There is no doubt that the mythological character of Medea has had a wide-ranging, interesting, and frightening legacy. If one were to think about the mythological story, one would perhaps vaguely recall that Medea was responsible for Jason’s success in securing the Golden Fleece. More familiar – and more terrifying – would possibly be the parts of her story that relate Medea’s killing of her two children, murderous vengeance on Jason’s new bride and father-in-law, and banishment of Jason to a future without heirs, future wife, or a real home. This acquaintance with the myth or nebulous resonance of some components of the story probably arises from Euripides’ play, Medea (431 BC).

However, other ancient texts and artwork also shape our modern interpretations, refashionings, and opinions about this magical woman – especially in the art of film, which is the source of the majority of the current opinions about Medea.[1] In addition to Euripides’ Medea, we also have Hesiod’s Theogony, Apollonius of Rhodes’ Argonautica, and Seneca’s Medea as the main primary literary sources about the Colchian priestess and princess – a foreigner that in the eyes of most Greeks, Jason and her adult victims among them, is a fearsome witch. There is also an abundance of art (vases and other types of paintings) that communicate the more gruesome parts of Medea’s life. This article briefly explores the literary and artistic representations in order to show their influence – or lack thereof – on films that use or allude to the myth of Medea. Secondarily, this article charts the ways in which some of the films reflect the times in which they were made.

Timothy Gantz in his Early Greek Myth: A Guide to Literary and Artistic Sources lists Hesiod (Theogony 992-1002) as the first author to mention Medea, who is the daughter of Aeëtes and whom Jason marries and takes to Iolcus. She bears him a son named Medeus.[2] The text reads:

When Aeson’s son had / completed these he came to Iolcus, after enduring much toil, upon / a swift ship, leading Aeetes’ quick-eyed daughter, and he made her / his vigorous wife. After she had been overpowered by Jason, the / shepherd of the people, she gave birth to a son, Medeus…[3]

Not much can be gleaned about the nature of Medea.

Post-Hesiodic brief, fragmented, or incomplete references to Medea exist in the Greek elegiac poet Mimnermus, Pherecydes of Syros, and Sophocles’ lost play Kolchides among many other literary and artistic references.[4] Pindar (Pythian 4.211-9) attributes the love of Medea for Jason to Aphrodite, who teaches the hero spells and incantations that he then uses to bewitch Medea into turning herself against her father and homeland, and to showing Jason how to get the Golden Fleece. Glimpses into the character of Medea appear in the Kolchides, in which scholars speculate Medea killed her brother Apsyrtus. We also read of this fratricide in the literary work that probably has had the greatest Nachleben, Euripides’ Medea, where we hear Jason say:

A great curse / you were even then, betrayer of your father and of the land that / nourished you. But the gods have visited on me the avenging spirit / meant for you. For you killed your / own brother at the hearth and then stepped aboard the fair-prowed Argo. It was with acts like these that you began. (1334-6)[5]

Pherecydes includes in his work the shocking detail that Aspyrtus is a small child and Apollodorus in his Library gives a gruesome account of the death of Medea’s brother:

When Aeetes discovered the daring deeds done by Medea, he started off in pursuit of the ship; but when she saw him near, Medea murdered her brother and cutting him limb from limb threw the pieces into the deep. Gathering the child’s limbs, Aeetes fell behind in the pursuit; wherefore he turned back, and, having buried the rescued limbs of his child, he called the place Tomi.[6]

It seems that Medea had a reputation for killing small children even before she committed that act of killing her own children. This act labelled her as a terrible being, whom one would not cross without suffering dire consequences.[7] From accounts such as these come the “accepted” characterisation of Medea as a child-destroyer and the modern, filmic representations of Medea.

This view of Medea has a deep and far-ranging influence. For example, Nina Billone has written on the work of Rhodessa Jones and Sean Reynolds, who have directed since 2009 the “Medea Project: Theater for Incarcerated Women.” The goal of the project is to guide the:

Incarcerated and formerly incarcerated women to turn stories on their heads, and in so doing to place themselves at the centre of cultural and political narratives… By staging mythical journeys through multiple underworlds, the group works to transform such concepts as death, descent, violence, and loss into life, love, power, and hope. The company’s work is founded on the belief that when women tell their stories on the public stage, they are empowered to change – even to save – their lives.[8]

This noble initiative – that is meant to rehabilitate and restore lives broken by crime – turns the “ideology of the prison on its head” and also reinterprets Medea as a source of a possible change to a better life. This is something that was denied to Medea by her own actions, which she may or may not have been forced to perform.

However, the villainous portrayal of Medea bestowed upon her by the ancient Greeks and Romans still dominates any delineation of her persona. Indeed, Ronald Hutton has noted that along with Circe – who happens to be her aunt – Medea is universally seen as a powerful woman that works destructive magic but that is not “unequivocally evil.” Although she murders her brother and her own children, she commits the former act because she wanted to help her beloved Jason and the latter deed “in an orgy of vengeance” when Jason casts her off. She escapes retribution for both deeds and, consequently, the “attitudes of the [ancient] Greek texts towards her remain ambivalent.”[9] The Romans, however, manipulate and alter the “Greek” Medea into a nastier character and depict her as the type of witch that performs unspeakable evil and conjures wicked things in “elaborate nocturnal rites.”[10] This is not something readily found in the works of the ancient Greek authors mentioned above (e.g., Euripides, Hesiod, Apollonius of Rhodes, Mimnermus, Pherecydes of Syros, Sophocles, Pindar).

The evil, child-destroying, vengeful dimension of Medea often appears in modern news accounts that have women killing their children. For example, a 2018 news article reports that a woman “was charged in the death of her baby after he overdosed from a lethal mix of methadone, amphetamine and methamphetamine in her breast milk.” The news reporter then writes that at “least in this case, this Medea is going to be held responsible for killing her child.”[11] Likewise, in a 2016 news item, one reads the following about the death of a two-year-old boy at the hands of his two mothers: “One of the earliest and most famous is probably the Greek myth of Medea, wife of Jason (of the Argonauts fame) who, in an act of revenge following Jason’s affair with another princess, killed their two young sons. In contemporary diagnostic terms, this is known as ‘revenge filicide.’”[12] One last item of the many that exist: The Plain Dealer, in commenting on the acquittal of Casey Anthony in the murder of her two-year-old daughter Caylee Marie characterizes the mother as “an attractive, white mother from the suburbs who acted more like Medea than the Madonna.”[13] The “Medea” link between the mythological stories and narratives and the disturbingly sad news account of horrific real-life crimes cannot seem to be broken. However, this single facet – as alarming as it is – does not account for the totality of this “magical” woman.

Medea in the Greek mind is not human but a grandchild of the god Helios and daughter of King Aeëtes and his nymph-wife Eidyia: Hesiod in his Theogony (956-7) writes that Aeëtes and his sister Circe were born to Helios by the ocean nymph Pereis and that Eidyia is the child of the ‘god Ocean’. Additionally, Medea is a witch, a female practitioner of magic, who could not only turn old men young but also cunningly dispatch her enemies. An example of the former occurs when Medea rejuvenates Jason’s aged father Aeson and kills Pelias, the man that had sent him on the expedition to get the Golden Fleece. The Roman poet Ovid includes these events in his Metamorphoses: after intricate and lengthy preparations that involve brewing a regenerative potion, Medea:

unsheathed her / knife and cut the old man’s throat; then, letting the old blood all / run out, she filled his veins with her brew. When Aeson had drunk / this in part through his lips and part through the wound, his beard / and hair lost their hoary grey and quickly became black again; his / leanness vanished, away went the pallor and the look of neglect, the / deep wrinkles were filled out with new flesh, his limbs had the / strength of youth. Aeson was filled with wonder, and remembered / that this was he forty years ago. (Metamorphoses 7.285-93)[14]

Things did turn out so well for Pelias; Medea encouraged Pelias’ own daughters to kill him:

Medea / said. “Come, draw your swords, and let out his old blood that I may / refill his empty veins with young blood again. In your own hands / rests your father’s life and youth. If you have any filial love, and if / the hopes are not vain that you are cherishing, come, do your duty / by your father; drive out age at your weapon’s point; let out his / enfeebled blood with the stroke of the steel.” Spurred on by these / words, as each was filial she became first in the unfilial act, and that / she might not be wicked did the wicked deed. Nevertheless, none / could bear to see her own blows; they turned their eyes away; and / so with averted faces they blindly struck with cruel hands. The old / man, streaming with blood, still raised himself on his elbow and half / mangled tried to get up from his bed; and with all those swords / round him, he stretched out his pale arms and cried: “What are you / doing, my daughters? What arms you to your father’s death?” Their / courage left them, their hands fell. When he would have spoken / further, the Colchian cut his throat and plunged his mangled body / into the boiling water. (Metamorphoses 7.332-49)

The literary consensus on the image of Medea – though somewhat ambivalent and unclear in some authors – is therefore a negative one, and it has generally remained so throughout time. What does appear in the texts is a woman that is not human, but a deadly witch, a passionate lover that will betray kin and homeland for her beloved. The ancient texts describe her as a vengeful practitioner of dark arts, and a murderer of children. An additional aspect of her character that has not been mentioned is that she is considered a foreigner, a barbarian by the Greeks.

Although the wife of Jason, a Greek, she is originally from what is considered a wild, untamed, and savage part of the world. Her homeland, Colchis, is located at the extreme end of the known world, at the furthermost point of the Black Sea. Evidently, in the Greek mind, nothing good can come from such a fierce place where monsters, such as a dragon, protect the Golden Fleece. This was the dragon that Medea helped Jason put to sleep and then vanquish in order that her beloved Jason could reach his goal. This is the literary portrayal, but what does ancient art tell us about Medea?

Ovid’s account, included above, tells the reader that aged Pelias died at the hands of his own daughters – Medea had tricked them and Pelias into doing so. She had shown the daughters that she had such amazing powers that she could restore to youth any ancient being; she had done so with both Jason and his father Aeson. However, in this case, she successfully rejuvenated an old goat as proof, which Medea had killed, dismembered, and boiled in a cauldron of rejuvenation with the spectacular result of a youthful transformation. Unfortunately, the outcome for Pelias was not the same, he just ended up dead at the hands of his daughters. Perhaps this could be interpreted as a reverse-foreshadowing of what Medea would do to her own children: filicide instead of patricide, but filicide that metaphorically kills the father. Jason, after all, had no future, no children, and no woman would want to marry Jason for fear of what may happen to her and any children that she might have with Jason.

The earliest work of art that depicts a scene from the Medea-narrative is an Etruscan olpe vase that dates to around 630 BC.

Etruscan Olpe Vase, c. 630 BC.

Daniel Ogden describes the vase as having Medea on it: “labelled with an Etruscan variant of her name, ‘Metaia’, wielding a spoon or a wand, boils up Jason in her cauldron to rejuvenate him as the Argonauts, misunderstanding the situation, come running to help….”[15] Later depictions of the myth involve more scenes of rejuvenation, as Emma Griffiths notes, and these depictions emphasize “Medea’s powers which the literary sources can tend to elide.”[16] The iconographic components tend to include, for a large number of images, some or all of the following: Medea, Jason, a goat or ram (which was used in the deception to murder Pelias), a cauldron, an elderly man, a dragon (either the creature guarding the fleece or the one that pulled Medea’s chariot that she used to fly away from the scene of her Corinthian slaughter), and the Golden Fleece. Griffiths uses as an illustrative example an Attic red-figure hydria that dates to around 430 BC; the scene includes a woman (presumably Medea), an old man that has the name “Jason” inscribed next to him, and between them a ram in a tripod-cauldron that is suspended over a fire.

Attic Red-figure Hydria, c. 430 BC.

The scene, Griffiths writes, is “not a scene we have in early literary sources, and this difference of emphasis already alerts us to one of the discrepancies we may encounter when accessing mythology via written and visual sources.”[17]  However, later artwork with Medea-motifs can be more often associated with Euripides’ influential play relating the story of the Colchian wife of Jason. Indeed, after the play was produced in 431 BC, the appearance of the iconographic Medea becomes more oriental in nature and tend to show the death of her children and the dragon chariot.[18]

This generic/standard iconographic representation of the Medea story appears, for example, on a vase that Griffiths discusses in her monograph:[19] a Lucanian red-figure bell krater that dates to around 400 BC and is attributed to the Policoro Painter (Leonard C. Hanna, Jr. Fund 1991.1; The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH).

Lucanian Calyx-Krater c. 400 BC.

The vase includes a synoptic departure-scene of Medea on a chariot pulled by two dragons. The krater has the dead children on an altar in the lower register of the vase; an elderly nurse looks down on the dead children and pulls at her hair in grief and anguish. To the left of the altar, the painter has Jason approaching his children while he looks at the central image of the vase, which has Medea surrounded by an over-sized, awe-inspiring aureole as she speeds away from the scene of her crime. This synoptic image, this essay contends, is the indelible image that has most influenced art (of any type) in the post-classical era.

