Feminist Afterlives of the Witch: Popular Culture, Memory, Activism 3031252918, 9783031252914

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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN (RE)PRESENTING GENDER SERIES EDITOR: EMMA REES

Feminist Afterlives of the Witch Popular Culture, Memory, Activism Brydie Kosmina

Palgrave Studies in (Re)Presenting Gender

Series Editor Emma Rees, Institute of Gender Studies, University of Chester, Chester, UK

The focus of Palgrave Studies in (Re)Presenting Gender is on gender and representation. The ‘arts’ in their broadest sense – TV, music, film, dance, and performance – and media re-present (where ‘to represent’ is taken in its literal sense of ‘to present again’, or ‘to give back’) gender globally. How this re-presentation might be understood is core to the series. In re-presenting gendered bodies, the contributing authors can shift the spotlight to focus on marginalised individuals’ negotiations of gender and identity. In this way, minority genders, subcultural genders, and gender inscribed on, in, and by queer bodies, take centre stage. When the ‘self’ must participate in and interact with the world through the body, how that body’s gender is talked about – and side-lined or embraced by hegemonic forces – becomes paramount. These processes of representation – how cultures ‘give back’ gender to the individual – are at the heart of this series.

Brydie Kosmina

Feminist Afterlives of the Witch Popular Culture, Memory, Activism

Brydie Kosmina Department of English, Creative Writing, and Film University of Adelaide Adelaide, SA, Australia

ISSN 2662-9364 ISSN 2662-9372 (electronic) Palgrave Studies in (Re)Presenting Gender ISBN 978-3-031-25291-4 ISBN 978-3-031-25292-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25292-1 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover credit: clu/Getty Images This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Preface: Witches in 2022

On January 21, 2017, people across the world marched in protest against inequality. One of the biggest single-day protests in the history of the United States, the Women’s March (as it came to be known) was one day after the inauguration of Donald Trump as President of the United States, and was initially organized to protest Trump’s presidency but soon morphed into an organized, global protest movement against inequality. The protest marches occurred on the same weekend in January every year throughout Trump’s presidency. Women’s March has now become a formally organized political activist group aligned with broadly liberal principles. Women’s March has drawn on very specific political messaging in their organizing, particularly in relation to their use of symbols. The thousands of photos from the 2017 protests of a sea of hot pink pussy hats serve as a clear example of the way that Women’s March marshals visual symbols as part of their activism. The pussy hat serves as a microsymbol that functions as something of a synecdoche for Women’s March itself, and which has become a central commanding symbol in present-day Western feminist activism (for good or ill). I begin with this discussion of Women’s March for two reasons. Firstly, Women’s March is indicative of the ways that feminist activists use memories of past movements as part of their action, a central concern of this monograph. The title of the Women’s March alone demonstrates this. The 2017 Women’s March on Washington was initially called the Million Women March in order to recall the 1997 Philadelphia Million Woman v

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March (a protest march that called for support for African-American women and families), but was renamed to the Women’s March on Washington by the organizing committee, led Vanessa Wruble, in order to draw upon the memory of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Women’s March also draws on the memory of centuries of women’s protest marches: women’s marches as early as the 1789 Women’s March on Versailles, one of the significant early events in the French Revolution, through to the March 4 Justice in Australia in March 2021 (protesting the refusal by the Australian Government led by Scott Morrison to appropriately deal with sexual assault and rape in Parliament), protests in which I took part. Naming the 2017 protest ‘Women’s March’ evokes the memory of these past women’s marches and the political ramifications of these marches that have rippled throughout history, and demonstrates the ways that memories of past oppressive conditions and protest movements play a key role in present-day activism. The memories of women’s protest marches leave traces, afterlives that haunt present-day feminist activism. Women’s March has seen a sharp decline in attendance and participation (possibly due to the Covid-19 pandemic, but also possibly for many other reasons), and it is further evidence of how activist movements rise and fall in popularity according to cultural context and political necessity. The second reason for starting with the 2017 Women’s March is more personal. Scrolling through my social media feeds in the days after the marches, looking at the thousands of photos documenting the events, it was the first time I saw the phrase that sparked my interest in this whole project: ‘we are the granddaughters of the witches you couldn’t burn.’ Daubed on a hand-painted sign held by an anonymous protester, something about this phrase captured me. Perhaps it was due to my long love for and fascination with the fantasy genre, or because I was halfway through a rewatch of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003) at the time, but I could not stop thinking about how this protest phrase captured many questions I had at the time about being a feminist in 2017: how to find one’s place within a lineage of political activists; what it means to connect to an activist lineage in an era when digital cultures provide a simultaneous and paradoxical sense of overwhelming connection and disconnection; and how to use memories of activist pasts to draw the power and language needed to create future change. I was also drawn to the symbol of the witch herself: among the signs with photos of Princess Leia, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Rosa Parks, Hillary Clinton,

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Beyoncé, Wonder Woman, even the Statue of Liberty, the witch stood proudly as a revolutionary figure, a defiant woman fighting for feminist causes globally. For many years when I was a child my not-quite-religious but still kind-of-spiritual mother loosely associated herself with Paganism and Wicca/witchcraft, and I vaguely connected to it as well; I had a little altar set up in a window, and did spells to find lost items or to protect loved ones that I learned from a book that Mum bought for me and my sister. While I drifted away from more spiritual connections to witchcraft as I grew up, my connection to the more literary and popular cultural dimensions of the witch continued to resonate with me: I grew up in the Harry Potter generation, after all, and while my perspective on Rowling’s series has certainly changed since I was a child, I cannot deny the smaller version of myself that dressed up as a witch for every book or film release, and who thought being a witch was a way to feel powerful, smart, confident, and compelling. That pre-teen or teenage girl turning to the witch for power and liberation is not just me; thousands, maybe millions of people around the world have turned to the witches as a means of spiritual, political, and emotional support and emancipation. This continues to the present day: I am in group-chats on Facebook Messenger or book clubs made up of friends that we refer to as our coven; the shared office of postgraduate students I was lucky enough to work in during my doctoral studies was filled with queer women and we would sometimes refer to ourselves as a coven or as the witches from Macbeth. The witch is (and has been for a long time) a particularly useful identity for feminists and people concerned with gender liberation. While the witch is a very real historical, religious, and spiritual figure, she is also a figure of myth, story, and legend; she lives on the screen and the page and in stories told around a fire. There is a radical potential in the witch’s status as both fact and fiction, a position that blurs lines between history (what happened) and memory (what stories we tell about what happened). The witch, it seems to me, is a key figure through which to understand how history, memory, and narrative intersect, particularly in relation to gendered power dynamics. I began this project when Donald Trump was first inaugurated as President of the United States, and I am bringing it to a close as global catastrophes have escalated exponentially. In that time, polycrisis—the intersection and proliferation of crisis—has come to characterize everyday life. Political crisis erupts, it seems, daily around the world; economic

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crisis and inequality continues to shape the lives of majority of the people alive; the crisis of colonialism continues to oppress millions of people around the world, including in the settler nation I am from where First Nations people are disenfranchised and dispossessed on a structural and institutional level; the Black Lives Matter movement has demonstrated the continued violence of white supremacy; the violence of patriarchy has continued to be evidenced by the violence that transgender, nonbinary, gender non-conforming people, and cisgender women face daily, including notably by the overturning of Roe v. Wade by the United States’ Supreme Court in June 2022; the Covid-19 pandemic has exacerbated existing inequalities and killed millions, many (perhaps most) of whom were already marginalized; and behind all of these crises (along with many, many more crises, both global and regional), looms the climate catastrophe that fundamentally threatens the planet. I have written this monograph while precariously employed, through a pandemic, through war, through bushfires, through protest movements, through increased restriction on abortion rights, and on unceded land stolen from Kaurna people. I begin with this because just as I am remembering past feminist movements and symbols over this project, I also want to situate this monograph in its own moment; what popular culture symbols will emerge across cultural memories of the moment that I am writing this monograph in and the crises that dominate this moment? In conceiving of this monograph, I am repeatedly drawn to the idea and art of weaving; the bringing together of disparate threads, both complementary and contradictory, to produce a new tapestry. Some of the colours of these ideas might not seem to blend together in a familiar pattern, but the juxtaposition hopefully renders these ideas, disciplines, methodologies, and politics more stark. The act of weaving seems a fitting method when characterizing the feminist activist memory practice I outline in this monograph. To engage in the act of repair and revolution that feminist activist memory studies calls for requires the weaving and stitching of disciplines, ideas, words, crises, and temporalities. This monograph is an attempt to meet with the ghosts of the past, to weave together the temporal disjuncture of memory and popular culture, and to consider how the future hovers just ahead of us. Adelaide, SA, Australia

Brydie Kosmina

Acknowledgements

This monograph, and the doctoral thesis from which it emerged, was primarily written on the lands of the Kaurna people, where I live and work in Tarndanya/Adelaide. I acknowledge Kaurna elders, past, present, and emerging, whose land I try to tread lightly upon. Sovereignty of this country has never been ceded: this always was and always will be Aboriginal land. The doctoral thesis from which this monograph is drawn was undertaken at the University of Adelaide, with funding from a Research Training Program Stipend (RTPS) from the Federal Government of Australia. I acknowledge both the University of Adelaide and the Australian Federal Government for their financial support while building the bones of this monograph. The RTPS is a crucial scheme for emerging postgraduate scholars, enabling people without financial stability to undertake further study: I would not have been able to do a Ph.D. without this funding. My thanks to my colleagues in the University of Adelaide English, Creative Writing, and Film Department for their support while I undertook this project. My particular thanks to Associate Professor Mandy Treagus, Dr. Joy McEntee, Associate Professor Meg Samuelson, and Associate Professor Lucy Potter who have all supported me across my time as an undergraduate student, a postgraduate student, a sessional teacher, and now as an early career researcher.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My eternal gratitude, thanks, and love go to Dr. Maggie Tonkin, my primary supervisor throughout my Ph.D., my colleague, my mentor, and my friend. Maggie was the very first person I told when I was offered a contract with Palgrave Macmillan to publish this monograph, and for very good reason. I’m still sorry I made you watch Suspiria, Maggie. I have worked in retail since I was 14, and that did not stop when I became an academic. Dymocks Adelaide represents more than a bookstore to me: it is the place where I have found endless stories that made me feel seen and known, a community of readers, friends who I forever cherish, a secondary career as a bookseller, and the person who I love more than any other, Andrew. I wrote many pages of this monograph while sitting in the staff room on my breaks or days off, I talked to my colleagues about what they thought about recent witchy releases, I complained and demanded hugs frequently, and everyone took care of me when I needed it. I would not have been able to complete this work if I did not have my Dymocks Adelaide family. My chosen family are the people who underpin every facet of my life. I cannot believe how privileged I am to have so many people in my community who together hold me together. I love each of you. To Calum Hurley, James Finnis, Lur Alghurabi, Natalie Carfora, Amelia Rohrlach, Donna Peters, Jon Dale, Kailee Ingham, Rachel Caines, Christina and Lia Devetzidis, and Ashton Hoole—thank you for being my people. When I started my Ph.D. in 2017, I did not know what I was doing (I still don’t). Luckily, I was put into the shared postgraduate office that is unofficially known in the department as ‘where the weirdos live.’ This was a blessing, and I would not be the person I am now without being a part of the network of weirdos who are associated with Napier 624. In particular, I would like to thank Dr. Ruby Niemann and Dr. Madeleine Seys. Ruby, you are my intellectual soulmate. Madeleine, you are the warp to my weft. I am grateful every day for our coven. Andrew, who makes me brave, and who is the A to my B, the Kevin to my Nora; thank you. You are by far the better writer of the two of us. I love you. And thank you to the witches who came before me.

Contents

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Witch: A Feminist Memory Why Witches? Why Now? Witches and the Divine Feminine Witch Manifestos Witches on the Streets (and the ‘Net) Black Witches Capitalist and Anti-capitalist Witches Queer Witches and Trans-Exclusionary Witches The Beginnings of the Witches Bibliography

1 4 9 12 14 16 19 21 23 31

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Witches and the Past (The Problem with) Understanding the Early Modern European Witch Trials Through Statistics The Church, the State, and the Witch Hunters: Witchcraft Histories of the Powerful Popular Beliefs, Everyday Life, and the Witch Trials: Witchcraft Histories of the Ordinary Feminist Histories of the Witch Trials From Europe to America Race, Colonialism, and the Frontier in Salem Feminist Histories of Salem Nationalism, Paranoia, and the Literary Salem The Inaccuracies of Witchcraft Pasts

35 37 39 42 45 50 52 54 56 58 xi

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CONTENTS

Re-remembering the European and American Witch Trials Bibliography

61 69

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Witches and the Present Memory and the Past Memory and the Present Memory and Feminism Memory and Activism Memory and Prosthetic Pasts The Inaccuracies of Feminist Memories of the Witch Memory and Narrative Memory, Temporality, Spectres Reading (and Re-reading) as Ghostly Memory Practices Re-remembering the Witch Bibliography

75 76 77 79 80 82 85 87 89 93 95 101

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Witches as Monsters Witches and the Monstrous-Feminine Body Witches and Queer Monstrosity Witches as Monstrous Utopians Monstrosity and the Future Bibliography

105 108 118 125 132 139

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Witches as Lovers Witches Within Regimes of Normality Witches and Covens Witches, Soulmates, and Chosen Families The Witch’s Sexual Futures Bibliography

143 146 154 163 170 178

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Witches as Mothers All About Our Mothers Witches as Anti-Mothers Witches as Mother-Goddesses Witches as Deathly Mothers Birthing the Future Bibliography

183 186 188 192 198 203 209

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Witches as Girls The Child and the Girl Girlhood, Feminism, Postfeminism

213 214 215

CONTENTS

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Girl Witches and Reproductive Futurity Girl Witches and Girl Power Girl Witches and Cool Feminism Girls and the Future Bibliography

219 223 227 232 238

Witches and the Future Remembering Hope Where to From Here? The Witches Are Coming Bibliography

243 244 248 251 257

Index

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About the Author

Dr. Brydie Kosmina lives and works in Tarndanya/Adelaide on unceded Kaurna land, where she works at the University of Adelaide as a Visiting Research Fellow in the Department of English, Creative Writing, and Film. Her research investigates feminist and literary memory studies and activism, the environmental humanities (particularly nuclearization and popular culture), and genre studies. Her work has been published in the Journal of Popular Culture and Continuum. Brydie works as a postgraduate/early career researcher representative for the Cultural Studies Association of Australasia, and serves on the Lilith Editorial Collective. She writes about witches, nuclear bombs, and other strange things.

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CHAPTER 1

Witch: A Feminist Memory

Who is a witch? It is a question that is at once obvious and difficult to answer precisely. Is a witch the hag or crone living in the woods, luring children to their deaths with her gingerbread house or Turkish Delight? Is she the woman burned at the stake for her secret knowledge of healing, punished simply for existing as an intelligent woman in a society that does not allow women authoritative roles? Is she the seductress, wantonly corrupting men of good standing and cavorting with other impious women? Is she the pagan, spiritually connected to nature and her inner goddess? Is she the precocious young girl, the smartest in her class, and not like the others? Is she even the activist, standing on the picket line fighting inequality and injustice? The problem is that the witch is all of these figures, and more: she contains multitudes. This difficulty in defining the witch is compounded because of her status as a historical, literary, mythological, and mnemonic figure: she exists at the intersection of multiple modes of knowledge and culture. And, just to complicate the matter further, being called a witch has historically been a death sentence: it has been an identity imposed on others but not necessarily taken up voluntarily until relatively recently. To say that a witch is specifically this or that (and only this or that) seems to miss the point somewhat. The overwhelming ubiquity of representations of the witch in history, mythology, memory, spirituality, and popular culture means that any witch scholar might at first feel the need to wade through an endless multitude © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 B. Kosmina, Feminist Afterlives of the Witch, Palgrave Studies in (Re)Presenting Gender, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25292-1_1

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of texts, images, and ideologies just to grasp at a rudimentary outline of the symbol. It is almost tempting to classify the witch as a floating or open signifier, given the overwhelming and overlapping (and often contradictory) referents associated with the figure. There is a diverse and vibrant body of scholarship on witches from across numerous fields (classical studies, history, literary studies, popular culture studies, spirituality, and religious studies to name just a few) and my investigation in Feminist Afterlives of the Witch of the symbol and her association with feminist, postfeminist, and anti-feminist rhetoric contributes to this evolving and exciting body of work. The entanglement of all of these competing and at times paradoxical discourses of the witch may be difficult to see through clearly, but it is this messy combination of ideologies that I want to lean into. The witch does contain multitudes, and it is from these overlapping and contradictory meanings that her potential stems: just like in the stories we are told as children, the witch is not always quite comprehensible, and this is where her power—and terror—lies. American comedy television show Broad City (2014–2019) follows the lives of two young New York-based women, Ilana Wexler and Abbi Abrams, encompassing their romantic and sexual adventures, family lives, artistic practices, feminist politics, and careers. In Season 4, Episode 6 “Witches” (dir. Abbi Jacobsen, 2017) Abbi and Ilana connect with a “ferocious female current” of witchy energy and power to overcome their respective struggles: Abbi deals with her first grey hair and worries about aging, and Ilana undergoes therapy when she realizes she has not orgasmed since Donald Trump was elected as President of the United States.1 Both are helped by older witchy women who guide them through their respective difficulties, and the episode ends as they dance with a diverse coven of witches at midnight around a bonfire in Central Park. This results in Ilana’s claim that “witches aren’t monsters, they’re just women! They’re fucking women who cum and giggle and play in the night. And that’s why everybody wants to set them on fire, ’cos they’re so fucking jealous.”2 Aside from being indicative of broader popular culture representations of feminist (and potentially postfeminist) women’s lives, Broad City also demonstrates the influence of feminist activist interventions in cultural memories of the witch and of the witch trials in early modern Europe and colonial America specifically. It is also indicative of how the witch has been deployed in Western popular media and culture as a symbol of feminist rage after the 2016 Presidential election in the United States of America. Broad City encodes the witch as a cultural

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symbol of political resistance, female solidarity, and intersectional feminism, and this use of the symbol has not been limited to American comedy. Even thinking back to my own childhood, there has long been a surfeit of witches in popular culture. The growing popularity of the witch may be stark now, but it has been growing for decades, as evidenced by the sheer number of popular culture referents from throughout the twentieth century that so many of us intuitively know. What is particularly striking, however, is the sharp rise in representations of the witch in popular culture and activist movements following the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States in late 2016. There is a surge in the publication of media texts that feature the witch in a leading role after 2016, particularly noticeable in 2018 and 2019. 2018 alone saw the release of blockbuster witch television shows and films including The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (2018–2020), Charmed (2018–2022), A Discovery of Witches (2018–2022), Hereditary (dir. Ari Aster, 2018), The House with a Clock in Its Walls (dir. Eli Roth, 2018), Cinderella and the Secret Prince (dir. Lynne Southerland, 2018), Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald (dir. David Yates, 2018), Avengers: Infinity War (dir. Anthony and Joe Russo, 2018), and Suspiria (dir. Luca Guadagnino, 2018) to name a few.3 The publishing market—particularly the young adult publishing market—is flooded with books about witches; Her Majesty’s Royal Coven by Juno Dawson, The League of Gentlewomen Witches by India Holton, and A Reluctant Witch’s Guide to Magic by Shivaun Plozza have all been published in the latter half of 2022, just to name a few. “Witches are having a moment,” to quote Sabrina Spellman in Sabrina.4 The current surge in witcherature that I am investigating in this monograph has a precedent. The 1990s saw the intersection of underground grunge and punk movements, riotgrrrl and girl power politics, and feminist recuperative narratives of the witch, as well as the concurrent growth in Wiccan spiritual movements. This resulted in novels such as Isobel Bird’s Circle of Three series (2001–2002) and Cate Tiernan’s Sweep series (2001–2003), films such as The Craft (dir. Andrew Fleming, 1996), and television series like Charmed (1998–2006) and Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003). The witch has always been present in popular culture and mass media in the Global North. There are two other decades in recent memory where witches have been as popular in media and culture: the (long) 1970s and the (long) 1990s. These particularly witchy decades in

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mass media coincidentally—or, as I will consider over this monograph, perhaps not so coincidentally—occur alongside the mainstreaming and heightened visibility of various models of feminist activism and critique in the West (the Women’s Liberation movement and feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s, and the postfeminist Girl Power movements of the 1990s respectively).

Why Witches? Why Now? Why is the witch such a powerful symbol post-2016? What about her resonates with the overlapping and myriad crises of the twenty-first century? Why has she become such a compelling figure in both popular culture and in political discourses? How has the witch gone from a monster to be feared and cast out to an identity freely assumed? How has she turned from a horrifying, Satanic threat to a cool, Stevie Nicksish figure of feminist and queer power, lineage, and aesthetics? As I will demonstrate in Feminist Afterlives of the Witch, the witch has come to function as an “engine of activism” in feminist memory cultures.5 She signifies myriad discourses associated with feminism (including, paradoxically, anti-feminist rhetoric). A figure woven together from the threads of any number of discourses, ideologies, and stories, the witch must be understood both holistically and in relation to her constituent threads. Throughout Feminist Afterlives of the Witch, therefore, there is a constant tension between trying to pull apart the tightly-woven threads that cohere to create her as a discrete cultural symbol without wanting to lose sight of the fabric that is made from these threads. In this sense, my approach to feminist activist memory is a form of conjunctural analysis. Stuart Hall, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, and Brian Roberts characterize conjunctures as “a specific moment in the life of a social formation” where the “antagonisms and contradictions” of the current cultural moment coalesce.6 Conjunctural analysis grapples with the ongoing, evolving, and, at times, contradictory discourses from both moments of stability and of unrest that unite into a moment of perceived crisis.7 The witch emerges at conjunctures of crisis, and can consequently be considered a figure of crisis, specifically social crises around gender, memory, and activism. Analysing the rhetoric and discourses at play in different formulations of the witch as a symbol of gender politics (feminist and anti-feminist) and activist movements across memoryscapes and popular culture expands our understandings of the disparate cultural and mnemonic threads woven together in moments of crisis.

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The witch emerges at moments of gender/ed crisis as a figure that both presages the catastrophe or functions as a remedy to it. She is intricately wound up in rhetorics of gender, particularly feminist and queer articulations of gender identity, experience, and oppression. The witch is so closely aligned with feminist rhetoric and ideology that it can seem counterproductive not to consider them together: this kind of unconscious connection between the witch and various feminisms is what I aim to make visible or to defamiliarize through this monograph. Over approximately 50 years—since at least 1968, if not earlier—the witch has been used by feminist activists, scholars, philosophers, theologians, and writers as a symbol of femininities and feminisms (what model of feminism and who that feminism serves are a matter of more nuance, and something I will draw out over the monograph). The overwhelming recurrence of this use of the witch has created a situation where she is often used in both popular culture texts and activist politics as a shorthand for feminism (often a kind of amorphous, allegedly universal brand of feminism), and for certain modes of gender representation and performance. In analysing the conjunctures of crisis that bring forth the witch, this monograph not only enters into a conversation around the witch herself but about the nature of feminist memory and activism over the past half a century. The witch holds feminist memories of the past and memories of feminist pasts and consequently can be mobilized as a figure of feminist temporalities. My project here is to think through how the witch has become a mechanic for feminist memory practices, how that plays out across popular culture and activist movements, and what possibilities that opens up for imagining more just futures. Despite the witch’s long travels across feminist memoryscapes, which I outline in detail below, she also traverses more rocky terrain and has long associations with violence against marginalized genders within patriarchal, heteronormative cultures. The label of ‘witch’ has been a death sentence for people who are marginalized due to their gender (transgender and cisgender women, gender-diverse and non-conforming people, non-binary people, men who do not demonstrate hegemonic masculinities…), and continues to be in any number of countries to this day. No matter how vehement the feminist reclamation of the term, there is still a vulnerability to patriarchal violence that comes with being called a witch, particularly for people who experience multiple intersections of oppression. The violence of being called a witch has been a matter of fact for centuries. Alongside the material violence exerted on people who have

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been called a witch, which includes execution, torture, social isolation, and exclusion, is more metaphorical violence, often within the political arena. Women who reach high office in politics have ‘witch’ hurled at them as an insult: Hillary Clinton has been called the ‘Wicked Witch of the Left’ by right-wing commentators,8 and Julia Gillard was called a witch (and a bitch) by conservatives as well.9 On the other hand, in the wake of ‘cancelling’ campaigns, high-profile men often claim to be the victims of a witch hunt. Donald Trump has claimed to be the victim of a witch hunt by Democrats, the FBI, and the media on multiple occasions.10 So have other men who see themselves as the victims of persecution from progressive groups, particularly following the Me Too and Black Lives Matter movements. Men, it seems, even those who have been accused of sexual assault,11 are victims of a witch hunt, but women are witches. While a lot of political rhetoric, popular culture, and academic research focuses on the witch’s status as a symbol of various feminisms (a diverse and lively field of work of which this monograph is a part) there remains an undeniable conservative narrative of the witch. This use of the witch hunt as a symbol of male persecution at the hands of ‘woke leftie mobs’ reflects the political and mnemonic slipperiness of the cultural symbol of the witch: witches can simultaneously be powerful women (empowering, terrifying, and sometimes both) and they can be (usually male) victims of an overbearing State or social justice movement. However, the conservative narrative of the witch and the witch hunt— wherein she is a figure of scorn and derision and witch hunts are unjust persecution of men and their freedoms—is actually quite powerful for feminists. Lindy West, a feminist cultural commentator, addressed this directly in her 2017 New York Times article about the Me Too movement: “Yes, This Is A Witch Hunt. I’m A Witch And I’m Hunting You.”12 This is admittedly a simplistic—but quite compelling—rendering of the conjuncture of contradictory discourses that cohere to form the image of the witch, and my aim in this project is to interrogate and make strange the (at times overwhelming) surplus of images that make up that allegedly singular and static symbol. In considering feminist reclamations of the term witch, I am also keenly aware of her imbrication into neoliberal capitalism, and the consequent dilution of her radical and revolutionary power. As Carmen Maria Machado writes:

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You’d be hard-pressed to find a more enduring and potent archetype than the witch; she has served as a shorthand for women’s power and potential – and, for some, the threat of those things – for much of human history. And yet, nowadays, witches have become a neo-liberal girlboss-style icon. That is to say, capitalism has gotten ahold of her; and like so many things capitalism touches, she is in danger of dissociating from her radical roots. What could have once gotten a woman killed is now available for purchase at Urban Outfitters. (Within limits, of course. You can sell her crystals but refuse to pay her fair wages.)13

Nevertheless, whether a hero, a monster, a girlboss, or a protestor on the street, there is a clear cultural power that comes with the name ‘witch.’ Invoking the witch is something of a signal to the audience: this is a text about feminism; this text is feminist. In many feminist memories, the witch serves as a stand-in for a certain type of woman (the protofeminist, intelligent, powerful woman, who resists patriarchy in both large and small ways throughout her life and who is persecuted for it14 ) and for (certain kinds of) feminist politics and activism. Consequently, the witch represents an opportunity to remember (and re-remember) competing feminist discourses and movements. This understanding of the witch’s multiplicity has been a mainstay of feminist witch scholarship for several decades. Raisa Maria Toivo argues that this tension between competing feminist discourses of the witch is what makes her such a useful figure for modern feminists, as this has “enhanced the potential of the witch’s image for feminists: it could symbolise many things at the same time, and its meanings could be added, and altered, when needed.”15 Recognizing the shifting impetuses and motivations in feminist activists and scholars using the witch across decades demonstrates Diane Purkiss’s claim that the witch “mirrors—albeit sometimes in distorted form—the many images and self-images of feminism itself.”16 In analysing how the symbol of the witch has been deployed across feminist and anti-feminist history, memory, activism, and popular culture, this monograph elucidates the connections between these ideas, and particularly how contradictory symbols like the witch can come to signify conjunctures of crisis within cultural memory fields. William Faulkner famously wrote that “the past is never dead. It’s not even past.”17 I am drawn to Faulkner’s quote here for two reasons. Firstly, what it reveals about post-Enlightenment modernism’s view on time, something I will elaborate on in Chapters 3 and 8. Secondly, Faulkner

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uses the metaphor of death and not-death to describe the endurance of the past in the present. I do not want to quite say life, but there is something of the undead—or more accurately, the never-dead—about Faulkner’s characterization of the past which resonates with the ongoing discussion of afterlives and ghosts used to describe memory cultures throughout this monograph. The tension between remembering and forgetting, and the use of a mechanic of haunting, spectres, and ghosts to reconcile these tensions, are particularly pertinent when considering popular media and the culture industry. In addressing how the witch is remembered and re-remembered, read and re-read, I am also trying to come to grips with how the spectre of activist memory operates across the proliferating media and culture industry over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Consequently, I begin with a wake for the ghosts of feminist witches of the past, outlining the immense canon of feminist literature that draws on the witch as a central organizing motif, and begin to unravel the different inflections or modes of feminist politics that this reveals, before moving over the rest of the monograph into a consideration of their ongoing haunting presence and future in feminist cultural memory and popular culture. What I am concerned with is how these pasts affect cultural memories of the witch, and particularly how feminist interventions in the history and memory of the witch and the witch trials have indelibly shaped the symbol and its deployment through activist movements, political rhetoric, and popular culture and, conversely, how feminist activism and rhetoric has influenced historical writing. My interest here is in identifying what cultural memories of the witch emerge within and from feminist politics, writing, and activism, what type or mode of feminist politics these cultural memories serve, reflect, and perpetuate, and how these feminist cultural memories both draw on and depart from historical work on the witch trials. In analysing how activists, scholars, philosophers, theologians, authors, artists, filmmakers, television show creators, politicians, and any number of cultural commentators and figures since the late 1960s have employed the witch as a symbol of (an apparently universal) ‘feminism’ this project enters into an ongoing conversation about and evaluation of past feminisms. Often the witch is designated as a kind of vanguard for feminism; as a figure, idea, symbol, and sometimes even a literal person or people who paved the way for capital-F Feminism. It is particularly urgent, therefore, to determine precisely who and what is included in this monolithic idea of feminism, and who and what is excluded. It is not my intention to hold

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up past feminist treatises or figures that feature the witch as untouchable bastions of progressive, intersectional feminist politics for 2022, but to recognize the central role these sometimes-problematic works have played in crafting the symbol of the witch as she exists today. What I hope the myriad examples of feminist uses of the witch that follows demonstrates is not only the ubiquity of the witch in feminist writing and activism over the past half-century, but also how tracing the witch’s appearances in feminist rhetoric and memory cultures reveals the shifting tones, motivations, and interests of different feminisms. Tracing the emergence of the witch in feminist rhetoric, activism, and memory is an exercise in tracing the patterns and trends in various feminisms over the twentiethand twenty-first centuries.

Witches and the Divine Feminine As a figure of myth, magic, folklore, fairy tale, and religion, it is not unexpected that the witch is invoked in discussions of feminist spirituality and theology. This is evident in Mary Daly’s radical theological treatise Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (1978) in which the witch (or hag or crone) becomes a central metaphor through which women’s political, historical, and theological liberation is envisaged. Daly’s manifesto traverses both the ‘history’ of the early modern witch trials and the more spiritual domain of the witch. The early modern witch trials, Daly argues, were an attempt “to break down and destroy strong women, to dis-member and kill the Goddess, the divine spark of be-ing in women. The intent was to purify society of the existence and of the potential existence of such women.”18 The witches were “women whose physical, intellectual, economic, moral, and spiritual independence and activity profoundly threatened the male monopoly in every sphere.”19 In her acknowledgements, Daly even refers to the women killed in the witch trials as precursors to her feminist revolution, thanking the “foresisters whose spirits inspired me to break the barriers of silence and of sound, and to keep on writing […] many whose names I do not know, many of whom were probably burned as witches.”20 Daly’s project in Gyn/Ecology is a fundamentally theological one: Daly provides spiritual-mythological figures like the witch and the hag as exemplars of feminist spiritual pasts and presents. In a similar vein, Gerda Lerner argues in The Creation of Feminist Consciousness (1993) that mysticism in the pre-modern and

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early-modern periods provided an “alternate mode of thought to patriarchal thinking” for women, but that mystic women were consequently far more open to accusations of witchcraft and heresy.21 What is clear is that witches provided models and symbols for historians and scholars working within a feminist theological or spiritual paradigm. Goddess feminism and other feminist theological movements, which emerged in the latter half of the twentieth century, also drew on the witch as a symbol of women’s power, spirituality, and deep history. Prominent feminist neopagan Starhawk, for instance, writes in The Spiral Dance (1979) that “[t]o reclaim the word witch is to reclaim our right, as women, to be powerful” and that “[t]o be a witch is to identify with 9 million victims of bigotry and hatred and to take responsibility for shaping a world in which prejudice claims no more victims.”22 Writing in this same tradition of female solidarity and communal survival, Margot Adler writes in her own Wiccan text Drawing Down the Moon (1979) that “[t]he Witch, after all, is an extraordinary symbol—independent, anti-establishment, strong, and proud. She is political, yet spiritual and magical. The Witch is woman as martyr; she is persecuted by the ignorant; she is the woman who lives outside society and outside society’s definition of woman.”23 This spiritual Wiccan tradition continues in a modern context, as evidenced by Kristen J. Sollée who writes that the witch is “everywoman. The witch is at once female divinity, female ferocity, and female transgression. She is all and she is one. The witch has as many moods and as many faces as the moon.”24 The political rhetoric of the witch in activist and spiritualist groups alike has been that of solidarity, self-empowerment, and resistance. While I do not intend to analyse Wiccan or (neo-)Pagan spiritual beliefs or practices, I do want to consider the role these religious movements play in popular culture texts, particularly in feminist and postfeminist popular culture texts in the 1990s and 2000s. What is particularly compelling about this history is the tension between myth, history, and religious and spiritual belief. Wiccans and neo-Pagans position themselves as inheritors of old spiritual traditions and practices, stretching back hundreds, if not thousands of years, and their practices are thus part of a centuries-old network of beliefs. However, as historians and theologians have demonstrated, the modern Wiccan and neo-Pagan movements have their origins in the early twentieth century. Influences from Gerald Gardner’s theology, Margaret Murray’s witch-cult hypothesis, earlier Victorian spiritualist movements, and twentieth-century Occult writings are identifiable in contemporary

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neo-Paganism and Wicca.25 These spiritual beliefs do not have the centuries of tradition that they claim to have (considered in Chapter 2: Witches and the Past) but are nevertheless important spiritual beliefs that warrant the respect of scholars and require theological interrogation.26 The self-fashioning of spiritual belief is what renders Paganism and Wicca such powerful correlators to feminist activism occurring concurrently. There are clear connections between the feminist memory practice that uses the history of the witch and the witch trials to create a usable past and the emphasis on deep history within modern pagan witchcraft and spiritual systems. The spiritual recuperation of the witch and her political use for 1970s feminists were part of a larger contemporary project of historical, mythological, and literary recuperation that sought to create (or restore) a Female Divine and women’s spirituality and mythology along with women’s history and politics. Women finding themselves in the mythological and spiritual past was necessary for goddess feminism to bring about an empowered female subject outside of patriarchy and thus drive towards a feminist utopia. Feminist theology and the associated self-identification with the witch as a spiritual or religious figure has a political purpose too, and goddess feminism offers a reconceptualization of “the divine” and of “the feminine.”27 These recuperated figures can be archetypal, such as the goddess or the witch, or specific, such as Lilith, Eve, Lamia, Circe, or Jezebel (to name a few). This spiritual recuperation of past mythological, spiritual, or religious women becomes “a symbolic act of self-empowerment by which these women permit themselves to connect with and legitimate both the sacred, strong and the dark, dangerous aspects of themselves. They are attempting to re-member themselves, to reclaim aspects of themselves to which they believe they have been denied access.”28 The recuperation of the witch as a figure of the divine feminine is part of a larger concurrent feminist recuperative movement that is under investigation throughout this monograph. It also indicates something that will become a recurring focus over this monograph—the prevalence of historically-dubious memories of the past that are presented with the appearance of authority and credibility to bolster contemporary ideologies, both resistant and hegemonic, feminist and anti-feminist.

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Witch Manifestos Alongside her spiritual recuperation, the witch as she exists in cultural memory and popular culture in the Global North inherits a great deal from feminist activists, writers, and scholars from the Women’s Liberation and feminist movements that swept across a number of countries in the 1960s and 1970s.29 However, the witch’s central role in the political organizing and rhetoric of the Women’s Liberation and feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s is identifiable even in much earlier texts that informed activists, such as Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929) and Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949). Woolf considers the killing of witches in A Room of One’s Own, stating that witches were those women whose genius marked them for death: [w]hen, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Bronte who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to.30

Witches, for Woolf, offer a historical example of how women who resisted or rebelled have been punished, and operate as precursors to an emerging movement to change that system. Beauvoir uses the witch and the trials in The Second Sex as evidence of patriarchal society’s repression of women, particularly of “feminine magic” which, under patriarchy, has been domesticated.31 The witch serves as a useful metaphor for Beauvoir and for Woolf, embodying a historical symbol of how women who do not conform to patriarchal definitions of femininity are rendered as villains. The recuperation of the witch as a symbol of women’s liberation became increasingly common and radical in the 1960s and 1970s in the United States and the United Kingdom as the Women’s Liberation movement began, with a significant number of manifestos and treatises from feminist activists and scholars using the witch as an organizing symbol for their feminist rhetoric.32 In the landmark anthology Sisterhood Is Powerful (1970), Robin Morgan explains why the witch was chosen as a symbol of the Women’s Liberation movement and the radical movements of 1968 more broadly: “the witch was chosen as a revolutionary image for women because they did fight hard [in the early modern European witch hunts]

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and in their fight they refused to accept the level of struggle which society deemed acceptable for their sex. Finally, they were the center of motion both as agitators and as targets.”33 This is not just a rhetorical flourish: after all, this reconsideration of history led to activists taking to the streets dressed in full witch costumes and hexing any number of patriarchal institutions, as discussed below. Similarly, in her formative work The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (1970), Shulamith Firestone writes of the American feminist movement of the 1960s that “[t]hough there have always been women rebels in history,* the conditions have never before existed that would enable women to effectively overthrow their oppressive roles.”34 In the footnote in this passage, Firestone points to the witches killed in the witch trials as examples of these ‘women rebels’ who had been unable to make broader changes until the 1960s feminist movement: “[f]or example, witches must be seen as merely women in independent political revolt: Within two centuries eight million women were burned at the stake by the Church—for religion was the politics of that period.”35 The witches in the trials of early modern Europe, for Firestone, were precursors to the contemporary women’s movement who had been hampered by their inability to organize collectively.36 In the same year as Morgan and Firestone’s manifestos, Germaine Greer also called upon the witch and specifically the witch trials in The Female Eunuch (1970). Greer writes this of the women killed as witches in the trials: [t]here have always been women who rebelled against their role in society. The most notorious are the witches, the women who withdrew from ‘normal’ human intercourse to commune with their pets or familiars, making a living somehow by exploiting their own knowledge of herbal medicine and the credulity of the peasantry, and perhaps indulging in the mysticism of other possibilities, magic white or black, perhaps Satanism.37

There is a clear correlation in all these treatises between the witches killed in the early modern witch trials and an amorphous but symbolically powerful idea of ‘women rebels’ who predate the 1960s feminist movements in the West. Andrea Dworkin uses the witch throughout her 1974 manifesto Woman Hating as a symbol of women’s persecution both in the witch trials and in mythology and religious rhetoric. Of the early modern European witch trials, Dworkin writes:

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we are dealing with an existential terror of women, of the ‘mouth of the womb,’ stemming from a primal anxiety about male potency, tied to a desire for self (phallic) control; men have deep-rooted castration fears which are expressed as a horror of the womb. These terrors form the substrate of a myth of feminine evil which in turn justified several centuries of gynocide.38

And Dworkin calls upon the witch as a figure of theological, spiritual, and mythological recuperation and revolution, opening the first chapter of Woman Hating with “[o]nce upon a time there was a wicked witch and her name was Lilith, Eve, Hagar, Jezebel…”39 Dworkin also references an extraordinarily high death toll in the trials: “the most responsible estimate would seem to be 9 million” women executed for witchcraft.”40 The witch in this era is an incredibly important and influential figure of the emerging feminist movement, and the symbol as she exists in cultural memory and particularly popular culture to this day inherits a great deal from this branch of feminist rhetoric and activism.

Witches on the Streets (and the ‘Net) Witches are not just figures of myth, story, and polemic—feminist witches have been taking to the streets in protest since at least the 1960s in the USA and the UK. Alongside the Civil Rights protest movements and groups that shook the world in 1968, witches were mobilizing. First appearing in New York on Halloween, 1968, WITCH was a feministMarxist activist group who grew out of the Women’s Liberation movement.41 The acronym WITCH stood for different slogans depending on what they were protesting: initially meaning Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell, but transforming to other titles including Women Infuriated at Taking Care of Hoodlums, or Women Incensed at Telephone Company Harassment as needed. The witch symbolized women’s liberation through the connection between the contemporary women’s movement with historical women who resisted patriarchy. This is identifiable in WITCH’s manifesto: witches and [Roma] were the original guerillas and resistance fighters against oppression – particularly the oppression of women – down through the ages. Witches have always been women who dared to be: groovy, courageous, aggressive, intelligent, nonconformist, explorative, curious, independent, sexually liberated, revolutionary.42

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The witch was a central organizing mechanic for the group: the witches killed in the trials were seen as the “original guerrillas and resistance fighters” against patriarchy.43 WITCH quickly set about using the memory of the witch in their protests, hexing global corporations exploiting nations in the Global South, such as the United Fruit Company (“Bananas and rifles, sugar and death/War for profit, tarantula’s breath/United Fruit makes lots of loot/the CIA is in its boot”), or perceived anti-feminist institutions, such as the University of Chicago (who fired a radical feminist academic).44 After WITCH New York hexed Wall Street (including Chase Manhattan Bank and Morgan Guaranty Trust—now J.P. Morgan) the stock market dropped five points.45 Although WITCH in its 1968 incarnation faded from view after the 1970s, it re-emerged as an organized activist group across the USA following the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States in 2016. Throughout their terms in office, President Trump and Vice-President Michael Pence, along with Trump-appointed Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, all were the subjects of repeated hexes by practising witches and Wiccans across the United States.46 Speaking anonymously to Gabby Bess in Vice, one Portland WITCH member says: [w]ith it [witch identity], we don’t just represent our individual identities, but thousands upon thousands of witches and other victims of patriarchal oppression […] We want to reclaim the fearsome, transformational, ecstatic power of being a witch to change that dynamic, and show how taking pride in that identity can shift the paradigm.47

Witch protestors are not limited to the United States. In Australia, the social media-based group ‘Mad Fucking Witches’ uses the symbol of the witch to fight against the #statusBRO, as they put it. The group is named in honour of a text that Australian conservative politician Peter Dutton sent about a journalist, Samantha Maiden, to a male colleague, in which he labelled Maiden a ‘mad fucking witch.’ However, Dutton accidentally sent it to Maiden rather than to his friend. Mad Fucking Witches (MFW) write in their Facebook About page: Mad Fucking Witches started as a way to highlight the appalling sexism, misogyny, racism, homophobia, transphobia and ableism in Australia. It uses the attention caused by Peter Dutton’s ‘Mad Fucking Witch’ text to highlight government and societal misogyny: from the lack of women in

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government positions, to asylum seeker issues, Indigenous issues, cuts to women’s family violence services, and cuts to women’s medical services, among many other things.48

Unlike WITCH in the United States (who are less active following the end of Trump’s Presidency), MFW continue to operate on social media to the time of writing (particularly on Facebook and Twitter). They have organized a number of boycott campaigns against News Corporation (usually using the hashtag #NewsCorpse), conservative politicians and parties, and media commentators who make derogatory comments about women, people of colour, disabled people, LGBTQIA+ people. Much like their 1968/2016 American WITCH predecessors, MFW use the memory of the witch as a figure of powerful, persecuted femininity to bolster their political action in the present day.

Black Witches The witch in Western feminist discourse and often in popular culture is a transnational but not a racially diverse figure. White feminism is not specific to witch feminism, but it is impossible to consider the witch in feminist rhetoric without an interrogation of the role of whiteness. This is not to say that the mode of feminist thought and action inherent in all depictions or utilizations of the witch as a literary, historical, mythological, theological, spiritual, and mnemonic figure is white supremacist: in fact, far from it. However, through her travels across popular culture and activism, the witch in western cultures is primarily figured as a white woman, and Black witches are framed as the exception to the rule. The mode or manner of feminist work that has drawn on the witch has consequently usually centred white women’s liberation: the feminism inherent in the modern idea of the witch in most Western popular culture and feminist rhetoric is white feminism. Angelica Jade Bastién consequently discusses the “narrow position black witches hold in the public imagination” and the exclusion of Black women from the emancipatory status of the witch in Vulture.49 Perhaps this is due to the exclusion in most white narratives of witchcraft of voodoo, hoodoo, rootworkers, and other related beliefs: these are exoticized and are “pushed to the margins of their respective stories […] used to incite fear or curiosity in the white imagination, which remains deeply suspicious of black ancestral practices that don’t allow for easy translation,” writes Bastién.50 Witches of colour

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have not benefitted from the liberatory power of the symbol, or from the emancipatory feminist discourse of the witch—at least, not to the same degree as white witches. This is evidenced by the fact that white witches outnumber witches of colour in English-language popular media to an upsetting degree, and what few witches of colour there are often exoticized and fetishized, like Marie Laveau, the Voodoo or Witch Queen of New Orleans. While there are certainly witches of colour included throughout this monograph, the fact remains that there is a representation deficit in comparison to white witches, a trend which Bastién labels a “yawning chasm in pop-culture history.”51 Broader patterns in witch feminism have continued this paradoxically narrow call to a ‘universal’ feminism that is centred on white women, and, as demonstrated throughout this monograph, analysing the figure of the witch in feminist rhetoric and in popular culture entails grappling with the exclusionary narratives of some models of feminism. However, I am also cautious of saying that all witch feminism is white feminism, as this is certainly not the case. Black feminists have been using the witch and the witch trials as a political symbol for decades. For instance, in 1982, bell Hooks writes in Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism that “[t]he brutal treatment of enslaved black women by white men exposed the depths of male hatred of woman and woman’s body” and that the “Salem Witchcraft trials were an extreme expression of patriarchal society’s persecution of women.”52 Audre Lorde also considers the erasure of Black women from white radical feminist discourses of the witch in “An Open Letter to Mary Daly” in 1979 (later published in This Bridge Called My Back in 1981). Lorde wrote this “Open Letter” in direct response to Daly’s Gyn/Ecology, criticizing Daly’s work for excluding women of colour from the emancipatory discourse of the witch as a historical and mythical figure. However, Lorde points out, Daly still includes women of colour in her discussion of how women perpetuate patriarchy: women of colour, it seems, are criticized for internalized misogyny but do not gain access to the emancipatory power of the witch that Daly calls to in order to think outside of patriarchy.53 Maryse Condé’s novel I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem is a clear example of how the witch is a symbol bound up not only in rhetoric of gender, sexuality, and patriarchy, but with race and white supremacy. To remove the witch from her racial contexts, as has been the case with a great deal of white feminist scholarship, is to only glimpse a part of the symbol. In rewriting the story of Tituba, the first accused in the 1692

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Salem trials, Condé interrogates how witchcraft is a white term imposed upon people of colour—in this case, on the Caribbean-African Tituba—to reinforce racial boundaries in a colony that is enacting genocidal violence on First Nations people and on enslaved people. Take, for example, Tituba’s reflection in the novel on the way she is remembered—or not remembered—in the Salem story: I [Tituba] had already regretted having played only a minor role in the whole affair and having had a fate that no one could remember. “Tituba, a slave originating from the West Indies and probably practicing ‘hoodoo.’” A few lines in the many volumes written on the Salem witch trials. Why was I going to be ignored? This question too had crossed my mind. Is it because nobody cares about a Negress and her trials and tribulations? Is that why? I can look for my story among those witches of Salem, but it isn’t there.54

Condé’s retelling of Tituba’s tale is indicative of the ways that white feminism’s reclamation of the symbol of the witch—particularly in the United States—has not been extended to women of colour. In the foreword to the English translation of Maryse Condé’s novel, Angela Y. Davis writes of the erasure of Black women from the liberatory power of the witch and the history of the witch trials: [Like Tituba] I have looked for my history in the story of the colonization of this continent [North America] and I have found silences, omissions, distortions, and fleeting, enigmatic insinuations […] Tituba’s revenge consists in having persuaded one of her descendants to rewrite her moment in history in her own African oral tradition.55

Tituba’s revenge, for Condé and for Davis, is evidence of the revisionary power that contemporary media and literature has in resistant and activist cultural memory: “Tituba’s revenge consists in reminding us all that the doors to our suppressed histories are still ajar.”56 Despite the activist, historical, and popular culture deficit in representations of Black witches and empowerment, however, there are emerging trends in current feminist activism that uses the witch for anti-racist and postcolonial purposes. WITCH, for instance, in their 2016 iteration, are vehemently anti-racist in their activism, aligned with Indigenous land rights movements, the Black Lives Matter movements, and antifascist action. This is (slowly) affecting popular culture representations

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of the witch too: although there is still a representation deficit, there are more Black witches emerging in twenty-first-century popular culture (although these witches are still the minority, and there are even fewer Asian or Indigenous witches). The new Charmed reboot, for instance (2018–2022), takes place in contemporary America and centres Black and Latina women as the core trio, and the anthology television show American Horror Story (AHS) plays out the tensions between white and Black witches in the United States in its third season, Coven (2013–2014). What television shows like this demonstrate is the changing inflections of intersectional feminist rhetoric of the witch. Over this project, then, I trace how the witch was initially reclaimed by white feminists for their own liberation, but how she is slowly being aligned with a more intersectional and radical branch of postcolonial, decolonial, and anti-racist feminism.

Capitalist and Anti-capitalist Witches The narrative of the witch trials as an instance of patriarchal violence continued to be deployed in feminist rhetoric through the 1990s. The witch reflects the multiplicity of feminist politics in the 1990s; she is aligned with the incorporation of neoliberal capitalist values into feminist rhetoric that is particularly noticeable after the 1980s, but equally with more radical and, often, anti-capitalist feminist politics. This is also a period where there is an immense growth in witches in popular culture which align with ‘girl power’ feminism, something which plays into the mainstreaming of neoliberal feminist politics (this is explored in particular detail in Chapter 7: Witches as Girls). Narratives of the witch trials as instances of gynocide continue to prevail in feminist writing and polemic from this era. In The Beauty Myth (1990), for instance, Naomi Wolf uses the witch trials and the burning of women as evidence of the way that women have been shut out of the medical industry and of medical misogyny, writing “[h]ealing and tending the sick were primarily female skills until the Enlightenment; women’s medical effectiveness was one catalyst for the witch burnings that swept Europe from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries.”57 Susan Faludi uses the witch as both a historical example and as a metaphor for backlashes against women’s rights movements throughout her 1991 book Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women. “Different kinds of backlashes against women’s mostly tiny gains—or against simply the perception that women were in the ascendancy,” Faludi argues, “may be found in the rise of

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restrictive property laws and penalties for unwed and childless women of ancient Rome, the heresy judgements against female disciples of the early Christian Church, or the mass witch burnings of medieval Europe.”58 Faludi goes on to point out that women in public office have been labelled witches by political opponents,59 that the 1980s’ family cinema trend culminated in a backlash where films began to depict wives as “virtual witches, controlling and conquering their husbands with a supernatural and deadly precision,”60 and that fairy-tale witches were deployed by men’s rights activists in the 1980s and 1990s as the embodiment of the evils of the women’s rights movement that emasculated men.61 Faludi also uses the phrase “feminist witch hunt” on multiple occasions to describe the backlash against the women’s rights movements—the hunting of feminists, rather than feminists hunting down men as might be expected in 2020 parlance.62 Faludi’s use of the symbol particularly demonstrates the sheer scope of the accrued meanings that the witch has picked up across her travels in feminist memory. Both Wolf and Faludi’s usages of the witch reveal an underlying neoliberal capitalist mode of feminist rhetoric—they are both concerned with women’s careers and economic status, and how the punishment of witches was a means of preventing women from achieving higher status within a capitalist system (or the emerging capitalist system of the early modern period). However, not all treatises from this era reflect this type of feminist politics, with a more radical and even anti-capitalist bent emerging in some feminist ventures that use the witch as a central motif. For example, Gloria Steinem maintains the spiritual and almost-theological facet of witch identity that earlier feminist manifestos like Dworkin’s and Daly’s held in Revolution from Within (1992), her feminist self-help book. Steinem again positions the trials in early modern Europe as instances of historical patriarchy, noting that early modern beliefs about women include the notion “that intelligent women were the work of the devil (a belief that had helped to justify killing nine million women healers and other pagan or nonconforming women as witches during the centuries of change over to Christianity).”63 In an even more radical Marxist feminist analysis, Silvia Federici contends in Caliban and the Witch (2004) that the witch hunts in early-modern Europe were “one of the most important events in the development of capitalist society and the formation of the modern proletariat.”64 The “campaign of terror” launched on women, Federici argues, smoothed the way for the assault launched against the proletariat by the

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landed gentry and capitalist State, and consequently “the witch-hunt was an essential aspect of primitive accumulation and the ‘transition’ to capitalism.”65 The “specter of the witches” continues to haunt contemporary debates about class struggle, evoking the memory of the violent oppression of the proletariat and of gender relations.66 The witch as a symbol of gendered class struggle (or classed gender struggle) is clearly evident in 1968 WITCH’s protesting of banks, Wall Street, and corporations: while the witch has certainly been co-opted into a more neoliberal girlboss postfeminism as Machado contends,67 she is equally haunted by the spectre of more radical, anti-capitalist feminist politics. Federici’s understanding of the witch trials is indicative of the continued use of the witch for a radical, anti-capitalist mode of feminist rhetoric and activism, alongside the more pervasive and recognizable capitalist-feminism that proliferates across the 1990s.

Queer Witches and Trans-Exclusionary Witches Like the white feminism of witches, feminist rhetoric that uses the witch as a symbol of power has often excluded transgender, gender-diverse, and non-binary people from its emancipatory rhetoric. For instance, to again turn to Daly’s Gyn/Ecology, the witch is used as a symbol of anti-transgender feminist rhetoric, or trans-exclusionary radical feminism: in one particularly offensive passage, Daly compares drag queens and transwomen’s gender identity and gender confirmation surgery to blackface,68 not only demonstrating the anti-transgender rhetoric at the heart of this model of feminism, but the intersection of transphobia and racism (and the deliberate misunderstanding of transgender identities, as drag is not the same as being transgender). The correlation between using the witch as a symbol of feminist power and feminist politics that excludes transgender people continues to the present day. The most notable incidence of the witch being used in anti-transgender feminist rhetoric is the current online debate around young adult author J. K. Rowling, who has been increasingly vocal about her ‘gender critical’ feminist politics, particularly on Twitter. Rowling explicitly correlates her ‘gender critical’ politics and the criticism she receives for it with the oppression and execution of witches. For example, on June 7, 2020, she Tweeted: “‘Feminazi’, ‘TERF’, ‘bitch’, ‘witch’. Times change. Woman-hate is eternal.”69 Her ongoing ‘gender critical’ politics reflect a long-standing feminist tradition that excludes transgender people (particularly transgender women)

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from their model of feminism. Across the ditch, the Pussy Church of Modern Witchcraft (PCMW) now holds tax-exempt status after being recognized as a religious organization by the US government.70 The Pussy Church of Modern Witchcraft hold anti-transgender rhetoric as a central tenet of their beliefs, only allowing cisgender women to be congregants and explicitly stating that the congregants have to provide evidence of ‘living a lesbian life’ (whatever that means).71 What the PCMW and Rowling’s ongoing ‘gender critical’ campaign against transgender liberation demonstrate is an ongoing correlation between trans-exclusionary feminist politics and the figure of the witch. However, despite the ongoing connection between the witch and trans-exclusionary radical feminism, there is an equally strong connection between queer and trans-inclusive feminism and the witch in the 2020s, a connection that draws out the emancipatory gendered discourses that the witch has always held for feminists, and equally, queer approaches to gender that the witch reflected even in the early modern period. The rejuvenated WITCH activist group that emerged in response to Trump’s election, discussed above, have explicitly constructed their feminist activism to be inclusive to queer and transgender people, in acknowledgement of their forebears’ less inclusive radical feminism.72 Activists representing WITCH have indicated their commitment to intersectional feminist protest: It’s been 50 years, but here we are still fighting for access to abortion and birth control, equal pay, justice for rape survivors, and other feminist issues […] Meanwhile, every day, black people are being murdered by police, ICE is destroying families, trans women live in fear for their lives, and slavery is still legal in the United States through the prison industrial complex.73

WITCH’s inclusive and intersectional feminism is reflective of broader trends amongst witchcraft and Wicca practitioners using their spirituality to reflect their gender diversity. Moira Donovan explores these queer feminist witch communities (or covens) in Vice, writing of the “resurgence among queer-identified young people seeking a powerful identity that celebrates the freedom to choose who you are.”74 Popular culture texts that feature queer witches increasingly use witchcraft as a means of transgender and queer people’s liberation as well as cisgender women’s and queer liberation. The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (2018–2020) features non-binary actor Lachlan Watson

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as a transgender student and Sabrina’s friend, Theo Putnam (although while Sabrina ties the witches’ freedom to transgender liberation, Theo himself is not a witch). The Craft: Legacy (dir. Zoe Lister-Jones, 2020) features a transgender Latina witch, Lourdes, who is played by Zoey Luna, a transgender actress. Molly Ostertag’s graphic novel for younger readers, The Witch Boy (2017) does not explicitly label its lead, thirteenyear-old Aster, as a transgender child, but the narrative presents quite a clear allegory where witchcraft stands in for transgender, gender-diverse, and gender-non-conforming children’s identities. Alison Evans’ Euphoria Kids (2020) features three queer teenagers (transgender and non-binary) who are connected to the magical world of witches and fae, and whose friendship and queer solidarity help them find themselves. All of these texts are very recent, no more than five or six years old. While there is a distressing growth in trans-exclusionary radical feminist rhetoric that uses the witch (a continuation of a long tradition), there is equally feminist work using witches that celebrates transgender people and fights for transgender liberation. The witch continues to contain multitudes, and reflects the ongoing internal tensions among feminisms globally.

The Beginnings of the Witches This is not an exhaustive overview of all feminist usages of the witch over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—in fact, far from it. To try and include every single iteration of the witch in popular culture, literature, film, television, activism, memes and digital discourse, political rhetoric, memes, historiography, religion and spirituality, and everyday life would take an encyclopaedia of its own. What I hope these examples have demonstrated, however, is that the witch has served as a central organizing symbol for all manner of feminist activists, scholars, writers, and audiences for decades, often to politically contradictory ends. The afterlives of various ideologies—particularly but not exclusively various feminisms—continue to haunt the witch, and she has come to exist in popular culture as a “symbol for active and dominant women.”75 The witch has been both an identity that is forced upon people as well as one that is freely taken on,76 compounding the multiplicity of ideologies inherent in the symbol. Often, she is invoked as a symbol not only of feminism but of femininity and ‘femaleness’ too77 —an essentialist understanding of the witch’s gender that I am not inclined to support but must also recognize is incredibly prevalent across feminist usages

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of the symbol. However, what it is also indisputable is that the witch is a symbol that is aligned with genders (plural) that are not in positions of cultural dominance—femininity, yes, but equally with non-binary genders, with non-hegemonic masculinities, with transgender and genderdiverse people, with people who exist outside binary understandings of gender. To consider the witch’s afterlives is to consider the structures of power as they are reified in the culture industry, and to consider how these norms of gender intersect with other identity categories. To consider the witch is to consider power. As theories and practices of feminism have evolved, and new critical discourses have arisen, popular notions of the witch as a figure of power and dissent have similarly developed. The changing theories, emphases, and practices of feminism and witchcraft scholarship have required an evaluation of feminist deployments of the witch that can be “painful and divisive,”78 as the witch has become a key part of some feminists’ identities over the ensuing decades. Where, for many feminists, the witch is a site of liberation—from gendered oppression, from capitalism, from white supremacy, from transphobia and homophobia—she equally has been subsumed into those hegemonic ideologies—white, neoliberal postfeminism, racial capitalism, transphobic, binary gender structures—and contending with these competing, often painful, but also potentially liberatory spectral afterlives is the aim of this monograph. Feminist revisions of the witch trials and the witch in manifestos and activist movements in the 1970s particularly represent deliberate interventions in cultural memories of the trials. My concern in this monograph is therefore to trace how the figure of the witch in popular culture and cultural memory responds to feminist activism and scholarship, and how, in turn, popular culture has shaped feminist activism and scholarship. The witch exists as a figure of history (/herstory), myth, and futurity at once. Her presence in literary and popular media and memory cultures reflects the entangled threads of different feminisms (not all positive or progressive): pre-feminisms, proto-feminisms, radical feminisms, postcolonial feminisms, ecofeminisms, trans-exclusionary feminisms, queer feminisms, anti-racist feminisms, white feminisms, Black and Blak feminisms, anti-capitalist feminisms, neoliberal or corporate feminisms, and even vehemently anti-feminist rhetoric. This is not to mention how the symbol reflects ideologies of nationalism and anti-nationalism, anti-authoritarianism, anarchism, communism and Marxism, ableism and

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disability justice, capitalism, white supremacy and racism, racial liberation, and any number of other identity intersections. The witch is not a monolith: she contains any number of paradoxical and competing ideologies and identities. The sheer ubiquity of scholarship on the witch as a historical or literary figure demonstrates the diversity and depth of representations of the symbol. Any attempt to cover every single thing that a witch ‘is’ or ‘does’ will fall short. Given my overall concern here with how the witch is imbricated with feminist memory cultures, I focus my analysis in this monograph on the relationship between history, memory, and feminist politics and ideology, and how this plays out in popular culture representations of the witch. Feminist Afterlives of the Witch is consequently organized according to each of these focuses and roughly charts the chronology of the witch’s afterlife in feminist cultural memory. I think of these haunting afterlives almost as afterimages—the spectral figure burned into your eyes after a flash of lightning illuminates the dark for a moment. Each chapter considers one of these haunting afterimages. In Chapter 2: Witches and the Past, I consider how the history of the witch trials in early modern Europe and colonial America has been written. Interrogating various ideological positions in the writing of these pasts, I consider not only how each demonstrates a different political intention in the present, but how there is a trend for historical inaccuracies to accrue around the cultural symbol of the witch. This consideration of affective attachment to inaccurate memories of the past is continued in Chapter 3: Witches and the Present. In this chapter, I outline the feminist activist memory and ghostly rereading practice that is at the heart of Feminist Afterlives of the Witch. The chapter is consequently a reckoning with the trinity of the spectre of memory, popular culture, and activism. Following this, Chapters 4–7 enact a consideration of different afterlives (or afterimages) of the witch in popular culture. Drawing out the threads of memory and activism as they are deployed and mediated through popular culture, I consider the memory of the witch as a monster (in Chapter 4), a lover (in Chapter 5), a mother (in Chapter 6), and a girl (in Chapter 7). Each of these identities demonstrates, in different ways, the afterlives of feminist interventions in cultural memories of the witch and the witch trials, and each consequently reflects the changing impetus of feminist scholarship, activism, popular writing, and politics. Finally, in Chapter 8, I consider the future orientation of feminist activist memory. Feminist interventions in memory are not just activist imaginings of the

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past for no purpose but are always turned towards the future, and in this final chapter, I consider how the ghosts of the witches enact justice by prompting action. What is at stake here is considering how the polysemy of a cultural, historical, and mnemonic symbol like the witch can contain and represent all of these competing, and paradoxical meanings, and, crucially, what this means for feminist activist memory scholars. Popular culture texts mediate memories of feminism and feminist memories and consequently make these memories actionable. This is what constitutes the activist nature of these popular culture memories and representations. As author Madeline Miller writes in The Guardian: “despite all the attempts to stamp out witches, they are as strongly with us as ever […] The stereotypical image of the witch […] has become entrenched, but beneath that surface lies a dazzling variety; a rich diversity of women who have frightened, possessed, and inspired us over the centuries.”79 Witches in popular culture, feminist activism, and cultural memory reflect our understandings of the past, our politics in the present, and our fervent hopes for the future.

Notes 1. Broad City, season 4, episode 6, “Witches,” directed by Abbi Jacobson, written by Gabe Liedman, Abbi Jacobson, and Ilana Glazer, aired October 25, 2017, in broadcast syndication, Roadshow, 2017, DVD. 2. Broad City, “Witches.” 3. What is also of note about these recent witch texts that I’ve named here is that they are all adaptations or remakes of older texts. This constant haunting of past stories and myths in witcherature is something I will discuss in more depth over this monograph, but the prevalence of witches in adaptations and remakes underlines my point that the story of the witch is something we re-tell or re-purpose according to our current cultural necessities or requirements. 4. Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, season 2, episode 7, “The Miracles of Sabrina Spellman,” directed by Lee Toland Krieger, written by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, featuring Kiernan Shipka, aired April 5, 2019, Netflix, https://www.netflix.com/watch/80230088?trackId=14170289&tctx=3% 2C3%2Cf7e16e73-8e79-479c-b500-43aaab9f8d00-51492608%2CGPS_ F779D5F610659E8B2D92AE3D11F4BD-994911DC4F528C-AF7AE9 83EB_p_1664340797968%2CGPS_F779D5F610659E8B2D92AE3D 11F4BD_p_1664340142580%2C%2C%2C%2C80223989.

