Carey Cook
Kingwood, Texas
April 11, 2012
Folklore Type: Folk Belief
Informant Bio: Carey Cook is married to my cousin, Debbie Richter Cook. He is half American and half Australian. He is very sarcastic and funny.
Context: I had flown home for Spring Break the evening before we drove almost an hour to my Aunt Linda and Uncle Frank’s to see Carey, Debbie, and their new baby Ashley. As Ashley was amusing herself with some suspended toys, I asked Debbie what some of the things she got told when she was pregnant were. Carey chimed in, in the middle.
Item: If you start to break out it’s cause she is robbing you of your beauty.
Informant Analysis: He laughed, and said I dunno (shoulder shrug).
Analysis: Clearly, Carey did not pay much mind to his comment other than the fact that he thinks it is funny. Especially because he knows our family is notorious for horrible acne which my cousin is not exempt from. What underlies this possible folk belief or saying is that there are stories where mothers or step-mothers are angry because their beauty is fading as their daughters’ is growing. This is the process known as aging, but some women do not want to accept that. So the answer is that their daughter must be stealing their beauty for themselves. This folk belief is actually a reflection of women’s struggle to accept how they look as they age.
Annotation: There is a book called Beauty by Nancy Butcher where the main character’s mother, the queen, is so obsessed with being the most beautiful she rounds up all of the young girls in the land including her daughter and puts them in an academy where the teachers give them drugs so they lose their minds and learn that ugliness is beauty. The mother also uses potions and other concoctions to maintain her youth and beauty. In the end the main character confronts her mother and with some bad mixing of poisons and concoctions the mother dies, and it is hinted her beauty gets transferred to her daughter.
Alex Williams
Los Angeles, California
University of Southern California
ANTH 333m Spring 2012