tag:theconversation.com,2011:/us/topics/the-witch-25791/articlesThe Witch – The Conversation2018-10-29T16:11:46Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1058702018-10-29T16:11:46Z2018-10-29T16:11:46ZWar of the witches: woman are accused while men claim victim status<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/242701/original/file-20181029-76396-1d1hcvb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Witches at a protest against Donald Trump in St. Paul, Minnesota, 2018.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Fibonacci Blue</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Halloween is a time when <a href="https://theconversation.com/halloween-turning-to-the-supernatural-to-work-through-our-anxieties-104517">cultural norms are turned upside down</a>: we encourage children to dress up as creatures from nightmares – witches, zombies, vampires – and we send them out to wander the streets in the dark, demanding sweets from strangers. Yet the witch, so often invoked as a sign of societal disruption through history, is no longer content to be confined either to Halloween or to history – if, indeed, she ever was.</p>
<p>Witch hunts didn’t end with the cataclysmic events of Salem in 1692. In Britain, the last witch trial took place in 1944, when <a href="https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofScotland/Helen-Duncan-Scotlands-last-witch/">Helen Duncan was jailed</a> for claiming to have conjured up the spirit of a dead sailor from the HMS Barham – the sinking of the ship by the Germans was classified information, and the authorities were worried that she might also reveal details of the D-Day landing plans. She was released after nine months, and lived to see the <a href="https://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/transformingsociety/private-lives/religion/overview/witchcraft/">repeal of the Witchcraft Act in 1951</a>, although she continued practising spiritualism for the rest of her life.</p>
<p>The practice of witchcraft continues. Browse any new age bookshop, visit the <a href="https://museumofwitchcraftandmagic.co.uk/">Witch Museum in Boscastle</a> in Cornwall, or Pendle in Lancashire, where Britain’s <a href="http://www.pendlewitches.co.uk/">most famous witch trial</a> took place in 1612, or the tiny village of Burley in the New Forest where the so-called “White Witch”, <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/insideout/south/series1/sybil-leek.shtml">Sybil Leek</a>, lived in the 1950s before she was forced by hostile locals to flee to the US. You’ll find that the books available are not just about the history of witches, but their present existence and practices. A <a href="https://www.ashmolean.org/spellbound">current exhibition</a> at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford also shows that both popular and academic interest in witchcraft is thriving.</p>
<h2>Every witch way in US politics</h2>
<p>But the witch in Western society continues to exist in other ways too, primarily self-identified and given to using political and sociopolitical language rather than incantations. The inauguration of the US president, Donald Trump, provoked women’s protest marches around the world, with some banners reading: “Hex the Patriarchy”, “Witches for Black Lives”, and “We are the daughters of the witches you didn’t burn, and we are pissed off.” </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/242695/original/file-20181029-76405-jpoiul.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/242695/original/file-20181029-76405-jpoiul.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/242695/original/file-20181029-76405-jpoiul.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/242695/original/file-20181029-76405-jpoiul.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/242695/original/file-20181029-76405-jpoiul.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/242695/original/file-20181029-76405-jpoiul.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/242695/original/file-20181029-76405-jpoiul.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/242695/original/file-20181029-76405-jpoiul.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Witch at a Black Lives Matter demonstration, Brooklyn, 2018.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Paul Sableman</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
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<p>An event even took place in October in Brooklyn, New York, to hex supreme court justice, Brett Kavanaugh. The meeting was sold out and the protest made <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-45928212">headlines across the world</a>. It is no surprise that, at a time when women’s rights are under increasing pressure in some areas of Western society, that the witch should be used as a feminist symbol of power, both in language and in the claimed reality of witchcraft.</p>
