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In this op-ed, Sarah Lyons explores how the idea of the witch has become feminist, but how Hollywood's depiction of them is still lacking.
For years, people have been fascinated by witches, and the image of the witch has changed in everything from folklore to film over time. When witchcraft was still a crime in Europe and America, the image of the witch was used to used to oppress and subjugate women. In the 19th century, the witch was turned into a harmless novelty and Halloween costume. But the pop cultural idea of witches hit its stride when Hollywood presented the Wicked Witch of the West in 1939’s The Wizard of Oz.
She was green-skinned — a departure from L. Frank Baum’s original book, which does not specify her skin color – and her wizened appearance is in stark contrast to Glinda the Good Witch’s lily-white complexion. The visual signaling is obvious: the traditional norm of beauty is good, and “ugly” is bad. Yet while our society has slowly begun correcting its lack of inclusion with regards to aesthetics, it still unfairly punishes women for not adhering to patriarchal narratives or standards of beauty. And that includes how pop culture has treated witches over the years.
While witchcraft can sometimes be hard to define, I see it as a spiritual practice — not a religion — grounded in old folk magic traditions. Often, people in the past who practiced things like magic, herbalism, and healing didn't call themselves witches, as the term was seen as pejorative. I know from personal experience as a witch that we are a diverse group of people, and come from many different races, ages, genders, and bodies. Historically, witch hunters targeted people with a disability or something “different” about them as having magic abilities.
But over time, that “otherness” translated into the binary of either being good or bad, even if that simplifies both witches and women, whose traits and moral compasses are far more complicated than that. It’s true that modern-day efforts to depict pop culture’s fascination with witches — think Buffy the Vampire Slayer, American Horror Story: Coven, and The Craft — have attempted to reclaim a more “feminist” bent. Yet while Hollywood likes to use witchcraft as a shorthand symbol for feminism and female empowerment, that empowerment is rarely intersectional — whether it be a depiction of an older “hag” or “unattractive” witch — and too often falls into the same tropes that vilified witches in real life. If Hollywood gives male characters countless chances to be seen as complex, shouldn’t everyone be afforded the same opportunities to be so multi-faceted?
While it’s true that Coven added surface-level (if, ultimately flawed) diversity with actresses like Gabourey Sidibe, Angela Bassett, and Jamie Brewer, Jessica Lange and her character arc as “the Supreme,” the villain of the show, speak to a gross trope of ageism. In many ways the Supreme is desperate to cling to the power she is losing. What is wrong with her? What is turning her evil? What is zapping her power? Ah yes, she’s “getting old.” Coven also spends far too much of its time perpetuating a tired, patriarchal narrative as it has Emma Roberts and Taissa Farmiga’s “good” characters feuding over a boy, thereby reducing their characters to another kind of trope.
That element of pitting women against each other is nothing new. The Craft also features its central witches fighting over men (the fact that one is coded as seemingly chaste and “good,” the other “slutty” and evil, as Slutist’s Morgan Claire Sirene points out, was likely intentional). It’s the evil witch that holds a certain key: For centuries, the witch has been a figure of anti-patriarchal intimidation, a person made monster because she held power outside the confines of the traditional patriarchal society. We’ve thankfully moved past that, in many ways, but while some witches are portrayed as good, that goodness is seen as some sort of reward, and not without its own rules. In Hollywood today, that means that only beautiful, young white women get to be good witches, while everyone else is relegated eternally to the role of being othered. And even if they get to be “good” witches, they’re still confined to many of the same tropes that burden women within media.
The same thing can be said about the concept of sexual availability — a narrative function that’s also hindered female representation in Hollywood for decades. In the case of the witch character, it’s only if you are sexually available — but aim to use your sexuality in a heterosexual, chaste way — can you be considered “good.” Witches who have been coded as “bad,” however, are painted as villains, often at the expense of the male gaze. In the 2017 book Witches, Sluts, Feminists, writer and New School professor Kristen J. Sollee argues that “These [witch] archetypal depictions…are often an expression of the ‘monstrous-feminine,’ which reflects male anxieties about the female body.” The monstrous-feminine posits that, basically, the scariest thing you can be to a man is something that he can’t control or posses sexually, so if you are old, disabled, or unconventionally attractive in some way, patriarchy turns you into a monster.
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Films like Bell, Book and Candle (1958) and shows like Bewitched (1964) star young, beautiful, and good witches, who either lose or curtail their power when they enter a heterosexual relationship. At the same time, horror films like Rosemary’s Baby (1968) reinforce old, villainous witch stereotypes in which the female reproductive system is hijacked by the ultimate evil, through the machinations of the elderly witches next door.
But while recent TV shows and films about witches have tried and marketed themselves as breaking this mold, it’s tough to completely upend centuries of patriarchal norms in one fell swoop. The genre of witchcraft has interestingly enough become synonymous with feminism in contemporary media — but those ideas have often been afforded to white, cisgender, and conventionally attractive women without much argument, while other feminist movements have had to fight for recognition and defend themselves against backlash. While TV shows like Sabrina the Teenage Witch and Buffy were appointment-viewing TV, they both had overarching messages of girl power, but only if you were white, young, and cis gender.
Even more family-friendly fare has its issues: Hocus Pocus is now considered a must-watch every Halloween, but it’s impossible to ignore the way it portrayed the Sanderson sisters with Oz-level hag-ery, which includes their desire to eat children in an effort to become young and beautiful again. Taken even farther is The Blair Witch Project, which never shows the witch in question on screen. She is merely a presence and a menace. Yet despite never appearing in the film, she is gendered female. Become evil enough and you stop being ugly or old; you just turn invisible.
If the witch has become a symbol of female power in the media, even it is not immune from the beauty bias, which describes a culture where conventionally beautiful people are seen as being more trustworthy and generally better than their “unattractive” counterparts, and rewarded accordingly. What’s more, it seems that witches in media open a window to how the patriarchy measures women’s virtue, worth, and morality. Witches in media certainly do get to be good, strong, and independent, but only if they fit within certain guidelines. Fall outside the criteria of young, sexually available, and white and you risk being cast as a very wicked witch indeed.
If pop culture holds a mirror up to the values we express as a larger culture, then what Hollywood seems to be saying is that only people of a certain class, appearance, age, and race get to exist and be good in that society. Yet that fundamentally misunderstands what witchcraft is about.
There’s a lot that witches can teach us that goes beyond what you think a spell is: Good or bad cannot be determined from appearance alone; deviation from the norm is a powerful thing; and age is natural, and can bring both wisdom and ignorance. But as witchcraft becomes more popular, we have to be wary of who gets to tell witches’ stories: those who know firsthand about these centuries-old traditions, or people who are still afraid, and let their prejudices influence what they think it means to be magic.
Related: How Disfigured Villains Like "Wonder Woman's" Dr. Poison Perpetuate Stigma
