Over the Garden Wall as Contemporary Folklore
Over the Garden Wall has become one of my seasonal go-tos. Nothing chimes in autumn quite like it - sitting down on one of the first cold nippy autumnal evenings with a pumpkin spice cheesecake, and Patrick McHale’s classic. And I know I’m not the only one - the show has become this kind of seasonal marker for many.
So, why is it that Over the Garden Wall captures such wonderful attention. Sure, a large part of it is how visually stunning the whole thing is. It captures an essence of autumn, from falling leaves to pumpkin harvests, to the dark lost nature of the season between seasons. But I think it goes far beyond this. Autumn itself seems to call to folklore - a type of storytelling that thrives year long, and yet somehow seems always and forever situated to be heard when the leaves fall and the Otherworld seems just around the corner.
Over the Garden Wall is one of the best examples of contemporary folklore. Obviously, the entire point of Incidental Mythology here is to look at pop culture as a form of contemporary mythology. I have a PhD studying pop culture and mythology, and so of course I have many examples, and far more to come, at my disposal for this conversation. But there is something deeply folkloric about Over the Garden Wall that deserves its own focus and understanding. And so much of it is built on the idea of the in-between.
One thing that I really want to stress though is that folklore is far more than just a narrative to copy. It has a very particular function and position in society. Stories do things - they are active and alive and have agency in this world. Simply copying narrative strands doesn’t copy what it is folklore is doing. Over the Garden Wall not only feels like folklore, but its doing what folklore does.
As an example of all this, I want to focus in on a particular episode of Over the Garden Wall. Even though I think most of us who re-watch this every year may watch it as one cohesive movie - which is inherently possible to do, and accumulates to only about 150 minutes or so - it is technically a television show broken up into ten episodes. The show focuses on brothers Wirt and Greg who are lost in the woods of a mystical place called “The Unknown”. There, they run into strange magical and interesting facets of the world as they try and find their way home, all while being hunted by a mysterious figure only referred to as “the Beast”.
The fourth episode, “Songs of the Dark Lantern” actually has a bit of a conversation about the nature of archetypal form replication. Wirt, Greg, and their guide Beatrice (a talking blue bird), find themselves in a tavern called the Dark Lantern, where they want to refill on food and try and get directions. The people in the Dark Lantern each talk about how they have a role - the baker, the tailor, the highwayman. They each have their role, and they demand to know Wirt’s. The problem is, Wirt doesn’t fit into these archetypes. He’s not a lover, not a hero. He’s just Wirt - a boy whose lost in the woods.
This episode is, to me, the perfect metaphor for how sometimes people treat a discussion around the study of folklore or mythology and popular culture. They look for a replica of archetypes. They read Campbell’s Hero’s Monomyth, and kinda think that’s all there is. But here, we see that things can be a lot more complicated. What we need is not a study of replication of archetypes, but rather looking for what’s actually happening far deeper in the narrative.
When I say that pop culture is our mythology, or even is our folklore, it isn’t because it’s fighting to do so. It’s not because some author studied what narrative elements and archetypal characters are in these traditional narratives and then replicated them, hoping to create the same thing. I say pop culture is our mythology because it just is. Because we have always turned to stories to understand ourselves and to understand our world. Our reliance on stories hasn’t changed, just what those stories look like. They now are on television screens or being played in video games. But the meaningful story is still there. So, in order to see how Over the Garden Wall is like folklore, we shouldn’t be looking for similar narrative strands, but looking at what its doing. It’s not just fitting the role of folklore, not being the “folklore” member of the Dark Lantern, but rather is existing and doing and acting the way we love and appreciate stories to do.
This isn’t to say that academia is free of the same opinions of simple narrative replication. As I mentioned, Joseph Campbell’s monomyth is essentially the doing the same - and is largely ignored in a lot of studies of mythology though I think that’s more of a conversation for another time. One of the benefits of being a structuralist - which, by the way, I am - is that at it’s core, the structural study of myth is an attempt to get at the actual elements that the myth or the tale is doing and saying. Its a study of how the myth understands the culture its in, and why people find it so meaningful and socially poignant. However, sometimes things are still focused on the archetypes and plot elements over some kind of deeper thinking about how these plot elements contribute and function.
Let’s look, for example, at a comparison between Vladimir Propp and Claude Levi-Strauss. Vladimir Propp was a Russian folklorist who studies hundreds of Russian folktales to create his Morphology of the Folktale. According to Propp, there were seven primary character types, and thirty-one narrative functions. Any folktale could be essentially sketched out in relation to these various elements. When it comes to the narrative functions, each of the thirty one was sketched out, and the idea was that it always happened in consecutive order. In other words, it was always 1, 2, 3, 4, never 4, 3, 1, 2. For example.
Propp’s morphology, however, follows something incredibly similar to the Dark Lantern. It’s a structured element, an idea that we can just copy the thirty-one elements and a folklore we make. But these narrative elements are simply story beats, not anything deeper than that.
Propp did influence Levi-Strauss, but by pushing him a bit further. I think we’ve talked about Claude Levi-Strauss before, and I think the exact details of structuralism can be a bit complicated. I did a whole discussion of it over on my personal channel for anyone who wants to know more about structual anthropology. But essentially, Levi-Strauss is digging into what these narrative beats are actually doing. To explain. The sixth of the thirty-one narrative function is Trickery - the villain attempts to deceive our character to get something, and through that cons them to gain their trust. This would be simply where Propp leaves it. But Levi-Strauss pushes to explore why it is that this trickery works on us as a story, what it reveals about how the society views what counts as a con and what doesn’t, and what these categorical structures reveal to us, the scholars digging our greedy little fingers into the narrative. Where Propp was looking at how the narrative looks, Levi-Strauss was interested in what the stories reveal to us.
As we see in the Songs of the Dark Tavern, Over the Garden Wall is not just replicated the set narratives types and heroic tropes. It is, instead, doing something - capturing our attention in regards to how folklore actually works and is understood in our society. So, instead of looking at how narrative beats are similar or exact to other narrative beats, today, I want to think instead about how the narrative feels and what it’s revealing about how we understand and connect to folklore more generally.
One of the biggest things happening in Over the Garden Wall that we can really deep is the role of liminality. In fact, I think its the constant liminal nature of everything that really helps to paint Over the Garden Wall as folklore.
The Liminal is simply the role of the in-between. Liminality was first really detailed anthropologically by Arnold van Gennep who was looking at rituals and rites of passage. Here, the liminal was the stage between. So, if the ritual was something like getting married, for example, the pre-liminal stage is the lead up - when the bride and the groom are still separate single people. The post-liminal is when the ceremony is completed and they are now a married couple. But there’s a point in the middle of the ceremony where they are now no longer the single separte people they once where, but they are also not quite married yet. This is the liminal phase.
This idea was taken up by Victor Turner, who was the one who really popularised the role of the liminal in anthropology. He copied the same idea that Van Gennep laid out, but pushed the idea further. Its not only a stage in the middle of ritual, but also a larger idea that highly impacts individuals and social reactions to peoples and places. Turner saw a possibility in the liminal - if it was this period of ambiguity and separateness, it was also a perfect place to mine for deeper cultural understandings.
But, we’re not really getting too into the ritual and nuances of these. Both Turner and Van Gennep have their problems, but the basics of what’s important to keep in mind is simply what liminality actually is. Its a place of in between and ambiguity and where things both are and aren’t simultaneously.
When it comes to Over the Garden Wall, the Unknown is itself a place in between. There are so many theories as to what the Unknown is, but what we can say is that it both is and isn’t at the same time. Its a place of life and a place of death, a please that’s real and also not real, a place both present and not present. While the boys are there, they struggle to place the realities of what is happening around them, and yet everything is very clearly real and occurring. Even at the end of the show, when the boys wake up in the hospital, it may seem like the show was one of those “it was all a dream” type endings, but both boys still carry the memories, and they still have on them some of the same objects and ideas. Even the frog, who became named Jason Funderburker, seemed to also have the same memories. Therefore, it wasn’t fully a “it wasn’t real” ending - the ending left us with just as much ambiguity as there was throughout.
