Transforming Paradigms:
The Witch Stereotype in Modern Female Writing
Nancy Cohn Peled
A THESIS SUBMITTED FOR THE DEGREE
“DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY”
University of Haifa
Faculty of Humanities
Department of English Language and Literature
May 2005
Transforming Paradigms:
The Witch Stereotype in Modern Female Writing
By: Nancy Cohn Peled
Supervised by: Dr. Sarah Gilead
A THESIS SUBMITTED FOR THE DEGREE
“DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY”
University of Haifa
Faculty of Humanities
Department of English Language and Literature
May 2005
Recommended by: __________________________ Date: ___________________
(Advisor)
Approved by: _____________________________
(Chairman of Ph.D Committee)
I
Date: ___________________
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Writing this dissertation has been an enthralling, adventurous journey for me, several
years long. At times, I felt like someone suffering from a “split personality” disorder –
one personality being the person who was engaged in a life: family, jobs,
responsibilities and routines, and the other, writing a doctorate dissertation, period.
The two personalities were not always compatible, and yet my family, colleagues and
I have emerged intact on the other side of it, and my dissertation is complete.
I would like to express my eternal gratitude to Dr. Sarah Gilead, my dissertation
supervisor, whose enthusiasm, support, wisdom and patience were indispensable and
unconditional, and whose questions were always constructive and enlightening.
Discussions with her were like soul food, delicious and spiritually inspiring. I know
that acknowledgments often include the phrase “without whom”, but for me this is a
simple truth. I wouldn’t have, and couldn’t have, done this without her. Thank you.
To my dear family, my husband and children, I express my appreciation for your
understanding and acceptance of that other persona in the house, hogging the
computer, forgetting meals, and generally behaving like an alien. Thank you for
indulging my obsession. I bask in your love and pride and return it manifold.
II
Table of Contents
Abstract
Chapter 1 Witch Heritage
Chapter 2 Medusa: The Myth, the Mirror and Hélène Cixous
Chapter 3 “Witch Anne:” Witch Imagery in the Poetry of Anne Sexton
Chapter 4 “Margaret the Medusa:” Margaret Atwood Writing Witch
Chapter 5 In Conclusion: The Paradigm Transformed
III
Abstract
As literature reflects its life and times, so fictional portrayals of humanity are
models for, and mirrors of, society’s expectations for behavior. Generations of
patriarchally defined gender roles have taught us that a woman needs to be silent or
silenced because she is untrustworthy by nature. A woman who speaks out is not
reliable; rather the manifestation of her speech is used as proof of her wicked nature.
The female writer has chosen to speak, and in embracing the witch-like characters in
successful current literature written by female authors the contemporary
understanding is, that while women are still positioned on the sidelines of authority –
despite the many legal and social changes that have occurred in the latter third of the
twentieth century to equalize the balance of power – women no longer need silently
acquiesce to remaining where they have been placed.
It is my intention here to further investigate how such a traditionally negative
image can and has become affirmative, why a possibly obsolete metaphor is fresh and
relevant to modern women authors and, indeed, how the female writer herself can be
viewed in this mold of “witch.” To this purpose I look into a representative selection
of contemporary female literature, focusing on theorist Hélène Cixous, poet Anne
Sexton and novelist Margaret Atwood, who not only created such “anti-heroic”
characters, but who themselves wrote– at least in part – in order to rebel against
culturally accepted norms. I have utilized one woman writer in each field who has
been publicly acknowledged as both successful and talented, critically and popularly.
The female author as trespasser, and therefore transgressor, in the male-dominated
world of literature, transforming the medium to suit her needs, can be seen to follow
in the footsteps of the historical witch whose power was feared and thus condemned
by the male authority, not least because she was perceived to have confiscated rights
IV
and realms neither meant for, nor becoming to, her female status. What is more, the
witch is contiguously recognized as both female and evil; the feminist project of representing “other”wise male definitives of identity for the female gender is well
served in the witch stereotype. In addition, the witch’s curse, her audacious forbidden
wielding of the language, was historically the medium for the transference of
maleficent activity – the project of witch-hunts was, and continues to be, to silence the
witch. Thus, the woman writer’s voice becomes the witch in our time, daring to reject,
deny or challenge the acknowledged methods of literary expression, which have been
traditionally male-defined.
I hope to illuminate how a negative historical stereotype of the female can be
and has been reconstructed to empower today’s women by women authors who are
themselves a modern manifestation of the stereotype they recreate; to examine, in
effect, how the witch is a metaphor for women’s voices in our patriarchal society.
V
Chapter One
Witch Heritage
In the world of literature created by female authors in the latter part of the twentieth
century, a new type of female character, if not always the heroine, has emerged, or more
precisely, reappeared. She is a woman descended from the witches of history and fairy tale –
frightening, evil and powerful. Her appearance in women’s writing fulfills a typical function
within the literary schema – in reference to the “bad” women created by male authors.
Whereas male authors have traditionally created the stereotypically evil woman in order to
condemn her – Steinbeck’s Cathy Trask in East of Eden is a prototypical example of this –
female writers have a more complicated and comprehensive motive in creating such figures,
combining censure with approbation– and in doing so, they enfranchise women themselves.
As literature reflects its life and times, so fictional portrayals of humanity are models for, and
mirrors of, society’s expectations for behavior. Generations of patriarchally defined gender
roles have taught us that a woman needs to be silent or silenced because she is untrustworthy
by nature. A woman who speaks out is not reliable; rather the manifestation of her speech is
used as proof of her wicked nature. This belief informed the historical witch persecutions of
the Middle Ages and continues to influence gender constructs in literature and life. In the
early nineteenth century Germany of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm the “proper housewife from
the propaganda prints of the Reformation who wears a padlock on her lips” (Warner 394) not
only corroborated their personal beliefs but also informed their choice of Tales, possibly “one
of the most powerful cultural conventions in the Western tradition” (Canton 30). The inherent
folk beliefs of many cultures express woman’s power over nature, and that power is often
manifested through language. However, according to the eminent folktale scholar, Ruth
Bottigheimer, who analyzed the speech patterns of female fairy tale characters in the Grimm
2
Brothers’ Tales, “powerful verbalizing women represented something Germans in general and
Wilhelm Grimm in particular were not at all comfortable with in the nineteenth century”
(“Silenced Women” 119). In this study, she found that “at one end of the speech scale are
biological mothers – good but dead—and their marriageable daughters. Both are silent. ...At
the other end of the speech scale appear both evil witches and witchlike figures ...all free to
speak” (“Silenced Women” 125). Thus female speech is equated with evil power in one of the
most primary literary texts of Western culture. And in the Victorian era, when women writers
flourished and enjoyed immense popular success, female authors were confronted with the
paradox of the repressive social framework within which they were “allowed” to write. One of
the major influential critical texts on the subject of the image of woman in the literature of this
time is Sandra M. Gilbert’s and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman
Writer and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination. In this study, which focuses on
female characters created by women authors from a feminist perspective, the "witch-monstermadwoman" in nineteenth-century texts by women is a motif that expresses "rebellious
impulses" and opposes "the self-definitions patriarchal society has imposed" on female writers
(79, 78). This double can be seen to speak implicitly for the author, while the “true” heroine
speaks for society.
Hélène Cixous, philosopher, poet and the architect of modern women’s studies, also
elucidated the need to break female silence in her seminal treatise “Laugh of the Medusa”, in
which she writes of the empowerment of “woman’s seizing the occasion to speak, hence her
shattering entry into history, which has always been based on her suppression” (“The Laugh
of the Medusa” 250) [emphasis original].
Accordingly, the modern female writer has chosen to speak through embracing witchlike characters in successful current literature written by female authors. The contemporary
understanding is that while women are still positioned on the sidelines of authority – despite
3
the many legal and social changes that have transpired in the latter third of the twentieth
century to equalize the balance of power – women no longer need silently acquiesce to
remaining where they have been placed.
It is my intention here to further investigate how such a traditionally negative image
can and has become affirmative, why a possibly obsolete metaphor is fresh and relevant to
modern women authors and, indeed, how the female writer herself can be viewed in this mold
of “witch”. To this purpose I look into a selection of contemporary female literature, focusing
on a theorist, a poet and a novelist, who have not only created such “anti-heroic” characters,
but who themselves wrote– at least in part – in order to rebel against culturally accepted
norms. The female author as trespasser, and therefore transgressor, in the male-dominated
world of literature, transforming the medium to suit her needs, can be seen to follow in the
footsteps of the historical witch whose power was feared and thus condemned by the male
authority. The witch’s curse was the medium for the transference of maleficent activity and
the project of witch-hunts was, and continues to be, to silence the witch. Thus, the woman
writer’s voice becomes the witch in our time, daring to reject, deny or challenge the
acknowledged methods of literary expression, which have been traditionally male-defined. In
line with this, my work begins with one of the leading feminist theorists of the latter half of
the twentieth-century, Hélène Cixous, whose choice of the Medusa as a trope for écriture
féminine opened this particular portal of insight for many women poets and authors. I then
discuss a selection of Anne Sexton’s poems, focusing particularly on the stereotypical witch
image and accompanying associations she used so efficaciously. Finally I turn to Margaret
Atwood and investigate her puissant application of this same icon in two of her more recent
novels, The Robber Bride (1993) and The Blind Assassin (2000).
4
The Witch Paradigm
To this end I will now discuss the witch with an historical outline of the role and fate
of selected negative female (i.e. witch-like) characters in literature for approximately a
century before the emergence of the writers whose works I will focus on. This first section
will necessarily include a consideration of relevant elements of the non-fictional definition of
a witch to enable an analysis of the relationship between this historical model and the literary
pattern. At the same time I will need to be cognizant, while making such an analysis, of the
different customs and beliefs accepted within a specific culture in distant periods of time.
Indeed, an intrinsic part of my discussion will include the transformation of this particular
historical stereotype in relation to the burgeoning status of women in life and in literature.
Initially I wish to discuss the witch stereotype as it has appeared and persists in
Western culture, through history and fairy tale (largely Grimms’). In order to scrutinize the
modern manifestation of this prototype, a brief historical investigation of her origins and
forms is required. The role of Christianity in formulating a definitive, negative representation
of the witch cannot be underestimated. Fairy tales, which adopted the historically typical
presentation of this figure for their own purposes, also share a large responsibility for the way
we perceive witches to this day.
Witch beliefs were universal in medieval times, but it was the intervention of the
Church that transformed these beliefs into crimes, and subsequently, witches themselves into
criminals of such fearful proportions. It is accepted among historians that before the Middle
Ages, when the Catholic Church took upon itself to regulate the daily lives of the simple
people, witch beliefs were comprised of sympathetic superstitions, such as magic potions,
conversing with spirits, making of storms or otherwise influencing weather, and almost any
activity connected to healing1. “[W]itchcraft beliefs among the ordinary people were an
unproblematic survival of age-old superstitions” (Barry, 3). Another historian explains how
5
the Crusades, by exposing Christians to “heathen” values, actually revealed much of the
corruption at the heart of the Church. The Inquisition was founded in 1199 as an attempt to
salvage the Church’s view of the natural and true order. “Seeing lives being lived blamelessly,
but not in the Christian way, was proof for medieval theology of the deceit of the Devil”
(Rosen 9-10). Hugh Trevor-Roper, who was the first to treat the phenomenon of the
persecution of witches in the Middle Ages as a topic worthy of historical investigation,
attempts to elucidate the movement from the social acceptance of witches to their persistent
persecution. He discusses the role of the Dominican Order, which had been founded to
combat heresy in the 12th century, and succeeded in doing so by the simple method of
eliminating its enemies. Trevor-Roper explains that the Dominicans were the “evangelists of
the ‘dark corners’ of Europe where the Catholic Church was not permanently established”.
However, their extreme methods were not particularly effective, for as soon as the
missionaries left an area, the people tended to revert to their earlier customs, which included
witchcraft and sorcery. This social incompatibility between the Dominicans and their subjects
came to be “clothed in religious heresy and when formal heresy had been silenced
...
witchcraft became heresy” (31-2). He goes on to illustrate how the various Inquisitions of the
period were similar, offering examples of an accused witch being sentenced to stand in a
public place wearing a Jew’s hat, and of Jews being charged with witchcraft. Accordingly he
explains how “the engine of persecution was set up before its future victims were legally
subject to it . . . Both witches and Jews were first subjected to the Inquisition as heretics; but
before long, both were being burnt without reference to ideas, the former as witches, the latter
as Jews” (33).
Much modern, feminist-oriented historical research on the witch phenomenon devotes
itself to the question of how “witches” came to mean “women”. I explore what use certain
modern female writers have made of this fact. Anne Barstow, a “new history” historiographer,
6
whose book Witchcraze examines the misogyny intrinsic to the period of the witch-hunts,
uncovers, by way of an accused witch’s individual case study, components of female sexual
fantasy, loneliness, and guilt over a woman’s failure as a midwife; indeed, guilt in regard to
any of her sexual feelings. Barstow asks and answers: “How did this useful woman become a
symbol for evil, attracting so much hatred? She qualified for the role because she had long
been a single woman, hence suspect in her sexual behaviour, was poor and a widow, hence
had no man to defend (or control) her, and possessed the power of healing, a power everyone
believed was also the power to kill” (Barstow 19). If we exchange “healing” for writing,
these words could easily be the comments of modern feminist theorists discussing male
attitudes towards women writers. Moreover, according to Barstow, women who did not
“know their place” were automatically suspect. In the sixteenth century, the family was
becoming ever more patriarchal. Outspoken wives became ”shrews”; older single women and
widows of the same temperament were “scolds”. Shrews and scolds and witches were similar;
they were criminalized—and they had power. People feared their “lip” (Barstow 28).
These specific historical “qualifications” for a woman to be a witch speak directly to
issues of power. Power naturally was forbidden to women; thus only a “witch” would dare to
appropriate it. A relevant case in point is expressed in the sixteenth and seventeenth- century
laws and beliefs on the phenomenon of cursing, which was a crime. Indeed there is much
documentation regarding the repressive character of witch definitions. Allison Coudert offers
an illuminating example:
[T]women who were the most likely candidaftes for witchcraft accusations
were . . .women who did not fit masculine steretypes of the good woman as the
obedient, silent and submissive wife and mother, dependent on male kin. The
majority of witches were past child-bearing age and a good percentage were
unmarried, widowed or living alone. (63-4).
7
These words, out of context, could accurately describe the woman writer in Victorian
times, for by the 19th century, women were expected to be totally docile. In point of fact, it is
quite likely that, in the past, the fear that they would be accused of being a witch caused
women to hold their tongues; silence had become a key to remaining alive. I trace the
language/power issue vis-a-vis the modern female writer in relation to this historical witch
crime, and examine how this conflict appears in the literature I will be discussing – and in the
act of the writing itself.
A further point that needs explicating is the physical fact of the woman’s body and the
major role it, by definition, played in the historical identification of witches. The infamous
“devil’s mark”, traditionally believed to be in the form of a teat, was where the witch’s
“familiar” could suckle. It could be found anywhere on a witch’s body. Barstow believes that
“the very concept of the devil’s teat is based on the female function of providing breast milk,”
and she sees sadism, pornography and control of women as issues that loomed large in witch
persecution. She writes, “In the witch hunts, the policy of forcing a witch’s confession may
have been a cover for making a socially approved assault on her body” (132). That women
make up the majority of those judged and condemned on this basis is a truism. In The Malleus
Maleficarum, the infamous medieval doctrine written by the Dominican monks Heinrich
Kramer and James Sprenger, first published in 1486 as an instruction manual for Inquisitors
“in the methods of identifying, judging and punishing witches,” the monks explain that
because in these times this perfidy is more often found in women than in men,
as we learn by actual experience, if anyone is curious as to the reason, we may
add to what has already been said the following: that since they are feebler
both in mind and body, it is not surprising that they should come more under
the spell of witchcraft (Kramer and Sprenger, Part I, Question VI).
8
What had “already been said” includes misogynous quotations from the Bible, Cicero
and Seneca , all attesting to the inherent evil of women, because “[a]ll wickedness is but little
to the wickedness of a woman” (Kramer and Sprenger, ibid.) Thus, suggestion is
metamorphosed into fact, and “witches” become “women”.
What is particularly compelling and even paradoxical in Barstow’s findings, is that
women were strong and persecuted. This is a startling thesis when compared to the one
offered by Keith Thomas and his followers, who found woman’s inherent weakness to be a
main factor in her being chosen as the stereotypic witch. Nevertheless the facts show that
women were responsible for maintaining and feeding households and animals, raising and
educating children, nursing the sick and preparing the dead for burial. This is congruent with
another female historian, Barbara Rosen’s, observation that the locus of female activity–
dealing with births and burials – was also the source of witch accusations. These tasks were
women’s given responsibility; beyond them lay a variety of jobs that women could take on, as
long as they did not ”interfere “ with their defined chores (43). These might include work as a
milliner, midwife, tavern keeper, or market seller. Clearly women were recognizably
important to society, yet it has been well documented how society viewed women. Whether it
was the lack of respect for women’s work as revealed in the law that men could only practice
one trade, whereas women were not restricted because it was clear that they were no threat to
male control of the economy; or the registries that listed women (if they did at all) as “the
wife of so-and-so the goldsmith,” to the fact that special laws had to be written into the legal
system in order to award women legal status, so that they could be prosecuted for witchcraft,
the social definitions were clear: women, like children and livestock, were male property.
Finally, the longevity of the image of the historical witch as bewitching
seducer and destroyer of men also originates with those infamous Dominicans,
who accredited witches – as agents of the devil – with being able to cause
9
impotence or castrate unsuspecting men: “There is no doubt that certain
witches can do marvellous things with regard to male organs, for this agrees
with what has been seen and heard by many. . . God allows more power of
witchcraft over the genital forces . . . and therefore even allows that that
member should be truly and actually taken off” (Kramer and Sprenger, Part I,
Question IX).
Ann and Barry Ulanov, in their Jungian/feminist analysis of the witch archetype,
remind us that “[i]n the past women who received projections of witch imagery were
imagined to indulge in fantastic and lascivious sexual practices” and that the “witch’s concern
with power mixes with her violent sexuality” (The Witch and the Clown 30). They put
forward that this trait of the witch archetype resembles characterizations of Lilith in the Bible,
and the siren of The Odyssey, who, in the “form of a beautiful woman . . . draws men away
from human relationships with flesh-and-blood women and into her mind-besotting grasp. Her
sexuality enchants and bewitches her victims” (29). Thus the continuum of the witch as a
sexual danger to men extends from myth through history and back to fiction.
The Fairy-Tale Witch
In all cultures, fairy tales effectively convey strong, if often complex, messages in
regards to social and gender behaviour. Through the auspices of the fairy tale, the witch has
become a cross-cultural emblem of the evil that women conventionally have been accused of
bringing into the world. The stereotypical fairy-tale witch, an affirmed constituent of Western
culture thanks to the Grimm Brothers, is a direct descendent of the witch persecuted during
the witch-hunts of the Middle Ages. Witches render a significant role in our grappling with
the essence of life, death and human nature. Because history has afforded us the convenient
stereotype as discussed above, witches are customarily assumed to be women. And this in
10
itself is meaningful within the functions fairy-tales fulfill since, from earliest history, fairy
tales have been connected to the education of children. Plato’s writings tell of old women
recounting symbolic stories to children, called “mythoi”. “Fairy tales have also been found in
Egyptian papyri . . . we have written tradition for 3000 years and what is striking, the basic
motifs have not changed much. . . . Until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, fairy tales
were . . . told to adults as well as children” (Franz 2-3). In the world of the fairy tale, where
good and evil are clearly defined, the abundance of evil females sends a clear message to its
audience, both adult and child, of the danger inherent in being in her presence. From the
Paleolithic statues of alluring goddesses that Wolfgang Lederer describes (42), to Disney’s
wicked stepmothers, the female is a figure of mystery, beauty, taboo and potential destruction.
This is a weighty cultural message which fairy tales effectively convey, for, as scholar MarieLouise Franz reminds us, “Fairy-tale language seems to be the international language of all
mankind – of all ages, all races and all cultures” (18). Sarah Aguiar agrees, commenting that
fairy tales are often “the first fictions a girl may be exposed to”, and concluding that the “first
lesson to be learned by readers is this: stay away from powerful females, especially if they are
older than adolescent age” (58).
Since the witch can embody any aspect of unacceptable rebellion, such as disobedient
children or selfish headstrong young girls, her consequent demise conveys a strong message
of deterrence. Accordingly, in the assessment of Henry Carsch, a cultural anthropologist who
made a thorough investigative study of the Grimm tales, the witch in the fairy tale functions
as a “dramatic construct serving in the cause of social control” (642). Jack Zipes, the
renowned scholar on fairy tales, looks at the witch as an emblem of ruling class oppression; in
his discussion on Hansel and Gretel in Breaking the Magic Spell (1979), he sees the witch as
portraying the forces of repression in their various social manifestations – rationalism,
utilitarianism, feudalism, and so forth, thus giving her a very political nature (30-32). Bruno
11
Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (1977)
did much for our understanding of the ways in which fairy tale witches can allow children to
express negative feelings toward their mothers, an intrinsic feature of a child’s psychological
development, without becoming engulfed by the guilt that such an acknowledgement might
otherwise entail. Ruth Bottigheimer offers a theory of female submission in her analysis of the
Tales, which has proven enlightening in attributing power through language to the witches,
not the princesses. The fairy tale witch emulates the historical substructure of “witch”, and her
representation is the anti-thesis of the canonical fairy tale princess, who is traditionally
silenced and then married off to “live happily ever after”.
Another interesting characteristic that typifies the evil enacted in classic fairy tales by
witch figures is the active persecution of the hapless heroine. Wicked stepmothers oppress and
torment their stepdaughters. They seem intent on “disturb[ing] the harmony among blood
relatives [and] can turn even the most aristocratic and beguiling girl into the humblest of
scullery maids “ (Tatar 142). The modern moral weight placed on feminine solidarity is
glaringly absent as older women persecute younger ones (an interesting turnabout from the
historical evidence of young women accusing older ones of witchcraft, although it clearly has
its roots in that history). In keeping with the female-oriented locating of such evil deeds, the
stepmother’s nefarious activity seems focused on removing the heroine from her rightful
status in her home/castle/palace. Tatar concludes that what at first appears to be “a conspiracy
of hags and witches, is, in the final analysis, the work of a single female villain” (144). And
this villain seems maliciously intent on persecuting other females, a staple of behavior
reenacted in the works of Margaret Atwood.
Noted psychologist Sheldon Casdan’s study of how fairy tales contribute to a child’ s
psychological development focuses on the final demise of the wicked witch. “To ensure that a
fairy tale fulfills its psychological mission – combating sinful tendencies in the self… [t]he
12
witch must die because it is the witch who embodies the sinful parts of the self. . . . [Fairy
tales] are tales of transcendence. Once the witch dies, everyone lives happily ever after” (2931). In Casdan’s discussion, which both supports and expands upon ideas that Bettelheim first
presented, the inevitable death of the fairy-tale witch is analyzed and elucidated. “Destruction
of the witch is the … quintessential portion of the fairy tale cycle. If children hope to
overcome bothersome thoughts and unwholesome impulses, the witch must die. Her death
constitutes the emotional core of the tale. Only by destroying the witch can one ensure that
bad parts of the self are eradicated and good parts of the self prevail” (35).
These comments reflect the antithesis of the attraction of the witch-like character for
the modern woman writer seeking to illuminate an identity that is beyond the flat, unsatisfying
definition offered by the psychologist Casdan in his book. True, he is discussing the function
of fairy tales in the psychological development of young children, but his subtitle expresses
the magnitude of influence these tales can have on creation of identity. Furthermore, even if
the witch, as the embodiment of negativity in the creation of the human character, is essential
to healthy identity formation, this does not depreciate the fact that this epitome of evil is
almost invariably female. By definition this creates a problem in the implications it has for
identity development, however positive the psychological repercussions of victory over the
evil witch in fairy tales may be. How many ways are available for children to understand the
subliminal message that the evil witch is always a woman?
Without a doubt, the witch figure occupies a major position in the allure of the fairy
tale. Human nature is such that we tend to be attracted to the very circumstances that frighten
us – as witnessed by the popularity of roller coasters, horror movies and extreme sports.
Hence the witch, frightening and repelling in her evil potential, lures us. I believe that for
many women, the witch figure is a concept of immense attraction, one wherein lies the power
13
to defy male dominated social norms. Both historically and mythically, the witch wields
command in areas where the “good girl” dares not. In the body of fairy tales, authentic power
is held by the wicked women. The acquiescent heroines, usually maltreated, and eventually
rescued, remain essentially passive. As the original archetype for the material this work
analyzes, the fairy tale witch will be an organic standard in my examination into the ways
Atwood, Sexton and Cixous have conceived and transformed her.
Characterizing Women
In order to understand the transformation in modern women’s literature of the
negative, witch-like female character into a creature offering empowerment and strength, it is
necessary to understand the background that influenced her evolution. Since the inception of
the novel, female protagonists have reflected social realities, and since the inception of
feminist literary theory, critics have investigated the implications of those realities. Initial
investigation into the female image in the novel from the nineteenth century reveals a broad
base of material and research on the cultural climate and societal limitations that informed
both novelist and persona. Whether created by male or female authors, the female characters
in these novels were often severely constrained, reflecting the socially dictated restrictions of
the times. However, at the same time, conflicting literary representations of women reveal
resistance to the perception of woman as the “moral centre” of society (Stubbs, xi). The
ubiquitous “Angel in the House” held sway for many years and dictated the expectations and
parameters of the good wife, which every young girl was raised to become. The trope, taken
from the popular book-length poem by Coventry Patmore originally published in 1854 (and
revised through 1862), increased in popularity at the end of the nineteenth century when
Queen Victoria claimed her domestic role to be as important as her imperial one. The
metaphor was so pervasive that Virginia Woolf famously felt compelled to kill her off:
14
I discovered that if I were going to review books I should need to do battle
with a certain phantom. . . . a woman, and when I came to know her better I
called her after the heroine of a famous poem, The Angel in the House.
It was she used to come between me and my paper when I was writing reviews.
It was she who bothered me and wasted my time and so tormented me that at
last I killed her. . . . I will describe her as shortly as I can. She was intensely
sympathetic. She was immensely charming. She was utterly unselfish. She
excelled in the difficult arts of family life. She sacrificed herself daily. . . .
[S]he was so constituted that she never had a mind or a wish of her own . . .
.Above all – I need not say it – she was pure. Her purity was supposed to be
her chief beauty. . . . In those days – the last of Queen Victoria – every house
had its Angel. And when I came to write I encountered her with the very first
words.
. . .The shadow of her wings fell on my page; I heard the rustling of her skirts
in the room. . . .I took my pen in my hand to review that novel by a famous
man, she slipped behind me and whispered: "My dear, you are a young woman.
You are writing about a book that has been written by a man. Be sympathetic;
be tender; flatter, deceive; use all the arts and wiles of our sex. Never let
anybody guess that you have a mind of your own. Above all, be pure." And she
made as if to guide my pen.
. . .I turned upon her and caught her by the throat. I did my best to kill her. My
excuse, if I were to be had up in a court of law, would be that I acted in selfdefense. Had I not killed her she would have killed me. She would have
plucked the heart out of my writing. (Collected Essays Vol 2, 286)
15
Here, Woolf articulates the opposition of the woman as a writer with the constrictive
positioning of the woman in her home, and by extension, in society. The incipient female
writer must reject (kill) the passivity with which she has been instilled in order to tap into her
sourcel of creativity, of artistic expression; without freeing herself from the internalized
stereotypes of who she is and what she may become she will never be able to write. This is, in
Woolf’s view, an absolute necessity – “Had I not killed her she would have killed me” – for
the very nature of writing as an expression of self, is selfish, and as such counter to all the
Angel (sacrificing her self ) stands for. The Angel, as Woolf well knew, was a male ideal not a
female inclination. In this manner Woolf links female writing not only to independence but to
murder as well, thus implying the female writer is transgressive and lethally dangerous; she is
witchlike.
Although the female characters from the nineteenth century who breach the rules are
duly excoriated or punished, they are often a vital and fascinating component of the novel,
revealing a complex tension at work beneath the surface of both art – and life. A woman who
contravenes the accepted norms of behavior approximates, in the patriarchal gaze, the
historical witch, whose association with the devil made her motivations suspect, and whose
success cannot be officially authorized without affirming that female negativity as legitimate.
Thus, these wicked, amoral female characters are witchlike by definition – and their female
authors are guilty of murdering the Angel .
Gilbert and Gubar enumerate the ways in which, for the female writer, “the essential
[for literary artists] process of self-definition is complicated by …patriarchal definitions that
intervene between herself and herself” confirming “with pain and confusion that what she
sees in the mirror is usually a male construct” (17). It is the authors’ contention that although
women writers began by “alternately defining themselves as angel-women or monsterwomen”, by the end of the eighteenth century women “were conceiving fictional worlds in
16
which patriarchal images and conventions were severely, radically revised” (44). Their study
was one of the first to examine characterization of women by women; the title, alluding to
Jane Eyre’s mad Bertha, was a metaphor for a previously hidden tradition of women’s
literature – hidden, yet very much alive, and dangerous to the status quo – like Bertha.
Another of the important works that explores the resistant power of the female
character in Victorian literature is Nina Auerbach’s Woman and the Demon, in which she
investigates the “disruptive spiritual energy” (1) that animates this literature. Indeed her
premise is that the “disobedient woman in her many guises” is in fact perceived as “heir of the
ages and demonic savior of the race” (2) in popular myth. Auerbach’s theory is that in the art
of the period, including the literature, on the surface we see the “image of prone womanhood
at its most dispiriting” (17) but that, in fact, the “very rigidity of the categories of victim and
queen, domestic angel and demonic outcast, old maid and fallen woman, concentrates itself
into a myth of transfiguration that glorified the women it seemed to suppress” (9). She
examines many of the classic and popular texts of the era,2 demonstrating the ways in which,
contrary to the prevailing perception of the Victorian heroine, female characters chafe against
the restrictions of virtue society imposes upon them. Her hypothesis is that the “repressiveness
of Victorian culture is a measure of its faith in the special powers of women. . . . Assuming
the power of the ruler as well as the menace of the oppressed, woman was at the center of her
age’s myth at the same time she was excluded from its institutions” (188-9). The literature of
the times often exposed the paradox and hypocrisy of the expectations placed on real women
to live up to essentially impossible ideals– neither angels nor devils are human, yet the
problematic female characters were decidedly so. Auerbach reveals the subversive power
Victorian women wielded – the need to subdue and domesticate them in fact exposes male
limitations.
17
Toward the end of the nineteenth century, a literary phenomenon appeared, variously
called “Novissima: the New Woman, the Odd Woman, the Wild Woman” (Ardis 1). This new
woman, in refusing to choose marriage and/or motherhood as her destiny, openly rebelled
against the virtuous “angel” image of the “Pamela” model for women.3 As Ann Ardis reports
in New Women, New Novels, “for her transgressions against the sex, gender and class
distinctions of Victorian England, [the New Woman] was accused of instigating the second
fall of man” (1). Ardis scrutinizes the ways in which the “‘natural’ inevitability of the
marriage plot is challenged as New Woman novelists ‘replace’ the ‘pure woman,’ the
Victorian angel in the house, with a heroine who is either sexually active outside the marriage
or abstains from sex for political rather than moral reasons . . . as these novelists demystify the
ideology of ‘womanliness’ ” (3). Again the literary extremes speak of the ambiguity of female
identity.
Elaine Showalter’s innovative A Literature of their Own (1976) also investigates the
strategies, both personal and artistic, that women novelists of this period developed, as a
defense against the “double bind” in which they found themselves: humiliated by
condescending male critics and anxious over appearing unwomanly (21). Because Victorian
women were expected to devote themselves to the well-being and nurture of others (their
husbands and their children first and foremost but then the needy at large as well) writing,
with its accompanying preoccupation with “self” was in “direct conflict with the
subordination and repression inherent in the feminine ideal . . .. In their novels, the heroine’s
aspirations for a full, independent life are undermined, punished or replaced by marriage”
(22). Showalter explains that women writing at this time were looking for “two kinds of
heroines
. . . professional role-models . . . .[and] romantic heroines. It was very difficult for
the Victorians to believe that both qualities could be embodied in the same woman” (103). In
her discussion of women authors of the period, who were inevitably compared to Charlotte
18
Bronte and George Eliot (and who in turn were the “descendents” of George Sand and Jane
Austen; i.e. passion vs. intellectual culture), Showalter, too, discusses the paradigmatic “split
female” identity affirmed by the social conventions of the times: both Jane (Jane Eyre) and
Maggie (The Mill on the Floss) have the “option of angelic innocence, which leads to death,
or ‘witchlike’ self-preservation, which leads to social rejection” (125). It is telling that
Showalter identifies self-preservation as “witchlike”– as fairly tales have taught us, happy
endings happen to subordinated women, not independent ones. And the writers themselves,
often unmarried or childless, were living proof of problematic social status.
Victorian readers expected – or so they had to claim – their literature to mirror the
virtues Victorian culture extolled. But the general fascination with non-virtuous characters,
revealed through their frequency in the literature, disclosed an understanding that this
“goodness” was little more than wishful thinking – and that the upright protagonist was
perhaps the less interesting one, even– perhaps especially– for the male author. For these
transgressive female characters can be found in their novels as well, such as Dickens’ Bleak
House, Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, and as far back as Defoe’s Moll Flanders. Hortense in Bleak
House, for example, is a murderer; Therese Defarge enjoys decapitating the murdered
governor of the Bastille in A Tale of Two Cities. Dickens, however, is careful to create these
morbidly fascinating women, and others like them, as essentially deviant, “the negative that
defines the positive, the true Englishwoman” (Ingham 5). These two examples are French
women, concretizing their “otherness”.4 Both die, as they deserve. But other Dickens women
who are English, yet break the social “codes”, also meet with their deaths, or are punished in
various ways: the manner of the demise of Lady Dedlock, for instance, is clearly punishment
for having borne an illegitimate child. But the pervasiveness of these characters can be read as
evidence of the cultural discomfort with the angel/whore dichotomy for the Victorian female
protagonist.
19
Thackeray’s text evinces how he is obviously drawn to Becky Sharp; she is a lively,
appealing character where Amelia seems to exist largely as her negative counterpart, and
Amelia is simply a much less engaging persona. The virgin/whore splitting of female
characteristics between two characters, as asserted by Nina Auerbach in Woman and the
Demon, “is a common approach to the paradox of femininity” (Dever 20). Becky is not evil,
(although she is amoral, which is arguably an inherent part of being wicked), but in her
manipulations she appropriates power that is, at this time, “correctly” denied to women, and
in her open exploitation of her sexuality she denotes the “fallen woman” double of the angel
stereotype. Thackeray, as he must, has morality triumph when Becky’s husband leaves her
and Amelia prospers, but this does not negate Becky’s innate power to absorb readers. And
Moll Flanders (Becky’s predecessor) in Defoe’s novel by the same name is “essentially
amoral in all her dealings with reality. She is a criminal. She is also quite astonishingly
independent “ (Stubbs xii). Having made Moll “a criminal” Defoe proceeds to create an
interesting and compelling character whose enterprises readers avidly follow. Although Moll
suffers severely throughout the novel, her course is a resolutely self-determined one, and her
dealings with the strictures imposed upon her by the times reveal her intelligence and
resourcefulness – even if Defoe seems at times to be objectifying her in the way he parallels
her with merchandise, bought and possessed. But since this is an accurate reflection of
women’s status at the time, the text can be seen as expressing the lack of clarity and
precariousness of a woman’s position in the eighteenth century. Moll overcomes her
difficulties and is rewarded with a conventional happily-ever-after ending, although it comes
late in her life and only after she has embraced an acceptably normal lifestyle (in a way that
Jane Eyre’s adventures echo a century and more later). However, her real identity is always
hidden, which is in itself a manifestation of women’s status in society – anonymous. Both
Moll and Becky are condemned for their avarice, yet this characteristic is inherent to their
20
survival. And finally, however dominant these troublesome female protagonists are, the
novels’ endings ensure that patriarchal order is restored.
The way in which the female writer in the past grapples with these conflicting
elements is also the focus of discussion in a variety of critical texts. In Mothers of the Novel, a
bibliography and discussion of 17th- and 18th-century women writers, Dale Spender
investigates the progenitors of Jane Austen, exploring the groundwork of women’s
authorship, refusing the putative concept that the male authors of the time – Defoe and
Richardson particularly – originated the novel. She examines, among others (the book is
subtitled 100 Good Women Novelists Before Jane Austen), the works of Aphra Behn,
Penelope Aubin and Eliza Haywood; Behn preceded Defoe and the latter were as popular as
he was at the time. What is consistently and significantly obvious about the female authors of
these times is that the women were habitually condemned for their writing and needed to
defend and justify themselves for doing what male writers of the same period were praised
for. The writing woman is seen to invade a public space when her place was meant to be
hidden, quiet, anonymous– at home. A transgressor within the social discourse, and as a
resistor of authority, she is a direct descendent of the historical witch. Writing is for women,
as Sexton designated it, a “black art” (Complete Poems 88).
Another excellent example of the ambivalence of female identity vis-a-vis the writer is
from the early nineteenth century: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. There are many respected
works dealing with this text, from articles in well-regarded journals on Romanticism, some of
which have been collected in Critical Essays on Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (edited by Mary
Lowe-Evans 1998), to Muriel Spark’s Mary Shelley: A Biography (1987). Scholars have
examined ways in which Frankenstein can be read as an allegory for the creative act of
authorship; Victor Frankenstein apes the ultimate creative act. He transgresses in trying to
21
move into the feminine arena of childbirth, and Mary Shelley, as author, moves into the male
domain of art, emulating the creative power of the gods. Frankenstein can also be read as an
account of a woman's anxieties and insecurities about her own creative and reproductive
capabilities, so that Mary Shelley can be seen to examine her own fears and thoughts about
pregnancy, childbirth, and child development. Just acknowledging that there are fears, that
becoming a mother is something less than desired or natural, can create a witch-like identity
for the woman (as well as the woman writer) who expresses them. Certainly Anne Sexton
grappled with these very demons, both the fears and the reprobation from her family– and
then she wrote magnificent poetry about it. Thus we can see in Mary Shelley a prototype for
the modern female writer dealing with these same issues, creating her own “monsters” in
presenting us with witch-like characters, whom we may admire and perhaps even want to
emulate.
Rosalind Miles documents the continuity of socially-dictated constraints on female
identity in The Female Form: Women Writers and the Conquest of the Novel (1990), asserting
that despite late twentieth century progress, women are still “under pressure to conform to
traditional concepts of womanly behaviour” (4). Their attempts to refuse these patriarchal
restrictions have led twentieth-century female writers into creating novels that not only
express their rebellion, but also reconstruct the manner of that articulation by foregrounding
the excluded. It is interesting to note that Miles contends that it is “difficult for all women
except witches and whores to shake off [the] time-honoured female role of custodian of the
moral values” (11) [emphasis added]. Does it not follow, then, that the writer who wishes to
free herself from such circumscriptions might be tempted to assume the identity that does
allow it?
22
The Witch Image
In investigating the witch image in a selection of works by modern female authors,
several examples of scholarship have proven enlightening. The Witch in History: Early
Modern and Twentieth Century Representations by Diane Purkiss (1996) is a comprehensive
historical/cultural exploration that focuses on early modern women’s stories of witchcraft, as
well as Elizabethan and Jacobean stage representations of the witch. The book also includes
discussions on the ways in which women have “invested heavily in the figure as a fantasy
which allowed them to express and manage otherwise unspeakable fears and desires,
centering on the question of motherhood and children” (2). Purkiss, who describes herself as
a feminist historian, aims to reveal how the witch herself is “a created myth,”, and to show
how the “resulting female figure has had considerable appeal for women writers” (2).
Various studies in nineteenth-century literature have been done on “anti-heroines”,
characters who tend to be “fallen women” rather than specifically witch-like. However, since
one of the sources of the rejection and fear of a woman’s sexual attraction is the definition of
the witch used during the witch hunts of the Middle Ages, in which sexuality was equated
with danger to male strength, or evidence of copulation with Satan, these studies too have
much to offer in background. In either case, secondary characters and even heroines who did
not conform to the Victorian expectations are plentiful within the literature, and works
investigating their significance for literature in general, and women in particular, abound.
These include Lyn Pykett’s The ‘Improper’ Feminine: The Women’s Sensation Novel and the
New Woman Writing (1992), which deals with characters from such diverse authors as
George Eliot, Charles Dickens, D.H. Lawrence, Thomas Hardy, Sarah Grand and Virginia
Woolf, often in light of views by Elaine Showalter, Hélène Cixous, Jacques Lacan, and Freud.
A study such as Carolyn Dever’s Death and the Mother from Dickens to Freud: Victorian
Fiction and the Anxiety of Origins (1998), as well as Patricia Beer’s Reader, I Married Him:
23
A Study of the Women Characters of Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell and
George Eliot (1974) also investigate ways in which the “official” Victorian feminine identity
was subverted. With its obvious allusion to Gilbert and Gubar’s tome, Winifred Hughes’ The
Maniac in the Cellar: Sensation Novels of the 1860s (1980) is also of relevance. Rachel M.
Brownstein’s Becoming a Heroine: Reading About Women in Novels (1994) also focuses on
the nineteenth-century female character. Harold Bloom has recently (1998) published his
comprehensive British Women Fiction Writers of the 19th Century which is an informative
source on this topic.
Judith Fryer focuses on American literature from the position of “America as New
World Garden of Eden” (vii), and in her discussion of Eve touches necessarily on witch
characteristics, for Eve is, of course, one of the sources of feminine evil in the
Western/Christian canon5. Her book, The Faces of Eve: Women in the Nineteenth Century
American Novel (1976), attempts to analyze “not only the American heroine, but . . . the
culture which shaped the perceptions of the authors whose creation she was, and of the
authors themselves who projected their own images upon their heroines” (x). Her work
investigates a variety of types, among which are several that parallel the subject of my own
research: “The Temptress”, “The Great Mother” and “The New Woman”.
Nor is there a dearth of scholarship on woman’s writing in the twentieth century.
Beginning with Virginia Woolf’s “Women and Fiction”, and continuing with Elaine
Showalter’s works, especially The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature, and
Theory (1985), the question of how women writers create and how female characters are
imagined in modern literature is a subject for multidisciplinary study. Feminist theory by its
nature also delves into this multi-faceted subject matter; for example, Susan Koppelman
Cornillon edited Images of Women in Fiction: Feminist Perspectives in 1972. This is a
collection of essays by men and women that examine types of writing and depiction of images
24
and characters using a feminist approach to Reader Response Criticism. Paulina Palmer
published Contemporary Women’s Fiction: Narrative Practice and Feminist Theory in 1989
and Jennifer Birkett and Elizabeth Harvey edited Determined Women: Studies in the
Construction of the Female Subject, 1900-90 (1991). Katherine Anne Ackley has edited
Misogyny in Literature: An Essay Collection (1992), the subject of which is self-evident, and
Sidonie Smith also grapples with similar issues in her focus on autobiography: Subjectivity,
Identity, and the Body: Women's Autobiographical Practices in the Twentieth Century (1993).
Because part of my claim is that the writer herself is analogous to the witch stereotype in her
innovation of writing practices, whether in subject, theory or characterization, Smith’s book
offers relevant insights. Nancy Walker concurs, pointing out that the “presentation of a ‘self,’
whether in fiction or in autobiography, is a somewhat different matter for women than for
men. . . . Because women . . .are systematically discouraged from thinking of themselves as
unique and autonomous, their relationship to selfhood must be approached in a different way”
(Disobedient Writer 76-7). Another recent study is Anxious Power: Reading, Writing, and
Ambivalence in Narrative by Women, (1993) edited by Carol J Singley and Susan Elizabeth
Sweeney, a collection that grapples with such topics as authors and personal context, plot
concepts and narrative structures. These are just examples of the scholarship and literature
published in the last decade that scrutinize questions of gender, identity, and the construction
of a social and political entity. As Walker fittingly indicates, “The fact that feminist literary
criticism does concern itself so frequently with questions of self and identity suggests that
women writers raise these questions in provocative ways in their work; and yet the very
terminology available to the critic derives from a concept of selfhood that is at least oblique to
women’s experience” (Disobedient Writer 77).
25
I believe it is evident that my proposition will be examined first and foremost from a
feminist perspective. However, in order to facilitate my investigation into the appeal the witch
figure possesses for both modern female writers and their largely female readership I will
need to employ a macrocosmic critical approach encompassing more than feminist literary
theories. Because cultural considerations are an inherent part of the socially engendered
construct for both witch and woman, especially in view of how the two terms have become
interchangeable, I will, at times, have to take these concepts into account. And thanks to
those same feminist theorists mentioned earlier, it is axiomatic today that we must clarify a
myriad set of values and perspectives appearing in literature that differ from erstwhile
commonly accepted principles – both in literature and in life. The designation “woman writer”
offers recognition while simultaneously implying a difference and separation from the male
writer that has traditionally been of lesser value than male writing; his gender never needed
clarifying. I believe that one form of the resistance women writers have adopted in order to
challenge that automatic label of implicit inferiority is to embrace the “wicked witch” in all
her possible forms and integrate her into the processes of growth and development within the
literature they write. Psychoanalytical, reader-response, ideological and other “post” theories,
in addition to poststructuralist feminist literary theories, all have something to contribute to
the way in which we can understand how the writers I have chosen for this study fashion
female identity in relation to the witch paradigm in their texts. Therefore, I will sometimes
incorporate a number of these views into my discussion, including those of the highly
influential feminist theorist, Julia Kristeva, a psychoanalyst who develops her thought by
merging various disciplines – philosophy, linguistics, semiotics, literary theory,
psychoanalysis – and whose Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1982) also speaks
directly to my project. She describes abjection as an operation of the psyche through which
subjective and group identity are constituted by excluding anything that threatens one's own
26
(or one's group's) borders. The main threat to the fledgling subject is his or her dependence
upon the maternal body. Therefore, abjection is fundamentally related to the maternal
function, and maternal dysfunction is a major “witch” attribute. Furthermore, I will examine
how this witch identity represents the woman writer herself, as she challenges and defies the
“false universalism, misogyny and gender asymmetry of mainstream literary criticism”
(Baym 101). Women writers have learned to manipulate the language that has long been
denied them as a legitimate forum for their expression, much as the accused witch of early
modern times appropriated cursing as a mode of power and a defense against abjection.
Cixous has exhorted, “[W]oman must write woman. And man, man” (“The Laugh of the
Medusa” 247). She differentiates between what men have accepted and even praised from
woman writers with woman “putting herself into the text—as into the world and into history”
(245). Although Victorian women did write without fear of the brutal response their
outspoken “shrewish” ancestors faced, the writing women engaged in was considered
inconsequential “[b]ecause writing is at once too high, too great for [women], it’s reserved for
the great – that is for ‘great men’...” (246). Here Cixous relates the fact that there have been
few “great” women writers to the notion that, “writing has been run by a libidinal and cultural
– hence political, typically masculine – economy; that this is a locus where the repression of
women has been perpetuated”( 246). Cixous claims that when women “write through their
bodies” they “invent the impregnable language that will wreck partitions”, thus
metaphorically wielding the power of the ancient witch’s curse, resurrected in écriture
féminine.
My intention is to then discuss the philosophies and theories of Hélène Cixous with a
view to how they rejected or modified earlier affirmed theoretical conventions and, in doing
so, changed forever the ways in which we read what women write. I will use these insights to
examine selected writings of Anne Sexton and Margaret Atwood, always with an eye to the
27
witch paradigm and how and why the paradigm appears within these works. In embracing
language in a way that embodies a distinct view of the world, with its own sense of meanings,
relationships, and intentions, these women authors use their particular “magic” to allow us to
read a witch through heteroglossia, or a multiplicity of voices, which, according to Bakhtin in
The Dialogic Imagination, is a desirable state and one of the great virtues of the novel. And,
finally, I want to investigate the writers’ own “witch” identity vis-a-vis the place and role of
the woman writer within the literary sphere.
The female writer is a popular, successful and preponderant figure in today’s literary
landscape. From a myriad of possibilities available I have chosen to focus on three publicly
acknowledged women writers of the latter half of the twentieth century. In order to explore
how the woman writer’s voice trespasses against accepted modes of expression in a wide area
of writing, my intention is to center on a poet, a novelist and a literary theorist, each of whom
has found in the witch paradigm an efficacious and gratifying vehicle for her project. An
investigation into selected poetry by Anne Sexton, who won the Pulitzer Prize in poetry in
1967 for Live or Die (1966), will be one focus to support my thesis. Among her works I plan
to scrutinize Transformations (1971), 6 for in these rewritten fairy tales, the position of the
witch is often vitally rearranged in a manner that exemplifies a new standing for this
stereotype. Sexton “dove headlong into territory considered taboo in her era: incest, addiction,
mental illness, and abortion, to touch on a few” and in doing so, “paved the road for what is
now considered the basis of ‘feminist’ poetry” (McCarten). In fact, her work is often
described in terms such as “taboo”; moreover, she wrote as a feminist before this designation
had become an identifiable part of our language. These elements make Sexton and her poetry
an exceptional example of the transition from undesirable to empowering within the scope of
what women can and, indeed, should write about. Moreover, Sexton declared herself
28
connected to the historical witch in her notable poem “Her Kind”, which will also be included
in my study.
Margaret Atwood is a prolific and influential writer whose career has spanned the last
three decades of the twentieth century and who has begun the twenty-first with no sign of
flagging7. She has generated a richness of scholarly investigation, perhaps the highpoint of
which is the recent Margaret Atwood: Works and Impact, a work which the editor, Reingard
Nischik explains “was prepared for the occasion of [her] sixtieth birthday in November 1999”
(1). One of Atwood’s unique talents is her success in writing in any genre she chooses; in this
collection, Coral Ann Howells “demonstrates Atwood’s expressive ‘slightly postmodern’
(Atwood) recreation of genres, such as the dystopia, the fictional autobiography, the
kunstlerroman, the Gothic romance and the historical novel . . . and her challenging
engagement with questions of femininity, identity and gender” (6). Atwood has created some
strikingly witchy characters, in novels as diverse as The Handmaid’s Tale, Cat’s Eye,
Surfacing, and Alias Grace. In these, her multiform inquiry into the nature and elements of
female identity can be seen to parallel the multitudinous identity of the female as author. My
attention will be focused on The Robber Bride and The Blind Assassin, her last novels with
female protagonists.8
Hélène Cixous is unarguably one of the major influences on feminist writing today. In
1976 she wrote that “writing is . . . the very possibility of change, the space that can serve for
subversive thought . . . of a transformation of social and cultural structures” (“The Laugh of
the Medusa” 249) [emphasis original]. The fact of her choice of the Medusa as a trope for her
ideas about women, writing and social change supports my central theme that the witch has
become an image of accreditation. Geraldine Meaney has written a comprehensive critical
work encompassing gender, culture and difference in which she explores the relationship
between women and writing. Cixous is one of the writers she discusses in (Un)Like Subjects:
29
Women, Theory, Fiction. In “Laugh of the Medusa”, Meany contends, “language is both the
agent of [maternal] engulfment and the residue of resistance to that engulfment” (17),
mirroring the duplicity woman’s writing necessarily engenders.
Today there is no escaping the issue of gender differences and their ramifications in
every aspect of modern western culture. While girls were once assumed to have limited
potential for academic success, or alternatively, little need for it, currently there is an inherent
concept in education which posits that a child’s potential is not a de facto dispensation
resulting from his or her sex. However as reality is very often in conflict with possibility,
women continue to live “second-class” lives in a variety of ways. In current academic literary
discussion, when Derrida has taught us that all writing may be viewed as a complex historical,
cultural process whose roots are to be found in the relationships of texts to each other as well
as in the institutions and conventions of writing, the role and position of women as writers,
characters and human beings is significant. I hope that this discussion will contribute to our
understanding of the ways in which women have developed their literary identity by refusing
to submit to the dictations of self that in the past were male-defined. If once feminist critics
hoped to champion a gender-less identity, they have quickly realized that what is feminine is
unique, different and worthy of its own investigation to uncover the richness of the concept
that is part of being female. Indeed, this has been the focus of much critical feminist theory in
the last decade of the twentieth century and leaders in the field are continually expressing their
new insights.9 I see one way in which this privileging of the feminine has been attained: the
transformation of an intrinsically evil (as defined by patriarchal values) symbol, the witch,
into a figure that awakens approbation, as her identity is “deconstructed” in a process that
recognizes that the ways in which women imagine, create and perform are different from, but
not necessarily inferior to, the way men do. Recognizing this then allows for that particular
identity to be “reconstructed” in a manner that enables other, that is female, possibilities of
30
being in literature. In this way issues of gender, as they relate to issues of the self, can be
foregrounded, while we continue to attempt to illuminate and interpret the human condition
through literature.
Thus, I hope to elucidate how a negative historical stereotype of the female can and
has been reconstructed to empower today’s women by women authors who are themselves a
modern manifestation of the stereotype they recreate; to examine in effect how the witch is a
metaphor for women’s voices in our patriarchal society.
31
Chapter Two
Medusa: the Myth, the Mirror and Hélène Cixous
If we want to epitomize the message Hélène Cixous conveys in “The Laugh of the
Medusa,” her influential 1975 treatise on women and writing, “acclaiming the female” might
suffice. It is commonly accepted that Cixous’s theories have altered the very core of the way
in which women’s writing is read. Indeed when she denominated her idea of “écriture
féminine”, she forever transformed the meaning of “woman” and “writing” as well as
shedding light on how the two interweave. A woman’s language “does not contain, it carries;
it does not hold back, it makes possible” she wrote (250). With this essay, Cixous opened
many eyes to the possibilities available for women writing in our masculine, phallo-centric
literary culture, writing in a uniquely female way that she termed “écriture féminine.” She
intended this to be a means for previously repressed women to express themselves and their
experiences. And rather than deny their difference, as in “I am a writer not a woman writer,”
Cixous argues for “affirmation of difference . . . a step forward, an adventure, an exploration
of woman’s powers: of her power, her potency, her ever-dreaded strength, of the regions of
femininity” (“Castration or Decapitation?” 52). As Kathleen O’Grady of Cambridge
University explains in the introduction to her 1996 interview with Cixous, “[she] celebrates a
theory of écriture féminine – an ethical writing style (which women in particular can access)
that is able, through a phonetic inscription of the feminine body, its pulsions and flows, to
open up and embrace the difference of the other” (1).
She identified and named a female writing style which was, in essence, a rejection of
masculine parameters for writing–what women writers have been doing, in fact, since they
began writing, but perhaps only recently acknowledged. In this admirable project, Cixous
wants to “destroy (or perhaps just deconstruct) the phallogocentric system Lacan describes,
32
and to project some new strategies for a new kind of relation between female bodies and
language” (Klages, “Cixous”).
Cixous pioneered the approach that has facilitated important revelations vis-à-vis
woman, gender and authorship. Thus, we now recognize that usurping masculine modes in
order to critique them or reform them into a femininely “appropriate” discourse became one
technique women authors adopted in order to be recognized and accepted within the
patriarchally-defined realm of literature. However, this did not necessarily succeed. As Alicia
Ostriker so succinctly points out:
We seldom encounter, in praise of women poets, terms like great, powerful,
forceful, masterly, violent, large or true. The language used to express literary
admiration in general presumes the masculinity of the author, the work, and the
act of creation -- but not if the author is a woman. Complimentary adjectives of
choice then shift towards the diminutives: graceful, subtle, elegant, delicate,
cryptic and, above all, modest; for the most continuous term for approbation
for a woman poet from the nineteenth century to the day before yesterday has
been modesty (original emphases) (3).
Ostriker goes on to comment that when female Victorian poets are praised for
modesty we are not unduly surprised “since we think of the Victorian period as a nadir in
women’s history”. Nevertheless, when poets of the stature of Marianne Moore, Elizabeth
Bishop, Louise Bogan, Sylvia Plath and Adrienne Rich are all commended, in one way or
another, by a variety of critics for modesty, it becomes clear that “originality has never
protected the woman poet from the condescension of critics” (4).
Margaret Atwood also laments this reality, as she wryly comments:
[W]e like to think the old stereotypes are fading [but]. . .I can tell you from
experience the old familiar images, the old icons have merely gone
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underground and not far at that. . . .We still think of a powerful woman as an
anomaly, a potentially dangerous anomaly; there is something subversive about
such women.
. . .Women writers are particularly subject to such projections,
for writing itself is uncanny: it uses words for evocation rather than detonation;
it is spell making. A man who is good at it is a craftsman . . . .A man’s work is
reviewed for its style and ideas, but all too often a woman’s is reviewed for the
supposed personality of the author . . . .When a man is attacked in print, it’s
usually for saying what he says; when a woman is attacked it’s often for being
who she is (“Witches” 331).
Atwood wittily offers a simple yet provocative example of the imbalance of power in
the literary realm in her article “On Being a Woman Writer”, where she reminds us “there is
no critical vocabulary for expressing the concept ‘good/female’. Work by a male writer is
often spoken of by critics admiring it as having ‘balls’; ever hear anyone speak admiringly of
work by a woman as having ‘tits’?” (Second Words 198). We laugh, yet this integral,
judgmental hierarchy has implications for women writers that reverberate from the nineteenth
century to, as Ostriker put it, “the day before yesterday.”
Of course, female writers also use language for power but, over the history of writing
in which women have participated, they have had to code their messages of identity and
perspective, constrained by the knowledge that “true writer signifies assertion while true
woman signifies submission” (Ostriker 6), for the male continues to define what woman’s
sphere of, and access to, knowledge can be. All the traditionally curious women of our
cultural history and mythology – Eve, Pandora, Psyche – suffer for their pursuit of knowledge
that has been forbidden them; the message that woman and knowledge are an inauspicious
combination has been reiterated and rewritten for generation after generation. The mode of
expression may have metamorphosed with the prevailing fashions and culturally accepted
34
value systems of the times, but the underlying inference remains essentially intact. Atwood
writes, “[I]f you display any kind of strength or power, creative or otherwise, then you are not
merely human, you are worse than human. You are a witch, a Medusa, a destructive powerful
scary monster” (“The Curse of Eve” 226). Ostriker concurs, “the image of woman as monster
recurs throughout western myth and literature” (73). Sexton writes, “I have gone out, a
possessed witch, /haunting the black air, braver at night; / dreaming evil” (“Her Kind” 1-3).
Cixous’ essay “The Laugh of the Medusa” disputes the tenets of the patriarchal social order;
in it she writes that women must return from “‘without’ from the heath where witches are kept
alive” (247).
In a sense, then, women writers have had to become “witches”, defying the patriarchal
authorial voice, in order to be heard. This may help to elucidate the foregrounding of such an
inherently negative representation of woman in modern literature written by women. The
female author as trespasser, and therefore transgressor, in the male-dominated world of
literature, transforming the medium to suit her needs, can be seen to follow in the footsteps of
the historical witch whose power was feared and thus condemned by the male authority. The
woman writer’s voice becomes the witch in our time, daring to reject, deny or challenge the
acknowledged methods of literary expression, which have been traditionally male-defined.
The witch is an eminently suitable trope for such expression, since she is so inextricably
identified as female.
In my discussion it is understood that “witch” has come to mean “woman” – our
cultural heritage is imbued with this assumption, which is hardly surprising given the female
biological function as creator of life. 10 This capability has always been dichotomously linked
with the potential for that same female to cause death, thus creating the fear that has
historically/psychologically perverted the ways in which men are able and willing to respond
to women, a fear that Freud and his followers have institutionalized in Western culture since
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the beginning of the twentieth century. Accordingly, women have internalized these
responses, and from their abjected position, are also enablers of socially sanctioned violence
perpetrated on women. These assumptions form an integral part of my investigation as I
examine the choice of the witch as a vehicle for the expression of an empowered and rounded
female identity by certain twentieth century women writers.
The witch did not appear suddenly, full-blown and shrieking curses, in the fifteenth
century. Her ancestors have always resided alongside the affirmative goddesses predominant
in history and myth. In my investigation of the transformation of the witch conceit in the
poetry and novels of a select representation of modern female writers, of especial appeal is
Cixous’ choice of the Medusa for her widely-quoted seminal theoretical manifesto, “The
Laugh of the Medusa”, which was published in 1975, as was “Sorties”. These works,
according to Susan Dunn, are
two of the most influential essays in contemporary feminist theory. Both works
are best understood if one sees that they are concerned more with poetics than
politics although the two notions are clearly entwined. ‘The Laugh of the
Medusa’ takes on both the Greek myth and the psychoanalytic interpretation of
that myth in order to challenge the orthodoxies of patriarchy. ‘Sorties’ expands
her notions of the connections between women's desire and women's language.
Cixous' theory of writing is a feminist theory because she recognizes that
patriarchy is a specifically cultural and historical context with power relations
that are not universal but nonetheless a real condition and that these do not
exist separately from aesthetics and poetics. (“The Place that Writes”)
Hélène Cixous, who was born in Oran, Algeria, on June 5, 1937 to a French-Jewish
father (Georges) and a German mother (Eve), began her life in the midst of WW II, a life
characterized by “foreignness, exile, war, the phantom memory of peace, mourning and pain,
36
as the place and time of [her] birth” ("From the Scene" 2). For, despite the anti-Jewish
climate, Cixous remembers having “a very strong feeling of paradise” in Oran, a family life
full of "dreams and creation" (Cixous and Calle-Gruber, "Albums" 196). Her father, who died
when she was only 11, “loved music, drawing, words, books,” and he engaged the family in
"word games" for entertainment, and so Cixous developed an early love for language and
poetry (196). In 1955, Cixous married, moved to Paris, and enrolled at Lycee Lakanal. There,
she says she encountered for the first time “the odour of misogyny” (“Albums” 204) and “felt
the true torments of exile” (205). Her first-hand experiences with anti-Semitism and
misogyny, which flung her into the place of "the other," left her acutely aware of the need for
an “other” way of thinking, one that would scrupulously oppose all forms of subjugation and
address “the other” without appropriating or eradicating its existence. This “other” way of
thinking would be connected to the creative forces of writing, poetry, and music.
Cixous began her thesis on James Joyce in 1960 but became a full professor and chair
of English literature at the University of Nanterre (1967) before she had earned her doctorate.
In May of 1968, in answer to student uprisings against the conservative French university
structure, and at the behest of the Minister of Education, Cixous established the then
experimental Université de Paris VIII-Vincennes, which she staffed with Latin-American
writers and provocative new philosophers, such as Michel Foucault. That same year, Cixous
received her Doctorat d'état, becoming, at age 31, France's youngest “Doctor”. As a university
professor, Cixous published her thesis, L'Exil de James Joyce ou 1' art du Remplacement
(1968; translated as The Exile of James Joyce, 1972). Also in 1969, Cixous published her
novel Dedans (Inside, 1986), for which she was awarded the prestigious Prix Médicis. Since
then she has published close to fifty novels and plays and some more theoretical essays like
“La Jeune Née” (1975; translated as” The Newly Born Woman” 1986), the best known of
Cixous's texts to date in the United States. Cixous continues to be a champion of freedom in
37
many guises in her writings. In 1974, she created Europe's first doctoral program in Études
Féminines (Women's Studies), which she still chairs, and which continues to thrive.11
The focus of Cixous's seminal treatise is “écriture féminine,” in which she challenges
assumptions of gender identities that had been accepted as "given" essences of male and
female characteristics by demonstrating how they are, in fact, cultural conventions, and as
such, can be ignored, broken or changed.12 Even for the layperson who is unaware of the
subtleties or origin of the Medusa legend, there is no denying that this mythological creature
is both female and negative in the collective Western unconscious.
Here, briefly, is the the Medusa Legend, as told by Thomas Bulfinch:13
Medusa was a terrible monster who had laid waste to the country. She was
once a beautiful maiden whose hair was her chief glory, but as she dared to vie
in beauty with Athena, the goddess deprived her of her charms and changed
her beautiful ringlets into hissing serpents. She became a cruel monster of so
frightening an aspect that no living thing could behold her without being turned
into stone. All around the cavern where she dwelt might be seen the stony
figures of men and animals which had chanced to catch a glimpse of her and
had been petrified with the sight. Perseus, favored by Athena and Hermes, the
former of whom lent him her shield and the latter his winged shoes,
approached Medusa while she slept, and taking care not to look directly at her,
but guided by her image reflected in the bright shield which he bore, he cut off
her head and gave it to Athena, who fixed it in the middle of her Aegis.
Many later images of Medusa thwart our expectations of what she should
look like. From the previous story, we are led to believe that she was a creature
so hideous in appearance that her very glance could petrify the viewer.
However, in works such as the Medusa Rondanini, the first extant sculpture
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depicting Medusa with the face of a beautiful woman, it is only her expression
of deep sorrow – and the intertwined snakes around her head –that hint that this
is a representation of the monster of myth and legend14. This manner of
depiction accentuates the fact that Medusa was originally a lovely woman – it
was her tragedy that she was foolish enough to compare herself to a goddess.
Medusa's head retained its petrifying power even after her death. Because of
this power, her image frequently appeared on Greek armor. In some myths
Athena used the Medusa head on her aegis. (Bulfinch’s Mythology)
Ironically, it was the goddess Athena’s jealousy that led her to transform Medusa into
“one of the Gorgons whose hair was changed into serpents, after which all who looked upon
her were turned into stone” (Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary). Similarly the entry
for “gorgon” in The Oxford Dictionary and Thesaurus tells us that not only is “gorgon”
another name for Medusa (Def. 1) but that a gorgon is “a frightening or repulsive person, esp.
a woman” (Def. 2).