Before moving to the filmic Medea it is necessary to review very briefly Medea’s Nachleben in the medieval period and the Renaissance. Ruth Morse[20] has demonstrated that Ovid, and his immensely influential Metamorphoses and Heroïdes, moulded the medieval perception of Medea. Other authors like Seneca also exert some influence in her depiction but notwithstanding any attempts to rehabilitate her mythological story “the history of female seduction (with all its terrors and destructiveness) is grounded in blameworthy events. In medieval texts Medea, however pitiably seduced and abandoned, is the author of her own fall.”[21] Indeed, Katherine Heavey observes that “Medea is frequently identified as one of classical literature’s most abhorrent  and  uncontrolled  heroines,  by  authors  and  commentators  from  the  Middle  Ages  to  the  present  day.”[22] More importantly for the modern perception of Medea, Heavey makes it quite clear that for the early modern literary Medea one finds that authors could choose to emphasize the ruinous monster that committed unspeakable acts and then received an appropriate punishment or elicit compassion for her by suggesting that she suffered from and acted out of love. However, Heavey does caution that simultaneously “and paradoxically… there is a sense that early modern authors felt themselves perversely constrained by Medea: although undeniably fascinated by her power, they cannot and do not celebrate it as their classical forebears do.”[23] As we shall see in films that treat this myth, this contrast is abundantly manifest in the conundrum that the directors face: although the story of Medea is quite moving and her plight actions are terrible and intolerable, one cannot overlook the murder of the children.

How do the classical, medieval, and Renaissance literary and artistic evidence and interpretations about Medea influence the modern, filmic view of the Colchian princess? How does a director tell the story of such a powerful “magical woman” – one that is generally viewed “as the epitome of the monstrous-feminine…the destroyer of her children”?[24] How can film capture that Medea that is a witch, who is beautiful, “sexually dangerous,” has knowledge of “potions, herbs, spells, and charms,” and is both a creator of and threat to children?[25] Due to space limitations, it is impossible to answer fully these questions or give a thorough analysis of all films that have Medea or Medea’s story as subjects.

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1969 Medea is a puzzling, yet straightforward film.[26] On the surface, it appears to be a simple retelling of the myth with all of the adjustments to the story heavily reflecting the director’s style and creativity. Indeed, as Jon Solomon notes, Pasolini’s work belongs to those non-Hollywood films that dealt with ancient themes and were made by European (especially Italian directors) as a consequence of the scandals and cost overruns that frequented American films like Joseph Mankiewicz’s 1963 Cleopatra. This new wave of ancient films had “non epic” atmospheres and “fresh artistic perspectives” as created in Pasolini’s Medea and the 1969 Fellini Satyricon; Solomon describes the former work as “creating a metahistorical, anthropological environment for Medea’s revenge on Jason and Creon.”[27] This transformation is symptomatic of the social and political changes in context: “She, a stranger, is believed to be such by the society in which she migrates and into which she cannot integrate; Medea becomes a symbol of rejection and marginalisation, and magic a topos of discrimination – again a magic which is a powerful symbol of danger and alterity.”[28] Pasolini downplays the filicide.

More importantly – or better said, more imposingly – Maria Callas is the lead. The opera star’s lines are not as many as those of the Medeas that we see in the other three films discussed in this essay. However, what is constant and immensely compelling is the gaze of Medea, which is more Callas than “Medea” or at least what anyone familiar with the ancient texts and images would have imaged. It is the female gaze, Colleen Marie Ryan argues – an opinion that I agree with – that serves as “the” important key with which to decipher what Pasolini’s film is all about and to appreciate his transformation of the magical-mythical character.[29] Ryan states that the director empowered the female gaze and thus defined femininity and used “it as a vehicle through which to ascertain and examine his own male identity.”[30] Pasolini used Medea and her filmic character’s desire to return to her original “private and spiritual being” as his own frustration surrounding the “socio-political events around 1969.”[31] This is a break from the Euripidean Medea who had no real power in the male-sphere in which Jason lived. After all, she was a foreigner, a witch, a woman in a Greek male-dominated society. She had no real recourse or refuge except to use her “magical” or “wise-woman” ways by interpreting correctly the oracle that Aegeus had received regarding his own fecundity.[32]

Jules Dassin’s 1978 A Dream of Passion revisits the myth with another stellar lead, Melina Mercouri, who plays an actress called Maya that is rehearsing for a performance of the Euripidean tragedy. Dassin, a director that had been exiled from Hollywood during the McCarthy era, juxtaposes the stage actress Mercouri with Brenda Collins, a woman that had been sentenced to prison for murdering her three children. The murderess, who is played by Ellen Burstyn, is like Medea since she was about to lose her husband to a foreign woman in a foreign land. Aside from the fanatical religious dimension of Brenda’s personality, which sort of fits with the magical or ritualistic that is often attached to the mythological Medea, Dassin presents the viewer with a striking analytical insight as to why Brenda killed her children. Not only was she to be made a husbandless, childless, destitute exile in a country not her own, she had also been the victim of violence at the hands of her husband, for whom she had a love that bordered on some sort of sexual psychopathy that may have originated in a repressed, religion-centred personality disorder. In an interview with Dassin, Dan Georgakas and Petros Anastasopoulos relate that the director said that:

The romantic treatment of women in screen roles is dead or dying. That doesn’t mean romance is dead or dying. But you have to deal with a new kind of woman, thank God, a woman who is not exclusively and only to be treated in a romantic way. Women have things to say, women have a fight, women are beginning to occupy important social positions.[33]

This is followed later by this intriguing statement:

Brenda is an international character. I think she is that woman, of which there are legions everywhere, whose world is so small, whose horizons are so shrunken, that they have constructed an entire life around one single human being. She is a woman who has not had the time or information to structure other interests. And when what she has built is shaken, she is in deep trouble. I think that woman, unfortunately, exists everywhere.[34]

Dassin’s opinions cast Brenda as being more similar to Medea than the Medea that Maya is preparing for on the stage. In fact, there is no doubt that the way in which Dassin staged the moments leading to the death of Brenda’s three children is much more moving and poignant that what Euripides himself wrote. There is no getting away from the fact that the combination of the three Medeas (the mythical, the actress, the murderess) completely characterises an extremely tortured woman that commits an extremely evil act – the motivation for Brenda’s acts and the person of Brenda herself appear inconsequential in view of the destruction of the children. Patricia Salzman-Mitchell and Jean Alvares write that of the three Medea films (Pasolini 1969, Dassin 1978, and von Trier 1988) that came before Arturo Ripstein’s 2000 Así es la vida, Dassin’s film “is probably the one most ‘modern’ and ‘reflexive’ of the three, and probably the easiest to follow in some ways.”[35] It should also be described as the most “shocking” perhaps because there is no actual way to rescue Brenda from condemnation except if some sort of psychological aberration is blamed for her actions. After all, it is noted in the film that she ate cake while she wrote the letter to her husband in which she shared the details of her crime.

Lars von Trier’s 1988 film is unlike Pasolini or Dassin in its depiction of Medea. The viewer is exposed to a surreal watery world from which Medea arises just like a mythological sea nymph. The places, people, and things in which she finds herself or is surrounded by – both in the present, past, and future – are associated with the sea. This, of course, is a logical correlation to the myth since Jason was a seafarer and known for his ship Argo and his sailing companions the Argonauts. Medea, after all, had sailed as a fugitive away from her father’s fleet and in some versions of the myth, Medea had dismembered her brother Apsyrtus and then tossed the pieces of the corpse into the sea. This was done to slow down the pursuing fleet, which stopped to collect all of the parts of the body so as to give a proper funeral. The only “dry” circumstances materialise when Medea hangs her sons on the dead tree in a field flush with life.  A truly horrific set of minutes when one son helps hang the other and then urges Medea to hang him. All the while, Jason is lost amid a thick copse of trees trying to locate Medea and their sons.

 Medea’s plight and her ensuing actions in this film do not appear to originate fully in Euripides’ play, which offers some sympathy for Medea. However, it was Euripides that introduced Medea as a killer of her own children because other versions had the citizens of Corinth murder them after Medea had killed their king and young princess. It may be argued that filmic versions discussed thus far may rely more on the Senecan play, which, as Hanna Roisman suggests:

Does not allow the audience to identify with Medea” and that from the very beginning Seneca presents Medea “as being different as possible from the good people of the audience, as ‘not us’. The audience was invited to observe her from a distance, as a barbaric foreigner and supernatural witch, with whom they had nothing in common.[36]

Indeed, without a doubt, von Trier offers a Medea that elicits revulsion and horror, but he also, as Helene Foley observes, makes her a sympathetic character:

Largely by reducing her almost to silence. In this version, Medea’s eldest son lovingly helps his appallingly ill-treated mother to hang her child. Hence, as Medea, finally ensconced on Aegeus’ boat, takes off the disfiguring cap that she has worn throughout the film to liberate a cascade of long red hair, the audience is, I think, urged to feel a thrill of sympathy.[37]

From the very start of the film, Medea is shown with non-human characteristics: sea-borne, shrouded in mists that steam up from the sea and boggy lands, a mysterious witch collecting plants and berries. The story also emphasises Aegeus, his dilemma, and sex more at the outset of the story – he cannot have male children, which is paralleled at the end with the destruction of Jason’s male children and any future sexual partner and resultant male offspring. This film, in truth, plays up the role of sex more than in the classical texts. For instance, in this modern example, we have Glauce refusing sex with Jason until he does something about Medea; toward the end of the film Jason refuses to have sex with Medea and he then strikes her. This physical violence against women seems to be gain a greater hold in later films on this myth and lends to the creation of a greater understanding of the character and her actions, but it does not excuse them.

This essay concludes with Arturo Ripstein’s 2000 Así es la vida, which clearly announces at the end of the film that it was based on Seneca’s Medea which, as noted above, presented an extremely pejorative view of the magical Medea. In fact, from the very start of the film, the magical, mysterious, witchcraft practicing aspects of the main character Julia are emphasised and then repeated throughout the entire film. The film opens with the camera focused on the back of a moving truck that has a metallic hatch that shimmers in the light as if it were made of gold – a clear reference to the legendary Golden Fleece – this truck and its glimmering gold are recurrently shown going through tunnels as if on a katabatic trek. Immediately thereafter, Julia appears and speaks about her abandonment by Nicolas (Ripstein’s Jason) as she is surrounded by shocking juxtapositions of Christian iconography and curandera accoutrements in one room while in an adjoining room the viewer gets glimpses of medical equipment and furniture used in performing abortions. This Medea is unlike the others depicted in film before Ripstein’s version.

The delineation of Julia’s character is surprising: she uses obscenities frequently and imaginatively, relies upon and uses a man-hating madrina (godmother) for advice, smokes, and drinks. The madrina is a fascinating reworking of the Nurse character found in some of the classical texts, but here she initially seems to be used to mouth the anti-male feelings that Julia has: male children should never be allowed to be born; their necks should/could be snapped at birth like chicken bones; males are, for the most part, to be avoided. However, the madrina does suggest to Julia that she forget Nicolas, leave, and seek another man; there are always men who would be interested in bedding Julia. Even though she offers such advice, she is worried and shaken by the threats that Julia makes against her children. This hatred of the male is also evident in the Creon character as found in the person of Marrana, which translates as pig or sow, but can also mean “slut” when applied to women. Evidently, what is intended is that Nicolas’ future father-in-law have within him all the male qualities that Julia and madrina despise; in other words, Marrana is a “sexist pig.”

As in all of the texts and films mentioned in this essay, Julia/Medea eventually kills her children. However, Ripstein’s clever innovations and additions do not take away from the customary view of Medea as an abandoned woman, a foreigner in a foreign, a witch, someone to be feared, and a murderer of her own children.[38] It seems that no matter the medium, time, interpreters, or changing social mores and attitudes, Medea will always be summed up by her final actions toward her children even if Ripstein’s murder sequence looks “far removed from that tranquility we saw in Pasolini’s Medea.”[39]

It appears that Medea will always be the horrific Medea. However, it must be remembered that all of the texts and artwork, ancient and modern, are the creation of men. It is men who craft the character of Medea and it is men that then set the model that is used when working with the myth.

Notes

[1] Indeed, after a presentation on what the ancient Greeks and Romans thought and wrote about Medea, this essay analyses four films  that may help us understand how the modern auteur manipulates the myth or how the myth and all its literary and artistic baggage may influence the auteur. The films are Medea (Pier Paolo Pasolini, Italy, 1969), A Dream of Passion (Jules Dassin, Greece, 1978), Medea (Lars von Trier, Denmark, 1988), and Así es la vida (Arturo Ripstein, Mexico, 2000).

[2] Timothy Gantz, Early Greek Myth: A Guide to Literary and Artistic Sources (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 358.

[3] The translation is from Hesiod, Theogony. Works and Days. Testimonia, ed. and trans. Glenn W. Most, Loeb Classical Library 57 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 83.

[4] See Gantz, Early Greek Myth, 358-73 for a thorough enumeration and discussion of the artistic and literary references regarding Medea.

[5] The translation is from Euripides, Cyclops. Alcestis. Medea, ed. and trans. David Kovacs, Loeb Classical Library 12 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 403-5.

[6] The translation is from Apollodorus, The Library, Volume I: Books 1-3.9, trans. James G. Frazer, Loeb Classical Library 121 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1921), 113.

[7] Apollonius of Rhodes has a different narrative on the death of Aspyrtus: he is a grown man that leads the Colchian fleet in pursuit of Medea and Jason after they have stolen the Golden Fleece.

[8] Nina Billone, “Performing Civil Death: The Medea Project and Theater for Incarcerated Women,” Text & Performance Quarterly 29, no. 3 (2009): 261.

[9] Ronald Hutton, The Witch: A History of Fear, From Ancient Times to The Present (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), 58. Hutton writes that both women “were to be immensely influential figures in later European literature, as ultimate ancestresses of many of its magic-wielding females…” (58).

[10] Hutton, The Witch, 63.

[11] Christine M. Flowers, “A Formula for Disaster: An Addicted Mom and a Breastfeeding Child,” The Chronicle (Willimantic, CT), July 25, 2018, 5.

