CORE Metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk Provided by ChesterRep This work has been submitted to ChesterRep – the University of Chester’s online research repository http://chesterrep.openrepository.com Author(s): Susan Jennifer Elsley Title: Images of the witch in nineteenth-century culture Date: April 2012 Originally published as: University of Liverpool PhD thesis Example citation: Elsley, S. J. (2012). Images of the witch in nineteenth-century culture. (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). University of Liverpool, United Kingdom. Version of item: Submitted version Available at: http://hdl.handle.net/10034/253452 Images of the Witch in Nineteenth-Century Culture Thesis submitted in accordance with the requirements of the University of Liverpool for the degree of Doctor in Philosophy by Susan Jennifer Elsley April 2012 Acknowledgements This thesis would never have been conceived without the initial influence of Laurie Walsh and her colleagues at Deeside College who guided me back into education as a mature student; Chris, Kathy and Steve who made my foundation year at Northop College such a joy; and the wonderful teaching staff from the English and History Departments at the University of Chester who opened new worlds to me as I completed my first and second degrees. It could not have been born without the enthusiastic intervention, encouragement, and wise words of Professor Roger Swift. I owe a great debt of gratitude to the keen but kindly eye of Dr Melissa Fegan; and finally I owe the deepest thanks to Professor Deborah Wynne whose unstinting efforts as an academic fairy godmother have ensured the survival of my research into a completed thesis, and who inspired me to continue my work through the dark times as well as the light. I would like to dedicate this work to Alexander who was magic personified, and Paul who always encouraged me and never resented the time I spent studying, and most of all to Gavin whose support was, and is, constant, practical and loving. Abstract Images of the Witch in Nineteenth-Century Culture, Susan Jennifer Elsley This thesis examines the witch imagery used during the nineteenth century in children’s literature, realist and gothic fiction, poetry and art, and by practitioners and critics of mesmerism, spiritualism and alternative spirituality. The thesis is based on close readings of nineteenth-century texts and detailed analysis of artwork, but also takes a long view of nineteenth-century witch imagery in relation to that of preceding and succeeding periods. I explore the means by which the image of the witch was introduced as an overt or covert figure into the work of nineteenth-century writers and artists during a period when the majority of literate people no longer believed in the existence of witchcraft; and I investigate the relationship between the metaphorical witch and the areas of social dissonance which she is used to symbolise. I demonstrate that the diversity of nineteenth-century witch imagery is very wide, but that there is a tendency for positive images to increase as the century progresses. Thereby the limited iconography of malevolent witches and powerless victims of witch-hunts, promulgated by seventeenth-century witch-hunters and eighteenth-century rationalist philosophers respectively, were joined by wise-women, fairy godmothers, sorceresses, and mythical immortals, all of whom were defined, directly or indirectly, as witches. Nonetheless I also reveal that every image of the witch I examine has a dark shadow, despite or because of the empathy between witch and creator which is evident in many of the works I have studied. In the Introduction I acknowledge the validity of theories put forward by historians regarding the influence of societal changes on the decline of witchcraft belief, but I argue that those changes also created the need for metaphorical witchery to address the anxieties created by those changes. I contend that the complexity of social change occurring during and prior to the nineteenth century resulted in an increase in the diversification of witch imagery. I argue that the use of diverse images in various cultural forms was facilitated by the growth of liberal individualism which allowed each writer or artist to articulate specific concerns through discrete images of the witch which were no longer coloured solely by the dictates of superstition or rationalism. I look at the peculiar ability of the witch as a symbolic outcast from society to view that society from an external perspective and to use the voice of the exile to say the unsayable. I also use definitions garnered from a wide spectrum of sources from cultural history to folklore and neo-paganism to justify my broad definition of the word ‘witch’. In Chapter One I explore children’s literature, on the assumption that images absorbed during childhood would influence both the conscious and unconscious witch imagery produced by the adult imagination. I find the templates for familiar imagery in collections of folklore and, primarily, in