<p>But there are other people looking to get in on the act. Trump has repeatedly stated that the 2016 investigation into his alleged collusion with Russia was “the biggest witch hunt of a politician in American history”. According to the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/18/us/politics/fact-check-trump-russia-election-interference-.html">New York Times</a>, Trump used the term “witch hunt” – casting himself as victim – in tweets more than 110 times in the period May 2017-18. </p>
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<p>Further, the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements led Woody Allen to <a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2017/10/woody-allen-harvey-weinstein-witch-hunt-atmosphere">invoke the spectre of Salem</a>, but with men as accused witches, saying: “You also don’t want it to lead to a witch-hunt atmosphere, a Salem atmosphere, where every guy in an office who winks at a woman is suddenly having to call a lawyer to defend himself.” In these cases, men are positioning themselves and their peers in the role of witches, but in this scenario the witch is an innocent, a victim. These men are actually denying their own status as witches, using the power associated with claims to victimhood as a weapon against those considered oppressors. They position their accusers as powerful, while simultaneously accusing them of abusing that power.</p>
<p>Yet Trump – and countless others – still use “witch” as a term of vilification against women. During the 2016 presidential election campaign, Hillary Clinton was <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/apr/07/cursed-from-circe-to-clinton-why-women-are-cast-as-witches">repeatedly defined as a witch</a> by Trump supporters: Clinton was “the wicked witch of the Left”, pictured with green skin, pointy hat, and riding a broomstick; her opponents <a href="http://friendlyatheist.patheos.com/2016/10/11/alex-jones-hillary-clinton-obama-demon-sulfur/">claimed she smelt of sulphur</a>. Aligning her with such stereotypical representations of witchcraft evidenced the power plays at the root of such blatant and public misogyny.</p>
<h2>Innocence and guilt</h2>
<p>This concentration on the binary nature of witch accusations – on the guilt or innocence of both accusers and accused – shows how the reclamation of the witch for the 21st century is, as it has always been, concerned with power and, frequently, the relative positioning of gender. The accusation of witchcraft is one that has been used to undermine the status of both women and <a href="https://theconversation.com/whats-behind-children-being-cast-as-witches-in-nigeria-57021">children</a> – who have also been branded as witches, from Salem in 17th-century America to Nigeria today.</p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/242702/original/file-20181029-76393-q70x68.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/242702/original/file-20181029-76393-q70x68.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=394&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/242702/original/file-20181029-76393-q70x68.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=394&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/242702/original/file-20181029-76393-q70x68.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=394&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/242702/original/file-20181029-76393-q70x68.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=495&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/242702/original/file-20181029-76393-q70x68.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=495&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/242702/original/file-20181029-76393-q70x68.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=495&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">A 19th-century lithograph depicting the Salem Witch Trials.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Library of Congress</span></span>