[12] Val Burns, “Hearts of Darkness: Inside the Minds of the Women who killed Liam Fee,” The Herald and the Sunday Herald (Glasgow, Scotland), June 5, 2016.

[13] The Plain Dealer, “Cases Celebrated vs. Cases Ignored,” The Plain Dealer (Cleveland, OH), July 8, 2011.

[14] The translated passages from Ovid are from Ovid, Metamorphoses, Volume I: Books 1-8, trans. Frank Justus Miller and rev. G. P. Goold, Loeb Classical Library 42 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1916), 363.

[15] Daniel Ogden, Drakōn: Dragon Myth and Serpent Cult in the Greek and Roman Worlds (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 203 fn. 58. There exists an Etruscan mirror (Paris [France] Bibliothèque Nationale de France, département des Monnaies, médailles et antiques bronze. 1329) that dates to the end of the fourth century BC that may perhaps include a similar retelling of Jason’s restored youth. The rejuvenated figure has been identified both as Jason and Pelops. The latter was slaughtered, cooked, and then served by his own father Tantalus as a meal to the gods, who then reassembled almost all of the bits and pieces of Pelops except for the his shoulder, which had been eaten by a preoccupied Demeter. Of course, the other gods had not been duped by Tantalus and, therefore, did not partake in the cannibalistic meal.

[16] Emma Griffiths, Medea (London: Routledge, 2006), 23.

[17] Griffiths, Medea, 25.

[18] Griffiths, Medea, 25 also notes: “There are also images which give us views of stories which are not referred to in the written art at this period, as with the red-figure pots from around 450 BC which show Theseus and a woman, presumed to be Medea—this is not well-attested in the literary sources. Similarly the death of Talos at Medea’s hands receives its first literary account in Apollonios’ Argonautica, but is seen earlier in vases from the last quarter of the fifth century.”

[19] Griffiths, Medea, 86ff.

[20] Ruth Morse, The Medieval Medea (Cambridge, England: D. S. Brewer, 1996).

[21] Morse, The Medieval Medea, 126. Commenting on Morse’s analysis of Medea, Amy Wygant (Medea, Magic, and Modernity in France Stages and Histories, 1553-1797 [Aldershot, England: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2007], 33) writes that “Morse’s point is that the story of Medea and Jason was for the Middle Ages a secular tale of history, not a myth, and because the medieval notion of the cycle of human ambition and the buffetings of fortune differed from antiquity’s notion of the hero’s fortunes and fall, this story was specifically not tragedy. What medieval writers wrote, Morse argues, was necessarily not tragedy, but rather sorrow, and this necessity arose from their understanding that, with the story of Medea, they were in the presence of secular chronology, not mythical time.”

[22] Katherine Heavey, The Early Modern Medea: Medea in English Literature, 1558–1688 (London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2015), 2.

[23] Heavey, The Early Modern Medea, 201.

[24] Serinity Young, Women Who Fly: Goddesses, Witches, Mystics, and Other Airborne Females (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 46.

[25] Young, Women Who Fly, 155. See also Martin M. Winkler’s “Medea’s Infanticide: How to Present the Unimaginable” in his Classical Literature on Screen: Affinities of Imagination, 59-98. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017.

[26] The literature on this film is vast and the opinions regarding what Pasolini was attempting to do in his retelling of the myth are varied. For example, see among very many: Marianne McDonald’s “Pasolini’s Medea: The Lesson of the Grain” in her Euripides in Cinema: The Heart Made Visible, 3-50 (Philadelphia: Centrum, 1983); Ian Christie, “Between Magic and Realism: Medea on Film,” in Medea in Performance: 1500-2000, eds. Edith Hall, Fiona Macintosh, and Oliver Taplin, 144-65 (Oxford: Legenda, 2000); Filippo Carlà, “Pasolini, Aristotle, Freud: Filmed Drama between Psychoanalysis and ‘Neoclassicism,’” in Hellas on Screen: Cinematic Receptions of Ancient History, Literature and Myth, eds. Irene Berti and Marta García Morcillo, 89-115 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2008).

[27] Jon Solomon, “The Sounds of Cinematic Antiquity,” in Classical Myth and Culture in the Cinema, ed. Martin M. Winkler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 332. It has also been suggested that Corrado Alvaro’s essay La lunga notte di Medea (1949) may have anticipated the transformation of Medea into the person that we see in Pasolini.

[28] Filippo Carlà and Irene Berti, Ancient Magic and the Supernatural in the Modern Visual and Performing Arts (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), 10. See also Jesús Carruesco and Montserrat Reig’s “Medea, a Greek Sorceress in Modern Opera and Ballet: From Barber to Reimann” in Carlà and Berti; Carruesco and Reig write that “in the history of reception two main ways of interpreting Medea’s magical knowledge can be distinguished: a psychological line, predominant in the twentieth century, which places the source of its destructive power in the interior of Medea’s mind, and what we would call a political-sociological approach, in which the magic motif functions as an element of characterization of the stranger or the barbarian in conflict with so-called civilization” (93).

[29] Colleen Marie Ryan, “Salvaging the Sacred: Female Subjectivity in Pasolini’s Medea,” Italica 76, no. 2 (1999): 193-204.

[30] Ryan, “Salvaging the Sacred,” 201.

[31] Ryan, “Salvaging the Sacred,” 201.

[32] See Lada Stevanović (“Between Mythical and Rational Worlds: Medea by Pier Paolo Pasolini,” in Ancient Worlds in Film and Television: Gender and Politics, eds. Almut-Barbara Renger and Jon Solomon [Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2013], 219) on Medea’s dislocated but potent sphere of power: “He recognizes the repression and unrecognized status of the domain/time to which Medea originally belongs, especially when it is merged into and swallowed by the dominant masculine one. However, Medea’s rebellious reaction also belongs…to the domain of rational entrance into historical linearity, because it was her only option to be noticed and respected.” However, Colin Dignam (“Cutting Narrative Ties: Sacrifice and Transformation in Medea,” At the Interface / Probing the Boundaries 90 [September, 2017]: 83) does find a continuation of the Euripidean and Ovidian paradigms in Pasolini, especially in those scenes that echo the sacrificial-ritualistic components of Medea’s acts that may point to a display of Medea’s “individual autonomy even as she seeks to achieve acceptance within a community.”

[33] Dan Georgakas and Petros Anastasopoulos, “‘A Dream of Passion’: An Interview with Jules Dassin,” Cinéaste 9, no. 1 (Fall 1978): 21.

[34] Georgakas and Anastasopoulos, “‘A Dream of Passion,’” 22.

[35] Patricia B. Salzman-Mitchell and Jean Alvares, Classical Myth and Film in the New Millennium (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 227.

[36] Hanna M. Roisman, “Medea’s Vengeance,” in Looking at Medea: Essays and a Translation of Euripides’ Tragedy, ed. David Stuttard (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 121.

[37] Helene P. Foley, “Euripides and Tragic Theatre in the Late Fifth Century,” Illinois Classical Studies 24/25 (1999-2000): 12.

[38] For example: the use of the television set and the “Anselmo Fuentes y sus hermanos” band as modern reinterpretations of the classical chorus; the reference to the mal ojo as an anchor for the Latin American setting of the plot; the continual allusions or use of rain and water and the mopping of floors as hints to the sea and its mythological connection to the Graeco-Roman Medea; and the classical proskynetic begging made by Julia to Nicolas and the Marrana.

[39] Winkler, “Medea’s Infanticide,” 65.

Bibliography

Apollodorus. The Library, Volume I: Books 1-3.9. Translated by James G. Frazer. Loeb Classical Library 121. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1921.

Billone, Nina. “Performing Civil Death: The Medea Project and Theater for Incarcerated Women.” Text & Performance Quarterly 29, no. 3 (2009): 260-75.

Burns, Val. “Hearts of Darkness: Inside the Minds of the Women who Killed Liam Fee.” The Herald and the Sunday Herald (Glasgow, Scotland), June 5, 2016.

Carlà, Filippo. “Pasolini, Aristotle, Freud: Filmed Drama between Psychoanalysis and ‘Neoclassicism.’” In Hellas on Screen: Cinematic Receptions of Ancient History, Literature and Myth, edited by Irene Berti and Marta García Morcillo, 89-115. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2008.

Carlà, Filippo, and Irene Berti, eds. Ancient Magic and the Supernatural in the Modern Visual and Performing Arts. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015.

Carruesco, Jesús, and Montserrat Reig. “Medea, a Greek Sorceress in Modern Opera and Ballet: From Barber to Reimann.” In Ancient Magic and the Supernatural in the Modern Visual and Performing Arts, edited by Filippo Carlà and Irene Berti, 93-102.  London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015.

Christie, Ian. “Between Magic and Realism: Medea on Film.” In Medea in Performance: 1500-2000, edited by Edith Hall, Fiona Macintosh, and Oliver Taplin, 144-65. Oxford: Legenda, 2000.

Dignam, Colin. “Cutting Narrative Ties: Sacrifice and Transformation in Medea.” At the Interface / Probing the Boundaries 90 (September 2017): 83–94.

Euripides. Cyclops. Alcestis. Medea. Edited and translated by David Kovacs. Loeb Classical Library 12. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994.

Flowers, Christine M. “A Formula for Disaster: An Addicted Mom and a Breastfeeding Child.” The Chronicle (Willimantic, CT), July 25, 2018.

Foley, Helene P. “Euripides and Tragic Theatre in the Late Fifth Century.” Illinois Classical Studies 24/25 (1999-2000): 1-13.

Gantz, Timothy. Early Greek Myth: A Guide to Literary and Artistic Sources. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.

Georgakas, Dan, and Petros Anastasopoulos. “‘A DREAM OF PASSION’: An Interview with Jules Dassin.” Cinéaste 9, no. 1 (Fall 1978): 20-24.

Griffiths, Emma. Medea. London: Routledge, 2006.

Heavey, Katherine. The Early Modern Medea: Medea in English Literature, 1558–1688. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2015.

Hesiod. Theogony. Works and Days. Testimonia. Edited and translated by Glenn W. Most. Loeb Classical Library 57. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018.

Hutton, Ronald. The Witch: A History of Fear, From Ancient Times to the Present. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017.

McDonald, Marianne. Euripides in Cinema: The Heart Made Visible. Philadelphia: Centrum, 1983.

Morse, Ruth. The Medieval Medea. Cambridge, England: D. S. Brewer, 1996.

Ogden, Daniel. Drakōn: Dragon Myth and Serpent Cult in the Greek and Roman Worlds. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

Ovid. Metamorphoses, Volume I: Books 1-8. Translated by Frank Justus Miller. Revised by G. P. Goold. Loeb Classical Library 42. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1916.

Plain Dealer, The. “Cases Celebrated vs. Cases Ignored.” The Plain Dealer (Cleveland, OH), July 8, 2011.

Roisman, Hanna M. “Medea’s Vengeance.” In Looking at Medea: Essays and a Translation of Euripides’ Tragedy, edited by David Stuttard, 111-22. London: Bloomsbury, 2014.

Ryan, Colleen Marie. “Salvaging the Sacred: Female Subjectivity in Pasolini’s Medea.” Italica 76, no. 2 (1999): 193-204.

Salzman-Mitchell, Patricia B., and Jean Alvares. Classical Myth and Film in the New Millennium. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018.

Shipley, Lucy. 2016. “Stories in Clay: Mythological Characters on Ceramics in Archaic Etruria.” Etruscan Studies 19 (2): 225–55.

Solomon, Jon. “The Sounds of Cinematic Antiquity.” In Classical Myth and Culture in the Cinema, edited by Martin M. Winkler, 319-37. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Sterritt, David. “‘The Future is Digital Cinema’: An Interview with Arturo Ripstein and Paz Alicia Garciadiego,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 21, no. 1 (2003): 39-51.

Stevanović, Lada. “Between Mythical and Rational Worlds: Medea by Pier Paolo Pasolini.” In Ancient Worlds in Film and Television: Gender and Politics, edited by Almut-Barbara Renger and Jon Solomon, 213-227. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2013.

Young, Serinity. Women Who Fly: Goddesses, Witches, Mystics, and Other Airborne Females. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018.

Winkler, Martin M. Classical Literature on Screen: Affinities of Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017.

Wygant, Amy. Medea, Magic, and Modernity in France Stages and Histories, 1553-1797. Aldershot, England: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2007.

Filmography

Dassin, Jules, dir. A Dream of Passion. 1978.

Pasolini, Pier Paolo, dir. Medea. 1969.

Ripstein, Arturo, dir. Así es la vida. 2000.

Trier, Lars von, dir. Medea. 1988.

About the Author
Edmund Cueva is a tenured Professor of Classics and Humanities at the University of Houston-Downtown. He has possessed a commensurate record of accomplishment as a teacher-scholar, and has demonstrated a sustained and high level of excellence in teaching and scholarship. At Xavier University (Cincinnati, Ohio), where he won the Bishop Fenwick Teacher of the Year Award, and received the rank of full professor of Classics and then was hired at UHD as its first-ever external department chair. In addition to a demonstrated ability in teaching, Edmund has shown substantial dedication to scholarship. His research demonstrates an abiding habit of mind: 27 refereed articles in peer-reviewed, premier journals; over 60 book reviews in top-rated journals; 13 monograph, co-edited, or co-authored books. Additionally, he was the managing editor of the Classical Bulletin for ten years and since 2005 have been the executive editor of The Petronian Society Newsletter; since 2012 he has served as the book review editor for Interdisciplinary Humanities. Edmund’s exemplary contribution to the advancement of the field is further evidenced by a record of continuous and consistent public speaking at professional conferences in prominent and prestigious venues at regional, national, and international levels.

