ABSTRACT
Toni Morrison, Eilis Ni Dhuibhne, Zora Neale Hurston, and Mary Lavin have characters who fall in the categories of otherworldly or wise folk women, and each of the four address, through these characters, volatile questions of reproduction and religion. This chapter examines how their otherworldly women help them indirectly address these subjects. The indirection of the folkloric vision woman the watery borderland of the stream, with its Freudian "tunnel of foliage", enables Ni Dhuibhne to introduce volatile issues dealing with reproduction to a mixed audience. The folk mermaid may belong to the elevated end of the scale, as an otherworldly being, but the pub Mermaid brings the role back to the middle ground of the day-to-day working world, and, perhaps, a little lower, owing to the nature of how she keeps her job. All the folk women from the watery end of the Otherworld work against binaries that set women at extremes.