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<p>As American historian and philosopher Perry Miller <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=kVHFWP8ic0wC&pg=PA191&lpg=PA191&dq=perry+miller+salem&source=bl&ots=ebujBmTecx&sig=U48ylu3tkWN8dr3-mNToatL4t3o&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwix6_fhraveAhVJKMAKHctRDkoQ6AEwCnoECCcQAQ#v=onepage&q=perry%20miller%20salem&f=false">has argued</a> regarding the difficulties of understanding the Salem witch trials, “language itself proves treacherous” – by which he meant we struggle to put ourselves into the minds of the Puritans who threw around accusations of witchery in 17th-century New England. And now, in the early 21st century, it seems that efforts to understand the resurgence of the word “witch” in public discourse may be no less troubled.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/105870/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Kristina West does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>So often used to condemn women through history, feminism is reclaiming the word ‘witch’ in the 21st century. Some men also want to get in on the act.Kristina West, Adjunct Lecturer, School of English, University of ReadingLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/850682017-10-26T21:22:13Z2017-10-26T21:22:13ZWhy ‘The Witch’ is the scariest historical film ever<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/192123/original/file-20171026-13331-vsugwi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Robert Eggers’ "The Witch" is a scary representation of Puritan life in the 17th century.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">(The Witch, A24 Films, 2016)</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Popular culture and literature has been rife with depictions of New England witchcraft for years. Perennial Halloween favourites include Disney’s <em>Hocus Pocus</em>, John Updike’s <em>The Witches of Eastwick</em>, <em>Practical Magic</em> and Arthur Miller’s play, <em>The Crucible</em>, which was also made into a movie starring Daniel Day-Lewis and Winona Ryder. </p>
<p>All of these movies are entertaining, but none of them are supposed to be scary, or very historical, although <em>The Crucible</em> comes closest. The story is suspenseful and Miller researched the notorious <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/a-brief-history-of-the-salem-witch-trials-175162489/">Salem Witch Trials</a> to interrogate what he called “<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=940CE0DB1038F93BA3575AC0A960958260">a paranoid situation</a>.” When Miller staged the play in 1953, that situation was the <a href="http://americanhistory.oxfordre.com/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.001.0001/acrefore-9780199329175-e-6">Red Scare</a> and McCarthyism. </p>
<p>By 1996, when <em>The Crucible</em> appeared as a film, Miller <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=940CE0DB1038F93BA3575AC0A960958260">told</a> <em>The New York Times</em> he had “immense confidence in the applicability of the play to almost any time, the reason being it’s dealing with a paranoid situation…that doesn’t depend on any particular political or sociological development. I wrote it blind to the world. The enemy is within, and within stays within, and we can’t get out of within. It’s always on the edge of our minds that behind what we see is a nefarious plot.” </p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">The trailer for <em>The Crucible</em> (1996) based on Arthur Miller’s 1953 play.</span></figcaption>
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<p>Enter Robert Eggers’ indie film, <a href="https://a24films.com/films/witch#watch-now"><em>The Witch</em> (A24 Films, 2016)</a>. The movie chronicles the saga of a Puritan family in the 1630s as they try to carve out an isolated existence after their village exiled them over differing interpretations of the New Testament. Horror soon ensues as children disappear into the woods and the oldest girl, Thomasina, is accused of witchcraft. </p>
<p>Telling any more of the story risks spoiling it. But I will say that by using extensive historical research, Eggers offers the most captivating — and historically accurate — representative of the Puritan imagination I’ve ever seen. And it’s terrifying.</p>
<h2>Who were the Puritans?</h2>
<p>The Puritans were members of an English Protestant church. They deemed the <a href="http://www.history.com/topics/reformation">Protestant Reformation</a> unfinished because English monarchs had supposedly allowed too much religious compromise and inclusion. Steeped in Calvinist doctrine, Puritans sought a morally refined Christianity that eschewed the supposed luxuries of Catholicism and Anglicanism.</p>
<p>The Puritans promoted the absolute sovereignty of God and believed that the best way to attain his favour was through close, intimate relationships that were facilitated through small prayer groups and zealous, evangelical sermons. </p>
<p>In the early decades of the 17th century, Puritans began migrating from England to colonize Massachusetts and Connecticut. As the theologian <a href="https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/winthrop.htm">John Winthrop said</a> in 1630, Puritans hoped to make their settlement a “city upon the hill” and serve as an example of spiritual purity to Europeans back home.</p>
