The Jewish Daughter

The Jewish Daughter by George Warthon Edwards

While I was reading Morrissey’s The Jew’s Daughter I felt that this story seemed never being advancing. The monotonous operation of clicking on a blue word looked like a very interesting device for the text. However, after several clicks, multiple times, the eyes get tired. Perhaps it was just my frustration as a reader. Sometimes, when I clicked on a blue word, the page apparently did not change much; sometimes it actually did not change much. There is one thing that needs to be said, the composition of this novel sometimes falls in a repetition of the same thing with different arrangement, and sometimes the scenario turns repetitive. However there is certain turning point that occurs in the most unpredictable ways. Among the monotony of an amorphous  story, the game of sentences that appear and  disappear,that flashes, on and off, gives you fragmentary pictures of scenes tha turn from blurry to crystalline with the turn of a page but suddenly comes back to a blurriness mode.



The story is very amorphous, as its description says “The Jew's Daughter is an interactive, non-linear, multi-valent narrative, a storyspace that is unstable but nonetheless remains organically intact, progressively weaving itself together by wayof subtle transformations on a single virtual page.” I feel that the Jew’s Daughter don’t have a place or time. For quite a moment, I found it disturbing,chaotic,atemporal, nonspatial and totally confusing. However it had also a sound in some bombastic words or set of words that the author throws in the middle of the confusion.


“Her hair is like southwestern wheat”

“A morning that asks too much”

“Somnambulistic murky sinking speech”

The fascist and the Irish-Jew

"Champagne eyes”

“The dolphinose plane”

“Bulbous dresses”

“Spidery socks”


As the pages were going, I was trying to understand what was going on. Trying to identify the narrator(s), I keep going deeper and deeper in the reading. There was not a single clue of narrator’s identity, what kind of diegesis was behind it. It was difficult to know if the narrator was a male or female. Sometimes it is difficult to grasp who the interaction is with.

Trying to understand what was behind this confusing text, I started researching about the first and only element that seemed to me crystal clear, without hesitation of any kind about its straight-forward meaning, it was the title. The Jew’s Daughter is a traditional British folkloric ballad also known as Sir Hugh. This ballad tells the story of a boy that was playing ball among with 19 other fellows, the ball accidentally went into a Castle that happened to be owned by a Jew who had a daughter. The daughter came out, ask one of the boys to come down to the castle for the ball, he replies that he can’t do it without his other 19 mates. She baits the child with a fruit and a gold ring. The boy gets into the castle’s garden, sits on a throne and the Jew’s Daughter stabs him right into the heart.

Sir Hugh or The Jew's Daughter 

155[U].1 You toss your ball so high,
                You toss your ball so low,
                You toss your ball into the Jew’s garden,
                Where the pretty flowers grow.

155[U.2]         Out came one of the Jew’s daughters,
                 Dressed all in green:
                 ‘Come hither, pretty little dear,
                 And fetch your ball again.’

155[U.3]         She showed him a rosy-cheeked apple,
                 She showed him a gay gold ring,
                 She showed him a cherry as red as blood,
                 And that enticed him in.

155[U.4]         She set him in a golden chair,
                 She gave him kisses sweet,
                 She threw him down a darksome well,
                 More than fifty feet deep.


There are many referent points between the story and the ballad. Morrissey talks about a white castle “Frigid nights when mists ascended the white castle, diffusing the white horn-glow of the invisible tower”.  We have a white castle but we also have  also a “house that bled”, a woman decapitated, a scene  at a bar, someone playing some old record of his/her aunt, a woman that leaves a room, in one instance goes to the bathroom; in the other one, goes to her mid-   June flight. There is romance, a story of two. There is a man and a woman in a tormented relationship. The woman is always rejecting the man but somehow cannot push him away completely.


“you can starve a parasite but first, it has to starve you”


After you keep reading the story turns hysterical and more chaotic. As the reading advances, the presence of dead seems more evident; words dead, blood and sacrifice appear more often. I could place this tormented, chaotic, intricate romance in an analogy to the dialogue between the Jew’s Daughter and the sacrificed child of the ballad. The tension in both scenarios seems to be similar.


Perhaps one of the most remarkable things about Morrissey’s work and the ballad is the constant repetition of words and sentences. It changes slowly with the shift of a word. One example of this in the ballad is:


155E.15          She cries, Bonnie Sir Hugh, O pretty Sir Hugh,
                 I pray you speak to me!
                 If you speak to any body in this world,
                 I pray you speak to me.


Just as in Morrissey’s work, the ballad has a game of words swirling and twisting the reality and the whole body of the text with each change.



155E.3     Out then came the Jew’s daughter:
                 ‘Will ye come in and dine?’
                 ‘I winna come in, and I canna come in,
                 Till I get that ball of mine.

155E.4    ‘Throw down that ball to me, maiden,
                 Throw down the ball to me!’
                 ‘I winna throw down your ball, Sir Hugh,
                 Till ye come up to me.’

155E.5    She pu’d the apple frae the tree,
                 It was baith red and green;
                 She gave it unto little Sir Hugh,
                 With that his heart did win.

155E.6    She wiled him into ae chamber,
                 She wiled him into twa,
                 She wiled him into the third chamber,
                 And that was warst o’t a’.

155E.7    She took out a little penknife,
                 Hung low down by her spare,
                 She twined this young thing o his life,
                 And a word he neer spak mair.

155E.8    And first came out the thick, thick blood,
                 And syne came out the thin,
                 And syne came out the bonnie heart’s blood,
                 There was nae mair within.

The final correlation I found is the pamphlet within the text on page 302


Murder Victim’s
Mother
Speaks out against the
Death Penalty



According to the folk story, the murder child’s mother went to the Jew’s daughtercastle asking for him. Somehow the child contacts his mother and asks her to prepare his funeral.

155[T.6]        ‘Go home, go home, my mother dear,
                 And prepare my winding sheet,
                 For tomorrow morning before eight o’clock
                 You with my body shall meet.

155[T.7]        ‘And lay my Prayer-Book at my head,
                 And my grammar at my feet,
                 That all the little schoolfellows as they pass by
                 May read them for my sake.’


If there is not internationalism between these two stories, then the goddesses that spin the wheel of fortune and the moirés that knit everyone’s fate manufacture a great peace of coincidence.


The Jew’s Daughter is a very confusing story, it is heavy to read and the characters are somehow difficult to distinguish. It has many bombastic words that give  an idea of what’s going on. The end seems to be a dead end, perhaps it’s open,   and perhaps it is the same circular story without much narrative tension but witha visual distraction. The story is blurry, fragmentary and confusing; however thevisual aspect of paragraph shifting makes it fluid. At certain point you may get tired of reading the same over and over, however the change of layers is evident and even entertaining with the pass of the pages, at the end you just want to get there, to the end. This a visually challenging work with some literary elements probably linked to a folkloric ballad. This is another experiment on this world of electronic literature.