translations of ‘traditional’ fairy tales sanitised for the nursery by collectors such as Perrault and the Brothers Grimm. I then examine fantasies created for Victorian children by authors such as Mary de Morgan, William Makepeace Thackeray, George MacDonald and Charles Kingsley, where the image of witch and fairy godmother is conflated in fiction which elevates the didactic fairy tale to a level which in some cases is imbued with a neo-platonic religiosity, thereby transforming the witch into a powerful portal to the divine. In contrast the canonical novelists whose work I examine in Chapter Two generally project witch imagery obliquely onto foolish, misguided, doomed or defiant women whose witchery is both allusionary and illusionary. I begin with the work of Sir Walter Scott whose bad or sad witches touch his novels with the supernatural while he denies their magic. Scott’s witch imagery, like that of Perrault and Grimm, is reflected in the witches who represent women’s exclusion from autonomy, education and/or the literary establishment in the works of Charlotte and Emily Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot. Traditional fairy-tale imagery is particularly evident in Charles Dickens’ use of the witch to represent negative aspects in the development of society or the individual. In contrast Scott’s impulse to distance himself from the pre-urban world represented by his witches contrasts with Thomas Hardy’s mourning of the female earth spirits of Wessex, thereby linking fluctuating and evolving images of nature with images of the nineteenth- century witch. In Chapter Three I explore poetry and art through Romantic verse, Tennyson’s Camelot, Rossetti and Burne-Jones’ Pre-Raphaelite classicism, Rosamund Marriot Watson and Mary Coleridge’s shape-shifting, mirrored women, and Yeats’ Celtic Twilight: in doing so I find representations of the witch as the destructive seductress, the muse, the dark ‘other’ of the suppressed poet, the symbol of spellbinding amoral nature, and the embodiment of the Celtic soul. In the final chapter witch imagery is attached to actual practitioners of so-called ‘New Witchcraft’, yet they also become part of a story which seeks to equate neo/quasi science with the supernatural. I demonstrate a gender realignment of occult power as the submissive mesmerist’s tool evolves into the powerful mother/priestess. I note the interconnectedness of fiction and fact via the novels of authors such as Wilkie Collins and Edward Bulwer-Lytton; and identify the role of the campaigning godmother figure as a precursor of the radical feminist Wiccan. I believe that my thesis offers a uniquely comprehensive view of the use of metaphorical witch imagery in the nineteenth century. Contents Acknowledgements Abstract Introduction 1-11 Chapter One: The Witches of Nineteenth-Century Childhood 12-47 Chapter Two: Representations of the Witch in Nineteenth-Century Fiction 48-110 Chapter Three: Witches in Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Art 111-167 Chapter Four: New Witchcraft 168-204 Conclusion 205-206 Bibliography 207-216 1 Introduction In 1823 Sir Walter Scott, who had included a witch-figure in most of his novels, implied that the wicked witch as a physical being was dead to the rational mind, and he wrote her obituary: ‘Nobody would believe such folly now-a-days, except low and ignorant persons’.1 The diminution of the witch’s power to arouse fear among the elite had been demonstrated as early as 1736 when James I’s 1604 Witchcraft Act was superseded by an inversion which, instead of hanging those convicted of witchcraft, imposed less draconian punishments on those who claimed to perform magic or those who harmed a supposed witch. Thus the image of the felonious witch faded to that of a fraud or a victim, and the idea of the witch as a tangible entity lessened exponentially until the twentieth century when neo-pagan witches claimed to have ‘come out of the broom cupboard’ to ‘counter the imagery of evil'.2 Yet, while the ‘real’ witch virtually disappeared from sight the metaphorical witch was in the ascendancy: as Roy Porter notes, ‘expelled through the door, the supernatural was let back … through the window, in art and literature, in aesthetic and imaginative incarnations’ wherein witches ‘assumed a new symbolic reality’.3 This is particularly evident in the diversity of witch imagery produced by nineteenth-century writers and artists for consumers who primarily occupied the broad intellectual middle ground between the elite and the ‘ignorant’. Ironically the powerful symbolism of witchery was being utilised most effectively during a period when those who claimed to be witches were suffering the final humiliation of being prosecuted under the 1824 Vagrancy Act. While belief in witches melted like a wax image under the light of rationalism, images of the witches whom King James and his Bible had deemed too wicked to live were reformed by pens and paintbrushes into metaphors of ‘otherness’, reflected in artistic mirroring of nineteenth-century society.