Witches: Book Review No. 3

 

I'm teaching eighth grade American History for the first time this year so, while I was listening to presentations on World War II and the peoples of Iraq from my high school history classes and bracing myself to read a slew of exam papers last spring, I was also immersing myself in young adult historical fiction.  No fun, of course.  After all, I had to read these novels before I could assign them as summer reading.  A terrible burden.

The Witch of Blackbird Pond (1958) by Elizabeth George Speare is a classic, and Witch Child (2000) by Celia Rees is a more recent novel in the same vein.  Both feature a feisty young heroine, stymied but not undone by the strictures of colonial Puritan society.  In both cases, the young lady escapes a repressive and possibly life-threatening situation by journeying across the ocean to a new land and a society that combines new opportunity with unexpected oppresion.

Witch Child, set in 1659, opens a window to the orginial inhabitants of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and their interaction with the English settlers.  The Native Americans are skilled woodspeople and healers, and save the lives of the new arrivals with little fanfare and less thanks.  The protagonist's troubles, originating in England, continue in part because of her friendship with a people whom most other colonists views as "untouchables."

The Witch of Blackbird Pond is herself something of a tangential character in a novel set in Connecticut in the 1680s.  Frontier battles with Indians barely merit a mention; here, the conflict is between the Royalists who support the English governor and the Puritans who insist upon the freedoms granted in their colonial charter.  The central character finds herself caught between the two groups, as well as between the freedom she has enjoyed as a carefree girl in Barbados and the rigidity of her adult life in America.  The "witch" enables her to see her way to making peace with all the fragments of her life.

It's significant that two of the best novels I've come across with female characters at the forefront both center on witchcraft.  Women's potent roles in connection with birth, sickness, healing, and caring for children combine with their subordinate status in a patriarchal and authoritarian society to create an ever-present undercurrent of fear.  The men seem terrified of the power of the women, whose connection to the natural world is both mysterious and unalterable, and the women are ever threatened with exposure and death in the event that their own authority becomes untenable.

Not, perhaps, the thoughts with which one would introduce American history to thirteen-year-olds.  But inevitable thoughts for an adult woman face-to-face with the burdens under which her female ancestors struggled to create a new world.

 

(In case this sounds familiar: this was originally an entry in another journal I started but gave up on -- I've just moved it over here.)

Walked: 4.7 miles.