What do Walt Disney, William Shakespeare and Roald Dahl have in common? Aside from the fact that they're men, or perhaps because of this, they have all created at least one enduring evil witch character.
The Evil Queen, who transforms herself into the Wicked Witch (or Old Hag, take your pick) in Disney’s Snow White, the three witches in Macbeth, and the Grand High Witch as the arch-villain of Dahl’s eternally terrifying The Witches. This last witch was memorably brought to life by Anjelica Huston in a 1990 film adaption. With sleek black hair, pale make-up and ferociously sensitive nostrils, she epitomised a femme fatale figure, whose evil ways lay just beneath the shellacked surface.
The characterisation of witches as hags, sorcerers, temptresses, child murderers, evil incarnate over the course of centuries is the focus of the Swiss-French feminist Mona Chollet's In Defence of Witches, which seeks to reclaim this denigrated figure for modern women. This isn't a new idea: in the 1970s in San Francisco, a movement was founded by Diane Barker in order to revive and develop neopagan rituals. Since then, the recasting of witches as figures of power and wisdom has been seen in everything from popular television series such as Charmed and Sabrina, to the fantasy genre with Harry Potter, to the literary fiction of Madeleine Miller's Circe.
What sets Chollet’s book apart is her aligning so clearly the historical mistreatment of so-called witches with the misogyny of the 21st century. The subtitle sums it up: why women are still on trial. Over the course of four engaging, complementary chapters, she details the history of witch hunts and society’s fear of independent women down through the ages; the judgement around being childfree in contemporary times; the pressure from the beauty industry on women to remain eternally (and expensively) young; and the lack of autonomy and respect afforded to female patients by medical science, specifically in the area of obstetrics. Altogether, it makes for a rousing read.
Unlike her namesake Mona Eltahawy, the Egyptian-American feminist whose recent publication Seven Necessary Sins was full of commendable rage against the sins of the patriarchy, Chollet takes a more considered view. Snippets of her personal life show a measured, methodical approach to her writing, both as editor of the French broadsheet Le Monde Diplomatique, and in her previous feminist non-fiction efforts.
Chollet defines herself as someone who is “stepping up to found the ‘scaredy-cat’ branch of feminism. I am a nice, well brought-up, middle-class woman and I hate to make myself stand out in a crowd”. This reticence translates into a litany of cold, hard facts on the page. We get a dire picture of misogyny through the ages, from the trials and pyres of the early modern witch hunts, to the fact that the great majority of victims belonged to the lower classes, and to the various types of women who men in power have, time and again, sought to censor, repress and, when all else fails, exterminate. A line from the Malleus Maleficarum, the treatise on witchcraft from 1487, states it plainly: “When a woman thinks alone, she thinks evil.”
As a woman who chose not to have children, Chollet is particularly strong on the prejudice, and the fear, of a society that judges her deficient based on this decision. She quotes other well-known female writers on this topic, among them Elizabeth Gilbert, Rebecca Solnit, Gloria Steinem and Jeanne Safer, the latter eventually coming to the realisation that she "didn't want to have a baby: she 'want[ed] to want' to have a baby".
Chollet believes this is caused by women internalising from a young age that their purpose in life is to be found serving others. She writes equally well on the judgement that single women face as they get older, backing up her views with examples from mainstream media in France and further afield: "Newsweek shrieked that single women over forty are 'more likely to be killed by a terrorist' than to marry".
Occasionally the references have a random quality – especially when they suddenly shift countries or demographics – and many refer to media articles in 2017, which dates the book somewhat, reminding the reader that this is a translation of a book first published in French in 2018. With so many cultural references and literary quotations, footnotes on the page itself, as opposed to the given endnotes, would also have worked better, giving more gravitas to the individual examples.
But this is a minor point in a very interesting take on contemporary feminist politics. In Defence of Witches asks us to really consider how today’s society treats women who are no longer young, fertile or conventionally beautiful, which is to say, judged to be no longer of use.