Two interesting points come to light here: first, one of the most generic representations
of female hideousness was actually a beautiful woman who was transformed into an ugly
monster as a form of punishment, and second, the agent of that retribution was another
female.
Cixous’ intentional choice of this particular analogy in her exhortation to women to
“write themselves” evocatively links the positive and the negative, the appealing and the
frightening, the desirable and the repulsive, with the “herself” of being a woman. She does all
this while acknowledging the fact of female misogyny, which is embedded into our cultural
understanding of female identity.15 As a precursor to the witch of fairy tale and history, the
Medusa legend embodies the dichotomy of the female image that pervades literature both past
and present. Furthermore, embedded within the myth is the destructive power unleashed with
39
that shift from beautiful to grotesque and from the sanctioned to the forbidden. Medusa
enables a totality of female identity that traditional patriarchy denies her when it limits the
possibilities and venues of her expression. For Cixous, whose “strong critique of such
patriarchal modes of thought” (Moi 104) is well known, the metaphor of the Medusa
concretizes how the feminine can be expressed other-wise.
The locus of the “monstrosity” of woman is her body: “Who … hasn’t accused herself
of being a monster?” (“Laugh” 246). The monster Medusa is destroyed when Perseus beheads
her. Bulfinch mentions that the head “retained its petrifying power even after [Medusa’s]
death.” Yet, her body also reserved its power: Pegasus, the winged horse, and Chrysaor, the
giant, her offspring from Poseidon, were, according to the legend, born of her headless body
(Bulfinch, Age of Fable). How awful, how wonderful are these female powers, that even in
decapitated death, woman’s body is capable of creating life. This is indeed one of the “illmannered bodies” Cixous claims men “desperately” would have women forget (247).
Throughout “The Laugh of the Medusa”, Cixous features the female body as the source of
écriture feminine: “Write yourself. Your body must be heard. … Censor the body and you
censor breath and speech at the same time” (250). Cixous brought to a collective “feminist”
attention the realization that “the same image that has been used to oppress women can also
help to set women free” (Bowers 217). The “ebullient infinite woman” (“Laugh” 246) is well
represented in the multifarious trope of Medusa: a bodiless head with the power to petrify and
a headless body with the power to create life. She does indeed “resist death” (246). Yet she is
never whole.
Another significant element for this discussion embodied in the Medusa trope is the
mirror. As Julia Walker so aptly explains,
in the story of Medusa we find a reflection of society’s fear of the power of
women … Those who gaze directly at the face of Medusa are vulnerable,
40
rendered lifeless stone by the power of what they see. Medusa, when beheld in
a mirror, becomes vulnerable herself, rendered lifeless by the hand of Perseus.
But what Perseus sees in the mirror is a reversed image, not the face that
causes death. Through this process of reflection, power is relocated from the
face of Medusa to the eye of Perseus and the agency of that relocation is the
surface of the mirror. (46)
Cixous mocks that power in her essay, claiming “Men [emphasis added] say that there are two
unrepresentable things: death and the feminine sex. That’s because they need femininity to be
associated with death … they need to be afraid of us. Look at the trembling Perseuses moving
backward toward us, clad in apotropes. What lovely backs! …Let’s get out of here” (255). It
is little girls that Cixous wants to free, for it is their bodies, she reminds us, that are “immured,
well-preserved, intact unto themselves in the mirror [emphasis added]” (247). By equating all
women’s condition with Medusa’s and all men with Perseus, Cixous offers the possibility of
escape from the mirror and its metaphoric death, which, significantly, in the Medusa legend,
was the agent of her literal death.
The mirror is a familiar and resonant emblem in culture, myth and literature, often
imbued with magical properties in an attempt to explain the inherent mystery of seeing what
in essence is an impossibility – ourselves, from the outside, as others see us. It all boils down
to perception, and from the time Aristotle explained that the “female is a female by virtue of a
certain lack of qualities; we should regard the female nature as afflicted with a natural
defectiveness” (quoted in de Beauvoir xxii), women have had to cope with living the image of
an identity defined by what it lacks.
Not only did French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan appropriate the mirror to describe
one of the stages of the development of identity in his theory of the self – a concept that he
perceives to be an “illusion”– but he defined that illusionary identity as characterized by
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“lack”. Lacan's mirror stage describes a “moment” of psychological development of the child
when he (or she) recognizes his/her image in the mirror and believes it is his or her actual
“self”. Before that “moment” of development, which cannot be exactly defined or predicted,
the infant “assumed” that whatever he/she looked at reflected itself, and that was usually the
face of the mother. When the infant sees him/herself reflected in the mirror, often it is the
mother who is there to affirm, “Yes, that [image] is you.” Thus, the most primitive idea of self
is intricately defined by oneness with the mother concurrently with the separating from her.
This is the element of lack that Lacan assumes is inherent in the creation of “self”. Little
wonder that traditional psychoanalytic theory presupposes a love/hate relationship with the
mother/female. However Lacan contends that the mirrored reflection is not, nor can be, an
exact duplicate; hence the child will only be able to conceive of his/her identity in fictional or
“imaginary” terms. That fantasy image of the self can be filled in by others whom we may
want to emulate in our adult lives, that is, anyone we set up as a mirror for our selves. It is
only after the acquisition of language that a child can identify itself in the context of a
socialized identity – or, in Lacanian terms, the symbolic order, and its corresponding abstract
paternal law that governs interpersonal relations. The symbolic order is the equivalent of
adulthood, which we have to enter in order to become “speaking subjects,” in order to be able
to say "I" and have "I" designate a stable identity.
The problem for women, according to Dr. Mary Klages, lies in the fact that when
“taking up a position in the Symbolic, you enter through a gender-marked doorway; the
position for girls is different than the position for boys. Boys are closer to the Phallus than
girls, but no one is or has the Phallus – it's the center” (“Lacan Lecture”). Jacques Lacan used
the term other in two ways, one internal and one external. He referred to the other with a small
“o” as that part of self which is idealized – that image in the mirror. In effect he is saying that
all individuals are divided selves – this is what leads to neuroses and psychoses from a
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psychoanalytic perspective. He determined in his influential essay, “The Subject and the
Other,” that the “Other” with a capital “O” refers to what exists as opposite of, or excluded
by, something else – everything the subject – i.e. the individual; the thinking, acting person –
is not. This Other can include more than people – it encompasses the rules and roles society
dictates on the self via language. His ideas, based on Freudian ego development theory, are
oriented to the masculine – his choice of the term “Phallus” unequivocally flaunts this bias.
Accordingly, a woman is not-a-man, for Lacan’s theory claims that in giving something a
name, we in fact identify that thing as being separate from our self. Trudy Mercer discusses
the problematic nature of Lacan’s work vis-à-vis female identity conceptions: “We ‘know’
that the phallus is a theoretical construct formulated to discuss patriarchal structures, and that
the penis is a part of male anatomy. In fact, Lacan insists that the phallus is not the penis; yet,
he and other theorists… cannot help but speak/write as though they are one and the same. The
problem of maintaining distinctions between the phallus and the penis is also true of
distinguishing between the abject, the feminine (and to some extent the maternal body), and a
real woman. We ‘know’ there is a difference but the line of distinction is blurred” (“On Julia
Kristeva’s Power of Horror”). European feminists, of whom Hélène Cixous is only one
example, use and re-form Lacan’s ideas to provoke us to think about how gender might be
organized "other"-wise – that is, in constructing an identity that is uniquely yet wholly female,
not one based on the lack of masculinity. Within this realm, Julia Kristeva, for example,
attempts to differentiate between identity structure and real beings, and in doing so, she
foregrounds the very feminine, maternal elements that Lacan marginalizes. She plays with the
known applications of the word “other,” designating it as a term that belongs solely in the
realm of female identity construction in her theoretical sphere. Simone de Beauvoir had
already stated that “woman is the Other” in The Second Sex (16). For Kristeva, the “Other”
alludes to a hypothetical space or place which is that of the pure signifier, rather than a
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physical entity. It is in this space that feminine identity resides; Kristeva offers a more
prominent place (vis-à-vis women) for the maternal and the feminine in the subject's
psychosexual development. In contrast to Freud and Lacan, she emphasizes the maternal
function and its importance in the development of subjectivity and access to culture and
language. Kristeva uses the maternal body with its two-in-one, or other within [emphasis
added], as a model for creating the subject, which is her term for identity.
Thus, relationships between the mirror, identity, self and gender shape our cultural,
psychological, and mythical literary canon, as well as the works of theorists, poets, and
psychoanalysts. Moreover, the pertinence of mirror symbolism to writing is fundamental
when viewing literature as a reflection of life. This association, as it pertains particularly to
female identity construction, can be discerned in the tale of the Medusa. Medusa can be
understood as “other” both in the Lacanian sense of what she is not – not a goddess, not an
empowered self, as numerous indignities are enacted upon her, and, finally not even alive – as
well as for what she is, in Kristeva’s realm – a body that gives life and a gaze that petrifies, an
element that both empowers and abjects her by creating the process of hate, and desire to
objectify, that result from recognizing the other we fear. Both allow for the very opposite of
the passivity inherent in her Lacanian otherness. The essence of her story lies in the mirror
which simultaneously reflects and deflects both her power and her identity. Finally, death
reduces Medusa to her designated abjected position and yet, the use of her image (initially
literally her head) as a shield against danger and as a weapon against enemies for both Perseus
and Athena, metaphorically obviates her death. This allows the symbolic meaning of the idea
of her death to defy its inferior position.16
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The division that bestows superiority to one element over the other in the binary
relationship of identity began with the Greeks, and endures today; the Medusa legend is
rooted there. As scholar Genevieve Lloyd explains in her book, Man of Reason:
The Pythagoreans saw the world as a mixture of principles associated with determinate
form, seen as good, and others associated with formlessness – the unlimited, irregular or
disorderly – which were seen as bad or inferior. There were ten such contrasts in the
table and ‘male’ and ‘female,’ like the other contrasted terms, did not here function as
straightforwardly descriptive classifications. ‘Male,’ corresponding to the other terms on
its side of the table, was construed as superior to its opposite; and the basis for this
superiority was its association with the primary Pythagorean contrast between form and
formlessness. (3)
Lloyd further explains that an “exclusion . . .of the feminine is built into past ideals of
Reason as the sovereign human character trait. And correlatively...the content of femininity
has been partly formed by such processes of exclusion" (37). In La Jeune Née, written with
Catherine Clément (1975), Cixous presents her own version of this patriarchal dual
relationship, in order to demonstrate that all the “couples” in the end are the basic male/female
opposition, with its predictable positive/negative assumptions. By rejecting the exclusion of
the feminine in the positive, active, male scheme of identity with her celebration of it in “The
Laugh of the Medusa,” Cixous opened the portal to “the study of different responses to the
fundamental conditions of life”. In fact, this is Cixous’ definition of “feminine” research
(Sellers 7).
Cixous writes: “When I speak of male writing. . . [it is as] a locus where the repression
of women has been perpetuated, over and over, . . . where woman never has her turn to speak”
(249). In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Perseus is the one who tells Medusa’s story, after he has
killed the Gorgon; Medusa does not have “her turn”:
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She was once most beautiful in form, and the jealous hope of many suitors.
Of all her beauties, her hair was the most beautiful – for so I learned from one
who said he had seen her. ‘Tis said that in Minerva’s temple Neptune, lord of
the Ocean, ravished her. Jove’s daughter turned away and hid her chaste eyes
behind her aegis. And that the deed might be punished as was due [emphasis
added], she changed the Gorgon’s locks to ugly snakes. And now, to frighten
her fear-numbed foes, she still wears upon her breast the snakes she has made.
(Metamorphoses 4 (1984), 793-803)
Notice the leap Medusa has made here from frightened rape victim to a frightening
monster that deserves punishment, in an unfortunately familiar “blame the victim” format.
Notice too, that although her face has become the locus of her fearfulness and maleficent
power, there is no face described– we have her body and her hair but no face. What is the
Medusa’s real power, then? According to Julia Walker, she has none. “She is the object of
many responses, but her power is generated only by the actions of others. Her gaze has no
power …only those who look upon her will die” (original emphasis) (50). Bulfinch implies
that Medusa was indeed responsible as she dared to “compare herself to a goddess” but where
in the tale is she in fact guilty of anything other than being beautiful? She did not seduce
Neptune, yet she was punished for “desecrating the temple” of Athena. Indeed, as Walker
points out, Athena/Minerva’s power is transferred to the males in the story, first by the act of
punishing Medusa for Neptune’s crime, and then by aiding Perseus to defeat the Gorgon – and
she herself is described as “the goddess least threatening to men” (48-9). There are elements
of female abjection enacted on Medusa (who, we should remember, was a mortal) by both
gods and goddesses alike. This facet of the tale reinforces the characteristic complicity of
women in punishing other women; ostensibly, we have the gods united against this hubristic
mortal. In fact it seems to me that here we have one of the prototypes of a devastating witch
46
stereotype that later became immortalized by the Grimm Brothers as both evil witch qua
witch, as well as in her incarnation as the infamous wicked stepmother of our popular fairy
tales: the old(er) witch-woman preying on the young(er) and ever more beautiful rival.
Athena/Minerva fulfils the role of the witch enacting revenge on her rival, in this scenario,
Medusa. Further, Walker claims that being presented this way, as “the object of the sight and
speech of other characters in the narrative …[shows] Medusa as a woman who is a monster,
not as a woman who is transformed into a monster” (49). The possibilities available in the
Medusa legend for Cixous, who vehemently averred that “woman must write herself”, and
who determined to persuade women to empower themselves through language in order to
refuse the cultural subjugation of their bodies, are evident. “We have internalized the horror of
the dark,” Cixous writes. Medusa’s tale exemplifies how women are “the executants of
[men’s] virile needs”, a model of what she calls man’s “greatest crime against women,
…[leading] them to hate women” (248). We today are hardly free from the this particular
patriarchal “horror” and the strife generated among women forms a key element of the tension
and conflict in novels and poetry, serving as a basis for their success and attraction to a varied
reading public.17
Another level of analysis offered through the Medusa myth resides in the situating of
her hair as one of the focal points of the tale.
Freud uses the Medusa myth as an allegory for the male subject's paradigmatic
encounter with female genitalia, and in this manner exposes the conflicting agendas within
Oedipalized male heterosexuality: “The terror of Medusa is . . . a terror of castration. . . . It
occurs when a boy . . . catches sight of the female genitals, probably those of an adult,
surrounded by hair. . . . The hair upon Medusa's head is frequently represented . . . [as] snakes,
and these once again are derived from the castration complex. . . . They serve actually as a
47
mitigation of the horror, for they replace the penis, the absence of which is the cause of the
horror” ("Medusa's Head" 273). Thus the image of Medusa’s head is the image of female
genitalia, a source of anxiety and fear, and the presence of the surrounding hair strengthens
the genital analogy. Her body, however, is absent, for as Cixous asserts, the body is the text,
and, as such, outside feminine access. Woman not only remains excluded from the text but
she is not to be looked upon, for her gaze can reflect back to the viewer her lethal power.
Freud also interprets the paralytic effect of looking at the Medusa as another
phallic comfort, the "stiffening" of the body suggesting erection, thus reminding the male
of the continued existence of his own penis. The erection is not only an internal comfort,
but its display to the woman "has an apotropaic effect. To display the penis (or any of its
surrogates) is to say: 'I am not afraid of you. I defy you. I have a penis.' Here, then, is
another way of intimidating the Evil Spirit" (ibid. 274) (Jackson, 21-2).
Thus, according to Freud, the Medusa myth addresses many unconscious issues. The
severed head can represent both castration itself and, as the female genitals, the castrated
state; but since those who viewed the severed head were turned to stone by the experience,
their very stiffness and erect state were interpreted as reassurance against the threat of
castration, confirming that the phallus was still intact. Further, the goddess Athena, by
wearing the symbol of the severed head, "the terrifying genitals of the mother," on her tunic,
repels all sexual desire in order to preserve her virginity, just as, in one of Rabelais' books, a
woman repelled the Devil by showing her vulva (Freud, “Medusa’s head” 273). The same
hair-snake-phallus equation appears as well in certain European superstitions about snakes
that claim if a hair is pulled from a woman’s head, it turns into a snake (Tucker). Because it
shed its skin, the snake was a symbol of resurrection, renewal, restoration, and immortality
prior to Christianity. When the children of Israel wander in the desert, the serpent is seen
possessing this duality of life and death: “And Moses made a bronze serpent and set it on the
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standard; and it came about, that if a serpent bit any man, when he looked to the bronze
serpent, he lived” (Numbers 21:9).18 Because the serpent can both kill and heal; because it
lives so much of its life underground and thus close to Mother Earth (yet at the same time in
the realm of the underworld), and because it rejuvenates itself in the act of shedding its skin,
which should represent the end of its life, the snake is a highly ambiguous, multifarious
symbol. Simultaneously, with this affirmative quality, however, the Christian characterization
of the snake and his identification with the Devil has become dominant via the story of the fall
of man (Genesis 3). In addition, the serpent is considered the author of temptation and, when
he told Eve, "You will not surely die," the snake secured its reputation as a liar and a deceiver.
[Gen 3:4 & 13]. As Hans Biedermann reports in his Dictionary of Symbolism, “Symbolic
traditions tend to stress the negative role of the snake …[o]lder systems of myth, however,
include mysterious positive aspects of the snake” (311).
Just as cutting or plucking hair can symbolize loss of power or castration (Freud
SE:.XVII 121-2) – as so clearly demonstrated in the biblical tale of Samson and Delilah – so
the offering of hair may represent the gift of the phallus,19 perhaps to placate the rival parent,
and ensure the giver's own fertility. In this vein, the pubescent youths of classical Greece
offered their shorn locks to Hippolytus (Frazer).
At the most superficial level, hair signifies physical beauty in a woman, but here too
literature and myth demonstrate layers of unconscious meaning. The Sirens used their long
hair as an instrument of seduction to lure unwary sailors onto the rocks, while it was by way
of her tresses that Rapunzel gave access to ‘her’ tower, both to the Enchantress/Mother and to
her lover. “The same meaning can be applied to the young women in classical Greece, who
dedicated their shorn locks to the Goddess Athena before marriage, and to Orthodox Jewish
women and novices in the Roman Catholic Church in our own time” (Stein, Christenson and
Hollander). The most extremely conservative religious traditions in diverse cultures share this
49
demand on females: remove or cover your hair. In this way, the weakness of the woman is
ensured, paralleling the Samson legend.
Hair plays a significant role in many fairy tales where witches reside; thus it is easy to
understand how Medusa’s snake-locks express a form of unconscious identity development
that represents the tension between the desire for a woman and the fear which that desire
arouses. This tension can surface when the princess or “good”, beautiful heroine has gorgeous
hair and the witch, who may envy the heroine’s locks, uses them against her – as in Rapunzel,
for example. In this tale the hair is first used to assist the witch/guard and later, the
prince/lover, to reach the maiden in the tower, pointing yet again to an ambiguity because it
contains both beneficial and detrimental elements vis-à-vis Rapunzel’s circumstances.
Historians and folklorists have often commented that the long flowing hair of the goddess was
regarded as a physical characteristic of suspected witches of both sexes, and was regarded as
having magical significance20. This is an added element in the legend of Medusa, whose once
beautiful hair has become repulsive, that has filtered down through time, together with the
mirror element that is also prevalent in fairy tale and favored by Lacan, Cixous and Kristeva
to discuss gendered identity formation.
Because Lacan’s theories of identity and the mirror stage in the development of the
self have set up the paradigm of the mirror as a reflection of an ideal “I”, the function of the
mirror, first in the Medusa legend and later in witch-inhabited fairy tales, is congruent with
the various levels of meaning imbedded in female hair. For the infant, Lacan theorizes, the
delight that comes in recognizing his/her self in the mirror stems in part from the perfection of
that image. Fairy tales have appropriated the power of that perfection, using the mirror image
in a manner that can be traced back to the medusan source. In “Snow White”, which is
perhaps the Grimms’ best-known “mirror” tale, the supremacy of the “perfect” mirror image
becomes a motive for the evil queen’s murderous intentions – this image being, of course,
50
youth, beauty and goodness. In other stories, the mirror has powers to defeat evil witches, thus
reflecting the medusan genealogy of these tales. Just as Medusa’s strength and downfall are
both actualized in her gaze, the mirror too encompasses and reproduces the pervasive
good/evil duality of the female.
Gerardine Meaney explicates the underlying multiplicity of Cixous’s intentions in her
use of “féminin,” which in French can mean both female and feminine, in “The Laugh of the
Medusa” vis-à-vis women and writing. She comments that féminin is “fluid, differential,
disturbing; it diffuses, it affirms, it writes and empowers.” This is in opposition to the
masculine, which “centralizes, organizes under the law of the One [sic] and the same. It
denies, possesses and takes power” (13-14). In the legend of Medusa, all these qualities
inhere. “It is by writing,” Cixous proclaims, “and by taking up the challenge of speech which
has been governed by the phallus, that women will confirm women in a place other than that
which is reserved in and by the symbolic, that is, in a place other than silence” (“Medusa”
251). Voiceless Medusa will speak.
In his comprehensive study, Medusa, Steven R. Wilk explores the myriad renditions of
the Medusa myth cross-culturally and chronologically, ending with an observation of
Medusa’s present status as a symbol to women of “the power of their anger and the source of
their inspiration” (224). Annis Pratt also discusses this recent metamorphosis of Medusa,
writing in Dancing with Goddesses that looking Medusa in the eye is a metaphor for many
twentieth century poets for powers “previously hidden and denigrated, collective powers we
are finally beginning to reaffirm and claim for ourselves” (40). It is thanks to Cixous, who
broke the silence of the traditional legend and gave Medusa the voice to tell her side of story,
that these “collective powers” have come into their own. She has enabled women to repossess
51
Medusa, demonstrating how “I am for you what you want me to be at the moment you look at
me in a way you’ve never seen me before” (“Medusa” 264).
Ultimately, Medusa and witch are family; they share both physical and psychological
characteristics in male eyes. They are a dynasty whose youngest members are rebelling, as
young people are wont to do, against an identity that society dictates. Roberta Rosenberg, who
uses the terms interchangeably, contends that the “ ‘laugh’ of the witch or of the medusa [sic],
as in French feminist Helene Cixous [sic] important article ‘The Laugh of the Medusa,’ . . .is
a statement of open rebellion [ against the] status quo. . . .This revolutionary laughter can
come from the reinterpretation of myths previously held taboo” (143). When what was once
forbidden enters the public forum it can then be reinterpreted, reevaluated, reconstructed and
finally repossessed. In “The Laugh of the Medusa” Cixous not only illuminated a way for
women to refuse the male-constructed feminine identities of cultural discourse, she also urged
women to be the creators of their own myths.
Writing, for Cixous, is the very essence of life, and every word, every sign is rich with
possibility and significance. When women write, “writing and voice . . . are woven together”
as she “physically materializes what she’s thinking” (quoted in Moi, 114). The eloquent use of
the Medusa myth as a metaphor for transforming female identity from its patriarchal
imprisonment, transforming her from a signified “deadly” creature to a life-affirming
“laughing” entity illuminates the power of language:
That is our privilege in language. To think that we have at our disposal the
biggest thing in the universe, and that it is language. What one can do with
language is. . . infinite. What one can do with the smallest sign! . . .This may
be why so many people do not write: because it is terrifying. And conversely, it
is what makes certain people write: because it's intoxicating. (Rootprints, 22)
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Susan Dunn reminds us that “‘Laugh of the Medusa’ is an inspiring and moving work
at its most powerful when understood as a feminist manifesto.” Thus Cixous’s choosing of the
Medusa was, I believe, a deliberate “sign,” meant to encourage women writers to investigate
the ways in which the traditionally negative witch paradigm can be transformed to enrich our
perception of how women write, and what they write, and the manner in which this discourse
can be apprehended in celebration of their difference to male constructs in literature and life.
May Sarton is one of the many poets mentioned earlier who have found in Medusa a metaphor
for their creative powers, and she has eloquently expressed this impact in her poem, “The
Muse as Medusa”:
I saw you once, Medusa; we were alone.
I looked you straight in the cold eye, cold.
I was not punished, was not turned to stone How to believe the legends I am told? (1-4)
……………………………………..
I turn your face around! It is my face.
That frozen rage is what I must explore Oh secret, self-enclosed, and ravaged place!
This is the gift I thank Medusa for. (25-28)
Through these words, and through the words of Hélène Cixous, we, too, are inspired to “thank
Medusa.”
53
Chapter Three
Witch Anne: Witch Imagery in the Poetry of Anne Sexton
I have gone out, a possessed witch,
haunting the black air, braver at night;
dreaming evil, I have done my hitch
over the plain houses, light by light:
lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.
A woman like that is not a woman, quite.
I have been her kind.
I have found the warm caves in the woods,
filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves,
closets, silks, innumerable goods;
fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves:
whining, rearranging the disaligned.
A woman like that is misunderstood.
I have been her kind.
I have ridden in your cart, driver,
waved my nude arms at villages going by,
learning the last bright routes, survivor
where your flames still bite my thigh
and my ribs crack where your wheels wind.
A woman like that is not ashamed to die.
I have been her kind. (1960)21
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This poem, entitled in previous “incarnations” “Night Voice on a Broomstick”
(December 1957) and “Witch” (July 1959) was Anne Sexton’s signature, according to her
biographer, Diane Middlebrook. “‘Her Kind’ served as the poem with which she began her
readings, with Sexton telling the audience that it would show them “what kind of woman she
was, and what kind of poet. . . . What kind of woman was she? Spirited, good-looking: tall
and lean as a fashion model; a suburban housewife . . . a daughter, a mother; a New England
WASP; like Emily Dickinson, ‘half-crack’d.’ And what kind of poet? Intimate; confessional;
comic; insistently, disruptively female” (Preface). Sexton was extremely talented yet highly
unstable, and she suffered intense emotional trauma throughout her adult life, finally
committing suicide at the age of 45. Although her writing career was relatively brief (19591974), she created a prolific body of work, largely poetry, but also including plays, some
prose, novels, and four children’s books co-authored with Maxine Kumin. Her poems create
an affective ambience that sear readers with the raw emotion of an intensely female
experience, often disclosing and scrutinizing subject matter that even today, thirty years after
her death, remains taboo. What was it about the witch that so spoke to Sexton that she was
inspired to choose this trope to describe herself? Many of her poems, on a variety of subjects
not necessarily related to witchcraft, employ imagery redolent of black magic and sorcery,
curses and hexes. Sexton’s poetry deals with topics as intimate, controversial, provocative and
diverse as incest, addiction, mental illness and abortion, alongside the more familiar topics of
love, identity and relationships, in a manner “insistently, disruptively female.” Her usage of
recurrent witch-associated images, not to mention her open declaration of an identity I will
refer to as her “witch self” distinguish the poems in such an unrelenting mode that their
significance cannot be disregarded.
A most telling comment on this comes from Sexton herself, in a letter she wrote to her
mentor W.D. Snodgrass after a month in Robert Lowell’s graduate course in poetry writing at
55
Boston University. In it she expresses “. . .a fear of writing as a woman writes. I wish I were a
man – I would rather write the way a man writes” (Sexton and Ames 40). When Sexton wrote
these words to Snodgrass, she was expressing her insecurity about her abilities as a poet,
which subsume the detrimental implications about women writers so prevalent in the early
1960s. According to Middlebrook, Lowell “spent a good deal of time mulling over whether
this or that poet was ‘major’ or minor,’ and women were almost inevitably categorized as
‘minor, definitely minor” (Anne Sexton 93). Furthermore, in that same letter, Sexton worried
that she was “a reincarnation of Edna St. Vincent”, who had been presented as a symbol of
what women poets lacked, in the view of their male critics, in the 1938 essay by John Crowe
Ransom, “The Poet as Woman.” Alice Ostriker uses Ransom’s article as an example of how
male critics from the school of New Criticism “miss[ed] the point” of the poetic feminine
experience, which they found “inevitably trivial and distressing” (47). What Sexton may have
found to “fear” in comparing herself to Millay was Ransom’s contention that Millay’s
limitation [as a poet] was “her lack of intellectual interest” and “deficiency in masculinity”
and that her “best subjects are death …[and] personal moods” (quoted in Ostriker 47-8), as all
these ostensible failures applied to Sexton. Maxine Kumin, Anne Sexton’s good friend,
female mentor and fellow poet, once said, “Highest compliment was to be told, ‘You write
like a man’” (Andrews and Seidel, The Columbia World of Quotations). I believe that Sexton,
affected by these persistent messages of lack and transgression as related to female
subjectivity and, by association, to female authorship, used the witch’s narrative voice to
mock the lapses she felt guilty of committing. Much as the historical witch embodied a
dichotomy of identity – she was feared, and so despised, yet that same fear was also
comprised of awe – so Sexton’s witch self could allow her to manage the endless conflict she
contended with in her effort to balance her own conflicted identity of woman/ wife/ mother
with that of poet. Sixteenth century women were allowed to take on a wide range of tasks,
56
such as healer, fortune-teller, dispenser of wisdom and curses, all acceptable “professions” in
early modern times, as long as these did not interfere with their designated duties. These
professions tended to make their practitioners vulnerable to accusations of witchcraft. To draw
a parallel with Sexton’s conflict, if she had to be despised for not fulfilling her wifely
responsibilities, at least she could create enough fear – because of her emotional illness – to be
allowed to write22. I would even argue that the rare but extant occurrence in early modern
times of women claiming to be witches, even though cognizant of the dire consequences of
such an admission, can be seen as a type of emotional illness.23 Like a witch, Sexton operated
in territory presumed to be exclusively male, and not only did she succeed, but she did so
using subject matter not countenanced in poetry. Indeed, John Holmes tried to dissuade her
from publishing To Bedlam and Partway Back, writing: “I distrust the very source and subject
of a great many of your poems, namely all those that describe and dwell on your time in the
hospital. . . . It bothers me that you use poetry this way” (Middlebrook, Anne Sexton 98).24
This earnest wish of Sexton’s to “be a man” not only reminds the reader of the
predictability of such views vis-à-vis the female “place” in the late 1950s, but conveys how
unquestioningly and completely Sexton embraced her upbringing, which naturally reflected
society’s expectation that she be “a suburban housewife”.25 Her “failure” in this role, as she
and her family – husband, mother, and mother-in-law – perceived it, and later on, her similar
“failure” at motherhood,26 only sustained her belief that she was “not a woman, quite.” What
is more, as she realized that writing replaced these roles for her, this only provided further
reason for reprobation: “I realize, with guilt, that I am a woman, that it should be the children,
or my husband, or home – not writing. But it is not – I do love my children but am not
feminine enough to be all lost in their care” (emphasis added) (Middlebrook 63). Being “not
feminine enough” is concurrent with being “not a woman, quite”, a definition Sexton herself
created for the witch in “Her Kind”. In an interview with Barbara Kelves in 1968, she
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responds to the question, “Do the responsibilities of wife and mother interfere with your
writing?” with an anecdote:
…as I was writing the poem “Eighteen Days Without You” – the last poem in
Love Poems – my husband said to me, “I can’t stand it any longer, you haven’t
been with me for days.” That poem originally was “Twenty-one days Without
You” and it became “Eighteen Days” because he had cut into the inspiration;
he demanded my presence back again, into his life and I couldn’t take that
much from him. (Colburn 101)
Here we are offered a view of the constant tug-of-war in which Sexton was engaged.
One side pulled her to her family, which encompassed for Sexton her identity as “woman”27;
the other to her talent, her obsession, her profession: writing. Her personal sense that she was
“not a woman, quite” haunted her to her death, and her success and accomplishments as a poet
somehow never quite nullified that lack. Sexton’s embracing of the conventional definitions
of femininity encompasses the designation “witch” as a woman of evil intent congruent with
her – and our – understanding of that identity through history and fairytales.
Thus, as she struggled to accept that it was not within her to perform the traditional
female duties, and to recognize that she would need other modes of expressing her own
experiences, and other role models – “other” in the literal sense and in the allusive meaning
with which Simone de Beauvoir has endowed it – her “witch self” was brought into being.