The Beast, our primary antagonist of the show, is also a liminal figure. A liminal figure within a liminal space is a lot of liminal. But the Beast is a figure always on the margins. He’s not really fully there - throughout most of the episodes he’s not really even seen. He’s a literal shadow, a figure fully on the sidelines. Sometimes, all we really know of his presence is his beautiful operatic voice flowing on the wind. Hearing him, but not seeing him, makes him feel like someone both fully there, material and actual, while also only really being this ephemeral musical moment. He song is just as liminal as he is.
The Beast works functionally as both a psychopomp and a trickster, and these are often seen in the same folkloric figure.
Tricksters, as figures on the margin, keeps alive the ability to transcend and move beyond our social restrictions. Structurally speaking, myths, stories, literature, folktales - they are all obsessed with what is between categories. Tricksters embody this. Being a marginal figure, they are naturally between categories, and naturally mess with these categories.
Our views of the beast being a trickster is in his direct coning of those around him, like the Woodsman. He also loves to plague people with riddles and thinking outside the box. He likes to push those he’s haunting to think about things in new and unique ways. He wants Greg to think on the margins, to blur categories as well and to see things as liminal as the world is.
However, this also tires people, and he does this to do his job as a psychopomp - a figure who ushers souls from the world of the living to the world of the dead. Characters who move between categories, for example life and death, often have to also be existing in both categories. Levi-Strauss calls this a mediatory figure, one who indivdiuals use in order to move between categories. Psychopomps are therefore naturally marginal and liminal in nature.
Essentially, folklore is something which fully embodies and lives and loves in the margins. Folklore really embodies the liminal, both in place, like woods and forests, and in function and characterisations. In fact, I think the stories are, themselves, liminal in nature. When we have a story from folklore, there are so many different variations and forms the stories take, and yet, we don’t think of them as many different stories, but all versions of the same one. A story is both singular and multiple at the same time. The performance of folklore is both sacred and important and yet also so everyday and banal.
One of the other liminal factors uniting both folklore and Over the Garden Wall is the relationship the story has with the moral. Folklore has a typical amoral stance, a position that things are far more complicated than we make them think. Folklore is both simplistic and complicated, and it provides us with morality and amorality simultaneously.
Over the Garden Wall has ambiguity and complicated morality stances. It plays with elements of this by presenting us with things that we think is going to go one way, and then swings in the opposite.
[I wanna steal]
One of my favourite examples of this is the episode all about Auntie Whispers. The boys run into a house where a young girl appears to be constantly overworking through some kind of control from her Auntie Whispers. Whenever she seems to put up a fight against doing the chores she has to do, Auntie Whispers rings a bell, and magically commands the girl to keep working. We are set up to see an evil to Auntie Whispers, repeating the kinds of stories of evil stepmothers that we’re used to. However, as the boys soon learn, the the girl is not a Cinderella, but has an evil spirit which prays on those around her, which Auntie Whispers has been working to keep in check.
Pottsfield, too, complicates aspects of morality and amorality. Death is presented and in front of the boys, and it scares Wirt tremendously. However, the figures of death are kind and caring, and simply have the boys repay them for the destruction they caused before freeing them to do as they wish. What is presented as initially scary and weird are then shifted to safe and secure and happy. It plays with these aspects of what is considerate and thoughtful.
The liminality of Over the Garden Wall, embodied in so many aspects of it, is what makes the whole thing have an intense feeling of folklore. Its what makes us turn to it when the seasons are also liminal, when the worlds of ours and the Others are so connective. Autumn is liminal itself, and so we turn to folklore to emulate this. And Over the Garden Wall is that, too. And its not folkloric because of some kind of similarity in heroic archetypes or narrative beats. It’s because its liminal, because it lives as a story that is both a story and not a story at the same time. So maybe its also folklore and not folklore at the same time, which would really suit it, too. By understanding the unique position of marginality and ambiguity, Over the Garden Wall truly situates itself as a contemporary folktale.