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5. Kristen J. Sollée, Witches, Sluts, Feminists: Conjuring the Sex Positive (Berkeley: Three L Media, 2017), 47. 6. Stuart Hall, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, and Brian Roberts, Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order, 2nd ed. (London: Bloomsbury, 1978; 2013), xv. 7. Hall et al., Policing the Crisis, xv. 8. Anna North, “The Witching Season: Editorial Notebook Column,” New York Times, October 22, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/ 23/opinion/sunday/the-witching-season.html. 9. James Massola and Political Correspondent, “Julia Gillard on the Moment That Should Have Killed Tony Abbott’s Career,” Sydney Morning Herald, June 23, 2015, https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/julia-gillardon-the-moment-that-should-have-killed-tony-abbotts-career-20150622ghug63.html. 10. “Donald Trump Says Impeachment Trials Part of ‘Greatest Witch Hunt in the History of Our Country’,” ABC News, February 14, 2021, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-02-14/donald-trump-says-impeac hment-trial-part-of-greatest-witch-hunt/13153230; David Smith, “‘A One-Sided Witch Hunt’: Angry Trump Lashes out at January 6 Hearings,” Guardian, June 18, 2022, https://www.theguardian.com/usnews/2022/jun/17/donald-trump-january-6-hearings-witch-hunt. 11. For instance, Woody Allen described the treatment of Harvey Weinstein following his conviction for sexual assault and rape as having 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” (see Kyle Swenson, “Woody Allen, of Course, Warns of ‘Witch Hunt Atmosphere’ Following Harvey Weinstein Scandal,” Washington Post, October 16, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morningmix/wp/2017/10/16/woody-allen-of-course-warns-of-witch-hunt-atm osphere-following-harvey-weinstein-scandal/). Bill Cosby’s attorneys also referenced “Witch hunts. Lynchings. McCarthyism” in their closing statements during a 2018 trial (see Nicole Weisensee Egan, “Cosby’s Attorney Compares #MeToo to ‘Witch Hunts, Lynchings, McCarthyism’,” Daily Beast, April 24, 2018, https://www.thedailybeast.com/cosbys-attorneycompares-metoo-to-witch-hunts-lynchings-mccarthyism). 12. Lindy West, “Yes, This Is a Witch Hunt. I’m a Witch and I’m Hunting You,” New York Times, October 17, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/ 2017/10/17/opinion/columnists/weinstein-harassment-witchunt.html. 13. Carmen Maria Machado, foreword to In Defence of Witches, ed. Mona Chollet, trans. Sophie R. Lewis (London: Picador, 2022), vii. 14. I am using ‘woman’ here deliberately rather than the more accurate ‘person’—witches are not ubiquitously women, but certain strains of feminism (which I elaborate on below) position them as being exclusively cisgender

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15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21.

22.

23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30.

women as part of their political agenda to exclude transgender and nonbinary people from their feminist work. This is one of the many haunting legacies of the witch that I grapple with over the monograph. Raisa Maria Toivo, Witchcraft and Gender in Early Modern Society: Finland and the Wider European Experience (Hampshire, UK: Ashgate, 2008), 10. Diane Purkiss, The Witch in History: Early Modern and Twentieth-Century Representations (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 10. William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books in Association with Chatto and Windus, 1953), 81. Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978), 183. Daly, Gyn/Ecology, 194. Daly xviii. Daly’s manifesto is characterised by a vitriolic attack on transgender people. It is unsurprising that she only refers to the (presumably cisgender) women killed in the trials rather than the more accurate ‘people.’ Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Feminist Consciousness: From the Middle Ages to Eighteen-Seventy (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 77–79. Starhawk, The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess, Special 20th anniversary ed. (San Francisco, CA: Harper Collins, 1999), 31–32. Note also the reference to nine million killed, which will be considered in the next chapter. Margot Adler, Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, GoddessWorshippers, and Other Pagans in America Today (1979, reis., Boston: Beacon Press, 1986), 183. Sollée, Witches, 15. Adler, Drawing Down the Moon, 56–60. Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 399. Kathryn Rountree, Embracing the Witch and the Goddess: Feminist RitualMakers in New Zealand (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), 5. Rountree, Embracing the Witch, 4. I also discuss important precursor texts such as Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949) and Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929) here that clearly are not from the 1960s or 1970s. I am stuck between the rock of using inaccurate periodization and the hard place of using an overly-general ‘waves model’ of feminism. In this instance, I choose the rock. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1929, reis., London: Penguin, 2009), 50.

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31. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier (1949, reis., London: Vintage, 2011), 193–198. 32. Importantly, scholars who were not necessarily historians. 33. Robin Morgan, Sisterhood Is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Women’s Liberation Movement (New York: Vintage Books, 1970), 543. 34. Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, Bantam revised ed. (Toronto, New York, and London: Bantam, 1971), 15–16. 35. Firestone, Dialectic of Sex, 15–16. 36. I also want to flag Firestone’s claim here about the eight million women burned. 37. Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch (1970, reis., London: Harper Perennial, Harper Collins, 2006), 329. 38. Andrea Dworkin, Woman Hating (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1974), 134. 39. Dworkin, Woman Hating, 31. 40. Dworkin 130, emphasis original. Again, note the reference to nine million killed. 41. Morgan, Sisterhood, 538. 42. “WITCH Documents,” quoted in Morgan, 539. 43. “WITCH Documents,” quoted in Morgan, 539. 44. Morgan 538. 45. Morgan n.p. The pictures and figures in Sisterhood is Powerful are unnumbered, and the photograph pages are not paginated. This is from the captions of one of the images. The reference to the stock market dropping after being hexed by WITCH is probably apocryphal, but it is one of my favourite stories about the activist group. 46. See “Witches Cast ‘Mass Spell’ Against Donald Trump,” BBC News, February 25, 2017, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-390 90334; Emma Grey Ellis, “TikTok Witches Are Hexing the Election This Halloween,” Wired, October 29, 2020, https://www.wired.com/ story/internet-witches-election/; Lisa Stardust, “Witches Hex Trump and His Supporters After Capitol Insurrection,” Teen Vogue, January 12, 2021, https://www.teenvogue.com/story/witches-hex-trump-andhis-supporters. 47. Gabby Bess, “How the Socialist Feminists of WITCH Use Magic to Fight Capitalism,” Vice, October 3, 2017, https://www.vice.com/en/art icle/yw3bpk/how-the-socialist-feminists-of-witch-use-magic-to-fight-cap italism. 48. Mad Fucking Witches (MFW). “About Page.” “Mad Fucking Witches (MFW) Started as a Way to Highlight…” Facebook. n.d., https://www. facebook.com/MFWitches/about/?ref=page_internal. 49. Angelica Jade Bastién, “Why Can’t Black Witches Get Some Respect in Popular Culture?” Vulture, Oct 31, 2017, https://www.vulture.com/ 2017/10/black-witches-why-cant-they-get-respect-in-pop-culture.html.

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50. Bastién, “Black Witches.” 51. Bastién, “Black Witches.” 52. bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (London: Pluto Press, 1982), 29–30. 53. Audre Lorde, “An Open Letter to Mary Daly,” in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, ed. Cherríe L. Moraga and Gloria E. Anzaldúa (Berkeley, CA: Third Woman Press, 2002), 105. 54. Maryse Condé, I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem, trans. Richard Philcox (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1992), 149. 55. Angela Y. Davis, foreword to I Tituba, Black Witch of Salem, ed. Carol F. Coates (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1992), xi–xii. 56. Davis, foreword, xiii. 57. Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women (London: Vintage Books, 1991), 221. Naomi Wolf can hardly be considered historically rigorous in her polemical writing, even though she presents herself as a historian, and, like many of the other feminist manifestos already mentioned, The Beauty Myth gives the appearance of historical accuracy. 58. Susan Faludi, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women (1991, reis., New York: Three Rivers Press, 2006), 62. 59. Faludi, Backlash, 83, 245–246. 60. Faludi 150. 61. Faludi 322–323. 62. Faludi 246, 392. 63. Gloria Steinem, Revolution from Within: A Book of Self-Esteem (London: Bloomsbury, 1992), 133. Again, note the reference to ‘nine million’ victims in the trials. 64. Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (New York: Autonomedia, 2004), 165. 65. Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 165. 66. Federici 206. 67. Machado vii. 68. Daly 67. 69. J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling), “‘Feminazi’, ‘TERF’, ‘Witch’, ‘Bitch’. Times Change. Woman-Hate Is Eternal,” Twitter, June 7, 2020, https://twitter. com/jk_rowling/status/1269401983095648259?lang=en. 70. Peter J. Reilly, “Lesbians Want a Church of Their Own and IRS Approves,” Forbes, August 3, 2018, https://www.forbes.com/sites/pet erjreilly/2018/08/03/lesbians-want-a-church-of-their-own-and-irs-app roves/?sh=2ab88e0721c2. 71. See Mary Emily O’Hara, “This TERF Church Has Officially Been Declared a Place of Worship by the IRS,” Them, August 9, 2018, https:// www.them.us/story/terf-church-irs. I am referring to articles written about the PCMW rather than their own writing as they barely have an

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72.

73.

74.

75. 76. 77. 78. 79.

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online footprint, with only an inactive blog and a Twitter account that has been suspended for violating Twitter rules available at the time of writing. WITCH in its current form are completely anonymous. This is due to their intention to represent all persecuted or oppressed people. It is likely also due to safety concerns in an increasingly violent political environment. Sara Meghan, “This Activist Group Is Fighting for Equality in the Witchiest Way,” Bust Magazine, October/November, 2017, https://bust. com/feminism/193579-witch-activist-group.html. Moira Donovan, “How Witchcraft Is Empowering Queer and Trans Young People,” Vice, August 8, 2015, https://www.vice.com/da/article/ zngyv9/queer-trans-people-take-aim-at-the-patriarchy-through-witchcraft. Toivo, Witchcraft and Gender, 10. Sollée 9. Justyna Sempruch, Fantasies of Gender and the Witch in Feminist Theory and Literature (Indiana: Purdue University Press, 2008), 18. Purkiss, Witch in History, 26. Madeline Miller, “From Circe to Clinton: Why Powerful Women Are Cast as Witches,” Guardian, April 7, 2018, https://www.theguardian. com/books/2018/apr/07/cursed-from-circe-to-clinton-why-womenare-cast-as-witches.

Bibliography Adler, Margot. Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshippers, and Other Pagans in America Today. 1979. Reissue. Boston: Beacon Press, 1986. Aguirre-Sacasa, Roberto, writer. Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. Season 2, episode 7, “The Miracles of Sabrina Spellman.” Directed by Lee Toland Krieger. Aired April 5, 2019. Netflix. https://www.netflix.com/watch/802 30088?trackId=14170289&tctx=3%2C3%2Cf7e16e73-8e79-479c-b500-43a aab9f8d00-51492608%2CGPS_F779D5F610659E8B2D92AE3D11F4BD994911DC4F528C-AF7AE983EB_p_1664340797968%2CGPS_F779D5 F610659E8B2D92AE3D11F4BD_p_1664340142580%2C%2C%2C%2C8 0223989. Bastién, Angelica Jade. “Why Can’t Black Witches Get Some Respect in Popular Culture?” Vulture, October 31, 2017. https://www.vulture.com/2017/10/ black-witches-why-cant-they-get-respect-in-pop-culture.html. Bess, Gabby. “How the Socialist Feminists of WITCH Use Magic to Fight Capitalism.” Vice, October 3, 2017. https://www.vice.com/en/article/yw3bpk/ how-the-socialist-feminists-of-witch-use-magic-to-fight-capitalism.

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Condé, Maryse. I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem. Translated by Richard Philcox. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1992. Daly, Mary. Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism. Boston: Beacon Press, 1978. Davis, Angela Y. Foreword to I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem, xi–xiii. Edited by Carol F. Coates. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1992. de Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex. Translated by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier. 1949. Reissue. London: Vintage Books, 2011. “Donald Trump Says Impeachment Trials Part of ‘Greatest Witch Hunt in the History of Our Country’.” ABC News, February 14, 2021. https://www. abc.net.au/news/2021-02-14/donald-trump-says-impeachment-trial-part-ofgreatest-witch-hunt/13153230. Donovan, Moira. “How Witchcraft Is Empowering Queer and Trans Young People.” Vice, August 8, 2015. https://www.vice.com/da/article/zngyv9/ queer-trans-people-take-aim-at-the-patriarchy-through-witchcraft. Dworkin, Andrea. Woman Hating. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1974. Egan, Nicole Weisensee. “Cosby’s Attorney Compares #MeToo to ‘Witch Hunts, Lynchings, McCarthyism’.” Daily Beast, April 24, 2018. https:// www.thedailybeast.com/cosbys-attorney-compares-metoo-to-witch-hunts-lyn chings-mccarthyism. Ellis, Emma Grey. “TikTok Witches Are Hexing the Election This Halloween.” Wired, October 29, 2020. https://www.wired.com/story/internet-witcheselection/. Emily O’Hara, Mary. “This TERF Church Has Officially Been Declared a Place of Worship by the IRS.” Them, August 9, 2018. https://www.them.us/story/ terf-church-irs. Faludi, Susan. Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women. 1991. Reissue. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2006. Faulkner, William. Requiem for a Nun. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books in Association with Chatto and Windus, 1953. Federici, Silvia. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. New York: Autonomedia, 2004. Firestone, Shulamith. The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution. Bantam revised edition. Toronto, New York, and London: Bantam, 1970. Greer, Germaine. The Female Eunuch. 1970. Reissue. London: Harper Perennial, Harper Collins, 2006. Hall, Stuart, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, and Brian Roberts. Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order. 2nd edition. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. hooks, bell. Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism. London: Pluto Press, 1982.

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Hutton, Ronald. The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Lerner, Gerda. The Creation of Feminist Consciousness: From the Middle Ages to Eighteen-Seventy. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. Liedman, Gabe, Abbi Jacobson, and Ilana Glazer, writers. Broad City. Season 4, episode 6, “Witches.” Directed by Abbi Jacobson. Aired October 25, 2017, in broadcast syndication. Roadshow, 2018, DVD. Lorde, Audre. “An Open Letter to Mary Daly.” In This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, edited by Cherríe L. Moraga and Gloria E. Anzaldúa, 101–105. Berkeley, CA: Third Woman Press, 2002. Machado, Carmen Maria. Foreword to In Defence of Witches, v–viii. Edited by Mona Chollet, translated by Sophie R. Lewis. London: Picador, 2022. Mad Fucking Witches (MFW). “About Page.” “Mad Fucking Witches (MFW) Started as a Way to Highlight…” Facebook, n.d. https://www.facebook. com/MFWitches/about/?ref=page_internal. Massola, James and Political Correspondent. “Julia Gillard on the Moment That Should Have Killed Tony Abbott’s Career.” Sydney Morning Herald, June 23, 2015. https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/julia-gillard-onthe-moment-that-should-have-killed-tony-abbotts-career-20150622-ghug63. html. Meghan, Sara. “This Activist Group Is Fighting for Equality in the Witchiest Way.” Bust Magazine, October/November 2017. https://bust.com/fem inism/193579-witch-activist-group.html. Miller, Madeline. “From Circe to Clinton: Why Powerful Women Are Cast As Witches.” Guardian, April 7, 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/books/ 2018/apr/07/cursed-from-circe-to-clinton-why-women-are-cast-as-witches. Morgan, Robin. Sisterhood Is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Women’s Liberation Movement. New York: Vintage Books, 1970. North, Anna. “The Witching Season: Editorial Notebook Column.” New York Times, October 22, 2016. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/23/opi nion/sunday/the-witching-season.html. Purkiss, Diane. The Witch in History: Early Modern and Twentieth-Century Representations. London and New York: Routledge, 1996. Reilly, Peter J. “Lesbians Want a Church of Their Own and IRS Approves.” Forbes, August 3, 2018. https://www.forbes.com/sites/peterjreilly/2018/ 08/03/lesbians-want-a-church-of-their-own-and-irs-approves/?sh=2ab88e 0721c2. Rountree, Kathryn. Embracing the Witch and the Goddess: Feminist Ritual-Makers in New Zealand. London and New York: Routledge, 2003. Rowling, J.K. (@jk_rowling). “‘Feminazi’, ‘TERF’, ‘Witch’, ‘Bitch’. Times Change. Woman-Hate Is Eternal.” Twitter, June 7, 2020. https://twitter. com/jk_rowling/status/1269401983095648259?lang=en.

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Sempruch, Justyna. Fantasies of Gender and the Witch in Feminist Theory and Literature. Indiana: Purdue University Press, 2008. Smith, David. “‘A One-Sided Witch Hunt’: Angry Trump Lashes out at January 6 Hearings.” The Guardian, June 18, 2022. https://www.theguardian.com/ us-news/2022/jun/17/donald-trump-january-6-hearings-witch-hunt. Sollée, Kristen J. Witches, Sluts, Feminists: Conjuring the Sex Positive. Berkeley: Three L Media, 2017. Stardust, Lisa. “Witches Hex Trump and His Supporters After Capitol Insurrection.” Teen Vogue, January 12, 2021. https://www.teenvogue.com/story/wit ches-hex-trump-and-his-supporters. Starhawk. The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess. Special 20th anniversary edition. San Francisco, CA: Harper Collins, 1999. Steinem, Gloria. Revolution from Within: A Book of Self-Esteem. London: Bloomsbury, 1992. Swenson, Kyle. “Woody Allen, of Course, Warns of ‘Witch Hunt Atmosphere’ Following Harvey Weinstein Scandal.” Washington Post, October 16, 2017. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/10/16/ woody-allen-of-course-warns-of-witch-hunt-atmosphere-following-harvey-wei nstein-scandal/. Toivo, Raisa Maria. Witchcraft and Gender in Early Modern Society: Finland and the Wider European Experience. Hampshire, UK: Ashgate, 2008. West, Lindy. “Yes, This Is a Witch Hunt. I’m a Witch and I’m Hunting You.” New York Times, October 17, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/ 17/opinion/columnists/weinstein-harassment-witchunt.html. “Witches Cast ‘Mass Spell’ Against Donald Trump.” BBC News, February 25, 2017. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-39090334. Wolf, Naomi. The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women. London: Vintage Books, 1991. Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. 1929. Reissue. London: Penguin, 2009.

CHAPTER 2

Witches and the Past

The question of why so many people were tried and executed as witches in early modern Europe and colonial America is one that historians have attempted to answer for decades, if not centuries. Why did secular and religious authorities and institutions make a concerted effort over several centuries to ‘root out’ witches in Europe and North America? Why was everyday life across Europe and the American colonies characterized by this vehement fear of and mass persecution of alleged witches for several centuries (if, in fact, it did characterize everyday life)? What does this reveal about those cultures, that a figure like the witch, with all her entangled intersections of identity and power, holds such a central villainous role in this period? Historians and scholars bemoan the inaccurate (and sometimes patently false) ways that history is circulated in popular culture and media, particularly given the role that historical disinformation plays in dangerous, anti-social movements. While the history of the witch trials has not necessarily been turned to this level of extreme disinformation and potential violence, it is an example of how false history circulates in popular media and how these ahistorical narratives can be turned to activist movements. Over this and the next chapter, I consider what kind of ‘historical’ narratives about the witch trials and the figure of the witch emerge from the metaphorical cauldron of history. What follows is a sort of ‘history of the history’ of the witch trials. As the late, great John Berger writes in Ways of Seeing: “[t]he past is never there waiting to be © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 B. Kosmina, Feminist Afterlives of the Witch, Palgrave Studies in (Re)Presenting Gender, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25292-1_2

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discovered, to be recognized for exactly what it is. History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past.”1 Given the recurring concern with literature and narrative through this monograph, what kinds of narratives about the witch do these pasts provide? What effect does this have on historical and mnemonic understandings of the witch trials, and how she can be and has been deployed in feminist rhetoric, practice, and writing? Witchcraft beliefs and practices have existed in nearly all pre-modern and modern societies.2 However, witchcraft is not confined to the past: alongside the ever-growing neo-Pagan and Wiccan spiritual movements, witch hunts, trials and killings continue globally. The Satanic panics of the 1970s to the 1990s that swept the United States and the United Kingdom bear the hallmarks of the witch hunts and the fear of the witch.3 British military intelligence even exploited existing cultural anxieties about witches and Satanism during the Troubles in the 1970s, spreading disinformation about IRA paramilitary groups engaging in devil worship and witchcraft.4 Witch hunts and executions continue around the world5 and witchcraft is also practised around the world as a spiritual and religious system. Accusations of witchcraft in the contemporary moment across the Global South simultaneously reflect long-standing cultural, spiritual, and religious belief systems, and the interpellation of understandings of witchcraft that emerge from the colonial European centre. In South Africa, for example, cultural and spiritual practices that existed across the region prior to colonization were categorized as ‘witchcraft’ by settler-invaders, a designation that was slowly interpellated over time and that continues to be used to describe religious and spiritual practices to this day. In fact, witchcraft accusations and killings seem to be climbing in South Africa in recent decades.6 In Papua New Guinea all manner of important cultural practices, including witchcraft (which has a different implication to witchcraft in Western paradigms), are included under the banner of sorcery and the 1971 Sorcery Act. However, often what is labelled as witchcraft and is legislated as such by colonial authorities are important dimensions of religious belief systems and cultural practices.7 Again, in Indonesia, following the end of the Suharto regime, there were a sudden series of witch hunts and executions, with over 100 people dying.8 While these are only a very small number of contemporary examples of witchcraft beliefs and trials occurring contemporaneously, I mention these examples of ongoing witch hunts to demonstrate the vulnerabilities of being labelled a witch for already-marginalized people,

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and to contextualize the following historical overview of the witch trials in early modern Europe and colonial America. The witch is not just a historical symbol; she remains as with us as ever. Witchcraft history and scholarship is as diverse as contemporary cultural iterations of the witch. Witchcraft scholarship spans a number of theoretical and disciplinary fields: primarily history, but also anthropology, folklore studies, literary and art history, sociology and psychology, religious studies, and, perhaps most pertinent to me, gender studies. To that, this monograph adds memory studies as a critical lens through which to understand the witch trials and the witch. The sheer scope of witchcraft studies and history means that any summary I provide here will necessarily fall short. It is also not the norm for witchcraft scholars to attempt to tackle both the early modern European and colonial American trials in the same work. This compounds the necessary brevity of my summary in this chapter. The history of witchcraft scholarship demonstrates in many ways the evolution of the historical practice.9 Margaret Murray, an early twentieth-century witchcraft scholar whose work I discuss below, writes that “[t]he subject of Witches and Witchcraft has always suffered from the biased opinions of the commentators, both contemporary and of later date.”10 While Murray’s condemnation of bias and opinion here is ironic here (as will be discussed below), it is clear that, even as early as 1921, the history of the witch trials was explicitly politicized: writing about the witch trials was an exercise in ideological interventions in the past for contemporary purposes. Malcolm Gaskill consequently writes that “[t]he history of witchcraft illustrates the way that knowledge was not manufactured in a vacuum, but artfully determined by institutions and ideologies. Knowledge was political, and so therefore was witchcraft.”11 That is my concern in this overview: not the history of the witch trials in early modern Europe, or colonial America, but the ideological undercurrents that are discernible across the field of witchcraft studies, and how this is translated into cultural memories of the events.

(The Problem with) Understanding the Early Modern European Witch Trials Through Statistics The early modern European witch trials took place between approximately 1400 and 1700; although witchcraft practices and witch trials existed before then and continued after this date, the majority of the trials

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and ‘panics’ occurred over this period.12 The hunts were not premeditated or organized by a specific overseeing body (although in many cases the Church and the State were key actors): instead, ongoing cultural anxieties about hidden witches and both planned and spontaneous hunts using both secular and religious institutions and legislation to root the witches out spread unabated across the continent for over two centuries. While there have been many different historiographical approaches to understanding the witch trials, some of which I outline below, there is now a general consensus among witchcraft historians that a number of factors contributed to the fervour and longevity of the witch trials in early modern Europe.13 However, what is not disputed is that the overwhelming majority of the accused witches were women, non-binary people, transgender, or gender non-conforming people. Estimates about the gender breakdown of the victims of the witch trials vary according to region and period of time, but generally sit between 70 and 80% of the victims being women.14 There are notable exceptions to this: men constituted at least half of the victims in Finland and in some regions of France, and were the majority of the victims in Iceland, Estonia, Russia, and some other French regions.15 Nevertheless, the male witch has been made invisible in cultural memories of the trials.16 In the next chapter, and over the rest of the monograph, I explore the nuances of how feminist polemics remember the witch, but focusing on acts of remembering can sometimes obscure what is being forgotten, and male witches are often forgotten in both histories and cultural memories of the witch trials. Nevertheless, while acknowledging the worrying erasure of male witches, it is an undisputed fact that witchcraft was viewed, both at the time of the trials and in contemporary scholarship, as “overwhelmingly a woman’s crime.”17 The number of accusations and executions for witchcraft in early modern Europe has also been a matter of debate among witchcraft scholars and, like the gender breakdown of the victims, has been turned to ideological ends in cultural memories of the events. Estimates as to the death toll (as opposed to the much larger number of accused and indicted) differ, with scholars writing about 100,000,18 to 200,000,19 to hundreds of thousands20 of executions for witchcraft. The current general scholarly consensus estimates around 90,000 prosecutions across Europe for the duration of the hunts, with executions occurring in about half of these cases (approximately 45,000–50,000 executions).21 Not all estimates are this conservative, however; some feminist writers (who are not necessarily historians) have put the death toll of the trials at

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nine million.22 This incredibly high death rate has been comprehensively rejected by contemporary witchcraft scholars as an exaggerated death toll used by feminist activists as part of their political agenda; Diane Purkiss even calls this feminist narrative the ‘myth of the Burning Times.’23 Although Levack argues that this number has never been taken seriously by witchcraft historians,24 it has been taken seriously by many, many people who are not witchcraft historians, and requires serious interrogation as to its role in feminist cultural memory and activism (as demonstrated in Chapter 3: Witches and the Present).

The Church, the State, and the Witch Hunters: Witchcraft Histories of the Powerful The image of the witch tied to the burning stake is rife in popular culture depictions of the early modern witch trials. Just on the edge of the frame, or perhaps gently blurred in the background, is the tall, imposing man, probably wearing a cleric’s collar, who put her there. The witch hunters are just as much a part of cultural memories of the witch trials as the witches; for the witch to function as an ideological metaphor in the contemporary moment, she needs to be persecuted by someone in authority. Recovering the motivations and ideologies of the prosecuting authorities in the witch trials has been a strong focus of witchcraft scholarship. Sometimes this emphasis on the persecutor takes the form of investigating how religious institutions such as the Church(es) sought to root out heretics and consolidate orthodox beliefs (thus scapegoating all who do not adhere to the orthodoxy of the day); sometimes it focuses on demonologists and demonological treatises or ‘witch-hunting manuals’; and sometimes it interrogates how the State and legislative processes enabled the violence of the trials to be enacted on the victims, or even how emerging cultural structures associated with the State such as capitalism led to the trials. Evaluating the motivations of the institutions and individuals who shaped cultural understandings of witchcraft and perpetuated violence against alleged witches has been an important thread of witchcraft scholarship seeking to illuminate the darker aspects of Western culture and has significantly impacted cultural memories of the witch trials. Hugh Trevor-Roper’s The European Witch-Craze of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (1956) is a landmark work in witchcraft studies, primarily now because the majority of contemporary and modern

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witchcraft scholars reject the premise of his argument. Trevor-Roper argues that the witch hunts were a direct result of the Protestant and Catholic Reformations, reasoning that as witchcraft beliefs existed prior to the fifteenth century without such fervent hunting of witches, there must have been some cultural shift that resulted in the rapid growth of witch hunting as a cultural practice of scapegoating.25 The climate of religious anxiety during and following the Reformations, Trevor-Roper contends, created an ideological current where any deviance from religious norms was incorporated under the banner of heresy, and was punished accordingly.26 What is notable about Trevor-Roper’s argument—and what has made witchcraft scholars largely disagree with his argument—is his insistence that the hunts were solely the result of top-down religious upheaval, rhetoric, and reform, and his suggestion that the common people had no part in driving the trials. This ‘top-down’ approach to the history of the witch trials has been comprehensively rejected by social historians,27 and witchcraft scholars after this who identify the Reformation(s) as being significant in the changing religious rhetoric that led to the witch hunts also identify a number of other factors that emerge from this cultural religious moment. This includes changing understandings of the Devil and diabolism following the Reformation(s),28 changing understandings of witchcraft (for instance, the codification of the Sabbath as an alleged practice29 ), renewed emphasis on the sanctity and piety of the individual,30 and zealous purges of alleged heretics in the renewed Christian world after the Reformation(s).31 However, rarely after Trevor-Roper’s treatise has religious upheaval during the Reformation(s) and the Church’s quest for orthodoxy been considered the only reason. Witchcraft scholars have further considered how religious rhetoric contributed to the outbreak of the hunts in the analysis of religious texts from the period. Demonological treatises such as the notorious Malleus Maleficarum (c. 1486) or the Papal Bull of 1484 are often written about—by witchcraft scholars and popular writers—as sources that clarified, consolidated, and defined who a witch was and therefore contributed to the vehemence of the trials from this point. Pope Innocent VIII’s Papal Bull of 1484, Summis desiderantes affectibus, effectively served to ratify existing powers that Dominican friars Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger held as inquisitors into heretical practice. The 1484 Papal Bull is notable particularly for its inclusion, two years later, at the start of Kramer and Sprenger’s Malleus Maleficarum, the most notorious early modern demonological treatise.32 The Malleus is particularly

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notable for its incredible misogyny, and the vehemence with which its authors insist that witchcraft is a solely female crime. It is taken for granted in the Malleus that witches are women33 and that this is due to women’s inherent tendency to sinfulness and corruptibility.34 Women are naturally more prone to carnality,35 and so great is the wickedness of women that it is “no wonder if the world now suffers through the malice of women.”36 Whether the Malleus was representative of early modern views of women and sin or if it was extreme at the time of its publication has been a matter of debate. On the one hand, some scholars see the Malleus as the “starting signal” to a newly clarified and consolidated discourse of witchcraft and femininity, and point to the rise in persecutions and executions of women in the fifty years immediately following the publication of the Malleus as evidence of its significance.37 On the other hand, some scholars question whether the Malleus was truly representative of widespread popular beliefs about witchcraft prior to its publication, and has instead assumed that status after the fact.38 While witchcraft may be a religious or spiritual crime of heresy, it was also one that was legislated against, and therefore the role of the State and the law in the witch trials has been a central concern for witchcraft scholars.39 Interrogation of the role of the law and the State in the witch hunts often implicitly traces changes in religious rhetoric too, which influenced legal definitions and interrogation methods. For instance, the secular crime of witchcraft had to encompass changing religious rhetoric around diabolism and the pact with Satan, which distinguished witchcraft from other heresies, and jurisdictions that did make diabolic witchcraft a secular crime saw far higher levels of prosecutions.40 There are also correlations between prosecutions and changing judicial definitions of witchcraft and interrogation methods.41 This is further complicated by the different regional and national governments in place across Europe over the centuries that the trials took place, and the different statutes on the books in each principality. Critiques of the State’s legislative are mirrored by Marxist critique that addresses the role of the European witch hunts in the formation of modern capitalism; both suggest that the trials were an enactment of hegemonic control of the common people by cultural authorities. Silvia Federici’s work Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation (2004) is the key exemplar of this model of witchcraft scholarship. Federici contends that the witch hunts were:

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one of the most important events in the development of capitalist society and the formation of the modern proletariat [...] the unleashing of a campaign of terror against women, unmatched by any other persecution, weakened the resistance of the European peasantry to the assault launched against it by the gentry and the state […] the witch-hunt was an essential aspect of primitive accumulation and the ‘transition’ to capitalism.42

The witch hunts of the early modern period demonstrate how women’s bodies, labour, and means of (re)production were commodified and placed under the domination of the State during the period when mercantile capitalism became culturally hegemonic.43 What these disparate approaches to studying the witch trials of early modern Europe share is an emphasis on powerful institutions (such as the Churches, the States, the legal system, and even the emerging hegemonic capitalist system) and individuals (such as the witch hunters, the clergy, the government, and demonologists and inquisitors and their treatises) as key drivers over two centuries of the trials. These histories situate the witch hunts within broader cultural structures of domination and subordination in their overt or explicit and institutionalized forms. This particular trend in witchcraft studies has significantly impacted cultural memories of the trials; remembering the witch hunts according to this model of scholarship positions them as acts of widespread persecution against marginalized groups and people by figures and institutions with authority and power. The witch hunt is consequently remembered as the violent and murderous enactment of power upon the disenfranchised by cultural elites.

Popular Beliefs, Everyday Life, and the Witch Trials: Witchcraft Histories of the Ordinary Just as the cultural image of the witch burning at the stake in the early modern European trials may have the man who put her there standing just to the side, there is also the entire village standing around the burning pyre to watch. Alongside the compelling and vital body of work that investigates how institutions and authorities drove the witch hunts, there is an equally urgent field of scholarship that seeks to recover the experience of ordinary people during the trials, and how the hunts and trials were driven on by the implied but unconscious consent and participation

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of the common people who for several centuries accepted the accusation and often the execution of their family, friends, and neighbours. This approach considers both how popular beliefs contributed to the fervour of the hunts, and how everyday life was structured by the prevalence of witch hunts and trials and the fears and anxieties that contributed to and emerged from the ubiquity of the witch. The witch trials are understood as Gramscian processes of cultural hegemony: they may have been staged by clerical and secular authorities, but these elites did so with the unconscious apparent consent of the common people through the ideological structures of popular beliefs about magic, witchcraft, gender, heresy, and punishment. This branch of witchcraft scholarship seeks to recover how popular beliefs, often not explicitly recorded but coded in contemporary texts, influenced the impetus, severity, and nature of the trails, and to recover the everyday experience of the common people. Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971) is demonstrative of this historiographical approach. Thomas attempts to “make sense of some of the systems of belief which were current in sixteenthand seventeenth-century England” and in doing so, recover the spiritual worldview that went often unacknowledged but fervently believed in.44 Thomas contends that there were two views of witchcraft; firstly, the view of witchcraft as harmless (but technically heretical) beliefs and practices in magic and cunning folk, and secondly, the more diabolical view of witchcraft as malefic requiring a pact with the Devil.45 It was this latter belief about witchcraft that dominated in popular spiritual beliefs of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, leading to the increased fervour and viciousness of witch hunts and trials.46 Thomas enacts a village-level approach to tracing and recovering contemporary systems of belief in early modern England which has been fruitful in witchcraft scholarship and demonstrates the importance of popular belief in understanding the witch trials. Alongside consideration of popular beliefs, witchcraft scholars seek to recover the experience of living through centuries-long events like the witch trials, and capture how everyday life was shaped by these beliefs. Michel de Certeau, for instance, considers the everyday life of the people of Loudon during the witchcraft and heresy trials there in the 1630s. de Certeau investigates the “diabolical crisis” that erupted in Loudun when a convent of Ursuline nuns claimed to be possessed by demons.47 Four years earlier, Carlo Ginzburg had similarly approached the witch trials through an interrogation of the everyday life and beliefs of the groups

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who were victimized in and who perpetuated the hunts in The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (1966). Ginzburg argues that hidden pre-Christian agrarian and fertility cults were the initial target of the witch hunts, focusing on the benandanti sect in the Friuli (Northern Italy, near modern-day Austria and Slovenia) who, Ginzburg argues, practised a form of ‘white’ or ‘good’ magic.48 The development and entanglement of these cultural beliefs, Ginzburg argues, eventually meant that the benandanti were perceived as practising malefic and correspondingly persecuted for it.49 Thomas’s, de Certeau’s, and Ginzburg’s texts are all representative of social historical approaches to understanding the trials by considering popular beliefs and everyday life; there is an enormous body of work that prioritizes this more egalitarian consideration of the witch hunts. For example, some scholars consider how the structures of communities like the village and the neighbourhood contributed to the witch trials and hunts.50 Others consider the religious, supernatural, or magical belief systems that existed across Europe and how these commonly held beliefs created the cultural conditions under which the witch hunts and trials functioned.51 These are just some examples of this model of witchcraft scholarship but is indicative of scholarly approaches to understanding the witch trials that seek to recover cultural mindsets and everyday life in the period. This approach to witchcraft history is pertinent for two reasons. Firstly, this model of scholarship represents a clear response to approaches that focus on cultural elites and authorities, and demonstrates changing ideological impetuses in the history of witchcraft studies. This is not to say, however, that this approach is antithetical to scholarship that understands the witch trials as violent actions perpetrated by authorities and elites; these two approaches work in tandem.52 The dichotomy of ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ is not as binary as it appears: witch hunting required active participation from both the oppressed and oppressor.53 Secondly, this more ‘egalitarian’ approach to understanding the witch trials through the beliefs and experiences of common people demonstrates the nuance and complexity of memory, as evidenced in de Certeau’s title for the introduction of The Possession at Loudun: “History Is Never Sure.”54 History may not be sure, but cultural memories thrive on the ambiguities of the past. While there are many, many more variations of witchcraft history and scholarship that I could elaborate on here, these two historiographical approaches, at their core, reflect dominant narratives of the trials that emerge across cultural memories of the events. The witch hunt

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stands as a mnemonic symbol of persecution from above and below: she is targeted by authorities and abandoned by her neighbours.

Feminist Histories of the Witch Trials Given the clear interrogation of power dynamics in the witch trials that both of these approaches are predicated on, it is curious that the obvious corollary of gendered power dynamics is not more prominent in either. This is not to say that gender was not understood as being instrumental in the shape and manner of the trials, but that it was in some ways taken for granted. This acceptance without interrogation of the gendering of witches and witchcraft has caused gender to be “at once the most and the least visible feature of the persecution of witches.”55 However, alongside shifts in historical practice that led to the consideration of everyday life and the beliefs of the common people, mid-twentieth-century ideological adjustments in witchcraft studies generated more considered scholarship about the gendering of the witch trials and the witch herself. From the 1960s onward, as women’s and later feminist and gender history emerged as a political response to activist efforts in the streets and in the academy, historical understandings of the relationship between the witch trials and patriarchy changed. These scholarly approaches do not necessarily share a methodology or goal, but a tone or underlying understanding of the political necessities of a ‘usable past.’ There is a distinction necessary between histories written by feminist historians and histories written by feminist activists. Both position the witch trials as evidence of the violent nature of patriarchy and are influenced by contemporary feminist activism, but the former does so using historical methodologies and expands historical practices while the latter is more concerned with finding and using these revised pasts for activist work. Difficulties arise as some of the polemics by feminist activists that used the witch trials metaphorically (for instance, the manifestos I discussed in the first chapter) are presented with the appearance of historical rigour and accuracy, but often make far-fetched claims that are not supported by historical evidence.56 Nevertheless, the image of the witch as a victim of patriarchy and as a symbol of ‘women rebels’ that is so prevalent in popular culture is heavily influenced by these radical feminist polemics that have the appearance of historical work, as will be discussed in the next chapter. There is one particular feature in feminist histories of the witch trials that offers a general indication of whether the author is a historian or

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an activist writing history: the contentious notion of the witch hunts as woman hunts. For the latter group, the witch hunts are hunts directed at women—they are, to use Dworkin’s term, a “gynocide.”57 While this offers a great deal of polemical affective power, it is not a position that feminist historians of the trials have generally taken.58 Feminist historians have, to use Christina Larner’s defining phrase, viewed the trials as “sexrelated” but not “sex-specific.”59 The key focus of witch hunters, Larner argues, was hunting out witches, not hunting women—but the fact that the majority of the witches were women was not coincidental but evidence of the misogyny of the age.60 While Larner’s conceptualization of the gendering of witch hunts has been contested61 it is nevertheless a useful starting point for considering how the trials demonstrate the operation of patriarchal systems and regimes of power. The association of witchcraft with women (rather than the direct causation) is indicative of how patriarchal gender ideologies are circulated and reinforced through both implicit and explicit exertions of control over marginalized people: the hunting of witches was the product of a system of patriarchal gender ideology that primarily affected women but was not a direct hunt for women. This also highlights how patriarchal gender norms negatively impact people of many marginalized genders (including but not limited to cisgender women): queer people, people of colour, disabled people, and workingclass people are all also disadvantaged and face higher prospects of facing violence within the systems of the witch hunts and trials. Whether witch or women hunting, it is an unassailable fact that witchcraft and the witch trials were gendered. “Gender,” writes Alison S. Rowlands: shaped every aspect of early modern witchcraft and witch trials: beliefs about magic and witchcraft; the social and psychological tensions from which accusations emerged; the anxieties about their own gendered identities expressed by accusers and demonologists; the legal processes by which people were tried; and the degree of power that individuals had to defend themselves against formal prosecution.62

While gender may not be ‘the’ ‘cause,’ patriarchy was a “necessary precondition” of the witch trials.63 Feminist historians consequently investigate the operation of gendered power structures in the witch trials and consider how the cultural manifestations of patriarchal ideology across

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institutions of authority and common belief systems influenced the development and outcomes of the hunts. Recovering the lived experience of women during the trials is consequently a recurring concern in feminist witchcraft history. This is made difficult by power dynamics at the time of the trials: after all, the correlation between being unable to read and write and being in a marginalized position that opened you up to accusations of witchcraft is strong. Scholars like Marion Gibson, therefore, consider the “stories” of witchcraft and the lives of specific victims through a close reading of contemporary documents from the period. These sources offer insight into specificities of the victims that are not necessarily explicitly recorded, including how social status, gender, and other identity intersections affect the trials.64 In recovering the experiences and victimhood of women during the trials, feminist histories contributed to the overall feminist project of defining and dismantling the patriarchy. The witch hunts and trials offer a vexing problem for feminist historians considering how women participate in patriarchy and perpetrate misogynist ideology. Men were certainly the key authorities in the persecution of witches.65 However, ‘blaming men’ elides the fact that women did participate in the trials in ways other than as the condemned: women claimed to be the victims of malefic and accused others of being witches (usually other women).66 This offered the opportunity to participate in trials as witnesses; women’s testimonies in trials (as both victims of witchcraft and as confessors to the crime) are a key example of their voices existing in historical records and was enabled by new mechanisms for women’s legal participation.67 In this manner, popular beliefs about gender and witchcraft were enforced within state apparatuses like the courts and the church and demonstrates how patriarchy operates within the realm of common belief and an institutional force, particularly how women sometimes participated in this system of ideological oppression over their own gender.68 The gender dynamics of the trials are not as simple (and reductive) as ‘man kills woman’ and the—at times enthusiastic—participation of women in the trials and women’s confessions to the crime of witchcraft are evidence of this. Feminist historians consequently interrogate how the gendering of witchcraft is part of the broader ideological project of patriarchy, and what the witch hunts demonstrate about women’s participation in patriarchy. Given the sexual connotations of witchcraft as a crime, there is a recurring concern in feminist analysis of the trials with sex and sexuality. Feminist scholars interrogate how early modern Christian ideas

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of female sexuality and sin contributed to the gendering of witchcraft and were linked with the wide and entangled web of patriarchy. Lyndal Roper, for instance, specifically discusses the overt connection between witchcraft, female sexuality (particularly lesbianism), and diabolism in her analysis of the ‘witches’ pact’ and of victims’ confession transcripts.69 The sexualization of witchcraft in demonological treatises, which posited that the witch sealed their pact with the Devil through sexual intercourse, was compounded in trials, and visual imagery reinforced the connection between non-heterosexuality and witchcraft, with queer sex depicted in many woodcuts, and with snide allusions to lesbianism in demonological treatises.70 Sexual violence was proactively used by witch hunters against women throughout the hunts. Torture was used to extract confessions from alleged witches: often this torture took the form of aggressive sexual violence by men against women, sanctioned by the alleged diabolism of the woman.71 While torture was not unusual in early modern Europe, the sexualized nature of it in the witch trials demonstrates the prevailing patriarchal logic of the witch hunts. Alongside the sexual violence that witches faced from torturers procuring confessions, women also were raped by prison guards as they awaited trial.72 The sexualized nature of the violence exerted on witches was a feature of a broader cultural shift in attitudes to sex and sexuality, and this also affected the types of evidence provided to prove a witch’s guilt. Younger women were charged with infanticide and sex work, and this “criminalization of younger women came in the wake of new punitive attitudes to sexual activity.”73 The presence of alleged ‘witches’ marks’ (any freckle, mole, scar, or other strange mark that was said to be where the Devil had marked the witch) led to situations where alleged witches’ nude bodies would be searched in great detail, including their genitals, by witch hunters and ‘pricked’ (poked or stabbed with a needle or something similar).74 The detailed search of the witch’s nude body also demonstrates how sex and sexuality were a means of punishment and repression within the hunts. What the recurring emphasis on sexuality and on the body in these histories demonstrates, whether in the crime of witchcraft or the punishment, is how patriarchal logic operated across sexual norms and discourses. This is also reflected in how pregnancy, birth control, abortion, midwifery, and healing are considered by feminist historians. The correlation between witchcraft and alleged infanticide perhaps bolstered connections made between witches and midwives.75 In the Malleus Maleficarum, “witch midwives” are described as “commit[ing] most

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Horrid Crimes when they either Kill Children or Offer them to Devils in most Accursed Wise [ways].”76 Where younger women were charged with murdering children or with sex work, older women, Larner argues, were charged with witchcraft because of their participation in healing and midwifery.77 As with the way that sex and sexuality were both evidence of witchcraft and punishment for the crime, miscarriages also were both evidence of witch’s presence and resulted from the punishment of witches. People who were pregnant would have a stay of execution until after they gave birth, and often this delayed their execution permanently.78 However, pregnant people would also miscarry while in prison.79 As Barstow puts it, “the society that hunted witches could not claim to be pro-foetus or pro-child.”80 The consideration of pregnancy, abortion, healing, midwifery has been particularly efficacious in feminist polemics that discuss the witch trials, likely because of the correlations to contemporary political campaigns like expanding abortion and birth control access. Many radical feminist activists writing about the trials from the 1960s through to the present day argue that women who provided birth control and abortion were targeted; not because of alleged cultural concern for children, but instead as a means of maintaining control over women’s sexuality and reproductive choices.81 Alongside the correlation to reproductive rights, there is also a trend in activist manifestos to suggest that healers or midwives were targeted by the emerging male medical establishment. Barbara Ehrenreich and Deidre English suggest this in their often-cited pamphlet Witches, Midwives and Nurses: A History of Women Healers (1974),82 and this was taken up by other feminist activists from the 1970s. Andrea Dworkin contends that witches’ magic was “an imposing catalogue of medical skills concerning reproductive and psychological processes” and that midwives were particularly despised by the Church and thus persecuted as witches.83 Naomi Wolf, almost twenty years later, similarly argues that the trials were partially caused by male assumption of formerly female healing and midwifery skills.84 That so many feminists writing popular cultural criticism and political polemic have fixated on the notion of the ‘witch as midwife’ is indicative of how the past is remembered in activist work as a political strategy for the present: witches being persecuted as midwives and abortionists offers a powerful corollary to contemporary reproductive rights activism in the twentieth century. However, as with many other facets of feminist memories of the witch trials, claims that are investigated by historians considering the operation of gender in early

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modern Europe have been exaggerated by feminist activists as part of their political project, and the correlation between witches and healers and midwives has been questioned by some historians.85 All witchcraft history demonstrates how history is not written in a vacuum but is influenced by the political contexts and necessities of the present. However, this dilemma is more overt in feminist witchcraft history. Feminist histories of the witch trials are emblematic of the ideological and political underpinnings and potentials of feminist historical work more broadly and have been praised and critiqued for this radical impetus. The radical feminist narrative of the witch hunts as a violent expression of patriarchal domination over outspoken women who resisted the oppression they faced is a compelling and accessible narrative of patriarchy, and eloquently outlines the necessity of feminist interventions by both historians and activists. The feminist activist narrative of the witch trials has been assimilated into cultural memories of the events and become the hegemonic narrative in popular culture featuring witches (eclipsing feminist historians’ research into the trials). In the next chapter, I consider how this has blurred in cultural memories of the trials; often what has been only ‘proven’ in polemic is taken as popular historical fact when it comes to the witch hunts. It is easy to conflate feminist polemics that present themselves as completely historically accurate with feminist historical scholarship on the trials, particularly because cultural memories of the events seem to favour the former over the latter. However, even if this were not the case, feminist historians themselves have been criticized for being ‘too radical’ in their consideration of the past.86 Feminist witchcraft history consequently offers something of an ideological opportunity. As Diane Purkiss frames this: “[w]hat if women writing history allowed their invention to play about freely in the fields of the past, searching for fantasies that might be at least temporarily enabling or interesting, rather than (or as well as) for new ways to do empirical history?”87

From Europe to America Witchcraft historians rarely look at both the early modern European trials and the Salem trials in the same work. However, historically specific as these events are, the early modern European witch trials and the colonial American hunts have become entwined in their politicization and their contribution to contemporary feminist iterations of the witch. While for

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historians these events are difficult to compare, witch trials across the West have been conflated in popular culture discourses as similar and related events: this conflation has done “considerable violence to the historical reality,”88 but also strengthens the symbol of the witch in cultural memory. The witch trials that took place in the Puritan frontier town of Salem in 1692 and 1693 have come to stand as symbolic of American colonization, paranoia, frontier war, mob mentality and hysteria, and gendered violence, and are often discussed as a pivotal moment in the ‘making of modern America.’ As the events were on a smaller scale than the European trials, with a far more detailed written record of events, there is less scholarly debate about the ‘facts’ of the events. Instead, there is often a metaphorical or psychological component to academic work on the Salem witch trials, where the author will use the trials as an analogy or entry point for analysis of some aspect of later American history, or as a psychological exploration into mob mentality and hysteria. As with the European trials, historians of the Salem witch hunts have considered the roles that powerful institutions and communities (such as the Puritan church, the colonial government, and the legal institutions such as the Court of Oyer et Terminer) have played in the events of Salem 1692–1693, and to recover lived experiences of the trials and what everyday life in Salem was like for different groups. However, I am highlighting other historiographical approaches to Salem (specifically, histories that analyse racial dynamics and gender dynamics in the trials). This is for two reasons: firstly, the shorter timeframe and heightened status of these specific trials (in comparison to approximately 300 years of continentwide events in Europe) means that particular discourses come into clearer view (for instance, talking about how race structures the trials has more impact when Tituba’s role can be pinpointed). Secondly, the Salem trials have come to operate as a metaphor in American nationalism and cultural memory. The Salem narrative has been imbricated into the story of the ‘making of America’ far more so than the European trials have become part of a sense of ‘European identity’—and so I want to consider how witchcraft scholars have written about these events and who is included and excluded from the story of American nationalism. Although most scholars, contemporaneous and modern, date the Salem trials from early 1692, many also look at conditions in the years leading up to the events to provide context, particularly as witch trials had been occurring in Essex county for decades prior to 1692, and continued (to a lesser degree) after the Salem trials. Witchcraft accusations and

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executions had been regular events in the Puritan colonies since 1542 (the year witchcraft was made a capital crime).89 The 1692 witchcraft accusations were not limited to Salem: surrounding towns and villages also saw a new surge in witchcraft trials.90 Salem historians consequently consider the decades prior to 1692 in their interrogation of the witch trials. However, despite the importance of preceding social, environmental, and political events, nearly all scholars pinpoint a specific event as the outbreak of the 1692 trials: two young girls in the house of Reverend Samuel Parris falling ill, apparently at the hands of a witch. Tituba, an enslaved person in Parris’s household, was soon accused of bewitching the two girls, and the wave of accusations and trials spread from this point.Over the course of 1692 and 1693, twenty people and two dogs were executed, with more dying in custody after long periods in prison, including infants. Between 100 and 150 people were jailed for witchcraft (with at least 50 confessing to the crime), and dozens more were accused but never faced trial.91 The special court set up to deal with the trials, the Court of Oyer and Terminer,92 is seen as responsible for fostering the climate of fear and the ‘guilty unless proven innocent’ atmosphere of Salem at the time.93 (Previously judges in New England had appeared more sceptical in witchcraft trials; the Court of Oyer and Terminer in Salem condemned every person brought before it.94 ) The 1692 trials ended as rapidly as they began; even during the trials, people were questioning the viciousness of the persecution.95 Previously the New Englanders believed the Devil was working against them by sending witches into their midst; now they (conveniently) believed that the Devil was responsible for inciting the hysteria of the trials.96 Within five years one of the judges and twelve of the jurors formally apologized, and the colony held a formal day of mourning to commemorate the trials.97 In 1711, the New England government made compensation payments to survivors and victims’ descendants—with the notable exception of Tituba.98

Race, Colonialism, and the Frontier in Salem In Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life (2014) Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields examine how witchcraft aligns with what they term racecraft. Acknowledging that the practices of witchcraft and racecraft are culturally determined social constructs and not ‘real’ (witches do not actually fly on brooms; humans are not scientifically distinguishable according to biological racial markers) does not negate the incalculable

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ways that these constructs shape life and hegemonic belief systems in America, often in negative ways (people practice ritual beliefs called witchcraft, and have also been persecuted and executed for doing so; entire societies as well as individuals operate on the belief that race does constitute biological difference and oppressive power structures are correspondingly built on these racial constructs).99 The Salem trials offer an important historical symbol for how racial dynamics (racecraft) operate in the United States, from the time of colonization to the present day. The metaphorical resonances of race and witchcraft in the American imagination are deeply entwined concepts, particularly given the history of colonialism and slavery in the history of the nation. The role of Tituba in the trials has always been of crucial importance, particularly given her detailed and shocking confession, and the paucity of witches of colour in twentieth- and twenty-first-century cultural memory and popular culture. Elaine G. Breslaw argues that Tituba’s confession actually shaped the trials to a certain extent, as it confirmed the beliefs of the villagers that the Devil was making a concerted effort to attack the community.100 In spite of her importance in the events, there is little information available about Tituba and her origins (for example, while records indicate that Parris bought Tituba in Barbados, it is unknown if she was born there.101 ) The lack of information about Tituba is indicative of the lack of critical attention paid to race in the witch trials more broadly, and the exclusion of people of colour from historical records. This also reflects a broader racial coding of American witchcraft itself via Tituba’s racial otherness, despite the fact that witchcraft has been a recognized demonic practice within the Christian doctrine since the codification of the religion. Chadwick Hansen thus argues: We [the United States of America] are not free of racism, and we will not be free of it until we recognize, among other things, that beliefs and practices which we regard as superstitious do not necessarily have racial boundaries – until we recognize, in short, that witchcraft, when it is found in New England, is more likely to be English in origin than [Native American] or [African-American].102

The magic of Salem’s witches has been racially othered in both cultural memory and historical research, shifting the ‘blame’ to Tituba’s influence on young white girls, but it is also an event that offers a starting point for considering how racial power dynamics operate across the colonial state.

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The colonizing mindset of the Puritan settlers in Salem contributed not only to the devastation wreaked on the sovereign Naumkeag people, but contributed to the milieu that encouraged the fervour of the 1692 trials. As Norton argues “the witchcraft crisis of 1692 can be comprehended only in the context of nearly two decades of armed conflict between English settlers and the New England [First Nations’ people] in both southern and northern portions of the region.”103 Historians arguing the importance of the frontier wars do not claim that the ongoing conflict “caused” the witch trials: rather that the ongoing conflict created the cultural mentalities and social conditions among the colonizers that allowed the usually unremarkable occurrence of young girls falling ill to spiral into the events of 1692.104 The Puritan worldview held there was an ‘invisible’ world parallel to our own ‘visible’ world, a realm of the spirit inhabited by witches, demons, and the Devil himself. The colonizing process was, to the Puritans, a means of fulfilling their religious duty: the ongoing war with the original inhabitants of the land was not only disastrous in setting up their new colony, but was also evidence to them that the Devil was working against them. It is also unsurprising that even when facing a decidedly Christian evil, witchcraft, the settlers in Salem still directed their initial paranoia and fear at a woman of colour. As Karlsen frames it: “[i]t was not simply as Puritans that New Englanders drew on witchcraft beliefs in the seventeenth century. Their need for witches also grew out of their experience as settlers.”105 The impact of imperialist and colonial mindsets is evident in shaping the nature of witchcraft in all colonizing and colonized countries, but in the case of the Salem trials, where the colonial project intersects with the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and the first accused witch is a slave brought against her will to the colony, it is crucial to situate the events of 1692 within the broader project of white supremacy, colonialism, and imperialism.

Feminist Histories of Salem As with the European witch trials, feminist historiography has had a widespread and long-lasting impact on the writing of Salem’s history. As different in tone, manner, intention, and outcome as the Salem trials are to the European trials, what unites the two is the predominance of women as victims and the coding of witchcraft as a female crime. Feminist historians of Salem have illuminated the operation of patriarchy in the

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events of 1692 and their ripples throughout American nationalism afterward, often considering Puritan constructions of gender, sexuality, and diabolism. Puritan views of witchcraft were not as overtly sexualized as in Europe: as Sollée colourfully puts this, the Puritans were “too prudish to imagine the ways witches could be slutty as those across the pond.”106 Karlsen agrees that the witch in Salem was less sexual due to Puritan beliefs.107 However, this does not mean that the witch was not coded as feminine. Elizabeth Reis argues that Puritans viewed the soul itself in feminized, sexual discourse: inherently weaker, predisposed to temptation, and insatiable.108 The view of the corruptable feminine soul implicated real women in Salem, who were consequently more readily believed to fall to witchcraft.109 This is akin to Larner’s view of how the witch trials in Europe were sex-related but not sex-specific. The hunts were not explicitly targeting women, but by virtue of targeting witches, women tended to be more likely to come to harm. This is bolstered by consideration of how Puritan organizational structures and the economic realities of colonial New England intersected with the gendered dimensions of witchcraft. The witch in Salem, Karlsen contends, must be understood in relation to her economic effects as much as her cultural and social effects; after all, Salem was a colony, and colonization was an economic franchise as much as a spiritual one for the settlers. Having attempted to steal lands from First Nations’ people, the settlers now required both spiritual and financial results to consolidate their theft. Witchcraft, Karlsen consequently contends, had an economic basis. While women of various classes were accused, those from wealthy families were less likely to be brought to trial: there is an overrepresentation in convictions for witchcraft in women who came from less-wealthy families.110 Karlsen also suggests that gendered inheritance laws, which consolidated property and land ownership among men, influenced the gendering of the witch trials; women who did or would soon inherit a significant sum of land and property seem to have a higher likelihood of being accused.111 While this does not indicate falsity in beliefs about witches, it does demonstrate how gender norms intersected with the needs of the Puritan colony: women who implicitly threatened the patriarchal and colonial project of Salem were viewed with more suspicion, and when accusations of witchcraft were being thrown around, were more visible than others. 1692 Salem also demonstrates how cultural and religious gender norms around speech and agency impacted the colony and the designation of

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the witch. Witches represented the inversion of Puritan womanhood, usurping speech as an arbiter of cultural authority and consequently challenging family and neighbourhood structures.112 The idea of speech acts also makes the role of the afflicted girls and their accusations more visible. As with the European trials, even though women were the majority of the victims, they also participated in the Salem trials as accusers and witnesses, and the majority of those who confessed to the crime were also women,113 indicating how the trial offered legal space for women’s speech. Rather than being the accused, the afflicted girls and women who accused other women “ranked now as witch-finders supreme” in the 1692 trials.114 The afflicted girls were brought into the courthouse to confront the witches allegedly tormenting them; in one instance, the majority of the residents of the neighbouring town of Andover were paraded in front of the afflicted girls and women, who picked out two dozen strangers apparently guilty of tormenting them with witchcraft.115 The majority of the accusers in 1692 Salem were girls and women, differing from past witch trials in Europe and America, where the accusers had mostly been adult men (although the victims were always mostly women).116 These accusers “stepped far out of the modest role prescribed for persons of their age and sex, overshadowing even the magistrates who were officially in control.”117 Women’s speech in the trials—as accusers, victims, witnesses, and confessors—demonstrates how “as in no other event in American history until the rise of the women’s rights movement in the nineteenth century, women took center stage in Salem.”118 Feminist histories of the Salem witch hunts demonstrate how gender intersects with other cultural regimes of power, including race, colonialism, and capitalism.

Nationalism, Paranoia, and the Literary Salem Despite the centring of women in Salem discourses, feminist historiography on Salem does not have the polemical urgency of the European trials. Where the European trials have been used repeatedly as an analogy for patriarchy by feminist writers, there are fewer examples of the 1692 Salem events being turned to such specific uses in feminist polemic. Perhaps this is because Salem has come to represent a different form of oppression—that of the State in the McCarthy era. Where the European trials have become a useful tool for feminist writers to outline theories of patriarchal violence, Salem came to epitomize, for both historians and popular writers, the prevalence of mob mentalities and ideological

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persecution in American nationalism. Marion Starkey directly addressed the moral crusade of the witch hunters, and the twentieth-century incarnations of these hunters of ideological heretics: [m]oral seasons come and go. Late in the nineteenth century, when it was much the fashion to memorialize the witchcraft delusion, honest men discussed it with wondering pity as something wholly gone from the world and no longer quite comprehensible. But such condescension is not for the twentieth century. Heaven forgive us, ‘demoniac possession’ is with us still even if the label is different, and mass mania, and bloodshed on a scale that the judges of Salem would find incredible. Our age too is beset by ideological ‘heresies’ in almost the medieval sense.119

Starkey’s mid-twentieth century presentation of the Salem trials brought the comparison between the Court of Oyer and Terminer and the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and McCarthyism to the forefront of American cultural memory, a new focus which many journalists and culture writers would soon focus on.120 This is reinforced by the mediation of these memories of Salem through literature and film. The most famous literary use of the Salem trials in popular culture is Arthur Miller’s The Crucible (1953), which forcefully drew comparisons between HUAC and the Salem trials. In later interviews and commentary writing The Crucible Miller explicitly referenced Marion Starkey’s historical writing as an influence.121 As with the European trials, there are significant debates about the ‘accuracy’ of Miller’s metaphorical use of the trials. Regardless, Salem has become a “commanding symbol” of McCarthyism,122 offering “another metaphor for the aggressive government pursuit of alleged subversion represented by Salem’s witch hunt during the same few years.”123 As feminist versions of the European witch trials filtered into cultural memories, so did the politically charged, anti-authoritarian rhetoric of Miller’s use of the Salem trials filter into popular literature and cultural memory. This particular means of remembering Salem has still been used by feminist writers and activists: it is hard to fight against patriarchy without also fighting tyranny in all its forms.

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The Inaccuracies of Witchcraft Pasts To conclude this rough history of the witch trials, I want to briefly consider a curious trope in early twentieth-century-‘histories’ of the witch trials in both Europe and America (with all the loaded implications of placing ‘history’ in scare quotes); one that reflects a general trend in cultural memories of the witch trials. The hunts in both early modern Europe and colonial America are historical events around which all manner of ahistorical (if not downright fabricated) narratives emerge and are presented as ‘fact.’ There are any number of ideological approaches to writing the history of the witch that effects cultural memories of the events and the symbol of the witch, and I am concluding with two examples of this: scholarship from Matilda Joslyn Gage and Margaret Murray. The work from these writers is presented as being rigorous, evidencebased research, and has been received by other writers (although not by historians) and by the general public as historically accurate. However, the work from Gage and Murray does not hold water when it comes to historical rigour, and ultimately foster profoundly inaccurate understandings of the history of the witch trials in cultural memory and in popular culture. What these witchcraft scholars represent is a tradition that has come to define the witch and the witch trials in cultural memory: inaccurate or wildly ahistorical narratives about the witchy past proliferate and are circulated as truth in cultural memory and popular culture. The gulf between what witchcraft historians write about the witch trials and what is generally remembered in popular discourse and media about the witch trials seems to be increasing. Looking back to these early examples of historically-dubious narratives about the witch trials that have been presented as history represents an early example of the tension that polemic creates between history and memory. Matilda Joslyn Gage was a radical nineteenth-century American suffragist, abolitionist, and Native American rights activist whose work on the witch hunts heavily influenced later mid-twentieth century feminist activists. Gage’s criticism of Christianity and Christian churches echoed through all her works: in Woman, Church, and State (1893), she writes that “Christianity tended somewhat from its foundations to restrict the liberty women enjoyed under the old civilizations.”124 Gage was one of the first witchcraft scholars to see the hunts as an attack on women. The hunts showed, Gage argued, “[a] determined effort for the destruction of every virtue among women.”125 Women were the primary

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victims of the witch trials because “men believ[ed] in woman’s inherent wickedness,” and because the clergy explicitly fostered and supported the belief of women’s inherent diabolism and connection to the Devil.126 Compellingly, Gage writes that women in early modern Europe lived “under the laws of Church and State [where] they found their sex to be a crime.”127 Gage is also the first feminist scholar who refers to the death toll of the trials being nine million.128 The notion of the witch hunts being women hunts, so prevalent in cultural memories of the trials and particularly in feminist rhetoric, is clearly identifiable in Gage’s 1893 treatise. Gage even writes “[w]hen for ‘witches’ we read ‘women,’ we gain fuller comprehension of the cruelties inflicted by the church upon this portion of humanity.”129 1960s and 1970s feminist activists, writers, and scholars whose activist recuperation of the witch trials so fundamentally affected cultural memories of the witch and popular culture representations of her cite Gage liberally as an important precursor to the Women’s Liberation and feminist movements of the time. Mary Daly thanks Gage in her Acknowledgements as one of the witches who came before her, and cites her as evidence for her claims about the ‘nine million burned’ women.130 Kristen J. Sollée writes that “[t]he idea of every woman as witch—and as political dissident—has its roots in Gage’s work.”131 Although Gage’s historical veracity leaves a lot to be desired,132 many feminist writers—who are not historians— have taken Gage’s work as historically accurate, and consequently Gage’s central thesis has exerted enormous influence in later feminist cultural memories of the events. Margaret Murray, whose 1921 The Witch-Cult in Western Europe, has arguably had the greatest influence on cultural memories of the European witch trials outside of the discipline of history. Murray claims that: [t]he evidence proves that underlying the Christian religion was a cult practised by many classes of the community, chiefly, however, by the more ignorant or those in the less thickly inhabited parts of the country[side]. It can be traced back to pre-Christian times, and appears to be the ancient religion of Western Europe [...] I have not attempted to disentangle the various [regional variations of the] cults; I am content merely to point out that it was a definite religion with beliefs, ritual, and organization as highly developed as that of any other cult in the world.133

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Murray insists that the people killed as witches were not innocent victims accused as a result of various individual and structural prejudices and cultural, legal, and religious systems. Instead, Murray argues, the witches were acting in a way that society viewed as illegitimate: the witches were actually members of a long-standing, pan-European fertility cult that operated underground throughout the early modern period. Therefore, Murray argues, the confessions of the victims, rather than false stories of Satan worship produced under the duress of torture or in the hope of a lighter sentence, were in fact truly-held beliefs of victims who “often went to the gibbet and the stake, glorifying their [pagan] god and committing their souls to his keeping.”134 Murray’s notion of the pan-European pagan witch cult has developed a great deal of cultural cachet since she first proposed it, and has influenced some historians too (it clearly influenced Carlo Ginzburg’s consideration of the benandanti witch-cult). This is no doubt in part because in 1929, Murray was commissioned to write an entry on witchcraft for the Encyclopedia Britannica (which remained in reprints and new editions until 1969) that included her central argument about the pagan witch cult. However, Murray’s work has been comprehensively proven false by many witchcraft historians. Her central thesis is built on the omission of primary sources that contradicted her argument, and even in some instances the editing of these sources so that they appeared to support her argument.135 Alan Macfarlane even writes that Murray’s thesis creates “a totally false picture.”136 Murray’s inclusion in the Encyclopedia Britannica explains how her theory of the underground fertility witch cult has such cachet in popular historical understandings of the witch trials: for entire generations of people, the Encyclopedia was the most accessible historical resource, and, with a high degree of scholarly prestige, was presumed accurate by most readers. Even though the entry was eventually removed from the Encyclopedia, Murray’s theories became “so entrenched in popular culture that they will probably never be uprooted.”137 Perhaps more so than any other witchcraft scholar, Murray’s pseudo-history has become dominant in popular culture and cultural memories of the witch trials, as already seen in some of the feminist polemics in the introduction, and as repeatedly crops up over this monograph.

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Re-remembering the European and American Witch Trials It may seem strange to close out a chapter on the history of the witch trials with Gage’s and Murray’s thoroughly discredited but culturally contagious ‘historical’ treatises on these events. After all, while my point in this chapter has been to investigate how writing about the past inevitably reveals the concerns of the present, this does not mean that these histories are inaccurate: just that they illustrate how the past resonates and allows us to understand the present. In contrast, what Gage and Murray’s writing about the witch trials reveals is how ahistorical and, in some cases, fraudulent, claims about the history of the witch trials have become commonly accepted or promoted outside of the discipline of history. Studying the spread of these narratives of the past throughout political rhetoric and activism and through popular culture and media can be revelatory about the processes that historical writing undergoes when transitioning to cultural memory. The histories of the witch trials are both politicized and politicizing: these histories are influenced by political activist movements and popular culture, and in turn, influence political activist movements and popular culture. The act of re-remembering the various ‘pasts’ of the witch trials draws these competing ideological narratives into the present moment. The feminist narrative of the witch hunts has become not just a key historiographical approach to the trials, but has become the dominant cultural memory of the events. The witch has become a symbol of patriarchal persecution of women who fought the misogyny that dominated every aspect of their daily life and were punished for it. Some claims about the trials by radical feminist activists may be factually incorrect, but accuracy is not the primary requirement in memory narratives: the ‘truth’ unfortunately does not always stick. Rereading the histories of the witch trials now entails grappling with competing historiographical approaches and methodologies, but also with the narratives and memories that are fostered within feminist polemics and filtered into popular culture. Consequently, in the next chapter, I examine the ways that cultural memories of the witch and the witch trials operate, and what this reveals about the mechanics and intentions of feminist memory practices more broadly.

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Notes 1. John Berger, Ways of Seeing (1972; reis. London: British Broadcasting Corporation and Penguin Books, 2008), 11. 2. Merry E. Wiesner, Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 265. 3. Jean La Fontaine, “Witchcraft and Satanic Abuse,” in The Witchcraft Reader, ed. Darren Oldridge, 3rd ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 385–388. 4. Richard Jenkins, “Spooks and Spooks: Black Magic and Bogeymen in Northern Ireland, 1973–1974,” in Witchcraft Continued, ed. Willem de Blécourt and Owen Davies (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020), 191–194. 5. Brian Levack, “Introduction,” in The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe and Colonial America, ed. Brian Levack (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 9. 6. Adam Ashforth, Witchcraft, Violence, and Democracy in South Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), xiii, 7–11. 7. Michele Stephens, “Introduction,” in Sorcerer and Witch in Melanesia, ed. Michele Stephens (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1987), 3. 8. James Siegel, Naming the Witch (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 111. 9. Jonathan Barry, “Introduction: Keith Thomas and the Problem of Witchcraft,” in Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe: Studies in Culture and Belief , ed. Jonathan Barry, Marianne Hester, and Gareth Roberts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 1. 10. Margaret Murray, The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), 9. 11. Malcolm Gaskill, Witchcraft: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 47. 12. Levack, “Introduction,” 9; Gary Waite, Heresy, Magic and Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 1; Darren Oldridge, “General Introduction,” in The Witchcraft Reader, ed. Darren Oldridge, 2nd ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), 3. 13. Very rarely do any witchcraft historians definitively state that any of these factors singularly caused the trials. 14. Edward Bever, “Popular Witch Beliefs and Magical Practices,” in The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe and Colonial America, ed. Brian P. Levack (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 62; Hans Peter Broedel, “Fifteenth-Century Witch Beliefs,” in The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe and

2

15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22.

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Colonial America, ed. Brian P. Levack (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 47; Christina Larner, Enemies of God: The Witch-Hunt in Scotland (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981), 89, 91; Christina Larner, “Was Witch-Hunting Woman-Hunting?,” in The Witchcraft Reader, ed. Darren Oldridge, 2nd ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), 255; James Sharpe, Witchcraft in Early Modern England (Harlow, UK: Longman Pearson Education, 2001), 42; Walter Stephens, Demon Lovers: Witchcraft, Sex, and the Crisis of Belief (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 3, 32–57; Alison S. Rowlands, “Witchcraft and Gender in Early Modern Europe,” in The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe and Colonial America, ed. Brian P. Levack (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 452, 449. Rowlands, “Witchcraft and Gender,” 449; Lara Apps and Andrew Gow, Male Witches in Early Modern Europe (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2003), 2–3; Rolf Schulte, Man as Witch: Male Witches in Central Europe, trans. Linda Froome-Döring (Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 36–73. Apps and Gow, Male Witches, 2–3; see also Schulte, Man as Witch, 6–7, 36–73. Larner, Enemies, 91. Anne Llewellyn Barstow, Witchcraze: A New History of the European Witch Hunts (London: Pandora, 1994), 10. Rossell Hope Robbins, The Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology (London: Peter Nevill, 1959), 180. Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (New York: Autonomedia, 2004), 14, 164. Brian P. Levack, The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe (London and New York: Longman, 1987), 19–23; Oldridge “General Introduction,” 2; Lyndal Roper, Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004), 6–7. See Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, Bantam revised ed. (Toronto, New York, and London: Bantam, 1970), 15–16; Andrea Dworkin, Woman Hating (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1974), 130; Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978), 18; Starhawk, The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess, Special 20th anniversary ed. (San Francisco, USA: Harper Collins, 1999), 31–32; Matilda Joslyn Gage, Women, Church and State: A Historical Account of Woman Through the Christian Ages: With Reminiscences of the Matriarchate, 3rd ed. (New York: Truth Seeker, 1893), 247. There are likely many more instances of this occurring across feminist popular culture and activist writing.

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23. Diane Purkiss, The Witch in History: Early Modern and TwentiethCentury Representations (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 7–29; Barstow, Witchcraze, 21; Levack, “Introduction,” 5. 24. Levack, “Introduction,” 5. 25. Hugh Trevor-Roper, The European Witch-Craze of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries and Other Essays (1956, reis., New York and Evanston: Harper Torchbooks, Harper and Row, 1956; 1967), 111. 26. Trevor-Roper, Witch-Craze, 115. 27. Barry, “Introduction,” 3. 28. Levack, Witch-Hunt, 112–113; Waite, Heresy, Magic, and Witchcraft, 146; Joseph Klaits, Servants of Satan: The Age of Witch Hunts (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1985), 50, 52–53. 29. Jeffrey B. Russell, A History of Witchcraft: Sorcerers, Heretics, and Pagans (London: Thames and Hudson, 1980), 37. 30. Levack, Witch-Hunt, 114. 31. Levack, Witch-Hunt, 117; Klaits 60; Waite, Heresy, 149–150. 32. Christopher Mackay, The Hammer of Witches: A Complete Translation of the Malleus Maleficarum (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 71; Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger, The Malleus Maleficarum, trans. Montague Summers (1928, reis., London: Arrow Books, 1971), 29 (hereafter referred to as “Summers translation”). Summers calls Sprenger ‘James’ Sprenger rather than ‘Jacob’ or ‘Jacobus’ as most other scholars do. I am drawing on two translations of the Malleus Maleficarum here: Christopher S. Mackay’s 2009 translation, and Montague Summers’ 1928 translation. Summers is more florid, to put it mildly, in his impassioned translation of the Malleus. 33. Mackay, Hammer, 160; Summers translation 112. 34. Mackay 160–170; Summers translation 112–123. 35. Summers translation 117. 36. Summers translations 121. 37. Gerhild Scholz Williams, Defining Dominion: The Discourses of Magic and Witchcraft in Early Modern France and Germany (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 65, 72; Gerhild Scholz Williams, “Demonologies,” in The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe and Colonial America, ed. Brian P. Levack (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 74; Hans Peter Broedel, The Malleus Maleficarum and the Construction of Witchcraft: Theology and Popular Belief (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 7; Broedel, “Fifteenth-Century Witch Beliefs,” 45–48; Norman Cohn, “The Making of the Great WitchHunt,” in Witches of the Atlantic World, ed. Elaine G. Breslaw (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 308. 38. Mackay 38.

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39. Brian P. Levack, “Witchcraft and the Law,” in The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe and Colonial America, ed. Brian P. Levack (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 468. 40. Levack, “Witchcraft and the Law,” 469–470. 41. Laura Patrick Stokes, Demons of Urban Reform: Early European Witch Trials and Criminal Justice, 1430–1530 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 3; Levack, “the Law,” 471–477. 42. Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 165. 43. Federici 163–168. 44. Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England (London: Wiedenfeld and Nicolson, 1971), ix. 45. Thomas, Decline of Magic, 437–454. 46. Thomas 460. 47. Michel de Certeau, The Possession at Loudun, trans. Michael B. Smith (1996, reis., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 2, passim. Given that possession is a different, although closely related, practice or belief to something like malefic witchcraft, my interest here is primarily in the way that de Certeau’s work recovers how beliefs and norms of magic and supernatural power affected the everyday life and experience of his subjects. 48. Carlo Ginzburg, The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, trans. John Tedeschi and Anne Tedeschi (1966, reis., London: Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1983), 42, passim. 49. Ginzburg, Night Battles, 42. 50. Robin Briggs, Witches and Neighbours: The Social and Cultural Context of European Witchcraft, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 344; Sharpe, Early Modern England, 45. 51. Edward Bever, The Realities of Witchcraft and Popular Magic in Early Modern Europe: Culture, Cognition, and Everyday Life (Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), passim; John Demos, The Enemy Within: 2,000 Years of Witch-Hunting in the Western World (New York: Viking, 2008), 5–62; Waite 10, passim. 52. Silvia Federici is notably an exception to this, and is quite vehement in her claims that the witch hunts were only an enactment of violence from authorities on to the common people, and did not have at least some basis in popular belief systems: “even today, some historians ask us to believe that the witch-hunt was quite reasonable in the context of the contemporary belief structure!” she writes in polemical disbelief (169). 53. Larner, Enemies, 2. 54. de Certeau, Possession, 1.

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55. Katharine Hodgkin, “Gender, Mind, and Body: Feminism and Psychoanalysis,” in Palgrave Advances in Witchcraft Historiography, ed. Jonathan Barry and Owen Davies (Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 182. 56. Rowlands “Witchcraft and Gender,” 450. 57. Dworkin, Woman Hating, 134. 58. Alison Rowlands writes that academic feminist historians are “dismissive” of radical feminists’ use of the trials in their polemics (452). 59. Larner, Enemies, 92. 60. Larner, “Woman-Hunting,” 255. 61. Marianne Hester, “Patriarchal Reconstruction and Witch Hunting,” in Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe, ed. Jonathan Barry, Marianne Hester, and Gareth Roberts (1996, reis., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 288. This said, as Rowlands points out, Hester’s work shares many commonalities with the radical feminist activists’ polemical use of the trials, and so Hester’s dismissal of Larner’s dichotomy needs to be taken with a grain of salt (451). 62. Rowlands 466. 63. Rowlands 453. 64. Marion Gibson, Reading Witchcraft: Stories of Early English Witches (London: Routledge, 1999), 7; see also Marion Gibson, Early Modern Witches: Witchcraft Cases in Contemporary Writing (London: Routledge, 2000), passim. 65. Barstow, Witchcraze, 9. 66. Larner, “Woman-Hunting,” 255. 67. Clive Holmes, “Women, Witches, and Witnesses,” in The Witchcraft Reader, ed. Darren Oldridge, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2008), 282. 68. Holmes, ‘Women,” 284. 69. Roper, Witch Craze, 82–103. 70. Roper 144–156. 71. See Larner, Enemies, 75; Barstow 130–133. 72. Roper 59–60; Barstow 132. 73. Larner, “Woman-Hunting,” 254. 74. Holmes 280–3; Walter Stephens, “The Sceptical Tradition,” in The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe and Colonial America, ed. Brian P. Levack (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 110; Diane Purkiss, “Witchcraft in Early Modern Literature,” in The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe and Colonial America, ed. Brian P. Levack (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 133. There was a belief that there would be no feeling or blood flow on a witches’ mark, so stabbing an alleged witch on one of these marks would theoretically illicit no response and prove their guilt. 75. Cohn, “Great Witch-Hunt,” 306.

2

76. 77. 78. 79.

80. 81. 82.

83. 84. 85.

86.

87.

88. 89.

90. 91.

92.

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Summers translation, 304. Larner, “Woman-Hunting,” 254. Holmes 281. For instance, there are reports of women miscarrying while being kept in prison awaiting trial. See Tamar Herzig, “Witchcraft Prosecutions in Italy,” in The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe and Colonial America, ed. Brian P. Levack (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 256. Barstow 134–135. Kristen J. Sollée, Witches, Sluts, Feminists: Conjuring the Sex Positive (Berkeley: Three L Media, 2017), 39–40. Barbara Ehrenreich and Deidre English, Witches: Midwives, and Nurses: History of Women Healers (London: Compendium, 1974), 4, passim; Rowlands 450; Hodgkin 182. Dworkin 139, 140. Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women (London: Vintage Books, 1991), 221. Jane P. Davidson, “The Myth of the Persecuted Female Healer,” in The Witchcraft Reader, ed. Darren Oldridge, 2nd ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), 257–258. Robin Briggs, for instance, criticises some of Christina Larner’s scholarship on the trials as being “hardly less wrong than Margaret Murray,” a highly contentious claim. See Robin Briggs, “‘Many Reasons Why’: Witchcraft and the Problem of Multiple Explanation,” in Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe: Studies in Culture and Belief , ed. Jonathan Barry, Marianne Hester, and Gareth Roberts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 53. Diane Purkiss, “Modern Witches and Their Pasts,” in The Witchcraft Reader, ed. Darren Oldridge, 2nd ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), 384. Briggs, Neighbours, 5. Carol F. Karlsen, The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England (New York: Vintage Books, 1987), 2; Demos 111. Demos 163. Sally Smith Booth, The Witches of Early America (New York: Hastings House, 1975), 201; Demos 183; Brenda Murphy, Congressional Theatre: Dramatizing McCarthyism on Stage, Film, and Television (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 140; Mary Beth Norton, In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002), 3–4. A French legal term for a specially-commissioned court and a partial translation of oyer et terminer, ‘to hear and to determine.’

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93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100.

101. 102.

103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119.

120. 121. 122.

123.

Booth, Early America, 210–213, 220–222. Norton, Devil’s Snare, 10. Norton 10. Booth 223. Booth 224; see also Norton 10. Booth 227–228; Booth refers to Tituba as ‘Tibula.’ Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life (London and New York: Verso, 2012), 198–199. Elaine Breslaw, “Tituba’s Confession: The Multicultural Dimensions of the 1692 Salem Witch-Hunt,” Ethnohistory 44, no. 3 (Summer 1997): 536. Breslaw, “Tituba’s Confession,” 537. Chadwick Hansen, “The Metamorphosis of Tituba, or Why American Intellectuals Can’t Tell an Indian Witch from a Negro,” The New England Quarterly 47, no. 1 (1974): 12. Norton 12. Norton 298. Karlsen 182. Sollée, Witches, Sluts, Feminists, 37. Karlsen 160. Elizabeth Reis, Damned Women: Sinners and Witches in Puritan New England (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1997), 93. Reis, Damned Women, 94. Karlsen 79–80. Karlsen 80–101. Jane Kamensky, Governing the Tongue: The Politics of Speech in Early New England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 151–152. Karlsen 39. Demos 168, emphasis original. Booth 209–210. Norton 8. Demos 163. Norton 4. Marion Starkey, The Devil in Massachusetts: A Modern Enquiry into the Salem Witch Trials (1949, reis., New York: Anchor Books, 1969), 269– 270. Murphy 133–134. Murphy 136–137. Stephen Olbrys Gencarella, “Touring History: Guidebooks and the Commodification of the Salem Witch Trials,” The Journal of American Culture 30, no. 3 (2007): 278. Gretchen A. Adams, The Specter of Salem: Remembering the Witch Trials in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 152.

2

124. 125. 126. 127. 128. 129. 130. 131. 132.

133. 134. 135.

136. 137.

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Gage, Women, Church, and State, 11. Gage 257. Gage 260. Gage 270. Gage 247. Gage 291. Daly xviii, 18. Sollée 52. As much as the prevalence of historical inaccuracies is immensely frustrating, I have a particular soft spot for Gage, and do not have the same frustrations with her work as I do with Murray. It is likely Gage’s own politics and personal life that incline me to be more understanding— alongside her work for women’s suffrage she also campaigned for Native American rights and was an abolitionist (her childhood home was a stop on the Underground Railroad). As easy as it would be to disavow her remarkable inaccuracies in witchcraft history, I simply cannot—I think she is very cool. Murray, Witch-Cult, 12. Murray 15. Jacqueline Simpson, “Margaret Murray’s Witch Cult,” in The Witchcraft Reader, ed. Darren Oldridge, 2nd ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), 95; Russell, Sorcerers, Heretics, Pagans, 41; Briggs, Witches and Neighbours, 31; Larner, Enemies, 34. Alan Macfarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart English, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 1999), 10. Simpson 94.

Bibliography Adams, Gretchen A. The Specter of Salem: Remembering the Witch Trials in Nineteenth-Century America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Apps, Lara and Andrew Gow. Male Witches in Early Modern Europe. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003. Ashforth, Adam. Witchcraft, Violence, and Democracy in South Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Barry, Jonathan. “Introduction: Keith Thomas and the Problem of Witchcraft.” In Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe: Studies in Culture and Belief , edited by Jonathan Barry, Marianne Hester, and Gareth Roberts, 1–45. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Barstow, Anne Llewellyn. Witchcraze: A New History of the European Witch Hunts. London: Pandora, 1994.

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Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. 1972. Reissue. London: British Broadcasting Corporation and Penguin Books, 2008. Bever, Edward. “Popular Witch Beliefs and Magical Practices.” In The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe and Colonial America, edited by Brian P. Levack, 50–68. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. ———. The Realities of Witchcraft and Popular Magic in Early Modern Europe: Culture, Cognition, and Everyday Life. Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Breslaw, Elaine. “Tituba’s Confession: The Multicultural Dimensions of the 1692 Salem Witch-Hunt.” Ethnohistory 44, no. 3 (Summer 1997): 535–556 Briggs, Robin. “‘Many Reasons Why’: Witchcraft and the Problem of Multiple Explanation.” In Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe: Studies in Culture and Belief , edited by Jonathan Barry, Marianne Hester, and Gareth Roberts, 49– 63. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. ———. Witches and Neighbours: The Social and Cultural Context of European Witchcraft. 2nd edition. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002. Broedel, Hans Peter. “Fifteenth-Century Witch Beliefs.” In The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe and Colonial America, edited by Brian P. Levack, 32–49. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Certeau, Michel. The Possession at Loudun. Translated by Michael B. Smith. 1996. Reissue. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Cohn, Norman. “The Making of the Great Witch-Hunt.” In Witches of the Atlantic World, edited by Elaine G. Breslaw, 305–308. New York: New York University Press, 2000. Daly, Mary. Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism. Boston: Beacon Press, 1978. Davidson, Jane P. “The Myth of the Persecuted Female Healer.” In The Witchcraft Reader, edited by Darren Oldridge, 257–260. 2nd edition. London and New York: Routledge, 2008. Demos, John. The Enemy Within: 2,000 Years of Witch-Hunting in the Western World. New York: Viking, 2008. Dworkin, Andrea. Woman Hating. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1974. Ehrenreich, Barbara and Deirdre English. Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: History of Women Healers. London: Compendium, 1974. Federici, Silvia. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. New York: Autonomedia, 2004. Fields, Karen E. and Barbara J. Fields. Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life. London and New York: Verso, 2012. Firestone, Shulamith. The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution. Bantam revised edition. Toronto, New York, and London: Bantam, 1970.

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Gage, Matilda Joslyn. Women, Church and State: A Historical Account of Woman Through the Christian Ages: With Reminiscences of the Matriarchate. 3rd edition. New York: Truth Seeker, 1893. Gaskill, Malcolm. Witchcraft: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Gencarella, Stephen Olbrys. “Touring History: Guidebooks and the Commodification of the Salem Witch Trials.” The Journal of American Culture 30, no. 3 (2007): 271–284. Gibson, Marion. Early Modern Witches: Witchcraft Cases in Contemporary Writing. London: Routledge, 2000. ———. Reading Witchcraft: Stories of Early English Witches. London: Routledge, 1999. Ginzburg, Carlo. The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Translated by John Tedeschi and Anne Tedeschi. 1966. Reissue. London, Melbourne, and Henley: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983. Hansen, Chadwick. “The Metamorphosis of Tituba, or Why American Intellectuals Can’t Tell an Indian Witch from a Negro.” The New England Quarterly 47, no. 1 (1974): 3–12. Herzig, Tamar. “Witchcraft Prosecutions in Italy.” In The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe and Colonial America, edited by Brian P. Levack, 249–267. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Hester, Marianne. “Patriarchal Reconstruction and Witch Hunting.” In Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe, edited by Jonathan Barry, Marianne Hester and Gareth Roberts, 288–306. 1996. Reissue. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Hodgkin, Katharine. “Gender, Mind and Body: Feminism and Psychoanalysis.” In Palgrave Advances in Witchcraft Historiography, edited by Jonathan Barry and Owen Davies, 182–202. Hampshire and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Holmes, Clive. “Women, Witches, and Witnesses.” In The Witchcraft Reader, edited by Darren Oldridge, 267–386. 2nd edition. London: Routledge, 2008. Jenkins, Richard. “Spooks and Spooks: Black Magic and Bogeymen in Northern Ireland, 1973–1974.” In Witchcraft Continued, edited by Willem de Blécourt and Owen Davies, 191–212. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020. Kamensky, Jane. Governing the Tongue: The Politics of Speech in Early New England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Karlsen, Carol F. The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England. New York: Vintage Books, 1987. Klaits, Joseph. Servants of Satan: The Age of Witch Hunts. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1985.

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Kramer, Heinrich and James Sprenger. Malleus Maleficarum. Translated by Montague Summers. 1928. Reissue. London: Arrow Books, 1971. La Fontaine, Jean. “Witchcraft and Satanic Abuse.” In The Witchcraft Reader, edited by Darren Oldridge, 385–388. 2nd edition. London and New York: Routledge, 2008. Larner, Christina. Enemies of God: The Witch-Hunt in Scotland. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981. ———. “Was Witch-Hunting Woman-Hunting?” In The Witchcraft Reader, edited by Darren Oldridge, 253–260. 2nd edition. London and New York: Routledge, 2008. Levack, Brian P. “Introduction.” In The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe and Colonial America, edited by Brian Levack, 1–12. Oxford University Press, 2013. ———. “Witchcraft and the Law.” In The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe and Colonial America, edited by Brian P. Levack, 468– 484. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. ———. The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe. London and New York: Longman, 1987. Macfarlane, Alan. Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart English. 2nd edition. London: Routledge, 1999. Mackay, Christopher S. The Hammer of Witches: A Complete Translation of the Malleus Maleficarum. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Murray, Margaret. The Witch-Cult in Western Europe. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963. Murphy, Brenda. Congressional Theatre: Dramatizing McCarthyism on Stage, Film, and Television. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Norton, Mary Beth. In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002. Oldridge, Darren. “General Introduction.” In The Witchcraft Reader, edited by Darren Oldridge. 2nd edition. London and New York: Routledge, 2008. Purkiss, Diane. “Modern Witches and Their Pasts.” In The Witchcraft Reader, edited by Darren Oldridge, 279–348. 2nd edition. London and New York: Routledge, 2008. ———. The Witch in History: Early Modern and Twentieth-Century Representations. London and New York: Routledge, 1996. ———. “Witchcraft in Early Modern Literature.” In The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe and Colonial America, edited by Brian P. Levack, 122–140. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Reis, Elizabeth. Damned Women: Sinners and Witches in Puritan New England. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1997. Robbins, Rossell Hope. The Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology. London: Peter Nevill, 1959.

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Roper, Lyndal. Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004. Rowlands, Alison. “Witchcraft and Gender in Early Modern Europe.” In The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe and Colonial America, edited by Brian P. Levack, 449–467. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Russell, Jeffrey B. A History of Witchcraft: Sorcerers, Heretics, and Pagans. London: Thames and Hudson, 1980. Schulte, Rolf. Man as Witch: Male Witches in Central Europe. Translated by Linda Froome-Döring. Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Sharpe, James. Witchcraft in Early Modern England. Harlow, UK: Longman Pearson Education, 2001. Siegel, James. Naming the Witch. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006. Simpson, Jacqueline. “Margaret Murray’s Witch Cult.” In The Witchcraft Reader, edited by Darren Oldridge, 93–98. 2nd edition. London and New York: Routledge, 2008. Sollée, Kristen J. Witches, Sluts, Feminists: Conjuring the Sex Positive. Berkeley: Three L Media, 2017. Starhawk, The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess. Special 20th anniversary edition. San Francisco, CA: Harper Collins, 1999. Starkey, Marion. The Devil in Massachusetts: A Modern Enquiry into the Salem Witch Trials. 1949. Reissue. Garden City, New York: Anchor Books, 1969. Stephens, Michele. “Introduction.” In Sorcerer and Witch in Melanesia, 1–16. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1987. Stephens, Walter. Demon Lovers: Witchcraft, Sex, and the Crisis of Belief . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. ———. “The Sceptical Tradition.” In The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe and Colonial America, edited by Brian P. Levack, 101– 121. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Stokes, Laura Patrick. Demons of Urban Reform: Early European Witch Trials and Criminal Justice, 1430–1530. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Thomas, Keith. Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England. London: Wiedenfeld and Nicolson, 1971. Trevor-Roper, Hugh. The European Witch-Craze of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries and Other Essays. 1956. Reissue. New York and Evanston: Harper and Row, 1967. Waite, Gary. Heresy, Magic and Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Wiesner, Merry E. Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe. 2nd edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

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Williams, Gerhild Scholz. Defining Dominion: The Discourses of Magic and Witchcraft in Early Modern France and Germany. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995. ———. “Demonologies.” In The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe and Colonial America, edited by Brian P. Levack, 69–83. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Wolf, Naomi. The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women. London: Vintage Books, 1991.

CHAPTER 3

Witches and the Present

Walter Benjamin writes that “[t]o articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was.’ It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.”1 In turning from histories of the witch and the witch trials to cultural memories of these symbols and events, I want to trace how feminist activists, scholars, writers, and audiences have seized upon the memory of the witch in a moment of danger or crisis. Feminist memories of the witch are seized upon in moments of patriarchal crisis and violence to function as signifiers of feminist lineages, identity, and politics. Attachments to the past via cultural memory—whether or not that memory of the past is supported by historical accuracy—offer identificatory value in the present, particularly in the case of marginalized or oppressed groups and communities who have typically been excluded from the historical record. What I am thinking through in this chapter is what potential cultural memory holds for feminist scholars; how is feminist memory aligned with, and a product of, activism? What is the relationship between popular culture and media, feminist activism, and cultural memory? What political purposes does ‘historically inaccurate’ memory hold for marginalized groups? This chapter also offers something of a divergence from witches and attends to ghosts, spectres, afterlives, and hauntings. Having spent the past two chapters discussing the cultural landscape in which the witch emerges as a synecdoche for feminist activism and politics, I want to consider how © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 B. Kosmina, Feminist Afterlives of the Witch, Palgrave Studies in (Re)Presenting Gender, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25292-1_3

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mnemonic afterlives ripple across popular culture and media, haunting the present with the traumas of the past. Given the prevalence and ubiquity of the witch across feminist cultural memoryscapes, I reckon with and bear witness to the ghosts of these witches, and examine why and how these spectres emerge again and again in particular conjunctures of crisis.

Memory and the Past The rise of what has been termed the memory paradigm or the memory phenomenon addresses many issues and questions that have arisen from postmodern philosophical considerations of the past, but equally it raises questions about the nature of the past in historical writing. The contention that postmodernity is characterized by an “incredulity” towards grand narratives2 not only calls into question understandings of history and historiography as teleological and characterized by progress, but even as being chronological. The grand narrative of history and the neat, ordered structure of the past “has lost its credibility.”3 Fredric Jameson consequently suggests that the postmodern should be understood as “an attempt to think the present historically in an age that has forgotten how to think historically in the first place.”4 In this postmodern historical landscape of pastiche and simulacrum, “the past is thereby itself modified: what was once [history] […] has meanwhile itself become a vast collection of images, a multitudinous photographic simulacrum.”5 In this sense, postmodern thought and culture are characterized by an emphasis on the pure present: “time horizons shorten to the point where the present is all there is.”6 Consequently, I am interested less with history and more with memory, and particularly with how memory and feminist activism operate within a cultural milieu of commodified, nostalgic, and ideological recreations or simulations of the past. After all, while the grand narrative of history may be met with incredulity, totalizing narratives of the past are highly prevalent and accessible across contemporary culture. Cultural memory demonstrates how the past in postmodern/late capitalist culture is a collection of competing texts in mass media, functioning as a kind of bricolage of the past for present-day mnemonic purposes. This is not to say that history and memory are antithetical.7 The postmodern incredulity to grand historical narratives enables a more expansive

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approach to the past predicated on memory.8 The ossification of narratives of the past into historical metanarrative is thus addressed through turning to memory’s ‘present-ism’ as a mechanism through which to access the past. Astrid Erll even suggests that the rise of memory studies is due to postmodern philosophies of history: “[i]t is under the memory paradigm that the study of the past can be combined with these insights of postmodern theory, because the focus of memory studies rests, precisely, not on the ‘past as it really was’, but on the ‘past as a human construct.’”9 This is not a one-way street: the past is not just a product of the present, but the present is determined by the past too. A society’s experience of the present “very largely depends upon our knowledge of the past […] we will experience our present differently in accordance with the different pasts to which we are able to connect that present.”10 The act of remembering, individually and communally, is an act of engaging in the construction and maintenance of the present, something that clearly holds ideological importance and activist potential.

Memory and the Present Cultural memory studies scholars seek to articulate the correlations between the individual’s memories and the social milieu they live in, interrogating how memory operates on a collective and cultural level, and it is implicated in wider ideological terrains. The imbrication of memory and culture enables the interrogation of structures and discourses of power across acts of cultural remembering and forgetting. Considering memory within the broader processes of culture enables interrogating not only “those ways of making sense of the past which are intentional and performed through narrative, and which go hand in hand with the construction of identities” but also the more unconscious processes of memory—the “unintentional and implicit ways of cultural remembering […] or of inherently non-narrative” memory processes.11 The analysis of memory within and as culture entails reckoning with both passive and active acts of memory that crystallize around individual and collective acts and processes of memory, and opens up consideration of how popular culture and media operates as a site of mnemonic and cultural resistance. Memory is a part of the endless process of becoming that characterizes cultural identity, per Stuart Hall’s conception,12 and is firmly rooted in the “here-now.”13

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The importance of cultural memory as a means of identity and community construction is particularly pertinent for feminist memory studies investigating the gendered dynamics of memory. Identity groups and communities reconstruct shared and foundational pasts through cultural memories—a shared past from which to build present identity. These memories, however, do not necessarily constitute a ‘true’ representation of the past; group identity is determined by memories of the shared past, and those memories are distorted (consciously or unconsciously) according to ideological necessity in the present: “memory,” Pierre Nora writes, “wells up from groups that it welds together.”14 Which phenomena, events, people, or symbols from the broad sweep of history become important moments in a group’s cultural memories of itself and why is a matter of debate: what makes one moment resonate so deeply with a community that they actively practice remembering (and re-remembering) it together over a different moment from the past? How do these mnemonic narratives operate as what Connerton terms an “act of transfer” through which social norms, conventions, and practices are reinforced or resisted?15 Memory is a site of ideological contestation in the Gramscian sense, as mnemonic scripts are rewritten and re-remembered according to the political necessities of the present.16 Memory operates within and as a product of what Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer have labelled the culture industry.17 Imbricating the processes and landscapes of memory into the study of culture enables the cultural studies scholar or the memory studies scholar (if these require separate titles) to grapple with how memory is (re-)produced in the everyday processes of culture, in the media that is produced and consumed within and by the market, in the more reified heritage industries that both consciously and unconsciously intervene in cultural memories, and in everyday life. To consider cultural memory in mass media as only something imposed on ordinary people by corporations and cultural authorities is to dismiss the everyday workings of memory. Memory cultures can be conceived of as popular cultures, in the sense Stuart Hall outlines. Culture and memory are not only something imposed upon ordinary people in a top-down process. Instead, “[i]n the study of popular culture, we should always start here: with the double-stake in popular culture, the double movement of containment and resistance, which is always inevitably inside it.”18 Memory cultures function in this manner, as a site of both the maintenance and enforcement of hegemonic ideology, but equally as a site of resistance, where ordinary people recognize the ideological memory

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inherent in the media they consume and can enact resistance against these ideologies (or, use those texts to conceive of resistant ideologies). To understand memory as beholden to only one of these cultural forces (only a top-down or bottom-up process) is to miss half the point. Susannah Radstone consequently argues that cultural memory studies scholars need to reckon with understanding culture and memory as a process under constant negotiation.19 Memory cultures, Radstone states, must be understood “as ambiguous, as struggle, as a grey area.”20 The incorporation of memory into culture enables not only the analysis of mnemonic resistance and domination but aligns cultural memory studies as a discipline with the potential for activism and political resistance.

Memory and Feminism Memory has resonated throughout women’s literary, media, and activist cultures as a recurring symbol of women’s interiority and as a mechanism for feminist connection to the past. Feminist philosophy and activism has long had a close correlation to feminist literature, as feminist thinkers often double as writers too.21 In Orlando: A Biography (1928), Virginia Woolf characterizes memory as “the seamstress” who “runs her needle in and out, up and down, hither and thither. We know not what comes next, or what follows after.”22 One of the most enduring symbols of memory in women’s literature is Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), in which Morrison conjures a new conception of memory: rememory. As both noun and verb, rememory captures the cyclical, interlinked, and imagined pasts, presents, and futures of traumatic memory.23 Sara Ahmed has argued that memory functions as a form of feminist world-building: “[h]ow a world is shaped is memory.”24 As Susannah Radstone has argued, feminism itself can be understood as a mode of “memory work” through which to “investigate, interrogate and even, ultimately, transform our relationships with our remembered selves.”25 Marianne Hirsch has similarly argued that memory studies mirrors feminist scholarship, particularly its politically-charged investigation of the past.26 This is not to say that all women’s writing, writing by women, feminist writing, or feminist scholarship is filtered through the lens of memory, but instead to highlight that there has been a long tradition of memory being a mechanic for feminist engagement with the past, present, and future. There are clear commonalities in the motivations of feminist historians (and historians of and for other marginalized groups) searching for a usable past, and cultural

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memory scholars, who illustrate the uses of a past which has not quite been remembered. Given this pattern of deploying memory (consciously or unconsciously) in feminist writing, philosophy, and scholarship, it is curious that it is only comparatively recently that cultural memory scholars have specifically investigated the gendered intersections or implications of cultural memory.27 However, over the last five years there has been considerable growth in the study of memory and gender, and the publication of Red Chidgey’s Feminist Afterlives: Assemblage Memory in Activist Times (2018)28 (whose notion of the feminist afterlife informs my own approach) and Women Mobilizing Memory (2019)29 demonstrates this developing feminist memory studies field. These developing feminist activist memory practices: engage in acts of repair that demand justice but do not aim at restitution. If they rebuild, they take up temporary, often virtual, spaces. They acknowledge the haunting imprecisions of memory, they perform its wounds, but, at the same time, they enable us to imagine alternative histories and queer potentials that can reconfigure painful pasts.30

The feminist activist memory practices and reading methodologies I outline and demonstrate over Feminist Afterlives of the Witch sit within the emerging feminist activist memory studies discipline. To retell the story of the witch and the witch trials is to engage in acts of remembering the feminist subject and self, strengthening the connections between memory, feminist practice and philosophy, and activism. It attends to the spectres of the witch that proliferate across popular culture and media, performs the wounds that they hold, and offer the possibilities of exploring alternative pasts and hopeful futures.

Memory and Activism Memory holds the potential to be a mechanism for resistant cultural practices and ideologies, just as much as it can be a cultural process that reinforces the status quo. The politics of memory are consequently entangled in contemporary ideology, both hegemonic and resistant. The remodelling of the past for activist purposes is not just a matter of telling different or new stories (although this is certainly an important first step): it requires intervening in cultural processes and dynamics at a fundamental

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level. Ann Rigney has addressed this activist account of cultural memory and the cultural memory scholar. “Remembrance,” Rigney argues, “is not just about repeating the same story over and over again. As a communicative practice, it is fundamentally transferable and this means that remembrance is also a resource for redefining the borders between ‘them’ and ‘us.’”31 Rigney thus proposes a trinity of memory activism: – memory/memories in activism (how activists have used memory in their political projects) – memory/memories of activism (narratives and memories of past activist movements) – memory activism itself (the act of reshaping and defining memory for specific political and ideological purposes).32 Feminist Afterlives of the Witch fulfils all three points in Rigney’s trinity: it interrogates how feminist activists, writers, and audiences have utilized memories of the witch in service of ongoing feminist activism; it contributes to the strong body of scholarship that ‘remembers’ feminist movements globally (particularly 1970s’ feminism in the USA and the UK); and finally, it intervenes in cultural memories of both the witch and of feminist movements. Recognizing the activist potential of cultural memory and engaging in Rigney’s model of memory activism renders the cultural memory studies scholar both active and activist. In Feminist Afterlives, Chidgey writes the following of the emerging activist memory studies corpus: [a]n activist memory studies, if it is to emerge, should account for the banal and routine acts of memory making that animate popular, grassroots, official and counter-cultural imaginaries surrounding activist and contentious pasts. These accounts must bring into view the distributed acts of labour that underpin such imaginaries, and how movement memories are composed, recomposed and decomposed across a range of intersecting memory terrains: to include the legal, the monetary, the judicial, the symbolic, the corporeal and the everyday.33

Over the following chapters, my analysis of popular culture and popular media is an attempt to address the ordinary and everyday processes of feminist memory activism (and activist memory) as it is enacted through popular culture and mass media. The dispersion of feminist cultural

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memory across the culture industry is demonstrative of the “banal and routine acts of memory making” that animate the activist mnemonic imaginaries that Chidgey refers to. Feminist memories of the witch and the witch trials emerge again and again across popular media and culture, and reflect the ongoing intersections of activism and memory and what these intersections reveal about the contemporary moment. Cultural memories of the witch in popular culture reflect both the implicit reproduction of hegemonic narratives and ideologies, and the explicit repurposing and rewriting of these historical narratives for specific political purposes. The feminist activist cultural memory I am tracing throughout Feminist Afterlives of the Witch is therefore multidirectional , in the sense proposed by Michael Rothberg. Rothberg frames memory as multidirectional in that it “draws attention to the dynamic transfers that take place between diverse places and times during the act of remembrance. Thinking in terms of multidirectional memory helps explain the spiralling interactions that characterize the politics of memory.”34 Rothberg points out that the multidirectionality of memory, or the way that memory spirals out through political interaction and cultural processes, does not always foster solidarity: in fact, it can “function in the interests of violence and exclusion.”35 In interrogating how feminist cultural memories of the witch spiral throughout popular cultural milieus, I am certainly invested in determining how the afterlives of feminist activism around the symbol of the witch continues to foster progressive activist rhetoric, behaviours, and media. However, I also contend with the divisive, exclusionary, and downright regressive political patterns that continue to haunt the symbol of the witch and her traverses across cultural memoryscapes.

Memory and Prosthetic Pasts Alongside Rigney’s trinity of memory activism, Chidgey’s feminist activist memory, and Rothberg’s multidirectional memory, my approach to feminist activist cultural memory and popular culture in this monograph is strongly influenced by Alison Landsberg’s notion of prosthetic memory. Landsberg contends that in an age of mass culture, individuals interpellate cultural memory into their own identity and personal history via their mass media engagements. Prosthetic memory: emerges at the interface between a person and a historical narrative about the past, at an experiential site such as a movie theater or museum. In this

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moment of contact, an experience occurs through which the person sutures himself or herself [or themselves] into a larger history [...] In the process that I am describing, the person does not simply apprehend a historical narrative but takes on a more personal, deeply felt memory of a past event through which he or she [or they] did not live. The resulting prosthetic memory has the ability to shape that person’s subjectivity and politics.36

Prosthetic memory is a consequence of the technological changes of commodified mass culture: mass cultural technologies within the culture industry widely circulate and reproduce hegemonic mnemonic narratives that the individual interpellates.37 Prosthetic memory offers the individual the mnemonic technology to incorporate mass media narratives into “one’s personal archive of experience, informing one’s subjectivity as well as one’s relationship to the present and future tenses.”38 These memories are not ‘authentically’ or ‘organically’ experienced by the subject, and are the product of capitalist mass culture and the media industry.39 However, prosthetic feminist cultural memory is not a surface-level or shallow commodified engagement with the past (although it certainly can be): these are memories that actively “organize and energize the bodies and subjectivities that take them on.”40 Sarah Banet-Weiser has compellingly argued that contemporary “popular feminism” is mediated through media texts and platforms (in a commodifiable manner, aligned with the capitalist underpinnings of the culture industry).41 The feminist activist memory that I am outlining aligns similarly with Banet-Weiser’s view of feminism’s popularity (defined via its media visibility) and thus the prosthetic attachment to mass media representations of feminism is politically-generative for both individuals and political groups. In A Room of One’s Own, Woolf writes that “we think back through our mothers if we are women.”42 Woolf contended that the comparatively recent entrance of women into the canon of ‘great’ writers (an intensely ideologically-determined category) meant that women writers had to think back through their relatively few literary foremothers’ in developing their writing.43 Woolf’s claim is nuanced by Sara Ahmed, who reframes Woolf’s feminist mothers and instead thinks back through her feminist aunties, revising and reconsidering white feminist views of feminist movements.44 Thinking back through one’s feminist mothers and aunties offers an example of prosthetic memory practices, but also of what Marianne Hirsch has called ‘postmemory.’ Writing about the generation after the Holocaust, Hirsch articulates postmemory as “the

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relationship that the ‘generation after’ bears to the personal, collective, and cultural trauma of those who came before—to experiences they ‘remember’ only by means of the stories, images, and behaviours among which they grew up. But these experiences were transmitted to them so deeply and affectively as to seem to constitute memories in their own right”45 Hirsch’s notion of postmemory works in tandem with Landsberg’s prosthetic memory as productive frames through which to view feminist activist cultural memory. Both offer mnemonic mechanics for marginalized groups to connect to a past that they have not experienced, or is erased and forgotten. Both are also generated through attachment to story and narrative as affective mnemonic experiences. So much scholarship on the history of marginalized groups—women, people of colour, LGBTQIA+ people, disabled people, working-class people—is trying to recover a past that has been neglected or deliberately erased. This is not only demonstrative of how history is always a political project, but how prosthetic or post-memory for marginalized groups who are not visible in history is imbued with activist potential. The organizing or energizing potential of prosthetic memory is what I want to consider in relation to feminist activist memory work. My ongoing analysis of popular culture and media is consequently not only an attempt to grapple with the routine and everyday processes of memory activism, but is also a recognition of the prosthetic nature of feminist cultural memory in the culture industry. Feminist activist memories of the early modern European and colonial American witch trials in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries are prosthetic. They allow the feminist subject to interpellate a collective traumatic past from several centuries ago into their contemporary activist work and identify formation. Protest phrases such as “we are the granddaughters of the witches you couldn’t burn” demonstrate this. The witch becomes a maternal ancestor to contemporary feminist activists, and the traumas inflicted on cisgender women, transgender, non-binary, and gender non-conforming people throughout history are remembered, borne witness to, and acted upon in the present moment via media texts. These prosthetic memories are disseminated and reinforced through popular culture and media and generate affective attachments to the past for those who take the memories on.

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The Inaccuracies of Feminist Memories of the Witch Imaginative play with the past for contemporary feminist (or protofeminist) purposes has a long tradition in feminist thought; think of Woolf’s invocation of the imagined Judith Shakespeare in A Room of One’s Own.46 The witch and the witch trials are certainly not the only cultural mnemonic symbol of feminist activism from the 1960s and 1970s that is built on shaky ground. In August 1968, a group of Women’s Liberation activists protested the Miss America beauty contest by throwing what they called “objects of female torture” in the bin (bras, girdles, curlers, and issues of women’s magazines were all thrown away) and crowning a sheep.47 The protestors initially planned to set the bin with the objects in it on fire, but did not do so at the request of pageant officials, as the boardwalk where they staged their protest was wooden and it represented a fire hazard.48 Nevertheless, the bra-burning Women’s Libber has become one of the dominant images of 1960s and 1970s Western feminism. The symbol of the bra-burning feminist is “an early warning of the power of symbols, always important in politics, but in feminist politics touching particularly acute and sensitive nerves.”49 The witch and the bra-burner reflect the prevalence in feminist activist memory of prosthetic relations to a misremembered past. Feminist mnemonic revisions of the witch trials as a gynocide are not wholly inaccurate (the vast majority of the victims were women, and misogynistic ideologies and patriarchal institutions, both secular and religious, did contribute to this overwhelming gendering of the victims of the witch trials). However, they are not wholly accurate either (the view of the trials as a gynocide neglects any number of other factors that contributed to the execution of thousands of people as witches, including race, colonialism, environmental factors, political disruption, and religious upheaval, and also ignores the existence of male witches). Despite the vehemence with which feminist activists, writers, scholars, theologians, and thinkers have invoked the memory of the witch and the witch trials in their rhetoric and their action, often the claims they make are on shaky historical ground. For instance, claims as to the ‘nine million women’ burned in the trials in Europe that crop up across feminist memoryscapes have no real historical support, as seen in the previous chapter. Claims that midwives and healers were specifically targeted by the emerging medical establishment are historically contentious. The notion of the witch hunts

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as woman hunts has been fairly comprehensively repudiated by historians. Nevertheless, these misremembered facts of the witch trials serve a strong ideological purpose in feminist activist memory, tying contemporary patriarchy to historical violence and tragedy, and shaping a narrative of historical gynocide through which to understand the crisis of patriarchy in the present day. The witch as she is remembered in feminist activism and media is a “created myth,”50 but a useful one. The events of the witch trials have come to serve as a central historical moment in the organizing rhetoric of a great deal of feminist activism, scholarship, philosophy, popular culture, and art; however, the ideological purpose of these acts of remembrance has been conflated with the historical. The “myth of the Burning Times,” as Purkiss has labelled feminist memories of the witch trials,51 functions prosthetically as an important historical referent in feminist activism and memory since (at least) the late 1960s, and offers an affective relationship between contemporary feminists and a spectral, authentic-but-not-authentic past. This provides the pleasures and political requirements of the ‘real’ past that marginalized groups have been excluded from. Despite the potential that prosthetic attachments to the past generate in feminist activist memory practices, this is also clearly a fraught exercise that opens the door to all manner of misinformation and disinformation about the past. There are ethical considerations when it comes to thinking through prosthetic mnemonic attachments to inaccurate historical narratives as an activist tool. This is exacerbated when considering how feminist values are subsumed into racial capitalism and neoliberal white (post-)feminism. Take the protest phrase “we are the granddaughters of the witches you couldn’t burn.” What begins as a politically-radical protest idea that created a matrilineal link between contemporary radical feminist action and historical violence is subsumed into a neoliberal mainstreaming of feminist politics. The violence that witches face is safely relegated to memory, but still gives the protestor a sort of hereditary claim to that persecution, as the persistence of memory is affectively felt, conveniently forgetting the thousands of people—mostly in the Global South—who are still executed for witchcraft today. The’granddaughters of the witches you couldn’t burn’ has even become a meme that plays on the relative privilege of the types of feminism that this protest is usually deployed to represent. Memes in this vein have pointed to the privilege of the people—usually white cisgender women—deploying it as a feminist

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protest: you are the granddaughter of a Wall Street banker; you are the daughter of an oil magnate. In spite of these caveats, however, the fact remains that the dominant memory of the witch trials in popular culture, history, and activism is that espoused by feminist activists, theologians, writers, audiences, and, to a certain extent, historians. This prosthetic attachment to a traumatic past is politically-productive and ideologically-generative for contemporary feminist thinkers, and radical feminist writing on the witch trials from the 1970s particularly becoming dominant in popular culture memories of the trials. Cultural memories of the early modern European and colonial American witch hunts show the unmistakeable fingerprints of feminist activism, and demonstrate the affective and activist potential of prosthetic attachments to memory and history for marginalized groups excluded from the historical record. What is clear is that there are too many layers of contradictory and, intentionally or unintentionally, inaccurate historical claims and narratives about the witch that have developed over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to neatly contain the witch in historical narrative. There is too much accrued detritus of memory, history, and ideology for the witch to easily be claimed as a historical referent for feminist work. What is also clear, however, is that there are decades of texts from activist circles, polemics, and popular culture and media that can be used in understanding the symbol; that is where the witch is written and remembered, and where feminist activist memory cultures develop.

Memory and Narrative Pierre Nora argues that “[m]emory has been promoted to the center of history: thus do we mourn the loss of literature.”52 However, I disagree that by promoting memory we lose literature: memories and historical narratives are reproduced and circulated through a culture in many ways, including through stories. I use the term ‘literature’ because that is what memory studies scholars have typically used to describe the narrative processes of memory in all manner of cultural texts including, but not limited to, novels, short stories, poetry and epic poetry, plays and drama, and, more recently, film and television. (Andreea Paris also points out that memory studies scholars have a tendency to only investigate ‘canonical’ literary works in their analyses of literature and culture memory, with relatively little research on popular texts, genres, and authors.53 ) Consequently, I want to open up the study of literature—in its broadest

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definition—to more expansive Barthesian understandings of text and textuality, and consider not just the text itself but the processes, practices, and norms that exist around and within the text, as well as in its production and reception. As Astrid Erll writes, “[n]arrative structures play a significant role in every memory culture.”54 While I follow other memory studies scholars in using ‘literature’ as the central organizing term here, I am more invested in understanding memory in popular literature, film, television, media and culture through the rest of this monograph. The potential for mass media to operate as a vehicle of memory has been questioned by some memory scholars. Aleida Assmann, for instance, posits that “[i]n the world of mass media, the consciousness of a past silently evaporates in the cycles of continuous production and consumption.”55 However, while acknowledging that the accretion of the endlessly recycled detritus of texts across mass media generates difficulties in considering how memory sticks, I also want to offer up that this can be useful in activist memory, where access to the mediation of mnemonic identity groups becomes easier for marginalized groups. As Hoskins and Tulloch write of memory in contemporary culture, “twentyfirst century media bring[s] haunting and forgetting into a new struggle, disrupting the settling of history for a clear view on present and future risks.”56 Popular culture has the capacity to be a site of resistance, and it is important to think through the implications of resistant literary, media, and memory cultures and practices in feminist activist memory cultures. Further, as Landsberg’s conceptualisation of prosthetic memory is only possible due to the structures of mass media and culture,57 these popular texts provide the narrative structures that enable attachments to pasts that the feminist subject did not experience themselves. My approach to literature and memory is informed by Astrid Erll’s work on literary memory and Ann Rigney’s notion of textual afterlives. Erll contends that literature is a medium of cultural memory because it is a system of symbols that mirror processes of remembering and forgetting, and that reflect the narrative processes of memory.58 Literature represents cultural memories in various modes, and has various mnemonic functions, including storing, circulating, and reinscribing or altering cultural memory.59 Rigney, meanwhile, considers the ‘afterlives’ of a text’s ‘social life’ through memory cultures. Tracing a text’s afterlives requires “inaugurating a holistic approach to the past in which the historical imagination spilled over into material culture and everyday behaviour.”60 Rigney looks at how literary works from Walter Scott as well as the figure of Scott

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himself have been located and re-emerged in other cultural practices, and thus theorizes how a cultural symbol’s textual life and afterlife reflect an “underlying portability that enables them to move into different media and social contexts.”61 Consequently, in my interrogation of how the witch’s travels across feminist literary, mnemonic, and activist landscapes, I am unravelling the symbol’s “capacity to move, mobilize, and generate new cultural activities.”62 I also am considering the ways that popular literature and media are a resistant cultural field for feminist activist memory cultures. In understanding of popular culture as a site of contestation and resistance, I want to explore how feminist activist memory cultures are dispersed, shaped, and contested across literary and media objects.

Memory, Temporality, Spectres If memory is the seamstress, then here I want to bring together the threads she has woven. Each of the threads that this monograph attends to—memory, feminism, popular culture—are profoundly temporal, and, when woven together, create a tapestry that works towards future justice. In understanding the haunting presence and temporal structures of feminist activist memories in popular culture, I am particularly influenced by Jacques Derrida’s notion of hauntology proposed in Specters of Marx (1994) and Avery Gordon’s writing about haunting in Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (1997). Both of these texts are part of a broader cultural shift since the 1990s that has been termed the ‘spectral turn.’63 The spectral turn reflects a theoretical approach to consider temporality in the pure present of postmodernity, where the ghost represents an intrusion of—or perhaps invitation to—alternate pasts and futures. “Spectrality,” Jameson has written, is “what makes the present waver.”64 Derrida invokes the spectre as a symbol of both the haunting of Marxism and of capitalist postmodernity. Writing specifically of the haunting absent-presence of Marxism following the fall of the Berlin Wall, when neoliberal capitalism was cemented as the global hegemonic cultural model, but is continually haunted by the ghost of Marxism, Derrida theorizes the spectre as an absent-presence that collapses past, present, and future into the moment of haunting. The cultural conditions of postmodernity entails living with the haunting spectres of the past and the haunting presence of the future simultaneously. “A spectral moment,”

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Derrida contends, “is a moment that no longer belongs to time.”65 The spectre reflects the bringing together of multiple temporalities into the present, enabling access outside of the eternal present of postmodernity: the spectre is always “[t]urned toward the future, going toward it” but equally, “[e]ven if the future is its [the spectre’s] provenance, it must be, like any provenance, absolutely and irreversibly past.”66 Gordon’s work also engages the ghost and haunting as a central mechanic to consider postmodern culture and the narrowing or collapse of temporal parameters into the pure present.67 As Derrida investigates the spectres of Marx, Gordon’s ghostly critique grapples with how the social structures of everyday life are haunted by the impacts of institutional power dynamics and disparities.”68 As in Derridean conceptions of spectrality, the ghost for Gordon is a figure that carries with it the traumatic memories of the past on both an individual and a cultural level: “to be haunted,” Gordon contends, “is to be tied to historical and social effects.”69 Like Derrida, Gordon’s view of haunting not only draws the past into the present but is turned to the future. The ghost is “pregnant with unfulfilled possibility, with the something to be done that the wavering present is demanding. This something to be done is not a return to the past but a reckoning with its repression in the present, a reckoning with that which we have lost, but never had.”70 Both Gordon’s and Derrida’s conceptualizations of the haunted, haunting, and hauntological temporalities of postmodern culture demonstrate the multiple temporalities that operate within or alongside the apparent ‘pure present’ of postmodernity. That the spectral turn occurs alongside the rise of the memory paradigm indicates a persistent scholarly trend towards and perhaps a need for reckoning with mnemonic hauntings. Recent publications from cultural memory scholars have grappled with the temporal collapse that memory catalyzes, albeit without always explicitly addressing a logic of haunting. For instance, Katherine Hite and Daniela Jara characterize mnemonic afterlives as “fissures” in the present that can “tear open a new form of imagining emancipative possibilities […] interrupt[ing] the present radically, persistently, sometimes in democratizing ways.”71 This mirrors Elizabeth Grosz’s earlier claims that memory fractures and re-fracts the present with “the murmurs of the past and the potential of the future. Every present is riven by memory.”72 In Memory and the Future, Gutman, Brown, and Sodaro conceptualize an emerging “Janus-faced view of memory” which contends with both the backwards look of memory and the future-oriented urgencies of

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memory studies scholarship.73 Even Rothberg’s notion of multidirectional memory engages with mnemonic temporal flattening or collapse, if not overly or explicitly: the “spiralling interactions” across “diverse places and times” that acts of remembering generate enables the melding or collapse of alternative temporalities into the present moment.74 And Rigney’s notion of mnemonic afterlives similarly grapples with haunting pasts, presents, and futures: after all, what is a mnemonic afterlife but a spectre of the past haunting the present? My use of the logic of haunting via Derrida and Gordon to consider the temporal collapse of memory and the haunting or spectral presence of the past and the future in the act of remembering is part of an ongoing trend (explicit or implicit) within the cultural memory paradigm to grapple with memory’s spectral representation of temporalities other than the present. To be haunted is to recognize that the ghost has emerged due to some unfinished business of the past: the haunted must address the reason the ghost haunts them. The arrival of the spectre, Derrida contends, is an act that demands justice from the haunted subject: “[n]o justice […] seems possible or thinkable without the principle of some responsibility.”75 Similarly, Gordon insists on “our need to reckon with hauntings and to ponder the paradox of providing a hospitable memory for ghosts out of a concern for justice.”76 Considering cultural memory as a haunting, therefore, inherently demands that the haunted act to remedy the cause of the ghost’s arrival. This is productive for activist memory scholars seeking to grapple with the haunting legacies of past violence, particularly on institutional levels. To ‘be with’ the spectre of the past positions acts of remembrance, deployed in activist practice and dispersed through popular culture, as both a way to bear witness and to enact change. If, as Ian Baucom puts it, time “does not pass, it accumulates”77 then the spectre offers an intangible embodiment of the accumulating legacies of institutional violence. Its correlation to justice and responsibility offers the possibility for the spectre to provide an ethical framework for feminist activist memory scholars. Given the long tradition of critiquing linear temporalities and particularly patriarchal conceptions of teleological ‘progress’ in feminist scholarship and philosophy,78 there are resonances with haunting and hauntological understandings of memory and temporality when considering feminist activist cultural memory. Victoria Hesford contends that contemporary feminists are haunted by memories of the history of their own movements as much as by patriarchal pasts: “[f]or feminists in particular, to have a

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haunted relationship with the feminist past is to be able to bear witness to the possibilities, often unrealized, of that past.”79 However, the use of the spectre as a temporal mechanic to interrogate feminist responses to and inheritance of traumatic and violent pasts in literary and memory cultures is not without its problems. Red Chidgey argues that using the figure of the spectre for feminist activist memory work plays into postfeminist perspectives, where the politics and project of various feminisms are cast as ‘finished’ and ghostly or spectral.80 Consequently, Chidgey contends that spectral feminist memory practices: privileg[e] the ethics and poetics of memory but not its conditions of production […] A ghost analytic curtails critique, rather than opening it up. It is to enact a melancholic form of nostalgia rather than to elaborate, empirically, the multidimensional and productive elements of activist and feminist memory as they take place in the present and have productive effects on social relations.81

Instead, Chidgey proposes an assemblage memory practice which “refers to a set of historically contingent vitalities that circulate across different scales and sites to compose the intelligibility of memorial entities.”82 While I agree with Chidgey that postfeminism and neoliberal capitalism have attempted to simultaneously commodify and eulogize the activist underpinnings of feminisms and their histories, I do not think this means that a spectralized approach to feminist activist memory is equally dead and buried. Interrogating the accrual of institutional inequalities, oppressions, and violence and their ongoing impacts through the figure of the ghost does not necessarily imply that those systems and legacies are in the past. The spectre brings with it an urgency to act; it represents a “something to be done [which] is not a return to the past but a reckoning with its repression in the present, a reckoning with that which we have lost but never had.”83 Spectralized considerations of feminist activist memory consequently are able to address the repressing or neutralizing of radical politics that neoliberal postfeminism imparts, or at least has the potential to do so. My project of tracing feminist activist cultural memories of the witch through popular culture is consequently also a project in interrogating the implications of haunted, haunting, and hauntological approaches to feminist memory. The postfeminist implications of considering how the spectre of feminism activism is remembered through popular culture and

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the culture industry must be considered, and the nullification of past radical politics into an invisible, intangible ghostly memory that offers the comfort of its presence without needing to act must be reckoned with, as Chidgey cautions. However, this must also be balanced with consideration of popular culture as a potential site of resistance to ideological hegemony, and conceptions of the spectre and the call to act that its arrival heralds that inculcate a ‘something-to-be-done’ in the haunted subject. The afterlives of the witch and feminist activism that emerge again and again across popular culture and feminist memoryscapes must be considered as spectres of how radical feminist activism, history, pasts, culture, and texts are subsumed into the ideological hegemony of the neoliberal capitalist culture industry, but also as the spectres of radical feminist activism, history, pasts, culture, and texts which haunt the present and demand ongoing action and justice.

Reading (and Re-reading) as Ghostly Memory Practices It is difficult to outline an exact methodology that develops from the logic of haunting. Gordon considers this in Ghostly Matters, writing that “the method here is everything and nothing much really.”84 To clinically taxonomize a methodology or procedure for determining the exact dimensions of a haunting seems, as Gordon expresses, to foreclose on the expansive potential of the ghost as an analytic. Instead, to address the specificity of the ghost and the haunting as it arrives and what it brings with it requires reckoning with the story of what caused it to haunt the present/the subject in the first place, and how that haunting requires resolution and restitution. However, given my particular interest in how haunted, haunting, and hauntological cultural memories of feminist activism and feminist activist cultural memories are dispersed and deployed through popular culture and mass media, I do want to propose one loose method of a sort (among surely many) through which to meet the ghost on their own terms, and that is the act of re-reading. Rereading has been productively written about by feminist, queer, post- and decolonial, disability studies, and Marxist scholars as a method through which to ‘recover’ or ‘recuperate’ marginalized groups and individuals through literary history and also to challenge, question, and revise the inheritance of apparently canonical literature. Adrienne Rich argues that feminist revisionary reading practices and “re-vision—the act of looking

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back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction” are a necessary stage in feminist self-knowledge through radical literary critique.85 Reading is itself an ethical act that requires active, close listening and consideration, and elicits some sort of ethical response or action from the reader.86 Re-reading and its travels across literary studies methodologies has fruitfully been aligned with activism, justice, and ethics, and consequently lends itself to feminist activist memory practices and cultures. On top of this, memory is narratological, and re-reading is a mnemonic act. Narrative is integral to the practices and processes of feminist activist cultural memory work and to the logic of haunting, as temporalities are understood and engaged with in the manner of a narrative.87 Re-reading functions as a temporal process that allows the tracing of various haunting threads of memory while also layering in its own ethical engagements and considerations.88 Karen Newman, Jay Clayton, and Marianne Hirsch write this of the act of re-reading and temporality: [i]n the act of reading and re-reading, the present becomes think, layered not only in its contingency and its implicit relation to other presents, but also in its paradoxical resistance to history […] In the act of re-reading, the present is the space of contradiction, of multiplicity, and non-coincidence […] The present of reading is an encounter with other presents which reveals the contingency and impermanence of each, the coexistence of many mutually exclusive present.89

Re-reading feminist activist cultural memory through popular culture is consequently a useful methodology to consider how the logic of haunting and the spectre emerges across feminist activist memoryscapes in popular culture and literature. Feminist re-readings of cultural memories of the witch are responding to the haunting spectres of any number of intersecting ideologies and social forces or institutions that have worked in concert with, alongside, or in contrast to various deployments of the witch across feminist politics over several decades (for instance, racial patriarchy, neoliberal capitalism, white supremacy, Marxism, to name just a few). The haunting spectral memory of the witch as she irrupts into the present also represents the haunting futurity of the ideologies and institutions in which she is brought forward: sometimes a mournful harbinger of the maintenance of the status quo of the present, but also sometimes

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as the radical spectre of future change. Witches continue to haunt feminist activist memoryscapes, meaning many things to many people at many times and all at once. The act of re-remembering the witch and the witch trials—in popular culture and media, as writers and as audiences, on the streets and on the internet—is an act of taking responsibility for the past and shaping the future.

Re-remembering the Witch What do you do with trauma that cannot be moved past, memory that cannot be settled, politics that cannot be resolved? That is the question of much memory studies scholarship. One of the difficulties of remembering the witch is that this urgency is lacking. As Mona Chollet says, the trauma of the witch trials has been forgotten: “which other mass crime, even one long-past, is it possible to speak of like this – with a smile?”90 That is what I am contending with when discussing memories of the witch trials: traumas that have been forgotten, memories that exist only through prosthetic connection the past. In wrapping up these thoughts I want to return, as I so often do, to Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Sethe says this to her daughter, Denver: I was talking about time. It’s so hard for me to believe in it. Some things go. Pass on. Some things just stay. I used to think it was my rememory. You know. Some things you forget. Other things you never do. But it’s not. Places, places are still there. If a house burns down, it’s gone, but the place – the picture of it – stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world. What I remember is a picture floating around out there outside my head. I mean, even if I don’t think it, even if I die, the picture of what I did, or knew, or saw is still out there. Right in the place where it happened.91

It feels somewhat redundant at the end of this chapter to try and feel my way through a conception of memory that is at once haunted and haunting, material and intangible, affective and prosthetic, when Morrison has already done so with such vigour in Beloved. Nevertheless, the feminist activist memory practice I have outlined here is an attempt to think with—and not past—Morrison’s notion of rememory. The afterlives of various ideological interventions in cultural memories of the witch trials haunt the symbol of the witch and its popular

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culture representations and activist deployments to the present day. Each mnemonic revision of the symbol overlays the previous, creating a mnemonic palimpsest. Re-reading popular culture and media representations of the symbol of the witch is consequently an exercise in meeting with, reconciling with, and agitating with those ghosts of the witches that continue to be called forth in various feminisms. It is also an exercise is grappling with the necessarily prosthetic aspect of many communities’ mnemonic presences: the conditions of their oppression have typically led to their exclusion or minimization from the historical record, but remembering that past is key to the liberatory project. Access to the past is increasingly focused through mass media: the witch is revised, rewritten, recuperated, re-activated, and re-remembered through popular culture as a mechanism for feminist politics. Popular media from the later part of the twentieth century demonstrates how feminist interventions in memories of the witch and the witch trials became mainstreamed; popular media representations of witches is one of the ways that these mnemonic interventions became culturally dominant. Feminist interventions in the cultural memory of the witch and the prosthetic memory cultures that arise from these interventions become dispersed through popular culture in such a manner that it becomes general cultural knowledge. The figure of the witch therefore demonstrates the evolving memories of feminisms and anti-feminisms, reflecting back the “many images and self-images of feminism itself.”92 In the following chapters, I investigate four of these images of the witch and the narratives of femininity, feminisms, and memory that congeal around them and overlay them. While there are many more possible symbols associated with this figure (and I am not claiming to have a complete monopoly on interrogations of the cultural meanings of the symbol of the witch), I have chosen four which most clearly reveal the shifting and overlapping narratives and meanings of the symbol to various groups over the last century: the witch as monster, as lover, as mother, and as girl. Attending to the afterlives of the witches is a recognition of how the symbol is haunts and is haunted by feminisms, haunts and is haunted by cultural memory, and haunts and is haunted by popular culture.