Throughout Western history, the witch has existed as a gendered entity. The Malleus Maleficarum, a documentation of witchcraft written by agents of the Catholic Church Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger and published in 1487, claimed that since women are the weaker sex they are more vulnerable to the Devil’s possession and his influences. Following these declarations, the design and characteristics of a witch were thus identified alongside those of a woman; “since they are feebler both in mind and body, it is not surprising that they should come under the spell of witchcraft”.[1]

The Malleus Maleficarum enforced gender constructs and “catapulted the female sorceress to fearful new heights”.[2] Women were perceived as a threat to the social order and thus it was excused that they had to become more regulated by the patriarchy. As Kramer and Sprenger dictated, “What else is woman but a foe friendship, an unescapable punishment, a necessary evil, a natural temptation, a desirable calamity, a domestic danger, a delectable detriment, an evil of nature, painted with fair colours!”.[3] Although the Catholic Church disavowed the Malleus Maleficarum in 1490, the fear of the female witch had become embedded into social consciousness by then. The effects of the Malleus Maleficarum’s misogynistic doctrine are arguably still evident in culture today.

Various Renaissance artists were instrumental in ensconcing this misogynistic view of women in visual culture. Dutch painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c. 1525-1569) established the iconography of witchcraft by depicting women on broomsticks with their black cats and cauldrons. The signature black, pointed hat was introduced by William Hogarth in his 1762 print Superstition, Credulity and Fanaticism, creating the stereotyped depiction of the witch in Western popular culture still in existence today.[4] It is this imagery of the witch, and her respective mise-en-scène, that has consistently been replicated throughout visual history, and which serves as the conventional onscreen representation of the witch as a wicked woman, a seductress, a deceiver of children and men and above all, a symbol of defiance of the social order.

The development of the onscreen image of the witch has reiterated social constructs surrounding gender and often reinforced witchcraft as a signifier of the femme fatale. Beginning with silent cinema, most notably Häxan or Witchcraft Through the Ages (Benjamin Christensen, 1922), its imagery of witches is strongly built upon signifiers and constructs discussed provided by the Malleus Maleficarum. Then, during Hollywood’s classical period, The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939) illustrates and offers two forms of the witch; the green and malicious Wicked Witch of the West and the distinctly feminine Glinda the Good Witch of the North. The binary opposition between these two witches reinforces gender roles and dictates pure femininity as ‘good’ whilst also illuminating a witch beyond her evil origins. Though Glinda is not inherently evil and negotiates the construction of the witch she still reinforces negative gender constructs through her emphasis upon natural femininity.

Later, the witch emerges on the cinema and television screen in various waves. In the midcentury, most notably, she appears in I Married a Witch (1942), Bell, Book and Candle (1958) and Bewitched (1964-1972) where the focus on her is through the lens of lighter themes of drama and comedy. Though the witch was being tamed on screen, during this time she was being integrated into the public sphere to provoke gender discussions and negotiate women’s marginalized position in society. Kristen J. Sollée observes that when “the feminist movement first gained visibility in the early 1960s, the witch began to transcend her evil origins”.[5] Throughout feminist waves, the witch has transcended her vilified position and restraints of socially constructed femininity to embrace her powerful position and combat patriarchy’s attempt to subdue her. Beginning in 1968, a group in New York utilised the iconography of witches as a united front towards women’s liberation and formulated W.I.T.C.H (Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell). Their manifesto stated “if you are a woman and dare to look within yourself, you are a Witch. […] You are a witch by being female, untamed, angry, joyous, and immortal”.[6] The group confronted what they considered creations of the oppressive environment inflicted upon women by targeting beauty pageants, Playboy clubs and wedding marches. They aimed to tackle patriarchal attacks on the bodies through marital rape, abuse and anti-abortion laws and claim ownership of their bodies. By claiming ownership of the marginalised witch they were embracing the right to revolt.

The second wave of witch film and television content includes prominent titles The Craft (1996), Practical Magic (1998), Sabrina the Teenage Witch (1996-2003) and Charmed (1998-2006), which blended comedy and drama whilst alluding to the darker themes of witchcraft without fully exploring them. Rather, these witches appealed to a new audience with focus placed upon coming of age narratives.[7] As the feminist agenda progressed, so did depictions of the witch in film and television. Though there were still stereotypical figures, such as the child consuming witches of Hocus Pocus (1993) and The Witches (1990), the witch was becoming prevalent in pop culture and tapping into immense power beyond evil intent. This served to regenerate the witch in a favourable way.

Contemporary witch texts are arguably more progressive, addressing contemporary issues of sexism and the threat of a return to traditional social structures and values. The current wave of witch films includes The Witch (Robert Eggers, 2016) and The Love Witch (Anna Biller, 2016). Witches are no longer malevolent forces in cinema, rather, the witch is contesting the history which sought to persecute women and reclaim her power. An analysis of the new wave of magical women through a historical context can reveal how the witch has been repurposed to draw attention to the renewed attacks on women’s rights and sexuality through oppressive patriarchal power and social subjugation.

Director Robert Eggers restores the witch to her vilified roots as a woman in New England in The Witch or The VVitch: A New England Folktale. Eggers strived for historical authenticity, spending five years researching and paying meticulous attention to detail even going as far as to build the house and barn only with tools available during the period. The film explores the cultural construction of the witch through a Puritan family in the 1630s who are exiled for different interpretations of the New Testament.

The family’s exile is the first example of religious persecution within the film. The bible was a “violent force” amongst Puritans, utilised to build the foundation of oppressive New England and justify punishments against those who threatened the social order.[8] In the opening scene of the film William, the patriarch of the family, questions the authority of the council and provides insight into how Puritanism functioned as lived religion. William’s pride and rigorous religious beliefs prevent him from being judged by “false Christians” to the extent he will displace his family. Eggers describes his film as “a Puritan’s nightmare”, intended to reveal how the strict religious beliefs of Puritan society intertwined with their superstitions created witch hunts and damned women.[9] The Witch explores the suppression of female power and sexuality in a strict religious environment through Thomasin who strives to conform to the image of the ideal Puritan girl. From the beginning Thomasin is portrayed as good; she prays and fulfils her duties and is visibly distressed at being banished alongside her family. Thomasin is utilised to explore, as Egger states, “the dark side of humanity but mainly the dark side of women”.[10] Her coming-of-age narrative illustrates not only ambivalence surrounding women but also women’s fear of power in a male dominated society. Thomasin’s first dialogue scene illustrates her inner turmoil and position within the family as she prays; “I here confess I’ve lived in sin. I’ve been idle of my work, disobedient to my parents, neglectful of my prayer. I have, in secret, played upon my Sabbath. And broken every one of thy commandments in thought. Followed the desires of mine own will, and not the Holy Spirit”. It is from this moment she is marked for the Devil’s possession as she reveals her dissatisfaction with Puritan life. Though she has not actually sinned, she is fearful of the potential as Puritans conceived a world in which God and Satan vied for souls and the temptations of witchcraft were a sinister threat to their goal of salvation. Her lapse in religious holding condemns her to a Puritan witch hunt as she begins to embrace the darker side of her humanity.

A woman who embraces her sexuality in Puritan society is a deviant and threat. The witch is the “anti-mother” within this text, a disgrace to her femininity and disregards religious and social concerns. In Puritan society women were held to strict expectations and motherhood was considered the most significant aspect of female identity and an inherent ability. For instance, rejecting maternal instincts would be considered a signifier of corruption by the Devil, when in actuality it was more likely postpartum depression. During this time, women who did not adhere to feminine expectations were at risk of genuinely believing they were witches as they were so thoroughly permeated by religious ideologies that they considered themselves vile and evil by nature.[11] Judith Butler states gender is learned through performative acts built upon the “reenactment and re-experiencing of a set of meanings already socially established”.[12] Thomasin has learnt her position as the inferior sex through the Puritan culture of religious persecution inflicted by misogynistic men who dictated women were weaker in mind and body and easily seized by the Devil’s temptations due to their weak will. Expectations are placed upon Thomasin to conform to the family structure by serving their needs in preparation of when she will have her own family. Her mother, Katherine, is distrustful of Thomasin’s impending womanhood and pleads with William to send her to the service of another family; “Our daughter hath begat the sign of womanhood”. Despite her devotedness to her family and faith, Thomasin is condemned from the beginning due to her burgeoning sexuality. Her sexuality is presented as a test to her younger brother Caleb, who peers at her cleavage, whilst to her mother she is a rival and later deemed a “proud slut”.

The family seek to blame witchcraft as the source for their despair when trying to establish a life within their exile, whilst it appears their grievances amongst one another conjured the witch. The witch first appears after kidnapping Samuel, creeping through the forest towards her hideaway where she disembowels the infant and uses him to create a flying ointment.[13] William claims Samuel was taken by a wolf, though Katherine directs her anger upon Thomasin who is expected to tend to the children. The family are struggling to survive within their exile and William fails to provide for his wife and children which develops a family crisis and “opens the door to Satan and the witch”.[14] The twins, Jonas and Mercy, illustrate the effects of witchcraft accusations and how the youth contributed to creating a witch hysteria through expressing dramatic outbursts whilst still exempt from social blame.[15] This is particularly evident through Mercy’s antagonising behaviour towards Thomasin, knowing her mother holds her in low regard and provides Mercy an amount of freedom and satisfaction from her rebellious behaviour. At the stream, Mercy taunts Thomasin by openly disobeying her parents, leaving the farm and speaking of witchcraft, behaviour her parents would not tolerate within their strict household. Though Thomasin is the one blamed for the misfortunes on the farm, it is Mercy who consorts with Black Philip, the family goat and assumed mortal vessel of Satan, and declares that Thomasin allowed the witch to take Samuel. It is Thomasin’s environment which ultimately turns her to accept the Devil; she is full of self-loathing which is only reinforced through her family’s attacks on her. During the scene at the stream she responds to Mercy’s taunts, stating she is the witch of the wood; “I am that very witch. When I sleep my spirit slips away from my body and dances naked with the Devil. That’s how I signed his book. He bade me bring him an unbaptised babe, so I stole Sam, and I gave him to my master. And I’ll make any man or thing else vanish I like”. This momentary indulgence seals Thomasin’s fate; she is a witch. She has departed from the narrative of the ideal Puritan girl and succumbed to the pressure of her role which, in Puritan values, transcribes to witchcraft. The witch was seen as “inverting not only the natural order in general but specifically the image of the ‘good woman’”.[16] In this witch text, Thomasin is rewriting the victim narrative through the witch by shedding societal expectations and beginning to embrace her female power.

Caleb’s death marks a significant turn in the film. Though Samuel’s disappearance was claimed to be due to a wolf, Caleb returns from the woods in an undeniably bewitched state and confronts the Puritan family with their greatest fear. The twins accuse Thomasin of being a witch and replicate Caleb’s inflictions. There is no saviour for Thomasin; her younger siblings condemn her, her mother accepts the accusations without question based on her intent to rid the farm of her, whilst her father does not waver in his commitment to Puritan values. William is sure of Thomasin’s guilt based upon what he has seen and intends to inform the council of his daughter’s witchcraft, ultimately issuing her a death sentence as witch trials were designed to prove a woman guilty of witchcraft, or kill them trying. They have created a fictional witch in Thomasin which leads her to embrace that which they despise. She tells her father he is a hypocrite for demanding she speaks truth of her witchcraft when he is deceptive and utilising her as a scapegoat for his lies; “You let mother be as thy master. You cannot bring the crops to yield. You cannot hunt. Is that truth enough? Thou canst do nothing save cut wood”. This only solidifies Thomasin as a witch in her father’s mind, as a young girl’s relationship to their father was particularly significant within Puritan culture. A father’s authority and judgment was absolute and she deferred to him as she would the man she would marry.[17] This also explains why Katherine perceives Thomasin as her rival within their exile and her relationship to both Caleb and her father threatens Katherine’s position; “Did you not think I saw thy sluttish looks to him, bewitching his eye as any whore? And thy father next!”. This emphasis upon how women should conduct themselves in relation to men has been imbedded into Thomasin’s being, she has known and identified as the Other and she attempts to readjust herself within this framework, now, as a witch.[18]

Revisiting history has illustrated how witchcraft transcribes into feminist values.[19] Thomasin’s outburst against her father is her revolt against the Puritan patriarchy which vilifies her as a woman and thus, a witch. Puritan men harboured a deep suspicion of women as potentially willing and able to disrupt the social and moral order, assigning women roles within society which dictated that they remain submissive and obedient to the male heads of family and society.[20] The Malleus Maleficarum is an example of how women were feared and convinced of their inherent evil nature to subdue them. Puritan culture relied heavily upon socially constructed misogyny and enforced patriarchal values which further divided women and prevented overthrow of the social and moral order.[21] Patriarchy not only restricts women’s freedom but also presents a patriarchal mindset which is responsible for all forms of oppression including social forms such as sexism, racism, classism and personal forms of rationality against intuition and emotion and mind against body.[22] Society has predominately been male dominant or patriarchal and presents multiple barriers for feminists to deconstruct, this is amplified within Puritan culture. The witch represents female empowerment and freedom from patriarchy. Ultimately, she is a feminist figure. The Witch illustrates the extent of women’s subjugation within Puritan culture through religious and social persecution; Thomasin’s redemption begins when she rejects the religion which displaced her. It was Satan who offered her salvation within a culture that sought to persecute her; “Wouldst thou like the taste of butter? A pretty dress? Wouldst thou like to live deliciously? Wouldst thou like to see the world?”. The Devil did not coerce Thomasin or initiate contact. Rather, her choices led her towards a delicious life, beginning when she confesses her sins and dissatisfaction with Puritan existence.

