thereby injecting a certain interpretative ambiguity which weakens the exemplum-aspect of the narrative – “The Stranger Of The Ball” is well removed from being a folk-tale. That much is obvious, but not more so than the fact it is plainly based upon a folk-narrative type. Its author understands the conventions of such material and uses them to create something which is arguably more in keeping with modern (early Victorian) taste.
Narrators of traditional folk-tales were accustomed to accommodate the likelihood that the audience knew the plot of the story as well as they themselves; knew, that is, how the story would turn out and how it would be resolved, most of them having already heard it a dozen times or more. Accepting this and perhaps introducing no more than a few minor variations of his or her own, the performer met those audience expectations by providing both expected plot ond predicted ending. What we might see as a further constraint on the performer – the possibility that the narrative might predicate or canvass a belief in the supernatural – was actually not much of a constraint at all since the issue of strict credibility does not seem to have arisen. Regardless of the degree to which our ancestors “believed” in the supernatural once within the storytelling circle they could achieve temporary suspension of any scepticism they may have harboured about it with little effort, especially when guided by the narrator’s use of certain motifs associated with tales of the uncanny and magical.
But the Chambers’s Journal writer was an early Victorian writer. She may have been unhappy about the restrictions imposed by working with a standard plot whose action demanded a fixed ending, one that imposed a solitary (supernatural) reading upon the story. Equally, he or she may have felt that a relatively sophisticated audience would reject a tale too flagrantly glued to a hoary, credulity-stretching folk superstition concerning a materialized Devil, whereas it might appreciate a plot which enable them to retain a measure of scepticism. One major strength of the best Victorian ghost stories is the delicate management of the desire to believe and the desire to rationalise; their authors create a series of events which appear to lay beyond the possibility of explanation in real-world terms, yet simultaneously pretend that of course there must be some such explanation. Frequently, the success or failure of the story depends on this balance, recognizing the width of the gap between supernatural interpretation and rational exegesis.
Besides, the ostensible disadvantages inherent in working with an old, rigid plot structure can prove to be a strength. Any variation upon that plot, but especially a variation in how it is finally resolved, becomes more striking; the piece as a whole will seem more ingenious, more entertaining. The salient point here is that “The Stranger Of The Ball” was written with the assumption that readers would guess what is coming next. We are expected to pick up Bella’s ripeness for punishment, particularly when she utters the unwise promise that she will dance with the – (and here we automatically fill in the unspoken word, “Devil”). Just as certainly will be guess who the handsome mystery-man invoked by her words is meant to be. All this would only be feasible if the audience was already familiar, very familiar, with The Devil on the Dance-Floor prior to reading the story.
The ending’s divergence from expectation threatens to turn Satan in to a set of false whiskers and a Cockney joke, indicating perhaps that the writer is mocking the Dancing Devil legend – at least in part. Alternatively, this comically bathetic gesture towards rationalisation may be mocking itself and the “mystery explained” ending at the same time: as though the writer wanted to say “You’re too sophisticated to believe in the Devil aren’t you? You knew I’d come up with a rational explanation didn’t you? Well, here it is – and isn’t it feeble!”. Either way, this early Victorian short story is wholly dependent on – makes no sense without it – the older legend-type and moreover an audience which was familiar with it. All this evidence that the Devil must have been on the Dance Floor some time – and perhaps a long time – before he put in an appearance as The Stranger Of The Ball in 1847.
Note
- Jan Harold Brunvand, The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends and Their Meanings. (New York: Norton; London: Pan paperback edition, 1981). See pages 135-136 of the latter. Prof. Brunvand takes his version of “The Devil in the Dance-Hall” fromn Joe Nick Patoski’s “GGGhost Stories” in Texas Monthly (October 1978) pages 134-130. If I omit to mention here the numerous papers on this subject by Mark Glazer, it is chiefly because I suspect that any reader who is seriously interested in this topic will already be family with them. If not, see his “Continuity and Change in Legendry: Two Mexican-American Examples”, in Perspectives on Contemporary Legend: Proceedings of the Conference on Contemporary Legend Sheffield, July 1982, edited by Paul Smith (Sheffield: Centre for English Cultural Tradition and Language, University of Sheffield, 1984) pages 108-126. Similarly there is Maria Herrera-Sobek’s “The Devil in the Discotheque: A Semiotic Analysis of a Contemporary Legend”, in Monsters with Iron Teeth: Perspectives on Contemporary Legend III, edited by Gillian Bennett and Paul Smith (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1988) pages 147-157. The footnotes to this paper suggest a number of furthe references which might be followed up.