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Notes 1. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (1968, reis. New York: Schocken, 2007), 255. 2. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), xxiv, 37. 3. Lyotard, Postmodern Condition, 37. 4. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), ix. 5. Jameson, Postmodernism, 18. 6. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Cambridge, MA and Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing, 1989), 240. 7. Astrid Erll, “Cultural Memory Studies: An Introduction,” in A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies, ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning (Berlin and New York: De Gruyer, 2010), 7. 8. Patrick Hutton, The Memory Phenomenon in Contemporary Historical Writing (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 129. 9. Erll, “Cultural Memory Studies,” 5. 10. Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 2. 11. Erll, “Cultural Memory Studies,” 2. 12. Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Identity, Community, Culture, Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990), 222. 13. Collins, Felicity, Chris Healy and Susannah Radstone, “Provincializing Memory Studies: The Insistence of the ‘Here-Now’,” Memory Studies 13, no. 5 (2020): 850. 14. Pierre Nora, Realms of Memory, Vol. 1 Conflicts and Divisions, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 3. 15. Connerton, Societies 39. 16. Astrid Erll outlines in Memory in Culture how different strands of cultural memory studies have emerged from different scholarly traditions and regions. German cultural memory studies is influenced by Kulturwissenschaft and the Frankfurt School approach, as well as the cultural milieu after the Holocaust and the national and cultural attempts to grapple with the traumas of the Holocaust. Similarly, American cultural memory studies stems from Holocaust and trauma studies, while also incorporating a Derridean model of representation. British cultural memory studies has been greatly influenced by the Birmingham School’s (Centre for

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17.

18.

19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24.

25. 26.

27.

28. 29.

30.

Contemporary Cultural Studies or CCCS) approach to culture, emphasising Gramscian understandings of power relations within memory and culture, and is particularly invested in analysing the hidden or unconscious workings of ideology within memory and culture. It is this understanding of popular culture and memory stemming from the CCCS that informs my analysis of feminist cultural memory studies. See Astrid Erll, Memory in Culture, trans. Sara B. Young (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 10–11. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 96–97. Stuart Hall, “Notes on Deconstructing ‘the Popular”,” in People’s History and Socialist Theory, ed. Raphael Samuel (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), 228. Susannah Radstone, “Memory Studies: For and Against,” Memory Studies 1, no. 1 (2008): 36. Radstone, “Memory Studies,” 36. Feminist philosophers as far back as Mary Wollstonecraft in the mideighteenth century or Virginia Woolf in the early twentieth century have used both fiction and non-fiction writing to explore the nuances of their politics. Feminist philosophy and politics have always been intricately woven with feminist literature and literary figures. Virginia Woolf, Orlando: A Biography (1928; reis., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 75–76. Toni Morrison, Beloved, Reading Guide ed. (1987; London: Vintage Books, 2010) 43. Sara Ahmed, “Feminist Futures,” in A Concise Companion to Feminist Theory, ed. Mary Eagleton (Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 236. Radstone 32. Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 16. Marianne Hirsch, “Practicing Feminism, Practicing Memory,” in Women Mobilizing Memory, ed. Ay¸se Gul Altınay and María José Contreras, Marianne Hirsch, Jean Howard, Banu Karaca, and Alisa Solomon (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), 2. Red Chidgey, Feminist Afterlives: Assemblage Memory in Activist Times (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). Ay¸se Gul Altınay and María José Contreras, Marianne Hirsch, Jean Howard, Banu Karaca, and Alisa Solomon (eds.), Women Mobilizing Memory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019). Hirsch, “Practicing Feminism,” 16.

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31. Ann Rigney, “Remembrance as Remaking: Memories of the Nation Revisited,” Nations and Nationalism 24, no. 2 (2018): 253. 32. Ann Rigney, “Remembering Hope: Transnational Activism Beyond the Traumatic,” Memory Studies 11, no. 3 (2018): 372. 33. Chidgey, Feminist Afterlives, 174–175. 34. Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 11. 35. Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory, 12. 36. Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 2. 37. Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory, 26. 38. Landsberg 26. 39. Landsberg 26. 40. Landsberg 26. 41. Sarah Banet-Weiser, Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2018), 4–5, passim. 42. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1929; reis., London: Penguin Books, 2009), 76. 43. Woolf, Room, 75–77. 44. Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2017), 4. 45. Hirsch, Postmemory, 5. 46. Woolf, Room, 48–49. 47. Sheila Rowbotham, The Past is Before Us: Feminism in Action since the 1960s (London: Pandora, 1989), 245. 48. Rowbotham, Before Us, 245. 49. Rowbotham 245. 50. Diane Purkiss, The Witch in History: Early Modern and Twentieth-Century Representations (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 2. 51. Purkiss, Witch in History, 15. 52. Nora 20. 53. Andreea Paris, “Literature as Memory and Literary Memories: From Cultural Memory to Reader-Response Criticism,” in Literature and Cultural Memory, ed. Mihaela Irimia, Andreea Paris, and Drago¸s Manea (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2017), 95–96. 54. Erll, Memory in Culture, 147. 55. Aleida Assmann, “Texts, Traces, Trash,” Representations 56 (1996): 132. 56. Andrew Hoskins and John Tulloch, Risk and Hyperconnectivity: Media and Memories of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 11. 57. Landsberg 26.

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58. Erll, Memory in Culture, 144–145. 59. Erll, Memory in Culture, 158; 160–161. 60. Ann Rigney, The Afterlives of Walter Scott: Memory on the Move (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 11–12. 61. Rigney, Afterlives, 12. 62. Rigney, Afterlives, 12. 63. María del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren, “The Spectral Turn/Introduction,” in The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory, ed. María del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 2, 31–35. 64. Fredric Jameson, “Marx’s Purloined Letter,” New Left Review 209 (January/February 1995): 85. 65. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), xix. 66. Derrida, Specters, xix. 67. Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (1997; reis., Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 8–11. 68. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 19. 69. Gordon 190. 70. Gordon 183–184. 71. Katherine Hite and Daniela Jara, “Presenting Unwieldy Pasts,” Memory Studies 13, no. 3 (2020): 247, 250. 72. Elizabeth Grosz, The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution and the Untimely (Crows Nest, NSW: Allen and Unwin, 2004), 251. 73. Yifat Gutman, Amy Sodaro, and Adam D. Brown, “Introduction: Memory and the Future: Why a Change of Focus is Necessary,” in Memory and the Future: Transnational Politics, Ethics, and Society, ed. Yifat Gutman, Adam D. Brown and Amy Sodaro (Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 1, passim. 74. Rothberg 11. 75. Derrida xviii, emphasis original. 76. Gordon 60, emphasis original. 77. Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005), 311. Like Gordon, Baucom is concerned with the spectres of the transAtlantic slave trade. 78. Karin Sellberg, “The ‘Turns’ of Feminist Time: Evolutionary Logic, Life and Renewal in ‘New Materialist’ Feminist Philosophy,” Australian Feminist Studies 34, no. 99 (2019): 93–94. 79. Victoria Hesford, “Feminism and Its Ghosts: The Spectre of the Feministas-Lesbian,” Feminist Theory 6, no. 3 (2005): 227–230.

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80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87.

88.

89. 90. 91. 92.

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Chidgey 20, 32–33. Chidgey 33. Chidgey 42. Gordon 183. Gordon 24. Adrienne Rich, “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision,’ College English 34, no. 1 (1972): 18. Jane Gallop, “The Ethics of Reading: Close Encounters,” Journal of Curriculum Theorizing (Fall 2000): 12–14. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative Volume 1, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 3, passim. Literature also has a hauntological impulse and mediates the returning ghosts of the past. See Katy Shaw, Hauntology: The Presence of the Past in Twenty-First Century English Literature (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 107, passim. Karen Newman, Jay Clayton, and Marianne Hirsch (eds.), Time and the Literary (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), 5–6. Mona Chollet, In Defence of Witches: Why Women Are Still on Trial (London: Picador, 2022), 5. Morrison, Beloved, 43. Purkiss, Witch in History, 10.

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CHAPTER 4

Witches as Monsters

Monsters, as terrifying as they may be, reveal the underlying anxieties and fears of an individual and a society: what we are scared of, personally and as a community, reveals a great deal about our values, politics, and ideologies. The witch has been, and remains, a monster across any number of cultural fields and memories: the vile sexual Satanist who threatens the good Christian village; the evil cannibalistic crone living in the gingerbread house; the icy witch queen tempting children with Turkish Delight; even the marching Women’s Libber whose protests make men feel slightly guilty for even a single, solitary moment. On the other hand, feminist perspectives of the witch—particularly in activist circles in the 1960s and 1970s—contend that the witch is considered monstrous because she reflects underlying cultural anxieties about powerful women. Compounding this is yet another ideological and mnemonic layer where the monstrosity of the witch is not denied but is cast as a kind of vengeful justice or power.1 What I am interested in this chapter is how the mnemonic afterlives of various monstrosities haunt the representation of the symbol of the witch in popular culture. The witch’s deployment across feminist memoryscapes means that varying, often contradictory, politics and ideologies of monstrosity have accrued around the symbol. Monsters are deployed over and over from time immemorial to mark the boundaries of the accepted and acceptable, and for this reason they operate as a cultural category associated with power and ideology.2 The © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 B. Kosmina, Feminist Afterlives of the Witch, Palgrave Studies in (Re)Presenting Gender, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25292-1_4

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monster serves to transgress normative categories of identity and self, but in doing so, the monster clarifies ambivalence around cultural taboos and desires, and embody the repressed.3 ‘Witch’ has long been, and continues to be, a label hurled at people, mostly but not entirely women, who do not conform to patriarchal, heteronormative, and colonial projects of gender. Witches embody any number of cultural fears and anxieties of femininity, sexuality, consumption, and power. She is the wicked devilworshipper threatening the village, causing miscarriages and making milk go sour; the evil cannibal woman in the gingerbread house eating babies; the murderous stepmother threatening the beautiful Princess on the day of her wedding to the handsome Prince. The early modern European and colonial American witch was certainly viewed as monstrous by those around her, usually in a religious sense: a transgressor against God, a sexual deviant, a threat to the community. The monstrosity of the witch, in this view, is something to be feared, hunted out, destroyed; she is powerful, and she represents everything violent, inhuman, and disgusting. The witch becomes the monstrous other in an incredibly strict binary gender model that must exist in patriarchal, colonial systems: what is not this must be that, and that must be destroyed. What is deemed monstrous shifts according to the ideological needs of those in power, and therefore the monstrous witch is emblematic of whatever crime is considered the most abhorrent within a particular context or system. The haunting mnemonic spectre of the witch as a pure monster exists in any number of popular culture texts, media, artefacts, and discourses. Aspersions about female politicians being witches from (usually) conservative commentators are trying to invoke the spectre of the monstrous witch, particularly when these memories are called forth in debates about reproductive rights and abortion access.4 In spite of the ubiquity of the witch’s subsuming into a postfeminist girlboss figure, the image of the witch as a terrifying monster is still prevalent in popular culture. Recent horror films demonstrate this trend: in the last decade alone, films and film series such as The Witches (dir. Robert Zemeckis, 2020), The Ritual (dir. David Bruckner, 2017), The Unholy (dir. Evan Spiliotopoulos, 2021), Gretel and Hansel: A Grim Fairy Tale (dir. Oz Perkins, 2020), The Wretched (dir. The Pierce brothers, 2019), Hereditary (dir. Ari Aster, 2018), and The Conjuring film universe (created by James Wan, 2013–present) (to name just a few) have flooded the horror film market. It does not escape notice that not only do most of these films follow a fairly standard formula for the title—The Noun-for-somethingspooky—but they are mostly written and directed by men. While I do not

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subscribe to the reductive model of feminist politics that deems all texts by (white, cisgender) women as ‘feminist’ and all texts by men (without qualification) as ‘not feminist’, and while I also do not mean to imply that all horror films featuring the witch in the last decade are made by cisgender men, it does still seem suspicious that there is a clear pattern of men churning out horror films where the witch is the harbinger of the return of the repressed. The monstrous repressed serves a crucial role in popular culture as an arbiter of hegemonic ideologies of the family and sexuality.5 At the core of the American horror film is the figure of the monstrous repressed, with the difference between these two poles of monstrous and not-monstrous rendered stark in light of their juxtaposition. The witch’s monstrosity has been used in popular culture to represent “the relationship between normality and the monster,” and embody a threat to the family unit from within.6 The horror film—or really, any depiction of the witch designed to terrify, not just film—offers what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has called “an aesthetic based on pleasurable fear.”7 The terror of the witch provides some sort of comforting, perhaps cathartic enactment of monstrosity. Remembering how the witch is represented as a monster or as monstrous makes the ideologies that render her as the repressed (or oppressed) opaque and visible; the monstrous witch defamiliarizes hegemonic cultural institutions, such as racial patriarchy or the heteronormative family that work to villainize particular gendered or racialized bodies or sexualities. The witch consequently operates as a mnemonic symbol that reveals different political reactions to or understandings of monstrosity and femininity, and renders the various (often competing) ideologies at play and their relationship to different power structures visible. There is perhaps a temptation to suggest that the witch as monster is the least commodifiable iteration of the symbol in popular culture. However, as is clearly evidenced by the ubiquity of the witch in the horror genre, the witch as a pure monster (whether her monstrosity reinforces patriarchal ideologies of femininity or resists those same ideologies) is a reliable money-earner and will continue to haunt popular culture for as long as it is profitable for her to do so. This does not negate the usefulness of the witch as a figure of mnemonic complexity and political activism. Instead, this demonstrates the expansive political potential of interrogating feminist activist memorycultures via popular culture: the spectres of past monstrous witches continue to haunt contemporary media and

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are produced within the cultural systems that create them—and then they burn those systems down on screen or on the page.

Witches and the Monstrous-Feminine Body The cultural anxieties and fears that the monstrous witch represents are bound up with the inability to contain the body within restrictive ideological categories. Systems of power and domination seek to inscribe those dominating forces on to the body, but the body will always escape such narrow strictures: the witch is an example of one of these monstrous bodily escapes. The witch’s monstrous horror, no matter how apparently inhuman, is threatening precisely because it is very human; it is the literal embodiment of all the things these systems cannot control. Feminist scholars have consequently characterized the witch’s monstrosity and the correlations to the body as a consequence of her abjectness, in the sense proposed by Julia Kristeva. The abject is that which “disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite.”8 The abject is opposed to I but also is I.9 Kristeva provides the corpse, wounds, body fluids, and excretion as examples of the abject. The horrified, repulsed, or disgusted response to being confronted with the abject is a result of the breakdown in meaning as to the difference between the subject and object that the abject embodies. When met with the corpse, for instance, the subject is violently shaken from the symbolic order and brought into a confrontation with the Real: in that moment, writes Kristeva, we are confronted at the border of the condition of living.10 There is consequently a strong correlation between the abject and the body, in all its Realness; something that is particularly notable when considering the connections between gender and the abject. To encounter a witch is to encounter the abject, and to be brought into conflict with her violent, bodily monstrosity that shakes the subject from their place in the Symbolic order. Barbara Creed’s work on the monstrous-feminine is particularly pertinent in understanding the abject embodied monstrosity of the witch.11 Using feminist psychoanalytic theory, Creed examines how femininity is aligned with monstrosity in horror cinema, proposing the figure of the monstrous-feminine, a figure who is not just a female monster (which implies it is the opposite of a ‘male monster’), but who is monstrous because they are feminine.12 The female monster is a monster who happens to be feminine, but the monstrous-feminine is a monster who

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is monstrous because she is feminine. Like the abject, the monstrousfeminine represents a threat to the symbolic order, and is intricately bound to the body.13 The monstrous-feminine is nearly always classified as monstrous due to her sexual or reproductive behaviours,14 all of which reinforce the correlations between abjection, the body, femininity, and sex. The witch, Creed contends, is an example of the monstrous-feminine as she reflects these associations. The witch: is defined as an abject figure in that she is represented within patriarchal discourses as an implacable enemy of the symbolic order. She is thought to be dangerous and wily, capable of drawing on her evil powers to wreak destruction on the community. The witch sets out to unsettle boundaries between the rational and irrational, symbolic and imaginary. Her evil powers are seen as part of her ‘feminine’ nature […] Irrational, scheming, evil – these are the words used to define the witch.15

The witch as the monstrous-feminine is a figure that represents all that is deemed aberrant or monstrous about femininities in heteronormative, colonial racial patriarchy, and this is evident in texts both prior to and after mid-twentieth-century feminist recuperation of the witch. This is indicative of the multidirectionality of memory—the mnemonic afterlives of particular cultural inflections of monstrosity, gender, bodies, and abjection ripple across popular culture, and the act of re-reading brings these disparate texts into concert with one another. In re-reading two texts that depict the monstrous-feminine witch, the relatively recent critically lauded film The Witch (dir. Robert Eggers, 2015)16 and the classic children’s Narnia series by C.S. Lewis,17 I am interrogating not only the ongoing association in cultural memories of the witch of her monstrous-femininity and the body, sex, and sexuality, but how these texts deploy the witch’s abjection to define (or to blur) the borders of the self. The White Witch in C.S. Lewis’s earlier Narnia books18 reflects the ongoing association in cultural memory between the witch’s monstrous-femininity and the body, sex, and sexuality, particularly feminine bodies and sex. While Lewis’s intentions in the Narnia books were likely to condemn the monstrous female sexual power of Lilith and the White Witch, re-reading the books now it is hard not to be haunted by the spectre of feminist recuperative narratives of Lilith, re-introducing a feminist joy in the White Witch’s sexual monstrousfemininity. Thomasin in Robert Eggers’s 2015 film The Witch reflects

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Puritan notions of witchcraft and witch identity that are tied to puberty and emerging feminine sexuality, and Thomasin’s decision to “live deliciously”19 as a witch represents an embrace of the monstrous-femininity of the witch’s sexuality. Both of these texts are haunted by the mnemonic afterlives of quite paradoxical understandings of feminine sexuality and monstrosity. C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia offers an all-encompassing Christian retelling of human history,20 and the White Witch offers the monstrous underside to Lewis’s vision of the universe. Her abject monstrosity and the aberrant bodily form she represents is not even human, representing the ultimate perversion of the Christian self. The White Witch is described by Mr. Beaver to the Pevensie children in light of her inhumanity (and consequent monstrosity): “I mean isn’t the Witch herself human?” “She’d like us to believe it,” said Mr. Beaver, “and it’s on that that she bases her claim to be Queen. But she’s no Daughter of Eve. She comes of your father Adam’s” – (here Mr. Beaver bowed) “your father Adam’s first wife, her they called Lilith. And she was of the Jinn. That’s what she comes from on one side. And on the other she comes of the giants. No, no, there isn’t a drop of real human blood in the Witch”.21

The witch’s monstrosity is tied to the body—specifically her inhuman body that does not hold a drop of real human blood. Her monstrous embodiment of abject notions of the human is compounded by her monstrous aping of the human form: there may be two views about humans (meaning no offense to the present company). But there’s no two views about things that look like humans and aren’t […] when you meet anything that’s going to be human and isn’t yet, or used to be human once and isn’t now, or ought to be human and isn’t, you keep your eyes on it and feel for your hatchet.22

The witch’s abject monstrosity casts the Pevensie children—the “two Sons of Adam and two Daughters of Eve” prophesied to free Narnia from the Witch’s wintery reign23 —as Christian knights crusading to save humanity itself against diabolical, abject monsters such as the Witch, who dilute and taint the body of the human. The witch, in Lewis’s books, is abject: to be confronted with her is to be violently ripped from comforting ideology of the Christian human form that the books clearly invoke.

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Alongside her abject inhumanity, Lewis invokes the spectre of Biblical feminine evil by making the witch a descendant of Lilith. In Jewish and Christian mythology, Lilith was the first wife of Adam, made from dust as he was (and thus symbolically equal), but cast out of Eden for refusing to lay beneath her husband. When Adam tries to overpower Lilith, she “utter[s] the magic name of God” before fleeting to the Red Sea and living with demons, becoming “renowned for her promiscuity.”24 Often Lilith is characterized as demonic herself (sometimes even as the mother of all demons), and is aligned with the tempting serpent from Genesis. Lilith as a cultural and religious figure exists at the intersection of multiple folkloric and religious traditions, but in all these narratives “Lilith is socially and sexually transgressive, a libidinal force, disruptive of social and family stability.”25 The monstrosity of Lilith, when viewed through Lewis’s Christian gaze, is in her perversion of norms of female sexuality and agency, which is inextricable from her diabolic, Luciferian evil, marking her as the antithesis of the Christ-like Aslan and the good, human, Christian Pevensie children. The Witch has Lilith’s diabolic and demonic strength; she is described as having a grip as “strong as steel pincers,” “strong enough to break [Polly’s] arm with one twist.”26 Like Lilith, the Witch invokes hidden or sacred knowledge and words for monstrous purposes. Where Lilith speaks the name of God, the Witch utters an unknown, mystical word to end all life around her during a battle: “[t]hen I spoke the Deplorable Word. A moment later I was the only living thing beneath the Sun.”27 Lilith’s sexual dominance and perversity is mirrored in the Witch, and is made even more grossly monstrous in Narnia by the Witch’s attempted seduction of multiple young boys. She acts as a temptress to Edmund, seducing him to her cause with Turkish Delight.28 In The Magician’s Nephew, she plays perverted—and foiled—Eve to Digory’s Adam, tempting him to taste an apple from a tree in a walled garden that correlates to Eden and the fruit of the tree of knowledge.29 The Witch also holds the raw sexual power of Lilith. The fight between the Witch and Aslan in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe has clear sexual undertones; they roll over each other with the Witch first on top (recalling Lilith’s refusal to lay beneath Adam), before Aslan then reasserts his masculine dominance and (literally and symbolically) resumes his place on top.30 The Witch in Narnia is clearly haunted by the memory of Lilith, a memory that is used to mark her as the monstrous-feminine. However, Lewis also tries to grapple with

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the spectral memory of the evil witch by ‘correcting’ her transgressions: she does not seduce Adam; she remains beneath the man. There is also an inherent anxiety about the reproductive function of the white female body, and how the White Witch’s inhuman, antiChristian, demon-loving white body fails to adhere to this mechanic. The white female body is deployed for the maintenance of heteronormative racial patriarchy through being turned to passive or submissive sex that produces good Christian children like the Pevensies; the White Witch represents a rejection of these norms. She does not reproduce; she is sterile, like the endless winter that she brings to the land of Narnia. Her sexuality is not submissive and does not produce children; like Lilith, she refuses to lay beneath Adam/Aslan and quietly produce the heirs to humanity. There is a recurring racist anxiety in the Narnia books about the maintenance of white Christianity, and the White Witch’s monstrosity sits within the novels’ ideological systems by her refusal to prop up the white supremacist project through sexual submission.31 This is one of the many ways that the haunting memory of the witch as a sexual monster can be invoked to reinforce oppressive ideologies: here she not only embodies a threat to patriarchal systems of control over gender identity and norms, but also a threat to entwined hegemonic institutions such as white supremacy. These kinds of memories of the witch are difficult to reconcile with current iterations that position her as an engine of progressive activism: but that is the paradoxical nature of her mnemonic entanglement. The reason Narnia’s White Witch is remembered as a monster is because of the norms she transgresses. However, re-reading the Narnia books with the rippling mnemonic afterlives of Lilith as a figure in Romantic artistic movements and midtwentieth-century feminist recuperative efforts introduces further, potentially recuperative and paradoxical connotations to her abject monstrosity. Romantic and Pre-Raphaelite artists and poets represent Lilith as “the endlessly desirable other” and “a dangerous seductress.”32 Poets such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and John Keats feature Lilith, or Lilith-esque figures such as Lamia, in their poetry as a figure of unobtainable sexual desire, while painters including John Collier and Dante Gabriel Rossetti paint Lilith as a woman of supreme beauty and danger. In Collier’s painting Lilith 33 she is depicted nude with a snake winding around her body, invoking her perverse Biblical heritage in a seductive and knowing manner. The story of Lilith’s refusal to lie beneath a man has clear political use for feminists, and she was deployed repeatedly by activists, scholars,

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and particularly theologians in the 1960s and 1970s. In the first chapter to Woman Hating, for instance, Andrea Dworkin names Lilith first in a list of slighted and misrepresented women: “[o]nce upon a time there was a wicked witch and her name was Lilith, Eve, Hagar, Jezebel…”34 Feminist literary scholars Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar similarly refer to Lilith as a woman who “represents the price women have been told they must pay for attempting to define themselves.”35 Writing within a 1970s feminist consciousness-raising framework, Judith Plaskow theorizes a feminist theology through the figure of Lilith which “conjure[s] up the lost or hidden stories of women’s experience, [and] set[s] in motion a process that has its own momentum and that may take us in unexpected directions.”36 Plaskow argues that feminist theology figured through the symbol of Lilith is a symbol of empowerment for individual women, as well as for the “sisterhood”37 Fiction writers in the same era such as Octavia Butler with Lilith’s Brood (1987–1989) and Erica Jong with Fear of Flying (1973) used the figure of Lilith as a symbol of women’s mythic power, sexual energy, and as a representative of the Divine Feminine. The Lilith narrative offers a “paradigm” for feminist scholars and writers, particularly in the 1970s, that reshapes cultural memories according to activist and ideological necessity.38 Remembering Lilith in the present day, and re-reading her in popular culture texts calls forth not only the ghosts of her Biblical monstrosity but the spectre of feminist recuperation and revisionism of the witch. The witch as the abject monstrous-feminine, sexual, and Satanic Lilith, as Lewis envisages her, is certainly still present: but so is the seductive and mysterious Lilith of Romantic and pre-Raphaelite art, and the powerful and sexually-liberated Lilith of feminist spirituality and politics. The White Witch as Lilith is not a figure of feminist empowerment, sexual liberation, or spiritual subversion: she is the exact opposite, a figure of Biblical monstrosity and sexual deviance predicated on abject notions of the body. However, when considering her position across multiple memoryscapes, through the collapsing of different cultural contexts and temporalities in the act of re-reading, she is haunted by the mnemonic afterlives of alternate ideologies that work in concert. Re-reading the White Witch in Narnia through a feminist activist memory framework is thus an exercise in balancing ideological tensions in the mythical symbol of Lilith: she is simultaneously an example of the punishment that women who step out of line will receive in patriarchal systems, and a figure of liberation in the face of those systems.

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Robert Eggers’s 2015 film The Witch similarly reflects mnemonic afterlives of the witch as a symbol of the monstrous-feminine and a sexually-promiscuous demon, albeit with a more historical bent alongside the similarly religious tone. There are approximately six decades between the publication of the Narnia books and The Witch. In spite of this gap, re-reading these two temporally-disparate texts reveals similar definitions and understandings of the witch and her correlation to sexual monstrosity. The Witch follows a family exiled from a Puritan colony in North America in 1630, and the supernatural misfortunes that plague them in their attempts to build a life in the wilderness.39 Narratives of Puritan colonizers being beset by witches in the woods clearly invoke the spectre of Salem; although the film is set in 1630, 60 years prior to the Salem trials, the film exists within the blurry mnemonic field where Salem 1692 stands in for any Puritan colony throughout the colonization of North America. The Witch follows the family as they fall victim to both the paranoia and fear that characterized Salem during the trials, and to the witch that attacks them one by one, until only Thomasin, the eldest daughter, survives. Thomasin is accused of being a witch throughout the film (by her younger twin siblings, Mercy and Jonas, as well as by her parents, William and Katherine), an accusation she repeatedly denies, before relenting and signing the Devil’s book in the denouement and emerging as a fully-fledged witch. A title card at the end of the film reads “[t]his film was inspired by many folktales, fairytales and written accounts of historical witchcraft, including journals, diaries and court records. Much of the dialogue comes directly from these period sources.”40 The film distinguishes itself by the attention to period detail, and through including this final note, Eggers directs the audience to view the film (and its magical ending) within cultural memories of the Salem trials, and insists on a historical memoryscape. However, in subtitling the film “A New England folktale” Eggers “suggest[s] something other than a reconstruction of facticity.”41 The slippage between the apparently historical source of the film and the fantasy of the ending reflects the inaccuracies of witchcraft pasts in cultural memory. As A.A. Dowd writes for The A.V. Club: the events in Salem loom large over the events of the film, like the long shadows of gnarled tree branches […] given the film’s self-advertised stabs at historical accuracy, one could read this singular shocker as something even more disturbing: a kind of fright-flick answer to Arthur Miller’s The

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Crucible, presenting a revisionist national history in which true evil exists and religious hysteria is the proper response to it.42

The Witch thus presents a paradoxical revision of cultural memories of Salem, representing Puritan notions of Satanic witchcraft as both realistic and fantastic. This play with cultural memory and history therefore invites reconsideration of the symbol of the witch as both monster and protagonist. It is no coincidence that Thomasin has just started puberty when she is accused of witchcraft, reinforcing the connections between the witch’s monstrosity, the body, and sexuality. Her younger brother, Caleb, sneaks covert glances at her growing breasts through her loose shirt, emphasizing not only Thomasin’s emerging womanhood but creating a correlation between her sexual maturation and the violation of her body.43 Her parents express concern about Thomasin’s emerging sexuality too, discussing whether they should send her to another family now that she has started menstruating.44 The recurring preoccupation in the family with Thomasin’s sexual maturity leads Britt Ashley to write in Bitch that the film “centers on a [Puritan/patriarchal] community’s fear of women’s bodies.”45 In her discussion of the monstrous-feminine, Creed points out that the depiction of girls starting their period is usually reserved for the horror film, using Carrie as an example.46 The titular Carrie gains her telepathic powers and becomes a witch when she starts her period: “[w]oman’s blood is thus linked to the possession of supernatural powers, powers which historically and mythologically have been associated with the representation of woman as witch.”47 Thomasin’s designation as a witch just as she enters puberty and crosses the border from ‘girl’ to ‘woman’ mirrors Carrie’s emergence as a witch upon starting her period, and demonstrates the recurring correlation in memoryscapes that feature the witch between monstrosity, sexuality and sex, and the body. The leaky menstruating body of the witch is designated abject, aberrant, and monstrous, and this reflects on the girls and women who are cast out for their apparent witchy-ness. The correlation between the witch and the afterlives of the aberrant, devious, even Satanic sexuality of women’s bodies is strengthened by the unnamed witch from the woods who haunts the family. When seen by the audience in her hovel in the woods, she is a nude, grotesque old crone; her fleshy body is covered in dirt, her hair matted and filthy, her fingers stretched out in rancid claws.48 She is the physical embodiment

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of the crone archetype of the witch: she holds the memory of the old cannibal woman in the gingerbread house; of Baba Yaga in her chickenfeet house. When she magically steals the not-yet-unbaptized baby Samuel from underneath Thomasin’s nose,49 the haunting spectre of cannibal witches eating babies is invoked. However, when Caleb later discovers her hovel, she slowly emerges in the form of a beautiful young woman (played by model and actor Sarah Stephens) and seduces the young boy. As she wraps her arms around his head while she kisses him, the camera pans across his back and shows her aged, wrinkled arm.50 Caleb later stumbles back to his house, bewitched—nude, feverish, delusional, and close to death. In his final illness, just before he dies, Caleb vomits up a whole rotten, bloodied apple with one bite taken from it, before proclaiming his soul to Christ and dying.51 His nudity, the witch’s sexual attack, and the bitten apple, with its clear connotations of Eve’s Fall in the Garden, all align the witch’s bodily monstrosity and violence with her aberrant, disgusting sexuality—made even more monstrous by her attacking and sexually violating children such as Samuel and Caleb. The Witch thus clearly reflects the afterlives of a view of the witch’s power, her monstrosity, and her status as dependent on the abjected feminine body and on sex and sexuality. In the end, with her family violently murdered (some of them by her), Thomasin approaches Black Philip, the goat who may or may not be the Devil in disguise, asking him for help. Surprisingly (it has been ambiguous before this point whether the goat actually is Satan), Black Philip asks Thomasin: “[w]ouldst thou like the taste of butter? A pretty dress? Wouldst thou like to live deliciously? […] Wouldst thou like to see the world?” before asking her to sign His Book in return for granting these requests.52 It is implied, through his hand settling possessively on her shoulder, that he also has some sort of coerced sexual interaction with Thomasin. Following this initiation, Thomasin walks naked into the woods, joining a coven of witches dancing around a fire, before floating into the air alongside them. This not only reflects the mnemonic afterlives of historical and religious discourses of the witch’s Sabbath and her sexual covenant with the Devil, but also reinforces the correlation between monstrous sex and witchcraft. However, there is an aspect of monstrous ecstasy in Thomasin’s new witch identity: as she floats into the air the camera holds on her face, floating with her as she laughs and writhes orgasmically.53 Freed from the constraints of gravity and from her Puritanical family and community, Thomasin revels in her new magical

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status, with clear undertones of sexual release. The family’s preoccupation earlier in the film with Thomasin’s emerging sexuality is realised in this final orgasmic moment of witchcraft. Thomasin comes to embody the monstrous-feminine, the sexually-deviant witch, but in doing so, escapes her abusive family and the constraints of her Puritan community: literally flying high on her newfound power, Thomasin’s story in The Witch demonstrates the power of the monstrous-feminine and of the witch’s sexuality. Like the White Witch in Narnia, the witch in Eggers’s film and the anxiety about her sexual monstrous-femininity is tied to her whiteness and her role within the ongoing colonial project in North America, betraying settler anxieties about the success of that project. The threat of witchcraft first looms as the family break from the colony and move further from the village. As they trespass further on First Nations land,54 the colonizing family becomes more afflicted by the witch who, in line with her abject sexual monstrosity, attacks the children in the family first. This invokes the mnemonic afterlives of the witch’s monstrosity in the sense understood by the Puritans in Salem; that either the witch emerged as a sign of God’s displeasure, or as a demonic foe to be overcome in their religious struggle against the Devil through colonizing stolen land. However, it also invokes memories of the witch as something else; having taken most of the family, Thomasin’s moment of becoming a witch represents the ultimate fears and anxieties of the settler-colonial community who sought to expel her in the first place. The violence of their project of colonization is connected to the maintenance of whiteness as an in-group; and as the family unit has failed in light of the sexual libidity of a young woman, witchcraft is demonstrated to in fact be a violent result of the colonial project, and represents the breakdown in the ongoing structures of whiteness. Both the White Witch and Thomasin demonstrate how re-reading witches in popular culture through the lens of feminist activist memories entails grappling with paradoxical memories of monstrosities, and also reveals the resonances of ongoing cultural anxieties about religion, the body, sex, and race. A culture can be read through the monsters that it produces, embodying “a certain cultural moment—of a time, a feeling, and a place.”55 Re-reading the witch as a monster, and specifically as a sexual monster, in both of these texts, reflects the afterlives of ideological debates around the body, sex, sexuality, race, and femininities. The anxieties around gender and sexuality that the witch clearly evokes are tied to both patriarchal control over the body but also colonial and

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racialized designations of the body and reproduction—she is rendered monstrous because her sexual abjection does not serve the maintenance of whiteness as a hegemonic cultural system. However, the overlapping discourses of the witch’s sexual monstrosity mean that as she is deployed across mnemonic cultural fields, she signifies multiple, paradoxical ideas. This is evident in the representation of the monstrous, sexual witch in popular culture texts like Narnia and The Witch. Her violence, horror, and abjection—the White Witch’s inhumanity, her seduction of Edmund through the pleasure of sweets, her Lilith-ian perversion of masculine sexual dominance, and Eggers’s witch’s similar grotesque sexual seduction and cannibalism of children, and Thomasin’s witchcraft emerging with her menses—all demonstrate the deconstructiveness of the witch’s abject monstrosity. However, re-reading these texts imbues them with a different feeling when considering the haunting spectral afterlives of feminist revision of the witch. She does still represent the horror and threat of the Satanic, sexually-deviant witch—but she also demonstrates how these horrific spectres are deployed in mass media texts to serve the possible subversion or undermining of racial and/or colonial, hetero-patriarchy.

Witches and Queer Monstrosity The witch’s monstrosity is constantly adaptable to cultural anxieties, emerging in a change of clothes to signify each new haunting terror currently in vogue. The witch as monster or as monstrous is not only a figure of sexual abjection, although she certainly does evoke the spectral return of the repressed monstrous-feminine body. The witch is also haunted by the spectre of their inherent queerness. The witch has long been associated with queer genders, sex, and sexuality—think of the correlation between the witch in early modern European rhetoric and lesbianism,56 or the gender trouble that the witch wreaked in their sexual relations with the Devil and other demons.57 When the witch is invoked as a monstrous Satanist or demon that keeps children up at night, queerness is one of the markers of monstrosity: the othering of gay, lesbian, bisexual, queer and transgender, non-binary, and gender non-conforming people in heteronormative patriarchy is invoked to characterize the witch as the Other as well. The maintenance of hegemonic gender ideologies “elicits an array of anxious responses throughout culture, producing another impetus to teratogenesis.”58 However, as has been discussed already, the witch has also been taken up by trans-exclusionary radical

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feminists, and any consideration of the witch’s queerness and the destabilization of gender norms must also be balanced with recognition of the deployment of the witch to reinforce essentialist gender categories by certain groups. The ongoing correlation of the witch with the monstrous body has the potential to reinforce this essentialist understanding of gender. Re-reading popular culture texts that engage in a discussion of the witch as a queer monster is an exercise in grappling with queer liberation and joy but also with homophobia, transphobia, biphobia, and other oppressive regimes. I am consequently interested in how witches have been deployed to mark the boundaries of binary norms of gender, but equally have demonstrated the blurring and deconstruction of binary and essentialist gender norms. Much like the image of the witch as the monstrous-feminine, the discussion of the witch as a queer monster is made more urgent by the prevalence of these representations in popular culture. The long heritage of aligning the witch with queerness (not always monstrous queerness) continues to the present day; in texts such as The Craft: Legacy (dir. Zoe Lister-Jones, 2020), Ami McKay’s The Witches of New York (2017), The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina TV series (created by Roberto AguirreSacaso, 2018–2020), Austin Chant’s Caroline’s Heart (2017), and Hal Schrieve’s Out of Salem (2019) the witch’s queerness (as a term encompassing transgender, gender non-conforming, and non-binary genders, and non-heteronormative sex and sexualities) is made explicit. Alongside these explicit representations of the witch’s queerness is the arguably more prevalent trend where texts feature witches who are not explicitly queer but whose presence in a text or narrative has been recuperated or adopted as queer: texts like Hocus Pocus (dir. Kenny Ortega, 1993), The Craft (dir. Andrew Fleming, 1996), or Practical Magic (dir. Griffin Dunne, 1998). In these texts, the witch’s presence is coded as queer and adopted by queer audiences as a resistant model of popular culture engagement but is not made canonical. This is certainly evident in re-reading the camp, queer monstrosity of the witches in early twentieth-century texts such as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (dir. David Hand et al., 1938) and The Wizard of Oz (dir. Victor Fleming and King Vidor, 1939).59 In these texts, the afterlives of the witch’s monstrosity clearly still linger; the witch in both films is a violent and grotesque threat who embodies a danger to all that is ‘good.’ In both Snow White and The Wizard of Oz, the witches undergo an aesthetic transformation early in the film which signifies their monstrosity:

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they put on the costume of respectability and ‘normality’ but their internal monstrosity is ‘revealed’ in their ‘true’ monstrous form (which in both instances is coded as monstrous because it does not fall into hegemonic regimes of bodies and aesthetics). Queer monstrosity potentially functions as a kind of rejection of normative regimes of the body, of sexuality, and of selfhood that proliferate across cultural discourses.60 As Cryle and Stephens point out, there has been a tradition for queer scholars to position the queer as the contradiction to the normal,61 and thinking of the queer witch and her monstrosity is certainly productive for thinking about recuperative and activist politics in remembering through literature. Similarly, the notion of ageing bodies or bodies that do not conform to normative models of form and function being representative of internal depravity or monstrosity is horrendously offensive, but certainly evident in both these films, and demonstrates how the witch’s body exists at the intersection of disparate, contradictory memoryscapes that seek to both define and subvert the ‘normal’. However, the complex mnemonic afterlives of the witch means that the borders of normality that the films seek to reinforce are contested and resisted in queer and camp acts of re-reading. Re-remembering the witch as a queer monster is an act of knowing appreciation that adds a level of enjoyment or fun to the violent monstrosity: in essence, the act of remembering the witch as queer monster is the application of contemporary queer humour and culture to past texts and mediums. Multiple queer theorists and literary scholars have addressed this ironic, knowing edge to the pleasures of queer monstrosity. I am particularly influenced in this knowing appreciation of and pleasure in queer monstrosity by Susan Sontag’s 1964 Notes on Camp and Jack Halberstam’s Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (1995).62 These scholars each capture a tone of vicious pleasure in queer monstrosity, and remembering witches who function as queer monsters draws out the political resonances of monstrosity. Sontag outlines the nature of queer pleasure in rejections of the ‘normal’ through camp modes of appreciation for that which is cast out. Sontag writes that a camp sensibility is “not a natural mode of sensibility, if there be any such. Indeed the essence of camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration.”63 Camp taste, Sontag argues, “is, above all, a mode of enjoyment, of appreciation—not judgement. Camp is generous. It wants to enjoy. It only seems like malice, cynicism.”64 To reread the queer monstrous witch with a camp sensibility enables appreciation and enjoyment of their violence and horror. Jack Halberstam’s work

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on Gothic monstrosity extends this queer appreciation of monstrosity. Halberstam argues that the monster exists so that otherness can be fixed to a body that can be both expelled and enjoyed, and that horror as a genre and as an affect “exercises power even as it incites pleasure and/or disgust.”65 Halberstam consequently theorizes a feminist and/or queer identification with the monster in Gothic literature, which “inspires fear and desire at the same time—fear of and desire for the other, fear of and desire for the possibly latent perversity lurking within the reader herself.”66 What Sontag and Halberstam offer, individually and together, is a consideration of monstrosity that highlights the pleasurable, recuperative, resistant, and fun elements of the monster. This fun and pleasurable relationship with the monstrous witch is evident in both Snow White and Oz. Both these monstrous witches demonstrate an aesthetic transformation quite early in their respective films. This aesthetic change in both cases demonstrates the externalizing of the witch’s apparently inherent and previously hidden monstrosity. Viewing this aesthetic transfiguration of the witch through a camp and queer sensibility embraces or takes pleasure in their apparently artificial or unnatural aesthetic. If campness takes pleasure in the unnatural or the artificial, then the queer monstrous witch’s aesthetic transformation in these films demonstrates the joy and appreciation of that externalizing of the self. What these queer and Camp modes of appreciation and remembering demonstrate is how the witch as queer monster inherits the haunting legacies of multiple understandings of and political responses to monstrosity—particularly monstrosity that is associated with sexuality, the body, and dress. Snow White’s evil Stepmother (forever unnamed) clearly demonstrates discourses of the witch as a monstrous woman, particularly in her relationship with Snow White. However, there is simultaneously a recuperative or ironic pleasure in the Stepmother’s monstrosity that reconfigures her violence as a form of emancipation and her unnatural monstrous body as pleasurable or aesthetically pleasing. The visual markers of the Stepmother reflect familiar ideologies of patriarchal tropes of apparently wicked femininity. She demonstrates a repeated concern with appearance, beauty, and surfaces: after all, her goal is to be “the fairest of them all.”67 Her desire to fulfil the necessity in patriarchal culture for women to be ‘beautiful’ (in this case, to be the most beautiful) reflects how patriarchal ideology is interpellated in gender identification. In turn, however, her appearance and aesthetic are coded as being monstrous due to the very ‘unnaturalness’ of them. She has two distinct aesthetics in the film: her initial,

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striking, beautiful Queenly look, and the haggard, crone appearance she assumes later in the film.68 The Stepmother’s initial appearance demonstrates how her monstrosity and her will to power are tied to feminine aesthetics and particularly highlights the artificiality of her performance of femininity at the outset of the narrative, something that, within the ideology of the film, is used to mark her as monstrous. With her sweeping black cape and hood with a high, lily-shaped white collar, spiked golden crown, fitted purple gown with red highlights, matching purple eyeshadow, blood-red lips, and thin, arched eyebrows, it is any wonder that the Stepmother’s queenly raiment has been imitated by drag queens for decades. The colours of her clothes—the purple, green, and white specifically, offset with black and red—render her a sort of monstrous Suffragette.69 It is also no coincidence that the first time we see the Stepmother, she is looking in the mirror, with the camera moving behind her so the audience sees her face as a reflection first: she is literally only seen as a surface.70 Her later appearance is implied to be her ‘true’ form, as the ‘ugliness’ reflects her inherent monstrosity.71 The witch’s body represents both artifice and authenticity, demonstrating the mnemonic afterlives of ableist and patriarchal notions of the body, femininity, and monstrosity, but equally the recuperative activist potential of queer and camp re-readings of Snow White. The dual nature of the Stepmother’s physical appearance also opens up a consideration of how the witch’s body is a site on which anxieties about femininity, monstrosity, and aesthetics are played out. The opening of the film demonstrates the correlations between the Stepmother’s physical appearance, her monstrosity, and the anxiety around surfaces, aesthetics, and authenticity in the film.72 Within the patriarchal logic of the film, the witch’s imitation or mimicry of feminine beauty is as monstrous as her later ‘crone’ appearance, as it is an unnatural beauty. It is an abnormal or manufactured form of feminine beauty, highly stylized and in complete contrast to the ‘natural,’ ‘sweet,’ ‘gentle’ and, importantly, passive and (literally) white beauty of Snow White herself. However, this is equally why the witch’s ‘beautiful’ form is so pleasurable for audiences when viewed with Sontag’s camp sensibility. The artificiality of her appearance, the clearly exaggerated and stylized status of her beauty (particularly when contrasted to Snow White), and the emphasis on surfaces with little consideration for depth resonate clearly with Sontag’s notion of camp, and also demonstrate the performed or manufactured status of the ‘normal’ or the hegemonic. The feminist or

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queer monstrous joy of the witch in Snow White appears on the surface cynical or malicious, but this veneer of inauthenticity obscures the deep pleasure in her rejection of normative models of the body. Similarly to the Stepmother in Snow White, the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz evokes a ‘pleasurable fear’ for the modern audience in her camp aesthetic and her ‘inauthentic’ or ‘unnatural’ witchy body. The Wizard of Oz has strong correlations to American queer popular culture, particularly through Judy Garland’s star image and the queerness of L. Frank Baum’s original texts.73 Alexander Doty even suggests that the film should be read as a lesbian text: the Wicked Witch and her human counterpart, Miss Gulch represent an ‘evil butch’ lesbian archetype.74 While I am not necessarily intending to categorize the characters in Oz into specific queer identities, what is undeniable is that the film has a canonical status in Western queer popular culture and that the lingering afterlives of its queer history affect readings of the text today. Re-reading the queer monstrous body of the witch in The Wizard of Oz is always affected by the memory of what the film has signified in queer popular culture in the decades since its release. Like the Stepmother, the Wicked Witch in Oz undergoes a transformation early in the film, and her aesthetic transfiguration signifies her monstrosity within the patriarchal ideologies of the film, and her queer monstrous joy when read in light of camp and queer monstrosity. Unlike Snow White (which is animated), Oz uses the doubling of actor Margaret Hamilton as both Miss Gulch, Dorothy’s mean neighbour, and as the infamous Wicked Witch of the West, to reinforce the ‘falsity’ of the witch’s human form and the ‘truth’ of her monstrous green witch form. Like the Stepmother, the transition of Miss Gulch into the Wicked Witch signifies a type of ‘unnaturalness’ that aligns with queer or camp sensibilities and modes of appreciation. Miss Gulch, whom Doty describes as the prototypical “dyke on a bike,”75 already assumes the signifiers of a mode of feminine expression and aesthetic that is maligned or disavowed within heteronormative patriarchy. Her dress, with its high, severe neckline, buttons, and bowtie, is reminiscent of governess dresses, while her constant association with bikes (she is rarely depicted without her bike, either as she rides or pushes it alongside)76 recalls the image of the New Woman, that revolutionary and subversive symbol of women’s suffrage movements. Miss Gulch’s New Womanhood, symbolically aligned with her spinsterdom (she is, after all, Miss Gulch) and her unattractiveness operate “as a warning for Dorothy not to follow in the pedal-strokes of

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the suffragettes of an earlier era.”77 It is unsurprising, therefore, that the New Woman transforms into the Wicked Witch when a hurricane lifts Dorothy’s house and everything in the surrounds from Kansas to Oz.78 Matthew Pangborn in fact describes this as the fulfilment of the audience’s “anticipation” of the New Woman’s symbolism within the film, as the witch’s horror is a familiar horror to match the New Woman’s disturbing presence.79 The transition of New Woman to witch thus highlights the ‘monstrosity’ of feminist liberatory politics of gender. Early in production, the costume of the Wicked Witch was modelled on that of Snow White’s Stepmother (which was released two years earlier),80 indicating an intertextual aesthetic lineage in the monstrous witches of these films. While there are still visual echoes of the Stepmother in the Wicked Witch’s costume (particularly the floor-length black gown or cape she wears), her aesthetic became simpler during pre-production. Like Miss Gulch, the Witch’s dress alludes to historical fashion: her dress appears to have a silhouette that, along with the colour, are indicative of Victorian mourning dress, particularly in the high collar and leg-of-mutton sleeves.81 The Wicked Witch’s ‘ugliness’ is explicitly described as a result of her wickedness: as Glinda the Good Witch tells Dorothy, “[o]nly bad witches are ugly.”82 Green-skinned, with clawed fingers, a hooked nose and chin (facial features themselves loaded with memories of anti-Semitic rhetoric), black gown and hat, and a bicycle swapped interchangeably for a broomstick, the Wicked Witch is “the witch as creature, as alien, as monster.”83 Like the Stepmother, the internal depravity of the witch in Oz is signified by her transition into an ugly monster: the perversion of the proto-feminist New Woman transforms into the ugly monstrous witch. However, that transition is also what makes remembering these witches in early Hollywood so pleasurable. Their falsity, their unnaturalness, and their artificial performance of femininity are pleasurable when remembered with a camp sensibility precisely because it reveals the constructed nature of binary genders. The mnemonic afterlives of regressive gender ideologies, the body, and monstrosity are certainly still evident in rereading these depictions of the witch’s monstrosity. However, the witch’s potential as a site of queer appreciation and camp joy are equally evident in re-reading these texts. The transition from enforced performance of patriarchal designations of femininity (either as competitive attempt to be the most beautiful, or as ugly spinster who demonstrates why women’s rights activists are so loathed within patriarchal ideology) to fully-fledged

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and glorious monster, completely rejecting any semblance of adherence to patriarchal norms of appearance, aesthetic, beauty, and gender, is immensely pleasurable for contemporary audiences to re-remember and re-read. The witch as queer monster thus offers the activist potential of feminist and queer memory: to remember the witch as a queer monster offers the affordances of both monstrosity and of recuperation, and demonstrates the haunting of past, present, and future political iterations of monstrosity.

Witches as Monstrous Utopians The revision of the witch in popular culture of the last few decades has “seemed to embark on a mission to redeem the ‘wicked witch.’ Rather than ‘wicked’ […] this figure is really just a misunderstood ‘good witch.’”84 The recuperation of the witch into a misunderstood figure, often a victim of violence herself, has been a politically-useful recuperative measure in feminist rhetoric that invokes the witch. However, it also removes some of the threat and inherent violence of the witch and, somewhat paradoxically, can unintentionally force women cast as witches back into restricted gender roles. In remembering the witch as a monster, it is tempting to explain, justify, or otherwise make sense of her monstrosity through her characterization or narrative. The witch’s suffering at the hands of abusers is what leads her to violently lash out, or her monstrosity is not even really monstrosity at all, but is what patriarchy casts as monstrous when it is actually feminist protest and subjectivity. This type of narrative is immensely appealing—it removes the anxiety of being labelled as a monster and adds political heft to the righteous feminist anger of their actions. However, as demonstrated with memories of the witch’s monstrosity as the embodiment of the monstrous-feminine or as the camp or queer, there is also a potential for the witch’s monstrosity to be engaged with on a visceral, violent, and pleasurable level. In this rereading, the witch’s monstrosity is not recuperated, or explained, or even fully justified: it is left somewhat unexplainable, inarticulatable, violent, and abhorrent. Texts that feature the witch as an irredeemable monster glory in the destructive and deconstructive power of monstrosity, enacting an erasure of the systems which produce them through a monstrous praxis of destruction and sacrilege. The existential pleasures of monstrosity and

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of rage (feminist or otherwise) recalls debates about rape-revenge narratives in feminist politics, demonstrating not only the political potential of violence but also the moral panics that violence in the name of liberation often generates.85 The witch as monster offers a ‘negative utopianism’—a vision of a utopian future without those hegemonic systems, but achieves that future through the incredibly violent, horrific, and terrifying destruction of the present. In order to create a utopia, the dystopia must first be destroyed. The monstrous witches in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997– 2003) and Suspiria (2018)86 demonstrate this destructive power and rage. Both Willow in Buffy and Susie in Suspiria begin as ‘good’ witches before transforming into ‘bad’ witches. In each case, this monstrous witch goes about destroying the system or institution that has caused them angst: Willow tries to destroy the whole world, while Susie destroys her own coven. Their monstrosity functions as an act of feminist vengeance and retribution, and the death and destruction they wreak upon the world enables a form of rebirth or renewal. Willow Rosenberg, the quiet, nerdy best friend of Buffy Summers, was often neglected by both her friends and Buffy scholars until she ‘went dark’ in Season 6.87 Willow’s ‘descent’ or ‘fall’ into ‘evil’ is foreshadowed throughout Season 6 by a metaphorical addiction narrative (she increasingly becomes ‘addicted’ to magic, breeding tension and fights in her relationships with her loved ones—particularly her girlfriend Tara).88 After Tara is killed by Warren Mears,89 Willow seeks revenge and then, unable to tolerate all the pain and suffering in the world, she (unsuccessfully) attempts to destroy it.90 While there had been monstrous witches in Buffy before Willow’s turn to darkness in Season 6, Willow’s transition from ‘good’ to ‘bad’ offers a useful contrast through which to understand the destructive potential of the witch’s monstrosity. Willow’s revenge against Warren marks some of the goriest moments in the young adult show: she magically tortures Warren by slowly and repeatedly driving the bullet he killed Tara with into his body before skinning him alive and setting him on fire.91 In a later fight with Rupert Giles (Buffy’s Watcher and a father figure to all of the young adults on the show) who is using the magic of a powerful English coven of good witches, Willow absorbs his magic but, in the process, gains an emotional connection to all of humanity.92 Filled with both the rage and trauma of Tara’s death and the emotional connection to humanity through Giles and the English coven, Willow chooses to destroy the world to end humanity (and thus end human suffering). She is ‘talked down’ by her childhood best friend,

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Xander Harris, who reassures her that he will always (platonically) love her.93 Vetere argues that Willow’s transition from ‘good’ witch to ‘bad’ witch (becoming the ‘Big Bad’ as the final villain of each season is metafictionally referred to in the show) reflects the implicit feminist bent of the series as a whole, as it “dramatizes how the social insistence to be a ‘good witch’ reinscribes conventional gender boundaries, forcing women to perform the role of ‘good girl.’”94 Willow’s monstrosity is violent and horrible, but it is also potentially feminist: she wants to “annihilate human suffering” through annihilating the world.95 Her torture of Warren, as gruesome as it is, is violently justified: not only did he murder Tara, but he is demonstrated over the series to have attempted to rape and then to murder Katrina Silber, a woman he had casually dated. In fact, Willow only flays Warren when an apparition of Katrina appears and confirms his misogynistic behaviour towards her in their relationship.96 Warren is symbolic of the violence of toxic masculinity in modern popular culture, as he violently inflicts his own shortcomings upon all the women around him. It is for this reason that Lorna Jowett frames Willow’s revenge as a “specifically female (even ‘feminist’)” act of retaliation.97 After her torture and murder of Warren, Willow’s attempted destruction of the world is not unexpected. The incredible violence and monstrosity of Willow in Season 6 consequently evokes the spectre of the witch as the angry, hateful, and violent remedy to unjust and toxic patriarchal systems. This foreshadows the finale of Season 7, when Willow temporarily becomes the polar opposite of her monstrous self, transforming into what is referred to by fans as her ‘White Willow’ persona.98 Willow channels the power from the Slayer’s Scythe (the sort of mystical ancient weapon that is not uncommon in science fiction and fantasy) to imbue all the young girls and women around the world who have the ‘potential’ to become the Slayer after Buffy’s eventual death with the Slayer’s powers. Viewing White Willow as the inverse to Dark Willow has the potential to reinstate a binary of good or bad witchiness that removes any of the recuperative potential of feminist analyses of monstrosity. However, White Willow represents more than just the inverse of her more recognizably monstrous earlier form. As White Willow, she does help to save the world—but Sunnydale, the Californian town which has been the focal point of the entire show, is destroyed in the process, and so is the very notion of ‘the Slayer.’ Taking Willow’s two most noticeable personas together—the ‘evil’ witch who wants to destroy the world to prevent suffering and pain, and

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the ‘good’ witch who wants to save the world and share magical power with other women, but does so by desecrating the entire town which has been the heart of the show—demonstrates the negative utopianism of the witch’s monstrosity. It is Willow’s monstrous witch identity that allows the destruction of oppressive and violent systems, institutions, and individuals, but her apparently ‘good’ witch identity is also equated with destruction as a means of opening up new utopian worlds and futures. Keegan articulates this dual monstrosity thus: “Willow’s supernatural body becomes the matrix for a new and queerly catastrophic articulation of the utopian imagination, one that upholds the vision of a purely democratic community even as it brings an end to the known world of Sunnydale and, with it, the text itself.”99 The unmaking of the world and of the Slayer—as violent, monstrous, deathly, destructive, desecrating, and sacrilegious as this act may be—is the first step in a utopian reimagining of the world. As the surviving members of the Scoobies (what the core group of protagonists call themselves, referring to Scooby Doo) stand by the smoking crater that is all that remains of Sunnydale, Xander says “[w]e saved the world,” to which Willow replies “[w]e changed the world.”100 Rather than maintaining the status quo of the present (saving the world), Willow’s witchy magic opens up the potential for changing the world and inscribing a new, better system where magical power like the Slayer’s is democratized. The undefined nature of the new, more democratic, and hopefully better world is indicated in the final moments of the series finale. As the group stand on the edge of the crater, the camera zooms in on Buffy’s face as Dawn, her younger sister, asks: “Buffy, what are we gonna do now?” before cutting to the credits.101 That the series ends on a question—what happens now?—is indicative of the negative utopianism of the ending. Willow’s monstrous impulse to destroy the world in Season 6 to end human suffering is transformed into a destructive utopianism that opens up the potential for a better world after the ending of the series— but this better world is not shown or described, only gestured to before a cut-to-black. The spectral legacies of the witch as a monster are invoked in this model of negative utopianism; the witch offers the potential to destroy unjust or unequal hegemonic systems and institutions, leaving space for a new, undefined but better future. This is even more overt in Luca Guadagnino’s 2018 Suspiria, where Susie Bannion, a young Mennonite woman, travels to Berlin to join an internationally renowned dance school which secretly harbours a coven of witches. The coven worship Mother Suspiriorum (the ‘Mother of Sighs’), one of three great witch Mothers in the mythology of the film,

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but has been corrupted over time by the leader of the coven, Helena Markos, and has begun to worship Markos instead. Susie is revealed by the end of the film to be Suspiriorum reincarnated, and wreaks (incredibly gory) havoc on Markos and the disloyal witches within her Berlin coven. Like the dance piece “Volk” that the school/coven practice and perform through the film, the monstrosity of the witch in Suspiria is concerned with “rebirths […] the inevitable pull that they exert and our efforts to escape them.”102 The beautiful, monstrous, and almost operatic violence that Susie/Suspiriorum enacts upon her own coven enables a new beginning for the witches, repurposing and revising national traumas of Berlin’s past and of women’s and psychoanalytic history, and presenting the monstrous self-actualization (or individuation) of women in the face of immense trauma. Depicting a Germany still reconciling traumatic memories of the Holocaust, living through the ongoing ordeal of the separation of Berlin by the Wall, and upheaval of contemporary resistance movements such as the Red Army Faction (RAF), the film is imbued with both feminine and feminist sensibilities. Loosely adapted from renowned Italian horror director Dario Argento’s 1977 giallo-adjacent film103 of the same name, Guadagnino’s Suspiria makes the political context of the earlier film more explicit, weaving the politics of the Baader-Meinhof era into the narrative of the film (unlike Argento). Guadagnino’s Suspiria offers, Alexander Howard and Julian Murphet suggest, a glimpse of “the last fecund moment when something like praxis remained a possibility.”104 Plagued by nightmares and comforted by Madame Blanc earlier in the film, Susie says: “[i]t’s all a mess, isn’t it? The one out there. The one in here. The one that’s coming.”105 The film repeatedly signals the intersection of cultural traumas and systems of oppression, and rather than offering a solution to these issues, demonstrates how the witch, with her haunting legacies of monstrosity and violence, is able to enact a negative utopianism and destroy those oppressive systems and institutions. The film considers the nuances of gendered violence within national and cultural contexts of violence and trauma (for instance, the experience of women during the Holocaust or within the RAF), but also the way that institutional and systemic discourses enact violence upon women (for instance, how women are maligned, ignored, or diagnostically-neglected by psychiatric practitioners and institutions). The monstrosity of the witch and her destructive and deconstructive violence, is offered as a remedy to these inequalities.

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As in the USA and UK in the 1970s, witches were being deployed by feminist activists in Berlin in the 1970s. In 1977 (the year that Suspiria is set), feminist activists in Berlin lead ‘Take Back the Night’ marches on Walpurgisnacht, 30th April.106 Walpurgisnacht (Walpurgis Night, or Saint Walpurgis Night) is also called Hexennacht (witches’ night), and commemorates the Saint Walpurga (who protected against various diseases and infections, and witchcraft), while also being the night that, according to folklore, witches gathered on the Brocken mountain to celebrate the return of Spring. The feminist activists marching in Berlin in April 1977 “aimed to mobilize the witches’ spirit of empowerment.”107 Again, as in so many other places, the witch is deployed in ‘on-the-ground’ activism in 1977 Berlin in a manner that draws on diverse cultural memories of the symbol and her correlation to feminist politics, revolution, and violence. In Suspiria, cultural and political traumas in Germany (and more specifically in Berlin) are contrasted and correlated with the gendered violence and mistreatment that women face in patriarchal societies and institutions through the figure of Dr. Josef Klemperer, a psychoanalyst investigating the coven after one of his patients, Patricia, who dances in the coven, disappears.108 The psychologist is forced by the coven to act as a witness in their final, bloody ritual: this symbolically mirrors his witnessing of the horrors of the Nazi Regime, with which he feels complicit as he failed to act to protect his wife, Anka, who has been missing since the War. In turn, Klemperer’s psychiatric practice is correlated to his passivity in protecting Anka. As the witches drag Klemperer to the mütterhaus and he begs for mercy, the witches yell “[w]hat reason is there to pity you? You had years to get your wife out of Berlin before the arrests began. When women tell you the truth you don’t pity them. You tell them they have delusions!”109 The patriarchal violence of psychiatric institutions that Klemperer represents is correlated to the ongoing traumatic memories of the Holocaust that haunt 1977 Berlin. Klemperer, who is rendered complicit with these traumas, is forced into the role of witness to both, and, at least according to the witches in the coven if not to Suspiriorum herself or even to the audience, is found guilty of them. The conflation of national trauma and women’s trauma in Klemperer’s act of witnessing casts Suspiriorum’s emergence and her violent actions in the denouement of the film as acts of monstrous justice for those traumas. These correlations, which are already signalled through the historical and political context of the film, are reinforced through the finale of the

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film, where Susie becomes Mother Suspiriorum and murders the members of the coven who worship Markos instead of her while Klemperer is forced to watch. The final Act of the film110 begins with a magical ritual that is designed so that Markos can possess or take over Susie’s body that Markos may live longer.111 Markos has not only installed herself as leader of the coven, but has been claiming to be the earthly form of Mother Suspiriorum, the Mother-Goddess-Witch that the coven worships. In this final ritual, Susie calls forth the figure of Death, a black, clawed, faceless humanoid figure. As Death emerges and bows before her, a red light fills the room and Susie reveals herself to be Mother Suspiriorum incarnate.112 Suspiriorum/Susie sends Death to (remarkably violently) murder the witches of the coven who had aligned themselves with Markos: the red light that fills the room is mirrored by the enormous bursts of blood that spray across the screen, evoking the blood-soaked spectre of Argento’s source film’s slasher genre. Susie rips apart her own ribcage into a large, vaginally shaped opening, releasing the sound of screams and sighs and marking her full embodiment of Suspiriorum. As Death continues to wreak incredibly violent, bloody destruction upon the corrupted matrons of the coven and the girls in the school dance naked through this blood-red opera, Suspiriorum asks the three girls who had been sacrificed by the coven what they desire.113 Each of the three girls, Olga, Patricia, and finally Sara, asks to die: “Mother. Mother, we’re so tired […] I want to die.”114 With a kiss, Suspiriorum grants them each the peaceful death they ask for, finally cradling Sara’s body in her lap in the centre of the mütterhaus while the naked girls continue to dance through the exploded bodies of the coven. Suspiriorum telepathically calls to the dancers: “Yes. Dance. Dance. Keep dancing. It’s beautiful. It’s beautiful. It’s beautiful.”115 This climactic moment of the film is violently beautiful: the horrific disembowelling of the girls and the graphic and explosive deaths of the matrons are bathed in a pornographic and violent bloodred light. Even the gruesome tearing of Susie’s chest at her own hand is shot almost romantically (or pornographically): the camera slowly moves in long sweeps and zooms over the torn and rent bodies similarly to a love scene, and Susie orgasmically cries as she rips apart her chest, her fingers caressing the vaginal opening torn into her torso.116 Suspiriorum calls forth Death to cleanse the coven of corruption, ‘unmaking’ the witches who have betrayed her, and glorying in the “beautiful” dancing of the girls amidst the bodies. As Britt Hayes writes in ScreenCrush: “Suspiria is a theatre of pain and ugliness in which a woman such as Susie can and does

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come into her power. It is horrible. It is breathtaking. It is, to paraphrase Susie, she.”117 If there can be no more poetry after Auschwitz, there can at least be this bloody, artistic, and beautiful reckoning with the past for Suspiriorum and the Berlin coven. Suspiriorum ‘unmakes’ the corrupted order, glorying in this beautiful destruction: the gruesome death dance of the mütterhaus is an act of monstrosity through which a new future opens. Through the monstrous death and destruction these witches visit upon the world comes rebirth. Willow’s attempt to destroy the world in order to end suffering is reborn a season later as her ability to democratize female power and destroy Sunnydale in the process. Susie/Suspiriorum’s gory massacre of her own coven is balanced by her granting a peaceful death to the sacrificed girls and her restoration to her seat of power. Just as Dark Willow’s attempt to destroy the world in an act of queer negative utopianism creates an empty future, so does Suspiriorum’s balletic and bloody destruction of the coven construct a clear and unburdened future. Having been reborn as monsters themselves—Willow as ‘Dark Willow,’ Susie as Mother Suspiriorum—these witches monstrously unmake the present system in order to make space for a new, utopian future. The witch thus embodies the monstrous figure who does the work of unmaking an unjust world. Monstrosity is not just a reaction to overstepping the boundaries of society—it becomes the means to destroy unjust institutions entirely. Both Willow and Susie’s monstrosity, displaced into transformed personas (‘Dark Willow’ and Suspiriorum), functions as vengeance for their fallen sisters, and enables the possibility of a reimagined future. These twenty-first-century monstrous witches demonstrate the ways in which an ‘evil’ or angry witch is an opportunity to ‘un-make’ the injustices of the world. Using the memory of monstrous witches to build a more feminist future demonstrates a negative utopianism: a futureoriented destruction of the current patriarchal system in order to make space for a more feminist world.