Though the witch was conceptualised as a means of subjugation, Eggers makes the witch a reality within his film to illustrate how deep rooted the fear of female sexuality and power was within Puritan culture. Aviva Briefel observes how The Witch uses its careful detail “not merely to revive a past but to deepen it so far that those details finally turn strange and disturbing, until the aesthetic of verisimilitude gives up its monsters – a set of gender experiences that history cannot represent – and severs the viewer’s access to historical truths”.[23] The film presents a personal form of female experience within Puritan society which departs from the victim narrative in place of a declaration of female independence whilst negotiating women’s place within history. The current wave of witches and magical women on the screen aims to deconstruct stereotypes which, like Puritan culture, have deemed them inherently evil and signifiers of femme fatale. By revisiting its historical roots, The Witch confronts dangerous womanhood and “refuses to contain female monstrosity within its controlling narrative frame”.[24] In embracing her sexual awakening rather than suppressing it according to Puritan social dictations, Thomasin demonstrates her sexuality as a source of power and deconstructs the witch figure as a feminine monstrosity whilst combatting an oppressive social order. She is not villainous and deviant nor wicked in appearance, rather by embracing her Otherness and female sexuality she is vilified within Puritan culture. Like Benjamin Christensen, director of Häxan, Egger’s attempts to remove his audience from socially contained thinking and reveal the truth of a culture which created the witch.[25] Indications of Maleficium permeate the film; when Thomasin breaks an egg it reveals a bird’s bloody fetus and when milking a goat blood is produced from its udder. The animal familiars also present themselves as an indicator of witchcraft and forebode the family’s crisis. The failure of the crops was a subtle addition of the period as many historians discuss how fungi on crops could produce LSD-like experiences, possibly explaining witnesses accounts of witchcraft.[26] Eggers aims to illustrate how although there are reasonable explanations for the various aspects of witchcraft, they are interpreted as damning evidence of evil in Puritan culture so he strives to make them a reality and allow the audience to perceive things through the same lens. Ultimately, Puritan settlers did not find the Devil in New England: they brought it with them.

The representations of witchcraft in the film illustrate the duality of the witch. She is a form of feared womanhood untamed by society. She is a seductress, a hag, and most importantly, a woman. The witch who seduces Caleb is profound in her youth and beauty until the hand she clasps him with becomes wrinkled with age and provokes a response of horror. She is both a reminder of the dangerous temptations a woman’s sexuality presents in a male dominated society and a fear of ageing and infertility. Whilst the seductress can be suppressed and convinced of her evil nature to subdue her, the hag exists in a void where patriarchal society renders her useless for all intents and purposes. Puritan society only accepts women who conform and embody their oppressive values. The destruction of the family dynamic released Thomasin from her responsibilities to the family and her father’s domination. Finally, free from Puritan righteousness, she “floats in the air, set apart from her father’s line, as she finally pledges a wholly new self to someone who is not a man”.[27] Thomasin joins ranks amongst the coven of witches in the forest away from civilisation, once again experiencing exile; powerful women could not exist within the Puritan framework. Outside the restraints of Puritan patriarchy they are an untamed force of female solidarity and represent a threat to the Puritan social structure.

The Witch has been regarded as a feminist text and important addition to a new wave of magical women on screen. Witches in film and television have altered as gender discourse moved towards equality and women’s rights became integrated into the public sphere. Social constructs became a prominent point of inspection during this movement. This has been reflected through the development of the witch on screen, altering how she is interpreted whilst providing progressive and diverse representations of women. The current wave of witches engages with contemporary feminism, allowing Egger’s The Witch to revisit Puritan New England through a feminist lens. Michèle Barrett states, “cultural politics are crucially important to feminism because they involve struggles over meaning”.[28] Barrett further acknowledges that fictional, imaginative and aesthetic dimensions of works must be taken into consideration as meaning is “socially created in the consumption of the work”.[29] Meaning can exceed the intention of the creator as it relies upon interpretation. The imagery and meaning of the witch depicted in film and television has developed throughout the good witch versus bad witch conflict. Early trends of witchcraft alluded to the more malignant aspect of witchcraft and its history while contemporary American television and film has revitalised the witch and fully embraced the darker themes and provoking history. In contradiction to previous witch trends, contemporary depictions have revived historical accounts of what defines a witch through a feminist reassessment of these marginal figures. Films such as The Witch rely on factual representations which emphasise that the accused women were just that: women. The growth and progression of the witch on screen reflects how “American society was changing fast, as people were pushing cultural boundaries, challenging accepted standards of behaviour, and redefining roles and limitations with regard to sexuality, race, politics, gender, religion and so on”.[30] Due to this, the image of the witch and the meaning associated with witchcraft has developed within society and become a form of empowering female representation.

The witch has been revived as a political scapegoat for deflecting patriarchal accusations. The current wave of magical women on screen aims to illustrate that witch hunts were not an attack on the elite, rather, they were an attack on those who could not defend themselves, the already oppressed and subjugated. The contemporary witch engages with cultural politics through a feminist lens. Puritanism is being revived to illustrate the threat of a return to traditional values. This threat is evident within contemporary politics, predominately through controversy surrounding Donald Trump’s presidency, violence against women and renewed attacks on women’s rights. The current threat towards women’s place within society has created “a visible and dramatic crisis which occurs on a national level through media exposure”.[31] A new age of the witch has been prompted as a response to this crisis. Powerful women such as Rachel Notley and Hillary Clinton are being labelled witches and attached to the negative stereotypes created by misogyny. Christina Larner explores if a witch hunt was a “thinly disguised woman-hunt” as the majority of women prosecuted “were disturbers of social order; they were those who could not easily cooperate with others; they were aggressive.”[32] In 1712, Jane Wenham, an English woman of over seventy years old, was accused of witchcraft. Jane’s reputation was unfavourable within her community; not adhering to the demands of respectability as she had two husbands, a “bad temper and a sharp tongue”.[33] Farmer John Chapman accused Jane of witchcraft, claiming: “you are a witch and a bitch”. What is irregular about this particular accusation is Jane’s response, she rebelled and sought action for slander. She was awarded a shilling for her charge of defamation but did not accept this as justice. In response to Jane’s lack of conforming and inability to subdue her confrontational nature and reduce her to her submissive gender role, she was subjected to a witch hunt. Anne Thorne was a servant supposedly afflicted by Jane’s power. Her accusations are speculated about if she was a genuine believer, a deceiver, or pregnant and trying to avoid the community’s wrath by directing attention elsewhere. The most plausible reasoning, generally associated with youthful girls during the witch hysteria, is that she was “trying to find ways to express sexuality and rebellion in a dramatic and personally satisfactory act which exempted her from social blame”.[34] This is a common assumption, that “vicious girls” who embraced an opportunity to exercise control and power in an otherwise oppressive society, are the cause of the witch trials and provoked the extent of the violence.[35] Like most accused witches, Jane was used as a tool to unite a community against a common enemy whilst also being utilised to gain social and political favour for her alienation.[36] This ideology is consistent within the structure of Puritan society and the persecution of the marginalised witches. Women are purposefully juxtaposed and positioned to police one another. In Puritan society feminism cannot exist. Jane’s position as an accused witch and her actions thereafter place her amongst the “resistance fighters against the oppression of women”.[37]

In The Witch, Thomasin is the equivalent of the ill-tempered Jane, marginalised and persecuted by her community and seeks refuge in the witch from societal restraints. Rachel Moseley observes:

The witch as a metaphor for female resistance, witches as representative of women who lead unconventional lives – outside that which patriarchal society deemed acceptable in relation, for instance, to female-centered communities or sisterhoods, personal and sexual freedom and political resistance – and who were punished for this. [38]

Witch hunts and Puritan ideologies are a prominent aspect of history but they still provide impact in contemporary society. Rather than avoiding the narrative, The Witch embraces Puritanism, the historical women of witch hunts and the patriarchy that condemned them. Despite being set centuries ago, it speaks to contemporary issues, as Eggers states he prefers “to go in the past to look at humans today”.[39] Although feminism has achieved women numerous rights and freedom, there is still a patriarchal force that threatens to oppress them. The Witch illustrates that the threat of traditional values is not relegated to the past. Though Thomasin may not be a radical feminist openly attempting to dismantle the patriarchy, she is stripped of agency and embodies fears and ambivalences surrounding women and female power. The social and religious persecution of Thomasin mirrors issues in contemporary society, though Egger’s did not intend to delve into political agendas, feminism rose to the top of his investigation of the witch.[40] The new wave of magical women on screen has presented an opportunity to negotiate women’s history whilst providing a progressive and diverse representation of the witch during a politically challenging period for women. In the age of an oppressive president gaining international attention, rape culture and attacks on women’s bodies and rights, The Witch deviates from the victim narrative to provide a historical reflection of cultural politics. Through the witch, women can find their source of empowerment and rebel against a society that seeks to revert them to their historical status as the oppressed and the lesser. Through the witch, women can reclaim their power and live deliciously.

Notes

[1] Jakob Sprenger and Heinrich Kramer, Malleus Maleficarum (New York: Dover Publication Inc, 1971), 44.

[2] Kristen J. Sollée, Witches, Sluts, Feminists: Conjuring the Sex Positive (Berkeley: ThreeL Media, 2017), 23.

[3] Ibid, 43.

[4] Debbie Lee, Romantic Liars: Obscure Women Who Became Impostors and Challenged an Empire (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 87.

[5] Ibid, 112.

[6] Margot Adler, Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshippers, and Other Pagans in America Today (London: Penguin Books Ltd, 1986) 206.

[7] Notable contemporary example Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (Robert Aguirre-Sacasa, United States, 2018-Present).

[8] James P. Byrd, The Challenges of Roger Williams: Religious Liberty, Violent Persecution, and the Bible (Georgia: Mercer University Press, 2002), 1.

[9] Robert Eggers, “Robert Eggers on ‘The Witch’, Familial Trauma, and the Supernatural,”Vice Talks Film YouTube channel, 20^th February 2016,https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGNrHzCXpTM&frags=pl%2Cwn

[10] Ibid.

[11] Elizabeth Reis, Damned Women: Sinners and Witches in Puritan New England (London: Cornell University Press, 1997), 2-3.

[12] Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1990), 191.

[13] The historical context of the flying ointment, or witches unguent, is based upon witch hunt beliefs that the ointment required the entrails of an unbaptized infant and when applied to a broom it provided the ability to fly.

[14] Cynthia J. Miller and Bowdoin A. Van Riper, Divine Horror: Essays on the Cinematic Battle Between the Sacred and the Diabolical (North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2017), 23.

[15] Phyllis J. Guskin, “The Context of Witchcraft: The Case of Jane Wenham (1712)” (Eighteenth-Century Studies, 15 (1), 1981), 63.

[16] Elspeth Whitney, “The Witch “She”/ The Historian “He”: Gender and the Historiography of the European Witch-Hunts” (Journal of Women’s History, 7 (3), 1995), 77.

[17] Stacy Schiff, The Witches: Salem 1692, A History ( London: Little, Brown and Company, 2015), 131.

[18] Simone De Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949) asserts “[o]ne is not born, but rather, becomes a woman”. Woman identifies as everything man is not, thus, she is the Other due to gender constructs and binary opposition.

[19] Marion Gibson, Witchcraft: The Basics (New York: Routledge, 2018), 61.

[20] Elspeth Whitney, “The Witch “She”/ The Historian “He”: Gender and the Historiography of the European Witch-Hunts” (Journal of Women’s History, 7 (3), 1995), 85.

[21] Ibid, 87-88.

[22] Cynthia Eller, “Relativizing the Patriarchy: The Sacred History of the Feminist Spirituality Movement” (History of Religions, 30 (3), 1991), 287.

[23] Aviva Briefel, “Devil in the Details: The Uncanny History of The Witch (2015)” (Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 49 (1), 2019), 6.

[24] Ibid, 18.

[25] Richard Baxstrom and Todd Meyers, Realizing the Witch: Science, Cinema, and the Mastery of the Invisible (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 5-6.

[26] Roger Clarke, “The Witch” (Sight and Sound, 26 (4), 2016), 66.

[27] Aviva Briefel, “Devil in the Details: The Uncanny History of The Witch (2015)” (Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 49 (1), 2019), 9.

[28] Michèle Barrett, “Feminism and the Definition of Cultural Politics” Feminism, Culture and Politic (Ed. Rosalind Brunt and Caroline Rowan. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1982), 37.

[29] Ibid, 57.

[30] Heather Greene, Bell, Book and Camera: A Critical History of Witches in American Film and Television (North Carolina: McFarland & Co Inc, 2018), 4.

[31] Megan K. Maas, et al., “‘I Was Grabbed by My Pussy and Its #NotOkay’: A Twitter Backlash Against Donald Trump’s Degrading Commentary” (Violence Against Women, 24 (14), 2018), 1741.

[32] Darren Oldridge, The Witchcraft Reader (New York: Routledge, 2008), 255.

[33] Phyllis J. Guskin, “The Context of Witchcraft: The Case of Jane Wenham (1712)” (Eighteenth-Century Studies, 15 (1), 1981), 50.

[34] Ibid, 63.

[35] Robert Detweiler, “Shifting Perspectives on the Salem Witches” (The History Teacher, 8 (4), 1975), 600.

