Gender, Power, and Politics on the Early Modern Stage

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  1. I found Willis’s entire article very compelling, particularly her descriptions of the context in which other women made witch accusations. Her statement, “Though the younger woman might now possess the life-giving breast that gave her value and made family members depend on her, she confronted in the old woman not only a ‘bad’ mother but also a version of the envious child she once was and of the postmenopausal ‘hag’ she would become” (75) struck me in part because I’m reading a book called Women and Desire by Polly Young-Eisendrath. Young-Eisendrath frames most of her argument through the opposition of hags and muses, declaring that while both hags and muses are patriarchal labels that severely limit women’s complexity, the hag in fact has significantly more freedom than the muse. By definition, the hag escapes men’s reins by not subscribing to patriarchal desires. Because the patriarchy promises to reward the muse, she exerts tremendous effort to maintain her muse-ness, and so not only is she working to appeal to patriarchal desires, she is also exhausting herself by doing so. Thus she loses her autonomy and individuality twice over and never meets her own desires.

    In her youth, the younger woman that Willis refers to is essential to the patriarchal family structure and so is valued as such. At the same time, she fears the inevitable hag identity she will eventually age into, and so distances herself from the older woman through accusation, connecting the older woman’s grotesque bodily features to the supernatural. By doing so, the younger woman upholds patriarchal conventions, inevitably punishing members of her sex, including her future self. Furthermore, Willis states that “The witch might not only arouse retaliatory fears about an injury to the maternal body, she might also challenge the man’s right as husband or master to control that body” (79), thus cementing the witch’s actions as anti-patriarchal. When the younger woman/muse accuses the older woman/hag of being a witch, she is also upholding the current patriarchal system which, though she does conditionally benefit from, she is ultimately a victim of. Therefore, she sacrifices the autonomy of both her present and future selves for the sake of immediate patriarchal protection.

    We see something similar in Taming of the Shrew, as Bianca uses her own words (or lack thereof) to call out and establish herself as a counterpoint to her sister’s shrewish behavior, thus benefitting the patriarchy by labelling herself and her sister in patriarchal binaries that superficially reward her in such a system. Therefore, Bianca reinforces the power of verbal societal law to relinquish the power of threatening shrewish behavior, which if not checked might succeed in dismantling the system. The patriarchal structure is thus imperative to the cause and effect of this conflict even though it is mostly directly between women.

    In the witch conflict, the patriarchal concern is ultimately the power of words, where fear lies in the prospect of a force capable of overturning the system. There is irony in this, since witches can only really succeed in a patriarchy, as they represent the anti-patriarchy, which inevitably includes an opposition to motherhood, as human and “natural” motherhood is necessary in reproducing the patriarchy. Sawyer herself only becomes a witch after she has been accused of such identity, and only because of the combination of her age and economic status (constructs the patriarchy has dictated). In Act II, scene i, Sawyer’s words become curses because Old Banks’ taunts have broken her, while both his verbal and physical violence toward her are acceptable. However, the status of witch allows Sawyer a new kind of liberation; ironically, she is now able to live outside the patriarchy’s desires for young women because it has projected a new undesirable status onto her. She embraces the role, declaring, “Call me hag and witch!” (II, i, 33). And later, she calls out the patriarchy and its socially constructed power in the face of the Justice by announcing, “[You are] A man. Perhaps, no man. Men in gay clothes, Whose backs are laden with titles and honours, Are within far more crooked than I am; And if I be a witch, more witch-like” (IV, i, 95-98). She is able to exert this verbal power only because she does not care about conforming to patriarchal desires—the pressure to behave like a muse is off her shoulders as the patriarchal has relinquished any rewards with her age. Thus, she is now in a position to focus on her own desires, as opposed to those of the patriarchy.

    • wow, Maya–this is amazing–it’s a paper! I love the argument here about the tension between the young and older woman as it triangulates through the desires of the patriarchy–and I’ve actually read that Eisendrath book, which is totally relevant here!