Monstrosity and the Future What these monstrous witches demonstrate is the inheritance of different understandings, political reactions to, and acts of remembrance of monstrosity within feminist politics. Feminist recuperation of the witch has often had the explicit aim of ‘de-monstering’ womanhood: the abject horror of the diabolic witch and her Satanic master was re-remembered as

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patriarchal propaganda, a violent story used to smear uppity women who questioned authority. This has made the witch a useful figure for feminist organization and herstory, as demonstrated through the previous chapters. However, this loses some of the liberatory potential of monstrosity, and reduces texts featuring witches as abject monsters (particularly texts that predate 1970s feminism) to patriarchal propaganda without any value for contemporary feminist politics except as a warning about what patriarchal ideology does to women. Therefore, calling forth the spectres of monstrous witches and re-remembering the witch as a monster—with all of her perversities, violence, deviancy, and horror—can be useful for feminist and queer politics, as seen in the monstrous witches discussed in this chapter. The witch’s monstrosity demonstrates cultural anxieties about the gendered, sexed, and racialized body, and equally functions as a site through which to remember and resist those ideologies. Viewing these spectral remembrances of the witch hauntologically enables both of these apparently contradictory mnemonic threads to exist alongside one another, and brings those paradoxical memories into the present moment.

Notes 1. Asa Mittman, “Introduction: The Impact of Monsters and Monster Studies,” in The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous, ed. Asa Simon Mittman with Peter J. Dendle (Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2012), 8. 2. Stephen T. Asma, On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 13. 3. Elaine L. Graham, Representations of the Post/Human (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 53–54. 4. Or, in Gillard’s case, about her lack of children, which led one conservative Member of Parliament, Bill Heffernan, to remarkably offensively describe Gillard as being “deliberately barren.” See “Heffernan’s ‘deliberately barren’ the most sexist remark of 2007,” Sydney Morning Herald, November 13, 2007, https://www.smh.com.au/national/heffernansdeliberately-barren-the-most-sexist-remark-of-2007-20071113-gdrl0m. html. 5. Robin Wood, “The Return of the Repressed,” in Robin Wood and the Horror Film: Collected Essays and Reviews, ed. Barry Keith Grant (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2018), 57–58. 6. Robin Wood, “Introduction to the American Horror Film,” in Robin Wood and the Horror Film: Collected Essays and Reviews, ed. Barry Keith

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7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18.

19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

Grant (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2018), 84; Wood, “Repressed,” 58. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (New York and London: Methuen, 1980), 11. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 4. Kristeva, Powers, 1. Kristeva 3. Barbara Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (London New York: Routledge, 1993). Creed, Monstrous-Feminine, 3. Creed, 83. Creed, 3. Creed, 76. The Witch, dir. Robert Eggers (2015; Sydney, NSW: Universal Sony Pictures Home Entertainment Australia, 2016), DVD. C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950; reis., London: HarperCollins, 1990); C.S. Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew (1955, reis., London: HarperCollins, 1990). There is also a mysterious, evil woman who transforms into a snake in the sixth book in the Narnia series, The Silver Chair (1953). It is unclear if this woman, called either the Lady of the Green Kirtle, the Queen of the Underland, or the Queen of the Deep Realm, is the White Witch returned from the grave, or is a new villain. One of the owls theorises that she is from “the same crew” as the White Witch. It is also unclear if she even is a witch, or is actually a shapeshifter or were-snake. Due to the ambiguity of the Lady of the Green Kirtle, I have focused solely on the White Witch here. See C.S. Lewis, The Silver Chair (1953, reis., London: HarperCollins, 1990), 53. “Scene 19,” The Witch. Lily Glasner, “‘But What Does It All Mean?’ Religious Reality as a Political Call in the Chronicles of Narnia,” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 25, no. 1 (2014): 67. Lewis, Lion, 76. Lewis, Lion, 77. Lewis, Lion, 77. Pamela Norris, The Story of Eve (London and Basingstoke: Picador, 1998), 278. J.B. Bullen, “Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Mirror of Masculine Desire,” Nineteenth Century Contexts 21, no. 3 (1999): 337. Lewis, Nephew, 53, 55.

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27. Lewis, Nephew, 60. Re-reading this moment in 2022 overlays the memory of Lilith and the Witch with the events of the 2016 US election, wherein Hillary Clinton referred to Donald Trump’s supporters as a “basket of deplorables.” The word ‘deplorable’ has since become a meme for right-wing political activists, further imbuing this moment with connotations of monstrosity and violence. 28. Lewis, Lion, 36–38. 29. Lewis, Nephew, 150. 30. Lewis, Lion, 161; Jean E. Graham, “Women, Sex, and Power: Circe and Lilith in Narnia,” Children’s Literature Association 29, no. 1–2 (2004): 39. 31. This is particularly evident in the final Narnia book, The Last Battle (1956), which metaphorically depicts the Final Judgement and has some remarkably offensive stereotypes of people of colour (particularly of Arabic and Muslim people). See C.S. Lewis, The Last Battle (1956, reis., London: HarperCollins, 1990). 32. Norris, 331. 33. John Collier, Lilith, 1889, Oil on Canvas, 194 × 104 (Centimetres), Atkinson Art Gallery, Southport, UK. 34. Andrea Dworkin, Woman Hating (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1974), 31. 35. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1979), 35. 36. Judith Plaskow, The Coming of Lilith: Essays on Feminism, Judaism, and Sexual Ethics, 1972–2003, ed. Donna Berman (Boston: Beacon Press, 2005), 23, 54. 37. Plaskow, Lilith, 27–31. 38. Ann R. Shapiro, “The Flight of Lilith: Modern Jewish American Feminist Literature,” Studies in American Jewish Literature (1981–) 29 (2010): 70. 39. Eggers, dir. “Scene 1,” The Witch. 40. Eggers, dir. “Scene 20,” The Witch. 41. Alan Bernard McGill, “The Witch, the Goat and the Devil: A Discussion of Scapegoating and the Objectification of Evil in Robert Eggers’ The Witch,” Theology Today 74, no. 4 (2018): 412. 42. A.A. Dowd, “The 17th-Century Horror of The Witch Is Troubling on Multiple Levels,” The AV Club, February 18, 2016, https://www.avc lub.com/the-17th-century-horror-of-the-witch-is-troubling-on-mu-179 8186614. 43. Eggers, dir. “Scene 3,” The Witch. 44. Eggers, dir. “Scene 8,” The Witch. 45. Britt Ashley, “In Horror Film The Witch, Terror Stems from Puritanical Control of Women,” Bitch Media, March 3, 2016, https://www.bit chmedia.org/article/horror-film-witch-terror-stems-puritanical-controlwomen.

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46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

55. 56. 57.

58. 59.

60. 61. 62.

63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70.

Creed, 77. Creed, 79. Eggers, dir. “Scene 2,” The Witch. Eggers, dir. “Scene 2,” The Witch. Eggers, dir. “Scene 10,” The Witch. Eggers, dir. “Scene 13,” The Witch. Eggers, dir. “Scene 19,” The Witch. Eggers, dir. “Scene 19,” The Witch. It is unclear precisely where the village is, so I cannot pinpoint whose land it is that the colonizers are trespassing on. However, it is unceded First Nations land. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Monster Theory: Reading Culture (London and Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 3, 4. Lyndal Roper, Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004), 82–103. The Malleus Maleficarum is brimming with descriptions of the witch’s carnal relations with demons. See Hans Peter Broedel, “FifteenthCentury Witch Beliefs,” in The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe and Colonial America, ed. Brian P. Levack (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 46. Cohen, Monster Theory, 9. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, directed by David Hand, William Cottrell, Wilfred Jackson, Larry Morey, Perce Pearce, Ben Sharpsteen (1937; South Yarra, VIC: Walt Disney Company, 2014), DVD; The Wizard of Oz, dir. Victor Fleming and King Vidor (1939; Neutral Bay, NSW: Turner Entertainment and Warner Bros Entertainment Australia, 2013), DVD. Peter Cryle and Elizabeth Stephens, Normality: A Critical Genealogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017). Cryle and Stephens, Normality, 6. Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays (1961, reis., London and New York: Penguin Books, 2009); Jack J. Halberstam, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995). Sontag, Interpretation, 275. Sontag, 291. Halberstam, Skin Shows, 17. Halberstam, 13. Hand et al., dirs. “Scene 3,” Snow White. Hand et al., dirs. “Scene 3–6,” Snow White; Hand et al., dirs. “Scene 23,” Snow White. Hand et al., dirs. “Scene 3–6,” Snow White. Hand et al., dirs. “Scene 3,” Snow White.

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71. Hand et al., dirs. “Scene 23,” Snow White. 72. Hand et al., dirs. “Scene 3,” Snow White. 73. Tison Pugh, “‘There Lived in the Land of Oz Two Queerly Made Men’: Queer Utopianism and Antisocial Eroticism in L. Frank Baum’s Oz Series,” Marvels and Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies 22, no. 2 (2008): 217, 218; see also Alexander Doty, Flaming Classics: Queering the Film Canon (New York and London: Routledge, 2000), passim. 74. Doty, Flaming, 60. 75. Doty, Flaming, 60. 76. Fleming and Vidor, dirs. “Scene 5,” The Wizard of Oz. 77. Matthew Pangborn, “‘I’ll Get You, My Pretty!’: Bicycle Horror and the Abject Cyclicity of History,” in Culture on Two Wheels: The Bicycle in Literature and Film, ed. Jeremy Withers and Daniel P. Shea (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2016), 198. 78. Fleming and Vidor, dirs. “Scene 9,” The Wizard of Oz. 79. Pangborn, “Bicycle Horror,” 198–199. 80. Doty, Flaming, 58. 81. Fleming and Vidor, dirs. “Scene 17,” The Wizard of Oz. I use ‘appears’ here because it is difficult at times to distinguish between the black gown the Witch wears and the black cape worn on top. The blacks of each garment are blended or blurred in the film. Unfortunately, the costume has not survived to the current era so the footage in the film and from promotional material is the only record left. 82. Fleming and Vidor, dirs. “Scene 18,” The Wizard of Oz. 83. Doty, Flaming, 58. 84. Lisa Vetere, “The Rage of Willow: Malefic Witchcraft Fantasy in Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” Buffy Conquers the Academy, ed. Melissa Anyiwo and Karoline Szatek-Tudor (Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013), 77. 85. See Claire Henry, Revisionist Rape-Revenge: Redefining a Film Genre (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) for an overview of the raperevenge genre in contemporary popular culture and politics. 86. In this chapter, I am focusing primarily on Season 6 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, as that is the time when Willow ‘goes dark’ (and becomes monstrous). Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria is a remake of Dario Argento’s 1977 film of the same name. While Argento does expand the mythology of the Three Mothers and witchcraft over subsequent films, the symbol of the witch is presented with greater complexity in Guadagnino’s remake, and is used to explore discourses of femininity and witchcraft in more depth. For these reasons, I’ve examined Guadagnino’s more recent film. 87. Lorna Jowett, Sex and the Slayer (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2005), 37.

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88. Willow’s magic addiction narrative and the responses to it from her loved ones perpetuate problematic discourses of addiction. 89. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, season 6, episode 19, “Seeing Red,” directed by Michael Gershman, written by Steven S. DeKnight, aired May 7, 2002, in broadcast syndication, Twentieth Century Fox, 2006, DVD. 90. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, season 6, episode 22, “Grave,” directed by David Fury, written by James A. Contner, aired May 21, 2002, in broadcast syndication, Twentieth Century Fox, 2006, DVD. 91. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, season 6, episode 20, “Villains,” directed by David Solomon, written by Marti Noxon, aired May 14, 2002, Twentieth Century Fox, 2006, DVD. 92. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, “Grave.” 93. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, “Grave.” 94. Vetere, 81. 95. Jes Battis, Blood Relations: Chosen Families in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2015), 40. 96. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, “Villains.” 97. Jowett, Sex and the Slayer, 40. 98. This picks up on the connotations of white witchcraft or white Wicca, emphasized by Willow’s exclamation of “Oh. My. Goddess!”. See Buffy the Vampire Slayer, season 7, episode 22, “Chosen,” directed and written by Joss Whedon, aired May 20, 2003, in broadcast syndication, Twentieth Century Fox, 2006, DVD. 99. Cáel M. Keegan, “Emptying the Future: Queer Melodramatics and Negative Utopia in Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” Queer Studies in Media and Popular Culture 1, no. 1 (2016): 19. 100. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, “Chosen.” 101. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, “Chosen.” 102. Suspiria, directed by Luca Guadagnino (2018; Sydney, NSW: Universal Sony Pictures Home Entertainment Australia, 2019), DVD. 103. See Austin Fisher’s Blood on the Streets: Histories of Violence in Italian Crime Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019) for an overview of the giallo film genre. 104. Alexander Howard and Julian Murphet, “Transferring Suspiria: Historicism and Philosophies of Psychoanalytic Transference,” Film-Philosophy 26, no. 1 (2022): 83. 105. Guadagnino, dir. Suspiria. 106. Patricia Melzer, Death in the Shape of a Young Girl: Women’s Political Violence in the Red Army Faction (New York: New York University Press, 2015), 66; Finn Mackay, Radical Feminism: Feminist Activism in Movements (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 1–2. 107. Melzer, Young Girl, 66.

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108. There are only three male characters in the film: Dr. Klemperer, and two police-detectives, Agents Glockner and Albrecht, who investigate the coven. Glockner and Albrecht’s primary function in the film is to be the subject of mockery by the witches, who hypnotise the two men, strip them naked, and stand in a group laughing at their penises. Klemperer is a more significant figure. He is played by an actor credited as Lutz Ebersdorf: however, it was revealed in press coverage during the film’s initial release that Ebersdorf is actually Tilda Swinton in heavy prosthetics (one of her three roles in the film). Swinton has maintained that she only played Lutz Ebersdorf, and that Ebersdorf in turn played Klemperer. Swinton-as-Ebersdorf-as-Klemperer offers a clear indication of the emphasis on the feminine throughout the film; even the main male character is queered in some way. 109. Suspiria, dir. Guadagnino. 110. There are six named Acts and one Epilogue in the film, indicated by title cards. This final Act is titled “In the Mütterhaus (All the Floors are Darkness).” 111. Markos is played by Tilda Swinton (in her third role) under very heavy prosthetics. 112. Guadagnino, dir. Suspiria. 113. Guadagnino, dir. Suspiria. 114. Guadagnino, dir. Suspiria. 115. Guadagnino, dir. Suspiria. 116. Guadagnino, dir. Suspiria. 117. Britt Hayes, “Suspiria Review: A Masterpiece Is Reborn,” ScreenCrush, September 24, 2018, https://screencrush.com/suspiria-review-2018/.

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Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. Monster Theory: Reading Culture. London and Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Collier, John. Lilith. 1889. Oil on Canvas, 194 × 104 (Centimetres). Atkinson Art Gallery, Southport, UK. Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. London and New York: Routledge, 1993. Cryle, Peter and Elizabeth Stephens. Normality: A Critical Genealogy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017. DeKnight, Steven, writer. Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Season 6, episode 19, “Seeing Red.” Directed by Michael Gershman. Aired May 7, 2002, in broadcast syndication. Twentieth Century Fox, 2006, DVD. Dowd, A.A. “The 17th-century horror of The Witch is troubling on multiple levels.” The AVClub. February 18, 2016. https://www.avclub.com/the-17thcentury-horror-of-the-witch-is-troubling-on-mu-1798186614. Doty, Alexander. Flaming Classics: Queering the Film Canon. New York and London: Routledge, 2000. Dworkin, Andrea. Woman Hating. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1974. Eggers, Robert, dir. The Witch. 2015; Sydney, NSW: University Sony Pictures Home Entertainment Australia, 2016. DVD. Fisher, Austin. Blood on the Streets: Histories of Violence in Italian Crime Cinema. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019. Fleming, Victor and King Vidor, dir. The Wizard of Oz. 1939; Neutral Bay, NSW: Turner Entertainment and Warner Bros Entertainment Australia, 2013. DVD. Fury, David, writer. Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Season 6, episode 22, “Grave.” Directed James A. Contner. Aired May 21, 2002, in broadcast syndication. Twentieth Century Fox, 2006, DVD. Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1979. Glasner, Lily. “‘But What Does It All Mean?’ Religious Reality as a Political Call in the Chronicles of Narnia.” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts. 25, no. 1 (2014): 54–77. Graham, Elaine L. Representations of the Post/Human. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002. Graham, Jean E. “Women, Sex, and Power: Circe and Lilith in Narnia.” Children’s Literature Association. 29, no. 1–2 (2004): 32–44 Guadagnino, Luca. Suspiria. 2018; Sydney, NSW: Universal Sony Pictures Home Entertainment Australia, 2019. DVD. Halberstam, Jack. Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995.

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Hand, David, William Cottrell, Wilfred Jackson, Larry Morey, Perce Pearce, Ben Sharpsteen, dirs. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. 1937; South Yarra, VIC: The Walt Disney Company, 2014. DVD. Hayes, Britt. “Suspiria Review: A Masterpiece Is Reborn.” ScreenCrush. September 24, 2018. https://screencrush.com/suspiria-review-2018/. “Heffernan’s ‘Deliberately Barren’ the Most Sexist Remark of 2007.” Sydney Morning Herald, November 13, 2007. https://www.smh.com.au/national/ heffernans-deliberately-barren-the-most-sexist-remark-of-2007-20071113-gdr l0m.html. Henry, Claire. Revisionist Rape-Revenge: Redefining a Film Genre. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Howard, Alexander and Julian Murphet. “Transferring Suspiria: Historicism and Philosophies of Psychoanalytic Transference.” Film-Philosophy 26, no. 1 (2022): 63–85. Jowett, Lorna. Sex and the Slayer. Middletown, CN: Wesleyan University Press, 2005. Keegan, Cáel M. “Emptying the Future: Queer Melodramatics and Negative Utopia in Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” Queer Studies in Media and Popular Culture. 1, no. 1 (2016): 9–22. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. Lewis, C.S. The Last Battle. 1956. Reissue. London: HarperCollins, 1990. ———. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. 1950. Reissue. London: HarperCollins, 1990. ———. The Magician’s Nephew. 1955. Reissue. London: HarperCollins, 1990. ———. The Silver Chair. 1953. Reissue. London: HarperCollins, 1990. Mackay, Finn. Radical Feminism: Feminist Activism in Movement. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. McGill, Alan Bernard. “The Witch, the Goat, and the Devil: A Discussion of Scapegoating and the Objectification of Evil in Robert Eggers’ The Witch.” Theology Today 74, no. 4 (2018): 409–414. Melzer, Patricia. Death in the Shape of a Young Girl: Women’s Political Violence in the Red Army Faction. New York: New York University Press, 2015. Mittman, Asa. “Introduction: The Impact of Monsters and Monster Studies.” In The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous, edited by Asa Simon Mittman with Peter J. Dendle, 1–14. Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2012. Norris, Pamela. The Story of Eve. London and Basingstoke: Picador, 1998. Noxon, Marti, writer. Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Season 6, episode 20, “Villains.” Directed by David Solomon. Aired May 14, 2002, in broadcast syndication. Twentieth Century Fox, 2006, DVD. Pangborn, Matthew. “‘I’ll Get You, My Pretty!’: Bicycle Horror and the Abject Cyclicity of History.” In Culture on Two Wheels, edited by Jeremy Withers and

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Daniel P. Shea, 191–207. Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2016. Plaskow, Judith. The Coming of Lilith: Essays on Feminism, Judaism, and Sexual Ethics, 1972–2003. Edited by Donna Berman. Boston: Beacon Press, 2005. Pugh, Tison. “‘There Lived in the Land of Oz Two Queerly Made Men’: Queer Utopianism and Antisocial Eroticism in L. Frank Baum’s Oz Series.” Marvels and Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies. 22, no. 2 (2008): 217–239. Roper, Lyndal. Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. The Coherence of Gothic Conventions. New York and London: Methuen, 1980. Shapiro, Ann R. “The Flight of Lilith: Modern Jewish American Feminist Literature.” Studies in American Jewish Literature (1981–) 29 (Special Issue in Honor of Sarah Blacher Cohen) (2010): 68–79. Sontag, Susan. Against Interpretation and Other Essays. 1961. Reissue. London and New York: Penguin Books, 2009. Vetere, Lisa. “The Rage of Willow: Malefic Witchcraft Fantasy in Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” In Buffy Conquers the Academy, edited by U. Melissa Anyiwo and Karoline Szatek-Tudor, 76–88. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013. Whedon, Joss, writer. Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Season 7, episode 22, “Chosen.” Directed by Joss Whedon. Aired May 20, 2003, in broadcast syndication. Twentieth Century Fox, 2006, DVD. Wood, Robin. “Introduction to the American Horror Film.” In Robin Wood and the Horror Film: Collected Essays and Reviews. Edited by Barry Keith Grant, 73–110. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2018. ———. “The Return of the Repressed.” In Robin Wood and the Horror Film: Collected Essays and Reviews. Edited by Barry Keith Grant, 57–62. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2018.

CHAPTER 5

Witches as Lovers

In the notorious Malleus Maleficarum Heinrich Kramer writes that “[a]ll witchcraft comes from carnal lust which is in women insatiable.”1 Witches have long been labelled as sexual creatures: in fact, Sollée posits that “the ‘slut’ is in many ways the ‘witch’ of the twenty-first century.”2 The witch’s sexuality has signified many different things according to the moment in which it is invoked, but usually reflects how regimes of gender and sexuality operate as a kind of boundary or border (one that the witch transgresses). Like the monstrosity of the witch, the correlation to sex (usually in the form of having a lot of sex, or having sex that does not conform to the heterosexual marriage economy) marks her as different, and is consequently deployed in popular media to make visible those norms (either to reinforce or to resist them). Therefore, in this chapter, I interrogate how popular culture mediates memories of witches which reinforce or resist the long association between witchcraft, sex, sexuality, and gender. I consider the ways that love, sexuality, and romance— heterosexual and queer—are imbricated with witchcraft, and what this demonstrates about how the witch is remembered and re-remembered across cultural memory, particularly within feminist ideologies and politics of sex. The witch in early modern Christian traditions was an inherently sexualized figure. Gaining power from Satan, the diabolical relationship between male master and female servant was, even in less explicit © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 B. Kosmina, Feminist Afterlives of the Witch, Palgrave Studies in (Re)Presenting Gender, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25292-1_5

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descriptions, often heavy with sexual implications.3 In Europe particularly there was explicit discussion in trials of the sex acts (particularly non-reproductive sex acts like oral or anal sex, or sex between women) that the witches allegedly committed with the devil and with each other, which was then reproduced in visual art such as paintings, illustrations, and woodcuts—reinforcing the shock value of the witch’s sexuality by explicitly showing it.4 Early modern religious treatises by clerics and demonologists emphasized the sexual root of the witch’s diabolical power; the Malleus is the most notable of these. Trials and confessions (usually forced through torture) compounded the sexualized view of witchcraft, as victims often drew on increasingly lurid sexual imagery to craft more ‘accurate’ confessions in order to end their torture.5 Alongside the diabolical sex the witches were allegedly having with Satan, they were also allegedly having sex with each other and there is a recurring association between queer sex and the witch. Even in Puritan understandings of witchcraft, which were more ‘sexless’ than their European cousins, there was an underlying recognition of the sexual congress the witch makes with the Devil in exchange for earthly power. The Puritan idea of the passive, pliant feminine soul, just waiting to be penetrated by Christ or the Devil, inculcated an implicit sexual connotation to the Puritan witch, even if this was never outwardly spoken of. Demonological treatises (most notably the Malleus Maleficarum) emphasized that women’s “filthy lusts” led them towards Satan: three general vices appear to have special dominion over wicked women, namely, infidelity, ambition, and lust. Therefore they are more than others inclined towards witchcraft, who more than others are given to these vices. Again, since of these vices the last chiefly predominates, women being insatiable, etc., it follows that those among ambitious women are more deeply infected [by witchcraft] who are more hot to satisfy their filthy lusts.6

There remains debate about whether the Malleus created the religious connections between witchcraft, femininity, and sex/uality, consolidated existing connections, or was viewed as an outlier in its rampant misogyny. However, whether the Malleus did drive the trials or not, popular culture has fixated on it. It is often name-checked in films and television, and holds a similar status as texts like the Necronomicon: a vaguely evil sounding text about evil monsters like witches. Like the figure of the

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witch herself, the Malleus has become a symbol of the memory of the trials as episodes of patriarchal violence predicated on misogynistic understandings of marginalized genders, sexualities, and sex. What this brief return to the history of the trials illustrates is that the crime of witchcraft at the time of the witch trials was coded as not only a feminine crime, but a sexual crime. However, it is not just in religious rhetoric from hundreds of years ago that the witch is invoked as a sexual creature (and sometimes a sexual monster). Contemporary popular media and culture also emphasizes the witch’s correlations to sex and sexuality, drawing on general cultural knowledge that feminist memories of the witch have mainstreamed. Novels like Erin Sterling’s The Ex Hex (2021) and India Holton’s The League of Gentlewomen Witches (2022) demonstrate how the witch’s connection to sex also lends her to (less explicit) romance narratives. This reinforces existing postfeminist examples of witches in a popular culture whose narratives in their respective texts highlight their romantic foibles: for instance, while Charmed (created by Constance M. Burge, 1998–2006) follows its witch leads in their fight against evil, there is also a serious concern with their romantic relationships, dating as a witch, and their marriages (and divorces). The correlations between witchcraft and sex—and the way this has been oppressive, confining, and violent—are also explored in recent television series like Brand New Cherry Flavour (created by Nick Antosca and Lenore Zion, 2021). The Love Witch (dir. Anna Biller, 2016) is remarkably overt in correlating sex and witchcraft. In it, the protagonist, Elaine, is desperate for love, and uses her witchy sex magic to make men fall in love with her (however, when they become too enamoured with her or she becomes bored, they tend to meet a grisly end). While texts like The Love Witch may be more explicit than other popular media about the links between sex, sexuality, and witchcraft, they demonstrate a long-standing trope in representations of the witch. Allegations of witchcraft and the ensuing trials operated as technologies of sexual disciplining that reinforced the control and repression of non-hegemonic sexualities, genders, and sex acts. The sexual crime of witchcraft provides a means of demonizing, pathologizing, and criminalizing sex and sexualities that do not serve patriarchy and the colonial project. Cultural memories of the witch that circulate through popular culture and media now, even when working to resist the colonial patriarchal system of control over sex, are still affected by the correlation to

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sex, and the witch is routinely remembered as an inherently sexual creature. The witch, therefore, exists as a mnemonic symbol that is used to signify ‘abnormal’ or ‘deviant’ genders, sexualities, and sex acts in moments of cultural and moral crisis and panic. This is the case in popular culture representations of the witch from the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. These witches demonstrate the ‘abnormal’ through which ideological regimes of the sexual ‘normal’ are reinforced and strengthened; these texts then depict the witch being ‘contained’ within these systems of sexual normality, emphasizing the system’s ‘rightness’ or ‘naturalness.’ However, the witch’s licentiousness also offers an opportunity in popular media to consider alternate family structures, most notably through the unit of the coven. The coven offers a model of family connection that resists the coercive pull of the heterosexual nuclear family, and is a particularly productive mechanic through which to figure queer sexualities. Twenty-first- century witches, meanwhile, demonstrate postfeminist (and to a certain extent homonormative) approaches to sexuality that celebrate the witch’s inherent sexuality and queerness. Some of the texts I consider here are very sexual, some more romantic—but all address the witch’s loving relationships in some manner that invokes the ongoing mediation of cultural memories of witches, sex, and feminist politics.

Witches Within Regimes of Normality How does a sexual creature like the witch operate within the remarkably strict sexual confines of the nuclear family? When remembering the witch’s sexuality, it is tempting to view the witch as wholly irreconcilable with prevailing normative conceptions of sex and family structures within patriarchal ideologies and systems. How does someone who has anal sex with the Devil turn into a June Cleaver-type housewife? How does a figure whose lusty perversions are literally Satanic transform into the doting wife? Despite the vast gulf between sixteenth-century demonic magic-wielders and the white picket fence of 1950s’ United States, both of these cultural systems work on a controlling logic of sex and sexuality, and the witch is invoked as a disciplining figure in both instances. In the cultural moment following the publication of Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and in the Human Female (in 1948 and 1953 respectively) cultural discourses of sexual ‘normality’ were heightened.7 1950s’ American culture is defined by an obsession with sexual normality8 and the witch is deployed in popular culture in this moment

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as a figure of this moral and sexual panic and shame. However, while the witch offers a kind of scapegoat for the ‘sexual McCarthyism’ of the 1950s9 she is often, within the texts that feature her from this era, ‘fixed’ or ‘cured’ of her ‘perversions’. Through incorporating a figure of sexual panic, shame, and stigma like the witch within the regimes of sexual ‘normality’ of the 1950s (and early 1960s) through her integration into the heterosexual marriage and nuclear family the idea of sexual ‘normality’ is reinforced and naturalized. The sexual and familial norms of 1950s America are cast as normal and natural, rather than the accrued ideologies of various power structures—after all, if a sexual deviant like the witch can be ‘cured’ and brought into the regulatory frameworks of these regimes and institutions of sex, then the regimes must be moral and ‘right,’ surely? Richard Quine’s 1958 film Bell, Book, and Candle demonstrates how regimes and discourses of sexual ‘normality’ are reinforced through the deployment of the witch in popular culture. There is very little scholarship on Bell, Book and Candle, which Steffen Hantke ascribes to the film Vertigo with the same leads (Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novac) being released in the same year and eclipsing Quine’s film.10 In the film, which is closely adapted from John Van Druten’s 1950s Broadway play of the same name, a young, bored witch, Gillian Holroyd casts a spell so that Shepherd ‘Shep’ Henderson, her upstairs neighbour, is enamoured with her (he is already engaged to another woman, Merle). However, over the course of the film, Gillian falls in love with Shep, something that causes her a great deal of internal conflict because (within the world of the film), a witch loses her powers when she falls in love. Although Gill initially claims not to be interested in “tak[ing] other women’s men”11 she soon attempts to seduce him over drinks. Laying quite languorously over her couch she makes such euphemistic comments as “It’s nice having you over me… I mean, it’s reassuring having a man near one, in case he’s needed.”12 When this does not work (Shep is engaged and far too moral to break his vows independently), she casts a spell with her familiar, a cat called Pyewacket, that causes Shep to desire her and they passionately kiss. It is implied that they have sex frequently over the course of their relationship, although this is of course not actually represented on screen. Gill and Shep having sex is not necessarily condemned within the moral logic of the film, but it is viewed as being a by-product of her being a witch. Gill uses magic to draw a man to her bed that she desires, and does not even conceive of marriage as an option. In a later conversation with her brother, a warlock called Nicky (played by Jack Lemmon13 ), he

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seems aghast that she would even consider marrying Shep: “You don’t mean this is on the level?” “Yes. Yes, I do,” “Why? You already got him. What do you want to marry him for?”14 Sex is quite natural for witches, and it marks them out as being figures outside of 1950s’ sexual normality. While Shep insists almost immediately that he is in love with Gill and that he wants to marry her, Gill has only ever conceived of her life through want and desire: her life has been “sort of, well, disreputable” and she has only ever “lived… selfishly and restlessly, one thing after another.”15 Marriage, Gill insists, “would mean giving up a whole way of thinking…behaving…a whole, whole existence. I don’t know if I could. I wish I could.”16 However, Gillian (quite quickly) realizes that she is in love with Shep, and accepts his proposal. This consequently offers her a dilemma: witches cannot fall in love and retain their powers, and thus she must ‘renounce’ her witchcraft. This central premise offers the clearest understanding of how popular culture texts like Bell, Book and Candle mediate memories of the witch’s sexuality within 1950s cultural regimes of sexual normality. Witches literally cannot operate within the heterosexual marriage system of 1950s America; if Gill wants to be a wife, she cannot be a witch anymore. She does decide to follow through with her renunciation of witchcraft, and swears to Shep that she will be “different from now on […] I want to be. I want to be quite different.”17 What she does not reveal to him at this point is that she quite literally must be different. This is even indicated in her costume. While she is still a witch she wears primarily black or red; when she first seduces Shep she is wearing a backless black dress, and when she confesses that she is a witch to him she is wearing an all-black corseted dress with a hood. However, in the finale, when Shep discovers that she has lost her powers because she is in love with him, she is wearing all white: she has transformed from a carnal black-clad slutty witch to the pure, white-clad wife. While witches in Bell, Book and Candle demonstrate the sexual moral panics of the 1950s, the film also offers a remedy to this potentially panic-inducing figure, by allowing her to be incorporated within those ideological systems by renouncing her witchcraft and becoming the proper wife. The underlying concern in the film with prevailing discourses of sexual ‘normality’ is signalled from the outset. Within the first few minutes of the film, the Kinsey Reports are referenced: SHEP: GILL:

Oh, Magic in Mexico. Yes. Are you interested in that sort of thing?

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Well not personally, but professionally. I’m a publisher […]. Did you publish that? No, but I wish I had. Sold like the Kinsey Report. Well, I can’t think why. It’s completely phony. Oh, it is? I spent a year in Mexico. I’m sure they fed him a lot of fake tourist stuff, and he swallowed it whole. Maybe they did that to Kinsey too.18

The casual reference to Kinsey’s research is demonstrative of the wild popularity of the texts themselves (Cryle and Stephens point out that Kinsey’s works were on the New York Times bestseller lists for six months19 ). However, it also offers an early indication of how Bell, Book and Candle operates on a logic of sexual normality that the witch is initially excluded from before being ideologically contained. When Gill tries to tell Shep that she is a witch, but feels unable to find the words for it, Shep asks her “what, you been engaging in un-American activities or something?” to which Gill replies “No, I’d say very American… early American.”20 Clearly this invokes a memory of the Salem trials, and their metaphorical use in the American theatre by Arthur Miller.21 It also indicates how within Quine’s film, witchcraft operates as a highly visible mechanism through which to understand how sexual ‘normality’ is perpetuated. The person who steps outside those norms is a witch: but she can choose not to be and instead become a wife. This serves to doubly reinforce these regimes: not only does Gill interpellate these ideologies, but it casts anyone who chooses not to as deviant (because within this ideological system it is a choice to not participate in the heterosexual marriage complex). The heterosexual marriage complex was critiqued at the time these texts were being made. In 1963, Betty Friedan argued in The Feminine Mystique that the ideological cultural construction of femininity and the shackling of this construct to domesticity was “the problem that has no name” for housewives across the United States.22 By 1960, Friedan claimed, “the problem that has no name burst like a boil through the image of the happy American housewife” and, rather than telling these women that their nameless problem was themselves, instead “we can no longer ignore that voice within women that says: ‘I want something more than my husband and my children and my home.’”23 Friedan followed this a year later by writing “Television and the Feminine Mystique” in TV

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Guide, arguing that while American society was coming to grips with the nameless problem of domestic women, popular television failed to reflect changing ideas of the housewife. Instead, there was only “that moronic housewife image.”24 First released in the same year as Friedan’s “Television and the Feminine Mystique,” The Addams Family reflects changing understandings of American domestic femininity that Friedan called for, as well as a nostalgic display of the heteronormative patriarchal family unit. There is a concerted effort to both critique and validate ideologies of heteronormative patriarchy by incorporating the witch into the nuclear family, which results in the entire concept of the family being made “creepy and kooky.” The Addams Family is part of a 1960s genre that Lynn Spigel calls the ‘fantastic family sitcom’ and David Marc calls the ‘magicom’.25 This new generic form, Spigel argues, was “founded on the merger between the paradise of 1950s domesticity and the new-found ideals of the American future.”26 This genre of television shows is contradictory in its simultaneous critique and replication of contemporary suburban America and emerging middle-class values.27 Magicoms were “parodic in nature because they retained the conventions of the previous form, but they made these conventions strange by mismatching form and content.”28 These new magicoms contain an inherent potential for social critique and engagement with their disruption of reality, and the un/reality of The Addams Family allows the contradictory dualism of Morticia as a witch within the nuclear family unit. The Addams Family inverts 1950s and 1960s norms of the nuclear family: the Addams reflect the exact opposite of the hegemonic nuclear family while still validating the underlying ideologies of patriarchal, white, heterosexual America. The strangeness of the Addams is played for comedy, but also serves to reinforce what is ‘normal.’ Laura Morowitz argues that the show serves to parody and deconstruct the conventions of the 1950s’ nuclear family in a nonthreatening manner: it was both “transgressive yet deeply reaffirming.”29 The show is aligned with the emerging counter-culture movement of the mid-1960s in its subversiveness, but nevertheless reinforces the status quo of gender and sexuality norms enough to be ‘safe.’ The Addams Family is thus “deeply appealing to the TV audience because [it] satisfied the ubiquitous desire to be ‘normal’, while giving reign to the need to be different […] expand[ing] the borders of what compromised an acceptable American family unit.”30 The show is ideologically-comforting, for

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both the contemporaneous and modern viewer, as the Addams simultaneously and paradoxically affirm and deconstruct norms of the nuclear family and identity categories. The Addams are monstrous or abnormal, but they are also the “simplest ordinary everyday family.”31 The Addams family both adhere to and deviate from hegemonic constructions of family within 1950s suburban America, and demonstrate how regimes of ‘normality’ are enforced precisely through the expulsion of some people from those discourses of power. Morticia is able to be a part of the family unit, without having to overcome her status as a witch and the deviant sexuality that this entails, because the entire family is already slightly off-kilter: they are allowably deviant. Much like the Stepmother in the previous chapter, Morticia is not explicitly called a witch in the dialogue of the television show, but she has all the hallmarks of a witch; she is magical, concerned with plant lore, and is directly tied to Salem. Morticia’s witchy magic is often directly associated with domestic concerns, in a way that underlines her status in the family as wife and mother. The intersection of class with the position of women in the nuclear family troubles easy categorisation: the housewife is arguably a middle- and upper-class phenomenon. This tracks with Morticia’s middle-class domesticity: we rarely see Morticia performing domestic labour (most of which is done by the Addams’s servants, Lurch and Thing), although she is firmly rooted within the domestic sphere. On the odd occasions we do see Morticia performing domestic labour, such as cooking, cleaning, or gardening, these tasks underline her status as a witch, and thus directly correlate her particular form of witchcraft with domesticity and her place within the family. For instance, when making punch for trick-or-treaters she is shot from below stirring a cauldron-like smoking pot,32 and the family meals she cooks—eye of newt, pureed aardvark, roast yak—recall potion and spell ingredients as much as recipes.33 She is regularly seen gardening: tending to her hemlock, henbane, and poison ivy, and particularly doting on her African Strangler vine, Cleopatra, an apparently sentient vine with a taste for raw meat such as walrus burger.34 While Morticia’s magic is often played for comedy (as are most of the Addams’ supernatural powers) it is also aligned with domestic concerns such as cooking and gardening in a way that the male Addams are not. While at first glance, Morticia may seem to be the antithesis to the domestic housewife, she directs her magic towards the ‘proper’ concerns of a wife, reinforcing her position as wife even as it undercuts the presentation of this role.

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Not only do Morticia and Gomez Addams demonstrate the imbrication of the witch into the nuclear family, but they also have an unusually active sex life (in comparison to other sitcoms of the era), perhaps because of their ‘strangeness’. Morticia and Gomez consistently push the boundaries of ‘acceptable’ on-screen romance in the 1960s, most notably whenever Morticia speaks French. A recurring comedic bit shows how Gomez is taken by sexual passion by Morticia’s multi-lingual skills and begins frenzied kissing up her arms to her neck: “Tish, when you speak French, you know how it affects me.”35 Their passion for each other is seen regularly through the two seasons of the show, and is often played as a joke: “Tish, when you help me with my coat it goes right through me.”36 Gomez particularly shows little regard for propriety: for instance, when he is again seized with sexual fever and Morticia protests that someone is at the door his only reply is “[w]e’re married.”37 In another moment, Gomez describes being a “lover” as “the most important role a woman can have” (and is quickly corrected by Morticia that this role is actually being a mother).38 The normalization of sex in The Addams Family reflects changing cultural norms of sex and sexuality, while still maintaining the image of monogamous heterosexuality. John Astin, who played Gomez, commented on the Addams’s intense sexuality: “Gomez and Morticia were the first married couple on television who seem to actually have a sex life. I had proposed that their romance be unceasing and in the grand manner, that the slightest look or word sends Gomez into raptures.”39 Morticia and Gomez’s rampant sexuality, while defying televisual norms of the day, is still acceptable due to their ‘deviancy’: “[w]hat was strictly forbidden between ‘normal’ sitcom couples was permitted for the already deviant.”40 While episodes such as “Gomez the Reluctant Lover”41 revolve around fears that the marriage is in danger, these concerns are always resolved by the time Morticia and Gomez return to the marital bed each night. With a sexually charged couple at the heart of the eccentric Addams family and the housewife at the heart of the home using magic and cauldrons rather than vacuums and saucepans, The Addams Family appears on the surface to subvert or challenge norms of domestic femininity, the nuclear family, and of the wife. Morticia’s position as witch and her position as wife are mutually dependent in The Addams Family, and this consequently blurs mnemonic landscapes: the raw sexuality of the witch shoehorned into the demure kitten heels of the housewife in the suburban nuclear family. However, any potential challenges to the status quo of the

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family unit as the primary social unit are quickly laid to rest. Norms of the nuclear family, the role of the wife within that family, and the remarkably heterosexual relationship between husband and wife that sits at the heart of the nuclear family are satirized in The Addams Family, but are also reinforced through that subversion. By depicting what is ‘not normal,’ the show is inherently reinforcing what ‘normal’ is; Morticia being both a wife and a witch is strange, it does mark her as being unusual, and goes some way to ‘explaining’ her ‘sexual deviancy’ (she clearly has frequent sex with her husband and enjoys it, cue horror). The kitsch representation of the deviant as humorous creates an ‘allowably subversive’ blending of witch and wife that does not challenge norms of sex and sexuality inherent to both, but does at least render these cultural forms visible. Morticia appears to break the norms of her role as domestic housewife, but never goes too far, demonstrating how popular culture media invokes memories of various oppressive ideologies and rhetorics without necessarily challenging or disrupting those ideologies. While the Addams seem on the surface to subvert norms of the family, and Morticia’s role as a wife is secondary to her status as a witch, the show reaffirms the norms it appears to destabilize. The family looks exactly as the ideal nuclear family unit should: a loving husband, doting wife, a little boy and girl, even a beautiful house with a picket fence (even if that picket fence is overrun with creeping vines). Morticia’s witchiness only ever underscores her domesticity and the maintenance of the heterosexual partnership at the centre of the family—her spells and potions are directed towards the ‘proper’ concerns of a housewife, and her apparently voracious witchy sexuality is only ever directed towards her loving husband. The paradox that lies at the heart of both of these texts—witches and wives—is indicative of how often very contradictory memoryscapes are mediated across popular culture texts. Gillian and Morticia, whose witchy sexuality seem to offer a challenge to mainstream discourses of ‘normality’ within popular culture, actually work to affirm that status quo in their own ways. Texts like Bell, Book and Candle and The Addams Family demonstrate the potential for memories of the witch’s sexuality to operate as a disciplining technology, reinforcing norms of heterosexuality and romance through the witch’s transgression of them.

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Witches and Covens While the witch and her rampant sexuality can be invoked to reinforce the ideological borders of normality, sometimes the memory of the witch is deployed in popular culture to challenge those same norms. 1970s’ feminist activists reconstructed the witches as women who were punished for their gender and sexuality, but that also became their strength: the witches became symbols of women’s independent sexual lives and choices. Alongside the emphasis on sexuality and oppression, however, feminist historians and activists also discussed the political uses of women’s sexuality and witchcraft, often emphasizing the lesbian connotations of the witch to appeal to a persistent notion of feminist separatism, of building a sisterhood without men. If, as Mary Daly insists, “[t]he women hunted as witches were (are) in a time/space that is not concentric with androcracy”42 then they reflect an implicit appeal to female-centred43 times/spaces for feminists writing in this era, and the witch’s active refusal of monogamous, compulsory heterosexuality became a rallying cry for feminists in their search for a new unit of social organization, with some finding it in the coven. These narratives of witches and particularly of covens are evoked in popular culture texts to challenge the sovereignty of the nuclear family as the primary social unit. Rather than ‘making room’ for the witch’s carnality within the structure of the family, the witches in these texts challenge the family itself, offering instead the coven as a potential model of feminist community and connection. The coven comes to operate in a similar manner to the commune as a separatist space and organizing social unit.44 In John Updike’s The Witches of Eastwick (1984) and George Miller’s 1987 film adaptation of the same name,45 Alexandra, Jane, and Sukie, the titular witches of Eastwick, seek comfort and respite from the world of men with their small coven, only to find their community of women shattered by the intrusion of Darryl Van Horne. However, while Updike’s novel has a more pessimistic tone about the nature of women’s communities and the intrusion of men into their coven, Miller’s adaptation emphasizes the empowering nature of the coven for late twentieth-century women. Despite the difference in inflections of the women’s covens in these texts, both versions of The Witches of Eastwick demonstrate the substitution of the heterosexual family unit with the coven, and the way that the community of women functions as a source of support and love for the witches within it. Consequently, both

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texts—as completely different as their sexual politics and mood may be— demonstrate how popular media is implicated in the circulation of feminist memory cultures and practices. At the beginning of Updike’s novel, “The Coven” (the title of Part One) functions as a community of women in the small town of Eastwick (a fictional town in Rhode Island, USA), providing support, platonic love, solidarity, and, eventually, sex. The three women, Alexandra, Sukie, and Jane, are all formerly married (having left, been left by, or outlived their husbands), and meet regularly on Thursday nights at each other’s houses.46 The women developed magical powers and became witches upon becoming single again. In a conversation about another woman, Brenda Parsley, who has been left by her husband, they discuss how it is in the separation from men that their magical power resides: “‘[w]e don’t have any powers she [Brenda Parsley] doesn’t, now that she’s been left.’ ‘Is that what does it, being left?’ Jenny asked. ‘Or doing the leaving,’ Alexandra said. ‘The strange thing is it doesn’t make any difference. You’d think it would.’”47 Being a witch, in Updike’s conception, is dependent upon the failure of the heterosexual relationship at the heart of the nuclear family, and allows the creation of new female communities such as the coven. Kim A. Loudermilk thus writes that “[a]t the beginning of the novel, the witches’ coven serves as a sort of support group for the women as they struggle to achieve independence, to gain self-identity and to escape the limits placed upon them by patriarchal ideology.”48 The three women love each other deeply in a way that they do not love their partners. They all have casual sex with men (particularly Alexandra), but do not seem to gain the emotional or loving support from these relationships that they do from their friendships (and often seem bored with the sex too). Alexandra even thinks to herself early on, “[s]he loved her two friends, and they her.”49 However, their love for each other is not strictly platonic; even before the coven begin having sex with each other, there is a constant, queer sexuality underlying their interactions. They call each other “baby,” “pet” and other romantic names,50 and Alexandra often thinks of Sukie’s body and what she would like to do to it51 if she did not suffer the “curse of heterosexuality.”52 The coven represents a model of feminist solidarity, community and family well before it becomes a sexual relationship, and offers an apparently feminist alternative to the nuclear family as the primary social unit. However, within the moral logic of the novel, there is an ambivalence about the ‘validity’ or morality of this coven; there is an implication

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from the outset that this is not an ‘ethical’ way to build a family (a patriarchal logic that becomes more overt over the course of the novel). Updike depicts the fragile nature of these female communities; the coven is disrupted and ultimately destroyed by the intrusion of masculine energy, in the form of Darryl Van Horne (coded as the symbolic Devil). Even just the “shadow” of Van Horne disrupts the women’s community: hearing her two friends gossip about the new man in town, Alexandra thinks that “[s]he was jealous of this man, that the very shadow of him should so excite her two friends, who on other Thursdays were excited simply by her.”53 The intrusive figure of Van Horne is framed as sexually violating when he buys all of the sculptures Alexandra stocks at local gift stores: “[h]is buying her out at the Hungry Sheep felt like a rape.”54 When the women stop holding their Thursday night coven meetings, it is because one or more of them are meeting with Darryl. When Jane first cancels a Thursday night meeting to catch up with Darryl, Alexandra feels hurt and abandoned by her fellow witch: It made Alexandra angry, to be put on the defensive, when she was the one being snubbed. She told her friend, ‘I thought Thursdays were sacred.’ ‘They are, usually,’ Jane began. ‘But I suppose in a world where nothing else is there’s no reason for Thursdays to be.’ Why was she so hurt? Her weekly rhythm depended on the infrangible triangle, the cone of power.55

Despite their much-vaunted love (and underlying lust) for each other, following their introduction to Van Horne, the coven rapidly ceases meeting on Thursdays, and begin meeting at his house for games of tennis, stoned spa baths, and orgies. The nature of their friendship changes following the women starting up a sexual relationship with Van Horne and with each other, when participating in group sex: “[a] pause [in the conversation] occurred, where in the old days they could hardly stop talking. Now each woman had her share, her third, of Van Horne to be secretive about, their solitary undiscussed visits to the island.”56 There is initial hope that the coven can survive in its new, male-centric, sexual form, but this soon collapses too: “[c]racks were appearing, it seemed to Alexandra after Sukie hung up, in what had for a time appeared perfect.”57 When Van Horne suddenly marries a young woman called Jenny and leaves the witches, they reform the coven in his wake, with Sukie even saying “I feel closer to the two of you than for months.”58 However, they discuss only Van Horne’s

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marriage, and turn their magical energy towards hexing Jenny, eventually resulting in her death from cancer. Van Horne runs off with Jenny’s brother, Chris,59 leaving the broken coven in his wake: “[n]ow that they no longer met at Darryl’s, they saw each other less frequently. They had not officially abandoned their Thursdays, but in the month since they had put the spell on Jenny one of the three had always had an excuse not to come.”60 While the coven in Updike’s conception offers a radical potential for family, connection, sex, and love, it is not viewed as a positive change. Instead, Updike presents a pessimistic view of the turn away from the nuclear family and towards female communities: rather than providing strength and solidarity, and a model for family structures that dissolve the heterosexual and patriarchal nuclear family unit, the coven is easily penetrated and destroyed by masculinity. Updike emphasizes sex and sexuality as the bedrock of both witchcraft and female community. The introduction of the three women to Van Horne initiates the transition from platonic to sexual congress among the women, and the love they feel for each other similarly changes. However, the queer sex and sexuality in the novel does not strengthen female community but functions as a performance for the heterosexual men at the centre of the novel. The transition from platonic love to sexual love among the witches fulfils the overt sexualised nature of the witches61 (and women in general) in the novel, and invokes memories of the witch as an inherently carnal creature.62 That sexuality, which offers so much potential for queer and feminist community and love, is again affected by the ultimately pessimistic tone of the novel. It is Jane who initiates sex with Alexandra for their first time63 but while the sex initially seems focused on the women’s pleasure, it rapidly turns into the three women pleasuring Van Horne alone: “[o]n the black velour mattresses Van Horne had provided, the three women played with him together, using the parts of his body as a vocabulary with which to speak to one another; he showed supernatural control, and when he did come his semen, all agreed later, was marvellously cold.”64 Van Horne (and Updike) “takes their attention—sexual and otherwise—to one another and diverts it to himself.”65 The undercurrent of queer sexuality, particularly in the case of Alexandra’s attraction to Sukie, is sexually fulfilled but not spiritually: the sexual episodes between the witches read as titillating for the straight male reader, rather than for each other (or for any readers who are not heterosexual cisgender men).66 The coven supposedly provides comfort and community for the three women outside of the nuclear family but

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is destroyed by the intrusion of a man; similarly, the sex the women have does not bring them closer or fulfil an unacknowledged queer sexuality. It exists to pleasure the men in their lives (and the assumed male reader and male author), continuing the pessimistic approach to women’s communities and lives that Updike presents. This mirrors the cynical tone with which Updike’s novel approaches 1960s and 1970s feminism and Women’s Liberation politics more broadly. The witches are coded as feminists (albeit in quite a shallow way) repeatedly throughout the novel. Alexandra, for instance, thinks to herself that “[o]ne of the liberations of becoming a witch had been that she had ceased constantly weighing herself,”67 and that: [n]ot until midlife did she truly believe she had a right to exist, that the forces of nature had created her not as an afterthought and companion – a bent rib, as the infamous Malleus Maleficarum had it – but as the mainstay of the continuing Creation, as the daughter of a daughter and a woman whose daughters in turn would bear daughters.68

This resembles 1970s’ radical feminist polemics, particularly in the references to the Divine Feminine and women’s lineages. However, the witches are not the only Eastwick-ians who espouse these views. Van Horne himself, the symbolic Devil, explicitly articulates feminist memories of the witch trials and the stifling of feminine energy under patriarchy: ‘Do you know,’ Van Horne stated […] ‘the whole witchcraft scare was an attempt—successful, as it turned out—on the part of the newly arising male-dominated medical profession, beginning in the fourteenth century, to get the childbirth business out of the hands of midwives. That’s what a lot of the women burned were – midwives. They had the ergot, and atropine, and probably a lot of right instincts even without germ theory. When the male doctors took over they worked blind, with a sheet around their necks, and brought all the diseases from the rest of their practice with them. The poor cunts died in droves.’69

Van Horne states on numerous occasions that he would “love to be a woman” and the witches feel like he “coveted their wombs.”70 There is a recurring, surface-level appeal to feminist memory, community, and spirituality in the novel: these witches are meant to be read as feminists,71 but there is no deeper interrogation about feminist politics, histories, or communities, nor is there any apparent celebration of feminist values.

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Margaret Atwood writes in her New York Times review of the novel: “[d]ivorced then, […] they [the witches] are free to be themselves, an activity Mr. Updike regards with some misgivings.”72 The ambivalent— if not downright antagonistic—attitude in the novel towards feminism, queer sexuality, and women’s bodies demonstrates the ambivalence with which the witch’s association with sex is considered in feminist and anti-feminist memory cultures. The witch offers a compelling mnemonic symbol of feminist attitudes to sex, sexuality, and liberation, but this symbol (and its accompanying feminist memories and politics) is pilloried and mocked within the novel. The sexuality of the witches in Eastwick exists almost solely for male gratification, and the female communities they form to love and support each other are destroyed by dominant masculinity with ease. When Updike “demeans the feminist concept of sisterhood”73 he reflects a view of witchcraft, sex, and female communities that is pessimistic at best, misogynistic at worst, but is clearly drawing on feminist memories of the witch trials—even if it is just to undercut or mock feminist memory and politics. However, in George Miller’s 1987 adaptation of The Witches of Eastwick, female communities and the coven not only survive the intrusion of a man, but are instrumental in removing this man from the women’s spaces and lives. There are vast differences in narrative, characterization and, crucially, tone between the novel and the film, which demonstrates how popular media—even when it is a direct adaptation of another text with a vastly different sentiment—mediates paradoxical and sometimes conflicting memoryscapes. Without wanting to mount an analysis of the adaptation’s fidelity to the novel, there are significant changes between the two texts that, when compared, demonstrate how popular culture texts can accrue competing and contradictory politics. Where the former text is suspicious about the strength and resilience of the coven in the face of masculinity, the latter presents the coven as all-powerful and able to reject patriarchy and masculinity entirely. This is not to say that the film is ‘more feminist’—Miller’s adaptation is somewhat muddled or unclear in its messaging about Women’s Liberation and sexual revolution, as was often pointed out in film reviews at its release.74 However, the tone of the film presents a far more optimistic view of women’s communities and their resilience to male intrusion than its source novel. The novel begins in media res, with the women already in full control of their witchcraft; the arrival of Van Horne comes out of the blue and, at the end, Van Horne leaves town with a young male lover and the witches

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also leave Eastwick after conjuring their own ideal man. Miller’s adaptation, however, reverses this narrative of the witches’ sexual powers and desires, and of the origins of the coven. The women begin as mortal friends who jokingly attempt to summon their ideal man while drinking together one night.75 Following their group affair with Van Horne, and the murder of a woman in the town by her husband who, it is implied, has been ‘driven’ to domestic violence by Van Horne,76 the three witches together defeat their lover, cast him from Eastwick, and live together in his house with the children they have each conceived with him. The ending of the film, where the three women together cast a spell hexing Van Horne,77 not only redirects the vitriolic misogyny of the three witches hexing Jenny, but rejects the pessimism towards women’s communities and sexuality that is characteristic of the novel. In the novel, the witches gain their powers prior to the arrival of Van Horne, while in the film they seem to gain powers because of his presence. This offers different views of witchcraft, sexuality, and power; their magical power comes from female community in the novel but from sexual relationships to a man in the film. Similarly, both the hexing of Jenny and the hexing of Van Horne represent the witches working together to craft a spell to defeat their enemy. However, in the former, it is intimated as the act of jilted lovers giving their ex’s new partner cancer, while in the latter it is women coming together to defeat an abusive man. Again, the politics of this moment’s adaptation differ from its source; from spiteful internalized misogyny to feminist solidarity and community, demonstrating how the same mnemonic symbol, the accretion of its sexual politics and the same cultural knowledges can reflect a wholly different tone and intention. While Miller retains Updike’s title, the word ‘witch’ is not said in the film adaptation. This is in part because of the changing nature of witchcraft in the adaptation. Where the women in Updike’s novel are cognisant and in control of their magic from the outset, and are fully aware that it is their newly-single status that makes them witches, the women in Miller’s adaptation only seem to pick up magic or witchcraft via Van Horne. The tennis scene, for instance, which in the novel is explicitly bewitched by the women (Van Horne is not even playing) is unclear in the film—is it the man making the ball float, or the women manifesting their witchcraft for the first time?78 When the women float over the pool together in an orgasmic threesome,79 it is unclear if it is their own joy and love allowing them to fly together, or if Van Horne is making

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them fly for his pleasure. Witchcraft in Miller’s film, it seems, is something women gain through their sexual relationships with men (a specific man), rather than stemming from women’s communities and separation from men as in the novel. As Jane Maslin writes in The New York Times: “Mr. Updike’s witches knew their own powers, and their shrewdness was a large part of the fun. But in the film, it’s never clear what Alexandra (Cher), Sukie (Michelle Pfeiffer) and Jane (Susan Sarandon) know about the supernatural, or even about one another.”80 While Updike seems ambivalent at best, scathing at worst towards female communities and love, there is a strong undercurrent of power inherent in being a witch that is determined by women’s separation from men. Miller’s adaptation reverses this—witchcraft comes through connection (usually sexual) to men, but women’s communities and love are still successful in expelling men. The star image81 of the four leads in Miller’s adaptation lends itself to a more optimistic narrative of feminist memories of the witch and her sexual potential, particularly in relation to discourses and depictions of domestic violence. The acting leads each have a personal and professional association with social issues that 1970s feminists sought to tackle, which haunt the film and affect the political ambiguity of Miller’s adaptation. Jack Nicholson had eight years earlier played Jack Torrance in The Shining (dir. Stanley Kubrick, 1980), a man who brutally attacks and tries to kill his family following demonic possession/psychosis, which, when read in conjunction with The Witches of Eastwick, characterize Van Horne’s attack on the women as (potentially supernatural but still very real) domestic abuse. Cher’s much publicized split with Sonny Bono in the 1970s similarly stamps her character in The Witches of Eastwick, Alexandra, with the memory of domestic violence survivors. Michelle Pfeiffer had previously played the wife of two drug lords who is also the victim of domestic violence at the hands of her husbands in Scarface, again influencing readings of her Eastwick character, Sukie, as a survivor of domestic violence. Meanwhile, Susan Sarandon is well known for her radical left wing and feminist politics, and her professional career prior to The Witches of Eastwick included two erotic horror films (The Rocky Horror Picture Show, dir. Jim Sharman, 1975, and The Hunger, dir. Tony Scott, 1983) both of which add to the eroticism and feminist politics of her character, Jane. For later viewers, Sarandon’s role in Thelma and Louise (dir. Ridley Scott, 1991) compounds the feminist implications of Sarandon’s star image. This is compounded when viewed in light of director George Miller’s

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subsequent films, most notably Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), an ardently feminist revision of the Mad Max franchise and the road film genre. The potential ambiguity of the film’s feminist narrative of the witch’s sexual politics is thus affected by the star image of the film’s actors and director, offering a more determinedly feminist tone in the film.82 The ending of Miller’s film is affirmatively attached to the idea of the coven as a family unit without men: all three women are pregnant with Darryl’s child, and choose to raise their many children together as a family coven.83 The family formed by the end of the film extends the coven into a family group without a patriarch, a social unit without men. While the feminist sexual politics are ambiguous, the tone of the film is certainly more woman-friendly than Updike’s leery prose. Miller’s film consequently does the exact opposite of its source, revealing a wholly antithetical narrative of witches and sexuality. Updike’s novel presents witchcraft as stemming from individual female power and (hetero) sexuality, dependent on the separation of women from men, and is consequently dubious of the power that comes from women’s communities and queer sexualities. Conversely, Miller’s film presents witchcraft as stemming from sexual connection to men, but is strengthened by women’s communities and ultimately women’s love for each other is used to repulse the men they were originally dependent on. Both texts depict casual sex, group sex, and queer sex as part and parcel of being a witch, revealing the afterlives of historical Christian narratives of the witch as a sexual monster, and of revisionist 1970s feminist narratives which saw witch identity as a means of breaking free of heteropatriarchy. Further, both texts engage with the radical feminist turn towards female communities following the explosion of the nuclear family, but with different results. Updike presents this turn away from the nuclear family and towards other women as ultimately untenable—these communities fail at the first intrusion of masculinity, and the women retreat back to the heterosexual family model, albeit with their ‘ideal man.’ Miller, however, presents a more radical perspective on these women’s communities—while they need a push, the women in Miller’s film find comfort, support, love, sex, and family from their coven, and only as a community can these feminist witches expel the embodiment of patriarchy, Van Horne. Consequently, these two texts which, ostensibly, present the same (or at least similar) narratives about three witches and their romantic and sexual foibles, and which respond to and mediate

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similar memories of the figure of the witch’s 1970s feminist sexual politics, actually demonstrate two alternative viewpoints regarding women’s sexuality, sex, power, and witchcraft.