Alicia Ostriker comments that the figure of the “monster-woman” is a figure for a female
identity “that fails to achieve wholeness” (73). I argue that, in fact, the witch that inhabits
Sexton’s poetry is a more complete “self” than the one society had presented to her. “If a
thinking woman internalizes some of the most powerful images in our culture” she “dooms”
herself to “monstrosity,” writes Ostriker (74). However, when the poet chooses the monster
identity precisely because it manifests the defiant rejection of the “angel” image, because she
58
covertly yearns to share the sense of unacceptable power that image affords, she is not
“doomed” but rather is enhancing the survival of that much- sought separate “self”. Sadly for
Sexton, she was unable to escape the import that “being a creator rather than simply a
procreator” (Ostriker 74) was first and foremost a malfunction in the essence her being; she
feared the witch even while she opted to be one. This tension is extensively evident in
Sexton’s body of work.
How compelling and authentic a description of the witch is this wonderfully evocative
phrase Sexton has used: “not a woman, quite”! Kay Capo, in her discussion of Sexton’s
“Communal Voice,” asks if being “not a woman, quite” means she is more than, less than or
merely different from other women (Bixler 28). I believe the answer is all of the above, but
there can be no doubt that when Sexton begins the pertinent phrase with “not”, she effectively
negates what follows: “a woman.” The woman effaced here is the woman in man’s image.
Just as the witch was created in the image of male frustrations and nightmares as experienced
by Dominican monks in the fifteenth century, in an attempt to render those feelings powerless
to do harm,28 so Sexton reclaims the witch identity as a way of rejecting the negative maleconstructed self. In doing so she can also appropriate male privilege and freedom in a manner
that parallels the witch behaviors perceived as threatening by the Church and other ruling
social institutions in the Middle Ages. The historical witch identity includes that transgressive
component.
The dictates of what “proper womanhood” entails have been available since the
appearance of the written word. Misogyny is a tradition dear to men as well as women,
assiduously adhered to for millennia.29 The Greeks viewed women as inferior to men in both
mind and body. Greek biology viewed women as innately inferior beings whose functions
were childbearing and housekeeping. Because their knowledge of embryology was limited, it
was believed that the male role in reproduction was more active and more important than the
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female (Aristotle ix).30 Aristotle is quoted as having said, “The female is a female by virtue of
a certain lack of qualities; we should regard the female nature as afflicted with a natural
defectiveness” (Mills 79). Therefore, females were considered aberrant males and monsters of
nature.31 The concept of female psychology was congruent with the biological theory.
Because women were physically inferior, they were also psychologically weak; that is,
because they were softer and more docile than men, they were despondent, querulous, and
deceitful. Lacking control of their passions, women were thought to crave sexual fulfillment.32
Female passions were created by the “hystera” (Greek for “womb”); thus women were lustful,
deceitful, loquacious, irrational, and in extreme cases hysterical.33 Due to their absence of
rationality and emotional control, women should be ruled by men in both the household and
the state. These ancient ideas obtain throughout the “Age of Reason” almost unchanged, and
certainly unchallenged, where the tradition of the Pythagorean dichotomy highlights the
“ideals of the Enlightenment, and denies the female subjectivity. . . [and] if she is not a
subject, then what is she? The short answer to this question is that she is an object”
(Springsteen) 34. For all our modernity – and post modernity – these Greek parameters
continue to frame female existence.
The Bible, too, has laid the blame for the loss of Paradise at Eve’s door. Hélène
Cixous, however, sees Eve’s decision to follow her desire to taste the apple and thus reject the
law as having other meanings. “Cixous interprets Eve’s response to the law as ‘feminine’ in
order to distinguish it from the classic ‘masculine’ response. She believes [the scene]
symbolizes the way all of us are required to deal with social schema. We can choose to accept
their prohibitions, or, like Eve, we can ignore and defy the law, searching for the means to
inscribe our defiance in the attempt to subvert its power” (Sellers 2).
It is the objectification of women that Sexton’s poetry challenges, refutes and
transforms. In this, she is following a legacy of earlier women writers whose contribution in
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repudiating the dismissal of woman as a coherent, creative self has only recently become a
source of research and analysis. According to Deborah Barker, in the 1990s “a full array of
theoretical approaches – postmodern, feminist, psychoanalytic, cultural materialist,
multiculturalist – are employed to analyze a group of writers often categorized under the
dubious title ‘literary domestic’” (9). In examining nineteenth century American literature by
women, Barker discusses how New Critical approaches ignored “women’s literary
contributions to crucial debates about the nature of aesthetics and high art” and she sees in the
“artist-novel” a strategy to “circumvent their problematic relationship to high culture” (11). In
her study, she attempts to show how “aesthetics, politics and the sentimental are not mutually
exclusive sets of concerns” because she believes “questions about the self, the body,
knowledge and language” are manifest in these writers’ “sentimental depictions of women’s
everyday lives” (10-11). Their “vulnerability to the derogatory label of the ‘lady novelist’”
and their determination to “circumvent and/or expose this label” (13) through a multiplicity of
strategies distinguish the narrative art of women writers more than a century later, Sexton
amongst them.35
The transformation in modern women’s literature of the negative, witch-like female
character into a creature whose attributes include empowerment and strength is part of this
inheritance from the earlier writers who resisted the perception of woman as the “moral
centre” of society. In spite of Nina Auerbach’s enlightening comments on how the
“repressiveness of Victorian culture is a measure of its faith in the special powers of women”
(Woman and the Demon 188), this does not negate the essence of the “either/or identity”
available to female authors, and consequently their heroines, as opposed to a fullness of
identity assumed for male writers at the time – a legacy that perhaps led Sexton to desire to
“write like a man” a century later. In the face of this impossibility, Sexton chose to write like
a witch.
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In A Literature of Their Own, Showalter, like Auerbach, discusses the paradigmatic
“split female” identity affirmed by the social conventions of the times. Using Jane (Jane Eyre)
and Maggie (The Mill on the Floss) as examples of the dilemma facing female characters in
Victorian literature, Showalter suggests that such characters have the “option of angelic
innocence, which leads to death, or ‘witchlike’ self-preservation, which leads to social
rejection” (125). Clearly, Sexton was not the first to choose the latter. Rather it is in defying
the negativity assumed to be ‘witchlike’ and in embracing the witch self that Sexton’s poetry
has helped transform the stereotype. Indeed, the writer who wishes to free herself from the
circumscriptions inherent in writing as a woman will be well served to assume an identity that
makes those time-honoured female roles redundant.
Middlebrook explains that Sexton’s choice of the witch as her public persona allowed
“a point of entry to her art” that presented her not as a “victim, but [a] witness” (“Poet of
Weird Abundance” 294). The witch archetype is also congruent with the revelations of the
theories of feminist critics, who, in exposing the “distortion of female experience in literature”
found that “images of power when related to women are also images of fear” (Monteith 2). It
is reflective of Sexton’s ambivalence to her own identity as a female that she provocatively
presented herself as a witch, and in doing so, exploited its negative implications, while
simultaneously expressing the anguish this association created for her though her art – the
writing she refers to as “The Black Art”:
A woman who writes feels too much,
those trances and portents!
As if cycles and children and islands
weren’t enough; as if mourners and gossips
and vegetables were never enough.
She thinks she can warn the stars.
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A writer is essentially a spy.
Dear love, I am that girl.
A man who writes knows too much,
such spells and fetiches!
As if erections and congresses and products
weren’t enough; as if machines and galleons
and wars were never enough.
With used furniture he makes a tree.
A writer is essentially a crook.
Dear love, you are that man.
Never loving ourselves,
hating even our shoes and our hats,
we love each other, precious, precious.
Our hands are light blue and gentle.
Our eyes are full of terrible confessions.
But when we marry,
the children leave in disgust.
There is too much food and no one left over
to eat up all the weird abundance. (Complete Poems 88-9)
The implicit criticism in the phrases “too much,” “weren’t enough” and “never
enough” evoke a disapproving male, a stern “Law-of-the-Father” voice which Sexton is both
parroting and heeding. What should suffice does not. Excess of all kinds is unbecoming in a
woman; these are evidence of her supposed hysterical passions. The eclectic conjoining of the
ordinary images of a woman’s daily responsibilities (“children,” “vegetables”) with
unexpected partners (“islands,” “mourners”) accentuates the eerie nature of this art, this
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writing. And yet the juxtaposition of these images imbues them with the writer’s “excessive”
feelings: that life with children is a cycle – perhaps a vicious one – a course of events that
recurs and leads back to the starting point as if there has been no growth; that the mother is as
isolated by her lifestyle as if living on an island. That she is helpless against a stereotypical
male-driven image of women as congenital gossipers; that the male dismissal of “woman’s
work” is expressed in the grouping of “mourners” with “vegetables” as if dealing with them
were one and the same responsibility. Or to remind the reader that the life of a housewife and
mother may be irrevocably linked with mourning the life not lived. These are “portents” for
the female writer’s identity, which can easily melt into the identity expected and demanded of
her – unless she uses her “black art” and writes. And for the writer, the children and
vegetables are “never enough”. As Sexton explained it, “It’s within a woman to
create…perhaps men are better [poets] because they are denied this in their lives. …[I]f you
are born with an extra amount , as a woman, it works out all right. You have enough for life
itself, you have a family, and then you have some left over. It always seems to me I have too
much left over” (emphasis added) (Colburn 76).
Implicit in the poem is a joining of the man and woman “who write”– they “marry” –
yet, the woman “feels too much” while the man “knows too much”. Even as both share some
propensities, notably negative, the “woman who writes” later defines herself as a “girl” while
the man remains a man. The former is a spy and the latter a crook; even in crime the woman is
an observer rather than a participant. Thus, in writing, as in life, the man and woman are never
truly equal, and their creativity, defined as the food left over and so directly placed in the
female domain, becomes a “weird abundance” – implicitly never “normal.”
The scorn insinuated in the line, “She thinks she can warn the stars” is self-directed, as the
final line of this stanza indicates. This “black art” allows her to appraise her own abilities as
beyond the possible, which evokes the hubris of the mortals the gods so love to punish. While
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writing offers Sexton a life transcendentally rich in possibility, it also subsumes her escape
from the physical life she not very successfully leads. The success of one negates the other;
furthermore, that success is in the “wrong” sphere for a woman. This dichotomy is expressed
in the designation of her writing as a “black art” which is defined variously as “witchcraft”
(The American Heritage Dictionary), “the art practiced by conjurers and witches”(Webster’s
Revised Unabridged Dictionary), and “the belief in magical spells that harness occult forces
or evil spirits to produce unnatural effects in the world” (WordNet). These classifications
embody Sexton’s use of a doubled meaning for writing in her life, incorporating the negative
aspects of the witch identity, and by association, her writing, which she, of course, embraces.
But it is these very adverse features of her writing that enable her to resist her fear of the
metaphorical death awaiting her in “the plain houses” in which the suburban housewife, of
whom she is one, dwells. And when Sexton wrote the poem, this was indeed an “unnatural
effect in the world” of the 1960s homemaker.
The second stanza of “Her Kind” deals with the narrator’s life as just such a
housewife. She is filling “caves”, the appropriate habitat of a witch, with “skillets”(among
other “innumerable goods”) the appropriate props for a homemaker who must fix “the suppers
for the worms and the elves” – representing husband and children, yet fitting company for a
witch. Her choice of imagery, focused on the small, again juxtaposes positive and negative, in
an attempt to resolve the pressure to perform the domestic role without being consumed by
the overwhelming demands of that domesticity. Elves are traditionally positive and
accommodating little creatures, as we imagine them from familiar stories such as “The Elves
and the Shoemaker”. However, they can be mischief-makers of the first degree, as Puck so
well personifies. Nevertheless, their dominant feature is affirmative. Worms, however, are a
different proposition, as the colloquialism “to open a can of worms” testifies – they signify
trouble, or worse, decay and even death.
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In “worm” inheres an obvious phallic connotation, which aligns the worm to the male
in a most disparaging manner, one that relates to the focus on “small” mentioned earlier. In
addition, its association with cowardice, by virtue of its being spineless, continues to intimate
criticism for this male creature for whom the narrator must fix supper. Thus are husband and
children joined in their positive/negative impact on the witch self of stanza two, who,
“whining”, is trying to “rearrang[e] the disaligned”. This, too, is a substantial and rich image
as it reflects both the futile element of housework – the endless tidying, arranging, organizing
that is Sisyphean by nature, as well as the way in which her life is not amenable to her needs;
she is making a great effort to align herself to what Capo calls “the corporate feminine
identity of her era” (36).36 Although she “whines” she does perform; this performance is an
aspect of various analyses of the subject/object female identity crisis of the nineteen
seventies.37. This emphasis on the actual fulfilling of the demands of her role is one of the
ways in which women protest society’s galling, ongoing underestimation of the weight of the
“burden of the trivial” that women carry (Spacks 28).
A similar idea is evident in the last stanza of “Her Kind”, the most transparent
expression of the historical witch in the poem. As she conjures images of witch burning,
“where your flames still bite my thigh” and inquisition-inspired torture: “my ribs crack where
your wheels wind,” we are flung brutally into the era of the witch-hunts, when, as now, people
feared those who could not be assimilated socially – an embodiment of a social “other.” “A
woman like that is not ashamed to die,” she informs us, as if, Grimm-like, there are no options
but death for “a woman like that.” Capo believes that the “biggest challenge of ‘Her Kind’ is
how to read” that final line. She feels we “intuitively expect the last line to read: ‘is not afraid
to die’” and the fact that it does not jars our expectations and “her tone is not resigned. It is
resistant” (35-6). In this light, Capo discusses the idea of shame, which requires “an
awareness of others as separate from the self” (36). As the witch in this closing stanza is
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waving her “nude arms at villages going by,” she is most definitely acknowledging an
audience – one who is witness to her last journey. But her lack of shame, as well as the nudity
mentioned, evoke “the devilish tone of a brazen hussy (we all know about that kind of
woman) which makes this stanza resistant to orthodox views of woman’s role” (36). This
observation is interesting to examine in the light of the peculiar historical aberration vis-à-vis
the persecution of witches in the Middle Ages mentioned earlier. Although it was not a
common occurrence, some women confessed to being witches without first having been so
accused. The irony lay in the fear that a witch generated in that era when belief in magic was
commonplace; some poor women preferred the audacious identity a witch personified to the
misery of their lives; indeed, in Europe, authorities had to overcome a good deal of popular
resistance to the witch trials. People were simply afraid to prosecute witches (Thomas 49899). The individual who succeeds in instilling fear holds power. Sexton seems to have
captured this Janus-faced facet of the witch; death may result for a woman embracing an
identity which offers a modicum of power and respect lacking in her present existence, but
living with that sense of authority is preferable. Women have always been punished if they
did not obey the demands of patriarchy; better to be punished for defiance than for a passive
attempt at conforming that fails. In choosing to be “unashamed” to die, Sexton accentuates her
rejection of that element of shame that is experienced as self-loathing, and makes use of the
witch parallel as the basis for her resistance. “Her Kind”, then, can refer to both the witch in
history as well as the stereotypic witch we meet in the first stanza: “haunting the black air/ …
dreaming evil/ twelve-fingered, out of mind”. Neither need be “ashamed to die” – and
defiance is inherent in those words.
In Capo’s discussion of this stanza, she claims that Sexton wishes “for death as a
prelude to regeneration … Her wish to die is not merely personal, but a wish for her kind, that
the tormented soul of Western woman be reborn in a healthy form. If housewives are ‘not
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ashamed’ to die, a new collective identity can emerge” (37). In this manner, a direct line has
been delineated from the historical witch of the sixteenth century to the suburban homemaker
of the mid twentieth century. The poem embraces the possibility for power available to
marginalized women who refuse to feel the shame their male, authoritative “audience”
attempts to engender. Thus this stanza presents Sexton’s “sense of victimage and her hope of
triumph” (Capo 39), both feelings, although contradictory in themselves, are harmonious with
the witch identity of a distant past.
In presenting the initial image of “her kind” in the first stanza, Sexton chooses both
physical and psychological aberrations to define her speaker. “Twelve-fingered” invokes a
factual constituent of the early modern witch-hunts: physical markings were considered
irrevocable proof that a woman was a witch. As elucidated by Merilee Hanson on her website
devoted to Tudor England, Anne Boleyn was rumored to have six fingers; this was a popular
explanation in Tudor England to elucidate how she “bewitched” Henry VIII into marrying her
. Accordingly, this image connects the six-fingered abnormality to one of the history’s most
powerful and fascinating female personalities, for Anne Boleyn was, of course, the mother of
Elizabeth I. Nor should we forget that Boleyn was the catalyst for changing the religious
landscape of England, and, indirectly the Christian world, as Henry VIII sought a way to
legally divorce his Catholic wife and marry Anne. Thus is the modern image enriched with
the weight of historical allusions through which Sexton succeeds in embodying an ambiguous
relationship between power and weakness through the application of this physical
characteristic. Moreover, this “possessed witch” is also “out of mind”, another multifaceted
concept that conveys several possible conceits simultaneously, as various associative
expressions are evoked: “time out of mind”, or eternally present; “out of sight, out of mind”
which suggests the very opposite meaning: unseen and thus forgotten. Being “out of one’s
mind” also connotes madness, returning us to the Greek origin of the modern term “hysteria”
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– originating in the womb. In addition, Sexton’s choice of “possessed” to modify “witch” is
also cogent. True, witches are usually perceived as being possessed by evil spirits, and they
are also agents of the possession of others in this supernatural context. In this fashion,
“possessed” is equally active and passive in meaning, thereby synchronously including and
eluding both. However “possessed” also implies being the object of another’s ownership. This
custody can be read, as the poem continues, to be that of society and its constraints upon this
witch – constraints she evades as she flies “over the plain houses”. Finally, “possessed” has
come to mean crazed or mad – a duplicitous term in its own right, with insanity and anger
implicit to its meaning – thus completing the cycle of the misogynous reference embodied in
the term “witch” that Sexton reinvents when she embraces that identity.
Another poem dealing with Sexton’s declarative witch self is “The Witch’s Life”,
from The Awful Rowing toward God (1975). Declaring her life to be the witch’s life reinforces
the earlier imagery of her craft as a “black art”, but then Sexton moves the witch imagery
beyond that conceit:
When I was a child
there was an old woman in our neighborhood
whom we called The Witch.
All day she peered from her second story window
from behind the wrinkled curtains
and sometimes she would open the window
and yell: Get out of my life!
She had hair like kelp
and a voice like a boulder.
I think of her sometimes now
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and wonder if I am becoming her.
My shoes turn up like a jester's.
Clumps of my hair, as I write this,
curl up individually like toes.
I am shoveling the children out,
scoop after scoop.
Only my books anoint me,
and a few friends,
those who reach into my veins.
Maybe I am becoming a hermit,
opening the door for only
a few special animals?
Maybe my skull is too crowded
and it has no opening through which
to feed it soup?
Maybe I have plugged up my sockets
to keep the gods in?
Maybe, although my heart
is a kitten of butter,
I am blowing it up like a zeppelin.
Yes. It is the witch's life,
climbing the primordial climb,
a dream within a dream,
then sitting here
holding a basket of fire. (Complete Poems 423-4)
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In order to maximize the associative signification with which this poem is informed,
Sexton begins with a witch stereotype straight from history and fairytale, simply: “an old
woman in our neighborhood/ whom we called The Witch.” The reader is immediately caught
up in both personal memory and cultural myth, for who among us did not know of such an old
woman in our own childhood? Moreover, with “hair like kelp” – evoking for us, through the
idea of seaweed, snakes and Medusa – the image reverberates with its allegorical linkage to
earlier monstrous women. The narrator of the poem wonders if she is “becoming her”. If we
accept this witch as an expression of a female archetype then it is inevitable that the narrator is
becoming her.
In Carl Jung’s definition of archetypes as primordial forms, they inform literature from
their locus in a writer’s unconscious. In 1919, Jung introduced the word archetype "to avoid
any suggestion that it was the content and not the unconscious and irrepresentable outline or
pattern that was fundamental" (Samuels, 26) .38 For Jung, archetypes are general tendencies
and subsist, rather than exist, in potentiality only. Annis Pratt explains that “Jung did not
intend his archetypal categories as fixed absolutes. He recognizes that fluidity is a basic
characteristic and that a single archetype can be subject to a variety of perceptions, not only
from culture to culture but even within a given culture or the mind of a single individual”
(Archetypal Theory 4). Literary images are thus the offshoots of archetypes, produced by an
innate predisposition of the human consciousness to organize experience in a format that is
familiar, or “typical.” The content of the images may differ; it is within the pattern that the
consistency which characterizes archetypes exists.
It should be noted that feminist critics of Jungian archetypal theory have taken issue
with Jungian theory, and when evaluating a female poet, there may appear to be a paradox in
using Jung to illuminate a process meant to be a form of paradigm transformation. According
to Sarah Aguiar, there are three fundamental difficulties for feminists when dealing with
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Jung’s concepts. One is that the female psyche remained “largely unexplored”; another, that
the female is presented in opposition to the male, and as such is his “antithesis” and finally,
that archetypes are inherently “fixed” identity modes, a position which goes against the grain
of the feminist belief, inherited from Cixous, of “possibilities” (14). Pratt’s contention that
Jung recognizes the fluidity intrinsic to human nature accentuates the differing positions
feminist critics can, and have, taken. 39 One conclusion Aguiar reaches is that the “very
nature of an archetype precludes the possibility of its extinction” (22-23). In my exploration
of Sexton’s witch identity and imagery the archetype is indeed inescapable. The confessional
mode of expression Sexton employed is redolent with the mythical, historical, and cultural
facets the idea of “witch” encompasses. The multiple meanings with which Sexton so often
succeeds in enriching our established ideas of what a witch is and does works because of our
common unconscious acceptance of these traditional archetypes. “A feminist archetypal
reading endeavors to contrast the woman’s lived experiences against the interpretation of her
character as rendered through a negative projection of the male anima,” Aguiar posits (24). It
this very contrast that enlivens and enriches Sexton’s treatment of witch imagery, no less so
because the poet herself has accepted that negative projection.
This is a case in point of women being unable to identify with female myths because
they have internalized the male, according to Pratt:
A battle goes on unremittingly within the heads of most women authors
between the assumptions about male and female behavior norms, and dreams
of more gender-free possibilities. It is as if the authorial superego, or censor,
preoccupied with proper conduct for women, were constantly repressing
subversive desires for self- expression and development. (Archetypal Theory
11)
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The results de-form a woman’s basic creative impulses into those of the negative,
“terrible Mother” archetype, characterized by an alliance with fear, danger, darkness,
dismemberment, emasculation, death – in short, all the most unnerving aspects of the
unconscious40. The cultural images available to creative women are reduced to those the male
mythology has identified and proscribed: witch, siren, sorceress – or, in its more prosaic form,
mother-in-law. Sexton employs all these images throughout her oeuvre, yet the witches
repeatedly appear in a variety of contexts and images. And following Pratt’s thesis, Sexton, as
a writer, a vessel of “subversive desires,” is indeed “becoming” the “old woman” the children
called “The Witch”, and as long as she chooses writing over the profession intended for her –
motherhood – she is destined to be her, “shoveling the children out /scoop after scoop”. The
reference to archetypes is enhanced by Sexton’s use of “primordial” to define both her witch’s
life – presented as a climb, reminding us simultaneously of the struggle involved and the
desirability of reaching a summit – “anointed” by her books, and her “dream within a dream”
to integrate those gender-free possibilities Pratt identified. In this stanza, she has abandoned
the children and again has used the witch persona to express her guilt at her inability to
integrate the “good mother” creator (of children) with the “Terrible Mother” creator (of
poetry). This leaves her “holding a basket of fire,” an impossible image that denotes the
painful and destructive forces of fire, while allowing the reader to experience the impact of its
beauty. Fire in itself is a highly dichotomous symbol, encompassing forces of creation and
destruction contemporaneously. If Sexton’s witch self can hold “fire in a basket”, she has
conquered the destructive force of her creativity – yet she has done so at the cost of
“shoveling out the children.” The gender-defined identity does not allow her to “keep” both
creations.
In keeping with this ambivalence toward being a mother, many of Sexton’s poems
deal with her equivocal feelings vis-à-vis her own mother, and these feelings infuse “The
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Double Image” “justly praised as a courageous and moving example of the ‘confessional’
poem” (Middlebrook 86). This poem, written at the beginning of Sexton’s career, is also
populated by witches, but here they play a very different role, first voicing Sexton’s guilt at
letting her daughter become deathly ill:
The blame,
I heard them say, was mine.
They tattled
like green witches in my head, letting doom
leak like a broken faucet;
as if doom had flooded my belly and filled your bassinet, (…)
The day life made you well and whole
I let the witches take away my guilty soul.
I pretended I was dead.
(Complete Poems 35, 1-5; 7-10 )
Later these same witches echo a wider accusation against her 41 brought on by
Sexton’s suicide attempts: “Too late to be forgiven now, the witches said.” While Sexton
presents these witches in the poem as all-knowledgeable harbingers that do not allow her to
evade the truth, they are merely a substitute for the voice of her own guilt, and she has
empowered them to accuse her, an ironic substitute for the historical setting when others
accused witches of a variety of improbable crimes. For of course, Sexton did not cause her
daughter’s illness, nor was she “deliberately” attempting suicide, although Mary Gray
(Sexton’s mother) did, in fact, accuse Sexton of “causing” her mother’s breast cancer at this
time.42 The witches also tell the narrator how inappropriate it is that she has allowed her
mother-in-law to raise her daughter while she herself is living with her mother: “Too late, /
too late, to live with your mother, the witches said. / But I didn’t leave”. The stereotypical
witch image deftly intimates Sexton’s ambivalent feelings about her mother and mother-in-
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law via the evil associations we naturally assume. At the same time, these lines exemplify
how Sexton changed the function of the witch trope; in this early poem, the witches are the
bearers of truth, and truth is inherently aligned with “good”. Even at this prevenient stage of
her writing, the witch beckoned to Sexton, and yet she altered the archetypal assumptions we
as reader would expect those witches to embody. By designating the witch as the voice of the
narrator’s conscience, Sexton upsets our expectations and creates a multileveled identity for a
stereotype, and in so doing, expands our understanding of the narrator’s conflict vis-à-vis her
chosen behavior. And as Sexton became aware of her need and ability to write poetry while
still unable to function as a homemaker and mother, the iniquity of the witch imagery began
to emerge and eventually assume dominance, all the while sustaining aspects of power,
creativity and truth even as the archetypal “Terrible Mother” looms darkly in the landscape of
the poems.
Sexton acknowledges that her writing is an “evil” act by embracing the witch persona,
and it is this identity that informs her everyday life. It is not only in “Her Kind” that Sexton’s
narrative voice openly calls herself a witch; here is the introductory poem of Transformations,
“The Gold Key”:
The speaker in this case
is a middle-aged witch, me tangled on my two great arms,
my face in a book
and my mouth wide,
ready to tell you a story or two.
I have come to remind you,
all of you:
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Alice, Samuel, Kurt, Eleanor,
Jane, Brian, Maryel,
all of you draw near.
Alice,
at fifty-six do you remember?
Do you remember when you
were read to as a child?
Samuel,
at twenty-two have you forgotten?
Forgotten the ten P.M. dreams
where the wicked king
went up in smoke?
Are you comatose?
Are you undersea?
Attention,
my dears,
let me present to you this boy.
He is sixteen and he wants some answers.
He is each of us.
I mean you.
I mean me.
It is not enough to read Hesse
and drink clam chowder,
we must have the answers.
The boy has found a gold key
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and he is looking for what it will open.
This boy!
Upon finding a nickel
he would look for a wallet.
This boy!
Upon finding a string
he would look for a harp.
Therefore he holds the key tightly.
Its secrets whimper
like a dog in heat.
He turns the key.
Presto!
It opens this book of odd tales
which transform the Brothers Grimm.
Transform?
As if an enlarged paper clip
could be a piece of sculpture.
(And it could.)
(Complete Poems 223-4)
A woman who is writing of herself, and Sexton makes that clear in both poem – “a
middle-age witch, me” – and letters, is very self-conscious. This may explain the doubling of
the narrative voice that she often employs – a female voice constantly checked by the voice of
the male. Because the fairy stories Sexton chose to rewrite are immediately familiar, as
readers we are attuned to the original while absorbing the new, for the poems in
Transformations are the Grimms’ stories and, as such, the voice of the original male narrator
can be heard in the background even as the witch narrator gives us “herstory”. In
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appropriating such a popular venue for revisioning – indeed, Alicia Ostriker calls fairy tales
“the one common denominator left to modern Americans from past traditions” (232) – Sexton
ensures that her insights are enacted in the milieu of the familiar, that is to say patriarchal,
“truth” embedded in the tales. This double voice both “modernizes and desentimentalizes” the
original (Ostriker 232), while maintaining its traditional base. Thus, the stories become the
narrator’s, rather than the Grimm Brothers’, and in changing gender, change focus. And yet,
Ostriker reminds us,
It is important to note that while the tales themselves are fixed – and Sexton
stresses their ruthless changelessness, never letting us think that her
“characters” act with free will or do anything but fill their slots in
predetermined plots – the teller is mobile. She emits an air of mental and
emotional liberty …[h]ers is an asexual role vis-à-vis her gendered characters.
Thus the full force of Transformations [lies in the fact that its axis is] necessity
(here seen as fixed and damaging social patterns) versus freedom; the “middle
aged witch, me” represents the latter. (234)
Consequently, the revision, today recognized as “feminist” (but for Sexton, who wrote before
the wider acceptance of this term had been popularized, instinctual) lies more in Sexton’s
adoption of the narrating stance rather than a change in any actual story content. We recognize
the stories, but the witch has refashioned their message from his to hers. The insights
afforded us from this new vantage point are the nuclei of the poems. For Sexton, this
insistently female persona was a necessity even as it exacerbated the distaff duties she
neglected as poet.
In the original tale, “The Golden Key,”43 which is only a very short paragraph, a poor
boy finds a small golden key and, “[w]here there’s a key, he knew, there must be a lock”, and
although the reader expects to be told what is inside the iron casket the boy discovers, we are
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told that “we must wait until he unlocks the casket” and opens it, and only then “we’ll learn
what wonderful things he found” (631).This is meant, logically, to refer to the tales
themselves. Sexton, inasmuch as she has claimed possession of the tales, immediately takes
ownership of the boy: “Attention, / my dears, / let me present to you this boy. / He is each of
us. / I mean you. / I mean me,” both as a mother proud of her son (“This boy! / Upon finding a
nickel / he would look for a wallet”) and blind to his faults (there could be an implication of
greed in his looking for a wallet that his “mother” doesn’t see), as well as of the curiosity the
boy in the original tale personifies. By proxy, she then claims dominion over the wonders he
finds, which she calls “this book of odd tales / which transform the Brothers Grimm.” Her
poems, in that case, become the “wonderful things” of the original, but they are chosen and
modified to refocus their message from the male view to the female, never forgetting that the
female has been identified as a witch. In this voice, she “mocks virginity and beauty” and
“decode[s] stories we thought we knew, revealing meanings we should have guessed”
(Ostriker 232-3). Such refocusing suits the role of a witch, who in history was meant to have
mocked and desecrated the holy Mass in her role as servant of Satan and enemy to God. The
fairy tales have long functioned as cultural supports of the patriarchal definitions of a
woman’s role in society; in helping to expose that role as constructed rather than natural,
Sexton’s poems gain depth and power from their twisting of the original message. As she puts
it, “As if an enlarged paper clip / could be a piece of sculpture. / (And it could.)” A paper clip
–one very plain, purely functional object – is used to keep pages together, and in this context
could signify the intertextuality Sexton’s project expresses. And it is a one-dimensional
function at that, yet Sexton transforms into a work of art, which by definition has infinite
possibilities for interpretation and expression, and is the opposite of practical. So a woman’s
role can be transformed, even within so common and ubiquitous a frame as the fairy tale, and
if that woman has been designated a witch, so, too, can she be redefined.
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Jane Hedley discusses several poets, both male and female, of the popularly termed
“confessional” school, with respect to what she refers to as their “concern with the gender of
things.” In her discussion on Sexton, she too elucidates the discord intrinsic to socially
proscribed gender roles that so preoccupied the poet, pointing out that:
“The Double Image” is the confession of a woman who, in becoming a poet,
has transgressed against motherhood. The poem's interlocutory strategy puts
being a poet and being a mother in tension and finally at odds with each other;
it creates an unmistakable dissonance between these two roles and their
prerogatives. Like the "middle-aged witch" of Transformations . . . the
speaker/protagonist of "The Double Image" is a poet and an unconventional,
outlaw mother, both at once. [Sexton] writes as a woman writes: that is her
strength and her weakness, both at once. (115)
Thus, once again for Sexton, the witch and writing are aligned. Sexton expressed a
certain ambivalence about the collection:
I realize that ‘Transformations’ are a departure from my usual style. I would
say they lack the intensity and perhaps some of the confessional force of my
previous work. . . . In fact I don’t know how to identify them except to agree
that I have made them very contemporary. It would further be a lie to say that
they weren’t about me, because they are just as much about me as my other
poetry. (Sexton and Ames 362)
Indeed, these poems consistently raise concerns she confronts in her earlier poetry.
