Female Narrators, Protagonists, and Villains of the American Mountain Märchen.

Although collectors, publishers, and scholars of American Märchen have devoted most of their attention to male narrators and a male hero named Jack, evidence from oral narrative tradition affirms that in fact it was women who dominated the oral Märchen-telling traditions of the Appalachian and Ozark mountains, where the English-language Märchen is best known. Relying principally on tales collected by Vance Randolph in the Ozarks between 1920 and 1957 and those told in an eastern Kentucky family between 1949 and 2004, this study centers on three observations. First, female and male mountain narrators differ in their approaches to Märchen: women tend to emphasize their legendary qualities while men exploit their potential for humor. Second, the Märchen most commonly told by both men and women in the American mountains (ATU 326 and ATU 366) blur the boundaries between legend and Märchen, and they focus upon female domestic space. Third, the significant differences in the ways that women and men perform these popular tales suggest that women often tell them to critique male violence and to call attention to the enormous responsibilities faced by women when left to run mountain households by themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]