  2. This may be a bit of a stretch, but I watched a video for my Feminist Blogging class this week about Incels and I saw connections between it and the play. (the video, for reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fD2briZ6fB0). Incel stands for involuntary celibates and basically it represents a world view that lonely men have invented online that constructs women as non-people who owe them, yet have denied them, sexual satisfaction. Incels mutually create a culture that tells them they are going to die alone and that they are unlovable. Some of them turn into mass shooters as revenge against how unfair the world is — it’s all very disturbing.

    Having watched this video right before reading the second two acts of The Witch of Edmonton, I couldn’t help but draw parallels between how Incel culture labels and defines women and how witch hunts did the same. Incels have lots of different categories for women based on how they look and act, and in the end it all boils down to trying to control women by typifying them and naming what they are (a tendency we’ve seen repeatedly in texts in this class). In this play, I was struck by the scene when the Justice and Sir Arthur arrive and within a few pages they go from defending Mother Sawyer to condemning her. This reversal seems to hinge on Mother Sawyer’s unwillingness to cooperate with their world view. She says several times “I defy you.” Unable to fit her back into their box, they give up and conclude that she is, in fact, a witch.

    While the Incel worldview and the witch trials of the early modern period are obviously not analogous, I couldn’t help but see the parallels that do exist and that fascinated me. Both involve men who, obsessed with their need to define, and thus control, the world around them, end up placing all their hatred, anger and fear (both real and imagined) onto women. This comparison works with this play especially because those accusing Mother Sawyer are men and not women, which as we read was often the case. As is often the case with the plays we read in this class, I found myself wondering how much has really changed since this was written and I’m not sure I like the answer.

    • This is really fascinating–might be worth bringing back again in the last two weeks, potentially? I especially liked the point about the way women are discursively constructed in relation to patriarchal needs–and it brings out the danger of that defiant position extremely well–your life is literally on the line. So interesting!

  3. Willis describes how “to a considerable extent, village-level witch-hunting was women’s work” with the majority of cases witches were indicted by other women. In class today, we discussed the similarities between the shrew and the witch however I think that these two categorizations are crucially differentiated by whose gender identity the unruly woman threatens. In the texts we’ve read so far, the shrew has always been sexualized and is often a wife. It is her failure to achieve full womanly subservience to her husband or love interest that renders her dangerous- she risks “wearing the breeches” in the relationship and emasculating her husband both by demonstrating her superiority (Like Hermione displaying more verbal potency than her husband, if she can be considered a shrew) to him and/or by exposing his inability to control his own property. The witch, by contrast “is older, usually postmenopausal” (Willis 33). Her body is much less threatening to men as she is seen as less conventionally desirable and she can no longer give birth, diminishing if not eliminating completely the fear f cuckoldry that seems so closely linked to the loud (double) mouthed shrew. Moreover, she is not presented as the unruly property of a man or an untamable bride but often as a single woman or her husband’s coconspirator in dark magic aimed at other households as in the case of Cicelly Celles (Willis 37). While her aged body is less threatening to men (think of Hermione’s rebirth as a post-menopausal and thus unthreatening statue), it is much more threatening to younger women as it reminds them of the tenuousness of their own feminine ideals. Their fertility and beauty will fade like the witches. It is not just the witch’s body that threatens the conventional female gender ideal, but also her words. As Willis notes ”the witch, in fact, was likely to be the one urging conformity to a patriarchal standard; her angry words might call into question her neighbor’s credentials as a nurturer or stress some other failings of female identity” (39). We see this with Sawyer’s tirade against “city-witches who can turn/ their husbands wares…to sumptuous tables, gardens stol’n sin…in one year wasting, what scarce twenty win” (5.1.123-6) and her denunciation:

    She on whose tongue a whirlwind sits to blow
    A man out of himself, from his soft pillows,
    To lean his head on rocks and fighting waves
    Is not that scold a witch? (5.1.135-8)

    Her words-with their sexist characterizations of the lustful, wasteful, and greedy wife and the tempestuous “scold”- and her body both expose the potential for other women’s cultural and physical feminine failures. By naming her a witch, other women can neutralize both but delegitimizing her words as curses and burning her body at the stake. The figure who, as an old woman, was a reminder of their feminine failures as a witch can be a scapegoat for them as we see with the woman in iv.1.5-10 who, when caught in an act of infidelity by her husband, “swore in her conscience that she was bewitched”.