And the “imaginative identification of poet with witch” (Hall 110) perfectly complements the
collection of fairy tales she modernizes with colloquial language and references taken from
advertisements of the time. “The speaker,” whose mouth is “wide,” is menacing, devouring;
her stories will consume us, it seems, as the images evoke the ubiquitous Grimm fairytale
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witch who eats children, herself an allusion to the archetypal Terrible Mother discussed
earlier. Yet we are incapable of retreating because we “want some answers”, and the witchstoryteller will offer the reader some in “this book of odd tales”, meant to engage us as
Grimms’ fairy tales have captivated children for centuries. Nevertheless, these tales are not
the familiar, patriarchal, stories we have grown up with and have learned to know and love.
When the witch tells the story, we are forced to recognize an “other” perception of events,
deal with “other” agendas and, perhaps, reach “other” conclusions. If the writing were
allowed, it would not be a “black art”, but that is only insofar as “art” has been defined for us
through the patriarchal structures of our culture. Thus if it were not a black art – the art of
witches – neither would it transform some of the fundamental assumptions we all hold about
being a woman, that are only considered to be “unnatural” as part of Aristotle’s legacy.
Sexton successfully imparts female resistance to this bequest when she chooses to begin with
the witch as the storyteller. A witch, too, is “disruptively female,” as Middleton calls Sexton;
the witch of history consistently trespassed in the realm of the (Church) father. It is within her
disruption of the Lacanian “lack” (that he defines as, the female “other”) that the witch
performs. “She lets the other language speak” (Braidotti 240) and the transformed poems that
follow the “The Gold Key” engage that “other language” intensely.
One mode of altering the original fairytale that Sexton employs to great effect is
foregrounding conflicts within the tales heretofore sidelined, if not ignored. The authenticity
of the altered perspective is attained, somewhat ironically, by its juxtaposition to the original.
The stepmother in “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” (Complete Poems 224-229) becomes,
in postmodern fashion, a murderess-to-be whose criminal acts are meant to be understood,
and so excused, within the larger context of the guilt of society. She is “a beauty in her own
right, / though eaten, of course, by age” (225, 5-6). We are all “victims” of society’s decree
that youth equals beauty, and this, above all, is to be prized: “Beauty is a simple passion, /
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But, oh my friends, in the end /you will dance the fire dance in iron shoes” (225, 8-10)44
When the magic mirror reveals that Snow White is fairer than the Queen, we are made aware
of her motive for aspiring to remove this beautiful young girl. “But now the queen saw brown
spots on her hand / and four whiskers over her lip / so she condemned Snow White / to be
hacked to death”(225, 27-30). Sexton articulates the inexpressible, exposing as myth that we
grow old gracefully; our true desire, to remain forever young, may be obtained through the
destruction of the real youth, whose essence can be consumed and thus become our own:
“Bring me her heart, she said to the hunter / and I will salt it and eat it” (225, 31-32)
In his canonical The Fear of Women, Wolfgang Lederer attempts to show what men
historically have feared women to be, a fear that even Freud was unable or unwilling to
penetrate, and that has remained almost totally undisputed. Drawing on a wide panorama of
sources, which include archaeology, ethnology, religion, mythology, art, literature, linguistics,
as well as psychiatry and psychoanalysis, the author traces the pervasive mythology of
infanticide, that proves, in his words,
the existence, in someone’s phantasy [sic] at any rate, of a female demon out to
destroy new-born babies. …
A fairly recent recrudescence [of this belief] occurred in Europe during the
witch-hunts of the thirteenth to eighteenth centuries, when it was firmly and
officially stated that witches killed and ate children; to be exact, they did this at
the Sabbath, and each witch had to kill at least one child per month. . . .45
In ruder cultures, mothers were said to eat their [unwanted] babies, reintrojecting them, as it were, and thus undoing their birth . . . .In one form or
another, as Kali, Hel, witch, etc. the ogress mother is a universal figure as
ancient as cannibalism, which is as ancient as mankind . . . . Significant . . . is
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the universal image and preoccupation with a monstrous and deadly female,
whether seductress or mother. (61-65)
The wicked queen in Snow White is both seductress and (step)mother, and her desire
to have youth (an infant) killed and to eat its heart establishes her position as the inheritor of
the myths and cultural taboos Lederer investigated. The heart, in its position as the essence of
life, is symbolic of the evil queen’s enterprise to keep her former position as most beautiful,
most desired, and in this way, most powerful, for sexuality has always been woman’s most
successful medium for wielding authority in the masculine milieu. The act of murder and
subsequent cannibalism align her with the witch of history; as a stepmother, she is the Grimm
brothers’ surrogate Terrible Mother.46
It is both interesting and significant that the crimes of witches and other evil females
are oral-focused. This leads back to the maternal that is so readily and repeatedly confused
with the female. The maternal figure is nurturing and loving, and the obvious sources of that
nurture are food and the act of feeding, which is one the most basic biological functions the
female body is empowered to provide. The evil qualities of the fairy tale female fiend
“represent the obverse of all the positive qualities associated with mother”, and the evil female
figure “takes on a single function in fairy tales- one that magnifies and distorts all the
perceived evils associated with mothers” (Tatar 142).
Sexton’s evil queen is fooled by the hunter who “brought a boar’s heart back to the
castle . . . chewed it up like a cube steak. / Now I am fairest, she said, lapping her slim white
fingers” (Complete Poems 225, 34-5; 226, 1-2). Weaving the colloquial with the familiar story
trivializes the horrific element embedded in the tale: we laugh. The queen believes she has
eaten Snow White’s heart and we have not condemned her. The poem, following the Grimms’
tale rather than the Disney movie, has the “killer-queen” make three attempts on Snow
White’s life; she succeeds with the poisoned apple on the third try – not coincidentally, the
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method involving food. The other two attempts on Snow White’s life appeal to her vanity – a
stay- lace and a comb; she too is a victim of society’s expectation of woman to be beautiful –
“the dumb bunny” as Sexton calls her, pitying yet implicating her at the same time, reminding
us of Cixous’s contention that women are the worst misogynists.
The Grimms’ tale has the wicked queen gloat over Snow White’s demise: “The queen
stared at her with a cruel look, then burst out laughing and said ‘White as snow, red as blood,
black as ebony! This time the dwarfs won’t be able to bring you back to life!” (202). Sexton
does not dwell on this aspect in her poem; rather her final verse raises other issues:
The wicked queen was invited to the wedding feast
And when she arrived there were
red-hot iron shoes,
in the manner of red-hot roller skates,
clamped upon her feet.
First your toes will smoke
And then your heels will turn black
And you will fry upward like a frog,
She was told.
And so she danced until she was dead,
a subterranean figure,
her tongue flicking in and out
like a gas jet.
Meanwhile Snow White held court,
rolling her china-blue doll eyes open and shut
and sometimes referring to her mirror
as women do. (Complete Poems 229)
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This focus on the manner of death reminds us of burning at the stake, the choice
method historically for disposing of witches. Because so many women were innocently killed
this way, the analogy implies that Snow White’s stepmother may also be guiltless. This
allusion is heightened by the end of the poem depicting Snow White as a mindless “china
doll” … “/ referring to her mirror / as women do” effectively replacing her step mother as
both the fairest in the land, and the most obsessed with being so. In conflating all the women
who refer to their mirrors, Sexton has implicated us all: we are as guilty and as innocent as the
wicked stepmother, maintaining, as Diana Hume George expressed it, “the tongue-in-cheek
tone so characteristic of Transformations, in which deadly serious material is relieved by
casual and sardonic wit” (179). In the final analysis, women have always acquiesced to, and
continue to accept, patriarchally defined frameworks of beauty and desirability.
Molly Hite suggests that some modern female writers articulate what [she] call[s] “the
other side of the story [by] emphasizing conventionally marginal characters and themes, in
this way re-centering the value structure of the narrative” (2-3) (original emphasis). This is
consistent with Sexton’s declared project in Transformations but also appropriate to her
foregrounding the poet as witch, as she does in such a large volume of her poetry. Her
duplicitous narrative voice, embedded in cultural myth yet intensely personal, speaks as a
witch in our time, transgressing the male- defined borders of poetic expression, much as the
historical witch was accused of doing centuries past. The appellation “woman writer” offers
recognition while simultaneously implying a difference and separation that has traditionally
been of lesser value.
Historically, witch identities were affiliated with a variety of “crimes” that provided
the proof of their practice of prohibited conjuring, and these acts speak directly to issues of
power forbidden to women who, by virtue of their appropriation, made themselves vulnerable
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to witch accusations, trials and punishment. Indeed there is much documentation regarding the
repressive character of witch definitions. In Allison Coudert’s essay, she reminds us that
The witch …upsets the natural order in the family by being verbally aggressive
when she should be silent, promiscuous when she should be chaste,
domineering when she should be obedient, and out and about when she should
stay at home. In short, witches were women who rejected the private world of
female domesticity for the public realm of men. They were women who
rebelled. (78)
This is such a veracious description of Sexton’s view of herself as poet that it may just
as well have been written explicitly about her. Sexton has embraced the “wicked witch” in her
multifarious forms and integrated her into the processes of growth and development within
her poetry, in spite of, or perhaps because of, responses such as Robert Lowell’s to her
“embarrassing poems” (Kumin XX).47 The witch persona has afforded Sexton a role familiar
to all, acknowledged and accepted as evil, and as whom she can play out the perpetual
dilemma a woman writer endeavors to solve, when she writes, as Cixous encourages, as a
woman. This woman is not actually evil as much as she is a woman expressing the extent to
which she is utterly human within a “phallocentric system of signification” that lacks the
“adequacy of language to express female desire and experience ” (Robinson 105-6). Annis
Pratt points out that women writers must constantly overcome the “stereotypes imposed by
fiction upon women as well as the stereotypes imposed upon feminine fiction by critics”
(“Theoretical Feminist Criticism” 17). Sexton succeeded in this endeavor. As she told
William Heyen and Al Poulin in a 1976 interview, “I was told over and over: ‘You can’t write
personal poems; you can’t write about madness; you can’t do this’. Everybody I consulted
said ‘Nix. You don’t write about that, that’s not a theme.’ Which I never understood” (No Evil
Star 134-5).
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Refusing the limits, the boundaries, the laws-of-the-father; trespassing into territory
that is literally no-man’s-land; shattering myths and revising stereotypes; forcing us to reevaluate the tropes, the metaphors and the analogies of patriarchal language, Sexton’s
uncanny ability to encompass multiple possibilities in her poetry, specifically vis-à-vis the
image of the witch, has enriched our understanding of the complexity of life for a female poet
in the years before “feminism.”
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Chapter Four
“Margaret the Medusa:” Margaret Atwood Writing Witch
During the course of an interview in Hay-on-Wye, Wales, in 2001, Margaret Atwood
commented, “People have often said, so who’s the character in The Robber Bride that you
identify with most, and I say, well, obviously, it’s Zenia because she’s the one who does the
story-telling. Tony controls the narrative, but Zenia is the liar, the professional liar”
(Heilmann and Taylor, 132). 48
It is of immense interest that such a celebrated, honored and award-laden author as
Margaret Atwood chooses to identify her profession with a negative analogy, and yet it is not
unanticipated. Atwood has often concerned herself with the more complicated, dark strata of
female identity and behavior in her poetry and prose, in protest of, and opposition to
representations of “women trapped in dubious definitions of goodness” (Ulanov and Ulanov
1). As she asked in a 1994 speech, “[W]ere men to get all the juicy parts? Literature cannot do
without bad behaviour, but was all the bad behaviour to be reserved for men? Was it to be all
Iago and Mephistopheles and were Jezebel and Medea and Medusa
. . . to be banished from
view? I hope not” (“Spotty-Handed Villainesses”). 49 Identifying her life’s work with being a
“professional liar” is one aspect of this interest of Atwood’s, which has expressed itself
through the creation of compelling female protagonists whose behavior can be clearly and
veraciously identified with another negative female entity: the witch.
Atwood has written of more than one witch-like character, prevalent and powerful,
realistically and devastatingly transforming the lives of the girls, women and men who share
her fictional environment. When we bear in mind that language is power, it follows that the
use of spells and curses, the common tools of ancient witchcraft, become emblematic
instruments of transgressive power. As Atwood herself explains, women using “words for
evocation rather than decoration” is in itself “subversive,” and powerful women are “a
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dangerous anomaly” (“Witches” 331). The roots of this anomaly may be found in the way
language was traditionally aligned with authority, and as such, forbidden to women. In fact,
historically, a woman could be arrested and physically punished for being a “scold”; that is
talking “out of turn”, talking “back”, assuming rights and expressing them verbally. Simply
put, the use of language by women was a crime.50 Cursing, whether in the sense of using a
profanity or hexing someone, in addition to being its own offense, was also a priori evidence
that a woman was a witch. In the era that Atwood began her writing career, her decision alone
to become a writer, let alone her success at it, made her a target for excoriation in the way
witches were in the past, and for many of the same reasons.51
Casting spells, together with its ideological partner, cursing, have become identified
with the conventional witch of history and legend. The witch’s ill-begotten power was
animated through language: her words were her weapon. In medieval times the popular belief
in magic to explain natural phenomena extended to language, when verbalizing meant that
which was expressed would come to pass. Spells and curses both rely on language as the
medium of their message, and Atwood recognized long ago that this relationship made
women’s writing a transgression for similar reasons, observing in 1980 that “writing itself is
uncanny: . . .it is spell making” (“Witches” 331).
Atwood’s fascination with, and avowal of, the potentiality and force of language
informs all her written work. Her poem “Spelling” deals directly with the relationship of
language and forbidden authority expressed through the alliance of writing with witchery. 52
My daughter plays on the floor
with plastic letters,
red, blue & hard yellow,
learning how to spell,
spelling,
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how to make spells.
*
I wonder how many women
denied themselves daughters,
closed themselves in rooms,
drew the curtains
so they could mainline words.
*
A child is not a poem,
a poem is not a child.
There is no either / or.
However.
*
I return to the story
of the woman caught in the war
& in labour, her thighs tied
together by the enemy
so she could not give birth.
Ancestress: the burning witch,
her mouth covered by leather
to strangle words.
A word after a word
after a word is power.
*
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At the point where language falls away
from the hot bones, at the point
where the rock breaks open and darkness
flows out of it like blood, at
the melting point of granite
when the bones know
they are hollow & the word
splits & doubles & speaks
the truth & the body
itself becomes a mouth.
This is a metaphor.
*
How do you learn to spell?
Blood, sky & the sun,
your own name first,
your first naming, your first name,
your first word. (True Stories 63-64)
Klaus Peter Muller writes that for Atwood the “reconstructing of history” – and the
history I refer to here is that of the historical witch – “ is always connected in her work with a
reclaiming of power, even if only small things are changed and everybody today in this
postmodern intertextual world can only use words that have been used by millions of other
people” (253). In this eloquent poem Atwood begins in a prosaic setting, literally of “small
things” – her young daughter playing with toy letters – where she challenges some basic
assumptions about the use of language, what it means, and to whom. “Spelling” – making
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words – transmutes into “making spells”. She segues back to a time when successful women
writers did not marry or, if they did, they did not have children; this was the penalty of their
misguided choice 53. At this point in the poem, Atwood puts one in mind of Anne Sexton, for
the conflict between writing and motherhood haunted many of her more evocative poems,
most particularly “Her Kind” in which she too conceives of the writing woman as the
historically hunted witch. Both poets have likened women writers to women giving literal
birth.
From here Atwood’s imagery shifts to the blocking of creation, evoking the harrowing
image of the war victim, prevented from giving birth, and “the burning witch” whose words
are strangled. Historically, both these scenarios ended in death. In this distressful
juxtaposition she implicitly equates them. The innocence of the first stanza becomes
progressively tainted with the horrors that follow, and this becomes the narrator/writer’s
daughter’s heritage as both female and author. Why? Because “A word after a word/ after a
word is power.”
Jerome Robbins points out, “As Atwood. . .exhibits with both wit and terror, language
is subtle, even dangerous, in its ambiguous ability to both clarify and obscure the chaotic
possibilities of life under the surface. To manipulate language is to alter one’s impression of
reality” (3). Thus making words becomes making spells, a tool used by witches to usurp
power wrongfully in their possession in the first place, and for purposes unbecoming to a
lady. Yet this is exactly what attracts, even delights Atwood in her quest to “transform
existing reality” rather than “construct absolutely new things” (Muller 255) – the refusal to
succumb to confining constructs of identity, whether they are patriarchal or feminist in origin.
The witch offers Atwood an easily identifiable theoretical entity to redefine. “Women
characters, arise! Take back the night!” she urges us (“Spotty-Handed Villainesses”) much as
the speaker exhorts her daughter to claim that witch’s power in the poem’s final lines: “How
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do you learn to spell? / . . . your own name first/ your first naming, your first name, / your first
word.” (64)
Margaret Atwood is an intellectual and self-analyzing writer, whose oeuvre includes
theory, lectures, and critical reviews, in addition to her own prolific creative output of prizewinning poetry and prose. In stark contrast to the confessional school of poetry, of which
Anne Sexton was such an exemplar, Atwood has stated that in her experience, “writing is not
like having dreams. It’s not that unconscious. It’s much more deliberate. When I write a poem
or a novel I’m not interested in . . . ‘expressing myself’. If I want to express myself I can go
out in the back field and scream. It takes a lot less time” (Ingersoll 44). She doesn’t seem to
have changed her mind on this point over the years, as seems evident when the elderly Iris in
The Blind Assassin (2000) comments that in “life, a tragedy is not one long scream” (510). 54
But of course, in her writing, Atwood has expressed herself, and in doing so, has also
expressed a female experience that has spoken, and continues to speak, to women who may
feel that screaming affirms the only true reflection of the events that compose their lives.
Despite her rational approach to writing, Atwood, like Sexton, has been drawn to the
emblematic witch to denote a modern female character whose maleficent power enfranchises
her even as it may alienate or, in fact, doom her. This is not unanticipated in the view of Ann
Ulanov, Professor of Psychiatry and Religion, who points out that the “witch commands
response from all ages and interests” and remains a figure both appealing and possessing
“something that could be described as grandeur” (Ulanov and Ulanov 1). Atwood seems to
affirm Ulanov’s observation that “women of unmistakable craft, whether of mind or of body
or of both, are not easily tolerated” (2). And while this is usually a male response to “women
of unmistakable craft,” many of Atwood’s female protagonists encounter and eventually
defeat another woman or women, who seem intent on disrupting, as painfully as possible, the
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heroine’s quest for a fulfilling life – in other words, a witch. Cordelia of Cat’s Eye (1988) and
Zenia of The Robber Bride (1993) are just two (very blatant) examples of such an iniquitous –
and always compelling – character. Defeat of the maleficent intentions of the witch character
is only attained when a wholeness of identity enables the protagonist to deal with the
obstacles she is forced to surmount in order to make her personal success possible. In
Atwood’s fictions, this surmounting of negative obstacles often manifests itself in an
integration of the “other” that at times is played out as a role reversal. This symbolic witch
character is so potent that it allows for exploration in more than one novel; indeed witchy
characters have become a motif visible in a number of Atwood’s works.
In taking Atwood at her word – that she doesn’t want to “express herself” – it would
seem that the attraction of the transgressor in its quintessential female form has led Atwood to
spend a great deal of time “deliberately” creating female characters who can easily be
identified as “witches”. Choosing the witch persona as a trope for identity is one mode of
defiance against the anti-female bias of critics. Atwood has addressed this concern directly in
various speeches, lectures and essays, and obliquely via a collection of female characters who
can simply be described as ghastly– frighteningly cruel, manipulative, and often oozing with
malicious charm, equally deadly to both male and female.
Although the women who grew up in the late 1940s and the 1950s may have chafed
against the patriarchal norms of poetic and literary evaluation, they were educated according
to these traditional patriarchally-grounded beliefs, whose veracity was not generally
questioned by either the women or society at large. The witch embodies the guilt, if not the
shame, women sustained when writing in the face of this powerful taboo, and her presence as
a character manifests that tension. After all, everyone knows what a witch is - an evil
woman.55 When referring to a Connecticut ancestor who was a convicted witch, and who
possessed such a strong neck that she apparently did not die after a night of being “strung up”
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– it was before the invention of “the drop” – Atwood comments, “One needs a neck like that
if one is determined to be a writer, especially a woman writer, and especially if you are good
at it” (“ Witches” 331). The underlying implication that women writers are witches, and as
such, criminal beings who deserve to be treated accordingly informs many of Atwood’s
narratives, in which modern heroines grapple with their own internalization of the negative
stereotypes that immure their world. Resolution of such an internal conflict is often manifest
through a shadow character, in the Jungian sense of the word. As Ulanov points out
The shadow is the image used by Jung to describe those contents in ourselves
that we repress because they are unacceptable . . . on the individual level it is
always represented by someone of the same sex [emphasis added] whom we
dislike and find irritating or even hateful. . . .[yet] without a shadow we are
flat, two-dimensional . . . It is not the shadow’s own nature that occasions its
menacing appearance, but rather our treatment of it” (The Feminine 33-4).
This explanation dovetails smoothly with the function of characters congruent with Zenia
(The Robber Bride) and Winifred (The Blind Assassin), both of whom not only victimize the
protagonists in each novel, but in the end serve as roles models for the originally weaker
women, each of whom, by the novel’s end, is ultimately strengthened in some way by her
encounter with this shadow adversary.
Atwood seems to agree, commenting: “If you are a man, the bad female character
in a novel may be – in Jungian terms – your anima; but if you’re a woman, the bad female
character is your shadow; and as we know from the Offenbach opera ‘Tales of Hoffman,’
she who loses her shadow also loses her soul” (“Spotty-Handed Villainesses”). Thus is the
double – the other, the witch, the writer – “shadowy but indispensable” (Negotiating with
the Dead 37).
95
Accordingly, Atwood’s classic witch characters can be seen to function as
explorations of the meaning of female identity in a modern world rife with contradictory
messages about what it means to be a woman. Sarah Aguiar explains that a character like this,
who embodies what we try to suppress, “makes the choice, either consciously or
subconsciously, to reject the traditional roles open to her and to possess power, a power that is
always presupposed to have been usurped from the male sphere. And although in most cases
she does not reject her femininity, she does reject the social limitations of femininity” (98).
The witch stereotype offers the quintessential mode for such female possession of power.
Witches are ubiquitous. The common, most familiar image comes to us via the Grimm
Brothers. The “international language” of the fairy tale (Franz 18) is understood the world
over because it narrates the crux of human existence, touching upon and dealing with its most
essential, basic and pivotal elements. The omnipresence and longevity of fairy tales are
testimony to this expression of the cultural expectations related to the fundamental rites of
passage of our lives: birth, maturation, marriage and death. Atwood has often acknowledged
her own love of, and fascination with, fairy tales, once referring to Grimms’ Fairy Tales as
“the most influential book I ever read” (Ingersoll 46).
What messages did this influential book have to convey to Atwood and its other young
readers? There is much scholarship available on the inherent misogyny of fairy tales. The
fairy tale witch emulates the historical substructure of “witch,” and her representation is the
anti-thesis of the canonical fairy tale princess, who is traditionally subjugated, silenced, and
victimized. The brutal end that the evil mother/stepmother/witch meets is her just punishment.
The heroine, the good (silent) girl, will receive the status/wealth/husband she deserves. By
fulfilling the expected passive role, she, too, receives what she is entitled to.
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Ruth Bottigheimer, who presents a theory of female submission in the Grimm
brothers’ Tales related to the amount of direct speech “good” female characters were allowed,
notes that
[t]he persistent denial of female voice in Grimms’ Tales culminates in the act
of speaking which is often made to herald female viciousness [emphasis
added]. This characteristic. . .continues the rough misogyny of early modern
German prohibitions [that] dovetail neatly with Wilhelm Grimm’s own clear
awareness that speech is allowed only to those who dominate their world.
(169-70)
But Atwood took away other impressions from those same tales:
I was exposed to the complete, unexpurgated Grimms’ Fairy-Tales at an
impressionable age. . . .“The Youth Who Set Out to Learn What Fear Was” . . .
featured a good many rotting corpses, plus a woman who was smarter than her
husband. . . .[M]any of these tales were originally told and retold by women,
and these unknown women left their mark. There is a wide range of heroines in
these tales; passive good girls, yes, but adventurous, resourceful women as
well. . .and also many wise women and a variety of evil witches, both in
disguise and not . . . . The stories, and the figures themselves, have immense
vitality, partly because no punches are pulled. . .and also because no emotion is
unrepresented. Singly, the female characters are limited and two-dimensional.
But
put
all
together,
they
form
a
rich
five-dimensional
picture.
(“Villainesses”)
Atwood has since been involved in creating her own “five-dimensional pictures” with
her writing, and this has always included the witch/shadow, a fact that helps explain how her
characters retain their souls. In referring to the poem, “Spelling”, Muller notes that
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the speaking of different words when other words have predominantly been
used conveys a certain power. . . . And in this way, it is even possible to
express the truth: “‘At the point where. . . the word/ splits & doubles & speaks/
the truth & the body/ itself becomes a mouth.” Speaking the truth occurs by
splitting and doubling, i.e. by revealing something other than the ordinary
meanings and constructing new ones. (253)
Atwood’s marked interest in doubles and shadows and even twins – all acknowledged
variations of that most fundamental binary opposition of good and evil underlying all human
existence – is especially evident in novels with predominantly witchy characters, such as
Cat’s Eye, The Robber Bride and The Blind Assassin. In a 2000 interview published in The
Guardian she explains:
Duality particularly interests fiction as a form. It is particularly interesting from
the word go - by which I mean Cain and Abel, Romulus and Remus. It’s the
structures of siblings. Look at Christianity - having had God, they had to have
the Devil. I think it’s the structure of the body and the brain. Two hands, two
eyes, two halves of the brain - but one heart. This has been something that has
interested people writing about being human. If we were millipedes, had a
thousand legs and compound eyes, we’d write quite different books. (Viner)
This interest in duality may be more personal than just that which “interests fiction as
a form” for Atwood herself has a twofold identity, and she speaks at great lengths of the
element of duality involved in the writing process in Chapter Two – surely no coincidence! –
of her collected lectures on writing in Negotiating With the Dead (2002). In an atypical
occurrence of personal anecdote, although the personal is soon expanded to embrace the
general, a more familiar Atwood style, she talks about becoming a writer:
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You might say I was fated to be a writer – either that, or a con artist or a spy or
some other kind of criminal [emphasis added] – because I was endowed at
birth with a double identity. Due to the romanticism of my father, I was named
after my mother; but then there were two of us, so I had to be called something
else.56 Thus I grew up with a nickname, which had no legal validity, while my
real name – if it can be called that – sat on my birth certificate like a timebomb. What a revelation it was for me to discover I was not who I was!
. . .Waste not, want not – I was bound to do something with this extra name of
mine, sooner or later. Then finally . . .I caved in to fate and embraced my
doubleness. The author is the name on the books. I am the other one. (36-7)
What “other” is Atwood referring to here? Using this term opens the issue of identity
to a myriad of associative reflections that can include those employed by de Beauvoir,
Bakhtin, Jung, Kristeva, and Atwood herself, all of which have been applied to interpellate
female identity. Accepting a “double identity” as her heritage, Atwood has implanted the
ambiguity of self, female in particular, in the subtext of her writings, where often her
characters experience a similar revelation of discovering they are “not who they thought they
were.” This revelation can be related to a character’s ability to “see the witch as she is and not
try to change her into what we want her to be . . . .She personifies energies that connect us
with unsuspected unconscious potentialities” (Ulanov and Ulanov 42-3).
The Robber Bride portrays a witch icon so maleficent and far-reaching in her wicked
authority that she is easily the equivalent of many. Sonia Mycak claims that:
The Robber Bride [of all Atwood’s novels] most fully explores the role of the
other in the constitution and continuance of the self. The plot is driven almost
exclusively by a struggle for supremacy between protagonist and antagonists:
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siege and conquest on the part of the merciless Zenia and strategies of defense
from the embittered and embattled Tony, Roz and Charis. (212)
Zenia is a depiction of almost all fantasies men and women have about witches, and she
seems possessed of an infallible power. Her malevolence is far-reaching and independent of
sex; she will curse the lives of men and women alike. And yet, there is something about Zenia
that is as attractive as it is repellent, fascinating and frightening – “a woman,” as one reviewer
wrote, “[the heroines] love to hate” (Kakutani). Certainly Zenia can be seen to personify any
“unsuspected unconscious potentialities” Ulanov refers to, especially those the protagonists
may yearn to express. She also clearly embodies their “evil other,” with her protean talent for
disingenuousness, uncannily successful in bewitching each victim in his or her turn.
The Robber Bride relates the story of three middle-aged women who have become
friends through their shared devastating experiences at the hands of the malicious Zenia.57 The
novel opens as the three women meet for lunch, on the day that Tony, the protagonist whose
narrative opens and closes the novel, identifies as the day that “Zenia returns from the dead”
(RB 4). Thus before the story has even begun we are made aware that Zenia is meant to be
“other,” a being of supernatural essence, so that even when the realistic details of plot inform
us that Zenia has faked her own death five years earlier, this first impression lingers, as it is
meant to do. After all, although the three women “have lunch once a month . . . [t]hey don’t
have much in common except the catastrophe that brought them together, if Zenia can be
called a catastrophe” (RB 29). The narrator’s description of Zenia’s appearance reinforces her
meticulously identified “wicked witch” position:
Tony feels a chill. . . .Zenia is standing behind her, in the smoke, in the glass,
in this room. . . . It’s not a hallucination. . . .Zenia is as beautiful as ever. . .
.[with] her hair, a dense cloud of it, blown around her head by the
imperceptible wind that accompanies her everywhere. . .filling the air near her
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with the sound of rustling.
. . .Waves of ill will flow out of her like cosmic
radiation. (32-3).
Zenia taps deeply into our collective female psyche in her witch persona, full, as
she is, of “secret knowledge, powerful spells, hidden ambition, cackling revenge” (Ulanov
and Ulanov 1). Zenia is an incarnation of the shadow elements each character refuses to
recognize, and as a result, displaces on the ultimate “other”. Zenia is, in essence, their
collective creation. The three heroines of the novel narrate her story so that she exists as what
Howells terms “another of Atwood’s missing persons” (77), which points to her shadow
function within the discourse of each of the central characters.
Tony, Charis and Roz are similar to other Atwoodian heroines, each having grown up
with a “missing” mother whose absence has made the character vulnerable to the
manipulations of a predator like Zenia. This “recurring trauma” according to Bouson (Brutal
Choreographies 11) is part of Atwood’s narrative strategy of investigating “the effects on
women of not having legitimised power. The lack can turn them into victims or manipulators”
(Howells 17) – both of which are traditional positions held not only by the historical witch,
but her successor, the fairy tale witch. The witch identity serves Atwood for it allows her to
demonstrate that although women have achieved many advancements in Western society at
the end of the twentieth century (both Tony and Roz are successful professionals, Tony as an
academic and Roz as a businesswoman), the traumas of the past, both personal as well as
those culturally positioning women as inferior, continue to influence a woman’s psychic
environment. In keeping with a psychological realism, Atwood expresses the distress that
accompanies a modern woman’s ambition to “have it all” through the function of the modern
woman’s mother, who is still confined by the dictates of earlier patriarchal codes. Atwood’s
characters in The Robber Bride are not free from the identity confusion that afflicts women
who were raised in one cultural climate, yet aspire to belong to the present, enfranchised
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environment in which they are living. By invoking the witch stereotype, Atwood takes us well
beyond a personal past, to a culturally collective one, one the witch embodies. Here all three
women are adults with fragmented identities, which have been “explained” in the course of
the novel as stemming from childhood traumas that are related to the character’s mother (or
lack thereof). The women need to integrate the various pieces of their “selves” in order to
“move beyond otherness and difference toward likeness” (Howells 168). In this, for the first
– and thus far the only – time in an Atwood novel, the protagonists are not alone, but help and
support each other in a narrative that reflects both the nurturing and the injurious aspects of
female-female relationships. Their support of one another eventually empowers them to
overcome the evil that Zenia epitomizes.
Each single character has her own split identity, evinced by her name/s: Tony/Antonia
Fremont/Tnomerf Ynot; Roz Andrews/Rosalind Greenwood/Roz Grunwald; Charis/Karen.
Atwood signals her strategy in the structure of the novel through, appropriately, the language
she chooses in her presentation of plot elements. In describing Tony’s ambidexterity, and how
since childhood she has spoken and written backwards, Atwood writes: “It’s her seam, it’s
where she’s sewn together; it’s where she could split apart” (RB 19). Charis appears when
Karen is raped by her uncle; she was “split in two” (263). And when Roz’s father returned
from the Second World War, her life “was cut in two” (332) once she discovered he was
Jewish. In this way the doubled “other” is not only externalized in the character of Zenia, she
is an integral part of each separate protagonist.