<p>All this, though, was easier said than done. The Puritans struggled against a range of enemies, both internal and external, to establish a colony committed to the worship of God in the emerging British Empire. </p>
<p>Believing themselves to be in a “<a href="https://public.wsu.edu/%7Ecampbelld/amlit/purdef.htm">covenant</a>” with God, Puritans’ religious zeal coloured how they saw the world. Obsessed with demonstrating their religious devotion in the hopes of securing salvation in the afterlife, many Puritans feared that living in the supposed “wilderness” of New England might lead them to spiritual savagery.</p>
<p>As a result, they had a tendency to see the devil everywhere, which led to paranoia over witchcraft during most of the 17th century.</p>
<p>Historians have offered different interpretations of what motivated this paranoia. In her 2003 book, <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/122784/in-the-devils-snare-by-mary-beth-norton/9780375706905/"><em>In the Devil’s Snare</em></a>, Mary Beth Norton makes a compelling case that trauma from violent conflicts between white settlers and the Abenaki people of Maine underlay accusations of witchcraft in the Salem Witch Trials. </p>
<p>But as Carol Karlsen points out in her now-classic book, <a href="http://books.wwnorton.com/books/The-Devil-in-the-Shape-of-a-Woman/"><em>The Devil in the Shape of a Woman</em></a>, “the story of witchcraft is primarily the story of women.” By making John Proctor, a farmer who was executed for witchcraft, the protagonist, <em>The Crucible</em> missed the mark. Witchcraft, Karlsen asserts, “confronts us with ideas about women, with fears about women, with the place of women in society, and with women themselves.”</p>
<p>It’s this Puritanical, fanatical fear of women and witchcraft — as it plays out in the New England wilderness — that <em>The Witch</em> captures so brilliantly. </p>
<h2>Fear of women</h2>
<p>First, there’s the wilderness, shot on location in <a href="https://www.thestar.com/entertainment/movies/2016/02/19/setting-of-the-witch-once-a-small-town-kiosk-lies-empty.html">Kiosk</a>, northeastern Ontario, which Eggers positions as an intimidating character. The film is abundant with images of thick white pine and hemlock forest, dark under a clouded sky. </p>
<p>At the beginning of the movie, William, the patriarch of the family, sees the woods as a place of spiritual salvation. Raising his arms up to the heavens, he proclaims, “What went we out into this wilderness to find? Leaving our country, kindred, our fathers’ houses, we travailed a vast ocean. For what? For the Kingdom of God.” </p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">The Witch (2016)</span></figcaption>
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<p>Quickly, though, the forest becomes a place of wickedness, at least in the family’s imagination. William forbids his children from entering the woods, fearing the evil spirits they believe lurk in it. </p>
<p>Of course, things go wrong. Children, including the family’s oldest son, Caleb, are lured into the trees surrounding the family’s isolated farm. They come back changed, if they come back at all. “There is evil in the wood,” says William by the end. </p>
<p>This follows many Puritans’ own ambivalent relationship to nature. At once a place of spiritual refuge, prominent Puritans, including ministers <a href="http://salem.lib.virginia.edu/people/i_mather.html">Increase Mather and his son Cotton</a>, “theorized about the desperate evils of the wilderness,” as the literary critic Richard Slotkin notes in his classic study, <a href="https://books.google.ca/books/about/Regeneration_Through_Violence.html?id=552NfCm3-WwC&redir_esc=y"><em>Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860s</em></a>. </p>
<p>The Mathers feared that living near the forest, close to supposedly “heathen” Indigenous peoples, would seduce Christian believers into spiritual degeneracy. </p>
<p>For five years, Eggers culled from this historical record to craft the dialogue for his script. As <a href="http://www.vulture.com/2016/02/how-robert-eggers-researched-the-witch.html">Eggers told <em>Vulture</em></a>, he used collections of Elizabethan witch pamphlets, for instance, to write dialogue for the children when they’re possessed. </p>
<p>“I had to research the vocabulary and understand the grammar structure,” he said. “After that, it was about going through the primary source materials and pulling out sentences and phrases and organizing them in a phrase book for different situations.”</p>
<h2>‘Feminism rises to the top’</h2>
<p>Perhaps inspired by Karlsen’s book, Eggers’s historical research brought him to the realization that making a movie about Puritan witchcraft would have to be about women. </p>