    • excellent–you make some very interesting distinctions between these categories of disempowered, disruptive female figures who somehow seem to turn against each other. Your post interacts interestingly with Maya’s (see above)–in its focus on the “hag” or “witch” as the figure feared by younger women as a warning about how their own cultural capital will drain away. I find it interesting that Sawyer denounces the scold/shrew, since in her defiance and railing she seems to become one–how do you work with that tension?

  4. The maternal relationship between the witch and the imp that Willis describes felt relevant in our introduction to Elizabeth Sawyer and the dog. When the dog suggests that it can help Elizabeth it says that it requires “a gift of soul and body,” which relates to the maternal relationship of a mother and child(2.1.152). A mother must relinquish control of her body and accept that some bodily changes from childbirth will are irreversible, and she must in some sense give up her soul because her birthing of a child is also irreversible and salient. The Dog then says that it needs to “seal’t with thy blood” which relates back to earlier discussions in our class about the continuum of bodily fluids and how blood can turn into breast milk, which adds a maternal subtext to this requirement. Willis comments on this as well remarking on “constructions of the witch, for he witch characteristically acquired her power over the demonic through her power to feed” and later says “mothers were believed to provide food to their infants by converting their blood to breast milk.” The dog seemed to mimic a feeding child when it “sucks her arm” to sign the deal (2.1.163). The specific imagery of sucking, even though on her arm, still incites the imagery of a maternal feeding.

    • Very good, Colleen–I think this perversion of maternal imagery is absolutely central to the construction of the witch. You were asking earlier about the culture’s treatment of postmenopausal women–the witch whose power is a kind of anti-maternal, anti-domestic power, is one answer…

  5. We see, almost immediately when we meet Elizabeth Sawyer onstage, the interpolative power of “men’s tongues”: they’ve essentially created a witch out of her. She says:
    “Some call me witch; And being ignorant of myself, they go
    About to teach me how to be one: urging
    That my bad tongue (by their bad usage made so)
    Forespeaks their cattle, doth bewitch their corn,
    Themselves, their servants, and their babes at nurse.
    This they enforce upon me” (2.1.10-15).
    Willis discusses the interaction between female neighbors that would typically lead to a witch-accusation. An older woman (the presupposed “witch”) would go to a younger woman’s house, asking for food or money. The younger one would deny her, and then the older one would walk away cursing and muttering. There would often be a confusion between “verbal violence and the casting of a spell”: “The witch was “in a sense the gossip ‘gone bad,’ a woman who brought envy, anger, and hatred into a community’s informal networks of female neighbors” (Willis, 35). We see this sort of cursing and muttering in Elizabeth’s speech: those that call her “witch” create a “bad tongue” out of her, interpreting what she says as curses on their cattle, corn, “themselves, their servants, and their babies at nurse.” So much of these accusations—both in Witch of Edmonton and in Willis’ piece—stemmed from what is spoken; Elizabeth’s “bad tongue” is made “bad” by the way the townspeople interpret it, but of course when a woman is socially exiled and accused of witchcraft, she will mutter more, be more frustrated by those around her. As she is pushed farther out of the social strata of the community, deemed more of an outsider, she adopts an even more negative attitude towards those that fear her, and perhaps mutters and curses under her breath more frequently. Elizabeth Sawyer says: “Tis all one, / To be a witch as to be counted one” (2.1.117). To be accused of being a witch, she seems to say, creates a witch: “They go about to teach me how to be one”; the “bad usage” of their tongues renders her tongue “bad” in response. This they enforce upon her.

    • This is excellent, and I think you immediately find the right concept for thinking about what happens here–she is “interpellated” as witch, hailed as a witch, and called a witch–and she actually says–“Tis all one to be a witch as to be counted one.” Such an interestingly modern conception of identity.

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