[36] Jacqueline Pearson, “Witchcraft, Witch-Hunting, and politics in early modern England” (The Seventeenth Century, 31 (3), 2016), 375-6.

[37] Rachel Moseley, “Glamorous witchcraft: gender and magic in teen film and television” (Screen, 43 (4), 2002), 410.

[38] Ibid.

[39] Katie Rife, “The Witch director Robert Eggers on Fellini, feminism, and period-accurate candlelight” (AV CLUB, 2016).

[40] Ibid.

Bibliography

Adler, Margot. Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshippers, and Other Pagans in America Today. London: Penguin Books Ltd, 1986.

Barrett, Michèle. “Feminism and the Definition of Cultural Politics.” Feminism, Culture and Politics. Ed. Rosalind Brunt and Caroline Rowan. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1982. pp. 37-58.

Baxstrom, Richard and Meyers, Todd. Realizing the Witch: Science, Cinema, and the Mastery of the Invisible. New York: Fordham University Press, 2015. 

Briefel, Aviva. “Devil in the Details: The Uncanny History of The Witch (2015).” Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 49 (1), 2019, pp. 4-20.

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge, 1990.

Byrd, James P. The Challenges of Roger Williams: Religious Liberty, Violent Persecution, and the Bible. Georgia: Mercer University Press, 2002.

Clarke, Roger. “The Witch.” Sight and Sound, 26 (4), 2016, pp. 66-67.

De Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex. London: Vintage Classics, 1997.

Detweiler, Robert. “Shifting Perspectives on the Salem Witches.” The History Teacher, 8 (4), 1975, pp. 596–610.

Eller, Cynthia. “Relativizing the Patriarchy: The Sacred History of the Feminist Spirituality Movement.” History of Religions, 30 (3), 1991, pp. 279–295.

Gibson, Marion. Witchcraft: The Basics. New York: Routledge, 2018.

Greene, Heather. Bell, Book and Camera: A Critical History of Witches in American Film and Television. North Carolina: McFarland & Co Inc, 2018.

Guskin, Phyllis J. “The Context of Witchcraft: The Case of Jane Wenham (1712).” Eighteenth-Century Studies, 15 (1), 1981, pp. 48-71.

Grossman, Pam. Waking the Witch: Reflections on Women, Magic, and Power. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2019. Print.

Lee, Debbie. Romantic Liars: Obscure Women Who Became Impostors and Challenged an Empire. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.

Lister, Lisa. Witch: Unleashed. Untamed. Unapologetic. London: Hay House UK Ltd., 2017.

Maas, Megan K., et al. “‘I Was Grabbed by My Pussy and Its #NotOkay’: A Twitter Backlash Against Donald Trump’s Degrading Commentary.” Violence Against Women, 24 (14), 2018, pp. 1739–1750.

Miller, Cynthia J., and Van Riper, Bowdoin A. Divine Horror: Essays on the Cinematic Battle Between the Sacred and the Diabolical. North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2017.

Moseley, Rachel. “Glamorous witchcraft: gender and magic in teen film and television.” Screen, 43 (4), 2002, pp. 403-422.

Oldridge, Darren. The Witchcraft Reader. New York: Routledge, 2008.

Pearson, Jacqueline. “Witchcraft, Witch-Hunting, and politics in early modern England.” The Seventeenth Century, 31 (3), 2016, pp. 375-379.

Reis, Elizabeth. Damned Women: Sinners and Witches in Puritan New England. London: Cornell University Press, 1997.

Rife, Katie. “The Witch director Robert Eggers on Fellini, feminism, and period-accurate candlelight.” AV CLUB, 2016.

Schiff, Stacy. The Witches: Salem 1692, A History. London: Little, Brown and Company, 2015.

Sollée, Kristen J. Witches, Sluts, Feminists: Conjuring the Sex Positive. Berkeley: ThreeL Media, 2017.

Sprenger, Jakob and Kramer, Heinrich. The Malleus Maleficarum. New York: Dover Publication Inc, 1971.

Whitney, Elspeth. “The Witch “She”/ The Historian “He”: Gender and the Historiography of the European Witch-Hunts.” Journal of Women’s History, 7 (3), 1995, pp. 77-101.

Filmography

Bell, Book and Candle. (Richard Quine, United States, 1958).

Bewitched. (Sol Saks, United States, 1964-1972).

Charmed. (Constance M. Burge, United States, 1998-2006).

Häxan or Witchcraft Through the Ages. (Benjamin Christensen, Sweden-Denmark, 1922).

Hocus Pocus. (Kenny Ortega, United States, 1993).

I Married a Witch. (René Clair, United States, 1942).

Practical Magic. (Griffin Dunne, United States, 1998).

Sabrina the Teenage Witch. (Nell Scovell, United States, 1996-2003).

The Craft. (Andrew Fleming, United States, 1996).

The Love Witch. (Anna Biller, United States, 2016).

The Witch or The VVitch: A New England Folktale. (Robert Eggers, United States, 2016).

The Witches. (Nicolas Roeg, United States, 1990).

The Wizard of Oz. (Victor Fleming, United States, 1939).

About the Author
During Chloe Carroll’s academic pursuits at the University of Limerick and its sister college Mary Immaculate College for her MA, she pursued studies in magical women, film and television, and their histories. Chloe is currently preparing her research for PhD level to complete the proposed study of the image of the witch throughout film and television, and how the gendered identity has existed in waves and is currently undergoing a new transformation. Having just completed an MA thesis ‘The Handmaid’s Tale from Ronald to Donald: A Feminist Analysis’ Chloe is predominately interested in the persecution of women revived from history to serve a renewed purpose for the screen.

As witches and other sorceresses populate our imagination, they bears witness to our fascination with uncanny female subjects, but also confirm that powerful, extraordinary women continue to face ruthless misogyny. Psychoanalytical, feminist, and cultural theories have all made clear our ambiguous relationship to the magical woman’s transgression of patriarchal gender norms.[1] Sigmund Freud, for instance, claims that the monstrous woman is an incarnation of the male “castration anxiety,” while Julia Kristeva connects her to motherhood and “primal fear.”[2] Barbara Creed celebrates the femme castrator, but also acknowledges that mainstream cinema tends to subjugate, discipline, or punish her since she is a threat to male dominance. ^[3] Most theories follow similar lines of thought, exposing the various ways in which culture posits the magical woman as intriguing but precarious.

These analyses correctly identify that the archetype of the witch embodies deep-seated male anxieties, and therefore most narratives about the figure have a restorative function that return the unruly woman to patriarchal order. However, less has been said about the monstrous woman as a product of patriarchal oppression born from constraining gender norms. In the following analysis of the critically acclaimed and highly popular recent Hungarian film, Liza, the Fox-Fairy (Liza, a rókatündér, 2015) my intention is to show that magical women, witches and the monstrous feminine are manifestations of female melancholia rooted in oppressive gender norms. Further, I argue that the binary way of thinking about mental health (sick vs. healthy, sane vs. insane, etc.) reduces narrative options available to the melancholic female subject; she must be either “cured” or destroyed. Finally, the film offers a rich ground on which to discuss both cinema’s potential and its limits to rewrite hegemonic narratives about women’s access to happiness.

Liza, the Fox-Fairy is a satire-fantasy-horror-romance hybrid movie by Hungarian director, Károly Ujj Mészáros. The film has drawn well over 100,000 viewers since its release in 2015, which is considered a major domestic success in a small country such as Hungary.[4] In addition, it was critically celebrated as it won the 54^th Hungarian Film critics’ award for best debut and won several awards during the Hungarian Film Week in 2016. The film also received international honours at numerous fantasy film festivals across the globe as well as Eastern European regional festivals.[5]

Adopted from a stage play by Zsolt Pozsgai, Liza, the Fox-Fairy employs a strong metanarrative element and postmodern irony. Its self-referential humour creates a critical distance between the viewer and the film in an effort to highlight the ridiculousness of romantic fairy tales and narrative tropes – including their positioning of women. Károly Ujj Mészáros, in making the movie, admitted to having been inspired by David Lynch, Luis Buñuel, and Wes Anderson’s surrealistic cinematographic styles, carefully crafted compositions and strong colour tones. The director also talked repeatedly about the influence of Japanese culture on his work, especially Japanese pop music from the 1960s and 70s.[6] This fascination is clearly present in the film’s music score composed by Eric Sumo, which was elected “the 2015 year most successful soundtrack” by Hungarian critics, and was later released on vinyl as well.[7]

Beyond its music, the film’s narrative also borrows heavily from Japanese mythology. The main protagonist, Liza is type of mythical witch creature, well-known in Japan. Michael Bathgate in his book, The Fox’s Craft in Japanese Religion and Folklore explores the immense religious, social, and economic significance of the shapeshifter fox-fairy in Japanese culture. Bathgate’s discussion of the symbolism of wives as fox-shapeshifters confirms the previously aforementioned interpretations of the monstrous feminine. He observes that fox-fairies “express a basic anxiety regarding the fluidity of female identity and influence.”[8] Further, in patriarchal economies, fox-women in Bathgate’s account, embody “complex and uncertain dynamics” that undermine dominant social norms.[9] The shapeshifter woman, who seamlessly moves between the spiritual world and the real world – and between human and non-human hosts – is dangerous because her liminality exposes the fragility of well-established hierarchical structures and physical boundaries.

Liza, the Fox-Fairy tells the story of 30-years-old woman, Liza (played by Mónika Balsai), a home nurse who lives largely isolated from the world and is desperately searching for a meaningful, romantic relationship. While Liza takes care of a deceased Japanese ambassador’s sick wife (which explains her intimate familiarity with Japanese language and culture), she struggles with loneliness until an imaginary, faux-1950s Nipponese pop music idol, Tomi Tani (played by David Sakurai) materializes in her imagination and she discovers that she has magical powers – of the dangerous kind. Tomi Tani’s strange, magic world, where he murders and takes the soul of his victims seamlessly meshes with Liza’s, creating a sense of magic realism in the film. Liza finds her escape and happiness in her fantasy as she talks, sings and dances with Tomi Tani while attending to her monotonous chores. However, this relationship quickly turns toxic as Tomi Tani starts interfering with Liza’s plans to find true love. First, he thrusts Márta néni, the ambassador’s wife off her bed causing her death. He then introduces Liza to fox-fairies by pushing an old Japanese museum brochure in front of her. In the rest of the film, Tomi Tani is behind numerous suspicious “accidents” that kill Liza’s love interests one after the other while all the evidence points towards Liza. The police launch an investigation and Liza herself gradually succumbs to the idea that she must be a cursed woman, an evil witch. Her despair grows culminating in a suicide attempt. However, she is saved by the courageous hero, Zoltán (played by Szabolcs Bede Fazekas), the only one to survive Tomi Tani’s murderous machinations. Pushed off a ladder, electrocuted, and injured multiple times, Zoltán shows the resilience of a true romantic hero. He, having “tamed” Liza, earns her hand in marriage and they live happily ever after.

Witch-ness as Melancholia

Julia Kristeva in her book, Black Sun, defines melancholia as “an abyss of sorrow, a noncommunicable grief […] a life that is unliveable, heavy with daily sorrows, tears held back or shed, a total despair, scorching at times, then wan and empty.”[10] A form of depression, melancholia has often been ascribed to the female condition. Kristeva, Judith Butler, Kaja Silverman and others have scrutinized such gendered nature of melancholia, but these theories tend to overlook a possible connection between melancholia and violence. They characterize melancholia as a pathological form of mourning and loss that paralyses rather than stimulates violence in the female subject. Liza, the Fox-Fairy offers us a chance to examine melancholia in a new light. By connecting the monstrous female subject to melancholia, I make the case that the magical woman is a product of rather than a threat to patriarchy.

 According to Freud, melancholia implies identification with, rather than mourning for, the lost object. The melancholic is “clinging to the object [of desire] through the medium of a hallucinatory wishful psychosis.”^[11] Julia Kristeva further explains that, for the melancholic subject, “life that is unliveable, heavy with daily sorrows;” it is a “devitalized existence.”[12] Liza in this sense is clearly a melancholic character. Her life as a live-in nurse is full of loneliness and sorrow. She rarely leaves the apartment, takes sleeping pills to sleep, and has little contact with the outside world other than observing people at her favourite fast food restaurant, Mekk Burger. The film’s narrator repeatedly describes Liza’s life as “lonely” and “sad.” The close ups, which show sadness and nervousness on her face, visually confirm her social and psychological isolation. Liza’s growing detachment “is [slowly] absorbing her” into her imaginary inaccessible to the outside world.[13]

Such intense visualization of Liza’s inner psyche is not simply a matter of imagination, it is much more than that. Her embodiment of a dangerous, magical creature requires an act of phantasy. Liza, the Fox-Fairy is indeed a “phantasy film” with a “ph,” as Barbara Creed uses the term. Liza’s dream is a phantasy that renders female sexuality as difference “grounded in monstrousness.”[14] The fox-fairy, through her phantasies, engages in an “activity in wish fulfilment” to destroy and castrate her subject of desire.[15] In other words, Liza’s embodiment of the monster-witch functions as a conduit for female melancholia and phantasies of violence.

The very first scene, which shows Liza at the police station being questioned about the murder of several men, is a close-up of her body that shows her shaking, dripping water, and wearing blood stained slippers. In a trembling voice, she admits “I am cursed…I am fox-fairy.” The opening scene is a forceful indication that Liza perceives herself as dangerous and undeserving of love or – in psychoanalytic terms – as a woman with an impoverished ego.[16] While the film soon jumps back to the beginning of Liza’s story, this first scene establishes the narrative expectations related to Liza’s monstrous nature. At first Liza is unaware of both Tomi Tani’s machinations and her own “magical powers.” Soon, however, she gets the first hint from an exhibition brochure about fox-fairies, Japanese women who live alone in the forest and are cursed to seduce and kill men until they finally succumb to madness killing themselves.