Zenia’s preying on West, Billy and Mitch, the male significant others of the three
women, explicitly evokes the witch in her sexual persona. Helen Haste explains that “Western
culture offers four images of women which express different mechanisms of coping with their
sexual powers. . . .Woman as witch is by far the most threatening image.
. . .The witch has
autonomous sexuality and makes demands on men. They do not have power over her” (172).
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The ease with which Zenia seduces each man, her ruthless disregard of the woman involved
(each of whom, at the time of Zenia’s subterfuge, is deluded into believing that they are
friends) and her subsequent discarding of each man makes her the ultimate “Other Woman.”
She is the focus of our muffled fear, born of endless subliminal messages about the ways in
which we women are deficient; she manifests, in her gift to attract our man, all that we are
lacking. That Zenia succeeds so effortlessly time and again resonates of magical power, which
is a way “of dealing with the incomprehensible and the mystifying; it is an essential quality of
witches that they are mystifying and incomprehensible to men” (Haste 173). Atwood subverts
this gender focus, for Zenia is just as incomprehensible to the female characters – and to the
reader – as she is to men, thus expanding this familiar sexual metaphor.58 Additionally,
Atwood ironically deconstructs feminist claims of being able to transform gender
relationships: “‘The Other Woman will soon be with us,’ the feminists used to say. But how
long will it take, thinks Roz, and why hasn’t it happened yet?” (RB 392). Of course, as a
physical enactment of an unconscious motif, it is apposite for Zenia to remain unfathomable.
It is clear that Zenia’s machinations raise the malevolence suppressed in the leading
characters’ (collective) unconscious. In the novel’s last quarter, each one of them meets with
Zenia in her hotel room, and each fantasizes about killing her, and indeed, each seems to come
very close to actually doing so. As Zenia blackmails Roz, she thinks she could “sneak up
behind Zenia, bop her on the head with a lamp or something. Tie her up with pantyhose. Make
it look like a sex killing. She’s read enough trashy novels like that, and God knows it would
be plausible, it’s just the kind of sordid ending a woman like Zenia deserves” (442). Tony
goes to Zenia’s hotel with a gun in her purse, imagining a scenario in which “Tony is
persuasive and dexterous and Zenia is taken in, one that acts out some of Tony’s more violent
although hypothetical fantasies and includes a neat red hole planted competently in the exact
centre of Zenia’s forehead” (409). And the magically realistic narrative style Atwood employs
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to describe Charis’ final encounter with Zenia intentionally misleads the reader into believing
that Charis has, indeed, killed her:
Inside Charis something breaks. Rage takes her over. She wants to
squeeze Zenia, squeeze her and squeeze her by the neck until Charis’s life, her
own life that she has imagined, all of the good things about her life that Zenia
has drunk come welling out like water from a sponge. The violence of her own
reaction dismays her but she’s lost control. . . . Somebody else is in charge . .
.It’s Karen. Charis can see her a dark core, a shadow. . . .She’s been waiting all
the time. . .for a moment. . .when she could get back into Charis’s body and
use it to murder. She moves Charis’s hands toward Zenia, her hands that
flicker with a blue light; she is irresistibly strong, she rushes at Zenia like silent
wind, she pushes her backwards, right through the balcony door, and broken
glass scatters like ice. Zenia is purple and red and flashing like jewels but she
is no match for shadowy Karen. She lifts Zenia up. . .and throws her over the
balcony railing; she watches her flutter down, down from the tower and hit the
edge of the fountain and burst like an old squash. (429)
Here is the power of the transgressive witch at work, the witch who “reverses the usual order”
of the way things are done (Ulanov and Ulanov 32). Intermingled with the language of murder
is imagery of light, strength and even goodness: Charis’s’ hands “flicker with a blue light”,
she moves “like silent wind”; and the incentive to murder is precipitated when Charis “feels
her body filled and surrounded with a white-hot light.” In those moments of rage that lead
Tony, Charis and Roz to contemplate murdering Zenia, they are symbolically rebelling
against the cultural oppression, exploitation and manipulation, effected largely by their
mothers and the men in their lives. These negative cultural influences controlled their earlier
lives and Zenia enacts them in their present lives. At the same time, Zenia simultaneously
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manifests the role of rebel and transgressor. By defeating Zenia, they free themselves from
those confining codes, but they also embrace some of the very attributes they abhorred in her,
because, although transgressive, those attributes are powerful. Sarah Aguiar points out that
Zenia in fact embodies positive qualities that Tony, Charis and Roz lack: Tony’s missing rage,
Charis’s absent boundaries and Roz’s poor self esteem (132). Herein lies the core paradox of
the witch figure who both fascinates and repels, affirms and denies. “The witch figure shows
us a compensating force. She looks out for herself” (Ulanov and Ulanov 33). In re-assuming
those strengths, re-claiming them as their own, Tony, Charis and Roz have successfully
integrated their “other” and emerged the stronger for being more complete.
Of course, because Tony, Charis and Roz are the real heroes in this tale, beyond their
subconscious desire for Zenia’s death, none is actually responsible for it. In fact, at the
ceremony they hold to spread Zenia’s ashes, each woman is reluctant to finally relinquish her.
Roz is sad: “Now figure that out! Zenia was a tumour but she was also a major part of Roz’s
life, and her life is past the midpoint. . . .She feels something else she never thought she would
feel, towards Zenia. Oddly enough, it’s gratitude” (RB 467). Charis has the urn containing
Zenia’s ashes, and wonders if she should “ ‘just pour it out or throw in the whole thing’. . .
She has a sneaking wish to keep the vase for herself: it has a strong energy” (467). And
Tony’s thoughts reveal her ultimate respect for Zenia:
What she herself would like is a little gunfire. A ritual cannon shot . . . . Other
dead fighters get that, so why not Zenia? She thinks of solemn moments,
battlefield vignettes: the hero leaning on his sword . . gazing down with noble
and philosophical grief at his freshly killed opponent. Of equal rank, it goes
without saying. I am the enemy you killed, my friend [original emphasis].
(468)
59
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They realize that truly letting Zenia go would mean losing an integral part of their identities
that is essential to their healthy individualism. So together they subsume Zenia’s most striking
and powerful talent: storytelling. In this they reconnect to ancient ancestors –Medusa, Mother
Earth, witches – they nurture, they laugh and they educate, embodying a universal idea of
woman in the spirit of Jung’s collective unconscious. Tony thinks that Zenia is
like an ancient statuette dug up from a Minoan palace; there are the large
breasts, the tiny waist, the dark eyes, the snaky hair. . . .[T]he woman with her
glazed pottery face does nothing but smile.
From the kitchen she hears laughter, and the clatter of dishes. Charis is
setting out the food and Roz is telling a story. That’s what they will do,
increasingly in their lives: tell stories. Tonight their stories will be about Zenia.
(470)
In choosing to end her book with the onset of storytelling, and in focusing those stories
on the archetypically feminine evil of Zenia, subdued and conquered, Atwood has returned the
female writer to the heart of the novel in both her incarnations, equally foreboding and
beneficent to her female audience, as Zenia was for Tony, Charis and Roz. “You could be
laughing your head off, ” thinks Tony, after Zenia’s ashes have been strewn over Lake
Ontario from the Island ferry deck (469). She is referring to what women might be doing
behind the traditional veils of mourning, for this is how she perceives the three of them, and
with these words, we are returned to Cixous’s laughing Medusa. True to Atwood’s “hide-andseek quality of the text as intertext” and “the complex relationship it constructs between
women’s identity/subjectivity . . . in the making of historiography, herstory [sic] and the
telling (writing) of stories” (Heilmann 172), at this moment of triumph over the agent of her
suffering, Tony could be laughing – but she isn’t. For of course the answer to her question at
the book’s closing: “Are we in any way like her?” is: absolutely yes.
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In Atwood’s award-winning The Blind Assassin we are introduced to new female
characters in many ways like Zenia. 60 This novel more audaciously raises questions about
“the intricacies and ambiguities of the narrative art, a theme that has shaped much of
[Atwood’s] work” (Stein in Wilson 136), exploring the relationship between truth and fiction
through a recognizable Atwood motif of female power and subjection61 – that is to say,
witches and their victims, for the frame narrative of this multifaceted chronicle has the 82year-old protagonist, Iris Chase Griffen, writing her memories down, and through these
memories Iris’s identity as a witch is substantiated. Her position as a writer reflects the
implicit involvement of the woman writer as transgressor which informs the structure of the
novel and enriches the exterior stories. As we have seen, a witch is immediately and
comprehensively identified as both female and evil, and, as shall become apparent, Atwood
ensures we recognize Iris as a witch. Nancy Walker reminds us that “because the concept of
individual selfhood and subjectivity have been problematic for women, merely to present
publicly one’s life is a disobedient act” (The Disobedient Writer 9). Disobedience
characterizes both the historical witch and Iris; to get away with disobeying one needs to excel
at duplicity. A successful (and insubordinate by definition) female writer does both, and when
she succeeds, she is “worse than human. [She is] a witch, a Medusa, a destructive powerful
scary monster” (Atwood, “Curse of Eve” 226).
The Blind Assassin is ostensibly the story of Iris Chase, who, in the exterior, or frame,
narrative, is writing her memoirs. Iris cannot tell her own life story without telling that of her
sister Laura’s, for “Laura was my left hand and I was hers” (BA 627). The novel, in fact,
begins with Laura’s death, so that in telling their story, Iris is resurrecting Laura in order to
make amends; a confession, in effect, of her sins. In medieval times, accused witches
confessed to their sins before their executions; Iris tells us she is in a race with time to finish
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her confession before she dies: “I have to hurry now. I can see the end, glimmering far up
ahead of me” (607) – and she writes this after she has revealed her culpability in Laura’s
death. In this subtle manner a link is forged from past witches to the present one, as Iris
personifies what Atwood claims is the motivation for all writing: “a fear of and fascination
with mortality – by a desire to make the risky trip to the Underworld, and bring back
something or someone from the dead” (Negotiating 156). Iris is bringing Laura back.
This fact, as with many other innuendos that appear and tantalize the reader, is
clarified at the novel’s end. Indeed Atwood’s discursive strategy in this particular instance is
the foregrounding of evasiveness, providing the narrative with a duplicitous tone that seems
always accompanied by a “whiff of brimstone,” an analogy Iris makes in reference to her
elderly (i.e. present) self. This allies her with the stereotypical “old witch” popularized in a
rich cultural buffet of books and films, particularly Disney’s, whose popular and successful
renditions of ‘favorite’ Grimm Tales have helped imbed this particular paradigm in the
collective [un]consciousness of several generations. Malice and its consequences hover over
the text. Our first encounter with “old witch” Iris – Iris the writer/narrator – is weighted with
references to her wicked witch persona; her morning routine is described as “the usual dawn
rituals – the ceremonies we perform to make ourselves look sane and acceptable to other
people”. Her hair must be combed because “apparitions have made it stand on end during the
night.” In her sleep she has been “gnawing on bones”. She showers “to get the smell of
nocturnal darkness off the skin” (BA 43; emphases added). This particular old lady is not
meant to be [mis]taken for anyone’s loving grandmother. The apprehension of Iris, writer and
witch, has been articulated.
“Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge” ( 3). In
beginning the novel with Laura’s suicide, Atwood focuses our attention on a death that
demands attention and explaining, yet all Iris initially tells us is that Laura “had her reasons”
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(3). Atwood has linked this death to female subjugation and malfeasance through the narrator:
“the car was mine”; the narrator, identified at first only as “Mrs. Griffen” when the policeman
addresses her in the opening paragraphs of the novel, describes herself at this moment of
revelation in an image reminiscent of Medusa and, perhaps, Hell: “A hot wind was blowing
around my head, the strands of my hair lifting and swirling in it, like ink spilled in water” (34). Her identity as “Mrs.” signals both her position in society as respected “wife of,” reflected
in the deference with which the policeman addresses her, and in her own home, where she is
nameless in her own right. The name she does have is monstrous – a homophone for the
mythical griffin.62 The spilled black ink is a maleficent image evocative of spilled blood, and
the swirling hair suggests one of Ulanov’s descriptions of the witch archetype: “the form of a
beautiful woman with flowing hair who, like Odysseus’s sirens, lures men off their proper
course to destruction” (Ulanov and Ulanov 29). We will eventually learn that this siren lured a
woman (Laura) off course (the bridge) to destruction. Atwood transforms a traditional
(patriarchal) trope by re-gendering its context, manipulating the language to ensure we can
read the “new myths [created] out of [the] old” and in this, she is transgressing “fundamental
social taboos in the very act” of that creation. (Pratt et al.11).
The novel moves from this death to the presentation of the other major characters’
deaths, interspersed with the opening chapters of the novel-within-a-novel, also called The
Blind Assassin, but this one is authored by Laura Chase. These deaths, offered via newspaper
obituaries, neatly explain the circumstances of the characters’ death and their relationship to
the narrator. The culmination of these reports is the realization that Iris is the only person still
alive of those who may or may not have been involved in Laura’s mysterious death so many
years before, and her storytelling is Iris’s “way to re-envision, understand and justify her life;
to gain power; to avenge herself on those who have betrayed her, and to set her life in order”
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(Stein 135). Beyond that, moreover, there is something uncanny about Iris’s longevity – a
whiff of immortality.
The novel’s “present” involves the 82-year-old Iris Chase Griffen sharing with her
initially unidentified audience the writing of her “re-envisioned” version of the past; her use
of the present tense, and her comments on the actual writing serve to engage the reader in the
process of re-discovery along with Iris. Since Iris began with Laura’s death, she first goes
back in their personal history, and advances chronologically from that point until we again
reach the place in the narrative where Laura dies, from which point the novel moves to a swift
conclusion, thereby reinforcing Laura’s death as the heart of Iris’s’ memoirs. Throughout this
principal discourse, the actual novel we are reading, Atwood has interpolated newspaper
articles, as if pasting clippings in a scrapbook in which larger world events are offered to
contextualize the personal ones. The juxtaposition of an ostensibly objective view, and Iris’s
personal version of events, positioned to undermine by commenting on them, enriches the
realistic environment of the novel while raising reservations about the veracity of Iris’s
perceptions– or of the articles’ truth. Effectively, the “official” discourse comes first
chronologically in the novel. This double vision allows the reader to appreciate how the
authorized discourse actually represents Iris’s oppression, but as something else entirely. For
instance, a gushy “society page” article describes a charity ball (“the third annual Downtown
Foundlings’ Crèche”) whose theme was “Xanadu” and where “Kubla Khan and his glittering
entourage . . .whirled gaily around a spectacular ‘Alph, the Sacred River’ fountain . . . . We
did not hear any ‘ancestral voices prophesying war’ as all was sweet accord, thanks to the
firmly-guiding hand of Mrs. Winifred Griffen Prior” (BA 332). Beyond expressing the
inappropriateness of such a lavish display of wealth during the dark days of the depression,
even in the name of a worthy cause, this falsely gay text is re-presented about seventy pages
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later, when Iris fills in the context, which is that of the early weeks of her married life,
beginning with Richard and Winifred deciding that
Richard was the man of the future, and that the woman standing behind him–
didn’t every successful man have one of those? –was her.
It certainly wasn’t me. . . .
Winifred had to keep me busy during the daylight hours. . . .she put a great
deal of thought into cooking up meaningless tasks for me, then rearranging my
time and space so I would be at liberty to perform them. . . .
Thus the Downtown Foundlings’ Crèche charity ball, of which she was the
convener. She put me on the list of organizers, not only to keep me hopping
but because it would reflect well on Richard. “Organizers” was a joke, she
didn’t think I was capable of organizing my own shoelaces, so what cindersweeping chore could I be given? Envelope-addressing, she decided. (407-8)
The Cinderella reference is apt, and there will be further discussion of Winifred in the
role of Iris and Laura’s wicked stepmother. Iris’s appearance at the Ball, so tellingly described
in the newspaper’s society pages, as “[a]lso on the reception committee [was] Mrs. Richard
Chase Griffen, an Abyssinian maid in green and silver” follows this description of Winifred:
“ravishing [emphases added] in scarlet and gold as a Princess” (332). The language conveys
the real relationship between Winifred and Iris, but we apprehend this only after we have
heard Iris’s version of events.
Moreover, Iris’s narratives, framed by the newspaper articles, revive persons long
dead, an act of supernatural power that aligns the (female) writer with witchcraft. Atwood
refers to this narrative device as “two forms of representation: each contradicts the other, each
comments on the other, and each reinforces the other in an odd way, call it counter point in
music, point counter point. So you have Iris’s story and the newspaper stories” each allowing
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for different “types of representations of reality” (Heilmann and Taylor 132) – the newspapers
as the authoritative (patriarchal) representation of reality and Iris’s writings as the “other”
(female, originally silenced) version.
Additionally, this strategy accentuates the split between Iris’s public and private life,
wherein the public, or official voice – for newspapers represent an authoritative truth – errs in
construing what it sees. During the Middle Ages, not only were witch accusations always
made in the public, authoritative forum, but they were often characterized by
misinterpretations of events that supported the witch identity of the accused woman. In
addition, the duplicity of the woman/witch and her ‘double life” as Satan’s agent were
underscored. The manipulation of “facts” was a core feature of witch accusations; in The
Blind Assassin, Atwood manipulates the novel’s truths and fictions in a manner that blurs the
distinction between them, making her heir, as a female writer, to both the historical witch and
accuser. In light of this, Iris’s memories demand a form of double, or “other” reading, one
considered central to a feminist project of re-gendering literature, in order to enable the reader
to absorb a more complete context for Iris’s story.
In order to do this, Richard is treated in much the same way male writers have
sidelined and devalued female characters in male-defined fiction: he is one-sided, a character
meant to represent a trait or type rather than a person. In the self-conscious framework of
Iris’s’ narrative, she acknowledges this:
I have failed to convey Richard in any rounded sense. He remains a cardboard
cutout. I know that. . . . Even at the time he appeared to me smaller than life,
although larger than life as well. It came from his having too much money, too
much presence in the world – you were tempted to expect more from him than
was there, and so what was average in him seemed like deficiency. He was
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ruthless but not like a lion; more like a sort of large rodent. . . . He had become
like a statue of himself: huge, public, imposing, hollow. (BA 585)
And indeed, there is nothing redeeming about Richard as Iris creates and remembers him –
cold, controlling, fascist, and cruelly brutal. This could be seen as a flaw in Atwood’s creation
of “real” male characters; in fact, John Updike comments on her failure in The Blind Assassin
to “see genderized humanity whole,” in contrast to The Handmaid’s Tale where “she manages
to generate some sympathy for the heroine’s personal oppressor, the Commander.” 63 I beg to
differ – that Richard is an evil stereotype makes him the narrative equivalent of a male
defined witch trope, a male Cathy Trask (in John Steinbeck’s East of Eden) or Nurse Ratched
(in Ken Kesey’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest) if you will, characters whose lack of
humanity is essential in motivating the [male] protagonist’s behavior and driving the plot.
Richard’s dehumanization is a female re-visioning of such classic witchlike characters; like
many of those male-created witch characters, Richard “does not tell [his] own story; [he] is
interpreted through the [feminine] narrator, and thus the reader never hears [his] motivations
for [his] actions” (Aguiar 40).64 Atwood has displaced the female usually found in this
particular role and reinstated a man in her position; in making both male and female
characters unilaterally evil –Winifred, Richard’s sister is his female counterpart – Atwood
does continue to “see genderized humanity whole.”
In addition to Iris’s personal story, the “real” novel – which in itself is doubled,
as it simultaneously relates Iris’s past and present, each with its own accompanying “counter
point”: the newspaper articles and the graffiti that Iris records from public washrooms – the
novel “The Blind Assassin by Laura Chase” is presented, a novel that contains the
actual/fabricated tale of a blind assassin. Laura’s novel tells the story of two unnamed lovers,
meeting clandestinely; the woman is obviously wealthy while the man is poor, disreputable; a
political fugitive whose situation demands that the lovers meet in a variety of shabby,
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borrowed rooms. In the course of their trysts, and usually after their lovemaking which
positions this storytelling as a form of intimacy between them, the man tells the woman a
story in installments: this is the story of “The Blind Assassin” of the other two “novels.”
Laura’s novel is obviously meant to fictionalize a “real” affair – one of the many speculations
the reader becomes engaged in, then, is: whose affair? Laura’s, we naturally assume, as she
has written the book, but as we read further into the “real” novel, we must reconsider – is it
Iris’s? By arousing these doubts in the reader, Atwood foregrounds the instability of truth, “a
larger project” she pursues of exposing “the basis of narrative” as a mode to “critique . . . the
hypocrisy, injustice, classism, and sexism of the twentieth century” (Stein 136). The narrative
structure, by means of the fantasy tale, within a novel, within a memoir, gives the silenced
Laura her voice after her death and her identity as a double of Iris, the “real” author, is
substantiated. At least, Iris the memoirist tells us that Laura’s voice is speaking in “The Blind
Assassin by Laura Chase”, that the book was “merely doing justice” (BA 626). In fact, Iris
has usurped Laura’s voice, just as she usurped Laura’s love for Alex, for, in one of the frame
novel’s most significant revelations, we learn that Iris, not Laura, has written the novel in a
transcendent act of “ghostwriting.” Iris’s confession to this, in which she tries to elucidate
why she put Laura’s name as the author, reveals how she hoped it would expiate her sins– of
robbing Laura of Alex, of colluding in her sexual abuse and even her death, while
simultaneously incriminating Iris as it exposes how she, in fact, took over Laura’s life. And
once again their doubleness is highlighted, vis-a-vis the act of writing, writing through the
body, a “bodiless hand scrawling across a wall”:
As for the book, Laura didn’t write a word of it. But you must have known that
for some time. I wrote it myself, during my long evenings alone, when I was
waiting for Alex to come back, and then afterwards, once I knew he wouldn’t. .
. . I wanted a memorial. That was how it began. For Alex, but also for myself.
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. . .I can’t say Laura didn’t write a word. Technically that’s accurate, but in
another sense – what Laura would have called the spiritual sense – you could
say she was my collaborator. The real author was neither one of us: a fist is
more than the sum of its fingers. (626)
Finally, the writing of this book metamorphoses into a collective act of rebellion against the
oppression of women; Iris, writing as Laura, is a fist, with its fingers, “the real author,”
women writers in “the spiritual sense.”
Herstory is also simultaneously contrasted with the (implied real) history as presented
in the newspaper texts that Iris has chosen to include. Atwood explains the novel’s structure in
this way:
So you have a text, the commentary on a text, a commentary on the
commentary on a text, a sideways addition to a text, and all of those little
ongoing narratives you might say are a community, are communal efforts, they
are all by women, we assume, unless a man is going into the washroom. So
you could say that also is a core narrative in the stories. So you’ve got five
different kinds, not just Iris. She’s reporting some of them, but she is not
necessarily creating them, for instance the ones in the washroom, unless she is
completely lying to us all of the time. She’s copying down what she has found
in the washroom cubicles, some of which are the very same things that I
myself have copied down out of washroom cubicles, which can often get very
interesting, especially on repeated visits when you see what people have added.
So there you have it: five different kinds, and they weave in and out amongst
the other narrative strands. (Heilmann and Taylor, “Interview” 133)
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The use of weaving as a metaphor for women’s writing has become familiar in the
recent past; it is satisfying on many levels – as reminiscent of concrete female creative
production when women wove cloth for their family needs, as the locus of female community,
when women gathered to create larger projects from their individual cloths, as a narrative
technique that creates a whole from the separate strands that Atwood mentions here. 65 This is
Atwood being “deliberately confrontational as she interprets women’s lives” (Bouson,
Choreographies 4), using this female trope to question female truth, as the “commentaries”
Atwood has created for Iris’s memoirs serve to destabilize the core of the novel – Iris’s story,
whose “‘protean changes in shape’ [are] so characteristic of fairy tales” (Wilson, Atwood’s
Fairy-Tale Sexual Politics xi). Duplicity allies Iris with the many fairy-tale witches who used
their words to manipulate and entrap their victims, and with one of the definitions of the
historical crime of practicing magic, where a witch was “the mistress of every form of iniquity
and malice, lying about the truth” (Taylor).
Iris’s narrative identity is first that of victim; as the memoir expands, that identity is
transformed to a more iniquitous one, 66 one that can be aligned with the witch figure of the
present discussion. Sharon Wilson has commented that the effect of fairy- tales on Atwood’s
writing constitutes “more than simple influence or allusion: they function as intertexts or texts
within texts” (Fairy-Tale Sexual Politics xi).67 Iris’s’ transformation allows the reader to
experience the polarized fairy-tale positions from another perspective – not the usual
omniscient male narrator’s of the Grimm brothers’ tradition, but an intimate female view.
Because she is not narrating in an ambiguous sense but engaging in the actual writing as she
speaks, she represents the writing body Cixous intended with the words: “Women must write
through their bodies” and with her memoir, Iris is “seizing the occasion to speak [and] hence
[making] her shattering entry into history” (“Laugh” 256; 250). We are meant to believe that
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her entry into history is based on truth, because Iris asks the reader early in the book, “For
whom am I writing this?”(BA 53) and then explains that
[t]he only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will
never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later
date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as
emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you
must see your left hand erasing it. (345)
In this way, and at a double level of apprehension, this truth is undermined both by Atwood
(as discussed earlier), and by Iris as she sees her “left hand erasing” what she has written.
“Laura Chase’s The Blind Assassin” portrays and parodies both fairy tale and fantasy
fiction genres, with a nod to science fiction, as the unnamed lover in “Laura’s” novel is a scifi writer. Atwood explains how Laura’s male narrator is “a reversal of the Scheherazade
situation. Because of the situation of the man telling the story to hold the woman’s attention”
(Heilmann and Taylor 133). The intertextuality at play here is further heightened because the
woman is telling us the stories the man invents. The fairy tale motif allows for the silenced
girl to escape her fate in the fictional “The Blind Assassin”(in the story the male Scheherazade
tells) through the love of her erstwhile assassin; however, the “real” Laura dies. Her love did
“assassinate” her and worse, her sister Iris is the unwitting (blind) agent of her death. It is
characteristic of Laura in her fairy-tale role of the passive captured “good girl” that she does
not kill the messenger of bad news – she kills herself. The transformations Atwood effects
are, as Wilson points out, “not always positive” (21) which is also true of myth and fairy tale,
but when a former victim (aka the passive princess of fairy tale motif) overpowers or replaces
or defeats her tormentor, that is exceedingly positive – for the victim. This is the case in The
Robber Bride, and to some extent, Cat’s Eye. In the former, the success of Charis, Roz and
Tony to unite and conquer Zenia leads each to a fuller understanding of who she is and how
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much fuller and more independent she has become as a result of having suffered from, and
finally vanquished, Zenia. In Cat’s Eye, Elaine’s personal strengthening and growth begin
when she walks away from Cordelia after nearly dying in the ravine as a result of Cordelia’s
malicious mistreatment, refusing to continue to comply as victim to Cordelia’s tormentor.
This act of survival effectively disempowers Cordelia, while simultaneously awarding Elaine
the security and competence to defeat and replace her. Both these examples incarnate “the
necessity for women to reconnect with severed portions of their psyches and to absorb the
power of the maligned negative archetypes” (Aguiar 135). In The Blind Assassin, however,
Laura is an innocent casualty of Iris’s struggle for emancipation from the male and social
expectations constraining her, and this holds true when those expectations are enacted through
a female agent. In Laura’s position of sacrifice, she is unable to reject that role and is thereby
doomed. Iris’s refusal of the sacrificial role precipitates her integration of the dark double that
Laura sometimes enacted, as will be discussed shortly, but this transformation occurs only
after Laura dies. The tragic irony of Laura’s death supports Cixous’ assertion that “[m]en have
committed the greatest crime against women. Insidiously, violently, they have led them to
hate women, to be their own enemies to mobilize their immense strength against themselves”
(“Laugh” 248.) Thus Iris, paradoxically Laura’s professed protector since their mother’s
death, is not able “out of love” to lie, or say “anything else: anything but the truth” (BA 595)
about her affair with Alex, and after this apparently malicious revelation, Laura’s suicide is
precipitated. We, concurrently with Iris, learn that Richard had been sexually abusing Laura,
who believed that in submitting to him she could save Alex – whom she loved. At this
juncture in the text Iris is transformed from victim into witch, damning Richard’s political
future by taking their daughter Aimee and leaving him, for “[d]ivorced men did not become
leaders of their counties, not in those days” (BA 584), and then sealing his fate by arranging
for the publication of “The Blind Assassin by Laura Chase.”
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The most diabolic element of this duplicitous narrative technique is the insinuation
that the novel “The Blind Assassin by Laura Chase” itself was instrumental in Richard’s
death. Elisabeth Bronfen has suggested that “[g]iving somatic materiality to what seems
safely symbolic . . . becomes a fascinating and dangerous game with fatality as well” (69).
The novel-within-a-novel is a symbolic reflection on the frame novel, at a number of levels.68
By having Laura’s novel physically present at the scene of Richard’s death, Atwood is
creating an actual event from the idea that “feminine characters acquire their power only once
they are dead” (Bronfen 71), with Laura literally, and Iris figuratively, dead to Richard at this
point in the novel. Bronfen analyzes two novels by Fay Weldon with a view to addressing
“her comic tautology” and identifies “her narrative strategy of feminine resubstantiation” as
one that “deconstructs [Freud’s] common patriarchal mythopoetics . . . by thematically
addressing the issue pf the powerful feminine ghost” – manifested in the novel “The Blind
Assassin by Laura Chase” – “[and] constructing a textual revenant” (71). Atwood has taken
this strategy one step further still by enacting Laura’s resubstantiation as a text –the novel she
supposedly wrote. In other words, Laura is not only a “textual revenant” but the text itself, a
text apparently endowed with such malignant supernatural powers that she/it causes Richard’s
death, or so Iris, our narrator, implies. Atwood sets the scene for this interpretation in the
frame novel’s exposition in which Iris tells us Laura’s book “even after fifty years retains its
aura of brimstone and taboo” (BA 48). Arranging for the publication of “The Blind Assassin
by Laura Chase” is how witch Iris avenges Laura’s death.
In order to enact this revenge Iris had to become her shadow self, her negative other,
which she was only able to accomplish after Laura, in her role as Iris’s psychological double,
had been destroyed. This dichotomous relationship between Laura and Iris is signaled in a
number of ways throughout the frame novel, and at first Iris takes the shadow role. Laura is
very blond, whereas Iris’s hair color seems to have darkened, which we understand from her
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comment at the beginning of the text about her hair “like “ink spilled in water” (3) as well as
this description of the newspaper and book jacket photograph of Laura: “Her long hair is
blonde, as mine was then [emphasis added] – pale, white almost” (56). The implication that
Iris used to be as blonde (pure) as Laura, but is now dark (evil) is supported in this apparently
casual aside, but is one of several intimations of Iris’s’ malevolent nature, which, as a result of
the present-to-past weaving of the narrative we are, at this point in the story, as yet unaware
of. Fifty pages later in the narrative, but almost 20 years earlier in their lives, on the day of
their mother’s funeral, Iris remembers:
Laura skipped ahead of me on the lawn. She was annoyingly light-hearted, as
if she didn’t have a care in the world; she’d been that way all through Mother’s
funeral.
. . .What rankled even more was that people seemed to feel sorrier
for her because of this than they did for me.
“Mother is with God,” Laura said. . . . [she] had a way of believing such
things . . . with a tranquil single-mindedness that made me want to shake her.
...
We sat on the ledge around the lily pond . . . I’d had to boost Laura up. She
leaned against the stone nymph, swinging her legs . . .humming to herself.
“You shouldn’t sing,” I told her. “Mother’s dead.”
“No, she’s not, “ said Laura complacently.” She’s not really dead. She’s in
heaven with the little baby.”
I pushed her off the ledge. (120-1)
This incident sets the tone that underscores the sisters’ relationship from that point on.
Iris struggles to repress the antipathetic responses Laura arouses in her when her behavior
manifests what Iris suppresses – defiance and disobedience, witchlike characteristics that Iris
yearns to be able to express. In this way Laura becomes Iris’s dark double during the time Iris
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is trapped in her personal “captive princess” role, from which, in effect, she only completely
escapes after Laura’s death; this period is punctuated by the inadvertent (blind) release of the
malice and anger raging beneath the surface of Iris’s life, similar to the memory recorded
above. Karl Miller posits that,
[t]here can be no satisfying short description of what doubles. . .have become
in shedding some part of their supernatural origins, as harbingers of evil and
death, and growing into an element of individual psychology and a domestic
feature. But it is time to repeat that they have often been about running away,
and revenge, when these pursuits are. . .prevented. . . .One self does what the
other can't; one self is meek while the other one is fierce. . . .Doubles may
appear to come from outside . . .or from inside . . .[and] within these
complications must surely lie an attempt to disclaim responsibility for events
and crises which are internal to the individual but in which his environment
will always seem to take part. (416)
Atwood has expanded the role of double or shadow for Laura, in that at times she
plays the “good” role as evidenced above in the memory of the girls’ childhood, and at others,
the “evil” role. Laura is not concerned with rules, manners, what others think or say about her;
her parents do not burden her with responsibility, as they do Iris, and she has no compunction
about running away when she disagrees with the agenda others have set for her. As one
reviewer comments: “The social rules that drive Iris into marriage do not apply to Laura; she
floats between idealistic ventures in soup kitchens, sheltering socialist agitators and eventually
into the darker margins of society” (Davies 1138) .
