“Other Ways of Being”

Following on from the previous chapter, which investigates “The April Witch” as an expression of post-war cultural anxieties about the transgressive metamorphic nature of female adolescence, this chapter provides a complimentary analysis of the folkloric facets of the tale, while also engaging how the story interrogates social norms and patriarchal family structures. Otto begins with an attempt to challenge the binary dynamic that Western thought constructs regarding the relationship between the scientific and the supernatural. Drawing on Alejo Carpentier’s conception of the “marvelous reality of the Americas”, Otto notes that such notions of a reality infused with the fantastic and the mystical extends beyond the magical, otherworldly qualities often associated with South America and the Caribbean, thereby extending this fantastical world order into the realm of North American folklore and fantasy. This chapter provides a unique insight into Bradbury’s work by reading “The April Witch” as an expression of an alternative, spiritual world order within the global, and more specifically American, north. Drawing on concepts such as shapeshifting and dream journeying as well as creole and indigenous folklore, “The April Witch” is read alongside Jamaica Kincaid’s “In the Night” and Leonora Carrington’s “The Seventh Horse” to highlight Bradbury’s creative kinship with writers from the Caribbean diaspora and Mexico, respectively, who tap into the “marvelous reality of the Americas”. In addition, by drawing on a Small Axe interview on Caribbean women’s writing and alternative sexualities (“Other Ways of Being”) and setting Bradbury in context with feminist writers like Kincaid and Carrington, Otto highlights how his story challenges normative gender identities, the patriarchal family, as well as our understanding of the natural world.