Witches, Soulmates, and Chosen Families I ended the previous chapter discussing how recent texts depict witches self-consciously using their historical monstrosity for future-oriented action. Similarly, evolving appreciations of the witch’s inherently sexual nature and association with women’s sexuality, queer or hetero, have come to be consciously marshalled in twenty-first-century texts to reflect a (post)feminist rhetoric of sex and reproductive rights. Where the witch’s sexuality made her a figure of moral and sexual panics in Friedan’s era, and presented an inherent appeal to women’s spaces and communities in the late twentieth century, the changing role of women’s sexuality is mirrored in the status of the witch as a sexual creature. Twenty-first-century television witches are haunted by the afterlives and memories of feminist, queer, and sex positive movements, as well as from capitalist commodification of sexuality and ubiquitous pornographic entertainment, reflecting a rhetoric of sexual agency and choice—and the capitalist exploitation of that choice. In what could be read as a return to oppressive constructions of the witch which position her magical power as sexually derived, but could equally be read as a celebration and reclamation of the sexual history of the witch (or both of these contradictory readings), television witches in the twenty-first century are more readily depicted engaging in sexual trysts which are coded as a reflection of their magical power. Witches such as Willow Rosenberg and Tara Maclay in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003) and Prudence Night and Ambrose Spellman in The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (2018–2020) reflect a queer sexuality which is associated with their status as witches. Both of these television shows focus on young adults, and the development of these witches’ sexuality, queer or otherwise, is a major part of their growth into adults.84 In Buffy, Willow’s sexual journey is aligned with both her witchcraft and her coming-out narrative, to the extent that casting spells is used as a metaphor for Willow and her girlfriend Tara having sex. Similarly, in Sabrina, becoming a witch is imbricated with sex: one of the ‘delicious gifts’ that the Dark Lord gives the witches in Sabrina is untamed sexual vigour. However, Sabrina differs from the other young witches in her coven, choosing not to participate in the regular orgies. In

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fact, a recurring subplot in Part Two concerns Sabrina’s uncertainty about having sex at all. What Sabrina offers instead is more of an emphasis on family and covens, similar to the Eastwick texts. The mnemonic entanglements of witchcraft, sex, and sexuality in contemporary television series demonstrate the ongoing accretion of the witch’s sexual politics and the emphasis on family (particularly chosen family) in young adult literature. In earlier seasons of Buffy, Willow was in a heterosexual romantic relationship with school friend and werewolf, Oz, and begins to learn magic at the end of high school. However, when she goes to university, having separated from Oz and lost her Wiccan mentor, Jenny Calendar, Willow begins to explore feminine and feminist communities of magic and her queer sexuality. Aside from some notable instances of witchcraft being performed by Rupert Giles, witchcraft is coded as a wholly feminine pursuit and tradition. The feminizing power of witchcraft in Buffy is so strong that it is even parodied. In “Once More With Feeling” the musical episode where a demon called Sweet visits the town and causes everyone to break into song as in a musical, the Scoobies sing “I’ve Got A Theory” together while they try to investigate what is causing the songs. Xander sings “[i]t could be witches, some evil witches! / [Tara and Willow glare at him] Which is ridiculous ‘cause witches they were persecuted Wicca good and love the earth and woman power and I’ll be over here.”85 Willow’s turn to witchcraft functions as a way of connecting her to a community of women for both magical support and love, by tying her to a wholly feminine magical tradition. Farah Mendlesohn addresses this turn towards queer witchcraft, writing: “[m]uch of what Willow does [in earlier seasons] is essentially gendered ‘male’: this may be why the writers introduced the witchcraft, as a way to regender Willow and to pick up on the association of witchcraft with female sexuality, with power, and with lesbianism.”86 Similarly, Lorna Jowett sees the turn to witchcraft as “refeminizing Willow,” and positioning her in a tradition of female power.87 While I am ambivalent about the view that Willow’s gender identity is redefined through her connection to witchcraft, the introduction of her witchcraft does allow her subplots to become more sexual and radical. Willow’s coming out as a witch is inextricably tied to her coming out as a lesbian, closely aligning witchcraft with women’s sexuality and queer community. Picking up magic after seeing a female authority figure, Jenny Calendar, living as an out-and-proud witch, Willow slowly learns about witchcraft and the witch community, finding her place within it,

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eventually feeling a sense of witch pride. Willow coming out as gay88 is the second coming-out narrative we see her undergo, having watched her discover her witchy self previously, which possibly led to the wholehearted acceptance of Willow’s lesbianism both within the show and from the fan base, who are encouraged to “read her as a person first and lesbian (and witch) second.”89 The conflation of Willow’s witch identity and her queer identity, seen through explicit feminine coding of witchcraft and the dual coming-out narratives she undergoes, reflect an imbrication of sexual orientation and sex with witchcraft. Queer sex is visually coded as witchcraft in Buffy, compounding the connection between queer sexualities, feminist and queer activism, and witchcraft. As Keegan writes “[i]n Buffy, melodramatic deployments of the supernatural often function as signifiers for queer desire.”90 For instance, when Willow and Tara first hold hands, it allows Willow to gain the mystical energy needed to perform telekinesis in order to move a heavy vending machine.91 This physical act of gaining energy from each other develops further when they practice spells together. Late one night in Tara’s dorm room, the two witches attempt to float a rose together and pluck the petals off it (the flower imagery further strengthens the link to female sexuality): [The two witches sit on the floor next to a magical circle with a rose in it. They hold hands]. Willow: Okay, we’ll start out slow. [They close their eyes, holding hands]. Tara: Willow? Start out slow doing what? Willow: Oh, we’re gonna float the rose, then use the magicks to pluck the petals off, one at a time. It’s a test of synchronicity. Our minds have to be perfectly attuned to work as a single delicate implement […] And it should be very pretty. [They hold hands again, closing their eyes. They start to breathe rapidly. The rose glows and begins to float. They then attempt to pluck the petals from the rose, but the spells fails].92

As they continue to experiment with each other, the visual language used to depict their magical trysts mirrors that of sexual partners. When they first perform a spell together successfully, it is shot similarly to a sex scene: soft, pink lighting, slow camera movements up the women’s

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bodies, romantic music, as the two women breathe increasingly heavily, holding hands, until falling back on to the pillows moaning.93 Not only are their magic scenes shot as love scenes, but they discuss their spells as sex. Soon after their magical experiment with the flower, the two meet again: Willow: Tara: Willow:

I had so much fun the other night…the spells. Yeah, that was nice. I hope you don’t think I just come over for the spells and everything. I mean, I really like just talking, and hanging out with you, and stuff.94

If one was to swap out the word ‘spells’ for ‘fooling around,’ this would read as a tentative discussion between new lovers, as opposed to two witches testing out their powers. In the final episode of Season 4, each of the characters fall into an enchanted sleep that foreshadows the next season’s arc: Willow dreams that she is painting a Sappho poem in Greek on Tara’s naked back while they discuss her ‘secret’ that everyone will find out about.95 Witchcraft and magic are quite clearly coded as metaphorical queerness. The magical coding of queer sex in Buffy has been criticized by some scholars for erasing queer sexual identities, as queerness is (initially) depicted metaphorically while heterosexual sex is not. Jowett argues that Willow’s long-term relationships with both Oz and with Tara are presented as romantic rather than sexual, as her “sexual activity tends to be displaced or projected elsewhere,” usually through magic.96 However, as Keegan points out, “Buffy’s melodramatic representation of supernatural queer desire allowed the show to refuse the normative identity politics of gay and lesbian representation while also surviving in a hostile network environment.”97 The magical coding of Willow and Tara’s sexual relationship is dismantled as the seasons progress, with the subtext rapidly becoming text. By “Once More With Feeling,” the musical episode in Season 6 discussed above, the two are seen having sex in as explicit form as possible on pre-watershed television. Tara sings about her love for Willow in “Under Your Spell” while Willow performs oral sex on her outside of the camera frame and makes the two of them float in the air with her magic. The song concludes with the lines “lost in ecstasy,/spread beneath my Willow tree,/you make me com––plete,” with Tara holding the note on ‘cum––,’ playfully increasing the clear sexual connotations

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of the song.98 Willlow and Tara’s sexual relationship and its correlations to witchcraft and magic demonstrate the accretion of feminist and queer memories of the witch and the consequent embodiment of witchcraft as queer sex. Conversely, where witchcraft and queer sex and sexuality are linked in Buffy, explicitly validating long-held beliefs about the link between lesbianism and witchcraft, in Sabrina there is an ambiguous coding about witchcraft and sexuality. The first season of Sabrina pivots on Sabrina’s choice on her 16th birthday to follow either her witch heritage or her mortal heritage.99 Witchcraft in the show draws heavily on early modern Christian theological tropes: Sabrina’s witches worship Satan, eat human flesh (both adults and babies), cavort on the Sabbath, and study the Dark Arts. Witches in Sabrina are almost all promiscuous (with notable exceptions, such as Sabrina’s Aunt Hilda, who is a virgin until Part 2), but they are not shamed for their rampant lust: in fact, they are celebrated for having as much sex as possible, and often use sex to their advantage. Sabrina is characterized by its explicitness and complete lack of subtlety: what might be implied or encoded in another text is part of the dialogue in Sabrina. For instance, in the middle of a conversation with her family, Sabrina says “[w]itches are into free love and multiple partners.”100 The sexual politics of witchcraft in Sabrina (while sanitized to a certain degree to meet the young adult audience and the Netflix platform) are quite overtly represented and commented on. The carnality of the witch is introduced early in the series. In Part One, Sabrina recruits Prudence, Agatha, and Dorcas, fellow witches at the Academy of Unseen Arts (a magical school run by the coven), to help her trick the boys at Baxter High (Sabrina’s mortal high school) who have been bullying her friend, Theo.101 Seducing the boys into joining them in the nearby mines, Sabrina and the other girls weaponize their sexuality to magically torment and punish the boys. Witches and warlocks throughout the series reaffirm the promiscuity and queer sexuality of the witch, often having orgies or polyamorous love affairs even as teenagers. For instance, the witches observe Lupercalia, a festival described as “witches’ Valentine’s Day,”102 which celebrates fertility through the encouragement of sexual activity among the witches. As Sabrina’s Aunt Zelda says “Lupercalia is a symphony of sensuality and pleasure, not shame and regret as the False God and your Aunt Hilda would have you believe.”103 Sabrina’s cousin Ambrose, a keen participant in Lupercalia, has continuous sexual

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relationships with multiple partners, including his boyfriend Lucas Chalfant, as do Prudence and the Weird Sisters. Sabrina’s fellow teen witches at the Academy even joke about their sluttiness: “‘[w]hy do you have to be such a bitch all the time, Pru?’ ‘I don’t know, Nicky, why do you have to be such a warlock-slut all the time?’”104 (There is a troubling trend in Sabrina where the young witches of colour, Ambrose and Prudence particularly, are heavily sexualised in a way that the white lead, Sabrina, is not.) Despite Sabrina being a young adult television show with a young adult rating to contend with, there is a constant, explicit inclusion of both teen and adult sex that reflects the commitment in the show to depicting witchcraft as a slutty, Satanic practice. However, Sabrina challenges this narrative around the inherent sluttiness of witches and the rampant lust they are imbued with when they sign the Book of the Beast, in action if not in words. Witches must be virgins before they sign the Dark Lord’s book. In an argument between Sabrina and her aunties, she points out the inherent sexism of this law: Zelda:

Ambrose: Sabrina:

He [Harvey, Sabrina’s mortal boyfriend] hasn’t defiled you, has he? Witch law forbids novitiates from being anything less than virginal. Oh, wow. Not that it’s anyone’s business, but no. […] However, now that you bring it up, I admit, I have reservations about saving myself for the Dark Lord. Why does he get to decide what I do with my body?105

Sabrina, as a half-witch, is in a position to question norms of witchcraft that her family, as full-blooded witches, are not able to, and she begins by questioning the link between sexual activity and witchcraft, asserting control over her own body. In a show which is not subtle about its intersectional feminist politics, Sabrina asking why a man should have control over her body and her sexual choices not only signifies the enduring connection between the symbol of the witch and feminist politics, but questions the link between lust and witchcraft itself. This exploration and disruption of the connection between witchcraft and promiscuity is continued in Part Two, as Sabrina decides whether to have sex for the first time with her warlock boyfriend, Nicholas Scratch. Prudence teases Sabrina for not having sex:

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[…] But, come on, Sabrina. In the dark, late at night, between the sheets of your virgin’s bed, are you telling me you’ve never had the odd, stray thought about Nick? Imagined him slipping through the window? Between your legs? Eww! You’re like one of my Aunt Hilda’s bad Harlequin romance novels. Lust isn’t a sin, Sabrina, it’s an emotion.106

Sabrina’s apparent reluctance to begin having sex is presented as being at odds with her witch nature: when pulled up for continuing to tease Sabrina, Prudence replies “Sabrina’s not so naïve and innocent as all that. No one is after signing the Dark Lord’s Book of the Beast.”107 Her own Aunt Zelda encourages her to participate in the Lupercalia and begin having sex, despite her young age: Sabrina: Hilda: Zelda: Sabrina: Zelda: Hilda: Zelda:

Is participating in the Lupercalia voluntary or mandatory? Voluntary. But everyone does it. Because, again, it’s aboutYes, Aunt Zelda, but if I’m not actively having S-E-XWhat better time to start? Zelda! How dare you pressure her like that. I’m doing nothing of the kind, Hilda.108

Nevertheless, despite the taunts from Prudence and the pressure from her Aunt Zelda, Sabrina does not have sex until she is ready to. In fact, Sabrina not having had sex before becomes a recurring plot point; like many young adult media texts that blends supernatural action with realworld dramas, cataclysmic events like the opening of the Gates of Hell are given as much airtime as Sabrina’s on–off relationship with Nick and her worries about his past infidelities. However, the series does not end in this impasse: at a moment in the final season where Sabrina believes she will die in six hours’ time she decides to have sex with Nick. This is not positioned as Sabrina ‘losing’ her virginity or any other outdated trope that assigns excess value or purity to the first sex act, but instead as Sabrina wanting to experience this act of love prior to her death. Tied as the series is to Sabrina’s coming-of-age narrative, the television show demonstrates a path away from the inherent sexualisation of witches. While the show seems to repudiate the sexual politics of the witch, there remains a recurring concern with the coven and with family in

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Sabrina. Like Pip and Harry Potter before her, Sabrina is an orphan; her search for family, both biological and chosen, mirrors those of many famous orphans in literature and film before her. Sabrina has many families: her aunties and cousin who raise her; her mortal friends, Harvey, Roz, and Theo; her witch friends and boyfriend, Prudence, Agatha, Dorcas, and Nick; and even the coven she joins, which changes form over time from the Church to Night to the Church of Lilith and finally to the Church of Hecate. This is compounded by the primary narrative of the Parts One to Three about Sabrina’s ‘true’ parentage; it is revealed that her father is in fact Lucifer Morningstar, who seeks to make her his Queen in Hell. Family, for Sabrina, is fraught; but as with many young adult texts, chosen family is demonstrated to be a more enduring attachment. Sabrina’s choice in Part One between choosing the life of a mortal or of a witch is as much a difficulty for her because she would lose one of her chosen families, and that is something she is not willing to compromise on. In spite of this, repeatedly and in a manner typical of most ‘battle for good and evil’ popular media texts, chosen family always wins. Witches in Sabrina are profoundly social creatures; they operate on bonds of community, care, love and, yes, sometimes, sex.

The Witch’s Sexual Futures Witches have always been associated with female sexuality, promiscuity, queerness, and polyamory, and that is not something that will likely ever fade. Even as the cultural conditions within which the witch’s sexuality is remembered adjust, the witch still has an inherent correlation to sex and sexuality, for good or ill. The diabolical sexual promiscuity of the witch has been used to underpin her monstrosity: the early modern witch is very much a sexual creature. However, as waves of feminist activists and writers have interrogated the connection between witches and women’s sexuality, the witch has been incorporated into and then outlasted patriarchal institutions and social norms. The inherent carnality of the witch has never really gone away—but it has been repurposed, much like the monstrosity of the symbol. Re-remembering the witch with an inheritance of feminist activism and with a feminist activist memory becomes an act of updating the past for the present’s purposes. The witch’s sexuality is the mechanic that represents her exclusion from cultural regimes of power and the marriage economy, the bond that connects her to her coven, and the way that she loves her partner. Drawing these past discourses

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of witchcraft, women’s sexuality, Christian rhetoric, and feminist activism into the present through re-reading these texts marshals these past ideas for a feminist future. The title of this chapter is ‘Lover’ as it picks up the connotations of ‘lover’ as both a sexual partner and as one who loves another, romantically or platonically. A lot of the focus in this chapter has been on how these witches work as wives, girlfriends, and partners (both sexually and romantically). However, by discussing how witches love, this chapter has veered repeatedly into family. They have friends, partners, and family (biological or chosen) that surround them. Gill and Morticia’s sexuality is connected to normative discourses of family as much as of love and sex; the Eastwick-ians are exploring new feminist models of family (to varying degrees of happiness and success); and Willow and Sabrina’s narratives are both defined by their search for community and by the strength of their chosen families. In investigating the role that sex, sexuality, and romance play in the cultural memoryscapes of the witch, feminist or otherwise, familial love repeatedly comes to the fore. These witches are never alone: they are all in communities, in relationships, in friendship groups, in families. Remembering the ideological impetus of the witch’s sexuality and carnality requires a concurrent consideration of family, community, and love. Witches, as carnal and lusty as they certainly may be, are fundamentally lovers, in all its expansive, feminist potential.

Notes 1. Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger, Malleus Maleficarum, trans. Montague Summers (1928, reis., London: Arrow Books, 1971), 122 (hereafter ‘Summers translation’). 2. Kristen J. Sollée, Witches, Sluts, Feminists: Conjuring the Sex Positive (Berkeley: Three L Media, 2017), 9. 3. Lyndal Roper, Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004). 4. Roper, Witch Craze, 144–159. 5. Roper 85. 6. Summers translation 123. 7. Peter Cryle and Elizabeth Stephens, Normality: A Critical Genealogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 333–338. 8. Cryle and Stephens, Normality, 337; see also Michael Warner, The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life (New York: The Free Press, Simon and Schuster, 1999), 16–20.

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9. This phrase was used to describe by Alan Dershowitz to describe the sexual and moral panics after Bill Clinton’s impeachment, but I use it in the expanded sense that Warner uses, describing the regimes of cultural shame that are directed at non-hegemonic sex and sexualities. See Warner, Trouble with Normal, 19. 10. Steffen Hantke, “Bell, Book, Candle, Vertigo: The Hollywood Star System and Cinematic Intertextuality,” Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 63, no. 4 (2015): 450. 11. Bell, Book, and Candle, dir. Richard Quine (1958; Culver City, CA: Columbia Picture Industries), Google Play Movies, https://play.google. com/video/lava/web/player/yt:movie:PLGu9dBWZRM?autoplay=1& authuser=0. 12. Quine, dir. Bell, Book, and Candle. 13. Nicky has his own subplot where he becomes friends with a human witchcraft researcher, Sidney Redlitch, who is writing a book about witches in Manhattan. This is coded as a sublimated queer relationship, something that is reinforced when viewed through Lemmon’s star persona and his role one year later in Some Like It Hot, where he plays Jerry/Daphne and spends most of the film in drag. 14. Quine, dir. Bell, Book, and Candle. 15. Quine, dir. Bell, Book, and Candle. 16. Quine, dir. Bell, Book, and Candle. 17. Quine, dir. Bell, Book, and Candle. 18. Quine, dir. Bell, Book, and Candle. 19. Cryle and Stephens 333. 20. Bell, Book, and Candle. 21. This line is actually taken directly from John Van Druten’s original Broadway play, which preceded The Crucible by 3 years. The witch and the witch trials were being invoked across the McCarthy era American stage in many different forms (not just Millerian). 22. Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1963), 19, passim. 23. Friedan, Mystique, 19, 29. 24. Betty Friedan, “Television and the Feminine Mystique,” in ‘It Changed My Life’: Writings on the Women’s Movements, ed. Betty Friedan, 59–76 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1998), 67. 25. Lynn Spigel, Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 108; David Marc, Comic Visions: Television Comedy and American Culture, (1989, reis., Massachusetts, USA: Blackwell Publishers, 1997), 107–108. 26. Spigel, Dreamhouse, 108. 27. Spigel 108–119. 28. Spigel 119.

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29. Laura Morowitz, “The Monster Within: The Munsters, The Addams Family and the American Family in the 1960s,” Critical Studies in Television 2, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 35. 30. Morowitz, “Monster,” 35, 36. 31. The Addams Family, season 1, episode 27, “The Addams Family and the Spaceman,” directed by Sidney Lanfield, written by Harry Winkler and Hannibal Coons, aired April 2, 1965, in broadcast syndication, Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2007, DVD. 32. The Addams Family, season 1, episode 7, “Halloween with the Addams Family,” directed by Sidney Lanfield, written by Keith Fowler and Phil Leslie, aired October 30, 1964, in broadcast syndication, Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2006, DVD. 33. The Addams Family, season 2, episode 18, “Fester Goes On A Diet,” directed by Sidney Lanfield, written by Hannibal Coons and Harry Winkler, aired January 14, 1966, in broadcast syndication, Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2007, DVD. 34. The Addams Family, season 1, episode 29, “Morticia’s Favourite Charity,” directed by Sidney Lanfield, written by Elroy Schwartz and Jameson Brewer, aired April 16, 1965, in broadcast syndication, Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2007, DVD. 35. The Addams Family, season 1, episode 17, “Mother Lurch Visits the Addams Family,” directed by Sidney Lanfield, written by Jameson Brewer, aired January 15, 1965, in broadcast syndication, Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2006, DVD. 36. The Addams Family, “Mother Lurch Visits the Addams Family.”. 37. The Addams Family, season 1, episode 20, “Cousin Itt Visits the Addams Family,” directed by Sidney Lanfield, written by Tony Wilson and Henry Sharp, aired February 5, 1965, in broadcast syndication, Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2006, DVD. 38. The Addams Family, season 2, episode 9, “Morticia, the Sculptress,” directed by Sidney Lanfield, written by Harry Winkler and Hannibal Coons, aired November 12, 1965, in broadcast syndication, Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2007, DVD. 39. Quoted in Morowitz 46. 40. Morowitz 46. 41. The Addams Family, season 2, episode 10, “Gomez, the Reluctant Lover,” directed by Sidney Lanfield, written by Charles Marion and Leo Rifkin, aired November 19, 1965, in broadcast syndication, Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2007, DVD. 42. Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978), 186. Mary Daly’s views of the witch’s sexuality

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43. 44.

45.

46. 47. 48.

49. 50. 51. 52.

53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58.

and radical separatism reinforce the essentialist view of gender she represents in Gyn/Ecology in general. Perhaps I should use ‘cis-terhood’ here instead. This again highlights Daly’s view of femininity and biology. The gendered rhetoric used in these texts is quite often biologicallyessentialist (sometimes intentionally so, as in trans-exclusionary radical feminism, and sometimes unintentionally so). I have tried to resist this essentializing rhetoric in my own analysis, but am not erasing the kind of language used in the texts themselves. Rather, I am concerned with how this particular invocation of the memory of the witch mediates contentious feminist politics: both challenging institutions like the family unit that serve to uphold rigid gender norms, while also, sometimes, reinforcing other rigid gender norms themselves. In spite of all the accruing memories of liberation that the witch holds, she also is deeply haunted by a feminism that is not inclusive of transgender, gender non-conforming, and non-binary people; as much as the witch can be a symbol of revolution, she is also still used as a normatizing force (particularly, strangely enough, in gendered and sexed discourses). John Updike, The Witches of Eastwick (1984, reis., London: Penguin Books, 2009); The Witches of Eastwick, dir. George Miller (1987; Pyrmont, NSW: Warner Home Video, 2000), DVD. Updike, Eastwick, 21. Updike, 178. Kim A. Loudermilk, Fictional Feminism: How American Bestsellers Affect the Movement for Women’s Equality (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), 96. Updike 21. Updike 29. Updike 28, 46–47. Updike 165. As a bisexual person myself, I am almost as baffled by binary logics of sexuality as I am by binary logics of gender. Clearly Alexandra is not heterosexual, and neither is she a lesbian. The erasure of bisexuality in Eastwick, however, is unsurprising, given the long erasure of bisexuality in both heterosexual and queer circles. See Hannah McCann, “Bi Visibility Day: We want bisexual existence, not just visibility,” Archer Magazine, September 23, 2020, https://archermagazine. com.au/2020/09/bisexual-existence-not-just-bisexual-visibility/. Updike 33. Updike 36. Updike 57. Updike 162. Updike 198. Updike 236.

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59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72.

73. 74.

75. 76.

77. 78. 79. 80.

81.

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Itself playing into tropes of queer villainy and Satanic queerness. Updike 252. Loudermilk, Fictional Feminism, 101. And, it must be said, regressive and overly sexualized views of womanhood. Updike 113. Updike 119. Michial Farmer, Imagination and Idealism in John Updike’s Fiction (Rochester, New York: Camden House, 2017), 167. Loudermilk 103. Updike 17. Updike 14. Updike 109. Updike 108, 98. Loudermilk 96. Margaret Atwood, “Wondering What It’s Like To Be A Woman,” The New York Times, May 13, 1984, https://www.nytimes.com/1984/05/ 13/books/wondering-what-it-s-like-to-be-a-woman.html. Loudermilk 107. Janet Maslin, “Film: The Witches of Eastwick,” New York Times, June 12, 1987, https://www.nytimes.com/1987/06/12/movies/filmthe-witches-of-eastwick.html; Jen Chaney, “The Witches of Eastwick Is A Fascinating Movie to Watch Post-Weinstein,” Vulture, October 30, 2017, https://www.vulture.com/2017/10/the-witches-of-eastwick-30years-later.html. Miller, dir. “The Martini Trio/Man of Desires,” The Witches of Eastwick. Miller, dir. “Eruption of Rage,” The Witches of Eastwick. Both the novel and the film have incredibly offensive depictions of women who are victims of domestic and family violence ‘leading’ their abusers to commit these horrible acts, usually through being ‘nagging wives.’ There is nothing that redeems these narratives in either text: they are inexcusable. Miller, dir. “Casting A Spell,” The Witches of Eastwick. Miller, dir. “Everyone’s Invited,” The Witches of Eastwick. Miller, dir. “Getting Natural,” and “Frolic for Four,” The Witches of Eastwick. Janet Maslin, “Film: The Witches of Eastwick,” New York Times, June 12, 1987, https://www.nytimes.com/1987/06/12/movies/filmthe-witches-of-eastwick.html. Richard Dyer, Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society, 2nd ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 3. Dyer characterises star image as an intertext, influencing and shaping interpretations of a given film. I have not mounted an analysis of star image for the other visual texts in this monograph, although it would certainly be productive in considering

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83. 84. 85.

86.

87. 88. 89.

90.

91.

92.

93.

94.

95.

how the memory of the witch accrues over popular culture. I have specifically addressed it here because it demonstrates such a marked difference in casting Updike’s source novel. Miller, dir. “18 Months Later,” The Witches of Eastwick. The discussion of these girls’ puberty and exploration of their sexuality dovetails with my discussion of these texts in Chapter 7: Witches as Girls. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, season 6, episode 7, “Once More, With Feeling,” directed and written by Joss Whedon, aired Nov 6, 2001, Twentieth Century Fox, 2006, DVD. Farah Mendlesohn, “Surpassing the Love of Vampires: Or, Why (and How) a Queer Reading of the Buffy/Willow Relationship Is Denied,” in Fighting the Forces: What’s at Stake in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, ed. Rhonda V. Wilcox and David Lavery (Lanham, Boulder, New York and Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2002), 56. Lorna Jowett, Sex and the Slayer (Middletown, Connecticut, USA: Wesleyan University Press, 2005), 38–39. Willow usually refers to herself as ‘gay’ or as someone who ‘likes women,’ rather than calling herself a lesbian. Tanya Krzywinska, “Hubble-Bubble, Herbs, and Grimoires: Magic, Manichaeanism, and Witchcraft in Buffy,” in Fighting the Forces: What’s at Stake in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, ed. Rhonda V. Wilcox and David Lavery (Lanham, Boulder, New York and Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2002), 191. While I concur with this reading of how heterosexual audiences read the witch/lesbian coming out narratives, I am also intrigued as to how queer audiences read this narrative. Cáel M. Keegan, “Emptying the Future: Queer Melodramatics and Negative Utopia in Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” Queer Studies in Media and Popular Culture 1, no. 1 (2016): 12. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, season 4, episode 10, “Hush,” directed and written by Joss Whedon, aired December 14, 1999, in broadcast syndication, Twentieth Century Fox, 2006, DVD. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, season 4, episode 12, “A New Man,” directed by Michael Gershman, written by Jane Espenson, aired January 25, 2000, in broadcast syndication, Twentieth Century Fox, 2006, DVD. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, season 4, episode 16, “Who Are You?” directed and written by Joss Whedon, aired February 29, 2000, in broadcast syndication, Twentieth Century Fox, 2006, DVD. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, season 4, episode 14, “Goodbye Iowa,” directed by David Solomon, written by Marti Noxon, aired February 14, 2000, in broadcast syndication, Twentieth Century Fox, 2006, DVD. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, season 4, episode 22, “Restless,” directed and written by Joss Whedon, aired May 23, 2000, in broadcast syndication, Twentieth Century Fox, 2006, DVD.

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96. Jowett, Sex and the Slayer, 57. 97. Keegan, “Emptying the Future,” 14. This draws on the ‘anti-social’ turn of queer theory that rejects homonormativity, a recurring feature of my analysis over the following chapters. 98. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, “Once More, With Feeling.”. 99. Presented as “leaving [her] girlhood behind” this choice and Sabrina’s personal development from girl to woman and witch will be discussed in more depth in Chapter 7. See The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, season 1, episode 1, “Chapter One: October Country,” directed by Lee Toland Krieger, written by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, aired October 26, 2018, Netflix https://www.netflix.com/watch/80230071?trackId=250 318489. 100. The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, season 2, episode 4, “Chapter Fifteen: Doctor Cerberus’s House of Horror,” directed by Alex Garcia Lopez, written by Ross Maxwell, aired April 5, 2019, Netflix, https:// www.netflix.com/watch/80230085?trackId=250308460&tctx=2%2C0% 2Cfe9e3842-b5cd-477b-8b40-7e160f919378-218028552%2CGPS_ D516A6EEE322B0C621BDEEB0062668-62A4BE648D8580-76E780 E6C5_p_1664496715212%2C%2C%2C%2C%2C80223989. 101. Theo is a transgender boy, played by non-binary actor Lachlan Watson (who uses they/them pronouns). Theo is called Susie and uses she/her pronouns in Part One, prior to coming out in Part Two. I have used Theo’s chosen name and male pronouns for my analysis, rather than his older names and pronouns. 102. The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, season 2, episode 3, “Chapter Fourteen: Lupercalia,” directed by Salli Richardson-Whitfield, written by Oanh Ly, aired April 5, 2019, Netflix, https://www.netflix.com/ watch/80230084?trackId=250308460&tctx=2%2C0%2Cfe9e3842b5cd-477b-8b40-7e160f919378-218028552%2CGPS_D516A6EEE322 B0C621BDEEB0062668-62A4BE648D8580-76E780E6C5_p_166449 6715212%2C%2C%2C%2C%2C80223989. 103. The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, “Chapter Fourteen: Lupercalia.” The ‘False God’ that Zelda mentions is the Christian God. 104. The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, season 1, episode 4, “Chapter Four: Witch Academy,” directed by Rob Siedenglanz, written by Donna Thorland, aired October 26, 2018, Netflix, https://www.netflix.com/ watch/80230074?trackId=250308460&tctx=2%2C0%2Cfe9e3842b5cd-477b-8b40-7e160f919378-218028552%2CGPS_D516A6EEE322 B0C621BDEEB0062668-62A4BE648D8580-76E780E6C5_p_166449 6715212%2C%2C%2C%2C%2C80223989. 105. The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, “Chapter One: October Country.”. 106. The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, “Chapter Fourteen: Lupercalia.”. 107. The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, “Chapter Fourteen: Lupercalia.”.

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108. The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, “Chapter Fourteen: Lupercalia.”.

Bibliography Aguirre-Sacasa, Roberto, writer. The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. Season 1, episode 1, “Chapter One: October Country.” Directed by Lee Toland Krieger. Aired October 26, 2018. Netflix. https://www.netflix.com/watch/ 80230071?trackId=250318489. Atwood, Margaret. “Wondering What It’s Like to Be a Woman.” The New York Times, May 13, 1984. https://www.nytimes.com/1984/05/13/books/won dering-what-it-s-like-to-be-a-woman.html Biller, Anna, dir. The Love Witch. 2016; Kew, VIC: Umbrella Entertainment, 2017. BluRay. Brewer, Jameson, writer. The Addams Family. Season 1, episode 17, “Mother Lurch Visits the Addams Family.” Directed by Sidney Lanfield. Aired January 15, 1965, in broadcast syndication. Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2006, DVD. Chaney, Jen. “The Witches of Eastwick Is A Fascinating Movie to Watch PostWeinstein.” Vulture. October 30 2017. https://www.vulture.com/2017/10/ the-witches-of-eastwick-30-years-later.html Coons, Hannibal and Harry Winkler, writers. The Addams Family. Season 2, episode 18, “Fester Goes on a Diet.” Directed by Sidney Lanfield. Aired January 14, 1966, in broadcast syndication. Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2007, DVD. Cryle, Peter and Elizabeth Stephens. Normality: A Critical Genealogy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017. Daly, Mary. Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism. Boston: Beacon Press, 1978. Dyer, Richard. Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society. 2nd edition. London and New York: Routledge, 2004. Espenson, Jane, writer. Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Season 4, episode 12, “A New Man.” Directed by Michael Gershman. Aired January 25, 2000, in broadcast syndication. Twentieth Century Fox, 2006, DVD. Farmer, Michial. Imagination and Idealism in John Updike’s Fiction. Rochester, New York: Camden House, 2017. Fowler, Keith and Phil Leslie, writers. The Addams Family. Season 1, episode 7, “Halloween with the Addams Family.” Directed by Sidney Lanfield. Aired October 30, 1964, in broadcast syndication. Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2006, DVD. Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, Inc, 1963.

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———. “Television and the Feminine Mystique.” In ‘It Changed My Life’: Writings on the Women’s Movement. Edited by Betty Friedan, 59–76. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1998. Hantke, Steffen. “Bell, Book, Candle, Vertigo: The Hollywood Star System and Cinematic Intertextuality,” Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 63, no. 4 (2015): 447–466. Jowett, Lorna. Sex and the Slayer. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 2005. Keegan, Cáel M. “Emptying the Future: Queer Melodramatics and Negative Utopia in Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” Queer Studies in Media and Popular Culture 1, no. 1 (2016): 9–22. Kramer, Heinrich and James Sprenger. Malleus Maleficarum. Translated by Montague Summers. 1928. Reissue. London: Arrow Books, 1971. Krzywinska, Tanya. “Hubble-Bubble, Herbs, and Grimoires: Magic, Manichaeanism, and Witchcraft in Buffy.” In Fighting the Forces: What’s at Stake in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, edited by Rhonda V. Wilcox and David Lavery, 178–194. Lanham, Boulder, New York and Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2002. Loudermilk, Kim A. Fictional Feminism: How American Bestsellers Affect the Movement for Women’s Equality. New York and London: Routledge, 2004. Ly, Oanh, writer. The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. Season 2, episode 3, “Chapter Fourteen: Lupercalia.” Directed by Salli Richardson-Whitfield. Aired April 5, 2019. Netflix. https://www.netflix.com/watch/80230084? trackId=250308460&tctx=2%2C0%2Cfe9e3842-b5cd-477b-8b40-7e160f919 378-218028552%2CGPS_D516A6EEE322B0C621BDEEB0062668-62A 4BE648D8580-76E780E6C5_p_1664496715212%2C%2C%2C%2C%2C8 0223989. Marc, David. Comic Visions: Television Comedy and American Culture. 1989. Reissue. Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers, 1997. Marion, Charles and Leo Rifkin, writers. The Addams Family. Season 2, episode 10, “Gomez the Reluctant Lover.” Directed by Sidney Lanfield. Aired November 19, 1965, in broadcast syndication, Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2007, DVD. Maslin, Janet. “Film: The Witches of Eastwick.” New York Times, 12 June 1987. https://www.nytimes.com/1987/06/12/movies/film-the-witches-ofeastwick.html. Maxwell, Ross, writer. The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. Season 2, episode 4, “Chapter Fifteen: Doctor Cerberus’s House of Horror.” Directed by

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Lee Toland Krieger. Aired April 5, 2019. Netflix. https://www.netflix.com/ watch/80230085?trackId=250308460&tctx=2%2C0%2Cfe9e3842-b5cd477b-8b40-7e160f919378-218028552%2CGPS_D516A6EEE322B0C621 BDEEB0062668-62A4BE648D8580-76E780E6C5_p_1664496715212% 2C%2C%2C%2C%2C80223989. McCann, Hannah. “Bi Visibility Day: We want bisexual existence, not just visibility.” Archer Magazine, September 23, 2020. https://archermagazine.com. au/2020/09/bisexual-existence-not-just-bisexual-visibility/. Mendlesohn, Farah. “Surpassing the Love of Vampires: Or, Why (and How) a Queer Reading of the Buffy/Willow Relationship Is Denied.” In Fighting the Forces: What’s at Stake in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, edited by Rhonda V. Wilcox and David Lavery, 45–60. Lanham, Boulder, New York and Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2002. Miller, George, dir. The Witches of Eastwick. 1987; Pyrmont, NSW: Warner Home Video, 2000. DVD. Morowitz, Laura. “The Monster Within: The Munsters, The Addams Family and the American Family in the 1960s.” Critical Studies in Television 2, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 35–56. Noxon, Marti, writer. Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Season 4, episode 14, “Goodbye Iowa.” Directed by David Solomon. Aired February 14, 2000. Twentieth Century Fox, 2006, DVD. Quine, Richard, dir. Bell, Book and Candle. 1958; Culver City, CA: Columbia Picture Industries. Google Play Movies, https://play.google.com/video/lava/ web/player/yt:movie:PLGu9dBWZRM?autoplay=1&authuser=0. Roper, Lyndal. Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004. Schwartz, Elroy and Jameson Brewer, writers. The Addams Family. Season 2, episode 18, “Morticia’s Favourite Charity.” Directed by Sidney Lanfield. Aired April 16, 1965, in broadcast syndication, Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2007, DVD. Sollée, Kristen J. Witches, Sluts, Feminists: Conjuring the Sex Positive. Berkeley: Three L Media, 2017. Spigel, Lynn. Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs. Durham: Duke University Press, 2001. Thorland, Donna, writer. The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. Season 1, episode 4, “Chapter Four: Witch Academy. Aired October 26, 2018. Netflix. https:// www.netflix.com/watch/80230074?trackId=250308460&tctx=2%2C0%2Cf e9e3842-b5cd-477b-8b40-7e160f919378-218028552%2CGPS_D516A6 EEE322B0C621BDEEB0062668-62A4BE648D8580-76E780E6C5_p_166 4496715212%2C%2C%2C%2C%2C80223989. Updike, John. The Witches of Eastwick. 1984. Reissue. London: Penguin Books, 2009.

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Warner, Michael. The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life. New York: The Free Press, Simon and Shuster, 1999. Whedon, Joss, writer. Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Season 4, episode 10, “Hush.” Directed by Joss Whedon. Aired December 14, 1999. Twentieth Century Fox, 2006, DVD. ———. Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Season 6, episode 7, “Once More, With Feeling.” Directed by Joss Whedon. Aired November 6, 2001, in broadcast syndication. Twentieth Century Fox, 2006, DVD. ———. Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Season 4, episode 22, “Restless.” Directed by Joss Whedon. Aired May 23, 2000. Twentieth Century Fox, 2006, DVD. ———. Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Season 4, episode 16, “Who Are You?” Directed by Joss Whedon. Aired February 29, 2000. Twentieth Century Fox, 2006, DVD. Wilson, Tony and Henry Sharp, writers. The Addams Family. Season 1, episode 20, “Cousin Itt Visits the Addams Family.” Directed by Sidney Lanfield. Aired February 5, 1965, in broadcast syndication, Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2006, DVD. Winkler, Harry and Hannibal Coons, writers. The Addams Family. Season 1, episode 27, “The Addams Family and the Spaceman.” Directed by Sidney Lanfield. Aired April 2, 1965, in broadcast syndication. Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2007, DVD. ———. The Addams Family. Season 2, episode 9, “Morticia, the Sculptress.” Directed by Sidney Lanfield. Aired November 12, 1965, in broadcast syndication. Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2007, DVD.

CHAPTER 6

Witches as Mothers

In All About Love (2001), bell hooks writes of her occasional impatience with her mother, and her friend (whose mother has passed away) urging her to be more generous.1 Only a few pages after this anecdote, hooks writes of her mother that “[l]ooking at her life, I was awed by her service to others […] It is so easy for all of us to forget the service women give to others in everyday life—the sacrifices women make […] When anyone thinks a woman who serves ‘gives ‘cause that’s what mothers or real women do,’ they deny her full humanity and thus fail to see the generosity inherent in her acts.”2 I open this chapter on witches and mothers with hooks’s writing as a reminder to myself, much like her friend reminded her, to move with generosity in my own analysis of the witch mother as a cultural symbol and the complex, contradictory, and sometimes irreconcilable threads of memory that she is woven from. The idea of the mother is almost as contested within feminist philosophy as the idea of the witch, or even of womanhood itself. These two identities—mother and woman— are often conflated and viewed as equivalent, both within patriarchal and feminist discourses, as a means of both restricting and liberating mothers.3 The long association between these two identities under patriarchy has led to feminist work, particularly from the 1970s onwards, which sought to distinguish womanhood from maternity, or reconfiguring motherhood so that it was not beholden to patriarchal ideologies. An ongoing part of the feminist project is the liberation and validation of the maternal. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 B. Kosmina, Feminist Afterlives of the Witch, Palgrave Studies in (Re)Presenting Gender, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25292-1_6

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There is a tendency (by many) of viewing the mother as a kind of cultural force around which or from which other identities operate or are formed: mothers primarily exist in relation to how other subjects respond or react to them. Mass media and popular culture texts and discourses featuring mothers or where mothers are the intended audience function as a form of mass surveillance and discipline (in the Foucauldian sense) over mothers and maternity; mothers are judged according to how well they do or do not conform to “ideologies of good motherhood” (with all the political and patriarchal connotations of ‘good’).4 In analysing the witch mothers in these texts, it is not my aim to perpetuate this surveillance, criticism, and endless moralizing about the patterns, behaviours, practices, and ideologies of motherhood and mothering: I am not judging these witches as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ mothers. I am not interested in the moralizing tenor of much discussion of maternity (within both feminist and nonfeminist discourses). My goal, as with my previous consideration of the witch as monster and as lover, is to consider how cultural memories of the witch are wound up with feminist politics and popular media, and what particular affordances the maternal brings to witches within feminist memory. The correlations between witchcraft and motherhood, which have recurred again and again across religious, spiritual, and theological discourses, activist efforts (feminist and anti-feminist), and popular culture texts, demonstrate something about the cultural prestige or value and power that is afforded to both witches and mothers, as well as the apparent ‘unknowability’ or inscrutability of both institutions. Both witchcraft and motherhood are held up as a kind of magic beyond words, in both trite and profound ways. What the depiction of the witch-as-mother demonstrates is a general popular cultural discourse about motherhood being a kind of magic but equally being a possibly dangerous condition. However, the loaded cultural memory of the witch and of maternity means that there is always an edge to witch motherhood; there is something not quite right about the witch mother that makes her a useful figure to understand the accretion of paradoxical mnemonic spectres. In some cultural discourses the witch is the embodiment of infertility, or she is an abortionist (which, for me in 2023, is the highest badge of honour to give her, but in anti-feminist ideologies is a sign of evil) but this is contrasted by the recuperative feminist counter-narratives that position the witch as midwife, healer, or wise woman, or even Jungian narratives of the witch and the Great Mother archetype. The feminist memoryscapes

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of motherhood and witchcraft are remarkably complicated and contradictory. Even without squaring this circle, the association between witches and motherhood is often still rooted in discourses of the reproducing body that align (and reduce) motherhood to the womb. It is not my intention to perpetuate this discourse, but to understand how feminist memory cultures and activist efforts that have deployed the symbol of the witch contribute to and in turn are generated within popular culture texts that either reinforce or break down this essentialist attitude towards the reproducing body and mothering. In fact, despite the prevalence of this essentialist rhetoric, the witch mother offers a curious imbrication of life and death, fertility and infertility, sex, pleasure, and chaos that opens up the potential, if not always the actuality, to divorce the mother from the body. My aim in this chapter is to examine how these overwhelmingly contradictory associations between motherhood and witches in both feminist and anti-feminist memory cultures exist across popular culture texts, and how this demonstrates the haunting legacies of so many different approaches to and considerations of maternity. As with the general growth in witcherature in the twenty-first century, witch mothers are everywhere in popular literature and film. Often, however, they are secondary characters: it is rare to see popular culture texts where the mother witch is the main character. Perhaps this is because it is rare to see texts where mothers are main characters full stop, and when mothers are represented, it is usually in a story that is about being a mother. However, there are many texts that offer some sort of commentary on the correlations between witchcraft and maternity as a secondary narrative to the plot. Children’s films like Maleficent (dir. Robert Stromberg, 2014) and Nanny McPhee (dir. Kirk Jones, 2005) offer the view of the witch mother as a powerful, benevolent figure who swoops in to take care of neglected children.5 Horror films like The Conjuring (dir. James Wan, 2013) and Hereditary (dir. Ari Aster, 2018) pick up the correlations between mothers, witches, and monstrosity, demonstrating how witch mothers are often associated with the murder of children and with the possession of parents. The witch mother is monstrous not just because she is a murderer but because she ‘perverts’ her ‘motherly’ duties to protect children. The witch mother is also represented in a more positive light: Rivka Galchen’s Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch (2021) and Alexis Henderson’s The Year of the Witching (2021) are demonstrative of this. Mothers and witches are inextricably bound together in both affirming and deconstructive manners.

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All About Our Mothers One of the recurring difficulties with discussing mothers, witches, and feminist memory is the vastly different theoretical and methodological approaches that feminist scholars, philosophers, and writers have taken to understanding and reconciling the spectre of the mother and of patriarchy as they invoke the witch in their activist efforts. This is not the first chapter to deal with this problem—every investigation of the witch entails reconciling different, contradictory threads and particularly recognizing the internal conflicts within feminist politics and memories. However, it has been the hardest to reconcile in my analysis and writing; particularly when considering that feminist and anti-feminist politics often use the same methodological approach. In psychoanalytic theory (a scholarly area that has not always been kind of women, transgender, and gendernonconforming people), the mother is the figure that the child must reject to become a subject: mothers are by necessity foreclosed from a subject position.6 Consequently, the mother has been a figure who is the trusted parent who inculcates patriarchal values in their children—someone who cannot assume subject status and whom the emerging feminist subject must erase or defy. Feminists in this vein write from the position of the matrophobic daughter: the mother is someone anterior to themselves who inculcates patriarchal thinking that they are trying to work through. For example, Mary Daly in Gyn/Ecology argues that the act of footbinding, a Chinese practice in which mothers bind daughters’ feet, affecting them permanently, in order to adhere to patriarchal standards of beauty and behaviour, is analogous to maternal inculcation of patriarchal ideology in girls’ minds.7 Similarly, Andrea Dworkin simultaneously idealizes and criticizes the role of the mother in cultural production, arguing that “[m]aternal love is known to be transcendent, holy, noble, and unselfish. It is coincidentally also a fundament of human (maledominated) civilisation and it is the real basis of human (male-dominated) sexuality.”8 Mothers are easy figures to level criticism at, even when patriarchal ideology is the real subject of critique. This particular model of feminism seems to infer “that a woman is not able to be empowered and be a mother, whether biological or non-biological.”9 On the other hand, in response to vehemently anti-mother rhetoric of maternal subjectivity (or, more often, objectivity), feminists (particularly French feminists) have sought to interrogate the semiotic objectification of the maternal. French feminism (a difficult and unwieldy term used

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to describe a difficult and unwieldy philosophical inheritance10 ) regards the mother with some ambivalence but also seeks to bring into vision a maternal subjectivity. The ‘big three’ French feminists—Luce Irigaray, Hélène Cixous, and Julia Kristeva—all consider the role of the maternal within the patriarchal Symbolic order and within feminist conceptions of subjectivity. Irigaray’s shift towards conceiving of feminine subjectivity as “plural” offers space for maternal subjects.11 Cixous sees the mother as “a metaphor” for the means by which women may liberate themselves,12 and suggests (with Catherine Clément) that the maternal voice offers an abiding representation of the potential for feminist subjectivity prior to entry in the Symbolic order13 : Kristeva, meanwhile, suggests that the maternal represents “a catastrophe of identity which plunges the proper Name into that ‘unnameable.’”14 Kristevan abjection also implicates the maternal, which is “as securing as it is stifling” for emerging subjects, and the wellspring of abjection.15 French feminists demonstrate a view of the maternal that resists her consistent objectification in Lacanian systems. In far more exuberant reclamation of the maternal, goddess feminism positions mothers as figures of such care, love, nurture, and affection that they are almost deities—people whose miraculous powers of creating and sustaining life render them a kind of goddess and that consequently confers importance on all people who have the ability to carry children. In Jungian archetypal paradigms, the mother emerges as an archetypal figure in the collective psyche through which all maternal subjects and phenomena are conceptualized (the witch is one of these phenomena).16 The mother archetype is indicative of how mythology correlates to historical phenomena, as the prevalence of goddess figures, myths, and art from various cultures and eras all emerged from the maternal archetype.17 While I am not employing Jungian archetypal theory as a methodological lens myself,18 it is important to consider when thinking about how the witch is remembered in connection to motherhood in feminist memory and in popular media. Goddess feminism, particularly in the 1970s, that emphasized the Divine Feminine and the witch as a kind of goddess symbol, clearly invites and depends on associations with Jungian notions of the Mother archetype. Drawing on Jungian tropes of the great Mother, goddess feminists sought to deify the maternal as an attempt to mythologize and exalt the feminine, and this plays out in the kinds of maternal witches that appear in popular media. This is not to even consider the commodification of mothers in neoliberal postfeminism, where they become saintly and all-suffering figures

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whose heart’s only desire is to see their children happy and healthy and to get a bunch of cheap flowers every Mother’s Day. Perhaps it is the metaphorical resonances of ‘reproduction’ that generate such an expansive view of mothering and its political and philosophical implications for feminists. More than any of the other iterations of the witch that I consider in this monograph, witch mothers are invoked in light of their bodies. The maternal body and its ineffable ability to create life are positioned as magical processes akin to witchcraft. However, viewing motherhood as a purely biological process is reductive at best; essentialist, restrictive, and transphobic at worst, and I am more interested in investigating motherhood as a cultural practice, discursively constructed with behaviours, languages, and gendered norms of care. There are two distinct scholarly considerations of maternity: as biological reproduction or as social construction. Adrienne Rich argues that while the former is “the potential relationship of any woman to her powers of reproduction and to children” the latter is “the institution, which aims at ensuring that the potential—and all women—shall remain under male control.”19 Patriarchal control over the practice and definition of motherhood has alienated mothers from their bodies while simultaneously defining them by their bodies.20 The denaturalization of motherhood, or “taking the nature out of mother,” is important in the ongoing feminist project of unshackling women from the body, and in destabilizing heterosexist patriarchy more broadly.21 Understanding motherhood as culturally constructed allows an understanding of how it is correlated to femininity, women, and gender expression, but equally opens up the potential for a more radical, queer modality of mothering and parenting that is dissociated from the reproductive and reproducing body. While I am not defining motherhood as biological reproduction, it is important to see how memories of this kind of essentializing rhetoric are still clearly evident in the figure of the witch mother. This is a part of the inheritance of the witch mother: considering the feminist afterlives of the maternal witch requires grappling with the regressive as well as the progressive aspects of these memory cultures.

Witches as Anti-Mothers In historical religious discourses, particularly Christian religious thought, the witch has been positioned as the antithesis to the mother, and the afterlives of this witchy anti-maternity continue to linger across popular culture iterations of the figure. Thurer, tracing the perception

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and construction of motherhood from antiquity to the present day, demonstrates how the witch in the early modern period in Europe was specifically positioned as the anti-mother within both theological and secular rhetoric, writing: the personae of witch and mother are closely related. They are inversions of each other. The characteristics of the witch are not random; they are direct perversions of the characteristics of the good mother. The good mother was silent; the witch was verbally aggressive. The good mother was chaste; the witch was promiscuous and perverted. The good mother was always obedient; the witch was wild and insubordinate. And the good mother was pious; the witch was flamboyantly sacrilegious. The witch was the antimom, the bad mother. She marked off the borders of proper maternal behaviour.22

Witches act as the other that defines the self; the good mother is what the witch is not. The witch is the inversion of the mother in early modern rhetoric (particularly theological but also in more secular logic) in one crucial way: the witch was infertile and caused infertility and miscarriage in others. The Malleus Maleficarum describes how witchcraft “infect[s]” sex and conception, and its authors assert that witches procure abortions.23 The witch caused crops to fail, milk to curdle, animals to suddenly sicken and die, and even caused miscarriages in other people; she was the embodiment of sterility and spread infertility in her wake. There is a prevailing concern in patriarchal, colonial, and heteronormative systems to contain and control the means of reproduction, which means that the witch’s monstrosity emerges again and again in perceived ‘anti-maternal’ behaviours such as eating babies and procuring abortions.24 The mnemonic afterlives of witch’s status as the embodiment of the infertile feminine, and the correlations to ideologies of ‘anti-maternity’ continues to emerge in popular culture iterations of the symbol up to the present day. Comparing witches from two Disney properties demonstrates the longevity of the witch’s anti-maternity. In both Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (dir. David Hand,1937), the first animated Disney film, and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (dir. Sam Raimi, 2022),25 witches demonstrate a paradoxical (anti-)maternal impulse. The witches in these films are associated with maternity but are not mothers. What these two witches demonstrate is the ongoing notion of the witch’s ‘antimaternity’ in cultural memory. However, there is a markedly different

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tone and attitude to motherhood in these films that is indicative of the enormous cultural shifts in the 85 years between their release and the altered memories of the witch that circulate in mass media. While the Stepmother’s witchy anti-maternity reflects earlier iterations of the witch as the embodiment of religious evil, Scarlet Witch’s narrative is about how much she yearns to be a mother but cannot be. These films demonstrate two sides of the same coin: the witch’s mnemonic status means she cannot be a mother, even if she desperately wants to be. The story of Snow White and her evil witch stepmother who tries to kill her to maintain her status as the most beautiful woman in the land certainly offers a compelling metaphor for both feminist and antifeminist ideologues drawing on memories of the witch and motherhood. In Disney’s adaptation, the witch Stepmother is a mother in name only, embodying the mnemonic legacies of the witch’s anti-maternity. Not only is she only ever referred to as Snow White’s stepmother, but she calls herself ‘Granny’ while in disguise as an old crone.26 It is telling that any reference to her status as a mother is always conditional—stepmother, grandmother. In fact, (step)mother and child are almost reversed in Snow White, as the un-motherliness of the witchy stepmother is underlined by Snow White’s motherliness. Upon arriving in the dwarves’ house (while they are out at work), Snow White exclaims about their filthy home: “[y]ou’d think their mother would… [gasp]! Maybe they have no mother. Then they’re orphans. That’s too bad. I know! We’ll [Snow White and her animal friends] clean the house and surprise them. Then maybe they’ll let me stay.”27 She repeatedly refers to the dwarves as “children” and upon learning that they are adult dwarves, then refers to them diminutively as “little men.”28 Snow White’s apparent love of cooking and cleaning for the dwarves is foreshadowed by her cooking and cleaning at the outset of the film when she still lives in the castle with the Stepmother (whose only gesture towards acts like cooking and cleaning is brewing evil potions). The only role Snow White is fit for is that of wife and mother, and her joy in performing this role is proof of her ‘good’ femininity and motherhood within the patriarchal logic of the film. Snow White functions as the model for maternity to further highlight that the Stepmother is not—and could never be—a mother. Snow White and the Stepmother thus validate long traditions of witchcraft and motherhood as being opposites: Snow White’s passive motherliness reinforces memories of the witch that figure her as antithetical to the mother. The reversal of maternity between these two

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figures—the daughter is maternal, the mother is a witch—destabilizes understandings of what a mother is: if the daughter is maternal but the woman who is called mother is not, then who can perform motherhood? While this is not answered in the film, what is clear is that within this controlling logic it is more appropriate for the daughter to be a mother than a witch. These ongoing questions about witches and mothers are asked in Raimi’s 2022 film featuring Scarlet Witch. The antagonist, Wanda Maximoff/Scarlet Witch, justifies her villainy as a result of her motherly love. Wanda, who has flipped between evil and heroism multiple times through her appearances in the MCU, has turned to dark ‘chaos’ magic to try and travel to an alternate universe where she can reunite with her lost children, Billy and Tommy. In the television series that narratively precedes the Multiverse film, WandaVision (2021, created by Jac Schaeffer), Wanda psychically kidnaps an entire town and forces them to act in a sitcom of her life. She wrote having two children, Billy and Tommy, into her ‘plot’ in the television show she is living, and at the end of the series is heartbroken by the loss of those children.29 Multiverse consequently follows Wanda’s descent into evil as she tries to rewrite reality to get her children back. Raimi’s film intertextually references Snow White repeatedly. Wanda is hiding her turn to chaos magic by generating a hex that gives her home the appearance of being in an apple orchard: the revelation of the twisted, barren orchard evokes the spectre of the Stepmother’s poisoned apple.30 Later, she breaks into the Sorcerers’ Stronghold, Kamar-Taj, by moving through reflective surfaces31 ; the connection between witches and mirrors in Snow White is reinforced through Wanda’s reflective movements. Perhaps the most obvious intertextual example is in the finale, when Wanda is confronted by how terrified her children from another universe are by her; in the background of the scene, Snow White is playing where the two boys had been watching it before Wanda’s intrusion into their reality.32 Disney’s first animated film and one of the most recent Disney mass-market films are not just through shared narrative conventions, therefore, but in the intertextual conversations taking place between these texts. In an early confrontation between Dr. Stephen Strange (the protagonist of Multiverse) and Wanda, Strange tells her “Wanda, your children aren’t real. You created them using magic,” to which Wanda replies “[t]hat’s what every mother does.”33 Wanda’s violence—which includes murdering dozens of people and attempting to kill a magical young

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girl from another dimension, America Chavez—is justifiable in her view because it is the act of a mother trying to return to her children. “I’m not a monster. Stephen. I’m a mother” she explains.34 However, as is demonstrated in the finale, Wanda may feel she is a mother, but as Scarlet Witch, she cannot be. After repeatedly trying to establish a link to another universe where her children are, in the finale she is able to, but discovers that the two boys are terrified of her. Upon seeing her appear in their lounge room while they watch television, they scream for their mother (the Wanda from that universe): “Mommy! It’s the witch!”35 Despite Wanda/Scarlet Witch’s insistence initially that she is their mother, the boys reject her, throwing their toys at her while yelling “You’re not our real mom! Go away! Get out of our house!” before hiding behind the stairs and whimpering “Please don’t hurt us.”36 This is what causes Wanda/Scarlet Witch to realize that she is not a mother: “I would never hurt you. Never. I would never hurt anyone. I’m not a monster. I’m a… I’m… [sobs] I’m sorry.”37 Despite Wanda/Scarlet Witch’s repeated claims that her actions are those of a mother and not those of a monster, what the finale demonstrates is that those two identities are far more entwined than she may assume. Scarlet Witch’s realization that she is not a mother (or, at the very least, is not Billy and Tommy’s mother) demonstrates the ongoing ambivalences about witchcraft and the maternal in memories of the witch. Like Snow White’s Stepmother, Scarlet Witch is associated with motherhood but is ultimately demonstrated not to be a mother. Witches in these films signify the difficult conflation of the position of witch and of mother. The long accretion of memories of the witch as the antithesis of everything that is maternal means that even when the witches in these films are correlated with motherhood—Snow White’s Stepmother and Scarlet Witch’s multiversal maternal self—it is not an easy connection, and one that clearly does not hold. These witches are anti-mothers—they are defined by their maternity precisely because they cannot be maternal.

Witches as Mother-Goddesses On the other end of the spectrum to the witch as anti-mother is the witch as the embodiment of the mother goddess. Witches as mother-goddesses demonstrate a view of maternity as not only a route to liberation and empowerment but literally the divine essence of womanhood (a fairly reductive view of womanhood). Popular culture depictions of witch

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mothers from the mid-twentieth century through to the present day are stamped with the afterlives of this view of the mother as a goddess. Texts like Bewitched and Harry Potter depict a universal witch mother who performs an idealized form of witch motherhood. There is a contradictory discourse of motherhood that intersects with the feminist politics of the witch herself in these texts: it privileges the witch mother with all the virtues and powers of the mother goddess archetype, but in doing so confines witchcraft to the enactment of (remarkably patriarchal view of) maternity. The features and characteristics of the maternal are coded as witchcraft in these texts, demonstrating how memories of mother goddess rhetoric and spirituality recur across popular culture. Maternity in Bewitched is predicated on domesticity, and the witch mother is crafted as a kind of magical goddess figure. Harry Potter presents a similarly idealized image of witch motherhood that draws on memories of the witch as a mother goddess, but casts maternity as a role that only exists within the family structure. What these texts demonstrate is how witchcraft is written into the fabric of motherhood; as vaunted as their maternal powers may be, however, that fabric is constricting. There is sense at the outset of Bewitched that Samantha “abdicate[s]” her power as a witch in order to become a wife (and, later, a mother).38 However, the dual narrative arcs of long-form television series undercut the apparently mutual-exclusivity of witches and mothers. Bewitched is unusual in that its short-term episodic narratives usually affirm the idea that witchcraft is incompatible with the nuclear family and motherhood, focusing on the daily struggles and chaos of being a witch and housewife and mother. However, the long-term narrative of the show undercuts this, demonstrating that Samantha is able to be both witch and mother. The show is thus polysemic, argues Walter Metz: “the short-term episodic plots endorse patriarchy while the long-term stakes of the serial narrative endorse feminist discontent with patriarchy.”39 In fact, as the series goes on, it becomes more and more clear that Samantha’s witchcraft is inextricable from her maternal connections. Bewitched cements this connection most explicitly in the mother– daughter relationship between Samantha and Endora, her eccentric witch mother. Endora is costumed as the kitsch parody of ‘what a witch looks like.’ Usually in strange robes (often in neon green and purple, presenting a 1960s version of a Suffragette colour scheme), with bright blue eyeshadow and a towering copper beehive hairdo, Endora is a parodic image of the feminine supernatural and the ‘empowered woman

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of the Women’s Liberation movement.’ Her performance of motherhood is continuously influenced by her political subversiveness, conforming to notions of maternity in some aspects and breaking convention in others. The generational clash between them is parodic: rather than the mother choosing the traditional route and the daughter rebelling, Samantha and Endora reverse this, similarly to Snow White and her witch Stepmother. While Samantha desperately wants to live the mortal, domestic life that Betty Friedan so railed against, Endora voices Friedan’s critiques of the maternal role within the hegemonic nuclear family, even using some of Friedan’s exact phrasing to describe the lot of the mortal housewife.40 Endora sees Samantha’s willingness to marry Darrin as a sign that “[a]s a mother I’ve apparently failed you completely.”41 There is a self-referential aspect to Endora’s witch mothering; she performs a familiar sort of overbearing motherhood that unfamiliarly centres on trying to get her daughter to divorce her husband and run away to exotic locales. Bewitched is one of very few texts to show the witch mother during pregnancy. Written into the plot because of Elizabeth Montgomery’s own pregnancies, Samantha’s pregnancies with Tabitha and Adam represent a fundamental shift in representations of witchcraft and motherhood. Although motherhood and magic are inextricable in Bewitched, pregnancy and witchcraft are not, and Samantha’s witchiness is displaced on to the other family members, usually women, during gestation. When Samantha gives birth to her first child, Tabitha, her cousin Serena (also played by Elizabeth Montgomery in a black wig and a miniskirt) comes to visit.42 Samantha does not perform any magic in this episode or the subsequent ones—instead, Serena does. In the moment that Samantha ‘becomes a mother’ (in the essentialist view of motherhood as being biological) her witch identity ceases to exist, and is displaced on to her ‘dark’ familial double. Labour is positioned as a liminal space, where Samantha is doubled and split. Her ‘original’ blonde form embodies her motherhood, while witchcraft is displaced onto the dark, seductive, and mischievous female family member, Serena. Similarly, when Samantha gives birth to her son Adam, her father Maurice arrives to be present for the birth, and causes chaos by casting a spell designed to make everyone fall in love with his grandson.43 Again, Samantha does not perform any magic during this episode, with her magic being displaced on to a family member—in this case, her parents, Maurice and Endora. The psychoanalytic implications of the witch mother not ‘being a witch’ during birth are stark when viewed in light of the mother being the object that the subject

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splits from. Motherhood and witchcraft, while certainly not incompatible in Bewitched, coexist uneasily, just as witch and wife: Samantha’s witch identity must be displaced onto a family member at the moment of becoming a ‘true’ mother (at least, within the essentialist and patriarchal logic of the maternal in the show). The idealized universal all-mother witch archetype is exaggerated and defines the representation of the witch mother in Harry Potter. In updating the boarding school narrative,44 the Harry Potter series, by necessity, sidelines parents. Consequently, mothers tend to feature in the book and film series as emotional symbols rather than characters who drive the plot. However, mothers are simultaneously idealized throughout, acting as moral imperatives. As Margaret S. Mauk argues, Harry Potter presents “a pseudo-hagiography of motherhood.”45 Gender scripts of femininity and motherhood in Harry Potter are highly conventional,46 and the depiction of motherhood is usually in line with this conservative approach to gender. The nuclear family, and the mother’s place in it, is privileged over other alternative family structures, which are often implied to be unsatisfactory or neglectful.47 The prevalence of mothers and maternal symbols in the text is partly due to the orphan narrative at the heart of the story: Harry’s violent, early loss of his parents immediately places adult authority figures in positions of symbolic paternity and maternity. Harry’s orphan status is mirrored in Tom Riddle (Voldemort), who similarly is orphaned from an early age. Where Harry finds maternal substitutes, however, Voldemort does not, and the mother thus acts as a marker of morality, argues Mauk, as “characters are frequently divided by those who had mothers who loved them and those who do not.”48 Witch mothers in Harry Potter are magical—and absent—symbols of morality. Harry’s biological mother, Lily Evans, is the primary symbol of absent magical maternal perfection, dying to save her infant son and thus imbuing him with magical protection. Lily’s absence throughout most of Harry’s life may seem to be betraying the basic tenet of ‘good’ motherhood, but the reason for her absence—sacrificing her life to save him—transforms her into an idyllic symbol of the ultimate act of motherhood. Lily’s sacrifice, which is mirrored by Harry’s at the end of the series, invites readings of a pseudo-Christian sense of sacrifice.49 Lily’s maternal sacrifice becomes religiously symbolic, and is mythologized and almost fetishized. Over the series a “powerful mythos” forms around Lily

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and her maternal sacrifice.50 As Dumbledore explains to Harry at the end of Philosopher’s Stone: [y]our mother died to save you. If there is one thing Voldemort cannot understand, it is love. He didn’t realise that love as powerful as your mother’s for you leaves its own mark. Not a scar, no visible sign… to have been loved so deeply even though the person who loved us is gone, will give us protection forever. It is in your very skin.51

This may seem trite, but it is literal: Lily’s maternal sacrifice is rendered magical; her death becomes a spell. In Deathly Hallows, Dumbledore even describes it as an “enchantment” that is materially focused in Harry’s blood: “[h]e [Voldemort] took into his body a tiny part of the enchantment your mother laid upon you when she died for you. His body keeps her sacrifice alive, and while that enchantment survives, so do you.”52 Lily’s idyllic motherhood and her witchcraft are entangled, and are materially and magically focused in her orphan son’s blood (so not only is motherhood magical but it is also biological). Lily, as the symbol of the supreme witch mother remains absent and it is her absence which allows her to be mythologized. In Lily’s absence, Molly Weasley acts as a pseudo-mother to Harry, and similarly becomes symbolic of ultimate magical motherhood, while still being kept at a distance through the texts. Molly first demonstrates her maternal role in the text when she helps Harry find his way on to Platform 9 and ¾, providing him with a “metaphorical key to enter Hogwarts” and the magical world.53 Molly’s maternal care over Harry is cemented after his first Christmas at Hogwarts, where, upon discovering Harry “didn’t expect any presents,” she sends him a hand-knitted jumper, as she does for the rest of the Weasley children,54 signifying his adoption into the Weasley family. Molly continues to mother Harry throughout the series, fussing over his hair and clothes, trying to feed him constantly, and expressing worry about him,55 and she frequently hugs and kisses him along with her children.56 As Harry undergoes more traumatic events, Molly more and more comes to occupy the mother role in his life, particularly in comforting him after trauma: “[h]e had no memory of ever being hugged like this, as though by a mother. The full weight of everything he had seen that night seemed to fall in upon him as Mrs Weasley held him to her.”57 Harry comes to view her as his pseudo-mother and worries about upsetting her.58

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Molly’s maternity aligns with notions of the mother more fitting a pre-Friedan cultural moment: the Weasley family fit the typical nuclear family stereotype of a working father, domestic mother. However, in Hallows, Molly’s magic becomes a means of both fulfilling her role as mother and becoming more aggressive.59 Battling Bellatrix in the Battle of Hogwarts in Hallows is, Cordova argues, the “natural culmination of [Molly’s] motherly role.”60 Bellatrix Lestrange, the most loyal follower of Voldemort, reflects more conservative notions of the witch as the antimother, and the opposition of Molly and Bellatrix represents the binary of motherhood inherent in the witch in Harry Potter (witches are good, perfect, sacrificial mothers, or they are so evil that they could not possibly be a mother). In this final battle, Molly reflects an archetypal universal motherhood in line with goddess feminism and Jungian archetypes. In her battle with Bellatrix, her first cry—“NOT MY DAUGHTER, YOU BITCH!”—is followed by “[y]ou—will—never—touch—our—children— again!”61 Moving from a woman defending her own children (Bellatrix had threatened Ginny), Molly takes on a role of defending all children with her magic. Like Lily, Molly becomes emblematic of a view of motherhood and witchcraft that position these as entangled and idealized identities, and pick up the mnemonic connotations of goddess feminism. However, this is troubled by the sudden plot twist in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, the play written by Rowling, Jack Thorne, and John Tiffany (premiering in 2016 in London’s West End and since having productions around the world; the play script was also published in 2016). While it is not discussed at great length in Cursed Child, the villain of the play, Delphini (also called Delphi and The Augurey) is revealed to be the child of Voldemort and Bellatrix Lestrange.62 As somewhat silly as this revelation is (with many popular culture reviews trying to make this retrospective narrative change fit logically into the original narrative63 and with a poor reception from many within the Potter fandom64 ), it does seem to offer an unusual view of motherhood and witchcraft. After all, in a series that until this moment has deified mothers to the point of “pseudohagiography”65 it is strange that the witch who most embodies evil is retrospectively transformed into a mother. However, while Bellatrix-asmother certainly ends the streak of perfect magical mothers in Harry Potter, this plot twist still ultimately serves to reinforce norms of motherhood. Bellatrix may have given birth, but she is not a mother. Her daughter, Delphi, certainly does not seem to feel any sense of maternal loss, instead trying to travel back in time to avenge her father’s death;

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at no point do the characters who knew Bellatrix reflect on her changed status, and she is never referred to as a mother or a parent. In fact, Cursed Child shifts drastically away from the original series’ emphasis on motherhood to an interrogation of fatherhood (notably Harry’s, Draco’s, and Voldemort’s fatherhood). Mothers are relegated to sacrificial figures of the past in Cursed Child, easier to remember than to be. Bewitched and Harry Potter demonstrate how witch mothers enact an entangled and idealized form of magic and maternity. Bewitched initially appears to operate on a similar logic to earlier texts that position the witch and the mother as opposites. However, the polysemy of the series repeatedly demonstrates all that ways that witches are correlated to mothers—except in birth. Harry Potter offers a more vehement deification of the witch mother: these witches are the embodiment of every ideal of the maternal. Their witchcraft demonstrates how pure and perfect their maternity is, to the point where their willing death to save their children becomes a spell, and they take on the role of magical protector of all children. What these texts demonstrate is that witch mothers, contrary to religious tradition, do correlate to (patriarchal) ideologies of ‘good motherhood: they give up almost every part of themselves for their children, and their witchcraft serves a form of maternal magic. As much as the witch seems to offer a kind of departure from patriarchal constructions of femininity, including maternity, there are many ways that witches are invoked in popular culture to reinforce hegemonic ideologies. Witch mothers like those in Bewitched and Harry Potter are such examples: through their enactment of a kind of idyllic mother, these witches reinforce the view of the mother as a sacrificial object.

