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These stories by authors from Elizabeth Gaskell to Jeanette Winterson show how societies in turmoil turn on the most vulnerable
‘It is easy to blame the dark,” Sylvia Plath writes in Witch Burning. Stories of witch-hunts show us how the dark is given a name; they talk to us about anxiety and belief and our hunger for scapegoats. All those pious fantasies of women suckling their familiars! Witch-hunts are just a metaphor now, we hope, but we’re drawn to them as much as we ever were.
The White House witch-finder might like to tweet that he’s the hunted, but in reality it’s the marginal, the outspoken, those who lack a voice or upset their neighbours who get pursued. Those least responsible become most at fault: the wanton, the widow, the shrew. Because most of all, witch-hunts have been about controlling women’s sexuality and their tongues. When “one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs”, Virginia Woolf wrote in A Room of One’s Own, “I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet”. Women writers, in particular, are recovering these voices. Continue reading...