The Hangmans Beautiful
Daughter: An Introduction
   his novel did not begin with a thread of plot, as had the other books I had written. The first stirrings
of The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter were a series of images that bobbed up out
of my subconscious, seemingly unconnected, and yet somehow necessary to the story.
When I began trying to make sense of this creative stew, I went to talk about the images with a friend who is a professor of folklore.
"I see a woman who is pregnant," I said. "I don't know who she is, though.
And an old woman who is weaving, and who know things. And a beautiful young girl
who has lost her family in a tragedy--and yet one of the dead still speaks to
her. And there is a river, so polluted that it seems dead as well..."
As we talked, trying to find a common link between these fragments, she said, "This is all about liminality, you know."
 The anthropologist Victor Turner described liminality as a state betwixt and between one thing and another, a time and a place in which the ordinary rules do not apply. The passage above is my rendering of Turner's philosophy.
I realized that I wanted my novel to explore the liminial state between life
and death. How many ways can one be neither dead nor alive? There is the groundhog
who hibernates in a netherworld of unconsciousness; the ghost who is neither
in this world nor the next; the old woman who talks to spirits, and is herself
caught between the realms; the celebrity who retires, but ceases to exist for
her fans; and the river that still flows but is dead with toxic waste.... Over
and over the image of people and things caught between death and life wove itself
into the narrative of the book.
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| Sharyn McCrumb's daugher holding the quilt created
for The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter |
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Finally I realized that Appalachia itself is a liminal state: it is a border
land, caught between the placid east coast and the wholesome heartland to the
west--but in between are the wild and mysterious mountains, where there might
still be cougars, and gold mines, and moonshiners, and ghosts--and all the magic
that has been civilized away from most of the world. I wanted to captur that
spirit of mists and memory.
I also wanted to issue a warning: That no place is really very far from civilization anymore. The river that flows into the mountains from the east brings death with it...and fifty years ago every chestnut tree in America died because someone left a door open in New York City.
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