<p>As a result, the film centres around Thomasina, whose transition from girlhood to womanhood seems to threaten the family’s spiritual purity. For this reason, Thomasina quickly becomes the black sheep of the family and is accused of being a witch by her siblings and her own mother. </p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/192121/original/file-20171026-13367-1c2asmw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/192121/original/file-20171026-13367-1c2asmw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/192121/original/file-20171026-13367-1c2asmw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/192121/original/file-20171026-13367-1c2asmw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/192121/original/file-20171026-13367-1c2asmw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/192121/original/file-20171026-13367-1c2asmw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/192121/original/file-20171026-13367-1c2asmw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">David Eggers’ The Witch centres around Thomasina and her transition from girlhood to womanhood.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://thewitch-movie.com/">(The Witch, A24 Films, 2016)</a></span>
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<p>“Feminism rises to the top,” Eggers <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2016/2/19/11059130/the-witch-director-robert-eggers-interview">says</a> about his film. “In the early modern period, the evil witch (represents) men’s fears and ambivalence and fantasies about female power. And in this super male-dominated society, the evil witch is also women’s fears and ambivalence and fantasies and desire about their own power.” </p>
<p>Women accuse other women of being witches, as happened so prominently in the Salem Witch trials. At the same time, accused women, uncomfortable with whatever power they find themselves able to exercise, particularly if it’s sexual, are left guessing if they are, indeed, bewitched. </p>
<p>As scholars such as <a href="http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674261556">Perry Miller</a>, <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/entertaining-satan-9780195174830?cc=us&lang=en&#">John Demos</a>, <a href="https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300172416/puritan-origins-american-self">Sacvan Bercovitch</a> and <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/100085/the-name-of-war-by-jill-lepore/9780375702624/">Jill Lepore</a> demonstrate, what has proven so fascinating about the Puritans is less what they experienced and more what they perceived. </p>
<p>This is why dramatizing the Puritan imagination, or “nightmare,” as Eggers phrased it, makes for such a fascinating film. With carefully crafted dialogue, stunning visuals and chilling music, akin to what Stanley Kubrick used for <em>The Shining</em>, <em>The Witch</em> is able to capture the Puritan nightmare in a way the best historical scholarship cannot.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/85068/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Melissa J. Gismondi does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Robert Eggers’ indie film The Witch brilliantly chronicles Puritan life in the 1630s. Horror soon ensues as children disappear into the woods and one girl, Thomasina, is accused of witchcraft.Melissa J. Gismondi, Lecturer in Women, Gender and Sexuality, University of VirginiaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/773742017-05-19T11:33:35Z2017-05-19T11:33:35ZHag, temptress or feminist icon? The witch in popular culture<p>You would have thought that Western society might have grown out of the habit of portraying powerful women as witches, but a trope that usually ended badly for women in the Middle Ages is still being used in the 21st century. Those who portrayed Hillary Clinton <a href="https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/hillary-clinton-confusingly-accused-of-satanism-thanks-to-marina-abramovic-email">as a witch</a> during the 2016 presidential campaign, or have given Theresa May a pointy hat and broomstick in Britain’s general election, may not be calling for them to be burned at the stake, but they do call down political destruction on their heads.</p>
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<p>Witches have featured in fairy tales and fiction for centuries. In her earliest incarnations, the witch served as a warning. Stories about the witch-as-hag demonised and punished women for attempting to exert power outside the bounds of the domestic sphere. Beyond the fairy tale, women with “occult” knowledge (of folk medicine, for example), or simply poor, social outcasts (such as the infamous <a href="http://www.pendlewitches.co.uk/">Pendle Witches</a> hanged at Lancaster castle in 1612), were the victims of persecution and prosecution in 16th and 17th-century Britain.</p>
