Set in the Pine Barrens, the sprawling enclave of forest that covers the southern half of the Garden State, the Jersey Devil story takes place amidst an ecosystem known for its difficult to farm sandy soil and swampy iron bogs, from which Revolutionaries once fashioned cannon balls. As Brian Regal and Frank Esposito note in The Secret History of the Jersey Devil, the folktale may have originated in an early colonial religious dispute centered on the polemical almanac-maker and Quaker dissident Daniel Leeds, who lived in New Jersey in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In his 2013 quasi-memoir The Domestic Life of the Jersey Devil, Bill Sprouse suggests that Mother Leeds may be modeled on Deborah Leeds, Daniel’s daughter-in-law, who had twelve children by his son Japhet in an area called “Leeds Point” in the 1730s.
The details of the Jersey Devil morph with every retelling. Sometimes this menace features a dog’s head and pig’s feet; sometimes he’s an eighth child instead of a thirteenth. The story’s emotional crux, however, is consistent: an unwanted pregnancy, a mother’s anger, a curse. It reads as what folklore scholars Joan Radner and Susan Lanser might call a “coded” tale—a story that invites multiple, even contradictory, interpretations to “protect the creator from the dangerous consequences of directly stating particular messages.” A hallmark of feminist folklore, coding allows a tale-teller to convey ideas that are controversial or forbidden by camouflaging morals in ambiguity, ensuring the story reads differently to different audiences. For listeners hostile or unattuned to issues of reproductive care, for example, it’s easy to see the Jersey Devil as a critique of callous mothering, and of the “self-centered, uncaring, unloving mother…who bears the brunt of the [story’s] blame,” write Regal and Esposito.
But that’s a red herring, a misdirection. Though gynaehorror often represents female reproductivity negatively, it can, Harrington notes, function as a “way of exposing misogyny.” Unlike many horror stories that portray what film scholar Barbara Creed terms “the monstrous-feminine”—misogynistic depictions of terrifying, evil women—Mother Leeds elicits empathy. Who would not feel overworked and overwhelmed, with twelve mouths to feed (thirteen if you count her own)? She isn’t even the monster—instead, it’s a lack of access to reproductive options that causes the ensuing problems, as well as the fact that spite and anger function as her only recourse in a desperate situation. The critique of the story falls not on Mother Leeds as a bad mother, but on the circumstances that prevent her from choosing whether to be a mother at all.