ABSTRACT
Children’s literature is highly responsive to shifts in social ideology, and the women’s movement of the 1970s produced one of the most significant twentieth-century paradigm shifts in the literature. As Robin Briggs observed in 1996, ‘Witches are everywhere in modern children’s literature. The identification of witches as strangers, outsiders and nonconformists is also virtually absolute in children’s literature. To recognize that reality is socially constructed, along with the conceptual categories used to order and reproduce it – history, science, reason, self, subject, sex, sanity – is to destabilize the ground of children’s literature. The witch in children’s and young adult literature remains an outsider outside society, but with the power to change society. For contemporary fictional representations of witchcraft, however, discriminations between fact and fancy are less important than the pervasiveness of the pseudo-history as an enabling myth. Where official society most forcibly reasserts traditional hegemonic structures and values, especially gendered behaviours, is in the depiction of the sorceress-witch.
