Poison dress

The tale known as "The Poison Dress", or "Embalmed Alive"[1] features a dress that has in some way been poisoned. This is a recurring theme throughout legends and folk tales of various cultures, including ancient Greece, Mughal India, and the United States. Although there is no evidence suggesting that the American urban legends are directly linked to the classical tales, they share several common motifs.[2]

Contents

Greek mythology

Main articles: Medea and Shirt of Nessus

In Greek mythology, when Jason left the sorceress Medea to marry Glauce, King Creon's daughter, Medea took her revenge by sending Glauce a poison dress and a golden coronet, also dipped in poison. This resulted in the death of the princess and, subsequently, the king, when he tried to save her.

The Shirt of Nessus is the shirt smeared with the poisoned blood of the centaur Nessus, which was given to Hercules by Hercules' wife, Deianira. Deianira had been tricked by Nessus into believing that his blood would ensure that Hercules would remain faithful. According to Sophocles' tragedy The Women of Trachis, Hercules began to perspire when he donned the shirt, which soon clung to his flesh, corroding it. He eventually threw himself onto a pyre on Mount Oeta in extreme agony and was burnt to death.[3]

Indian folklore

Numerous tales of poison khilats (robes of honour) have been recorded in historical, folkloric, and medical texts of British Indianists.[2][4] Gifts of clothing were common in major life-cycle rituals in pre-industrial India, and these stories revolve around fears of betrayal, inspired by ancient custom of giving khilats to friends and enemies as demonstrations of a social relationship or a political alliance.[2]

In 1870, Norman Chevers, M.D., a Surgeon-Major to the Bengal Medical Service, authored Manual of Medical Jurisprudence for India, describing unusual crimes involving poisons native to India. The book included three cases of poison khilat death, attributing the cause of one of the deaths to lethal vesicants impregnating fabric of the robe and entering victim's sweat pores.[5]

Lieutenant-Colonel James Tod wrote on the same case providing more detail. In the late 17th century, Mughal emperor Aurangzeb sent his rival Jaswant Singh to war in Afghanistan, and summoned Jaswant's son, Prithi Singh, to attend his court. During the meeting, Prithi's defiant attitude convinced Aurangzeb that he needed to be eliminated. Aurangzeb gave him "a splendid dress" in the guise of friendship, which Prithi put on and then left the court. He was taken ill soon after reaching his quarters, and died in utmost agony.[4] However, when Aurangzeb tried to murder his own son Prince Akbar in the same way, the prince, knowing his father too well, made an excuse to delay putting it on and ordered a slave try it on first, averting the unpleasant death.[2]

In Annals and antiquities of Rajasthan, James Tod mentions another folk story that describes how the "Queen of Ganore" killed Dost Mohammad Khan, Nawab of Bhopal with a poison dress, when he asked her to marry her.[6][7]

American urban legends

The theme of the poison dress appears in several American urban legends, which were recorded in folklore collections and journal articles in the 1940s and 1950s.[1] Folklorist Stith Thompson noted the classical prototype in these stories, "Shirt of Nessus", and assigned Motif D1402.5, "Magic shirt burns wearer up". Jan Harold Brunvand provides the summary of one of the stories:

“ Girl wears new formal gown to dance. Several times during the evening she feels faint, has escort take her outside for fresh air. Finally she becomes really ill, dies in the restroom. Investigation reveals that the dress has been the cause of her death. It had been used as the funeral dress for a young girl; it had been removed from the corpse before burial and returned to the store. The formaldehyde which the dress has absorbed from the corpse enters the pores of the dancing girl.[1] ”

Folklorist Ernest Baughman speculated that the story might have been used as adverse publicity to discredit a well-known store, since several variants of the story specifically mention the name of the store at which the dress was supposedly purchased.[1] The legend continued to be told long after its initial popularity, with "embalming fluid" sometimes replacing the formaldehyde mentioned in the earlier version.[1] This urban legend was dramatized in the episode "'Til Death Do We Part," from the crime-scene drama, CSI: NY.

Another American folklore related to the poison-dress theme is the story of blankets contaminated with smallpox, which were given by colonists to native Americans.[8]

References

  1. ^ a b c d e Brunvand, Jan Harold (2002). Encyclopedia of Urban Legends. W. W. Norton & Company. pp. 322. ISBN 0393323587. 
  2. ^ a b c d Bennett, Gillian (2005). Bodies: Sex, Violence, Disease, and Death in Contemporary Legend. University Press of Mississippi. pp. 68–71. ISBN 1578067898. 
  3. ^ Sophocles; Robert M. Torrance (translator) (1966). "Women of Trachis". Temple University. http://www.stoa.org/diotima/anthology/soph_trach.shtml. Retrieved 2008-10-21. 
  4. ^ a b c Mayor, Adrienne; Michelle Maskiell (2001). "Killer Khilats, Part 2: Imperial Collecting of Poison Dress Legends in India". Folklore. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2386/is_2_112/ai_79548470/pg_1?tag=artBody;col1. Retrieved 2008-10-21. 
  5. ^ Chevers, Norman (1870). A Manual of Medical Jurisprudence for India. London: Thacker. 
  6. ^ James Tod (2001) [1829]. Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan (Volume 1) (2 ed.). Asian Educational Services. p. 536-538. ISBN 9788120612891. 
  7. ^ Gillian Bennett (2009). Bodies: Sex, Violence, Disease, and Death in Contemporary Legend. University Press of Mississippi. pp. 70-71. ISBN 9781604732450. 
  8. ^ Mayor, Adrienne (1995). "The Nessus Shirt in the New World: Smallpox Blankets in History and Legend". Journal of American Folklore 108 (427): p. 54–77. doi:10.2307/541734. JSTOR 541734.