The double in Victorian literature was essentially concerned with the acting out of
repressed desires, and its appearance was a popular feature in the literature because of the
prevailing stifling and morally hypocritical attitudes of the time regarding acceptable behavior
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– Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte), The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oscar Wilde) and Dr. Jekyll and
Mr. Hyde (Robert Louis Stevenson) are examples of the most familiar of this genre. Otto
Rank explains that a literary double can be “a likeness which has been detached from the ego
and become an individual being (shadow, reflection, portrait)” or a real person “of unusual
external similarity” with the self (20). In incorporating this traditional conceit of male
identity issues, Atwood has appropriated the canon for revision and alteration. She has often
used this motif, as we have seen, but with Laura and Iris, she has expanded her transformation
by foregrounding the original element of physical similarity, which was not a feature of her
earlier doubled shadow characters.69 As previously mentioned, Iris looked like Laura when
Laura was alive, and her escape from Laura as her double is signaled as Iris comes to
physically resemble her less and less; Iris’s wardrobe changes with her new-wife- of-risingwealthy-politician status, and her hair seems to darken. And in a more crucial resemblance,
both Iris and Laura must suffer the malice of Richard and Winifred, and both are sacrificed
and sacrifice themselves to Richard sexually, and in vain: Iris realizes this when learning, on
returning from her honeymoon, that marrying Richard did not save her father’s factory as her
father had intended; Laura, when she learns that Alex is dead. The girls also exchange their
roles as “evil shadow” of the other, as circumstances in the narrative warrant. Atwood’s
metamorphic use of this familiar literary trope is yet another manifestation of the ways in
which her work incorporates female experience, refusing the constraints previously placed on
those experiences by patriarchal references.
Maria Tatar has identified a major source of satisfaction in fairy- tales as the implicit
“punishment for villains and rewards for heroes” (xxi) the stories enact; another of Atwood’s
textual transformations in The Blind Assassin is that not only the villains are punished. This
brings the narrative closer to real life, and hence the truth, in spite of Iris’s frequent caveats:
I look back over what I have written and I know it’s wrong, not because of
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what I’ve set down but because of what I’ve omitted. What isn’t there has a
presence, like the absence of light.
You want the truth of course. You want me to put two and two together. But
two and two doesn’t necessarily get you the truth. (BA 484)
Laura’s eventual fate and Iris’s collusion in it are presaged at the end of the
recollection Iris records of the day of their mother’s funeral, a memory that gives prominence
to Iris’s neophyte witch persona:
Then she began to cry.
(I have to admit I was gratified by this. I’d wanted her to suffer too—as
much as me. I was tired of her getting away with being so young.)
Laura picked herself up off the grass and ran along the back driveway
towards the kitchen, wailing as if she’d been knifed. I ran after her: it would be
better to be on the spot when she reached someone in charge, in case she
accused me. . . .She fell once on the way and this time she really hurt herself –
skinned her hand. When I saw this I was relieved: a little blood would cover up
for my malice. (121)
This passage evokes several social commonalities prevalent during the time of the
historical witch-hunts. One scholar of the witchcraze finds that there were almost no cases of
witch accusations in which the witch was of a higher social standing than her accuser
(Thomas 562-3) and in this vignette, the issue of status is tweaked to accommodate the
context: Iris feels her own grief is being ignored by adults who expressed their concern for
Laura, but not Iris, at their mother’s funeral, thus effectively demoting Iris while elevating
Laura in her own eyes; this is her justification for her malicious behavior towards Laura. And
even though Laura has yet to accuse Iris, Iris feels that she will – indeed, that she should.
Another researcher of the witch-hunt era finds that “many accusations were made within the
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extended family and particularly against women who had fears and jealousies through living
together” (Parrinder 136). Iris has documented such “fears and jealousies” between Laura and
herself with clarity, particularly this scene where she pushes Laura off the fountain.
Furthermore, women were often the chief accusers of other women; one scholar believes this
phenomenon existed since “women spent the majority of their time in the company of other
women, and that among women issues of status and esteem were important within their social
space [so] these were much more likely to be sources for female accusations against witches”
(Briggs 267). Again, Iris’s narrative of the girls’ childhood emphasizes how much time they
spent almost isolated, alone together, and Atwood’s language choices are allusive. Iris writes
that Laura was “wailing as if she’d been knifed” an expression that begs to be completed with
“in the back”, which certainly characterizes Iris’s traitorous behavior in this scene; the words
“accused”, “blood” and “malice” directly conjure up associations with witch hunts. And the
scene in Diana Sweets restaurant, the day before Laura’s death, plays out between the two
young women in an eerily similar way; the elements of Laura’s angel and Iris’s’ witch roles
are more heavily pronounced, with Laura described in a style redolent with religious
sacrificial imagery: “She was neatly, even austerely dressed . . .She appeared . . . leached of
colour, but at the same time translucent – as if little spikes of light were being nailed out
through her skin from the inside, as if thorns of light were shooting out from her” (BA 590).
Iris even remembers that earlier time, when Laura so infuriated Iris with her complacency
“secure in the conviction that everything was all right really and the angels were on her side”
that “I wanted to shake her” and “[my] fingers itched with spite” (595).
Iris’s active malice is directed only at Laura – until Laura’s death. Like the medieval
women who accused their “sisters” of witchcraft “in the hope of making their own obedience
to the rules clear and reducing any risk that they might be suspected themselves” (Briggs
267), Iris is acting out of desperation, hoping to deflect some of her own guilt. Furthermore,
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as were so many hapless good daughters and maltreated princesses in Grimms’ fairy-tales, Iris
is “sold to the devil” (Richard) by her father in exchange for riches, including the factory and
business of Chase & Sons, recalling the heroine of “The Maiden Without Hands,” and
abandoned to the machinations of a wicked stepmother, Winifred, similar to Cinderella and
Snow White. Her “child” is taken a la “Rapunzel” – her child being variously Laura, Aimee,
Iris’s daughter and Sabrina, Iris’s granddaughter; Winifred is implicated in each of these
figurative abductions. Iris, like her fairy-tale predecessors, must find the means to deal with
her personal wicked stepmother: Winifred.
Winifred Griffen Prior, a woman whose antecedents seem to be the malicious
stepmothers in familiar tales such as Snow White and Cinderella, and whose sole purpose in
life seems to be to make the narrator suffer, is Iris’s sister-in-law. When the Chase sisters first
encounter Winifred, she is a “breezy young society matron, right-wing and ruthless” (Updike
144) whom her brother Richard Griffen, rising industrialist, political hopeful, and more
heavily “right-wing and ruthless” than his sister, assigns to educate 18-year-old Iris. He
acquires her, along with her father’s button factory, in an attempt to save the factory at the
expense of the daughter.70 Winifred is a “classic” Atwood witch figure: her motives are selfserving. She represents what Atwood once defined vis-à-vis another witchlike character as “a
given [original emphasis], that thing that cannot be overcome or changed within itself” (FairyTale Sexual Politics 191) 71. There is nothing in Winifred of the multifaceted intertwining of
good and evil, no evidence of the complicated relationship between the need to defend oneself
from and aggression against the antagonist/witch that typify the Atwood heroines, such as Iris,
who move from the victim position to the empowered witch persona. Instead, Winifred
personifies Andrea Dworkin’s stereotype of the female characters in fairy-tale, in which, she
claims, “the only good woman is a dead woman. When she is bad, she lives, or when she lives
she is bad . . . . she is characterized by overwhelming malice, devouring greed, uncontrollable
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avarice . . .she is the wicked witch” (41). Winifred is married, but her husband is never seen,
and she is childless. This fortifies her position as “wicked witch” for she is incomplete as a
woman on her own, and as such, dangerous. In this, she also complies with the male writer’s
literary vision of the witch, which Aguiar reminds us derives from her independent state:
“Because she is usually an unattached female, her disregard for male protection renders her
suspect” (38). Atwood’s narrative control is such that she can locate Winifred within this
traditional position while expanding the context, as Winifred offers Richard her protection,
doing all she can to smooth Richard’s path socially and politically, thus reversing the
circumstance of the stereotype.
Her first appearance in Iris and Laura’s lives presages her future role as female villain
in their story. In the first place, Iris assumes she is Richard’s wife, which implies an
incestuous relationship between them, while alluding to another famous “witch,” Anne
Boleyn, who was accused of both sleeping with her brother and being a witch. This
misperception of Iris’s sets the stage for a rivalry between them, which will be acted out along
the lines of countless jealous evil stepmothers, queens, mothers-in-law and witches of familiar
fairy-tale stock; Richard will be the initial focus of that competition, which will later expand
to Aimee and Sabrina. Iris describes Winifred as “youngish, thin, stylish, trailing diaphanous
orange- tinted muslin” and her clothes as “wicked new-money clothes” (BA 214). The trailing
scarves suggest the sexuality of flowing hair and Iris thinks of Winifred’s clothes as
“wicked”. It is these adroit word plays that create the subtle intertextuality with which
Atwood imbues Iris’s narrative. Maria Tatar has discussed how such classic wicked females
“work hard to earn the trust of their victims with magnanimous maternal behavior, and then
reveal their true colors” (144) not least because the colors are so significant in this description.
Tatar’s observation accurately reflects Winifred’s behavior, particularly when she meets Iris
for lunch at the Arcadian Court (“where the ladies lunch”) in order to help “mould” Iris and
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plan the wedding. She is wearing “a vibrant green ensemble,” with matching alligator shoes
and purse that were “glossy, rubbery, slightly wet-looking,” presenting a picture of reptilian
slime and envy, in spite of the fact that Iris is impressed (“I had never seen such exquisite
unusual shoes”) and covetous (282). Winifred’s “true colors” are revealed through “hint” and
“suggestion” although she “had another method – the bludgeon – but I didn’t encounter it at
this lunch” (285). What Iris does encounter is a message from Winifred that if Iris “ever
crossed Richard there would be the two of them to reckon with” (284). Winifred chose Iris’s
engagement ring, bought Iris clothes she didn’t need because Iris “needed to dress the part”,
and the wedding was held in Winifred’s home because Iris’s father “could no longer afford
the kind of wedding Winifred felt was her due” (287). These activities confer a double role
on Winifred, as [step]mother to Iris and equal partner to Richard; both roles are iniquitous.
And both roles “embody entrapment and alienation” for Iris, because Winifred is “insensitive
to life and free choice; [she] epitomizes sterility and enslavement” (Fairy-Tale Sexual
Politics” 178 ; 301). Indeed throughout the memoir, when Iris refers to Winifred, it is in her
role as Richard’s (evil) agent. When the girls’ father dies, the living and schooling
arrangements for Laura are made by Richard and Winifred, the Griffen home is staffed and
decorated by Winifred while Richard and Iris are on their honeymoon; Winifred is “in and out
of the house constantly” (BA 391) causing Iris to feel “like a child excluded by its parents.
Genial, brutal parents, up to their necks in collusion” (374). Iris feels imprisoned in her
Winifred-designed home, a fairy-tale captive in the mode of Rapunzel with Winifred “like
some parody of a fairy godmother” (390). In Ulanov and Ulanov’s interpretation of the witch
archetype, she “competes with the heroine . . . for feminine preferment and position in the
world. She wants power and she takes it” (31). In Iris’s world, “Richard consulted with
Winifred about everything. . . .Our relative positions were now clear, hers and mine.
was necessary to Richard, I on the other hand could always be replaced” (BA 407).
. . .She
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Until Iris ascertains Richard’s sexual relationship with Laura (after her death), the
relationship between Iris and Winifred remains parallel to the fairy-tale stereotype. When Iris
takes Aimee and leaves Richard, she has in effect learned how to refuse her subjugation by
assuming the negative elements of the witch that subsequently empower her. Ironically Iris’s
self-preserving escape from Richard arouses anger and resentment in Aimee, effectively
making Iris a “wicked stepmother” in her daughter’s eyes. In fact, in the last meeting Iris has
with Aimee before the latter’s fatal accident – “fallen or pushed or jumped, we’ll never know”
(530) – Aimee accuses her mother of lying, ironically because she believes that Laura was her
real mother: “It was all there in Laura’s book, she said” (531). The tragic irony of this scene is
heightened when we learn that Iris wrote “Laura’s book.” Once again the text has a significant
role to play in the witch identity of the writer, but that role may not always be the one aspired
to when the woman begins to write. Iris’s intention to record the truth, to “offer a
counterdiscourse to the official version of family history passed down to Sabrina by
Winifred” (Bouson, “Wounds” 264) succeeds, but the text also implicates Iris at every turn:
she is guilty of acquiescence to her own subjugation, and Laura’s, at Richard’s hands, and
consequently culpable for her daughter’s suffering and then her granddaughter’s – for both
end up in Winifred’s clutches. As we have seen, Iris defeats Richard when she takes on her
new powerful witch identity, but Winifred survives, biding her time with baneful tenacity
until she recovers her power over Iris and gains custody first of Aimee, and then of Sabrina
when Aimee dies, for “Richard had appointed Winifred as Aimee’s guardian in his will” (BA
626). Sabrina’s absence is a physical pain in the elderly Iris’s life; whenever she thinks of her
“yearning [runs] through [her] like a cramp” (50). In this affliction, Iris, as fairy-tale wicked
witch, is punished for her transgressions.
The end of the novel is not, however, entirely bleak. Sharon Wilson comments,
“Contrary to most critical assessments, Atwood’s often unrecognized fairy-tale intertexts
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usually offer hope” (Fairy-Tale Sexual Politics 34). While Iris never defeats her, Winifred
dies the year before Iris, and Sabrina has long since severed contact with her great aunt. If
Sabrina is indeed the enabler of the publication of Iris’s memoirs, then Iris’s retaliation
against the Griffens has brought her – albeit posthumously – justice, and hope has been
offered to Sabrina:
Since Laura is no longer who you thought she was, you’re no longer who you
think you are either. That can be a shock but it can also be a relief. For
instance, you’re no relation at all to Winifred and none to Richard. There’s not
a speck of Griffen in you at all: your hands are clean on that score. Your real
grandfather was Alex Thomas.
. . . Your legacy from him is the realm of infinite speculation. You’re free to
invent yourself at will. (BA 627)
These words, which preface the epilogue section of the novel, speak to more than just
Sabrina. Atwood has credited her discovery that she was not who she thought she was with
her decision to become a writer (Negotiating 36); she also shows us that the female-writer-aswitch is not what we think she is. That identity was male constructed, and in this novel, the
Griffens embodied that particular construct – which is fitting, considering their allusive
monster precedents. But Atwood has demonstrated that “there is not a speck of Griffen” in the
transformed identity that women writers have taken on; their witch offers the example of “an
archetypal female of tremendous power”, one whose “‘negative’ depths of the feminine begin
to disclose unguessed benefits for the modern woman” (Ulanov and Ulanov 31; 32). In
Atwood’s talented hands (“clean on that score”) (BA 627) as in the hands of the many gifted
women writers of the twentieth century, women can be “the hand that will set things down”
(BA 631) and literature can continue to be a “realm of infinite speculation” (BA 627).
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Chapter Five
In Conclusion
The witch figure emerges as a major factor in the allure of literature as a forum for
examining the most existential issues. For women, her multileveled, rich ambivalent essence
speaks of possibilities perhaps yet unexplored on the journey of personal enlightenment. If the
witch, so clearly and unambiguously negative, can be transformed by female writers into a
locus of power and independence, then surely a real woman may also escape the constraints of
identity society has imposed upon her – it seems a much less daunting enterprise than making
a witch a figure of approbation!
In my discussion, I have attempted to illuminate the ubiquity of the witch stereotype in
modern female writing by focusing on three distinct loci of expression: theory, poetry and the
novel. I have utilized one woman writer in each field who has been publicly acknowledged as
both successful and talented, critically and popularly. I have extrapolated from their creative,
lucid and significant work with the witch stereotype a theory of identity that can be both
specific and far-reaching. The witch is a trope familiar to all, young and old, female and male,
which allows for an eloquent expression of identity to be applied to her existence. She crosses
gender and cultural boundaries with the fluidity her patriarchally-defined character
encompasses. As once the witch persecutors accused her of any and every possible atrocity
and blamed her for the calamity of the moment, so the modern female author endows her with
mutable characteristics that are not only evil or transgressive, but a combination of all the
elements that make us human, returning her to the realm of the real.
Jung's theories on archetypes and the unconscious lend credence to this unabashedly
feminist project, and by “feminist” I intend no more than the recognition that women are as
human and worthy as men to participate fully in life. To be allowed to exist not, as Simone de
Beauvoir pointed out, “defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with
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reference to her” (xvi), but to be equally, not subserviently human, with all that implies. Jung
posits that there is a deeper level of unconsciousness than the personal one Freud investigated,
that is, a cultural unconscious that is expressed in religion, myth and fairy-tale. It is here he
locates the archetypal image of the anima, including the witch, defining her in terms of
feminine individuation wherever myths deal with the feminine in any way. Jung, of course,
investigated the feminine in relation to its significance for a healthy functioning male identity,
but, as we have seen, female theorists and writers appropriated the theory to deconstruct it and
interpret the implications for feminine identity. Ann Ulanov, for example, sees our fascination
with witches as revealing elements in ourselves that she identifies as: “a cluster of images,
emotional and behavioral potentialities of response that operate unconsciously . . . well
beyond the immediate control of ego consciousness” (in Holbrook 157). These ideas help
establish the infrastructure for the manipulation of the witch identity by the writers I have
investigated, a project that has transformed the negative stereotype into something else, that
is, if not entirely positive, certainly much more human.
“The nature of patriarchal thought . . . is Medusa-like in its reifications” (Robertson
139). Women have been petrified by the gaze of the father, in both senses of the word, as
Cixous well knew when she wrote “The Laugh of the Medusa” and laughter is a subversive
and powerful weapon of defiance; one has only to think of another stereotypical trait of a
witch – her evil cackle – to make the connection. By appropriating for their own purposes
preconceived concepts and expectations that are the legacy of traditional discourses, women
writers expand the prevailing literary boundaries as well as the identities typically immured
therein. One of the attractions that the witch offers, I believe, is her protean suitability to both
female author and female character as inherent in her archetypal position as symbol of
feminine malfeasance. The act of writing has a respected history of being a transgressive act
for women; in writing about women who are villains the contravention is simultaneously
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compounded and strengthened. Nancy Walker reminds us that one of the ways female writers
transform the accepted norms of literary history is to resist the male-defined female
experience by creating their own gendered constructions through a text that “questions the
singularity and ownership of certain themes, plots, tropes, and narrative strategies. Such
revisions are a way not only of subverting the traditional text, but also of laying claim to it,
entering into dialogue with it on an equal plane” (5). Using the witch trope allows for the
writer’s entry into each of these literary when she is humanized she can then defend herself as
such – evil cackle and all. The act of writing is in itself a breaking of the silence inherent in
the lives of women who have been, historically, kept at a distance from the power of
language. Female writing refuses the silence, resisting the message that “[i]f you want to be
good at anything . . .you will have to sacrifice your femininity. If you want to be female,
you’ll have to have your tongue removed, like the Little Mermaid” (Atwood, Second Words
225).
Margaret Atwood is an exemplar in her construction of the witch stereotype as both an
agent of empowerment in the depiction of a character and in its self-conscious mirroring of
the woman writer. As my investigation has disclosed, Atwood uses language that summons
witch images, and this is no less true of Elaine’s narrative in her 1988 novel, Cat’s Eye, than
in The Robber Bride or The Blind Assassin. Cat’s Eye chronicles a dangerously sadomasochistic childhood relationship Elaine, the painter (artist/writer) protagonist has with her
three “friends,” of whom Cordelia is the most malicious. In one of the early, chilling “games”
that Cordelia devises for Elaine, she is buried in a hole in Cordelia’s backyard, impersonating
Mary Queen of Scots “wearing a black dress and cloak” (Cat’s Eye 112). This foreshadows
the black dress that Elaine wears to the opening of the retrospective exhibition of her
paintings, which is the reason she has returned to Toronto; she wanted another color but
finally, she “ended up with black after all
. . .it looks much the same as all the other black
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dresses I’ve ever owned . . . I will come as I am” (426). That “as she is” is a witch is
supported, beyond the fact that black is the witch’s color of choice, by Atwood’s choice of
language: “There’s too much loose malice blowing around” (409) is how Elaine describes
modern city life, and her description of the refreshment table at the art gallery opening is
equally portentous, as she tells us the grapes are “sulfur-drenched” and “plumped with blood”
(425). In Elaine’s view of “the female community as a site of possible oppression” (Bouson
182), Atwood recreates the community of women in early modern times where women were
as active in witch accusation as the men. The anxiety of being female in that ominous milieu
is echoed by Elaine, whose sense of otherness identifies her as the witch, right down to her
reference to being burned at the stake: “I avoid gatherings of women, walking as I do in fear
of being sanctified, or else burned at the stake. I think they are talking about me behind my
back. They make me more nervous than ever, because they have a certain way they want me
to be and I am not that way” (CE 401). Elaine also belongs to another “gathering of women”
– that of the female artist, where, as witches, they all use “dangerous language,” either
artists’ images or writers’ words.But this community has been empowered, recognized by the
community as talented and successful and worthy of public approbation. Wearing a black
dress to the opening of her one-woman show links Elaine to the subordinate negative witch
stereotype while she is occupying a position of esteem within the masculine social structure.
In this we can see how Elaine, among other artistic characters Atwood has written, is, in fact,
a double for Atwood – a role she fulfils in any event as the narrative voice of the novel.
The complexity of female identify has generated volumes of feminist theory, study,
fiction, criticism and meta-criticism in the past three decades.72 Atwood’s most memorable
characters reify that complexity. “If I create a female character,” Atwood has written, “I
would like to be able to show her having the emotions all human beings have – hate, envy,
spite, lust, anger and fear, as well as love, compassion, tolerance and joy – without having her
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pronounced a monster, a slur or a bad example” (“The Curse of Eve” 227). The act of creating
such characters – Cixous’ écriture féminine – is an art that Atwood has not only engaged and
excelled in but written about.
Anne Sexton, too, as we have seen, grappled with these same issues of creating a
whole human female in opposition to the muted female monster/writer. In her poetry the
recurring witch motifs were an expression of Sexton’s writing monster. She was writing at the
time Alice Ostriker observed that “to be a woman and a creator rather than merely a
procreator is to be uncontrolled and so to doom oneself – if a thinking woman internalizes
some of the most powerful images of our culture – to monstrosity” (74). For Sexton that
monstrosity metamorphosed into her witch identity, one that allowed her to acknowledge
the monster the author fears she is or secretly craves to be against the angel she
wishes to be or to appear. Among contemporary women poets, fascination with
deformity seems also to capture a sense –guilty or gloating, defensive or
aggressive – of unacceptable personal power: nature gone haywire, unregulated
and therefore horrible. . . . There is however the striking difference that the
misshapenness, which in earlier women’s writing is projected onto a
doppelganger and punished or killed, is now disconcerting but unsubdued
(Ostriker 74).
Sexton did not subdue her witch self; rather, she embraced “her kind” and named her writer:
Here,
all along,
thinking I was a killer,
anointing myself daily
with my little poisons.
But no.
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I'm an empress.
I wear an apron.
My typewriter writes. (169, 1-9)
...
So I won't hang around in my hospital shift,
repeating The Black Mass and all of it.
I say Live, Live because of the sun,
the dream, the excitable gift. (170, 7-10) (Complete Poems 167-70)
Molly Hite reminds us that the “issues of gendered otherness and of how this otherness
is construed by the surrounding culture are repeatedly raised within women’s experimental
writings in the twentieth century” (8). The challenge was then, and remains still, to present “
‘the other side, the woman’s side’ without accepting a masculinist definition of what this
‘side’ consists of” (11). It has become clear to me that the image of the witch, as many
modern female writers have presented her, is an unreserved expression of the woman’s side
far removed the cultural/masculine definition. Taking their cue from Hélène Cixous, female
writers of all genres have preempted the stereotypical witch identity, have embraced her
otherness and her laughter, have raised her consciousness and empowered her, and enriched
her fundamental nature to acknowledge and reject what is traditionally delimited as negative
in the feminine. Our culture is saturated with the essence of the witch: characters in popular
children’s books, in television programs, both comic and serious, in novels for adults and in
poetry, all proudly declare they are “her kind” – and yet she has not lost her “whiff of
brimstone.”73 For as Jung has explicated, the witch as archetype is inherently integrated into
our unconscious gendered psychological development, and she lives with us and within us as
“a spontaneous production of the unconscious” (Spring 5).
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This imaginative strategy creates an inherent critique of the cultural images it literally
describes, which I have pointed out in my discussion, and the witch becomes a vehicle for
both expressing and criticizing a woman’s acknowledged role in the perpetuation of the
stereotype. Women writers must manipulate the language that had long been denied as a
legitimate forum for their expression. This is an intrinsic element of the subversive narrative
strategies Cixous championed, and Sexton and Atwood, among other twentieth century
women authors, employ it in their texts to reflect their vision of the possibilities of female
identity. By employing the “retrieval and recuperation of the marginal and the buried”, these
prominently representative female writers are “undermining the canonized forms and . . .
implicit[ly] fracturing the universal literal subject” (Waugh 5). Because the universal subject
has traditionally been male, undermining it efficaciously is best enacted by exposing the error
of the accepted masculine tropes of femininity; by confiscating the masculine stereotypes and
re-presenting them through female perspectives. In this way, the writers themselves are
witches, transgressing against the defined canons, which are historically masculine. The witch
figure is a metaphor, then, of the female writer’s voice in a traditionally male world, just as in
history she was a woman who tried to usurp a man’s power. My investigation into the witchas-female-author has yielded a plenitude of strategies enabling women writers to survive in a
male-proscribed world. As Atwood protested, “When a man is attacked in print, it’s usually
for saying what he says; when a woman is attacked in print, it is often for being who she is”
(“Witches” 331).
In answer to Freud’s enduring confusion regarding what women want, modern female
authors have shown how women can be recognized as complete and complex human beings,
with all the rights and responsibilities that entails, as equal but different to men. This most
basic human desire is articulated through the complex, fascinating female characters these
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modern women create. Their agenda is, as Atwood so deftly put it, “to take the capital W off
Woman” (“The Curse of Eve” 227) because evil women
are necessary in story traditions for two . . . obvious reasons, of course. First,
they exist in life, so why shouldn't they exist in literature? Second –which may
be another way of saying the same thing – women have more to them than
virtue. They are fully dimensional human beings; they too have subterranean
depths; why shouldn't their many-dimensionality be given literary expression?
(“Spotty-Handed Villainesses”).
When Nancy Walker discusses the narrative strategy of confiscating male texts for
female expression, she shows how, for example, when “writers . . . retell the genesis story of
Adam and Eve, they need not name the central characters, so familiar are the outlines of the
story; yet this very familiarity ensures that the biblical account will resonate with the revision
as two possible versions of the story, neither possessing sole authority” (Disobedient Writer 67). Employing the witch is a similar strategy due to her cultural ubiquity. Female revisionists
in Walker’s meaning of the term are not interested in replacing the authoritative version with
their narratives but rather in opening the possibility for an-other account to be taken into
consideration – the female’s, formerly nonexistent, as opposed to the male’s, culturally
approved. This unswervingly follows Cixous’ declared purpose and motive for women’s
writing –i.e. her expression, herstory– and sanctions both an endorsement and a questioning
of the traditional ideas, as the two versions echo each other.
Fortunately, talented writers like those whose texts have been investigated here keep
us from being narrowly confined by the stereotype of the witch, but rather provide the means
for readers of both sexes to appreciate everything the witch has had to offer us in the past, and
seems to be continuing to do so into this new millennium. It is worth our while to appreciate
the witch, for “she invades the civilized community. She enters it. She changes it. . . .[she]
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stands for a radical mixing of human categories to make new forms. Although she is
represented in primitive, undifferentiated expressions, the witch in fact symbolizes the taking
of known parts in our world and mixing them with unknown parts to arrive at new results”
(Ulanov and Ulanov 44). These writers have repossessed the negative historical paradigm of
the female and reconstructed her into a modern manifestation of a witch – still a woman, but
one who is unreservedly human.
Endnotes
Chapter One
1
Hugh Trevor-Roper, Jonathon Barry, Keith Thomas, Anne Barstow and Robin Briggs are
just a few of the prominent names among the historiographers of the witch persecutions of the
15th and 16th centuries. Their approaches and conclusions may differ, but there seems to be no
argument about the prevalence of witch beliefs before the Middle Ages, when the Church first
stepped into the fray and began to see heresy in those convictions.
2
She includes in her discussion works by Dickens, Thackeray, the Brontes, and George Eliot,
among others.
3
The reference is of course to Samuel Richardson’s Pamela: Virtue Rewarded. Pamela’s
reward was, naturally, marriage to the master who had formerly pursued her in order to “have
his way” with her. But even with another agenda – at the end of the book, he wrote that his
“brief observations” will serve “the YOUTH of BOTH SEXES” and then proceeded to
explain how everyone should behave (278) – it is significant that Richardson allows writing
to be the catalyst for Pamela’s reward, inasmuch as in her letters Pamela was able to contest
Mr. B.’s version (control) of events, and through those letters he comes to realize her virtue,
and, eventually, to marry her.
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4
This particular concrete expression of the female as “other” presents itself in Jung’s
phychological theory as well. He wrote, “What is not-I, not masculine, is most probably
feminine, and because the not-I is felt as not belonging to me and therefore as outside me, the
anima image is usually projected upon women” (27; emphasis added). The not-I in these
examples from Dickens denote “not-English” at a time when being English was synonymous
with all that could be considered desirable in culture and society.
5
As are Lilith, the first “recorded” witch, and Pandora, in the Greek tradition.
6
All of Sexton's single volumes of poetry are reproduced in The Complete Poems; Live or
Die pp.93-170 and Transformations pp. 221-295.
7
Atwood won the Booker Prize for the year 2000, and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize
for her novel The Blind Assassin. The Booker Prize is awarded for the best full-length novel
written in English by a citizen of the UK, the Commonwealth, Ireland or South Africa. The
Booker Prize is sponsored by Booker PLC.
8
Oryx and Crake (2003) is Atwood’s latest novel, a futuristic apocalyptic adventure story
whose protagonist is male.
9
Some texts in poststructuralist feminine thought published in the last decade or so, which
lately have tended toward considerations of ethics as they pertain to the status of women,
include Sandra Bartky’s collection of essays Femininity and Domination: Studies in the
Phenomenology of Oppression (Routledge, 1990); Rosemarie Tong’s Feminist Thought: A
More Comprehensive Introduction. (Westview Press, 1998); Ann Garry and Marilyn
Pearsall’s second edition of Women, Knowledge, and Reality: Explorations in Feminist
Philosophy, (Routledge, 1996) “like the first, focuses on the areas of feminist philosophy
outside of value theory” (Stark 54); and Joan Callahan, whose work is primarily in the areas
of practical ethics, moral theory, and feminism, has edited Reproduction, Ethics, and the Law:
Feminist Perspectives (University of Indiana Press, 1995).
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Chapter Two
10
See Chapter one, The Image of Woman as Witch in Selected Novels by Fay Weldon and
Margaret Atwood, my MA thesis, University of Haifa, 2000 for a detailed description of the
manner in which this assumption came into existence.
11
The biographical information on Hélène Cixous was taken from The University of
Iowa’s English department website <http://www.uiowa.edu/~ddrhet/crs/cixous/cixous.htm>
and a biography of Cixous by Vera Andermatt Conley excerpted from Sartori and
Zimmerman's French Women Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Source Book. New York:
Greenwood Press, 1991, 66-73. <http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/cixous/conley.html>.
12
This, according to The John Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism, was in the
middle 1970s when Cixous, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, and Catherine Clément, among
others, began reading texts in the particular contexts of women's experience. This theorizing,
pursued in the politicized French atmosphere during deconstruction and the “cultural
revolution”, prompted questions about how "writing" deploys power, how to read a feminine
(nonpatriarchal) text, and, with even greater urgency, what the "feminine" is. (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. Pages 162-164).