Melancholia and loss are closely related in both Freud and Kristeva’s theories in that the subject is not willing to “abandon [her] libidinal position” vis-a-vis the lost object that would allow mourning to start. Instead the subject replaces the lost object with phantasy object(s). The fact that Liza is described as “adopted” by the Japanese ambassador and his wife is an early indication that she may be suffering from profound loss. Later, Zoltán finds a letter from Liza’s mother. Through his internal voice, we hear Liza’s mother expressing her love for Liza, but also her plea that Liza behave in a “responsible way” with men as to avoid her own children growing up without parents as she had. What the mother’s letter underscores here is that, indeed, Liza’s melancholia is related to being an orphan but also that she perceives her vagina as a source of danger. In Barbara Creed’s terms, Liza has a “vagina dentata” that needs to be carefully guarded.[17] This moment in the film is significant in two ways. On the one hand, it reveals simultaneous abandonment by and forced identification with the mother as one root cause for Liza’s melancholia. On the other hand, it also explains how female subjectivity becomes reified through romantic stereotypes of the princess-virgin.

While loss, shame and inferiority are important aspects of the melancholic psyche, Freud also describes a second product of the conflict between phantasy and reality. Due to its inability to admit loss the subject turns away from the external world and this turn inwards often results in destructive impulses. He calls this a “stage of sadism,” where the ego, unable yet to destroy itself due to narcissism, instead turns its destructive energy towards the outside world, into “murderous impulses against others.”[18] As the story progresses and one romantic loss follows another, Liza becomes engulfed by her own monstrous powers and turns increasingly inwardly. At the same time, she continues to live out her murderous phantasies through Tomi Tani’s actions.

The film repeatedly contrasts Liza’s longing for eternal spring and passionate love with her distress, frustration and loss. For example, at the Mekk Burger Liza observes a couple who seems to fall in love at first sight. However, right after the greatly charmed Liza leaves, the man grabs the woman’s breast and she beats him before running out of the restaurant. Later on, Liza tries to put a spell on another victim, Károly by using a magic cookbook to prepare the most perverse, outrageous food combinations (such as fish dill and watermelon soup and pork with chocolate pudding). Károly gobbles the food up like a swine and cannot stop talking about his wife who died. Ludvig úr, another hopeful contender for her romance-phantasy assumes that Liza is a prostitute and offers her money. Henrik, one of the last victims to Liza’s fox-fairy phantasy, has several sexual affairs throughout the film with Liza’s neighbour and other women. These men, in various ways, upset and disappoint Liza’s romantic phantasy.

It is precisely this clash between Liza’s phantasy and reality that manifests itself in her murderous impulses. Accordingly, Tomi Tani’s actions are the embodiment, through phantasy wish-fulfilment and magic realism, of Liza’s destructive desires, projected into the world as fox-fairy witchcraft. Liza’s phantasy world is rich in pastel colours and beautiful Japanese spring imagery, while her reality is characterized by decaying buildings, dark shades of brown and grey as well as minimalist mise-en-scène. Liza’s melancholia develops as she projects her personal loss into an impoverished world. Freud’s observation about the melancholic wife who, instead of accusing her husband, accuses herself of being incapable, finds a direct parallel in Liza’s statement “I’m a monster.”[19] Thus, internalizing her disgust with the macho, pathetic and patriarchal men.

As Liza’s desperation over the clash between her phantasy world and the real world grows, so does her resemblance with a fox-fairy. There are several visual markers of Liza’s transformation into a fox-fairy. For instance, she is surprisingly quick and precise with a butcher knife. At a certain point, a mysterious wind also shapes Liza’s hair into the image of a fox. Later in the film, Liza sees foxes forming more and more clearly as shadows on the wall. The dangerous, violent nature of Liza’s imagination is most clearly presented in a dream-scene, which takes place in Nasu, Japan in an enchanted forest. Liza is dressed as a Japanese geisha, with a fox tail, while Henrik appears in her dream as a samurai. Liza, pretending to be a frail woman, allures Henrik into the forest asking for his “help” as her parents suffered an accident. After Henrik follows her through a rocky terrain, she seduces and brutally murders him with her bare hands, at which point the camera shows her waking up in terror from a nightmare. Every time Liza is disappointed by reality, she retreats into such phantasies that she describes as “eternal spring rich with the fragrance of cherry blossoms.” She gradually becomes obsessed with the idea of being a fox-fairy, a cursed witch.

Liza’s transformation into a destructive fox-fairy is a critical symptom of this, second stage of melancholia. Through her murderous phantasy-acts, she turns her sadness and pain into violence towards the outside world, before she turns it towards herself. Understanding the monstrous female as a melancholic subject helps us see that Liza’s murderous and destructive impulses are not so much an act of transgression and disruption, but that of self-preservation and anguish. Thus, a new interpretation of the monstrous female subject opens up – one that sees “witch-hood” as a manifestation of the psychological inhibitions induced by patriarchy.

The most powerful moment that discloses Liza’s despair over loving and being loved “the right way” happens towards the end of the film, when she pleads with Henrik “Love me carefully, tenderly. This is not a fling, it is the eternal spring. I cannot be irresponsible with men.” In this moment, the viewers are exposed to Liza’s pain and anguish, as well as her melancholic desperation over the loss of her mother and over her severely constrained options for love. Liza’s gradual acceptance of being a fox–fairy and her simultaneous withdrawal from the hostile world results in a “manic state.”[20] Freud describes the manic state as the third stage of melancholia, a sort of intoxication, a discharge of emotions where the ego is freed from its earlier inhibitions. Liza, in this new state, temporarily embraces her witch-like power by transforming herself into a highly sexualized object. After studying the rules of seductions in an issue of the magazine Cosmopolitan (Rule 1: “Pay attention to how you are dressing), she tailors the same short lace dress for herself as on the front page. She also buys a necklace from a television commercial and puts on makeup. The camera participates in Liza’s self-objectification as it favours close-ups on her newly “enhanced” body. As Liza is turning herself into a sexual object, resembling a Barbie doll, her behaviour also changes. Learning the “rules of seduction,” she moves and looks seductively at Zoltán and offers alcohol (Rule nr. 3) to her next victim, Ludvig úr.

However, Liza’s free-flowing libidinal energy only amplifies her curse and Ludvig úr and Henrik both die soon after they engage with her. After Henrik’s death, Liza desperation escalates into a full manic episode. We see her running through the streets in despair in an effort to escape her curse. As Liza’s manic state accelerates into full panic and anxiety so does the rate of men dying around her. The camera follows her on an (unintentional) killing spree, showing man after man drop dead as soon as they catch a glimpse of her. In this scene, Liza’s phantasy world and reality finally mould into one continuous, inescapable nightmare breaking her completely. The murderous impulses, the subconscious manifestations of her melancholia gradually convert into an urge for self-destruction.[21]

Julia Kristeva in Black Sun claims that art and the imagination allows the melancholic subject to make meaning and thus re-enter the symbolic and ultimately heal itself. Kristeva asserts that creative imagination allows the transfer of “non-meaning” – death and loss – into meaning as a form of “a survival of idealization, […] a miracle.”[22] Liza, the Fox-Fairy is an excellent example of how narratives can serve as coping mechanisms for the melancholic psyche. But the film also demonstrates the ideological nature of those same narratives. More specifically, the stories we tell ourselves about magical women, female melancholia, and women’s happiness are predetermined by what Shoshana Felman calls a “primordial masculine model.”[23] In the second part of this analysis, I will show that cinematic representations of magical women often draw attention to, but rarely displace, patriarchal boundaries around women’s love and happiness. Liza, the Fox-Fairy simultaneously functions as a commentary on and a prime example of the ways in which visual and narrative representations of magical women carefully regulate female desire.

 Fox-Fairies, Witches, and Male Desire

It is important to note that Liza, the Fox-Fairy speaks as much about male desire as it does about female desire and despair. The film serves not only as phantasy wish-fulfilment for the melancholic female subject but also as a male phantasy of heroism and a desire to tame the “vagina dentata.”[24] While marginal male characters are portrayed as limited and ridiculous, the two main male characters in the movie embody common masculine cultural phantasies: the sexually charged, unreliable macho man and the overlooked, reliable romantic hero.

Henrik is the old lady’s nephew who sees Liza as a younger sister and supports her just to upset his hostile family. Henrik is a Marlon Brando-like, hyper-masculine character surrounded by women who admire him and readily accept his sexual advances. He, characteristically, only develops a romantic interest toward Liza after she has transformed herself into a sexy fox-fairy woman. Henrik is Liza’s last hope to realize her phantasy-wish and to find a man who loves her the “right” way. The romance of course is doomed because of Henrik’s promiscuity and premature death.

If Henrik is the prince who never quite arrives, Zoltán embodies another key male romantic phantasy: the lonely hero who is overlooked but who, in the end, proves to be the real prince. Zoltán loves Finnish Western films and is especially fond of the music. He rarely speaks. Instead, he admires Liza from afar but saves her repeatedly from the police and from self-destruction. Zoltán is a good handyman, and he is also resilient to Tomi Tani’s murder attempts. In the end, he rescues Liza and breaks her curse. Although both men are masculine stereotypes, they each fulfil a male phantasy about containing women and saving them from their monstrous nature. While Henrik conquers women through sexual aggression, Zoltán saves Liza through selfless heroism.

Another important male character, Tomi Tani, is the product of Liza’s phantasy. He is her ‘Id’, representing the destructive desires inaccessible to her melancholic conscience. Through Tomi Tani’s character, the film de facto delegates the agency of the magical woman to a man, a romantic hero-turned-villain who shapes Liza’s story to the outside world, but more importantly, to herself.

Further, men often carry the voice of reason in the film. For example, while on a date at Mekk Burger, Henrik lectures Liza about consumerism and the unhealthy quality of fast food. Liza carefully listens to Henrik’s words. However, a close up of her face shows her lovingly looking at the small plastic figure that comes with every meal. She remains inside her phantasy and her emotional attachment to romance remains unchanged.

Overall, men seem to be aware of Liza’s precarious state more than she is. They possess the knowledge that she lacks as she continues to fall back on gender stereotypes. An indication of this is the way in which Liza embraces female traits of servitude and helplessness. She cooks the most disgusting meals to seduce her second victim, Károly and she gladly repairs the holes on Zoltán’s socks. She also seems unable to manage household repair tasks and explicitly complains about the lack of a man in the house. When Zoltán moves in with her as a tenant, he assumes all typical male chores from repairing the boiler and the toilet to fixing the electric sockets. Liza, in the meantime, fulfils her womanly duties by sewing, cooking and baking birthday cakes. In Felma’s words, the “help-needing and help-seeking behaviour is part of female conditioning” and becomes the project of the entire movie.[25]

Another clear example of male desire at work is the way in which Liza is saved at the end of the movie. In a surreal scene, after taking dozens of sleeping pills, Liza is finally trapped in her phantasy world on the border of the life and death. She meets Tomi Tani at Mekk Burger, the space of her romantic hopes. Tomi Tani soon reveals himself to be the demon of death. As the frame shows cherry blossom trees decay and an immense dark storm mounting around the Mekk Burger, Tomi Tani professes his love for Liza and demands that she cross over to be with him forever. Liza initially fights his will, but when Tomi Tani threatens to also kill Zoltán, she immediately surrenders and is ready to die in order to save Zoltán. Liza’s ultimate sacrifice breaks the forces of destruction visualized as a dark storm, causing the Mekk Burger with Tomi Tani crumble into small pixels and finally disappear. By giving up on love completely, Liza finally earns the right to love.

In the last part of the movie, the fox-fairy is tamed and safely returned to domesticity. In the physical world of the film, Zoltán, after several accidents that nearly kill him, finally reaches Liza and saves her by making her cough up the sleeping pills. Liza’s curse is broken, her soul is healed by Zoltán’s perseverance and her own willingness to self-sacrifice. Liza, like other magical women in cinema, achieves “true happiness” and sheds her dangerous powers when and only when she learns the “essential lessons of service, of selflessness, of domesticity.”[26] Combining Liza’s self-sacrifice with Zoltán’s male heroism, Liza, the Fox-Fairy offers the perfect cocktail to soothe male anxieties about the transgressive, powerful female subject.

Liza’s access to happiness depends on her domestication, on her willingness to operate within the confines of such patriarchal structures as marriage and motherhood. The very last scene in the film confirms this interpretation in no uncertain terms. The frame shows Liza and her family in a car travelling through Japan. She is dressed, unlike before, neither as a shy virgin nor as an overly sexy woman but in simple blue jeans and a plain shirt. Zoltán is driving the car while their daughter sits in the back and the family is singing their favourite Finnish Western film song. Liza’s face shows content, her gaze turns lovingly at Zoltán – an indication that her melancholia is cured because she found “true love” and has successfully assumed her female domestic role.

Bathgate observes that, in Japanese mythical traditions, patriarchal anxiety caused by fox-fairy wives is often resolved through descendants.[27] Accordingly, Liza’s marriage and motherhood solidify her ambiguous, “temporary subjectivity” into a permanent, domesticated, fixed identity that accepts all patriarchal boundaries.[28] The film underlines Bathgate’s conclusion that, “stories of fox wives thus appear less as fantasies than as correctives to a more basic fantasy.”[29] This basic male phantasy requires that female melancholic subject, unwilling to fulfil her normative gender roles, be either punished as dangerous and destructive or given a “happy ending”  that restores normalcy in the patriarchal symbolic order.