Witches as Deathly Mothers Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series (1995–2000) and Suspiria (dir. Luca Guadagnino, 2018), two contemporary popular culture texts, demonstrate a queer inversion of maternity, transforming the mother from one who brings life to one who brings death. This melancholic and queer form of deathly witch maternity, much like the monstrous destruction of Buffy and Suspiria and the queer or radical sexuality in Sabrina and Buffy, is turned towards an anti-social utopian future. Lee Edelman’s controversial work in No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004) demonstrates a radical queer intervention in futureoriented politics. Edelman argues that the figure of the child “remains the

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perpetual horizon of every acknowledged politics, the fantasmatic beneficiary of every political intervention,” and argues that queer theorists and activists must therefore reject this reproductive futurity (and thus, the image of the child) in order to remain politically radical.66 The reproductive futurity of the ‘Cult of the Child’ functions as a maintenance of the status quo, as imagining the future through the figure of the child always forces a continuation of the present. “Queerness,” Edelman therefore argues, “names the side of those not ‘fighting for the children.’”67 The negative historical associations of queerness must be sought after by activists, Edelman argues, invoking an anti-social queer politics. The death-bringing witch mother of His Dark Materials and Suspiria fulfils this queer subversion of the maternal life-bringing norm. These witch mothers bring about deathly renewal: the death-impulse of the witch mother in these modern texts offers the possibility of radical rebirth. In Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series (1995–2000) the depiction of witches and mothers is tied to the subversion of Biblical narratives of femininity and creation, and Romantic depictions of nature and the soul, which also affects the depiction of the maternal in the series. The biological mother of the protagonist, Lyra, represents a “protoEve/Lilith,”68 in contrast to Lyra’s own symbolic Eve status. As in Harry Potter, the use of child protagonists by necessity sidelines parents in the narrative and turns the adults into the series into “a series of surrogate parents who counter the inadequacies of their biological parents and the depredations of malevolent institutional powers.”69 In turning away from their biological parents,70 Lyra and Will develop their own chosen family, centred on emotional connection rather than biological. Mary Malone, a scientist from Will’s world who joins them on their journey, and Serafina Pekkala, a witch from Lyra’s world who protects and fights for them, act as maternal figures to “reorient gendered power,” reversing the monstrous mother trope Mrs. Coulter, Lyra’s mother, presents.71 Family, biological and social, is, in fact, the basis of the novels; while other institutions and norms are presented as relational and dependent on point of view, made stark through the different worlds device (e.g. the familiar norm of electrical power is made unfamiliar in Lyra’s world where it is called anbaric power), the family is not.72 Instead, the family is used “to provide a discreet backdrop of normality against which remarkable things such as science and magic stand out in relief.”73 The normatizing force of family and motherhood is not extended to witch mothers, who instead offer a deathly and anti-social view of the

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maternal. The witch mothers in His Dark Materials reproduce death, rather than life, queering notions of what it means to be a mother. Serafina Pekkala, the Queen of her clan and the main witch in the novels, addresses the deathly maternity of witches with Lyra when discussing what it means to be a witch. There are men who serve us […] And there are men we take for lovers or husbands […] men pass in front of our eyes like butterflies, creatures of a brief season. We love them; they are brave, proud, beautiful, clever; and they die almost at once. They die so soon that our hearts are continually racked with pain. We bear their children, who are witches if they are female, human if not; and then in the blink of an eye they are gone, felled, slain. Our sons, too. When a little boy is growing, he thinks he is immortal. His mother knows he isn’t. Each time becomes more painful, until finally your heart is broken.74

The death of male children is inherent to witch identity in Pullman’s series, and the maternal is inextricably connected to death, rather than life. Later, Will encounters a priest who claims: Witches—have nothing to do with them, Will Ivanovitch, you hear me? You know what they will do when you come to the right age? They will try to seduce you. They will use all the soft cunning deceitful ways they have, their flesh, their soft skin, their sweet voices, and they will take your seed—you know what I mean by that—they will drain you and leave you hollow! They will take your future, your children that are to come, and leave you nothing.75

While this clearly demonstrates Christian designations of witchcraft as Satanic, sexual, and monstrous, the priest’s comment about the witch ‘taking the future’ demonstrates the queer, deathly futurity of the witches’ maternity: they embrace and consequently destroy the future, through the children they produce. The witch mothers appear to offer no future, to use Edelman’s phrase. The witches in Pullman’s world embrace death in a way that seems to foreclose the horizons of their futures. However, there is a further layer of gender coding to the deathly maternity of the witch mothers in His Dark Materials . While their male children are human and thus mortal, their female children are witches, who live long lives within their covens. The deathly maternity of the witches offers the potential of a feminine future. Pullman’s witches bring rebirth of the coven and

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of female lineage and community: maternity becomes matriarchy as the future is opened to a women’s space and time. Witch motherhood, death, and rebirth are thus imbricated in His Dark Materials; the witch mothers offer no future for some, and reproduce a future predicated on female lineages, power, and communities for others. Similarly, in Suspiria, maternity is linked with death and rebirth, and acts of female mourning. There is an underlying link between the monstrous death and destruction of witchcraft and the “inevitable pull” of rebirth in Guadagnino’s film.76 Suspiria is filled with Jungian psychology and spirituality, and this is reflected in the undercurrent of ‘Great Mother’ imagery throughout the film. In the final scene, a woman even walks past the camera carrying a copy of Erich Neumann’s The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype.77 There are numerous mothers in the narrative: Susie’s biological Mennonite mother dying in rural Ohio; Madame Blanc, who serves as a mother figure to the whole dance school, and more personally to Susie; Mother Helena Markos, a mostly unseen presence who haunts the film and the coven; and Maters Suspiriorum, Lachrymarum, and Tenebrarum (Sighs, Tears, and Darkness respectively), the Three Mothers who, in the mythology of Suspiria, have existed for centuries, and are worshipped by the Berlin coven. This insistence on the maternal as well as the feminine throughout the film codes the witch as a symbolic mother figure. Throughout the film there are frequent cuts between what is happening with Susie’s new family in the coven/dance school in Berlin, and her biological family in Ohio, where her unnamed biological mother lays dying of respiratory disease. Susie’s mother’s wheezing breaths recur throughout the film’s soundtrack and mirror her daughter’s ascension in the denouement to Mater Suspiriorum, the Mother of Sighs. Dying mother and reborn witch daughter are symbolically linked through breath. At the moment of Susie’s ascension to Suspiriorum, Mother Helena Markos, seeking to possess Susie’s body (unaware of Susie’s true identity as Suspiriorum) urges Susie to: “put down the woman who bore you. Think of that false mother now. Reject her. Expel her. You have the only mother you need here. Death to any other mother. Say it. Death to any other mother.”78 As Markos says this, the film cuts rapidly between the blood-drenched red mütterhaus and rural Ohio. As Suspirorum calls forth the figure of Death in the mütterhaus, Susie’s mother in Ohio is seen bathed in red light, with the shadow of Death’s clawed hand over her.79 The actor who plays Susie’s biological mother, Małgosia Bela, also

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plays the incarnation of Death. The multiplying of actors as mothers and monsters throughout the film (Tilda Swinton as Madame Blanc, Mother Markos, and Dr. Klemperer; Małgosia Bela as Susie’s biological mother and as Death) compounds the links between witchcraft, motherhood, death, and rebirth. Following the death of Susie’s mother at the hands of Susie/Suspiriorum, Death then emerges in the mütterhaus, bows before Suspiriorum, and kills Mother Markos. The corrupted Markos, ironically, was correct when she claimed that Susie/Suspiriorum must kill her ‘false’ mother: having destroyed the false mothers (her biological mother; Markos; and even her substitute mother Blanc), Susie can become her own mother. As Susie completes her transformation into Mater Suspiriorum, pulling apart her ribcage into a vaginal opening, she cries “I am the Mother!”80 Feminist self-actualization is a form of self-birth. Guadagnino has explicitly addressed the emphasis placed on motherhood in his remake that is not as explicit in Argento’s source. In an interview with Alan Jones in Notebook, Guadagnino says that: I deal in the concept of the uncompromising force of motherhood. A mother is supposed to be caring, nurturing, unbiased and devoted, but what if that is all our own pre-judgement? Even if you are the most radical person, you think of motherhood adhering to accepted norms. But real danger lies in that presumption as motherhood comes with deep conflict […] In my opinion, the 1960s was all about ‘Killing the Father.’ That changed in the 1970s to ‘Killing the Mother,’ and that’s my slant and what I reflect on in my Suspiria.81

The witch mother in Suspiria clearly reflects the deathly inversion of norms of motherhood that is also discernible in His Dark Materials , albeit in a far more visually spectacular (and gory) manner. As Suspiriorum stands above the destruction of the coven by Death Incarnate and the bodies of her false mothers (Blanc and Markos), she gives birth to herself having destroyed her mothers. Witch motherhood in Suspiria is therefore inverted: it functions only through death, but through death comes potential rebirth. One can become or be reborn as one’s own mother, but only with the death(s) of false mothers; to be a mother is also to bring Death into the world. Susie/Suspiriorum continues this cycle of maternity as Death, becoming the Mother and wreaking Death and destruction upon the coven.

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Birthing the Future Witches and mothers coexist uneasily, and with a great deal of internal contradiction. Mothers are good, mothers are bad, mothers teach their children patriarchal ideology, mothers teach their children liberation, mothers can never be a witch, mothers are a witch-like goddess: there are so many paradoxes in the figure of the witch mother that it is impossible to categorize them as only one thing. Contemporary popular culture representations of witch mothers reflect the culmination of decades of feminist revision and reconsideration of the mother. Witches in popular culture texts of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries perform multiple forms of motherhood, and these changing forms of maternity shift in alignment with feminist and queer re-examination of the maternal. Witches no longer solely represent the anti-maternity of early modern religious discourses of witchcraft; they are not always barren and antithetical to good motherhood. Instead, witchcraft and motherhood have been conflated in feminist discourses, and exist simultaneously, if uneasily. Paradoxical feminist discourses of the mother which position maternity as either a liberatory archetype of feminine power, or a confining relic of patriarchal oppression, reveal the afterlives of these contradictory discourses in the symbol of the witch mother. The tension in re-remembering these witches with a memory of contradictory feminist activism makes space for a more radical political reimagining of the witch that incorporates multiple perspectives on maternity and witchcraft. In embracing the death drive, witch mothers from recent texts reflect an anti-sociality centred on reconnecting to feminist self-actualization and community. The maternal figure becomes a figure of both death and of rebirth, projecting the radical feminist politics of the witch into the future. In the next chapter, the focus of analysis shifts from the mother to the daughter, with an investigation of how girlhood and witchcraft are imbricated in twentieth- and twenty-first-century texts. If, as seen in this chapter, there has been a trend in the twenty-first century towards witch motherhood drawing from the past and reflecting death and rebirth in the present, then girlhood, a state concerned entirely with the future subject, projects the witch into the future. Motherhood and daughterhood are positioned as a reciprocal relationship in both patriarchal and feminist discourses, and so in the next chapter examines the associated discourses of the witch on this spectrum of parent and child and the respective subject/object dichotomies that are imbued into the daughter. After all, as Adrienne Rich writes, “[w]e are, none of us,

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‘either’ mothers or daughters; to our amazement, confusion, and greater complexity, we are both.”82

Notes 1. Bell Hooks, All About Love, (New York: Harper Collins, 2001), 134. 2. Hooks, All About Love, 142. 3. Lenora Perry-Samaniego, “Other Mothers: Looking at Maternal Desire in The L Word,” In Mediating Moms: Mothers in Popular Culture, ed. Elizabeth Podnieks, (Montreal and Kingston, London, Ithaca: McGillQueen’s University Press, 2012), 359. 4. Elizabeth Podnieks, “Introduction: Popular Culture’s Maternal Embrace,” In Mediating Moms: Mothers in Popular Culture, ed. Elizabeth Podnieks, (Montreal and Kingston, London, Ithaca: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2012), 14. 5. Tellingly, neither of these films actually refer to either Maleficent or Nanny McPhee as a witch, and therefore I am not analysing them in more depth. In fact, Maleficent is more of a fairy than a witch (although the film goes out of its way to distinguish Maleficent’s fairy status from the other fairies depicted). 6. Marianne Hirsch, “Maternity and Rememory: Toni Morrison’s Beloved,” In Representations of Motherhood, ed. Donna Bassin, Margaret Honet and Meryle Mahrer Kaplan, (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994), 93–94. 7. Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978), 41–42. It does not escape notice that Daly feels more comfortable using an example of a non-Western custom rather than one closer to home that illustrates the same idea; mothers buying their young daughters their first pair of stilettos, say. 8. Andrea Dworkin, Woman Hating, (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1974), 38. 9. Janine Engelbrecht, “Magical Mothers: The Representation of Witches and Motherhood in Contemporary Fantasy Cinema,” Communication, Cultural, Journalism, and Media Studies, 47, no. 1 (2021): 23. See also Hirsch, “Maternity,” 94. 10. Toril Moi, Sexual/ Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory, (London and New York: Routledge, 1985), 94. 11. Luce Irigaray, The Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1985), 28. 12. Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, Signs, 1, no. 4 (Summer 1976): 881. 13. Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément, The Newly Born Woman, trans. Betsy Wing, (Minneapolis, USA: University of Minnesota Press, 1975), 93. Toril Moi describes this as a “lyrical, euphoric evocation of the essential bond between feminine writing and the mother as source and origin of

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14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19.

20. 21.

22. 23.

24.

25.

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the voice to be heard in all female texts.” See Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual, 114. Julia Kristeva, “Stabat Mater,” trans. Arthur Goldhammer, Poetics Today, 6, no. 1/2 (1985): 134. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 13. Carl G. Jung, Four Archetypes, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 9, 15. Erich Neumann, The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype, trans. Ralph Manheim, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 1996), 3, 12, passim. Jungian notions of the collective unconscious and archetypal theory are antithetical to memory studies as a discipline; rather than symbols emerging in the primordial collective psyche, memory studies analyses of how cultural processes and discourses shape these symbols. What I hope is made clear over this (and other) chapters is that where I refer to Jungian archetypes of maternity and witchcraft (as an example), it is not a reference to employing Jungian ideas in my own analysis of witch mothers, but rather following the mnemonic threads of how various feminists have themselves adopted in their deployment of the symbol of the witch; the memory of a vehemently non-cultural-memory-theoretical-approach, as it were. Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, Tenth Anniversary edition (New York and London: W.W. Norton and Company, 1986), 13, emphasis original. Rich, Of Woman Born, 13. Adria Schwartz, “Taking the Nature Out of Mother,” In Representations of Motherhood, ed. Donna Bassin, Margaret Honet and Meryle Mahrer Kaplan, (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994), 252. Shari L. Thurer, The Myths of Motherhood: How Culture Reinvents the Good Mother (Boston and New York: Houghton Miffler Company, 1994), 155. Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger, Malleus Maleficarum, trans. Montague Summers (1928, reis., London: Arrow Books, 1928; 1971), 160. Abortion and reproductive care are not anti-maternal, but within hegemonic cultural systems and institutions that rely on forced control over the body, any perceived threat to children—and therefore to the future continuation of those systems—is monstrous. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, directed by David Hand, William Cottrell, Wilfred Jackson, Larry Morey, Perce Pearce, Ben Sharpsteen (1937; South Yarra, Victoria, AUS: Walt Disney Company (Australia), 2014), DVD; Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness, directed by Sam Raimi (2022; Los Angeles, CA: Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures, 2022) Disney + https://www.disneyplus.com/en-gb/video/4925d08a32c3-44b9-829b-e1624dc3b6f0. Hand et al., dirs. “Scene 24,” Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

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27. Hand et al., dirs. “Scene 9,” Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. 28. Hand et al., dirs. “Scene 11,” Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs; Hand et al., dirs. “Scene 12,” Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. 29. WandaVision, season 1, episode 8, “Previously On,” directed by Matt Shakman, written by Laura Donney, aired February. 26, 2021, Disney + , https://www.disneyplus.com/en-gb/video/ebaaf404-b012-4a35-a4bd0d5d4f32ccd0. 30. Raimi, dir. Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness. 31. Raimi, dir. Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness. 32. Raimi, dir. Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness. 33. Raimi, dir. Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness. 34. Raimi, dir. Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness. 35. Raimi, dir. Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness. 36. Raimi, dir. Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness. 37. Raimi, dir. Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness. 38. Patricia Fairfield-Artman, Rodney E. Lippard and Adrienne Sansom, “Bewitched… the 1960s Sitcom Revisited: A Queer Read,” Taboo FallWinter (2005): 31. 39. Walter Metz, Bewitched (Michigan: Wayne State University Press, 2007), 92. 40. Metz, Bewitched, 18. 41. Bewitched, season 1, episode 2, “Be It Ever So Mortgaged,” directed by William Asher, written by Barbara Avedon, aired September 24, 1964, in broadcast syndication, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2016, DVD. 42. Bewitched, season 2, episode 18 “…And Then There Were Three,” directed by William Asher, written by Bernard Slade, aired January 13, 1966, in broadcast syndication, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2016, DVD. 43. Bewitched, season 6, episode 5, “…And Something Makes Four,” directed by Richard Michaels, written by Richard Baer, aired October 16, 1969, in broadcast syndication, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2016, DVD. 44. Pat Pinsent, “The Education of a Wizard: Harry Potter and His Predecessors,” In The Ivory Tower and Harry Potter, ed. Lana A. Whited (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 2002), 27–50. 45. Margaret S. Mauk, “‘Your Mother Died to Save You’: The Influence of Mothers in Constructing Moral Frameworks for Violence in Harry Potter,” Mythlore 36, no. 1 (Fall/Winter 2007): 124. 46. Frances Devlin-Glass, “Contesting Binarisms in Harry Potter: Creative Rejigging, or Gender Tokenism?” English in Australia 144 (2005): 61. 47. Mauk, “Influence of Mothers,” 124–125. 48. Mauk 130. 49. Nikolaus Wandinger, “‘Sacrifice’ in the Harry Potter Series from a Girardian Perspective,” Contagion: Journal of Violence, Mimesis, and Culture 17 (2010): 47.

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50. Melanie J. Cordova, “‘Because I’m a Girl, I Suppose!’: Gender Lines and Narrative Perspective in Harry Potter,” Mythlore 33, no. 2 (Spring/Summer 2015): 23. 51. J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (London: Bloomsbury, 1997), 216. 52. J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (London: Bloomsbury, 2007), 568. 53. Rowling, Stone, 70; Meri Weiss, “The Role of Maternal Females in Harry Potter’s Journey,” In Legilimens!: Perspectives in Harry Potter Studies, ed. Christopher E. Ball (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013), 20. 54. Rowling, Stone, 147. 55. J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (London: Bloomsbury, 1998), 31, 37; J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (London: Bloomsbury, 2003), 91–94. 56. J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (London: Bloomsbury, 1999), 58. 57. J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (London: Bloomsbury, 2000), 620. 58. Rowling, Phoenix, 157; Rowling, Hallows, 94. 59. Rowling, Hallows, 590. 60. Cordova, “Gender Lines,” 22. 61. Rowling, Hallows, 589–90, emphasis added. 62. J.K. Rowling, Jack Thorne, and John Tiffany, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child: Parts One and Two (London: Little, Brown, 2016), 260, 307. 63. See Sarah Doran, “8 questions and some answers we have after Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,” RadioTimes.com, August 2, 2016, https:// www.radiotimes.com/going-out/8-questions-and-some-answers-we-haveafter-harry-potter-and-the-cursed-child/; Kara Hedash, “How Voldemort’s Daughter Fits Into Harry Potter Canon,” ScreenRant, October 19, 2019, https://screenrant.com/harry-potter-voldemort-daughter-del phini-cursed-child-canon/. 64. Kelsey Stiegman, “After Reading the ‘Harry Potter’ Series 20 Times, Here’s Why I’ll Never Touch ‘Cursed Child’ Again,” Seventeen, October 26, 2016, https://www.seventeen.com/celebrity/a43367/harry-potterand-the-cursed-child-review/; George Simpson, “‘Horrible fan fiction’: Fans HATE Harry Potter and the Cursed Child and Here’s Why,” The Express, August 3, 2016, https://www.express.co.uk/entertainment/ books/696259/Harry-Potter-Cursed-Child-script-book-JK-Rowling-fanfiction. 65. Mauk 124. 66. Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2004), 3.

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67. Edelman, No Future, 3. Edelman’s pessimistic view of a queer future has been nuanced by queer theorists following No Future, as is discussed in Chapter 8. 68. Mary Harris Russell, “‘Eve, Again! Mother Eve!’: Pullman’s Eve Variation,” in His Dark Materials Illuminated: Critical Essays on Phillip Pullman’s Trilogy, ed. Millicent Lenz with Carole Scott (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005), 217. 69. Amelia A. Rutledge, “Reconfiguring Nurture in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials,” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 33, no. 3 (Summer 2008): 119. 70. Will is raised by his single mother who has severe mental health issues, and who he cares for. He leaves her in the care of a neighbour when he begins his journey into other worlds. Lyra is raised as an orphan, and upon discovering her true parents are alive, ultimately chooses to leave them behind. 71. Rutledge, “Reconfiguring Nurture,” 217. 72. Stephen Thomson, “The Child, the Family, the Relationship. Familiar Stories: Family, Storytelling, and Ideology in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials,” in Children’s Literature: New Approaches, ed. Karín LesnikObserstein (Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 151. 73. Thomson, “Familiar Stories,” 152. 74. Philip Pullman, The Northern Lights (1995, reis. London: Scholastic, 2007), 258–259. 75. Philip Pullman, The Amber Spyglass (2000, reis. London: Scholastic, 2007), 679. 76. Suspiria, directed by Luca Guadagnino (2018; Sydney, AUS: Universal Sony Pictures Home Entertainment Australia, 2019), DVD. 77. Guadagnino, dir. Suspiria. 78. Guadagnino, dir. Suspiria. 79. Guadagnino, dir. Suspiria. 80. Guadagnino, dir. Suspiria. 81. Alan Jones, “Killing the Mother: Luca Guadagnino Discusses ‘Suspiria,’” Mubi, November 16, 2018, https://mubi.com/notebook/posts/killingthe-mother-luca-guadagnino-discusses-suspiria. 82. Rich 253. As with Chapters 2 and 3, without wanting to presume that readers are interested in my writing process, this chapter on mothers and the next on girls and daughters have been written together to draw out the entanglements of each of these symbols.

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Bibliography Avedon, Barbara, writer. Bewitched. Season 1, episode 2, “Be It Ever So Mortgaged.” Directed by William Asher. Aired September 24, 1964, in broadcast syndication. Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2016, DVD. Baer, Richard, writer. Bewitched. Season 6, episode 5, “…An Something Makes Four.” Directed by Richard Michaels. Aired October 16, 1969, in broadcast syndication. Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2016, DVD. Cixous, Hélène. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Translated by Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen. Signs 1, no. 4 (Summer 1976): 875–893. Cixous, Hélène., and Catherine Clément. 1975. The Newly Born Woman. Translated by Betsy Wing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Cordova, Melanie J. ““Because I’m A Girl, I Suppose!”: Gender Lines and Narrative Perspective in Harry Potter.” Mythlore. 33, no. 2 (Spring/Summer 2015): 21–35. Daly, Mary. 1978. Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism. Boston: Beacon Press. Devlin-Glass, Frances. 2005. Contesting Binarisms in Harry Potter: Creative Rejigging, or Gender Tokenism? English in Australia. 144: 50–63. Donney, Laura, writer. WandaVision. Season 1, episode 8, “Previously On.” Directed by Matt Shakman. Aired February 26, 2021. Disney+. https://www. disneyplus.com/en-gb/video/ebaaf404-b012-4a35-a4bd-0d5d4f32ccd0. Doran, Sarah. “8 questions and some answers we have after Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.” RadioTimes.com, August 2, 2016. https://www.radiot imes.com/going-out/8-questions-and-some-answers-we-have-after-harry-pot ter-and-the-cursed-child/ Dworkin, Andrea. 1974. Woman Hating. New York: E.P. Dutton. Edelman, Lee. 2004. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Engelbrecht, Janine. 2021. Magical Mothers: The Representation of Witches and Motherhood in Contemporary Fantasy Cinema. Communication, Cultural, Journalism, and Media Studies 47 (1): 20–41. Fairfield-Artman, Patricia, Rodney E. Lippard, Adrienne Sansom, and “Bewitched… the,. 1960. Sitcom Revisited: A Queer Read”. Taboo. FallWinter 2005: 27–48. Guadagnino, Luca. Suspiria. 2018; Sydney, AUS: Universal Sony Pictures Home Entertainment Australia, 2019. DVD. Hand, David, William Cottrell, Wilfred Jackson, Larry Morey, Perce Pearce, Ben Sharpsteen, dirs. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. 1937; South Yarra, VIC: The Walt Disney Company (Australia), 2014. DVD. Hedash, Kara. “How Voldemort’s Daughter Fits Into Harry Potter Canon.” ScreenRant, October 19, 2019. https://screenrant.com/harry-potter-voldem ort-daughter-delphini-cursed-child-canon/.

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Hirsch, Marianne. 1994. Maternity and Rememory: Toni Morrison’s Beloved. In Representations of Motherhood, ed. Donna Bassin, Margaret Honet, and Meryle Mahrer Kaplan, 92–110. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Hooks, bell. All About Love. New York: Harper Collins, 2001. Irigaray, Luce. The Sex Which Is Not One. Translated by Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1985. Jones, Alan. “Killing the Mother: Luca Guadagnino Discusses ‘Suspiria.’” Mubi, November 16, 2018. https://mubi.com/notebook/posts/killing-themother-luca-guadagnino-discusses-suspiria. Jung, Carl G. 1969. Four Archetypes. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Kramer, Heinrich, James Sprenger, Malleus Maleficarum, and Translated by Montague Summers. 1928. Reissue, 1971. London: Arrow Books. Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. Kristeva, Julia. 1985. Stabat Mater. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Poetics Today 6 (1/2): 133–152. Mauk, Margaret S. “‘Your Mother Died to Save You’: The Influence of Mothers in Constructing Moral Frameworks for Violence in Harry Potter.” Mythlore 36, no. 1 (Fall/Winter 2007): 123–141. Metz, Walter. 2007. Bewitched. Michigan: Wayne State University Press. Moi, Toril. 1985. Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory. London and New York: Routledge. Neumann, Erich. The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype. Translated by Ralph Manheim. 2nd edition. London: Routledge, 1996. Perry-Samaniego, Lenora. 2012. Other Mothers: Looking at Maternal Desire in The L Word. In Mediating Moms: Mothers in Popular Culture, ed. Elizabeth Podnieks, 358–375. Montreal and Kingston, London, Ithaca: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Pinsent, Pat. 2002. The Education of a Wizard: Harry Potter and His Predecessors. In The Ivory Tower and Harry Potter, ed. Lana A. Whited, 27–50. Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press. Podnieks, Elizabeth. 2012. Introduction: Popular Culture’s Maternal Embrace. In Mediating Moms: Mothers in Popular Culture, ed. Elizabeth Podnieks, 3–32. Montreal and Kingston, London, Ithaca: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Pullman, Philip, and The Amber Spyglass. 2000. Reissue, 2007. London: Scholastic. ———. The Northern Lights. 1995. Reissue, 2007. London: Scholastic.

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Raimi, Sam, dir. Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness. 2022; Los Angeles, CA: Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures, 2022. Disney+. https:// www.disneyplus.com/en-gb/video/4925d08a-32c3-44b9-829b-e1624d c3b6f0 Rich, Adrienne. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. Tenth Anniversary Edition. New York and London: W.W. Norton and Company, 1986. Rowling, J.K. 1998. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. London: Bloomsbury. ———. 2007. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. London: Bloomsbury. ———. 2000. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. London: Bloomsbury. ———. 2003. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. London: Bloomsbury. ———. 1997. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. London: Bloomsbury. ———. 1999. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. London: Bloomsbury. Rowling, J.K., Jack Thorne, and John Tiffany. Harry Potter and the Cursed Child: Parts One and Two. London: Little Brown, 2016. Russell, Mary Harris. “‘Eve, Again! Mother Eve!’: Pullman’s Eve Variation.” In His Dark Materials Illuminated: Critical Essays on Philip Pullman’s Trilogy, edited by Millicent Lenz with Carole Scott, 212–222. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005. Rutledge, Amelia A. “Reconfiguring Nurture in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 33, no. 3 (Summer 2008): 119–134. Schwartz, Adria. 1994. Taking the Nature Out of Mother. In Representations of Motherhood, ed. Donna Bassin, Margaret Honey, and Meryle Mahrer Kaplan, 240–255. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Simpson, George. “‘Horrible fan fiction’: Fans HATE Harry Potter and the Cursed Child and Here’s Why.” The Express, August 3, 2016. https://www.express.co.uk/entertainment/books/696259/Harry-Pot ter-Cursed-Child-script-book-JK-Rowling-fan-fiction. Slade, Bernard, writer. Bewitched. Season 2, episode 18, “…And Then There Were Three.” Directed by William Asher. Aired January 13, 1966, in broadcast syndication. Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2016, DVD. Stiegman, Kelsey. “After Reading the ‘Harry Potter’ Series 20 Times, Here’s Why I’ll Never Touch ‘Cursed Child’ Again.” Seventeen, October 26, 2016. https://www.seventeen.com/celebrity/a43367/harry-potter-and-thecursed-child-review/. Thomson, Stephen. “The Child, The Family, The Relationship. Familiar Stories: Family, Storytelling, and Ideology in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials.” In Children’s Literature: New Approaches, edited by Karín Lesnik-Oberstein, 144–167. Hampshire, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.

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Thurer, Shari L. The Myths of Motherhood: How Culture Reinvents the Good Mother. Boston and New York: Houghton Miffler Company, 1994. Wandinger, Nikolaus. “‘Sacrifice’ in the Harry Potter Series from a Girardian Perspective.” Contagion: Journal of Violence, Mimesis, and Culture 17 (2010): 27–51. Weiss, Meri. 2013. The Role of Maternal Females in Harry Potter’s Journey. In Legilimens!: Perspectives in Harry Potter Studies, ed. Christopher E. Ball, 19–31. Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

CHAPTER 7

Witches as Girls

Young girls are becoming increasingly powerful figures in progressive politics. Girls like Malala Yousafzai, Greta Thunberg, and Emma González capture the political imagination and drive activist movements. The political power of these girls reflects the position young girls have had in children’s and young adult literature for decades—both as characters and as consumers. The girl as an identity category holds a great deal of future potential, either as figures who are in the process of internalizing patriarchal ideology, or as figures who have not yet interpellated these repressive ideologies. No matter which end of the spectrum girls are viewed from, there are two features which define them: they hold within their political subjectivity an inherent consideration of the future (who they will grow up to become), and they also are usually defined by adults. In this chapter, I consider how the futurity and openness of girlhood is wound up in feminist memories of witches. This is complicated by the fact that girls are particularly contentious symbols in contemporary feminist and postfeminist politics, and the witch consequently adds a further layer to the political investments of girlhood. Resisting the infantilizing tendencies of discussions of girlhood and childhood, I consider how these young girl witches mediate not only feminist memoryscapes of witches and witchcraft but also of feminist and more specifically postfeminist politics and media culture.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 B. Kosmina, Feminist Afterlives of the Witch, Palgrave Studies in (Re)Presenting Gender, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25292-1_7

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The Child and the Girl There is debate about when the construct of the child first emerged in a form recognizable to contemporary iterations, with varying dates proposed for when this cultural construct emerges. Philippe Ariés contends in Centuries of Childhood (1960) that the idea of the child as we currently recognize it is not broadly visible prior to the seventeenth century in Western cultures, and emerged most forcefully in and was consolidated across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.1 James Kincaid similarly contends in a survey of the field that the late eighteenth century is when the notion of the child was “invented […] to occupy an empty psychic and social space.”2 The child as a discrete social being with specific identity and cultural connotations emerges from discourses of the family unit and in places and conditions where particular norms of care (which are themselves gendered, racialized, and classed) can be enacted and enforced. This resonates with the previous chapter’s investigation of motherhood; the child and the mother are both subject positions that have been culturally and politically marginalized and emerge from the rigid structures of the family unit and practices of caring and dependence. The shaping or moulding of the child as emerging subject and as citizen became a social concern that played out in increased cultural anxieties and moral panics. The child as a kind of innocent tabula rasa human-being-in-formation is not itself an innocent notion; it is one that has underpinned any number of political movements that seek to maintain regressive versions of the status quo. Constructivist scholarship on the child and childhood consequently grapples with the political uses and abuses of this figure across historical, political, and ideological regimes. As Henry Jenkins writes, “[c]hildhood—a temporary state—becomes an emblem for our anxieties about the passing of time, the destruction of historical formations or, conversely, a vehicle for our hopes for the future.”3 It is this ‘but what about the children’ type of rhetoric that Lee Edelman labels the Cult of the Child and reproductive futurity. The inherent future orientation of the child as a cultural category means that adult investments in and deployments of the child as a political, cultural, and social figure have a tendency to reify nostalgic visions of the past and rose-tinted imaginings of the present. Reconsidering the cultural construct of the child consequently entails contending with the political investments in the symbol that inevitably seek to reinscribe contemporary ideological norms.

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However, there are also political affordances of childhood that make the child a particularly useful figure for radical politics. While childhood is a state of constant becoming, it is also a state of unbecoming; in the process of becoming an adult one must by definition be unbecoming a child. This opens up radical avenues of undoing or un-writing regressive ideologies (or, on the other hand, undoing or un-writing political progress). This construct of the child, written through cultural discourse and literature, consequently can be interrogated to understand the ideologies of the present, just as any of the other cultural figures I have already considered throughout this monograph. The political investments in the figure of the child can so often serve regressive or conservative ideologies. However, the incorporation of the witch’s polysemic memory cultures may seem a remedy to this; the child witch offers a radical panacea to the perpetual political conservativism enacted to ‘save the children.’ The witch, as radical as she has the potential to be, has equally been a force that normatizes certain ideologies and the child witch demonstrates this as much as other iterations of the symbol. As with the mother, the monster, and the lover, the child is a figure viewed with ambivalence within some feminist discourses, something that compounds the complexities of feminist memoryscapes of the witch.

Girlhood, Feminism, Postfeminism If the temporary and nostalgic view of the child has invited any number of cultural anxieties and moral panics, girlhood is a site of even further gendered anxiety. Childhood as a time of becoming and unbecoming resonates with Butler’s definition of gender as “a term in process, a becoming, a constructing that cannot rightfully be said to originate or to end,” or even earlier, Simone de Beauvoir’s proposition in The Second Sex that “[o]ne is not born, but rather becomes, woman.”4 The becoming of woman is a process of gendering the body that is situated in girlhood, and girlhood consequently can be a period of interpellation of patriarchy; unbecoming girl and becoming woman is a process of ideological formation. In Simone de Beauvoir’s formation, “the passivity that essentially characterises the ‘feminine’ woman is a trait that develops in her from her earliest years. But it is false to claim that therein lies a biological given; in fact, it is a destiny imposed on her by her teachers and by society.”5 For many feminist scholars, writers, and activists seeking to break free of patriarchal designations of womanhood, girlhood became something

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to be undone or overcome for the liberated feminist new woman.6 Girlhood under patriarchy is “the enemy of feminism,” in this framework, as it is the period of time when the emerging subject interpellates patriarchal ideologies that impact their later adult lives.7 Reading the girl witch with memories of these feminist discourses leaves her haunted by anti-girl rhetoric that emerges from patriarchal ideologies but also from within feminist ideologies. Sociological approaches to subcultures in the 1970s and 1980s, however, began to question previous feminist discourses of girlhood as a period of patriarchal inscription, and resist the anti-girlhood of earlier models of feminism, much like the revisionary conceptualization of the mother around the same time.8 Girls have been “excluded by feminism’s dominant model of subjectivity,” a model which also often excluded women of colour, LGBTQIA + women, working-class women, disabled women, and other marginalized groups.9 Feminist scholars of girlhood are concerned with cultural forces influencing, constructing, and altering the category of ‘girl’ globally, without the built-in anti-girl rhetoric of earlier feminist discourses.10 Girlhood studies require a similar scholarly construct as the child in childhood studies, simultaneously assuming certain conditions as being what marks out girlhood from other young people’s identity categories (childhood or boyhood as examples).11 Much like the child, girls are in some ways brought into being by the discourses around them; where the girl differs from the broader category of the child is the way that gendered discourses are wound up in the figure.12 This is particularly important to bear in mind when considering the girl witch as she is produced, represented, and circulated across popular culture feminist memoryscapes. Popular culture depictions of the witch are some of the ways that the figure of the girl is brought into being and defined, and, vice versa, girlhood and girls as cultural forces enact particular politics in feminist memoryscapes of witches. Contemporary constructions of girlhood in literary, cultural, and pedagogical discourses often emphasize resistance or subversion as a core element of the ‘modern girl.’ Girlhood scholars point to the inherent potential for subversion or resistance that girls have that adults do not. The notion that girlhood is an inherently subversive identity stage can be problematic, as it puts a lot of pressure on girls to do political labour that boys do not necessarily have to do. Nevertheless, girls have become well-known political activists, girls are everywhere in popular media and culture, both as producers and consumers (or as both), and much of

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the current cultural discourses about the figure of the girl (feminist or otherwise) positions her as an engine of activism, with an inherently future-oriented activist sensibility. The complexities of girl witches and political resistance, revolution, and agency are compounded when viewed in light of postfeminist constructions of power, particularly following the ‘girl power’ cultural trend of the 1990s and 2000s in Western popular culture and media. The girl power moment, heralded by the feminist-but-not-feminist politics of the Spice Girls in the 1990s,13 is wrapped up in postfeminist sensibilities: as Zaslow writes, “[g]irl power defines a new model of girlhood replete with a postfeminist system of values and practices.”14 Neoliberal models of agency and power are imbricated with the symbol of the girl in postfeminist ideologies and sensibilities, as are both contradictory feminist and anti-feminist politics, and the intersecting discourses of other identity categories and power relations, including those related to race, class, disability, and sexuality.15 Consequently, discussions of the witch in the context of ‘girl power’ and postfeminist media also need to be discussions about who is given access to neoliberal power structures, the types of power and agency that is afforded to these girls, and whether they pull the ladder up behind them. There are girl witches in popular culture prior to the postfeminist girl power moment, particularly in literature and film for early readers: Elizabeth George Speare’s The Witch of Blackbird Pond (1958), Florence Laughlin’s The Little Leftover Witch (1960), Alice Low and Jane Manning’s The Witch Who Was Afraid of Witches (1978), and Hayao Miyazaki’s 1989 film Kiki’s Delivery Service all come to mind. However, there is an enormous surge in girl witches in popular media around the same time as the ‘girl power’ movement kicks off in the 1990s and there is a contiguous boom in children’s and young adult publishing. There are more novels, films, and television shows from the last three decades alone that depict girl witches than could be considered in a whole book, let alone a chapter.16 Consequently, even though there any number of texts I could consider, my focus in this chapter (unlike in the last three) is on texts that demonstrate the different postfeminist inflections of girl witches during and after the 1990s through to the 2020s. More so than perhaps any of the other iterations of the witch in feminist memoryscapes, girl witches are inextricable from postfeminist popular culture. As Rachel Moseley has argued “the representation of the teen witch is a significant site through which the articulation in popular culture of the shifting

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relationship between 1970s second-wave feminism, postfeminism in the 1990s and femininity can be traced.”17 This is because postfeminist politics are inextricable from the figure of the girl in contemporary culture and media, and girls receive a degree of cultural and scholarly attention in this moment that they had not prior. Postfeminism requires, Angela McRobbie argues, an accounting of feminism in cultural power structures by assuming its passing or completion and thus comfortable incorporation into mainstream popular culture and media; postfeminist sensibilities “encompas[s] the existence of feminism as at some level transformed into a form of Gramscian common sense, while also fiercely repudiated, indeed almost hated.”18 McRobbie sees postfeminism as a contemporary political moment where the gains of feminism are recontextualized as occurring without the work of feminists, and feminism is thus “cast into the shadows, where at best it can expect to have some afterlife, where it might be regarded ambivalently by those young women who must, in more public venues, stake a distance from it, for the sake of social and sexual recognition.”19 A liberated woman is repositioned as the neoliberal consumer-subject who is sexually available and subscribes to capitalist tendencies. This plays out in popular culture and media in what Rosalind Gill characterizes as a postfeminist sensibility, wherein media reflects the contradictory “entanglement” of feminist and anti-feminist themes.20 Girls in the twenty-first century in the West offer a particularly useful political temporality: they are born at a moment where they benefit from past feminist struggle without having lived through it, and they embody the notion of the emerging postfeminist subject. Media representations of postfeminist girlhood demonstrate the mnemonic legacies of both feminist and anti-feminist ideologies and mediate these ongoing ideologies and memories. The cultural construction of the figure of the child and of the girl are invested with an innate preconception of the future: they exist in the present, but the very idea of childhood (and girlhood) presupposes the future adult subject the child will eventually become and consequently the future world the child will inherit. This future orientation makes the girl a figure of particular power and resonance in feminist memory work. The site of girlhood has become a means of imagining the future subject,21 and a site onto which cultural anxieties about the past and the future are projected, as “[y]oung women today stand in for the possibilities and anxieties about new identities more generally.”22 The figure of the girl thus contains meanings from the past, of the present, and for the

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future. The future-oriented activist potential of the girl resonates with the hauntological collapsing of past, present, and future in feminist activist memory methodologies. In analysing how witchcraft and girlhood are imbricated in these texts, I am also therefore analysing how the future is textually imagined and how this imagined future holds the memories of various (post)feminist pasts. The witch in feminist discourse is a figure of the past haunting the present and future, while the girl is a figure of future potentials haunting the present and the past: the girl witch thus envelopes past, present, and future. Texts featuring the girl witch necessarily therefore engage with an imagination of the future, albeit not always a progressive imagining, and mediate feminist responses to and imaginings of the future (or lack thereof).

Girl Witches and Reproductive Futurity While Lee Edelman’s Cult of the Child has been received with some contention, the notion of reproductive futurity and queerness comes more forcefully into view when considered in relation to the girl witch and particularly postfeminist iterations of this symbol across popular culture and media. As the child “remains the perpetual horizon of every acknowledged politics, the fantasmatic beneficiary of every political intervention,” imagining the future through the figure of the child, or investing the child within an innate futurity, projects the status quo of the present into the imagined future.23 Edelman’s conceptualization of reproductive futurity thus grapples with how the symbol of the child is used to imagine the forced continuation of the ideological present into the future. While I am more committed to an anticipatory hope than Edelman’s political pronouncements allow, there is also something that makes me turn to the more negative resonances of Edelman’s queer child: the endless procession of numbing media texts, each more clearly solely owing its existence to market-driven needs for profit than the last, certainly makes “the side of those not ‘fighting for the children’” more appealing.24 Even without this admittedly nihilist temptation, Edelman’s notion of reproductive futurity does describe some iterations of girlhood and girl witches in popular culture. While Edelman’s ‘solution’ (for lack of a better word) to the problem may be debatable in its productivity (which is the point), his articulation of the problem itself is certainly generative. The girl witch, in these contexts, operates as a symbol of a specifically gendered reproductive futurity. She simultaneously is the inheritor of feminist ideologies,

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agency, and power, and is also a symbol of why feminism is not ‘necessary’ anymore, and thus a figure through whom the tyranny of the present is projected into the future. This is the case in Harry Potter, where the girl witch, Hermione, inherits the radical signifiers of the witch and of feminist activism and memories—she benefits from the values and features of feminist politics and media—while the novels and films simultaneously seem to repudiate these politics as no longer necessary. Within the ideological and chronological limits of the seven Harry Potter novels and the eight film adaptations, the girl witch ultimately functions as a means of projecting contemporary postfeminist ideology into the horizons of the future. The epilogue of the final book (which is adapted quite closely in the film series) and the later Harry Potter and the Cursed Child play jump 19 years into the future, and the depiction of the children as adults projects the postfeminist ideologies of the story’s present into the future. The taking into account of feminism that the girl witch signifies in Harry Potter is simultaneously the pushing away of feminism that her growth into an adult witch reinforces. The status of the girl as an always-becoming (and unbecoming) subject combined with the contemporary young adult genre’s sensibilities fosters a narrative in the Harry Potter series about girlhood that reinforces the “traditional but vaguely liberal values” of the series as a whole.25 The girl witch across the (still-proliferating) Harry Potter texts reflects the reproductive futurity of postfeminist politics of girlhood. As a young girl in a social realist fantasy,26 Hermione exists in a postfeminist ideological realm where feminist values are taken for granted, while also being pushed away as no longer needed; where broadly liberal values are accepted without ever offering too much threat to hegemonic structures and institutions. Consequently, Hermione reflects how witches inherit memories and models of pre-feminist, feminist, and postfeminist ideologies, and how girlhood serves to enact and project those values into the political ideologies of the future. The girl witch is a figure through whom gendered oppression is critiqued but also marked as ‘resolved.’ Girls in Harry Potter (in remarkably stark contrast to boys) are engines of political engagement and activism (although their political power does not have much effect, and is often viewed as either useless or not as productive as the boys’ ‘action’). Throughout the series, Hermione is depicted as the most politically aware and active of the core trio, creating activist group Society for the Protection of Elvish Welfare (a group against the enslavement of a magical

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species called house-elves, something for which she is endlessly mocked), and founding, with Harry and Ron, Dumbledore’s Army, a subversive student group which resists the regime installed at the school by Dolores Umbridge.27 She is frequently shown to be the most politically savvy, often explaining Ministry of Magic policy machinations to Harry and Ron, and is repeatedly acknowledged as the best student in the school. Her exceptional skills are clear to the staff at Hogwarts and even to the Ministry for Magic, who give her special dispensation for a Time Turner (a device that the wearer can use to go back in time) so she can take more classes.28 Clearly, she is invested with levels of power, intellect, and agency that are recognized on both the reader’s part and by the other characters within the series. By the final story (Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows ), Hermione (nearly an adult by this point, 17 or 18 years old) even points out to her male friends that they treat her differently and require her to do all the cooking “because I’m a girl, I suppose!”.29 However, even as the characterization of Hermione appears to draw on feminist values and rhetoric, the series undermines the necessity of those values and instead projects the current patriarchal and neoliberal ideological structures of the family, of romantic relationships, and of gender identity into the interminable horizon of the future. As Pugh and Wallace frame this contradiction, the world of Harry Potter “appears to be both a fantastically post-feminist world where sexism no longer undermines women’s power and agency and one in which a post-feminist façade merely camouflages the novels’ rather traditional gender roles and its erasure of sexuality orientation difference.”30 In the epilogue to the final book, “Nineteen Years Later,” which is faithfully reproduced almost precisely in the film adaptations, Hermione, barely present in the text, is replaced by Ginny, Harry’s now-wife, as the primary female character. All glimpses of Hermione’s girlhood are gone—she has settled quite comfortably into the role of mother and wife. This obviously is not by necessity an unempowered or disempowered state (as the previous chapters have demonstrated), but, when taken with the familial and relationship politics of the series as a whole—which Levy and Mendelsohn describe as “pretty much mired in the 1950s”31 —certainly evinces a particularly regressive gender politics. The jump into the future that the epilogue provides represents the operation of Edelman’s reproductive futurity. The apparently liberal ideologies that characterize Hermione’s girlhood are—literally— projected into the future, and the ‘unbecoming’ that girlhood represents

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also indicates the becoming of a model of womanhood and witchcraft that serve remarkably regressive causes. This is even more stark in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, the play written by Rowling, Jack Thorne, and John Tiffany, premiering in 2016 with the playscript released in the same year. The entire premise of Cursed Child—a time-travel narrative where the children of the Harry Potter lead characters (Albus, Harry and Ginny’s son, and Scorpio, Draco Malfoy’s son) go back in time, inadvertently change the future, and consequently continue to go back in time to course-correct until the present and the future are reinstated as they ‘should’ be—is characterized by Edelman’s notion of reproductive futurity. The play picks up immediately from the Epilogue of Potter, and quickly establishes that Hermione has become Minister of Magic (head of the British wizarding government), and is married to Ron, with whom she has two children, Rose and Hugo. She briefly worries about being a working mother: “You know, Ron says he thinks I see more of my secretary Ethel (she indicates off) than him. Do you think there’s a point where we made a choice—parent of the year or— Ministry official of the year?”32 The endless questioning of work culture and feminist values of motherhood do not, it seems, disappear when one is a witch. What is more troubling in Cursed Child, however, is the way that romance plots play out for the grown Hermione. When Albus and Scorpio go back in time to try and save Cedric Diggory’s life, a young man killed by Voldemort in the fourth Harry Potter story, they accidentally interfere in the budding romance between Hermione and Ron and stop them from falling in love. Because of this, Hermione does not become Minister of Magic, but instead becomes a “quite mean,” unmarried, and clearly quite resentful teacher at Hogwarts whose unrequited love for Ron affects all of her life.33 In each new timeline that emerges as Albus and Scorpio change the past, Hermione and Ron are shown to be desperately in love but not together.34 Only when the past has been restored are they together (Ron even asks for a vow renewal) and is Hermione Minister of Magic again.35 That Cursed Child aligns Hermione’s career success and future happiness with her ability to marry her high school sweetheart and the very strict temporal borders of the past is indicative of the entire Harry Potter universe’s gender and familial politics, and consequently it demonstrates how the girl witch is deployed in the reproduction of the tyranny of the present into the future. Cursed Child is curiously self-aware of its ideological reproductive futurity: at one point while Harry and Draco Malfoy talk to each other about

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how they have raised their sons, Harry says: “We’ve been so busy trying to rewrite our pasts, we’ve blighted their present.”36 The girl witch is haunted by all of the cultural memories of feminist interventions in the history of witches, and all the future potential of girlhood—but, as in the case of Hermione Granger, that can be something of a red herring. Harry Potter offers the appearance of feminist politics, but simultaneously marks feminism as complete. These texts have the appearance of feminist values—they benefit from feminist gender ideologies, espouse apparently feminist politics, and do, I think, genuinely have some feminist potential for young readers—but when projected into the future, are demonstrated to reinforce and reify existing patriarchal ideologies of gender, the family, romance, and work. Hermione as a young girl witch certainly offers the tempting appearance of feminism; but when viewed in the temporal context of her future (something that is only available when considering literature, film, and media), she demonstrates how girl witches sometimes grow up just to reproduce the hegemonic tyranny of the present.

Girl Witches and Girl Power In texts like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which explicitly use the language and rhetoric of the girl power moment in its characterization and dialogue, the girl witch comes to embody the postfeminist girl power moment. While Buffy is optimistically attached to feminist principles, there are particular features in these girl witches that mark them out as postfeminist. Texts featuring these mediated memories of postfeminism reflect the general sensibilities and features of postfeminist politics, simultaneously assuming feminist principles and values while repudiating the ongoing need for feminist politics in their girl power jubilance. Witchcraft offers significant access to power that is only offered to girls, and offers apparent challenge to oppressive structures and systems. However, these girl witches opt for a more neoliberal rhetoric of self-empowerment and power. The girl witch in these particular memoryscapes demonstrates a particularly postfeminist view of girlhood: one that mediates the feminist correlations between witchcraft and empowerment into a tool that allows girls to grow up and become postfeminist women. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, often written about as a quintessential girl power text, demonstrates these embodied postfeminist principles of girlhood and witchiness. For a show that is repeatedly discussed by popular

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and scholarly commentators as a feminist text, it is shy about declaring its feminism out loud. In fact, the word ‘feminism’ is not ever spoken in the entire show, and ‘feminist’ appears once, in this sarcastic exchange between Xander Harris and Cordelia Chase: Cordelia:

Xander: Cordelia:

I hope you guys aren’t going to the Sadie Hawkins Dance tonight, ‘cause I’m organizing a boycott. Do you realize that the girls have to ask the guys? And pay and everything? I mean, whose genius idea was that? Obviously, some hairy-legged feminist Really! Well, we need to nip this thing in the bud. I mean, otherwise, things are going to get really scary.37

Buffy’ s constant use of feminist politics but refusal to actually use the language of feminism is an obvious example of its postfeminism. Despite this, Buffy offers a more optimistic politics around girlhood than the contemporaneous Harry Potter series, operating on a feminist politics that works to undo systems and histories of oppression—but does this for ultimately individualist reasons, rather than communal liberation. The negative utopian possibilities in Buffy have already been discussed in Chapter 4: Witches as Monsters, and, rather than diverge, this could seem to affirm Edelman’s embrace of the death drive as a means of accessing radical queer futures. However, while there is something in the characterization of Willow that aligns her with Edelman’s queer child—with the side not fighting for the children—ultimately the series as a whole (including Willow’s monstrous turn) represents an “attempt to produce a more desirable social order […] to affirm a structure, to authenticate social order, which it then intends to transmit to the future in the form of its inner Child”38 in such a manner that Buffy cannot fully reflect Edelman’s queer futurity. Buffy reflects the metafictional self-referentiality that characterizes postmodern literature and media.39 This, along with the fast-paced ‘quippy’ dialogue that defines Joss Whedon’s writing, means the show is filled with constant intertextual references (to other popular culture texts, to contemporary cultural trends and movements, and to historical events and figures). The postfeminist politics of girlhood in Buffy reflect this self-conscious referentiality: girl power is not just something that is being enacted in Buffy, but there are explicit references to characters’ having or assuming girl power. Empowerment—for all the vagueness of this term—is consciously sought out by the young girls

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in this narrative, and witchcraft is an avenue towards this liberation for Willow. Witchcraft acts as a kind of signifier in the show for ‘feminist’ and ‘feminine’ values that Willow uses as she ‘becomes’ an ‘empowered’ girl and can then move past once she has ‘unbecome’ a girl. The show draws on 1970s radical feminist narratives of the witch trials, and on pagan and Wiccan spiritualist movements to compound the understanding of Willow’s turn to witchcraft as a means of feminine and feminist liberation as she grows up. The 1692 Salem witch trials, for example, are invoked in contextualizing contemporary demon attacks in Sunnydale: in a Season 3 episode, the teenagers’ mothers, influenced by a demon, become convinced that witches are attacking their children, and the resulting paranoid panic spirals until Buffy, Willow, and Amy (a fellow student and fellow witch to Willow) are almost burned at the stake.40 Giles notes that this sort of demoniacal panic was the cause of the Salem trials,41 recalling past trauma in the present-day persecution of the girls and correlating past traumatic events with contemporary girlhood and witchcraft. When Willow initially begins practising magic, it is because her computer science teacher, Jenny Calendar, does, and it allows her to connect to a female authority figure (who is not her distant and overbearing mother). Calendar is a “technopagan” who repeatedly espouses feminist values and principles and who Willow becomes quite close to before Calendar’s death in Season 2.42 The Wiccan group that Willow joins when she starts university repeatedly emphasize the status of their coven as a sisterhood seeking feminist empowerment.43 When Willow needs to seek magical rehabilitation for her ‘addiction to magic’ she recovers with a coven of witches in England.44 Willow’s association with witchcraft, at least when she is still young, is an opportunity for her to connect to feminist histories, communities, and powers and is an avenue to power consciously sought out by girl witches. However, the mediation of postfeminist politics throughout the series leads to a situation where Willow’s girlhood is defined by her connection to feminist witchcraft communities and histories that she then outgrows. Girl witches grow up to become women who reject the feminist powers and histories that afforded them liberation in the first place. Willow actively rejects the Wiccan group at her university, labelling them a “bunch of wanna-blessed-bes,”45 and leaves the English coven to return to Sunnydale even though she has doubts about her ‘recovery.’46 Buffy scholars have argued that Willow’s early interest and skill in science

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and technology codes her as ‘masculine’ and that the introduction of witchcraft in Season 2 ‘re-feminises’ her by aligning her with typically female magic and lineages.47 This reflects a view of girlhood that sees it as a time of patriarchal ideological inculcation that needs to be ‘overcome.’ However, I would instead contend that Willow’s change is less about shifting from ‘masculine’ to ‘feminine’ behaviours (although the emphasis on her ‘makeover’ into a more feminine mode of gender performance certainly correlates to Gill’s postfeminist media sensibilities48 ) but is instead the operation of girl power politics. Having accessed the benefits of feminist politics, community, history, and power by becoming a witch, Willow repudiates the necessity of these politics in the first place: in order to be liberated—to have ‘girl power’—Willow must become a certain type of woman, one who has already benefitted from girl power rhetoric and earlier feminist reconfigurations of the witch. In unbecoming a girl, Willow thus becomes a witch: witchcraft becomes a stepping-stone for girls to become liberated, neoliberal women. For Willow, the fraught status of girlhood, and her ongoing process of unbecoming a girl and becoming a woman, is metaphorically reflected in her journey as a witch; her girlhood is not quite something to be outgrown, as intimated in some feminist discourses, but it is only ever a phase which prefigures the future empowerment of the woman she will become, who is able to divorce herself from the ghosts of feminism and gains power from her status as a neoliberal subject. In this, she differs very little from other postfeminist girl power conceptualizations of power. She is immensely powerful and witchcraft is how she accesses that power: but witchcraft is divorced from narratives of communal liberation, and instead is something that she ‘has.’ When she transforms in the final episode into Willow the White, even Buffy—the epitome of girl power— refers to her not as a girl (as all the other Potential Slayers are) but as a woman. Speaking to all the young Potential Slayers, Buffy says: So here’s the part where you make a choice. What if you could have that power… now? In every generation one Slayer is born because a bunch of men who died thousands of years ago made up that rule. They were powerful men. [She points at Willow, who looks nervous] This woman is more powerful than all of them combined.49

The mediation of girl power through the girl witch in Buffy consequently demonstrates how witchcraft and girlhood are correlated through

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the affordances of cultural power inherent to each. Postfeminist politics are mediated through these young girls, and witchcraft becomes a metaphor for the emerging neoliberal (adult woman) subject who has already benefitted from feminism and can thus move on from feminist politics entirely.

