RICE UNIVERSITY Rehabilitating the Witch: The Literary Representation of the Witch from the Malleus Maleficarum to Les Enfants du sabbat by Lisa Travis Blomquist A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS OF THE DEGREE Doctor of Philosophy APPROVED, THESIS COMMITTEE Dr. Bernard Aresu Dr. Elias Bongmba, Professor ofRe · ious Studies Holder of the Harry and Hazel Chavanne Chair in Christian Theology HOUSTON, TX DECEMBER 2011 ABSTRACT Rehabilitating the Witch: The Literary Representation of the Witch from the Malleus Maleficarum to Les Enfants du sabbat by Lisa Travis Blomquist The representation of the witch in French literature has evolved considerably over the centuries. While originally portrayed as a benevolent and caring healer in works by Marie de France, Chretien de Troyes, and the anonymous author of Amadas et Ydoine, the witch eventually underwent a dramatic and unfortunate transformation. By the fifteenth century, authors began to portray her as a malevolent and dangerous agent of the Christian Devil. Martin Le Franc, Pierre de Ronsard, Joachim du Bellay, Fran9ois Rabelais, and Pierre Comeille all created evil witch figures that corresponded with this new definition. It was not until the eighteenth century, through the works of Voltaire and the Encyclopedistes, that the rehabilitation of the witch began. By the twentieth century, Anne Hebert, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maryse Conde, and Sebastiano Vassalli began to rewrite the witch character by engaging in a process of demystification and by demonstrating that the "witch" was really just a victim of the society in which she lived. These authors humanized their witch figures by concentrating on the victimization of their witch protagonists and by exposing the ways in which their fictional societies unjustly created identities for their witch protagonists that were based on false judgments and rumors. Hebert attacks Sigmund Freud's association of the witch and the hysteric, Sartre utilizes his witches to expose many of his existential ideals, Conde highlights the role that racism played in witchcraft, and Vassalli strives to rewrite history by telling the story from the point of view of his witch character. Each twentieth-century author provides a story that deconstructs the very nature of the witch as this had been constructed over time, and shows how witches expose the problems associated with understanding one's place in the world in both their individual and their social dimensions. The witch, for these authors, challenges dominant norms and reveals how much our identities are influenced by our interactions with other individuals. And, because the witches in each text are marginal beings, they expose the repressiveness of their particular environments and the idiosyncrasies of their cultures. In all these ways, or so these 20th -century authors contend, we as modern readers, can relate to their situations and learn from their stories. ABSTRACT Rehabilitating the Witch: The Literary Representation of the Witch from the Malleus Maleficarum to Les Enfants du sabbat by Lisa Travis Blomquist The representation of the witch in French literature has evolved considerably over the centuries. While originally portrayed as a benevolent and caring healer in works by Marie de France, Chretien de Troyes, and the anonymous author of Amadas et Ydoine, the witch eventually underwent a dramatic and unfortunate transformation. By the fifteenth century, authors began to portray her as a malevolent and dangerous agent of the Christian Devil. Martin Le Franc, Pierre de Ronsard, Joachim du Bellay, Fran9ois Rabelais, and Pierre Comeille all created evil witch figures that corresponded with this new definition. It was not until the eighteenth century, through the works of Voltaire and the Encyclopedistes, that the rehabilitation of the witch began. By the twentieth century, Anne Hebert, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maryse Conde, and Sebastiano Vassalli began to rewrite the witch character by engaging in a process of demystification and by demonstrating that the "witch" was really just a victim of the society in which she lived. These authors humanized their witch figures by concentrating on the victimization of their witch protagonists and by exposing the ways in which their fictional societies unjustly created identities for their witch protagonists that were based on false judgments and rumors. Hebert attacks Sigmund Freud's association of the witch and the hysteric, Sartre utilizes his witches to expose many of his existential ideals, Conde highlights the role that racism played in witchcraft, and Vassalli strives to rewrite history by telling the story from the point of view of his witch character. Each twentieth-century author provides a story that deconstructs the very nature of the witch as this had been constructed over time, and shows how witches expose the problems associated with understanding one's place in the world in both their individual and their social dimensions. The witch, for these authors, challenges dominant norms and reveals how much our identities are influenced by our interactions with other individuals. And, because the witches in each text are marginal beings, they expose the repressiveness of their particular environments and the idiosyncrasies of their cultures. In all these ways, or so these 20th -century authors contend, we as modem readers, can relate to their situations and learn from their stories. TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction ........................................................................... 1 Chapter 1 What is the Witch? The Creation of a Binary and the Influence of the MalleusMaleficarum ................................................................26 Chapter 2 Who is the Witch? The Evolution of the Literary Witch: From Marie de France to Andre Breton ............................................................. 59 Chapter 3 Rehabilitating the Witch Character: The Witch as Victim in Hebert, Sartre, Vassalli, and Conde ................................................................. 100 Chapter 4 Hebert and the Fantastic Witch ................................................... 139 Chapter 5 Objectification and Witchcraft: Reading the Witch Through Existentialism ....................................................................... 184 Conclusion The Twentieth-Century Witch: What She Can Teach Us ..................... 220 Bibliography ......................................................................... 243 1 Introduction Who is the Witch? The word "witch" immediately conjures chimerical mental images still reinforced in twentieth-century popular culture and literary representations- images associated almost entirely with women. 1 For most of us today, the witch is an evil woman who dresses in black, has a pointed hat, and rides on a broomstick, thereby defying the laws of physics as she soars above the heads of her unsuspecting victims. Behind her black cat and giant cauldron, of course - behind her point shoes, the wart on her nose, and the green tint to her skin - she has also been imagined and punished over time as a figure of a certain charm, both fascinating and seductive. She is frightening but also alluring. Her paranormal powers elicit both fear and envy. Clearly, as she has been invented in the gaze of others over the course of time, she is a figure of some complication. Her outlines are a product of both very "real" superstitious thought and of the literary, historical, and popular images that have traced her path over the centuries. 1 In her critical review article, The Witch 'She'/ The Historian 'He ':Gender and the Historiography ofthe European Witch-Hunts, Elspeth Whitney examines gender from a feminist perspective and notes that "Whatever the profiles of actual accused and convicted witches, both the popular and elite mental image of the witch was invariably first that of a woman." [Elspeth Whitney, "The Witch 'She'/The Historian 'He': Gender and the Historiography ofthe European Witch-Hunts," Journal of Women's History 7.3 (1995) 88.] 2 It is easy to forget, of course, that the popular images we find so thrilling were not "images" at all for past societies, but the real thing: witches were dangerous, even damnable, women of evil character. The fear of them was so great, indeed, that during some periods they were massacred at an alarming rate. The "witch craze," the term coined by historians to describe the most deadly period in witch history, reached its peak in Western Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and by the end of the seventeenth century, untold thousands of women had met their deaths upon conviction of this horrible crime. Exact figures are difficult to come by, but the best estimates set the number of the dead near sixty thousand, and this is just for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.2 While occasional men were accused and convicted of witchcraft during this fatal craze, the witch was envisioned primarily as a female, with men implicated most often for merely being related by birth or marriage to women who had themselves been found accused of witchcraft. According to some reports, women made up eighty to eighty-five percent of those executed for witchcraft, 3 and were accused, convicted, and executed, in 2 Brian Levack, The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe (London: Longman, 1995) 21. 3 See Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers (Brooklyn: The Faculty Press, 1973) 8. See Brian Levack, Witchcraft and Magic in Europe: