ABSTRACT
This chapter will explore the construction of a uniquely uncanny view of female adolescence in Ray Bradbury’s short story “The April Witch”. Published in a 1952 issue of The Saturday Evening Post, “The April Witch” is a key text in Bradbury’s Elliott Family mythos. Centered around the soporific, psychic wanderings of an adolescent “last of summer witch” named Cecy, the story foregrounds a vision of teenage femininity that is fundamentally uncanny and cloaked in the visual signifiers of the gothic. This chapter will argue that the figure of Cecy emerges from America’s unique historical engagement with adolescent femininity, an uneasy relationship that stretches from the Salem Witch Trials to the teenage mediums of nineteenth-century Spiritualism and on into contemporary horror fiction. This chapter will unravel how Bradbury engages with these historical constructions of female adolescence through the character of Cecy, analyzing how her ability to transcend her physical body and occupy other forms is suggestive of long-held cultural conceptions of adolescent femininity as abject, transgressive and closely aligned with the supernatural. In doing so, I will argue that in “The April Witch”, Bradbury both draws upon and reimagines many of the key tropes associated with adolescent femininity in the horror genre. In particular, Cecy’s spectral flights and proclivity for possessing the bodies of others evokes the liminality and uncertainty associated with one of the most potent strains of horror—the uncanny. However, while Cecy’s supernatural abilities manifest as embodiments of pervasive social anxieties about the effluvial, uncontrollable, and potentially subversive nature of the feminine, Cecy is not depicted as some thoroughly monstrous Other. Instead, the character serves as a means to unravel the complexity of such archetypal constructions of femininity and pose questions about how adolescents navigate issues of identity and agency. As such, this chapter will demonstrate that while Bradbury draws extensively on the language of gothic horror to give form to his wandering adolescent witch, Cecy’s uncanniness is largely focused on negotiating her burgeoning feminine identity, questioning the cultural narratives associated with womanhood as she traverses the threshold of adult life.