<p>Nowadays, though, the witch is <a href="https://qz.com/535433/witches-are-some-of-the-most-enduring-feminist-icons-of-our-time/">often praised as a feminist figure</a>, who pushes boundaries, breaks the rules and punishes patriarchal authority. Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Willow Rosenberg (Alyson Hannigan) and Disney’s Maleficant (Angelina Jolie) (2014) are two oft-cited examples of the feminist witch.</p>
<p>In preparation for an upcoming academic conference on “<a href="https://gothicfeminism.com/">Gothic feminism</a>”, I have been researching these contrasting representations of the witch. Which witch (sorry!) does our popular culture currently favour? And can stories about the witch really be reclaimed as feminist parables?</p>
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<p>The witch was a recurring feature of horror film in the 1960s and 1970s. British <a href="http://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/news-bfi/features/where-begin-folk-horror">folk horror</a> films such as The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971) and The Wicker Man (1973) offer deeply ambivalent representations of the witch. In The Blood on Satan’s Claw, teenage temptress, Angel Blake (Linda Hayden) seems to be an anti-authoritarian heroine – the 1960s flower power movement transported to 17th-century England. But in the end she is killed by male authority figures after she oversees the rape and murder of one of her school friends. In contrast, The Wicker Man’s siren, Willow MacGregor (Britt Eckland), gleefully triumphs over the stern Christian policeman, Sergeant Howie (Edward Woodward).</p>
<h2>Wildly feminist</h2>
<p>The way witches are portrayed on screen has been refashioned many times over the decades. From 1964 to 1972, ABC’s Bewitched turned the witch into the subject of a suburban sitcom as domesticated Samantha (Elizabeth Montgomery) used her magic to serve her try-hard husband. The late 20th century favoured soft focus, “white” witchcraft, epitomised by the popular American television series, Charmed (1998 - 2006). More recently, the witch has taken on an explicitly Gothic guise. The big-budget TV series, American Horror Story: Coven (2013), Penny Dreadful (2015), and Game of Thrones (2011-) represent witches as glamorous and beautiful, but also suggest that their sexuality is deadly.</p>
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<p>In cinema, Robert Eggers’ award-winning feature, The Witch (2016), returned to the folk horror genre in its stark portrayal of a Puritan family struggling to survive in 17th-century New England. The film’s bare aesthetic slips into nightmarish horror as it restages the American <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-witch-the-facts-behind-the-folktales-56233">folk tale</a> of the witch in the woods to a particularly gruesome conclusion.</p>
<p>The film received a lot of plaudits, particularly from feminist cultural commentators. A recent article on film website <a href="http://lwlies.com/articles/witch-new-wave-the-love-witch/">Little White Lies</a> praises The Witch as a “feminist horror fantasy” that “celebrate[s] the inherent power of femininity”. Likewise, <a href="https://www.wired.com/2016/02/the-witch-demonization-women/">Wired magazine</a> called the film “wildly feminist”.</p>
<h2>Disempowering women</h2>
<p>However, there is another side to the witch. Mary Beard, in a recent lecture, <a href="https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n06/mary-beard/women-in-power">Women in Power</a>, argued that stories of monstrous women and witches dating back to antiquity, such as the tale of the Medusa, are parables aimed at disempowering women. </p>
<p>Over and again, such stories seek to reinforce the male right to defeat female (ab)users of power, suggesting that women are not entitled to power in the first place – and there’s been much of that in the way both Clinton and May have been portrayed as witches. </p>
<p>The Witch acknowledges this history in its return to the folk horror tradition. Early in the film, a witch pounds the flesh of a dead baby into a paste. Yet at the end of the film, the teenage heroine, Tomasin, agrees to join the witches who had so gruesomely murdered her baby brother. Even though these hags cause the deaths of the rest of Tomasin’s family, their offer of “some butter” and a “pretty dress” seems far preferable to the harsh strictures of Puritan life.</p>
