With Halloween just around the corner, I
thought I’d use ‘W’ in my Victorian Alphabet to look at a subject not often
associated with the nineteenth-century
– witchcraft.
Those interested in witchcraft and the supernatural
most often turn to Early Modern literature (Marlowe, Middleton, Greene, Rowley,
Decker and Ford), especially as the mid-1600s saw the last execution of a witch
in England, or to writings centred on the Salem Witch Trials in America, later
in that century. Yet superstitions surrounding magic – and particularly women
as workers of evil magic – were prevalent in the England, especially in rural
communities, in the Victorian period.
Any visitor to the Pitt Rivers Museum in
Oxford (yet another city attraction which any budding victorianist should check
out) can see English objects from the period with magical uses (e.g. a witch in
a bottle, a pig’s heart struck through with pins and nails for warding away
evil spirits) and the topic makes its mark on literature too.
Elizabeth Gaskell turned to the past and to
Salem for her novella Lois the Witch
(1861), which I wrote about previously, but Thomas Hardy is the writer whose
interest in rural traditions gives us a picture of contemporary (or near
contemporary) superstitions about witchcraft.
Le Chapeau de Brigand, Thomas Uwins (1833)
In The
Return of the Native (1878) the heath dwellers are deeply suspicious of
Eustacia Vye and the combination of her position as an outsider, dark beauty
and lonely habits leaves her open to the charge of being a witch. In fact, this
is how we are first introduced to her:
"He means, sir, that the lonesome dark-eyed creature up there
that some say is a witch—ever I should call a fine young woman such a name—is
always up to some odd conceit or other; and so perhaps 'tis she."
"I'd be very glad to ask her in wedlock, if she'd hae me and
take the risk of her wild dark eyes ill-wishing me," said Grandfer Cantle
staunchly.
"Don't ye say it, Father!" implored Christian.
Eustacia’s youth and beauty means that
Timothy (the first speaker) is loath to call her a witch, while at the same
time it is her attractive ‘wild dark eyes’ which make such an identification
probable. As the novel progresses what we might dismiss as superstitious
prattle from the locals becomes an important plot point. Eustacia is suspected
to such a degree that she is physically assaulted in church, having been blamed
for the illness of Susan Nunsuch’s children:
“We hadn't been hard at it for more than a minute when a most
terrible screech sounded through church, as if somebody had just gied up their
heart's blood. All the folk jumped up and then we found that Susan Nunsuch had
pricked Miss Vye with a long stocking-needle, as she had threatened to do as
soon as ever she could get the young lady to church, where she don't come very
often. She've waited for this chance for weeks, so as to draw her blood and put
an end to the bewitching of Susan's children that has been carried on so long.
Sue followed her into church, sat next to her, and as soon as she could find a
chance in went the stocking-needle into my lady's arm."
Susan Nunsuch’s victimisation of Eustacia
sets in motion the closing events in the novel. She counters the girl’s
suspected magic with her own, creating, attacking and eventually burning something
resembling a voodoo doll she fashions to resemble Eustacia:
From her workbasket in the window-seat the woman took a paper of
pins, of the old long and yellow sort, whose heads were disposed to come off at
their first usage. These she began to thrust into the image in all directions,
with apparently excruciating energy. Probably as many as fifty were thus
inserted, some into the head of the wax model, some into the shoulders, some
into the trunk, some upwards through the soles of the feet, till the figure was
completely permeated with pins.
Eustacia’s death, which could be attributed
to accident or suicide, could equally have a supernatural explanation because
of Susan’s actions here. Witches might not be being burned at the stake in
Victorian England but being suspected of witchcraft could, it seems, be equally
life destroying.
This, of course, is not Hardy’s only
treatment of superstitious traditions – consider Midsummer Eve in The Woodlanders (1886-7) or the role of
Stonehenge in Tess of the d’Urbervilles
(1891). All too often the Victorian period can seem all too familiar and
knowable, but there is plenty, even in realist fiction, for lovers of the
uncanny this Halloween season.
What should be ‘X’ in my Victorian Alphabet?
Please help me out! Let me know here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist!