Reclaiming the Figure of the Witch : How the Witch is Repurposed as a Symbol of Resistance and Stigmatized Female Experience in Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes and Madeline Miller’s Circe

Abstract

Many of us have grown up with stories about the witch. She has taken on many different forms in literature, from Homer’s Circe, the first witch in Western literature, to Hecate, Baba Yaga, the Weird sisters, the Wicked Witch of the West, the Wicked fairy godmother, and Hermione Granger. The literary witch is in other words nothing new. For centuries she has been portrayed as the cunning, evil creature lurking in the margins, a secondary character and an obstacle for the protagonist to overcome. However, this overused and simplistic image of the witch is being challenged in literature, as well as in film and popular culture. Writers are placing her in the centre of the narrative and giving her a voice, and what she has to say echoes the thoughts and sentiments of a lot of readers in the late-modern and contemporary world. But where did this stereotypical image of the witch come from and why does it matter how she is being portrayed in our culture? While the witch has been present in our literary world for centuries, as well as in our history, the way she is represented in contemporary literature can be seen to challenge some of the previous roles she has inhabited. In this thesis I will look at the figure of the witch in two novels – Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner (1926) and Circe by Madeline Miller (2018) – and discuss how the authors use their witches to represent gender issues of their times. I will first shortly discuss how certain characteristics in women in early modern Europe seem to have made them more susceptible to the accusation of witchcraft, and how these characteristics can be seen to stem from the literary archetypes in biblical stories and Greek myths, justifying why literary representations of the witch, and women, matter. I will then move on to the main discussion of this thesis; how the authors Sylvia Townsend Warner and Madeline Miller individually portray these same characteristics in their witches in a way that destigmatizes them. I will argue that they repurpose the figure of the witch as a symbol of resistance towards gender imbalances in our society, as well as a symbol of female agency.