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<p>What freedom and power is there in becoming a witch? Joining the witches is Tomasin’s last, desperate resort and it places her forever on the outside of a patriarchal social system in need of reform by and for its female members. More than this, Tomasin becomes one of the gruesome hags who have murdered her baby brother. In this respect, The Witch echoes old misogynist fairy tales, which often feature actual or attempted infanticide, as much as it revels in the witch’s power to destroy an authoritarian patriarch. </p>
<p>Eggers’ complex depiction is not a roadmap to female empowerment. A glimpsed-at moment of freedom (an aerial broomstick ride) for Tomasin occurs on the outside of acceptable social spaces – deep in the woods and far from civilisation. At the same time, the murderous witches continue to communicate centuries-old patriarchal fears about female power.</p>
<p>As scholars, it’s tempting to see our favourite genres and cultural products as proof texts for our politics – but Gothic horror, in particular, has always refused that role. Its monsters do not act as representatives for either the right or the left of politics, but instead slide troublingly between the poles. Given the current lurch to the right in Western politics – and the rise of anti-feminist sentiments – the ambiguity of the witch is perhaps even something to be wary of rather than to celebrate. Though she seems to be a powerful figure for feminists, we cannot forget the witch’s origins as a figure used to delegitimise powerful women and locate them on the outside of society.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/77374/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Chloe Germaine Buckley does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Independent, powerful feminist role models or a warning to women not to overstep the mark? Witches have been many things over the years.Chloe Germaine Buckley, Senior lecturer in English, Manchester Metropolitan UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/562332016-03-15T11:01:28Z2016-03-15T11:01:28ZThe Witch: the facts behind the folktales<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/114973/original/image-20160314-11285-179pmk1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The Witch, film poster.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BAf7dtMrSmI/?taken-by=thewitchmovie">The Witch/Instagram</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>From The Wizard of Oz to Harry Potter, Macbeth to Bewitched, witches have long been a part of popular culture. Witches are now regularly presented as <a href="http://flavorwire.com/192340/the-10-coolest-witches-in-pop-culture">cuddly feminists</a>, but Robert <a href="http://filmmakermagazine.com/people/robert-eggers/#.VubSOqiLQ4Y">Eggers’s</a> new film <a href="http://thewitch-movie.com/">The Witch: A New England Folktale</a> vividly reminds us of the horrors lurking behind the fantasy. </p>
<p>The is a horrifying tale of 17th-century New England, where witches roam the deep, dark forest kidnapping settlers’ children so they can boil down their fat and bones for <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/908398-the-botany-of-desire-a-plant-s-eye-view-of-the-world">ointments</a> which help them to fly. Witches were said to be able to fly on <a href="http://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/why-do-witches-fly-brooms">broomsticks</a>, perhaps because the broom was a symbol of female domestication, and flying on it was the ultimate rebellion.</p>
<p>In the 1600s, in both new and old <a href="http://www.historyextra.com/feature/witches-dock-witch-trials-10-britains-most-infamous">England</a>, and across the European continent, people often believed witches were “difficult” women (sometimes difficult men) who hated their neighbours and cursed them with sickness and bad luck. </p>
<p>As in the film, witches were thought to be <a href="http://www.historic-uk.com/CultureUK/Witches-in-Britain/">attracted to children</a>, particularly by their innocence and corruptibility. Children’s small, soft bodies could easily be sickened by spells or possessed by demons and they were especially vulnerable before they had undergone the ritual of baptism, because they weren’t thought to be <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Qr6_q-chR6MC&pg=PA142&lpg=PA142&dq=witches+children+and+baptism&source=bl&ots=GdRy4vZ1pn&sig=wgg7KmNiqNzrRA3w7gUtnZAu2IY&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiWzJnOqcDLAhWGTBQKHcESAcoQ6AEIKTAC#v=onepage&q=witches%20children%20and%20baptism&f=false">protected by the christian church</a>. </p>
<p>In the supposedly rational modern world, these superstitions may now seem ridiculous, but the fact that we still shudder when we hear such tales is a telling sign of the witches’ power. </p>
<h2>Toil and trouble</h2>
