The Witch Figure in Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Literature

The early nineteenth century’s portrayals of witches are under the spell of European Romanticism with the spectacular revival of spirituality, medieval inspiration and imagery of the powerful, unencumbered nature. Art and poetry (e.g. by Rosamund Marriot Watson, Sir Walter Scott, Mary Coleridge, Edgar Alan Poe or William Butler Yeats) is filled with images of twilight, horror, occult and various ecstatic enactments of altered states of consciousness and transgression. The witch figure is both, a femme fatale and a muse: the dark ‘other’ of the poet, the symbol of a spellbinding nature, and the embodiment of the suppressed, pagan soul, such as Scott’s The Lady of the Lake (1910). Shaped by these new aesthetic categories, literature elevates the figure from the dark ages of Christian persecution towards a new form of emotional intensity, a new form of desire to confront and experience the unknown aspects of humanity. Literary texts part from heavy, moral obligations to speak in the name of society or that of an institution be it the church or the monarchy. The limited iconography of malevolent witches (recorded mostly in fairy tales, particularly by Brothers Grimm) and powerless victims of witch hunts, promulgated by seventeenth-century witch hunters and eighteenth-century rationalist philosophers, is in the nineteenth-century literature replaced by mysterious temptresses, wise-women, fairy god-mothers, sorceresses, mythical immortals and enchantresses, shaping the conscious and subconscious witch imagery of the times. Generally, institutions condemning witchcraft had significantly diminished in influence across the nineteenth century when the majority of (educated) people no longer believed in the existence of witchcraft. ¹ Consequently, the witch figure becomes far more metaphorical, increasingly symbolizing areas of social dissonance and transgressive behaviour of women and men who rebel against the society. Bigamists, homosexuals, criminals, tricksters, prostitutes, madmen, and vampires appear in the nineteenth-century literature as boundary crossers, suspended between gender, class, sexuality and various other socio-economic areas of belonging. They offer an alternative discourse on human nature and initiate important processes in the cultural interrogation of existing representations of women and men.