Girl Witches and Cool Feminism Postfeminism offers something of a conundrum for feminist scholars. In its incorporation of feminist politics, postfeminist media offers a mainstreaming of feminism that is politically desirable: the more people who align themselves with feminism, the better, surely. But equally, by its incorporation into mainstream media and culture, postfeminism offers a repudiation of feminism as no longer necessary or as ‘completed,’ and a neoliberal capitalist bent that consequently render feminist structural critique undone.50 Feminist media and culture scholars continue to debate this paradox, with some arguing that it is in fact a “disheartening and sometimes frankly boring” debate to be still having.51 There would also appear to be no way out of this postfeminist Catch-22. However, rather than grappling with the function of postfeminist politics, contemporary media and culture has shifted form again, and feminist politics and values are more jubilantly represented in popular culture than at any time in recent memory, albeit still within a continuum of postfeminist politics. This new, ‘cool,’ ‘chic,’ and ‘stylish’ mode of feminism—which Gill has called post-postfeminism52 and Banet-Weiser describes as popular feminism53 —is very clear in popular culture after 2016 but does not directly emerge from this political moment. The growth of feminism’s popularity as a broadly accepted movement of renewed urgency and vehemence mediated through popular culture is evident prior to 2016, although the election of Trump no doubt hastened the development of this new branch of feminist media. Jessalynn Keller and Maureen E. Ryan’s 2014 work Emergent Feminisms identifies this new mode of feminist political renewal in popular culture prior to Trump, investigating “important instances of feminism’s renewed mattering to popular culture”54 and clearly demonstrating the urgency and existence of this not-quite-postfeminist mediation of feminism through popular culture. The figure of the girl witch in popular culture iterations in more recent years aligns with this model of feminist politics. In much the same way that the witch is used in 1970s feminist activism in the United States

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and the United Kingdom, the girl witch in contemporary popular culture texts signifies Capital-F Feminism—or, to be more precise, Capital-I Capital-F Intersectional Feminism. Given the usefulness of each different term for this contemporary feminist moment—popular feminism, postpostfeminism, and emergent feminisms—and to capture the particular type of aspirational prestige that these popular culture texts treat this nascent model of feminist politics with, I have referred to it here as ‘cool’ feminism, following Jessalynn Keller and Jessica Ringrose’s use of the term, and Jessica Valenti’s oft-cited Guardian article about the ‘coolness’ of feminism in contemporary media.55 Feminist politics in these texts not only signify liberation and revolution, but are also aspirational and imbue the witch with cultural prestige, cachet, and importantly, power: witchcraft (and consequently feminism) signifies as ‘coolness’ in these texts. This is what marks this particular era of feminist media culture and cool feminism. These texts operate on a logic of empowerment, where witchcraft offers power and agency, but without specific direction towards what liberation actually looks like: to use Banet-Weiser’s description of popular feminism, “empowerment is the central logic; with little to no specification as to what we want to empower women to do.”56 These most recent depictions of girl witches demonstrate this particular sensibility: feminism matters a great deal in these texts, arguably more so than in any era since the 1970s, and the girl witch becomes a vector through which feminist politics and empowerment are understood and deployed. However, the visibility of the girl witch’s feminist politics often becomes the only goal: being a feminist is about being seen as a feminist, and not about the ongoing and persistent acts of labour that activism requires. Nevertheless, there is still something politically generative in these cool feminist texts: the mediation of feminist memories offers an activist potential, if not an actuality. Netflix’s The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (2018–2020) demonstrates this particular deployment of the witch, girlhood, and feminist memory in popular culture. It is a show that is defined by its political earnestness and sincere, but very unsubtle, invocation of feminism. It is incredibly explicit in its feminist politics, representing the girl witch as a thoughtful and wholly committed feminist activist who uses her magic as another tool in her feminist killjoy survival kit, to use Sara Ahmed’s term.57 Being feminist—specifically, calling yourself an intersectional feminist—is what constitutes “cool” in Sabrina. The girl witches in Sabrina quite consciously discuss their feminism, and how their

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witchcraft signifies their political beliefs and enables their activist practices. (For example, Sabrina and her friends start the Women’s Intersectional Creative and Cultural Association at their local high school: W.I.C.C.A., as they repeatedly call it, to drive home the association between feminism and memories of the witch.58 ) Sabrina does demonstrate some of the features of postfeminism as outlined by Gill and McRobbie (for example, it demonstrates makeover and beauty paradigms, and a repeated emphasis on individualist narratives of choice). However, it ultimately mediates emerging feminist politics that are more sincere and radical.59 From the spectral return of the Salem witch hunts in the first season to the resurrection of Lilith and her eventual crowning as the new Queen of Hell, the series is concerned with the overhaul and dissolution of existing paradigms—even within the hierarchy of Hell—and girl witches are the figures through whom this dissolution of the present is figured. Sabrina cannot by any standard be described as subtle about its feminist politics, with the girl witches constantly fighting against the “puritanical masculinity”60 of contemporary American culture (both mortal and witchy). Whether Sabrina is protesting her mortal high school principal’s banning of feminist books like Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye,61 using her magic to prank transphobic footballers who have been bullying her friend, Theo,62 or trying to remove the misogynistic priest of her coven, Father Blackwood, and install a more feminist Church regime63 the show is consistent in its correlation of girl witches and feminist politics. Sabrina is afforded power and agency through her witchcraft, but, unlike other postfeminist texts about girl witches, it is not a power that allows her to grow out of girlhood. In fact, it is a power that exists because of her girlhood. Consequently, like the series’ (quite blatant) attempts to engage with feminist history, politics, and values, it is also very concerned with the language of girlhood, particularly in the first season. Girlhood is imbued with a sense of future potential and of generative politics, and it is the politics of girlhood in Sabrina that marks the ‘cool feminism’ of the show as different from earlier postfeminist girl power. To quote Megan Henesy, Sabrina “takes the teen-witch as a metaphor for female maturation and empowerment to a new level, explicitly exploring the role of a politically aware teenage witch in an uncanny America that is at once present day and eerily ‘out-of-time’.”64 Sabrina’s choice in Part One between becoming a full witch or remaining mortal is presented as a part of a coming-of-age narrative that marks witchcraft as something after girlhood (or childhood for her non-female cousins

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and friends). When Sabrina chooses Sabrina Edwina Diana Spellman as her Dark Baptismal name (to honour her deceased parents, Edward and Diana), Sabrina’s aunt Hilda says “[t]hey [Sabrina’s parents] would be so proud of the young woman you’ve become,” to which her other aunt, Zelda, says “[c]orrection, Hilda, they’d be so proud of the young witch she is becoming.”65 Witchcraft, much like girlhood, is seen as a process of becoming, and is a separate stage of development to girlhood: young people become witches. Sabrina, trying to explain to her mortal boyfriend, Harvey, about what will happen at her Dark Baptism, says that: Sabrina:

Harvey: Sabrina:

Harvey:

This place [the woods they stand in], it’s where I was born, Harvey. Not in Greendale General. Here. In this grove of trees. Almost sixteen years ago. It’s also where I’ll be reborn this Friday night. On my sixteenth birthday, at the stroke of midnight, under an eclipsing blood moon. I don’t understand. Reborn how? The ceremony’s called a Dark Baptism, but it’s not as bad as it sounds. It’s kind of like when we went to Shoshanna Feldman’s bat mitzvah. Or Guadalupe Lopez’s quinceañera. I’m leaving my… girlhood behind. [chuckles] In the woods? Is that a metaphor?66

Sabrina’s Dark Baptism functions as a social ritual that metaphorically divides identities of child and adult, and girl and witch. (The similarity between the Shoshanna Feldman whose bat mitzvah Sabrina and Harvey attended and Shoshana Felman, eminent literary studies professor, does not seem incidental. Sabrina is littered with these kinds of references that I am hesitant to quite call intertexts but operate similarly. Rarely do these references to cultural, historical, or media texts/objects offer much meaning beyond being a signifier in and of themselves (a kind of ‘hey, look, this exists in the real world, now moving on’ callout). This is arguably part of the overall ‘cool feminist’ project of the show—it references feminism (in this case, a feminist scholar) to render it visible, but does not then go on to engage in any great deal with the politics underlying the reference: the visibility is the only point.) However, Sabrina disrupts prevailing postfeminist narratives of the divide between girlhood and witchhood. In a conversation between Sabrina and the Weird Sisters prior to her Dark Baptism, Sabrina expresses

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her desire to have both the freedom of the permanent space of unbecoming of girlhood, and the power of the witch, something that appears precluded from Hermione and Willow: Sabrina:

Prudence: Sabrina: Prudence: Sabrina: Prudence:

[…] it still feels wrong to me. Signing my name in the Book of the Beast. Knowing that, on some level, I… I’m giving up my freedom. You are. In exchange for power. An even exchange. But I want both. I want freedom and power. [laughs] He’ll never give you that. The Dark Lord. The thought of you, of any of us, having both terrifies him. Why is that? He’s a man, isn’t He?67

This oppositional logic between freedom and power and the consequent choice that girl witches face is positioned within the logic of the show as a condition of patriarchy (and, for the feminist audience, of postfeminism), and one that must be challenged. That Sabrina questions it when other witches (who have already had their Dark Baptisms) do not further marks her out as unusual in some sense, and contributes to Sabrina’s own cultural prestige: her ‘cool feminism’ drives the series’ narrative. Sabrina’s questioning of patriarchal power structures and systems such as Lucifer’s oppression over witches is the central narrative arc of Parts One and Two, and indicates how the series as a whole is invested in circulating, disseminating, and deploying feminist politics. In her desire for both freedom and power, Sabrina also rejects postfeminist, neoliberal considerations of power, and chooses not to sign the Book of the Beast at her Dark Baptism. Running from the woods and pursued by the coven who try to force her to sign, she cries “[t]here is another path for me, just as there was for my [warlock] father and [mortal] mother. A third way. And even if there isn’t, my name is Sabrina Spellman, and I will not sign it away!”.68 This reflects how Sabrina mediates memories of postfeminist politics through her position as a girl. Sabrina’s refusal to choose between girlhood and witchhood demonstrates how the television series as a whole mediates contemporary ‘cool feminist’ politics: the “liminality” of girlhood functions “as a means of resistance.”69 Sabrina’s refusal to engage in a neoliberal system of illusory ‘choice’ signifies how the show does engage in a more substantive structural critique than earlier postfeminist media tends to. As Sabrina says in voiceover at the end of the second

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episode, “the girl who had to decide between being a witch and being mortal chose neither path. Or, if you look at it another way, chose both. She was half-witch, but with two covens.”70 Sabrina demonstrates how the mediation of feminist memory via the girl witch in popular media offers an anticipatory hope for the future, and privileges feminist politics with a degree of cultural cachet that is emblematic of contemporary cool feminist politics.

Girls and the Future The texts considered in this chapter all fall into the spectrum of young adult literature (some on the younger end, some on the more adult end, but all in some way designed for the broad category of teenagers and young adults). This is not so much a choice as a necessity: texts that engage in a substantive discussion of the capacities and powers of girlhood most frequently are texts written for girls.71 If contemporary media and culture is marked by a political sensibility where feminism once again matters but where it operates on a circular logic where ‘mattering’ is defined by visibility, postfeminist girl power texts for young adults offer a particularly useful example of the type of media produced in this ideological moment. ‘Cool feminism’ does seem to demonstrate all of the features of postfeminism, where feminist values are affirmed and incorporated into mainstream neoliberal capitalism—but these political values are not repudiated, pushed away, viewed as complete or offered any other act of closure. Feminism is marked as urgent, radical, intersectional, important, and as an essential part of the girl witch identity in contemporary cool feminist texts. As naïve as this may sound (and I have no doubt that history will ultimately make a fool of me when the rampant popular misogyny72 that characterizes contemporary politics starts to show up with more prominence in popular culture), this seems a promising turn for feminist media scholars. Yes, there is still a commodification of feminist politics occurring, and yes, feminist politics that do not divorce themselves from neoliberal racial capitalism are not radical: but that girl witches are specifically calling themselves feminists indicates something different to earlier postfeminist girl power politics where ‘feminism’ is only spoken in disgust. What this demonstrates is how the figure of the girl witch mediates contemporary debates about feminist politics in media culture, arguably more explicitly than other witch figures (and, as seen throughout this

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monograph, the relationship between witchcraft and feminism has been uncontested for decades in Anglo-American feminist politics, and so the unsubtlety of postfeminist politics in girl witches is particularly notable). These teen witches demonstrate a concerted and explicit feminist rhetoric in their characterization, narrative arcs, and even at the granular level of dialogue and physical appearance. Hermione Granger consistently demonstrates her activist and intellectual excellence, and refuses unfair treatment because she is a girl; however, the reproductive futurity of these texts ultimately suggests that girl witches, even when they seem to invoke the memory of feminist politics, can obscure the radical potential of future politics. For Willow Rosenberg, witchcraft offers a means of empowerment, liberation, and community building. Buffy is in the unique position to show how the girl witch transitions to womanhood when operating in a postfeminist media landscape. Witchcraft becomes a part of the process of unbecoming that signifies girlhood in postfeminism: the girl witch is always already becoming a woman, collapsing narratives of historical trauma and metaphorical growing-up into the subjectivity of a young woman. Sabrina Spellman—who remains forever a girl having sacrificed herself at the end of Part Four to save the world— views becoming a witch with ambivalence, as it appears to be a choice between freedom (mortality) and power (witchcraft). However, the postpostfeminist or cool feminist politics of contemporary girl witches instead makes the falsity of this choice apparent, to both Sabrina and to the audience. Sabrina’s refusal to engage in this demonstrates how popular culture representations of girl witches mediate contemporary feminist memoryscapes, and, maybe, what the future of feminist politics looks like, no matter what label it is given.

Notes 1. Philippe Ariés, Centuries of Childhood (Middlesex, UK: Penguin Books, 1960), 45. 2. James R. Kincaid, Child-Loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 11. 3. Henry Jenkins, “Introduction: Childhood Innocence and Other Modern Myths,” in The Children’s Culture Reader, ed. Henry Jenkins (New York and London: New York University Press, 1998), 5. 4. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990, reis., New York and London: Routledge, 1990; 2006), 45; Simone

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5. 6. 7. 8.

9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16.

17. 18. 19. 20.

de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans Constance Borde and Sheila MalovanyChevallier (1949, reis., London, Vintage Books, 2011), 293. Beauvoir, Second Sex, 305. Catherine Driscoll, Girls: Feminine Adolescence in Popular Culture and Cultural Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 127–128. Driscoll, Girls, 128. See Angela McRobbie, Feminism and Youth Culture, 2nd ed. (Hampshire and London: Macmillan Press, 2000), 12; Valerie Walkerdine, Daddy’s Girl: Young Girls and Popular Culture (London: Macmillan, 1997), 2. Driscoll, Girls, 133. Jennifer Helgren and Colleen A. Vasconcellos, “Introduction,” in Girlhood: A Global History, ed. Jennifer Helgren and Colleen A. Vasconcellos (New Brunswick, USA and London: Rutgers University Press, 2010), 4. Catherine Driscoll, “Girls Today: Girl Culture and Girl Studies,” Girlhood Studies 1, no. 1 (Summer 2008): 14. Driscoll, Girls, 5. Quoted in Emilie Zaslow, Feminism, Inc: Coming of Age in Girl Power Media Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 3. Zaslow, Feminism Inc, 4. Rosalind Gill, “Postfeminist Media Culture: Elements of a Sensibility,” European Journal of Cultural Studies 10, no. 2 (2007): 149; Marnina Gonick, Emma Renold, Jessica Ringrose, and Lisa Weems, “Rethinking Agency and Resistance: What Comes After Girl Power?” Girlhood Studies 2, no. 2 (Winter 2009), 1–3. In fact, Miranda Corcoran’s recently published work (too recent to be able to discuss at length here) Witchcraft and Adolescence in American Popular Culture (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2022) does exactly this, considering the emergence of the teen witch as a cultural force throughout the twentieth century. Rachel Moseley, “Glamorous Witchcraft: Gender and Magic in Teen Film and Television,” Screen 43, no. 4 (Winter 2002): 403. Angela McRobbie, The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture, and Social Change (London: Sage Publications, 2009), 12. MCRobbie Aftermath of Feminism, 11. Gill, “Postfeminist Media Culture,” 149. Both Gill and McRobbie characterize postfeminism as the ‘entanglement’ of contradictory feminist and anti-feminist discourses. However, I am also cautious of an overly prescriptive definition of postfeminist sensibilities. As Margaret Henderson and Anthea Taylor point out, Gill’s outline of the elements of features of postfeminist media culture (which includes specific trends, tropes, and narratives) has become so accepted that there is a tendency for feminist scholars to treat critique of postfeminist media as a ‘box-ticking’

7

21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26.

27.

28. 29. 30.

31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

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exercise where these features are “unreflexively sought out in whatever texts or cultural practices the feminist critic has chosen.” See Margaret Henderson and Anthea Taylor, Postfeminism in Context: Women, Australian Popular Culture, and the Unsettling of Feminism (London and New York: Routledge, 2020), 5–6. Anita Harris, Future Girl: Young Women in the Twenty-First Century (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), 1. Harris, Future Girl, 2. Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2004), 3. Edelman, No Future, 3. Michael Levy and Farah Mendlesohn provide a sound overview of the political and social resonances of the young adult fantasy genre in literature after the 1990s in Children’s Fantasy Literature: An introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016),161–164, 166. Levy and Mendlesohn characterized the series as ‘traditional but vaguely liberal’ prior to Rowling’s sustained anti-trans activism in the early 2020s, which further influences readings of the gender politics in the series. There is a coherent, fantastic magical system in place, overlaid on to recognizable, realist models of society: in this case, there is an entire magical world that is hidden underneath regular British society (and so situations happen where, for instance, the entrance for the Ministry for Magic is in a telephone box, or magical students can take Muggle Studies where they learn about electricity or the legal system). See Levy and Mendlesohn, Children’s Fantasy Literature, 161–164. J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (London: Bloomsbury, 2000), 198; J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (London: Bloomsbury, 2003), 301–311. J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (London: Bloomsbury 1999), 288–290. J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (London: Bloomsbury, 2007), 241, emphasis original. Tison Pugh and David L. Wallace, “Heteronormative Heroism and Queering the School Story in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter Series,” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 31, no. 5 (Fall 2006): 260. Levy and Mendelsohn 166. J.K. Rowling, Jack Thorne and John Tiffany, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child: Parts One and Two (London: Little, Brown, 2016), 33. Rowling, Thorne, and Tiffany, Cursed Child, 134–135, 150–151. Rowling, Thorne, and Tiffany 196–197, 204–206. Rowling, Thorne, and Tiffany 238-239. Rowling, Thorne, and Tiffany 279.

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37. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, season 2, episode 19, “I Only Have Eyes For You,” directed by James Whitmore, Jr., written by Marti Noxon, aired by April 28, 1998, in broadcast syndication, Twentieth Century Fox, 2006, DVD. 38. Edelman 2–3. 39. Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (New York and London: Routledge, 1988), passim. 40. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, season 3, episode 11, “Gingerbread,” directed by James Whitmore, Jr., written by Thania St. John and Jane Espenson, aired January 12, 1999, in broadcast syndication Twentieth Century Fox, 2006, DVD. 41. Buffy the Vampire Slayer “Gingerbread.”. 42. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, season 2, episode 22, “Becoming Part Two,” directed and written by Joss Whedon, aired May 19, 1998, in broadcast syndication, Twentieth Century Fox, 2006, DVD. 43. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, season 4, episode 10, “Hush,” directed and written by Joss Whedon, aired December 14, 1999, in broadcast syndication, Twentieth Century Fox, 2006, DVD. 44. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, season 7, episode 1, “Lessons,” directed by David Solomon, written by Joss Whedon, aired September 24, 2002, in broadcast syndication, Twentieth Century Fox, 2006, DVD. 45. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, “Hush.”. 46. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, season 7, episode 2, “Beneath You,” directed by Nick Marck, written by Douglas Petrie, aired October 1, 2002, in broadcast syndication, Twentieth Century Fox, 2006, DVD; Buffy the Vampire Slayer, season 7, episode 3, “Same Time, Same Place,” directed by James A. Contner, written by Jane Espenson, aired October 8, 2002, in broadcast syndication, Twentieth Century Fox, 2006, DVD. 47. Farah Mendlesohn, “Surpassing the Love of Vampires: or, Why (and How) a Queer Reading of the Buffy/Willow Relationship Is Denied,” in Fighting the Forces: What’s as Stake in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, ed. Rhonda V. Wilcox and David Lavery (Lanham, Boulder, New York and Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2002), 56; Lorna Jowett, Sex and the Slayer (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 2005), 38–39. 48. Gill, “Postfeminist Media Culture,” 149. 49. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, season 7, episode 22, “Chosen,” directed and written by Joss Whedon, aired May 20, 2003, in broadcast syndication, Twentieth Century Fox, 2006, DVD. 50. McRobbie, Aftermath of Feminism, 11. 51. Imelda Whelehan, “Remaking Feminism: Or Why Is Postfeminism So Boring?” Nordic Journal of English Studies 9, no. 3 (2010): 159.

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52. Rosalind Gill, “Post-postfeminism?: New Feminist Visibilities in Postfeminist Times,” Feminist Media Studies, 16, no. 4 (2016): 611. 53. Sarah Banet-Weiser, Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2018), 1. 54. Jessalynn Keller and Maureen E. Ryan, “Introduction: Mapping Emergent Feminisms,” in Emergent Feminisms: Complicating a Postfeminist Media Culture, ed. Jessalynn Keller and Maureen E. Ryan (New York and London: Routledge, 2018), 1. 55. Jessalyn Keller and Jessica Ringrose, “‘But then feminism goes out the window!’: Exploring Teenage Girls’ Critical Response to Celebrity Feminism,” Celebrity Studies 6, no. 1 (2015): 132; Jessica Valenti, “When everyone is a feminist, is anyone?” The Guardian, November 24, 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/ 2014/nov/24/when-everyone-is-a-feminist. To a lesser extent it also picks up on Gill’s description of feminism in current media as being “hip.” See Gill, “Post-postfeminism,” 611. 56. Banet-Weiser, Empowered, 17. 57. Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2017), 235–239. 58. The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, season 1, episode 1, “Chapter One: October Country,” directed by Lee Toland Krieger, written by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, aired October 26, 2018, Netflix https://www.netflix. com/watch/80230071?trackId=250318489. 59. Megan Henesy, “‘Leaving my girlhood behind’: Woke Witches and Feminist Liminality in Chilling Adventures of Sabrina,” Feminist Media Studies 21, no. 7 (2021): 1147. 60. The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, “Chapter One: October Country.”. 61. The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, season 1, episode 2, “Chapter Two: The Dark Baptism,” directed by Lee Toland Krieger, written by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, aired October 26, 2018, Netflix, https://www.netflix. com/watch/80230072?trackId=14170289&tctx=2%2C0%2C08c468a40e0a-4c0e-a06a-b0fc367bf0dc-236867018%2CGPS_F779D5F610659E8 B2D92AE3D11F4BD-994911DC4F528C-2F7C7202EA_p_166451089 8991%2CGPS_F779D5F610659E8B2D92AE3D11F4BD_p_1664510 893249%2C%2C%2C%2C80223989. 62. The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, “Chapter Two: The Dark Baptism.”. 63. The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, season 2, episode 20, “Chapter 20: The Mephisto Waltz,” directed by Rob Seidenglanz, written by Roberto

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Aguirre-Sacasa, aired April 5, 2019, Netflix, https://www.netflix.com/ watch/80230090?trackId=14170289&tctx=2%2C1%2C8f957be9-eab84dbb-84fb-1505edde374f-691820964%2CGPS_F779D5F610659E8 B2D92AE3D11F4BD-994911DC4F528C-1B0F998F96_p_166555248 6932%2CGPS_F779D5F610659E8B2D92AE3D11F4BD_p_1665552 486932%2C%2C%2C%2C80223989. Henesy, “Woke Witches,” 1146. The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, “Chapter One: October Country.”. The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, “Chapter One: October Country.”. The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, “Chapter Two: The Dark Baptism.”. The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, “Chapter Two: The Dark Baptism.”. Henesy 1151. The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, “Chapter Two: The Dark Baptism.”. This is admittedly a big claim, and there certainly are texts designed for adults where the witch is a teenage girl—for instance, Robert Eggers’ The Witch (2015) which I discuss in this monograph already, or Emily M. Danforth’s Plain Bad Heroines (2020). However, the majority of texts featuring teenage girl witches are created for teenagers. What is also of interest but is outside of the scope of my analysis here is the immense growth in adult readership and audiences of young adult texts, which no doubt affects the tenor of the conversation around girlhood. Banet-Weiser passim.

Bibliography Aguirre-Sacasa, Roberto, writer. The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. Season 1, episode 2, “Chapter Two: The Dark Baptism.” Directed by Lee Toland Krieger. Aired October 26, 2018. Netflix. https://www.netflix.com/watch/ 80230072?trackId=14170289&tctx=2%2C0%2C08c468a4-0e0a-4c0e-a06ab0fc367bf0dc-236867018%2CGPS_F779D5F610659E8B2D92AE3D11F 4BD-994911DC4F528C-2F7C7202EA_p_1664510898991%2CGPS_F77 9D5F610659E8B2D92AE3D11F4BD_p_1664510893249%2C%2C%2C% 2C80223989 ———The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. Season 1, episode 1, “Chapter One: October Country.” Directed by Lee Toland Krieger. Aired October 26, 2018. Netflix. https://www.netflix.com/watch/80230071?trackId=250318489. ———The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. Season 2, episode 20, “Chapter Twenty: The Mephisto Waltz.” Directed by Rob Seidenglanz. Aired April

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5, 2019. Netflix. https://www.netflix.com/watch/80230090?trackId= 14170289&tctx=2%2C1%2C8f957be9-eab8-4dbb-84fb-1505edde374f-691 820964%2CGPS_F779D5F610659E8B2D92AE3D11F4BD-994911DC4 F528C-1B0F998F96_p_1665552486932%2CGPS_F779D5F610659E8B2D 92AE3D11F4BD_p_1665552486932%2C%2C%2C%2C80223989 Ahmed, Sara. 2003. Feminist Futures. In A Concise Companion to Feminist Theory, ed. Mary Eagleton, 236–254. Malden, USA and Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Ariés, Philippe. 1960. Centuries of Childhood. Middlesex, England: Penguin Books. Banet-Weiser, Empowered. 2018. Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Butler, Judith, and Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. 1990. Reissue, 2006. New York and London: Routledge. Corcoran, Miranda. 2022. Witchcraft and Adolescence in American Popular Culture. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. de Beauvoir, Simone, The Second Sex, and Translated by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier. 1949. Reissue, 2011. London: Vintage Books. Driscoll, Catherine. 2002. Girls: Feminine Adolescence in Popular Culture and Cultural Theory. New York: Columbia University Press. ———“Girls Today: Girls, Girl Culture and Girl Studies.” Girlhood Studies 1, no. 1 (Summer 2008): 13–32. Edelman, Lee. 2004. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Espenson, Jane, writer. Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Season 7, episode 3, “Same Time, Same Place.” Directed by James A. Contner. Aired October 8, 2002, in broadcast syndication. Twentieth Century Fox, 2006, DVD. Gill, Rosalind. 2007. Postfeminist Media Culture: Elements of a Sensibility. European Journal of Cultural Studies 10, no. 2: 147–166. Gill, Rosalind. 2016. Post-postfeminism?: New Feminist Visibilities in Postfeminist Times. Feminist Media Studies 16, no. 4: 610–630. Gonick, Marnina, Emma Renold, Jessica Ringrose and Lisa Weems. “Rethinking Agency and Resistance: What Comes After Girl Power?” Girlhood Studies 2, no. 2 (Winter 2009): 1–9. Harris, Anita. 2004. Future Girl: Young Women in the Twenty-First Century. New York and London: Routledge. Helgren, Jennifer and Colleen A. Vasconcellos. “Introduction.” Girlhood: A Global History, edited by Jennifer Helgren and Colleen A. Vasconcellos. New Brunswick, 1–13. New Jersey, and London: Rutgers University Press, 2010. 1–13.

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Henderson, Margaret, and Anthea Taylor. 2020. Postfeminism in Context: Women, Australian Popular Culture, and the Unsettling of Feminism. London and New York: Routledge. Henesy, Megan. 2021. ‘Leaving My Girlhood Behind’: Woke Witches and Feminist Liminality in Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. Feminist Media Studies 21, no. 7: 1143–1157. Hutcheon, Linda. 1988. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. New York and London: Routledge. Jenkins, Henry. “Introduction: Childhood Innocence and Other Modern Myths.” The Children’s Culture Reader, edited by Henry Jenkins, 1–37. New York and London: New York University Press, 1998. Jowett, Lorna. 2005. Sex and the Slayer. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press. Keller, Jessalynn, and Mauren E. Ryan. 2018. Introduction: Mapping Emergent Feminisms. In Emergent Feminisms: Complicating a Postfeminist Media Culture, ed. Jessalynn Keller and Maureen E. Ryan, 1–21. New York and London: Routledge. Keller, Jessalynn, and Jessica Ringrose. 2015. ‘But then Feminism Goes Out the Window!’: Exploring Teenage Girls’ Critical Response to Celebrity Feminism. Celebrity Studies 6, no. 1: 132–135. Kincaid, James R. 1994. Child-Loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture. London and New York: Routledge. Levy, Michael, and Farah Mendlesohn. 2016. Children’s Fantasy Literature: An introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McRobbie, Angela. 2009. The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture, and Social Change. London: Sage Publications. McRobbie, Angela. 2000. Feminism and Youth Culture, 2nd ed. Hampshire and London: Macmillan. Mendlesohn, Farah. 2002. Surpassing the Love of Vampires: Or, Why (and How) a Queer Reading of the Buffy/Willow Relationship Is Denied. In Fighting the Forces: What’s at Stake in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, ed. Rhonda V. Wilcox and David Lavery, 45–60. Lanham, Boulder, New York and Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers. Moseley, Rachel. “Glamorous Witchcraft: Gender and Magic in Teen Film and Television,” Screen 43, no. 4 (Winter 2002): 403–422 Noxon, Marti, writer. Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Season 2, episode 19, “I Only Have Eyes For You.” Directed by James Whitmore, Jr. Aired April 28, 1998, in broadcast syndication. Twentieth Century Fox, 2006, DVD. Petrie, Douglas, writer. Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Season 7, episode 2, “Beneath You.” Directed by Nick Marck. Aired October 1, 2002, in broadcast syndication. Twentieth Century Fox, 2006, DVD.

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Pugh, Tison and David L. Wallace. “Heteronormative Heroism and Queering the School Story in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter Series.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 31, no. 5 (Fall 2006): 260–281. Rowling, J.K. 2007. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. London: Bloomsbury. Rowling, J.K. 2000. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. London: Bloomsbury. Rowling, J.K. 2003. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. London: Bloomsbury. Rowling, J.K. 1999. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. London: Bloomsbury. Rowling, J.K., Jack Thorne, and John Tiffany. Harry Potter and the Cursed Child: Parts One and Two. London: Little Brown, 2016. St. John, Thania and Jane Espenson, writers. Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Season 3, episode 11, “Gingerbread.” Directed by James Whitmore, Jr. Aired January 12, 1999, in broadcast syndication. Twentieth Century Fox, 2006, DVD. Valenti, Jessica. “When Everyone Is A Feminist, Is Anyone?” The Guardian, November 23, 2014. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/ nov/24/when-everyone-is-a-feminist Walkerdine, Valerie. 1997. Daddy’s Girl: Young Girls and Popular Culture. London: Macmillan. Whedon, Joss, writer. Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Season 2, episode 22, “Becoming Part Two.” Directed by Joss Whedon. Aired May 19, 1998, in broadcast syndication. Twentieth Century Fox, 2006, DVD. ——— Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Season 4, episode 10, “Hush.” Directed by Joss Whedon. Aired December 14, 1999, in broadcast syndication. Twentieth Century Fox, 2006, DVD. ——— Season 7, episode 22, “Chosen.” Directed by Joss Whedon. Aired May 20, 2003, in broadcast syndication. Twentieth Century Fox, 2006, DVD. ——— Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Season 7, episode 1, “Lessons.” Directed by David Solomon. Aired September 24, 2002, in broadcast syndication. Twentieth Century Fox, 2006, DVD. Whelehan, Imelda. 2010. Remaking Feminism: Or Why Is Postfeminism So Boring? Nordic Journal of English Studies 9, no. 3: 155–172. Zaslow, Emilie. 2009. Feminism Inc: Coming of Age in Girl Power Media Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

CHAPTER 8

Witches and the Future

On August 6, 2018, American band The Mountain Goats Tweeted “no matter how much degradation these self-serving assholes try to visit on the word ‘witch,’ I have seen the future and the witches get the last laugh.”1 In the previous chapter, I discussed how the figure of the girl is imbued with an idea of, and hope for the future, and the girl witch embodies the traumas of the feminine and feminist past as well as activist possibilities for the future. As I conclude this monograph, I want to broaden this discussion and consider how re-reading and re-remembering the past are acts of imagining the future—specifically, utopian futures. Remembrance, resistance, and revolution are inextricable; past, present, and future are tied together. The future-oriented feminist activist memory I have outlined over Feminist Afterlives of the Witch, with its haunting and haunted nature, is inherently hopeful, predicated on utopian imaginaries of feminist futures. It is an act of meeting with the spectral presence of the past that haunts the present and the future. As Gordon writes, “the ghost is pregnant with unfulfilled possibility, with the something to be done that the wavering present is demanding […] The ghost always also figures this Utopian dimension of haunting.”2 Consequently, contending with the afterlives of feminist activism across popular culture and media is an exercise in considering and enacting the ‘something to be done’ that the ghost brings with it. The spectral feminist afterlives of the witch embody the ‘something to be done’ of patriarchy, white supremacy and © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 B. Kosmina, Feminist Afterlives of the Witch, Palgrave Studies in (Re)Presenting Gender, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25292-1_8

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colonialism, neoliberal capitalism and class oppression, ableism, transphobia and homophobia, environmental desecration (and so on), and consequently prompt future action. Activist memory does not just exist to serve political narratives of the past, but to create activist narratives of the future too, as is evidenced by the emergence of future-oriented memories and texts in the last four chapters, culminating most obviously in the previous chapter. This may seem hopelessly utopian, but hope is the only way to create this more just future: and the ghost is a profoundly hopeful figure, imbued with possibility of revolution.

Remembering Hope Around the turn of the millennium, cultural studies scholars seemed to turn away from the future.3 In an era dominated by (premature) pronouncements as to the end of history, in the shift away from modernity to postmodernity the future became inaccessible, a phantom that hovers just out of reach that seems to promise an escape from the neoliberal capitalist present but ultimately keeps a culture on the same path that reinforces the status quo.4 Alongside the postmodern (and/or capitalist realist) pessimism for the future, there is also a shift under postmodernity (or, at least, the perception of a shift) from thematics of time to space,5 and when temporality is considered, it has been shortened or narrowed to the pure present. “Time horizons,” David Harvey argues, have “shorten[ed] to the point where the present is all there is.”6 These diagnoses of the postmodern condition as the pure present not only foreclose on meaningful access to the past except for pastiche-driven cannibalism, but close off the horizons of future too. Perhaps the anxieties about temporality are associated with the urgency of memory and memory studies, as explored in Chapter 3: Witches and the Past. A number of memory studies scholars have sought to understand how postmodern cultures enact temporal borders, and what ramifications this has for understanding memory cultures. Newman, Clayton, and Hirsch identify the rejection of futurity and emphasis on the spatialized present as a product of the incredulity towards metanarratives in postmodernity.7 Andreas Huyssen similarly sees the loss of narratives of the future and distrust of narratives of the past as a symptom of postmodernity, arguing that the turn to memory from history is also a part of the postmodern condition: “[t]he turn to memory is subliminally energized by the desire

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to anchor ourselves in a world characterized by an increasing instability of time and the fracturing of lived space.”8 This coincides with the emergence of an anti-utopian sentiment from the mid-twentieth century on, compounded as global traumas accrue, that leads to a prevalence of dystopian literature and a turn away from futurity by cultural studies scholars. The utopian impulse can be difficult to draw out in the face of overwhelming and accretive catastrophe: just in the few years of writing this monograph, fatal bushfires and floods have swept across my country; the death toll of First Nations people killed in custody in my country since the 1997 Bringing Them Home report that investigated Aboriginal deaths in custody has surpassed 500; the Covid-19 pandemic has led to the deaths of millions of people globally, with a significant portion of these deaths occurring in the Global South, where access to vaccines and treatments has been significantly limited by wealthy nations; the ongoing wars in Afghanistan, Syria, and Yemen have resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths, with a new war erupting in Ukraine; reproductive rights globally have been threatened by the winding back of Roe v Wade in the United States; not to mention the overwhelming and looming global catastrophes of capitalism and climate change. As Russell Jacoby succinctly puts it “[t]he movement from utopia to dystopia ratifies history.”9 Nevertheless, while there may seem to be a prevailing anti-utopian sentiment in scholarly discourse and popular culture, there remains a vehemently hopeful cultural and memory studies practice, particularly in activist imaginaries. This renewed interest in the future comes in direct opposition to the apparent inability of postmodernists to imagine the future, and, as Ann Rigney points out, is particularly pertinent for memory scholars, who seem bound to the study of traumatic pasts without always considering how those pasts enact the future.10 However, the intersections of memory and activism somewhat allay these concerns: the invocation of memory for and with a cause necessitates construction of future-oriented memory narratives. This future-oriented memory work is politically driven, either consciously or unconsciously: it forms “the struggle for a better life, if only in the form of small acts of resistance rather than of revolutionary transformations.”11 These small acts of resistance, in the case of feminist activist memory practices, are utopian in intention. The utopian project has had a long history dating from when Thomas More first coined the notion in 1516. Many have sought to define Utopia in their quest to find it, a strand of utopianism that Russell Jacoby refers to as blueprint utopianism.12

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Blueprint utopianism lays out precisely the shape of the utopian society— think of the precision of More’s outline of the island of Utopia, mapped down to the layout of the streets and the number of people living in each family household.13 However, blueprint utopianism is failed by its precision: what appears utopian to one society or culture is banal, idiosyncratic, or downright offensive to others (More, for instance, includes slaves in his outline of Utopia, something clearly not included in utopian politics).14 Consequently, Jacoby refers to iconoclastic utopianism, which imagines a future through ideas typically associated with utopia (peace, pleasure, harmony), but declines to define or shape what that future will precisely look like.15 Philosophers Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, and Ernst Bloch are characteristics of this unprogrammed, open utopianism. Bloch’s The Principle of Hope in particular represents this unplanned but longyearned for future utopia. Bloch opens his work by asking: “[w]ho are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going? What are we waiting for? What awaits us? […] It is a question of learning hope. Its work does not renounce, it is in love with success rather than failure. Hope, superior to fear, is neither passive like the latter, nor locked into nothingness.”16 Michael J. Griffin and Tom Moylan similarly articulate the politically generative nature of unprogrammed utopian thought, conceptualizing it as an “open-ended process” of hopeful “social dreaming.”17 Hope, however trite or naïve it may seem in the current political and environmental moment, remains a practice, not just an unformed passivity. Hauntology and ghostly practices are utopian in their emphasis on justice and futurity, containing the meanings, symbols, and resources of the past, the present, and the future.18 A “[u]topian practice,” writes Frances Bartkowski, “decenters questions of time and history.”19 The non-linearity of the utopian impulse, mapping the collapse of future into present and past, aligns the ghost or the spectre with the constant drive towards a more just future.20 Hauntological utopianism represents the possibility of a “revolutionary temporality” which draws on the temporal rupture of the spectre to “link desire to hope, to history” and thus “figure new ways of critically re-orienting subjects in their worlds.”21 Like Walter Benjamin’s angel of history, with its back to the future while it faces the catastrophe of the past,22 the spectre’s haunting temporal overlap or collapse invokes a utopianism. Avery Gordon writes this of the ghost’s utopian haunting:

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The willingness to follow ghosts, neither to memorialize nor to slay, but to follow where they lead, in the present, head turned backwards and forwards at the same time. To be haunted in the name of a will to heal is to allow the ghost to help you imagine what was lost that never even existed, really. That is its Utopian grace: to encourage a steely sorrow laced with delight for what we lost that we never had; to long for the insight of that moment in which we recognize […] that it could have been and can be otherwise.23

The ‘utopian grace’ of the ghost is what renders it such a productive symbol for activist memory scholars. The ghost offers the opportunity to intervene in or engage with memory, to recognize its haunting presence and its haunting nature, its future directions and activist potential. As seen throughout this work, the ghost is particularly evocative as a mechanic for feminist memory practices, and the utopian implications of the spectre resonate with activist politics and memoryscapes. The lack of precision or strict definition in iconoclastic utopianism is productive for activist memory studies. I am particularly drawn to Ann Rigney’s view of hope in activist memory studies: hope has an anticipatory logic, one that is not based on inevitability, but on mere possibility. It is life-affirming and future-oriented in a minimalist way: it indicates an enduring attachment to something of value in face of its present absence and past denial. It is precisely the uncertainty associated with it that invites action.24

While memory, as the haunting spectre of the past, and utopianism, the open-ended desire for a better future, may seem antithetical, they are temporally connected and politically dependent. Memory and forgetting are means of managing or engaging with the past, and are important elements in utopian politics.25 Reaching towards Utopia is achieved not just through the management of the past, but in conjunction with the past: the utopian impulse paradoxically builds and collapses past, present, and future. For an activist memory studies to have material effect, it must centre open-ended utopian social dreaming about the past, the present, and the future. The feminist activist memory practices I have proposed in Feminist Afterlives of the Witch are predicated on multiple, somewhat contradictory strands of thought, and, perhaps most urgently, the tension between the unplanned and open nature of hauntological utopianism and the

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careful planning and precision of activist work. The political work of feminist, queer, decolonial, working-class, and disabled authors, activists, thinkers, scholars, and organizers is future-oriented.26 The political realities of the present dictate activist yearnings for utopian—or, at least, more just—futures. Sara Ahmed compellingly makes this point, writing that “[t]he question of ‘feminist futures’ cannot be asked without reference to the pasts and presents of different feminisms.”27 Feminist utopian thought in and as activism is not new and, as already demonstrated, the prevalence of hauntological or spectral temporalities across feminist memoryscapes makes the interconnections between memory, spectres, and justice starker.28 The haunting and haunted utopian grace of memory as it ripples across and is deployed in popular culture and activist movements, of popular culture’s function as a staging ground for memory formation and activist community building and political organizing, and of the dispersal of activist imaginaries and politics across memoryscapes and popular cultures demonstrates the inextricable weaving together of cultural processes, practices, and texts. Popular culture texts mediate memories of feminism and feminist memories, and consequently make these memories actionable. This is what constitutes the activist nature of these memories. The feminist activist memory practice I have demonstrated across this monograph is an inherently hopeful practice: it entails reading and re-reading texts, cultures, histories, and memories with the “anticipatory logic” of activist memory that Rigney identifies as “life-affirming and future-oriented.”29 Feminist activist memory work is consequently what Huyssen calls “productive remembering”: it is remembering for a cause and for a future.30 Re-remembering and re-reading the witch through and with a feminist activist memory predicated on ghostly re-readings opens up the past, present, and future to more just popular culture imaginaries.

Where to From Here? My focus throughout this monograph has been on how feminist memory operates across popular culture and what temporal modes it opens up for political action and analysis. Further work is needed to consider how other political models of memory enact hauntings and temporal blurring. Through this monograph I have sought to demonstrate what it can mean to remember as a feminist, with feminisms, and in a feminist way. What continues to need to be asked is what does it mean to remember queerly,

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to remember de-colonially, to remember anti-capitalist-ly? How do intersectional understandings of these ideas influence the haunting presence of each for activist memory scholars? And how does activist memory operate in different realms—are the processes of memory cultures different in digital realms? Does the activist potential of memory signify something different on the internet? There is already research developing in these fields, which open up these avenues of thought. As with feminist memory studies, queer memory or the queering of memory is a matter of increasing scholarly attentions in recent years. C.W. Clark’s Queering Memory and National Identity in Transcultural U.S. Literature and Culture (2020), for instance, theorizes how queer memory emerges within literary and cultural landscapes in the twenty-first century.31 Ingrid Ryberg has also productively considered how the proliferation of queer representation across US popular culture has created a “fertile archive” of queer memory and history.32 The emergence of queer memory studies intersects clearly with feminist and/or activist memory, and the already existing consideration of queer temporalities. The openness of queerness is particularly productive when considering memory as a future-oriented cultural product and practice. The characterization of queerness as an “open mesh of possibilities,”33 and as a resistant or subversive identity category34 offers political hope. José Estaban Muñoz consequently contends that the future is queer. “Queerness,” Muñoz argues: exists for us as an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future. The future is queerness’s domain […] We must strive, in the face of the here and now’s totalising rendering of reality, to think and feel a then and there […] Queerness is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world.35

Muñoz’s queer utopian futurity clearly overlaps with the hauntological understandings of memory and ghosts I have considered throughout this work in relation to feminist activist memory practices. The possibilities of queer memory and hauntological utopianism as a paradigm or model for future activist memory studies is of importance for both queer studies and memory activism. Alongside the possibility of a queer future-oriented activist memory, future research is needed to consider how decolonial and anti-racist

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politics intersect with utopian activist memory and spectrality. As demonstrated throughout Feminist Afterlives of the Witch, the liberatory activist memory potential of the witch has been primarily reserved for white women. Whiteness has been the often unacknowledged but deeply felt spectre that haunts feminist activism and feminist memory. However, the non-linearity and temporal collapse of the ghost that I have drawn on throughout this monograph to consider how feminist activist memory operates is just as apposite a mechanism for considering decolonial and anti-racist activist memory. There is already a scholarly trend in using the ghost as a symbol through which to understand the haunting and haunted temporalities of white supremacy, racial violence, and the ongoing trauma from institutions such as trans-Atlantic slavery and genocidal colonization. Settler-colonial thought systems and futurity entail the forced relegation of First Nations peoples to ‘the past’ without the affordances of the present, let alone the future, reproducing settler-colonial futurities,36 something that is similarly perpetuated in discourses of slavery and its legacies. Anti-racist temporalities must reject this historicist approach to the haunting legacies of racist ideologies and societies. Conceptualizing anti-racist and decolonial futures through hauntological memory and futurity entails grappling with the utopian and activist dimensions of memory. To decolonize, argues Tuck and Yang, entails conceptualizing an “elsewhere.”37 Colonial paradigms are haunted by “those who have been made killable, once and future ghosts,” and haunting or spectral thinking entails recognizing and memorializing them.38 Thinking beyond settler time requires a reconceptualization of “the principles, procedures, inclinations, and orientations that constitute settler time as a particular way of narrating, conceptualizing, and experiencing temporality.”39 Hauntological conceptions of time could be productive for thinking through the alternate temporalities required for anti-racist and decolonial work that conceptualizes an elsewhere. There is already anti-racist and decolonial theory that draws on this use of the spectre and the ghost. Ian Baucom, for instance, uses hauntology to conceptualize the spectral memory of slavery and commodity capitalism.40 Gordon also uses the utopian memory of the ghost to think through the legacies of slavery.41 Further research is needed on how hauntology intersects with anti-racist and decolonial deployments of activist memory. Finally, alongside the political avenues that future research into hauntological activist memory could travel along, there is also further research

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required about how memory is dispersed across digital culture. Future research is needed for activist memory studies scholars that focuses on audiences and reception, particularly in the digital realm. The proliferation of feminist activism and cultural memory in digital cultures is a matter of increasingly urgent scholarship.42 Already in this work, I have demonstrated a number of different uses of the symbol of the witch in social media activism (such as Mad Fucking Witches or WITCH after 2016), and this prompts questions about how the witch and feminist activist memory operate online. I have gestured to this throughout this monograph already in my references to audiences and to digital cultures; but only briefly, and future research is needed to understand the expansive capacities of feminist activist memory in digital cultures.

The Witches Are Coming The overlap of contradictory memories inherent in feminist activist memory work means that when re-remembering the witch in 2023 it is impossible to escape Donald Trump.43 Trump, who claimed repeatedly throughout his time as President of the United States that he was the victim of a witch hunt from political progressives, the FBI, the Democrats, and various other groups, has repurposed the figure of the witch for a wholly different model of politics to the feminist and Marxist activists and writers who have been dominant in the use of the symbol over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Compounding this complexity is that, as evidenced throughout this monograph, this more progressive use of the symbol operates and is deployed across popular culture and media at the same time as more reactionary and conservative uses of the witch. What I have sought to clarify over this work is the various competing feminisms at play in memories of the witch, and this has entailed grappling with antifeminist rhetoric at times too. Further scholarship is needed on far-right activism and memory about how (and why) memories of the witch are deployed in these environments and scenarios, and how the legacy of her feminist values resonates in these memoryscapes. I began this project in 2017, just as Trump was being inaugurated as President of the United States. I finish it in 2023, following chaos, crisis, and catastrophe.44 There has been an enormous amount of popular culture texts and representations of witches in the last decade or so, which also prompted this research. I tend to think we are coming to the tail end of the popular culture witch fad; I do not know what will follow.45

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This said, history makes fools of us all and I may be premature in my pronouncement about the end of the witch craze: time will tell. In the meantime, I will leave the discussion of the witch in Trump-era feminist politics to Lindy West: [t]he witches are coming, but not for your life. We’re coming for your legacy. The cost of being Harvey Weinstein is not getting to be Harvey Weinstein anymore. We don’t have the justice system on our side; we don’t have institutional power; we don’t have millions of dollars or the presidency; but we have our stories, and we’re going to keep telling them. Happy Halloween.46

The story of the witch is a story that keeps being retold, and each retelling of these tales draws in new interpretations, new cultural moments and resonances, and new political ideologies and purposes as the symbol travels across memoryscapes. Re-reading the afterlives of the witch with a feminist activist memory that brings together the spectres of past, present, and future in the act of remembering consequently imbues these afterimages with multiple, sometimes contradictory meanings. Re-remembering the witch as a monster enables the re-interpretation of texts as instances of the reclamation and revolutionary potential of rage. The monstrous witch becomes a figure of camp, queer, or feminist rage, and with that anger, these witches destroy patriarchal institutions, opening up space for a negative utopian vision of the future. This monstrous utopianism is iconoclastic: it does not lay out a roadmap to utopia, but instead offers space for an unclear feminist future. Similarly, the long association between the witch and female sexuality is shaped and reshaped in feminist activist memories. Slutty, promiscuous witches consequently become symbols of sexual emancipation and feminist communities, while still holding the paradoxical memory of the oppression of marginalized sexualities. This is compounded through feminist revisionary spiritual movements such as goddess feminism, which also recuperate marginalized identities such as the mother. A site of ongoing contestation, the mother exists in tension with the witch, and re-remembering the witch thus allows her to paradoxically exist as the antithesis of the maternal, as a deathly figure of rebirth, and as an all-powerful goddess figure. Girlhood is as maligned as motherhood, and has been seen as a time of the inculcation of patriarchal values, while also being cast as a figure of heteronormative reproduction. However, the girl holds radical political

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potential as an engine of activism through which a future feminist subject can be imagined. In each chapter, the most recent texts are also, often, the most explicit in using the witch as a symbol of feminist politics. Rather than requiring a suspicious (or even reparative) reading, a cursory glance at recent texts demonstrates how the witch is inextricable from memories of feminism. This obviousness or unsubtlety of feminist politics—what Sarah BanetWeiser calls popular feminism47 —raises questions as to how feminist memory operates and circulates through popular media in contemporary culture, and how this serves to mainstream feminist ideologies and to commodify that resistance. The constant balance between ideological resistance and commodification of politics is not a new dilemma for feminists. Thinking through these issues is an ongoing (possibly unending) practice for feminist memory studies scholars: it is one I am hopeful about though. In re-reading the afterlives of the witch, the present becomes thick in holding multiple strands of meaning and temporality: the past is imagined in tension with the present, the future is envisioned in concert with the past. This temporal collapse is mediated through popular culture and mass media, and makes these activist memories actionable. The thickening of the present to incorporate the past and the future holds space for the contradictory evolution of activist movements and political memories, as ideas, texts, temporalities, politics, and utopias overlap in the re-reading experience. What I have sought to trace through Feminist Afterlives of the Witch is how the memory of the witch travels across popular cultures and activist moments, and how the haunting legacies of memory overlap, influence, invade, and shape other cultural arenas. It is not possible to remember the witch or the witch trials now without at least acknowledging the enormous impact that feminist re-vision-ings of the past have had on cultural memories of the figure and of the events that surround the witch’s death. Thinking through the spectres of memory that irrupt again and again into popular culture entails grappling with the capitalist, hegemonic conditions of culture which privilege commodification and consumption over community, while also acknowledging, celebrating, and elevating resistant and activist popular cultural discourses and practices that spiral across and out of memory cultures. The witch’s contradictions serve as a marker of shifting cultural memory practices and functions, and the mainstreaming of popular feminism. The activist cultural memory scholar can look at

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the ever-mounting catastrophes of the past; but there is also still a recognition that the future is there, hovering just behind their turned back. The haunting imaginaries of the future are easy to elide in consideration of memory, but are fundamental for activist memory scholars to bear in mind. The spectral feminist activist cultural memory that I have proposed and outlined in Feminist Afterlives of the Witch offers a new methodology for reading and re-reading memory, activism, and popular culture. This methodology provides the affordances of the collapsing of time that the spectre of memory brings about, the utopian futures that activist cultural politics provide (particularly feminist cultural politics, but all activist politics, even more regressive and conservative branches), and the practices of resistance, subversion, consumption, and commodification that characterize popular cultures and media. Remembering the witch with and through feminist activist cultural memory is an act of both bearing witness to the past and writing the potential for a new future. We, after all, are the granddaughters of the witches that you couldn’t burn.

Notes 1. The Mountain Goats (@mountain_goats), “no matter how much degradation these self-serving assholes try to visit on the word ‘witch,’ I have seen the future and the witches get the last laugh,” Twitter, August 6, 2018. https://twitter.com/mountain_goats/status/1026438416597241856. 2. Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (1997, reis., Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 183–184. 3. Ursula Heise, Chronoschisms: Time, Narrative, and Postmodernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 64–67. 4. Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Winchester, UK and Washington, USA: Zero Books, 2008), passim. 5. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 16. 6. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Cambridge, Massachusetts and Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1989), 240. 7. Karen Newman, Jay Clayton and Marianne Hirsch (eds.), Time and the Literary (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), 6. 8. Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 18. 9. Russell Jacoby, Picture Imperfect: Utopian Thought for an Anti-utopian Age (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 6.

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10. Ann Rigney, “Remembering Hope: Transnational Activism Beyond the Traumatic,” Memory Studies 11, no 3 (2018): 369; Yifat Gutman, Amy Sodaro, and Adam D. Brown, “Introduction: Memory and the Future: Why a Change of Focus is Necessary,” in Memory and the Future: Transnational Politics, Ethics, and Society, ed. Yifat Gutman, Adam D. Brown and Amy Sodaro, (Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 1. 11. Rigney, “Remembering Hope,” 371. 12. Jacoby, Picture Imperfect, xiv. 13. Thomas More, Utopia, trans. Dominic Baker-Smith (London: Penguin, 2012), passim. 14. Jacoby xv, 12–17; More, Utopia, 68–72. 15. Jacoby xv, 33. 16. Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight, (1959, reis., Cambridge, USA: The MIT Press, 1995), 3. 17. Michael J. Griffin and Tom Moylan, “Introduction: Exploring Utopia,” in Exploring the Utopian Impulse: Essays on Utopian Thought and Practice, ed. Michael J. Griffin and Tom Moylan (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2007), 11. 18. Eugene O’Brien, “‘Towards Justice to Come’: Derrida and Utopian Politics,” in Exploring the Utopian Impulse: Essays on Utopian Thought and Practice, ed. Michael J. Griffin and Tom Moylan (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2007), 49, 50. 19. Frances Bartkowski, Feminist Utopias (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 12. 20. Susan McManus, “Truth, Temporality, and Theorizing Resistance,” in Exploring the Utopian Impulse: Essays on Utopian Thought and Practice, ed. Michael J. Griffin and Tom Moylan (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2007), 59. 21. McManus, “Truth, Temporality,” 72. 22. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, (1968, reis., New York: Schocken, 2007), 257–258. 23. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 57. 24. Rigney, “Remembering Hope,” 370, emphasis original. 25. Ruth Levitas, “The Archive of the Feet: Memory, Place, and Utopia,” in Exploring the Utopian Impulse: Essays on Utopian Thought and Practice, ed. Michael J. Griffin and Tom Moylan (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2007), 20. 26. Even anti-social politics such as that in Lee Edelman’s or Mark Fisher’s work demonstrates a concern with the future in some manner. 27. Sara Ahmed, “Feminist Futures,” in A Concise Companion to Feminist Theory, ed. Mary Eagleton (Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 236. 28. Victoria Hesford, “Feminism and Its Ghosts: The Spectre of the Feministas-lesbian,” Feminist Theory 6, no. 3 (2005): 230. 29. Rigney, “Remembering Hope,” 370.

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30. Huyssen, Present Pasts, 29. 31. Christopher W. Clark, Queering Memory and National Identity in Transcultural U.S. Literature and Culture (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). 32. Ingrid Ryberg, “Queer Cultural Memory,” Lambda Nordica 25, no. 1 (2020): 125, 126. 33. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Queer and Now,” in The Routledge Queer Studies Reader, ed. Donald E. Hall, Annamarie Jagose, with Andrea Bebell and Susan Potter (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), 8. 34. Judith Butler, “Critically Queer,” in The Routledge Queer Studies Reader, ed. Donald E. Hall, Annamarie Jagose, with Andrea Bebell and Susan Potter (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), 21. 35. José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York and London: New York University Press, 2009), 1. 36. Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization is not a metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education, and Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 2. 37. Tuck and Yang, “Decolonization,” 36. 38. Eve Tuck and C. Rees, “A Glossary of Haunting,” in Handbook of Autoethnography, ed. Stacey Holman Jones, Tony E. Adams and Carolyn Ellis, (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2013), 642. 39. Mark Rifkin, Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination, (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2017), viii. 40. Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History, (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005), 24. 41. Gordon passim. 42. See, for example, Akane Kanai, “Between the Perfect and the Problematic: Everyday Femininities, Popular Feminism, and the Negotiation of Intersectionality,” Cultural Studies, https://doi.org/10.1080/095 02386.2018.1559869 (2019): 1–24. 43. This seems to be the case for nearly any area of contemporary culture and politics, not just witchcraft studies and memories. 44. To add another ‘C’ word here, I am writing this while recovering from Covid-19. 45. A friend and colleague insists pirates will be next. 46. Lindy West, “Yes, This Is a Witch Hunt. I’m a Witch and I’m Hunting You,” New York Times, October 17, 2017 . https://www.nytimes.com/ 2017/10/17/opinion/columnists/weinstein-harassment-witchunt.html >. 47. Sarah Banet-Weiser, Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2018), passim.

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Bibliography Ahmed, Sara. 2003. Feminist Futures. In A Concise Companion to Feminist Theory, ed. Mary Eagleton, 236–254. Malden, USA and Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Banet-Weiser, Empowered. 2018. Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Bartkowski, Frances. 1989. Feminist Utopias. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. Baucom, Ian. 2005. Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Benjamin, Walter, and Illuminations. Translated by Harry Zohn. 1968. Reissue, 2007. New York: Schocken. Bloch, Ernst, The Principle, and of Hope. Translated by Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight. 1959. Reissue, 1995. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. Butler, Judith. 2013. Critically Queer. In The Routledge Queer Studies Reader, ed. Donald E. Hall, Annamarie Jagose, and with Andrea Bebell and Susan Potter, 18–31. London and New York: Routledge. Clark, Christopher W. Queering Memory and National Identity in Transcultural U.S. Literature and Culture. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. Fisher, Mark. 2008. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Winchester, UK and Washington. USA: Zero Books. Gordon, Avery F and Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. 1997. Reissue, 2008. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Griffin, Michael J and Tom Moylan. “Introduction: Exploring Utopia.” In Exploring the Utopian Impulse: Essays on Utopian Thought and Practice, edited by Michael J. Griffin and Tom Moylan, 11–18. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2007. Gutman, Yifat, Amy Sodaro and Adam D. Brown. Introduction to Memory and the Future: Transnational Politics, Ethics and Society, 1–11. Edited by Yifat Gutman, Adam D. Brown and Amy Sodaro. Hampshire, U.K: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Cambridge, Mass. and Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1989. Heise, Ursula K. 1997. Chronoschisms: Time, Narrative, and Postmodernism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hesford, Victoria. 2005. Feminism and Its Ghosts: The Spectre of the Feministas-lesbian. Feminist Theory 6, no. 3: 227–250. Huyssen, Andreas. 2003. Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Jacoby, Russell. 2005. Picture Imperfect: Utopian Thought for an Anti-Utopian Age. New York: Columbia University Press.

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Jameson, Fredric. 1991. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press. Kanai, Akane. “Between the Perfect and the Problematic: Everyday Femininities, Popular Feminism, and the Negotiation of Intersectionality.” Cultural Studies. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2018.1559869. Levitas, Ruth. 2007. The Archive of the Feet: Memory, Place, and Utopia. In Exploring the Utopian Impulse: Essays on Utopian Thought and Practice, ed. Michael J. Griffin and Tom Moylan, 19–42. Oxford: Peter Lang. McManus, Susan. 2007. Truth, Temporality, and Theorizing Resistance. In Exploring the Utopian Impulse: Essays on Utopian Thought and Practice, ed. Michael J. Griffin and Tom Moylan, 57–81. Oxford: Peter Lang. More, Thomas. 2012. Utopia. Translated by Dominic Baker-Smith. London: Penguin. The Mountain Goats (@mountain_goats). “no matter how much degradation these self-serving assholes try to visit on the word ‘witch’, I have seen the future and the witches get the last laugh.” Twitter, August 6, 2018. https:// twitter.com/mountain_goats/status/1026438416597241856 Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York and London: New York University Press, 2009. Newman, Karen, Jay Clayton, and Marianne Hirsch. 2002. Time and the Literary. New York and London: Routledge. O’Brien, Eugene. 2007. ‘Towards Justice to Come’: Derrida and Utopian Justice. In Exploring the Utopian Impulse: Essays on Utopian Thought and Practice, ed. Michael J. Griffin and Tom Moylan, 43–56. Oxford: Peter Lang. Rifkin, Mark. 2017. Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Rigney, Ann. 2018. Remembering Hope: Transnational Activism Beyond the Traumatic. Memory Studies. 11, no, 3: 368–380. Ryberg, Ingrid. 2020. Queer Cultural Memory. Lambda Nordica 25, no. 1: 122–126. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. “Queer and Now.” In The Routledge Queer Studies Reader, edited by Donald E. Hall, Annamarie Jagose, with Andrea Bebell and Susan Potter, 3–17. London and New York: Routledge, 2013. Tuck, Eve and C. Rees, “A Glossary of Haunting,” in Handbook of Autoethnography, ed. Stacey Holman Jones, Tony E. Adams and Carolyn Ellis, 639–658. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2013. Tuck, Eve and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization is not a metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education, and Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 1–40. West, Lindy. “Yes, This Is a Witch Hunt. I’m a Witch and I’m Hunting You.” New York Times, October 17, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/ 17/opinion/columnists/weinstein-harassment-witchunt.html.

Index

A abject, 108–113, 115, 117, 118, 132 anti-social politics, 177, 198, 199, 203, 214, 219, 224, 255

B Bell, Book, and Candle, 147 Bewitched, 193, 194, 198 Black Lives Matter, viii, 6, 18 Broad City, 2 Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 3, 126, 138, 163, 223, 236

C camp, 119, 120, 122–125 child (as cultural construct), 198, 214 Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, 3, 22, 23, 119, 163, 164, 167–171, 198, 228–233 Clinton, Hillary, vi, 6, 135 Condé, Maryse, 17, 18 contemporary witchcraft hunts/trials, 36

cool feminism, 227–231 coven (as feminist community/family), 154–157, 159, 162, 164, 171 crisis, vii, 4, 5, 7, 43, 54, 75, 86, 146, 251

D Daly, Mary, 9, 17, 20, 21, 59, 154, 186 Davis, Angela Y., 18 death toll estimate, early modern European trials, 38 de Beauvoir, Simone, 12, 28, 215 Divine Feminine. See goddess feminism Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness , 189 Dworkin, Andrea, 13, 14, 20, 49, 113, 186

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 B. Kosmina, Feminist Afterlives of the Witch, Palgrave Studies in (Re)Presenting Gender, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25292-1

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260

INDEX

E early modern European trials and gender, 45 early modern European trials and sex/sexuality, 47 early modern witch trials (historiography of), 37, 39, 42, 45

F Faludi, Susan, 19, 20 Female Divine. See goddess feminism Firestone, Shulamith, 13 Friedan, Betty, 149, 150, 163, 194, 197

G Gage, Matilda Joslyn, 58, 59, 61 Gillard, Julia, 6, 133 girlhood (in feminist politics), 215–218, 224, 232 girl power, 3, 19, 217, 223, 224, 226, 229, 232 goddess feminism, 9–11, 187, 192, 193, 197 Greer, Germaine, 13 gynocide, 14, 19, 46, 59, 85

H Harry Potter, 170, 193, 195, 197–199, 220–223 hauntology, 8, 89–93, 219, 247–250 healers. See midwife His Dark Materials , 198–200, 202 Hooks, bell, 17, 183

I inaccuracy in witchcraft memory, 44, 50, 58, 61, 85

K Kinsey Reports, 146, 148, 149 Kramer, Heinrich and Jacob Sprenger. See Malleus Maleficarum

L Lerner, Gerda, 9 Lilith, 11, 14, 109–113, 118, 170, 199, 229 Lorde, Audre, 17

M Mad Fucking Witches, 15, 16, 251 male witch, 38 Malleus Maleficarum, 40, 41, 48, 143–145, 158, 189 Marxist/anti-capitalist feminism, 14, 20, 41 mass culture. See memory in culture industry/mass media mass media. See memory in culture industry/mass media memory and activism, 80–82, 84, 245, 247 memory and feminism, 79, 80, 83–85 memory and narrative, 87, 88, 91, 92 memory and spectres, 89, 90, 253 memory in culture industry/mass media, 8, 76, 78, 82–84, 93, 253 Me Too, 6 midwife, 48–50, 85, 158, 184 monster (as cultural construct), 105, 107, 108, 117, 119, 125, 132, 146 monstrosity monster (as cultural construct), 125 monstrous-feminine, 108, 109, 111, 113, 115, 117–119, 125 Morgan, Robin, 12, 13, 15 Morrison, Toni, 79

INDEX

mother (as cultural construct), 183, 184, 186–188, 199, 201, 202 multidirectional memory, 82, 91 Murray, Margaret, 10, 37, 58–61

N Narnia, 109–114, 117, 118 neoliberal capitalism and feminism, 6, 19, 20 ’nine million burned’, 20, 28–30, 39, 59, 85 nuclear family, 146, 148, 150–155, 157, 162, 193–195, 197

P Papal Bull of 1484, 40 popular culture as resistant, 77, 78, 88, 93, 97 popular witchcraft beliefs, 43 postfeminism, 2, 4, 21, 24, 92, 106, 145, 146, 187, 213, 215, 217–219, 223, 224, 226–229, 232, 233 postmemory, 83 pregnancy, 48, 49, 90, 162, 194 prosthetic memory, 82–88, 95, 96 Pussy Church of Modern Witchcraft (PCMW), 22

Q queer witches, 21, 22, 119, 165, 174

R Re-reading (as ghostly memory practice), 93, 94, 96, 114, 123, 243, 248 Rowling, J.K., 21, 22, 30, 197, 207, 222

261

S Salem and nationalism, 51 Salem trials and feminism, 54 Salem trials, race, colonialism, 53, 54 Salem witch trials (historiography of), 50, 52, 54, 56 Satanic panics, 36 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs , 119, 121–124, 189–192, 194 Social media Facebook, vii, 15, 16 Twitter, 16, 21 spectrality. See hauntology Starhawk, 10 star image, 161 Steinem, Gloria, 20 Suspiria, 3, 126, 128–131, 198, 201, 202

T The Addams Family, 150, 152, 153 The Witch (dir. Eggers), 109, 114–118 The Wizard of Oz, 119, 121, 123, 124, 164, 166 Tituba, 17, 18, 30, 51–53 trans-exclusionary feminism, 21–24, 28, 119, 174 transgender witches, 5, 21, 22, 24, 84, 119 Trump, Donald, v, vii, 2, 3, 6, 15, 16, 22, 34, 227, 251, 252

U utopian politics, 243, 245–248, 252

V virginity, 167–169

262

INDEX

W WandaVision, 191 West, Lindy, 6, 27, 252 white feminism, 16–18, 21, 168 Wicca/Paganism, 10, 11, 22, 138, 164 WITCH (activist group), 14–16, 18, 21, 22, 251 witch as symbol of feminism, 7, 8, 23 witchcraft as sex, 131, 144, 145, 165, 167, 169, 200 witchcraft studies (discipline), 37

witch-cult. See Murray, Margaret witches of colour, 16, 83 Witches of Eastwick (dir. Miller), 154, 159, 161 Witches of Eastwick (Updike), 154, 155 Wolf, Naomi, 19, 20, 49 Women’s Liberation movements, 4, 12, 14, 59, 85, 158, 159, 194 Women’s March, v, vi Woolf, Virginia, 12, 79, 83, 85