<p>Anxieties about children being kidnapped and murdered by witches were strongest in southern Germany, western France and the Alpine countries – and it was here that the <a href="http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/salem/witchhistory.html">persecutions</a> were carried out most enthusiastically. In these areas, witches were said to meet in groups of several hundred, worshipping the devil in the form of a man or a goat, <a href="http://witcombe.sbc.edu/davincicode/witches.html">holding orgies and plotting evil</a>.</p>
<p>In Britain and the American colonies, witches were more likely to be accused of <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=i1kKLrnjGsQC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false">less dramatic activities</a>, not necessarily devil-worship, but certainly murder and mischief on a smaller scale. They were not usually thought to be able to fly – so not much need for the baby-fat recipe – but every now and again, a truly horrific story was told. </p>
<p>In Lancashire in 1612, the teenage <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/domesday/dblock/GB-360000-429000/page/18">Grace Sowerbutts</a> explained how three women had transported her around the countryside, making her dance and have sex with strange black creatures. She added that they had broken into a neighbour’s house and murdered his sleeping baby by sucking its life out through the navel. </p>
<p>After the child’s burial, they dug up the body, boiled and roasted it. They ate some and saved the rest for flying ointment. The court rejected Grace’s evidence, however: her story was just too unusual in England – even in the age of the witch. It was explained away as the work of a renegade catholic priest making trouble for good protestants.</p>
<h2>Fire burn and cauldron bubble</h2>
<p>While it was easy for devout people then to imagine a malign devil lurking in the shadows, witchcraft was not immediately used to explain every misfortune. In America, the early protestant colonists felt protected by a “good” god – much like in the film.</p>
<p>The film’s settlers experience exactly the miseries endured by their real counterparts: crop failure, hunger, disease, animal attacks, loss of faith. Under the circumstances, they hold out pretty well. But once the first accusations of witchcraft are made, it becomes horribly easy for communities to <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Y2ZeU1RMYK0C&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false">turn on each other</a>.</p>
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<p>One heartrending 1662 tale from Hartford, Connecticut tells how eight-year-old <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=pASHBAAAQBAJ&pg=PA45&lpg=PA45&dq=Bethia+Kelly&source=bl&ots=R4w1qzISwF&sig=Ie5M9HnGMHgEv7qjop-VB96gqCo&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiQvJCWtsDLAhWIThQKHe7YDh0Q6AEISjAL#v=onepage&q=Bethia%20Kelly&f=false">Bethia Kelly</a> died of an inexplicable disease, her last hours disfigured by fits and claims that an invisible spirit sent by her neighbour Goodwife Ayres was pressing her belly and bowels. Another girl, Ann Cole, then began to name further people as witches, including <a href="http://www.womenhistoryblog.com/2008/03/rebecca-greensmith.html">Rebecca and Nathaniel Greensmith</a>. In the end, even Rebecca came to agree that her husband Nathaniel was a witch. </p>
<p>Nathaniel had met strange creatures in the forest, Rebecca told the court, and although he was a small, weak man, he was suddenly capable of huge feats of labour. None of this could be natural, surely? Both the Greensmiths were executed, along with at least two fellow-accused. Others spent years in jail. </p>
<p>For these tight-knit communities, it was often incredibly hard to rebuild after the “touch of a witch”. Once accusations began, they quickly spread like wild fire. Sometimes it was just easier for “witches” to run away, than try to explain themselves. Even their own family would turn against them, and it was safer to drop everything and run.</p>
<p>The Witch allows us, modern viewers, to see how easy it would be for our ancestors, driven by misapplied faith and pressed by calamity, to believe in and persecute witches – and why people still do so in some places today. In fact, staring into the dark forests brought to life the film, it’s hard not to wonder why the early American colonists didn’t become even more obsessed with the mysterious forces and withccraft that may have been lurking within.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/56233/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Marion Gibson has received funding from the AHRC for research on American witchcraft. </span></em></p>Were evil witches really stealing children in the 17th century?Marion Gibson, Professor of Renaissance and Magical Literatures, University of ExeterLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.