13
I have chosen to use Bullfinch’s version of the medusa legend because it is his that has
become popularized and is probably the most familiar. However, many versions and
interpretations of her story exist; see, for example, Robert Graves’ The Greek Myths (New
York: Penguin, 1957), Ovid’s Metamorphoses, (Capetown : Juta 1933); The Meddling Gods
by Hazel E Barnes (Lincoln: U of Nebraska Press, 1974) 1-51; Monuments and Maidens by
Marina Warner (New York: Atheneum, 1985)108-14.
14
The following is a description of the Medusa Rondanini found on the “Goddess Athena”
website under a photo of the sculpture. “The Gorgon Medusa head, for the first time here
shown as a beautiful woman, with wings in her hair and snakes around her face. The style is
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Classical or classicising. If the former, it might be associated with an Athena-aegis on one of
the great statues, or the centerpiece of her shield, but other copies of these heads have her still
semi-grotesque; if the latter, it might be from a gilt aegis dedicated on the Acropolis in about
200, but the type is always treated as head alone, not on an aegis. Scholars of style tend now
to place it in the 4th cent BCE. Copy of an original of about 440 (?) BCE, Height 0.39 m
Munich, Glyptotek 252”.
<http://www.goddess-athena.org/Museum/Sculptures/Alone/Medusa_Rondanini_x.htm>.
15
Anne Sexton’s life is just one example of how this form of “learned” female misogyny can
have a negative impact even on women who seem to have succeeded in transcending such
stereotypes. Cixous recognized the strength of such culturally sanctioned identity restrictions.
16
The suggestion of death bestowing power upon a woman whose position is fragile and
inferior in her lifetime is one taken up by a number of female writers of the latter half of the
twentieth century (for example, Fay Weldon in her 1976 novel Remember Me), and I will
return to this concept in a later chapter.
17
As it is meant to do, art in this case can be seen to imitate life, where powerful women in
the public eye are exposed to censure and cannot assume that there will be a support base for
them among other women. In fact, Julia Walker’s opinion is that Hilary Clinton’s lack of
popularity in her term as First Lady is directly related to the cultural construction of what
defines a female “monster”: “[W]e have only to look a the press clippings of Hilary Rodham
Clinton to see how our society reacts to a beautiful, powerful, aggressive woman who has
influence, sexual or otherwise, over an even more powerful man” (117-8).
18
This is the source of the Staff of Asclepius, the symbol of the medical profession, according
to the Orientalist A. Jirku (Biedermann 20).
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19
It is interesting to note that the snake, such an obvious (since Freud) phallic symbol, shares
so many of the dual characteristics associated with the feminine. Atwood aptly uses the
adjective “reptilian” when describing Winifred Prior in The Blind Assassin (282; 619).
Chapter Three
20
See Lotte Motz’s “The Winter Goddess: Percht, Holda, and Related Figures.”
Folklore 95:2 (1984) pp. 151-166 and Chapters 21 and 22 "The Language of Hair" in Marina
Warner’s From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales andTheir Tellers for a comprehensive
discussion on this issue.
21
This poem, and all other Sexton poems quoted in this document, taken from The Complete
Poems by Anne Sexton, published by Houghton Mifflin Company. Copyright © 1981 by
Linda Gray Sexton.
22
Sexton’s family had difficulty in accepting that she could attend poetry class but not take
care of her children. Her father-in-law wrote to her psychiatrist that he believed she was
“playing us all for a bunch of suckers”and that the time had come to “get tough with her”
(Sexton and Ames 73). However, it was evident that Sexton’s illness was a true impediment
to her daily functioning, whereas her writing kept her “sane.”
23
Of course, other explanations are possible. For example, Geoffrey Scarre explains that
benevolent sorcerers were prevalent in many communities in Europe and England, and
“would, for a fee, attempt the magical curing of diseases, counter malign sorcery, identify
one’s enemies, foretell the future, and locate treasure or lost property. It is likely that such
practitioners of white witchcraft satisfied their clients by purely non-occult means, though to
attract custom they may have deliberately cultivated an air of personal mystique” (5). Those
living in proximity to such a witch or wizard would naturally fear their powers. Obviously, if
a white witch can offset malfeasance through the occult, what is to prevent her from using her
powers for doing harm? Yet again, Sexton certainly “cultivated an air of personal mystique”.
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24
True to her rebellious form, this response moved Sexton to write another poem “For John,
Who Begs Me Not to Inquire Further” which she included in Bedlam (Sexton and Ames
101).
25
Sexton always expected to be a homemaker and mother; why would she not? At age
eighteen she announced her engagement to a man about whom little is known, but when
arrangements were being made for the same elaborate type of weddings her sisters had had,
she met Alfred Muller (Kayo) Sexton II. After three months, she suspected she was pregnant;
her mother suggested they elope to North Carolina, where marriage was legal from age
eighteen. And although it became clear that she was not pregnant, Anne Harvey married Kayo
Sexton in North Carolina when she was nineteen ( See chapter 2 of Diane Middleton’s Anne
Sexton, “Romance and Marriage” 17-30.)
26
After the birth of her second daughter Joy, Sexton suffered more intense anxiety and
depression than before. Middleton writes that “looking after [her children] in their infancy
brought [Sexton] to the brink of madness” (31), and it became clear that she was too ill to take
care of them properly. Linda, aged 3, went to live with Sexton’s sister Blanche, and the baby
with her paternal grandmother, where she stayed for 3 years. (Middleton 31-33).
27
During her 1968 interview with Barbara Kelves, Sexton commented that she needed “my
husband and my therapist and my children to tell me who I am” (Colburn 98).
28
It is commonly accepted that the Church encouraged the image of a witch dangerous to male
potency and survival as a way to cope with the perceived threat in the popular beliefs in
magic. The two extremist Dominicans, Kramer and Sprenger, who wrote the Malleus
Maleficarum in 1486 as a handbook for procedures against witches, are credited with
institutionalizing witch- hunts, as discussed in the first chapter.
29
In the “Laugh of the Medusa” Cixous refers to female misogyny “as the greatest crime
against women” that “men have committed” (248). The word itself comes to us from the
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Greek: “misos” meaning hatred and “gynē”, woman, and was first used, according to the
Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary, to describe hatred of women circa 1625.
30
In an intriguing historical novel, Circles of Stone, author and human sexuality educator,
Joan Dahr Lambert offers a prehistoric scenario that contradicts this ancient “truth”,
demonstrating through her fiction how Greek beliefs in male superiority were not always
dominant. She presents the story of three wise women, each called Zena, living thousands of
generations apart. This prehistoric world worships “the Mother”, giver and controller of all
life and death; each “Zena” is able to commune with the Mother and, because of this special
knowledge, is the leader of her tribe. She introduces the following premise into her plot:
before humans developed into Homo sapiens, women and men mated without forming a
single attachment as a “couple”. The Zena of this era – “between 500-200 thousand years
ago” (121) – has a revelation about how children are conceived because her son has the same
unusually colored eyes as the only male with whom she has mated. However, she is filled
with a dark instinctive horror at the moment of revelation. The lifestyle of this tribe is idyllic,
based on trust, mutual support and assistance. The “secret” of procreation is kept to the wise
women in order to prevent men speaking of “a child as theirs … [and take] the Mother’s
power for themselves” (452). The implication in the novel is that the transition to male power
and superiority was based on violence, that humans lived harmoniously when matriarchs
ruled, and that the fears “the Mother” imparted to the wise women should the knowledge of
“males and mating” become common knowledge, came to pass. The novel was written from a
solid base of anthropological research and this accounts, I believe, for the coherence of the
intriguing line of reasoning Lambert weaves into her narrative. This conceit is congruent with
modern popular belief that men are the source of violence in the world.
31
In his thorough, dated, yet slightly prescient work The Dangerous Sex (1964) H.R. Hays
comments that women have never been regarded as “female men” (7) it being understood that
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this would be the optimal identification. The ubiquitous male response throughout history has
been to negate, denigrate and subjugate non-men, acceptable in a more primitive time, but
difficult to justify in modern western culture. This proves to Hays that “human beings are still
primitives disguised in the mask of modern technology” (14). Witches ironically were
persecuted throughout the era of the “witchcraze” of the Middle Ages for their perceived
infiltration of male territory. This type of “aberration” can be applied to Sexton’s writing.
32
Once again the stereotype stretches from ancient Greece to the Middle Ages. An
examination of the Malleus Maleficarum reveals that its focus was the sexual hazard to men
from the witch predators – six out of seven chapters deal with sex. The monks offered this
explanation for this emphasis: “But if it be asked why the devil is allowed to cast spells upon
the venereal act, rather than upon any other human act … the power of the devil lies in the
privy parts of men (Kramer and Sprenger, Part I Question III, Continued, the Unabridged
Online Republication of the 1928 edition). The blame is laid upon women, as witches, the
devil’s agents, a non-sequitur that seemed most reasonable to the celibate minds of these early
modern clerics, whose writings seem a direct legacy from Aristotle’s.
33
It is interesting to note the analogous comments made by critics discussing the work of
female poets in the mid twentieth century. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar point this out in
their introduction to Shakespeare’s Sisters (1979), Margaret Atwood has observed that being
a female seems always to be an issue when male critics analyse female writers’ work, yet the
opposite does not hold true (Second Words 1980).
And in Alicia Ostriker ‘s introduction to Stealing the Language she quotes Theodore
Roethke’s description of the “typical deficiencies” of the female poet: “the spinning out; the
embroidering of trivial themes; a concern with the mere surfaces of life–that special province
of the feminine talent in prose . . . carrying on excessively against Fate, about time; lamenting
145
the lot of women; caterwauling, writing the same poem about fifty times, and so on” (2). Plus
ça change…
34
“Subject” is meant here in the “Enlightened” sense of the term; i.e. a citizen with rights.
The Greek definition of “citizen” also precluded women (together with slaves and aliens).
35
Barker points out that in a little-known story by Louisa May Alcott, “Psyche’s Art”, written
the same year as Little Women and in part a prototype for the competitive relationship
between Jo and Amy in that book, Alcott uses “images of disease and deformity to describe
women’s artistic endeavors” and this “disease –‘artistic fever’. . .perverts the ‘natural’ course
of motherhood”. Barker sees in this imagery a “strong parallel to the logic of the witch trials
which were part of the history of Alcott’ s own state of Massachusetts” (113). This is because
the female sphere of responsibility was often the catalyst in witchcraft accusations. “An
inability to conceive or to carry a fetus to term was quite likely to be blamed on witchcraft,
perhaps in part because it was such a standard reason for seeking help from counter magic”
(Briggs 270). Alcott finally depicts the “maniacs” in “Psyche’s Art” as harmless “and it is
hoped they will come to their senses” (Barker 114). This acceptable resolution of the tension
between artistic ability and female responsibility does not detract from the fact of Alcott’s
engaging the issue; furthermore, it may have been the first step along a different path for
Alcott’s own art. A later novel, Diana and Persis, offers a “ realistic vision of art and
motherhood as compatible” which Barker calls “unprecedented” (119).
36
Here we see Sexton grappling with issues that engaged Louisa May Alcott over a century
earlier. Their methods and options are vastly dissimilar, but the affinity of their quest remains.
37
Dorothy Dinnerstein proposed that until men truly share the burden of nurturing they will
never be able to answer Freud’s famous question: “What do women want?” In addition,
feminist theologian Valerie Goldstein wrote that, while theology has encouraged men to root
out the sin of pride, women need to be encouraged to love themselves. (Capo 32-33.)
146
38
The etymology of archetype is Greek, archetypos: “a type”. ( Archi means a beginning or
first instance, and typos, a stamp.)
39
For a comprehensive discussion of the pros and cons among feminists vis-à-vis Jungian
archetypal theory, see the first chapter of Aguiar’s The Bitch is Back: Wicked Women in
Literature.
40
This term is used by Erich Neumann in his canonic work The Great Mother to clarify
the duality of the mother image. “ Just as world, life, nature and soul have been
experienced as a generative and nourishing, protecting and warming Femininity, so their
opposites are also perceived in the image of the Feminine; death and destruction, danger
and distress, hunger and nakedness, appear as helplessness in the presence of the Dark
and terrible Mother. Thus the womb of the earth becomes the deadly devouring maw of
the underworld . . . For this woman who generates life and all living things on earth is the
same who takes them back into herself . . . disease, hunger, war above all, are her helpers,
and among all peoples the goddesses of war and the hunt express man’s experience of
life as a female exacting blood. This Terrible Mother is the hungry earth that devours its
own children and fattens in their corpses” (149).
41
By “wider” accusations, I mean those other than Sexton’s own. She was constantly
mutinous toward her mother-in-law, who was concerned for the welfare of the children, and
with good reason. Her biographer, Middlebrook, writes that “Sexton’s illness had been
extremely hard on Linda and Joy. Linda recalled being told by Billie [her grandmother] from
a young age that she must be very careful of her mother’s feelings and never do anything that
might unbalance her and make her sick. … Even at eight and six years old, the children felt
enormously responsible for Anne’s well-being” (153). Sexton, however, complained to her
psychiatrist that her mother-in-law “is going to be crying over those poor kids whose mother
has left and doesn’t care about them; they aren’t being loved … I don’t want to be selfish but
147
there’s no way to stop her – she’s like a tide that comes in a little more each day” (152-3).
This incident occurred because of her growing renown and success brought about by her
inclusion in a 1961 Newsweek article entitled “Women of Talent”, with photograph.
Middlebrook calls this conflict “one of the major difficulties of [Sexton’s] daily life: the
amount of authority she had delegated to her mother-in-law” (152). These conflicts
reappeared in the poems, personified by various witches.
42
“The narrative [of the poem] incorporates many factual details about the period [in Sexton’s
life] between July 1956, when Joy was sent to live with Billie [Sexton] and November 1958
. . .” when Sexton brought Joy home. “It reports that Sexton was hospitalized, attempted
suicide, recuperated in her parents’ home; that her mother was diagnosed and treated for
breast cancer and blamed Sexton for the illness; that Sexton attempted suicide a second time”
(Middlebrook 85).
43
This quotation, and any other tales quoted in this text, is taken from The Complete Fairy
tales of the Brothers Grimm, translated and introduced by Jack Zipes (New York / Toronto /
London : Bantam Books, paperback edition, 1992).
44
In the original tale, not the Disney version, the queen, referred to as “the evil woman,” is
invited to Snow White’s wedding. “Iron slippers had already been heated over a fire, and they
were brought over to her with tongs. Finally, she had to put on the red-hot slippers and dance
until she fell down dead” (Grimm 204).
45
Lederer refers to the age of witch persecution as “a fairly recent recrudescence” of the
pagan belief that witches eat children; in our time, the television series The Simpsons reflected
the durability of this belief in a Halloween special that portrayed Marge and her sisters as
witches who wanted to eat the children (“Treehouse of Horror VIII”. Written by Mike Scully,
David S. Cohen and Ned Goldreyer. Directed by Mark Kirkland. Original Airdate on FOX:
Oct. 26, 1997; Capsule Revision B, May 21, 2000).
148
46
Jack Zipes and other Grimms’ researchers have commented on the idealistic image of the
mother the Grimm brothers had, and assume that changes made in the tales that substituted
stepmothers for mothers have their root in this relationship.
47
In her foreword to The Complete Poems, Maxine Kumin quotes several scathing responses
by male peers, critics and, in Lowell’s case, mentor.
48
The Robber Bride. London: Virago Press, Ltd., 1994. All quotations from the novel will be
taken from this edition, and from here on referred to as RB.
49
It is interesting to note how often Medusa recurs in discussions of evil femininity. Helene
Cixous cannily chose Medusa as her symbol for female transformation of the act of writing
(“The Laugh of the Medusa” 1976). She appeals to our desire to reject male-defined negative
stereotypes while retaining their power for our own purposes, as discussed in the “Medusa”
chapter of this work. And, as evidenced in this quote, Atwood is also unwilling to give up
Medusa’s “bad behavior” in favor of a more affirmative identity.
50
Keith Thomas gives us the legal definition of a scold: “ troublesome and angry woman who
by brawling and wrangling amongst her neighbours breaks the public peace, increases discord
and becomes a public nuisance to the neighbourhood”(528). It was up to the judges to
pronounce whether a woman was indeed a scold. Frequently, a disgruntled husband was
bringing his wife to court. A convicted “scold” might be sentenced to wear the brank. “These
devices, which existed in a vast profusion of fantastical and sometimes downright artistic
styles from about 1500 to 1800, were used to punish those who, by their words, had
transgressed against prevailing conventions, against the arrogance of the male power
structure, or against the state of things in general. . . .The overwhelming majority of victims
were. . .women, and the operative principle was mulier taceat in ecclesia, ‘Let the woman be
silent in church’, “church” here meaning the ruling ecclesiastical and secular hierarchies, both
constitutionally gynaecophobic; the sense was thus ‘Let the woman be silent in the presence
149
of the male’” (“Branks or Scold’s Bridle”
<http://www.houseofdesade.org/torture/branks.htm>). First used in late medieval Scotland,
the brank – variously called the scold's bridle, or witch's bridle – had many different
appearances. Fundamentally, it was the same: a metal cage for the head with a built-in gag.
Some branks were very cruel pieces of work, with spikes that pierced the tongue. Some
simply had a bell built in, a device that would further humiliate the "scold" who wore it
through the streets, where she would be subjected to the taunting and jeering, or even
beatings, of the crowds that gathered to witness the spectacle. Branks were first seen in
Edinburgh in 1567, and in Glasgow in 1574. They appeared as far south as Surrey by 1632.
The Surrey bridle was inscribed: “Chester presentes Walton with a bridle, To curb women's
tongues that talk too idle” (Farrington 30).
51
Atwood’s speeches and interviews are sprinkled with anecdotes of the unfavorable
responses to her chosen field she received, both publicly and privately. In 1976 she wrote an
article entitled “On Being a ‘Woman Writer’: Paradoxes and Dilemmas” in which she
explains, “Most writers old enough to have a career of any length behind them grew up when
it was still assumed that a woman’s place was in the home and nowhere else, and that anyone
who took time off for an individual selfish activity like writing was either neurotic or wicked
or both” (Second Words 191). She later comments that “if a woman writer happens to be
good, she should be deprived of her identity as a female and provided with a higher (male)
status [as in “she writes like a man,” as Sexton so fervently desired to achieve]. . . . In other
words, there is no critical vocabulary for expressing the concept good/female” (198). A
particulary rich source of these references is found in her 2002 essay collection, Negotiating
With the Dead . While still in her teens, her announcement that she was going to be a writer
evoked “dismay” from her parents, who “bit their tongues . . .and made oblique suggestions
about the necessity of having a paying job.” One of her mother’s friends was more optimistic:
150
“ ‘That’s nice dear,’ she said, ‘because at least you’ll be able to do it at home.’” (Negotiating
15). She relates how she published in campus literary magazines using her initials because she
“didn’t want anyone important to know [she] was a girl” (21). She tells us that she “can still
hear the sneer in the tone of the Parisian intellectual” who asked her “ ‘Is it true you write the
bestsellers?’ [original emphasis] ‘Not on purpose,’ I replied” (68). She comments on the
expectations that women artists were expected to meet, an image that she calls “a sort of halfdead nun. . . .You couldn’t be a wife and mother and also an artist, because each one of these
things required total dedication. . . . Love and marriage pulled one way, Art another, and Art
was a kind of demonic possession . . . . [I]t would destroy you as an ordinary woman” (85).
Atwood has a more positive outlook today, although tempered: “Now it is more possible for a
woman writer to be seen as, well, just that: neither nun nor orgiastic princess, neither more
nor less than human. Nevertheless, the mythology still has power” (90). She then goes on to
give examples of just how the mythology still has power: “For instance, there’s the F-word. If
you’re a woman and a writer, does the combination of gender and vocation automatically
make you a feminist. . .? . . . .And even if you aren’t an F-word feminist in any strict
ideological sense, will nervous critics wallop you over the head for being one, simply because
you exemplify that suspicious character, A Woman Who Writes?” (106-7). Clearly there is a
connection between these two “suspicious characters,” Witch and Writer, not least because
both are Women.
52
This poem appears in the collection True Stories. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1981.
53
Some of the more familiar (because of their fame) women authors who remained single
and/or childless include, in alphabetical order, Louisa May Alcott, Jane Austen, Emily Brontë,
Emily Dickinson, Isak Dinesen, George Eliot, and Virginia Woolf. Furthermore, Atwood has
pointed out that biographies of successful women writers from the nineteenth century
“emphasize their eccentricities and weirdness” and this includes remaining unmarried,
151
detailing: “Jane Austen never got married. Neither did Emily Brontë, who also died young.
George Eliot lived with a man she was not married to and never had any children. Christina
Rossetti ‘looked at life through the wormholes in a shroud.’ Emily Dickinson lived behind
closed doors and was probably nuts. Elizabeth Barrett Browning did manage to squeeze out a
child but did not bring him up properly and indulged in séances” (“Curse of Eve” 225).
54
The Blind Assassin, London: Virago Press, Ltd., 2001. All quotations from the novel will
be taken from this edition and from here on referred to as BA.
55
This is exactly what most dictionaries tell us: “1. A person, esp. a woman, who professes or
is supposed to practice magic, esp. black magic; sorceress . . . 2.Slang. an ugly or malignant
woman; hag.” The Random House College Dictionary. (New York: Random House Inc.
(1975, 1979, 1980). A thesaurus is even more enlightening; to wit: “enchantress, fury, crone,
gorgon, ogress, shrew, harridan”, to list but a few of the definitive possibilities offered. The
Oxford Dictionary and Thesaurus: American Edition. (New York & Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1996).
56
She was “Peggy”. In his 1984 study of Atwood and her work, Jerome Rosenberg refers to
the five-year-old Atwood’s poems as “Peggy Atwood[‘s]” (1).
57
The fact that there are three friends in The Robber Bride is rich with its own significance,
but it is one that lies outside the scope of my topic. However, we can acknowledge the
allusion to the famous three witches in Macbeth, and note that perhaps Atwood’s three
function here as a type of “anti-coven” since Tony, Roz and Charis are not the designated
witches in this tale.
58
In her discussion of the witch archetype, Ulanov identifies the sexual witch as one who
“lures men off their proper course to destruction. She draws men away from relationships
with flesh-and-blood women and into her mind-besotting grasp. Her sexuality enchants and
152
bewitches her victims, exerting on them a sucking undertow” ( Ulanov and Ulanov 29-30).
Zenia assuredly fits this description.
59
This is an often-quoted line from the poem “Strange Meeting” by Wilfred Owen (1833-
1918) a poet recognized for his evocative impressions of a soldier’s experiences in WWI,
fuelled by his own experiences. The line refers to the moment of recognition in Hell where the
narrator meets the enemy soldier who killed him, now also dead. It is convincing for Tony,
the historian, to use this quotation in her private paying of respects to the conquered Zenia,
but more significant than the aptness of the war connotation at this juncture is the emphasis of
the parity between Tony and Zenia, reinforcing yet again the integrality of Zenia in Tony’s
identity.
60
61
The Blind Assassin won the Booker Prize for Fiction in 2000.
Elements of this motif can be found everywhere in Atwood’s prose; The Handmaid's Tale
(1985), Cat's Eye (1989), The Robber Bride (1993), and The Blind Assassin (2000) all
incorporate at their very core the subjugation of female protagonists by other women.
62
According to Thomas Bulfinch, monsters, “in the language of mythology, were beings of
unnatural proportions or parts, usually regarded with terror, as possessing immense strength
and ferocity, which they employed for the injury and annoyance of men. The Griffin is a
monster with the body of a lion, the head and wings of an eagle, and back covered with
feathers. Like birds it builds its nest, and instead of an egg lays an agate therein. It has long
claws and talons.” <http://www.bulfinch.org/fables/bull16.html>.
63
In discussing the lack of humanity in the three principle male characters, Updike mentions
that “[Iris’s] indifference [to Richard] is almost an invitation to abuse” (145). I cannot imagine
that a female reader, critic or otherwise, would see Iris’s indifference as an invitation to abuse;
his comment in this circumstance can be compared to the female victim whose rape is
insinuated to be her own fault as a result of her provocative fashion choices.
153
64
Sarah Aguiar is discussing the male perspective on archetypically negative female character
types here, in this instance Dickens’ Miss Havisham. The complete analysis, by types, can be
found in Chapter Two: “The Male Perspective” in The Bitch is Back (34-56).
65
Quilting also functions in this way, and for the same reasons, but Atwood has specifically
referred to weaving in this context. In Alias Grace Atwood makes rich associative use of the
quilting metaphor vis-à-vis women’s writing.
66
One of the motifs Wilson identified in her analysis of Atwood’s oeuvre as fairy-tale
intertext, Fairy-Tale Sexual Politics (32).
67
Wilson explains that although “intertext” can refer to the dynamics of any text, and building
on the theories of Bakhtin, a text is defined as always in process, she uses a more restricted
meaning of a “bounded” text, that is, one that has been published, within a frame text. (FairyTale Sexual Politics 4-5). I follow her in my use of this definition.
68
J. Brooks Bouson, for example, has identified The Blind Assassin as “an unsettling
cautionary tale that, like Atwood's other novels, focuses attention on the power politics of
gender relations. . . . In pointedly connecting the traumatic sexual sacrifice of the two sisters,
Iris and Laura Chase, to the sacrifice of the virgin in “The Blind Assassin” science fiction tale,
Atwood, through repetitive retellings of the story of women's sexual victimization, probes the
cultural – and historical – repetition of sexual violence against women, showing the link
between institutionalized misogyny and the sexual traumatization of women”
(“Commemoration of Wounds” 251).
69
There was no physical resemblance intended, or needed, for the characters Cordelia, Zenia
and Mary in their functions as doubles in Cat’s Eye (1988), The Robber Bride (1993) and
Alias Grace (1996) respectively.
70
This plot line is a common feature of several classic Grimm fairy-tales, when one or both
parents make various deals with witches or devils, usually disguised, in an attempt to improve
154
the quality of life of the very child they end up sacrificing –“The Girl without Hands,”
“Rapunzel,” and “Rumplestiltskin” are some of the more popular examples of this motif,
which Atwood has echoed with Iris’s marriage to Richard.
71
In correspondence with her editor regarding Auntie Muriel in Life Before Man, quoted in
Wilson, Fairy-Tale Sexual Politics.
Chapter Five
72
There is such a wide variety of defining “feminisms” from the mid twentieth century to the
present postmodern concern of identifying “female” that it would be an exercise in futility to
try and create a definable list. I will mention Elaine Showalter's seminal A Literature of Their
Own with its three-part model of the growth of feminist theory. She defines them briefly thus:
the Feminine, a period beginning with the use of the male pseudonym in the 1840s until 1880
with George Eliot's death; the Feminist, from 1880 till the winning of the vote in 1920; and
the Female, from 1920 till the present-day, including a "new stage of self-awareness about
1960" (12-13), where my own discussion begins.
73
The list of examples is extensive; to offer just a very few of the most popular we can
mention the hour-long adult television series Charmed and the half hour sit-com Tabitha,
novels by such diverse authors as Alice Walker, Fay Weldon, Ursula Le Guin, Alice
Hoffman, John Updike, Roald Dahl and Terry Pratchett as well as poetry by Patricia
Monaghan, Emily Hiestand, May Sarton, Anne Cameron – and Robert Frost.
155
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‫הפיכת פרדיגמות‪ :‬סטריאוטיפ המכשפה בכתיבה הנשית המודרנית‬
‫תקציר‬
‫כשם שהספרות מבטאת את החיים בתקופתה‪ ,‬כך עיצוב הדיוקן האנושי הבדוי‪,‬‬
‫משקף ומדגים את ציפיות החברה וציוויי ההתנהגות שלה‪ .‬דורות של חלוקת‬
‫תפקידים מגדרית פטריארכאלית לימדו אותנו‪ ,‬שאישה צריכה לשתוק‪ ,‬או להיות‬
‫מושתקת‪ ,‬משום שאין לבטוח בה מטבע ברייתה; שאין לסמוך על אישה המשמיעה‬
‫את קולה ברבים; ושעצם דיבורה מוכיח את טבעה המרושע‪ .‬הנשים הכותבות‬
‫בוחרות להשמיע את קולן; הסופרות המרכזיות בזרם הנוכחי של כתיבה נשית‬
‫מאמצות דמויות של מכשפה‪-‬כביכול‪ ,‬ובכך הן מבקשות לומר כי אף על פי שמעמד‬
‫הנשים עדיין שולי‪ ,‬גם בשליש האחרון של המאה העשרים – למרות שינויים‬
‫חברתיים ותחיקתיים רבים בכיוון של איזון יחסי הכוחות – אין הנשים חייבות עוד‬
‫להשלים ללא תגובה‪ ,‬עם מקומן המסורתי בסולם החברתי‪.‬‬
‫בכוונתי לחקור להלן‪ ,‬כיצד דימוי שלילי מסורתי כזה‪ ,‬יכול להיהפך‪ ,‬ואף‬
‫הפך לדימוי חיובי; מדוע מטאפורה הנראית כמיושנת‪ ,‬היא רעננה ורלבנטית בעבור‬
‫נשים כותבות מודרניות‪ ,‬ובמיוחד‪ ,‬כיצד ניתן לראות בסופרות אלה עצמן‪ ,‬סוג של‬
‫"מכשפות"‪ .‬לשם כך‪ ,‬אני בוחנת מדגם ייצוגי מתוך ספרות הנשים בת זמננו –‬
‫מתמקדת בתיאורטיקנית הלן סיקסו‪ ,‬משוררת אן סקסטון‪ ,‬וסופרת מרגרט אטווד‬
‫– אשר לא רק יצרו דמויות "אנטי‪-‬הרואיות" כאלה‪ ,‬אלא בעצמן כתבו – לפחות‬
‫באופן חלקי – כדי למרוד כנגד הנורמות התרבותיות המקובלות‪ .‬בכל תחום בחרתי‬
‫כותבת אישה אחת הידועה בהצלחתה ובכישרונה הן מבחינת הביקורת והן מבחינת‬
‫הפופולאריות שלה‪.‬‬
‫האישה הכותבת‪ ,‬המסיגה את הגבול ומשום כך מפירה את החוק בעולם‬
‫הספרות הנשלט בידי גברים‪ ,‬מתאימה את המדיום לצרכיה‪ .‬משום כך‪ ,‬אפשר‬
‫לראות בה ממשיכת דרכה של המכשפה ההיסטורית‪ ,‬המאיימת בכוחותיה על‬
‫הסמכות הגברית‪ ,‬שאף מרשיעה אותה – בעיקר משום שהיא רואה בה מי שדורשת‬
‫לעצמה זכויות ותחומים שלא נועדו לה ואינם הולמים את מעמדה הנשי‪ .‬ויותר‬
‫מזה‪ ,‬כיוון שהמכשפה נתפשת בו זמנית גם כנקבה וגם כמקור הרע‪ ,‬סטריאוטיפ‬
‫המכשפה משרת היטב את הפרויקט הפמיניסטי של ייצוג מחדש באופן "אחר"‪ ,‬את‬
‫הגדרות‪-‬הזהות של המגדר הנשי‪ ,‬כפי שנוסחו על ידי גברים‪ .‬בנוסף‪ ,‬קללת המכשפה‪,‬‬
‫השימוש הנועז והחתרני שלה בשפה‪ ,‬שמבחינה היסטורית היה האמצעי למימוש‬
‫פעילותה ההרסנית – הוא הדבר שציד המכשפות התכוון להשתיק בעבר וממשיך‬
‫בכך גם כיום‪ .‬לכן‪ ,‬קולה של הסופרת‪ ,‬הפך להיות קולה של המכשפה בת זמננו‪,‬‬
‫המעיזה לדחות‪ ,‬להכחיש ולקרוא תיגר על דרכי הביטוי הספרותי המקובלות‪,‬‬
‫שהוגדרו באופן מסורתי על ידי גברים‪.‬‬
‫אני מקווה להראות‪ ,‬כיצד הסטריאוטיפ ההיסטורי השלילי של האישה‬
‫מעוצב מחדש על ידי הנשים הכותבות ובכך משחרר את הנשים כיום – וכיצד הן‬
‫עצמן מהוות ייצוגו המודרני של הסטריאוטיפ‪ ,‬שאותו בראו‪ .‬אני מקווה לבחון איך‬
‫בפועל משמשת המכשפה מטאפורה לקול הנשי בחברה הפטריארכאלית שלנו‪.‬‬
‫הפיכת פרדיגמות‪:‬‬
‫סטריאוטיפ המכשפה בכתיבה הנשית המודרנית‬
‫ננסי כהן פלד‬
‫חיבור לשם קבלת התואר "דוקטור לפילוסופיה"‬
‫אוניברסיטת חיפה‬
‫הפקולטה למדעי הרוח‬
‫החוג לשפה וספרות אנגלית‬
‫מאי ‪2005‬‬