Sarah Ahmed in her book, The Promise of Happiness observes that happiness is often coercive as it turns social norms into social goods. Liza’s happiness in this sense is delineated by binary options, which are also hierarchical. She must choose between being a princess or being a witch, a wife or a spinster, a monster or a human.[30] In her discussion of the aesthetics of female melancholia, Francis L. Restuccia warns about such “dangerous circularity of returning women to the patriarchal symbolic order.”[31] Liza’s melancholia is cured by traditional domesticity, or in psychoanalytical terms, by “transferential duplication,” where the lost mother is replaced by becoming one.[32] In the end, the film normalizes our expectations of what woman’s happiness means. Liza’s “happily ever after” is as reductive as the nature of the romantic tropes at which the film pokes fun at.

Witches, Postmodern Play, and Patriarchal Binaries

It is important to note that the film, through ironic meta-commentary, attempts to mock romantic tropes. The sinister beginning of the film, which presents Liza as mysterious and threatening is quickly interrupted by a male narrator who asserts with authority “Stop. This is stupid.” The voice then demands to go “back to the beginning of the story” and comments throughout the film on Liza’s actions, justifies her “irrational” behaviour offering the viewer full access to her inner psyche. The omnipresent narrator can freeze the frame, take viewers outside the diegesis, and rearrange events. Yet, in its attempt to create a self-referential distance between itself and the viewers, the film allocates outsized power to the omnipotent male narrator, another man to control Liza’s story. The irony and meta-narrative commentary may prompt viewers to reflect on romantic tropes, but they do nothing to liberate Liza from being trapped in her nightmare-like story. The film’s postmodern playfulness is completely lost on Liza, who functions fully within these tropes laid bare to the viewer. In other words, she is blind to her own naive dedication to the romantic clichés that the film itself ridicules.

At the end of the film, the narrator also assumes a corrective role. As an illustration, while the police chief’s conclusion to the story is that “love is like a dark pit,” the narrator’s voice overrides this dark assessment claiming that love is “birds of a feather flocking together.” The lesson, as stated by the narrator, is unambiguous: regardless of our differences, we have a chance to find “true love” if only we believe in it. This statement, given the film’s general scepticism about romance as a genre discloses unexpected optimism about the myth of true love. It is soothing and stabilising in its compliance, and it stands in stark contradiction to earlier gestures of postmodern irony.

As a matter of fact, Liza earns her reward – her right to love – precisely because she demonstrates unyielding belief in fairy tales. It is her relentless commitment to “true love” that breaks the curse, and as finally Liza is ready to transform from a fox-fairy to a wife and a mother that patriarchal order is successfully restored. Liza’s self-sacrifice together with the happy ending underwrite the very same tropes that the film promises to subvert – the witch can turn into a princess and live to see her fairy tale-like “happily ever after” – but only if she is willing to sacrifice herself and to settle into traditional domesticity. This message is clear. While female melancholia is dangerous as it turns woman into a demonic virgin (a witch) or a sexy femme fatale (still a witch), her madness can be healed by the right man and by her self-sacrifice.

Ultimately, Liza, the Fox-Fairy reveals cinema’s potential as well as limits to rewrite master narratives about women’s options for love and happiness. On the one hand, humour and postmodern narrative techniques bring traditional romantic stories into critical focus. On the other hand, Liza’s story turns into a “traditional female quest within ‘the realm of domesticity’”[33] as it falls into the trap of patriarchal binaries: either she has to face complete destruction or she has to return to normalcy and accept the kind of happiness defined by masculine desire. Her path out of witch-hood goes through domestication, sexualisation, and sacrifice. Liza’s story is another tale of curse and cure disclosing the immense difficulty to move beyond romantic stereotypes entrenched into our cultural subconscious, which regulate love and happiness. It seems that we are yet to rewrite our narratives in a way that allows magical women to exist outside of binary options that requires them to be cured or contained.

Liza’s real curse, in the end, is her inability to break out of her story. Similarly, the film’s own curse is its inability to address the monstrous female outside well-established binaries. Despite its attempts at postmodern irony, Liza the Fox-Fairy fails to offer language that is radical and permanently disrupts dominant visual and narrative tropes about magical women. While decidedly humorous, entertaining and self-aware, the film does not provide an answer to the question: how can we tell stories about the fox-fairies – magical women and witches – without having to either destroy them or restore them to normalcy, to their “proper” role as wives and mothers? How can we talk about female melancholia in a way that breaks binary systems such as sane vs. insane, rational vs. irrational? Further, how can we think about the female quest for love outside master narratives wrought by misogyny?  Until we figure this out, our stories will continue to solve the woman as a problem rather than solving the woman’s problems.

Notes

[1] See the bibliography, especially Sigmund Freud, Julia Kristeva, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Barbara Creed.

[2] See Freud, Sigmund. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Volume XIV. Ed. by James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1953 and Kristeva, Julia. Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. European Perspectives. New York, NY: Columbia Univ. Press, 1989.

[3] Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. Popular Fiction Series. London ; New York: Routledge, 1993, p.7.

[4] Varga, “A Liza, a rókatündér már százezer nézőnél tart.”

[5] “Liza, the Fox-Fairy.”

[6] Arozamena, “Karoly Ujj Mészáros, Interview.”

[7] “Liza, the Fox-Fairy.”

[8] Bathgate, Michael. The Fox’s Craft in Japanese Religion and Folklore: Shapeshifters, Transformations, and Duplicities. New York: Routledge, 2004, p. 68.

[9] Bathgate. The Fox’s Craft in Japanese Religion and Folklore, p.69.

[10] Kristeva, Julia. Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. European Perspectives. New York, NY: Columbia Univ. Press, 1989, pp.3-4.

[11] Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, p. 244.

[12] Kristeva, Black Sun, p. 6.

[13] Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, p. 246.

[14] Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine., p. 2.

[15] Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine, p. 6.

[16] Freud, Sigmund. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Volume XIV. Ed. by James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1953, p.246.

[17] Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine, p. 2.

[18] Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, p. 252.

[19] Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, p. 248.

[20] Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, p. 254.

[21] Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, p. 252.

[22] Kristeva, Black Sun, p. 103.

[23] Felman, Shoshana, Phyllis Chesler, Luce Irigaray, Balzac, and Patrick Berthier. “Women and Madness: The Critical Phallacy.” Diacritics 5, no. 4 (1975), p. 4.

[24] Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine, p. 2.

[25] Felman, “Women and Madness: The Critical Phallacy,” p. 4.

[26] Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000, p. 205.

[27] Bathgate, The Fox’s Craft in Japanese Religion and Folklore, p. 68.

[28] Kristeva, Black Sun, p. 103.

[29] Bathgate, The Fox’s Craft in Japanese Religion and Folklore, p. 69.

[30] Ahmed, Sarah. The Promise of Happiness. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010, p. 2.

[31]  Restuccia, Frances L. “Tales of Beauty: Aestheticizing Female Melancholia.” American Imago 53, no. 4 (1996), p. 355.

[32] Restuccia, “Tales of Beauty: Aestheticizing Female Melancholia,” p. 355.

[33]  Benczik, Vera. “Gendered Quest in Recent Hungarian Fantasy Films.” Hungarian Cultural Studies 12 (August 1, 2019), p. 292.

Bibliography

Ahmed, Sarah. The Promise of Happiness. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010.

Arozamena. Jon. “Karoly Ujj Mészáros, Interview.” Cineuropa – the Best of European Cinema. April 23, 2015. https://cineuropa.org/en/interview/290178/.

Bathgate, Michael. The Fox’s Craft in Japanese Religion and Folklore: Shapeshifters, Transformations, and Duplicities. New York: Routledge, 2004. http://site.ebrary.com/id/10093863.

Benczik, Vera. “Gendered Quest in Recent Hungarian Fantasy Films.” Hungarian Cultural Studies 12 (August 1, 2019): 290–98. https://doi.org/10.5195/ahea.2019.365.

Butler, Judith. The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1997.

Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. Popular Fiction Series. London ; New York: Routledge, 1993.

Donaldson, Elizabeth. “The Psychiatric Gaze: Deviance and Disability in Film.” Atenea 25, no. 1 (June 2005): 31–48.

Eng, David L. “Melancholia in the Late Twentieth Century.” Signs25, no. 4 (2000): 1275-281. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3175527.

Felman, Shoshana, Phyllis Chesler, Luce Irigaray, Balzac, and Patrick Berthier. “Women and Madness: The Critical Phallacy.” Diacritics 5, no. 4 (1975): 2-10. https://doi.org/10.2307/464958.

Freud, Sigmund. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Volume XIV. Ed. by James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1953.

Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000.

Kristeva, Julia. Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. European Perspectives. New York, NY: Columbia Univ. Press, 1989.

“Liza, the Fox-Fairy.” 2019. In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Liza,_the_Fox-Fairy&oldid=923770146.

Pieldner, Judit. “Magic Realism, Minimalist Realism and the Figuration of the Tableau in Contemporary Hungarian and Romanian Cinema.” Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies 12, no. 1 (September 1, 2016): 87–114. https://doi.org/10.1515/ausfm-2016-0005.

Restuccia, Frances L. “Tales of Beauty: Aestheticizing Female Melancholia.” American Imago 53, no. 4 (1996): 353–83. https://doi.org/10.1353/aim.1996.0015.

Silverman, Kaja. The Acoustic Mirror. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988. http://public.ebookcentral.proquest.com/choice/publicfullrecord.aspx?p=4955944.

Tan, Kenneth Paul. “Pontianak s, Ghosts and the Possessed: Female Monstrosity and National Anxiety in Singapore Cinema.” Asian Studies Review 34, no. 2 (June 2010): 151–70. https://doi.org/10.1080/10357821003802037.

Varga Dénes, “A Liza, a rókatündér már százezer nézőnél tart,” [Liza, the Fox-Fairy Reached One Hundred Thousand Viewers] Origo.hu, Accessed November 25, 2019, https://www.origo.hu/filmklub/20150430-a-liza-a-rokatunder-mar-szazezer-nezonel-jar-ujj-meszaros-karoly-balsai-monika-megdonteni.html.

Filmography

Károly Ujj Mészáros. 2015. Liza, the Fox-Fairy [Liza, a rókatündér]. Film Team.

About the Author
Lilla Tőke is Associate Professor of English at CUNY, LaGuardia Community College where she teaches composition, literature, and film courses. She obtained her PhD from Stony Brook University in Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies. She also has an MPhil degree in Gender Studies from the Central European University, Budapest. She has published articles in edited volumes and journals such as Studies in Eastern European Cinema and Hungarian Cultural Studies. Her scholarly work focuses on communist and Postcommunist cinema and gender theory. Her current research examines representations of women and mental health in Eastern European film.

The princess is a figure who has featured prominently in fairy tales for centuries, but has been popularised in fairy tale animation through the films of the Walt Disney Animated Studio. Despite being framed through fantastic tales, the princess is more often placed as adjacent to magical power or simply as girls in a magical world. In the last decade, there has been an increasing trend in princesses who have wieldable magical power in popular fairy tale films, most notably Elsa from Disney’s Frozen (Buck and Lee, 2013). In this paper, I concentrate on magical power in relation to the figure of the princess through what I call magical agency, which I define as agency provided to a person through their own use of magic, particularly wieldable magical power. While there has been some work on magical objects and the use of portals as agents of transformation in relation to fairy tale and literary fantasy heroines, there is more limited study on their use of innate, wieldable magical power as tools of agency.[1]

I combine scholarship on girlhood and the magical shōjo genre to examine the trend of princesses with magical power in popular contemporary animated fairy tale films, using Walt Disney Animated Studio’s Tangled (Greno and Howard, 2010) and Studio Ghibli’s The Tale of the Princess Kaguya (Takahata, 2013) as case studies. By looking at both an American and a Japanese fairy tale film, I aim to provide two examples of how girlhood and citizenship are constructed through the figure of the magical princess in the fairy tale films of popular animation studios from different national contexts. Tangled and Kaguya are both contemporary animated film adaptations of folkloric stories, drawing from the Germanic Rapunzel tale and the 10^th century Japanese Tale of the Bamboo Cutter (Taketori monogatari) respectively. Both were the first films by each studio to centre princess characters who demonstrate the activation of magical powers. Furthermore, both films were commercial and critical successes, suggesting that there is a market for not just fairy tale films, but ones centring magical shōjo princesses, thus highlighting their significance in popular culture. Ultimately, through this paper I hope to provide a frame of analysis by which the liberating and resistant potential of future princesses can be examined through their relationship to magical agency.

Fairy Tale Princesses

Fairy tales are significant stories with lasting power, featuring narratives and characters that have been traced back to centuries ago and are still being reproduced today. One of the definitive features of the fairy tale is its centring of transformation, both through narratives which are propelled by change and the constantly adapting nature of the genre itself. Fairy tale scholars frequently highlight the metamorphic properties of the tales, examining how their various editions and adaptations become reshaped by the cultural, historic and national contexts in which they are told. Maria Tatar argues that the tales “function as shape-shifters” that are “always doing new cultural work, mapping out different developmental paths, assimilating new anxieties and desires”. [2],[3] Marina Warner has also described them as “magical shape-shifters, dancing to the needs of their audience”, and to Cristina Bacchilega, fairy tale variations are “shaped by varying histories, ideologies, and material conditions”. [4],[5] Several scholars have analysed differently shaped variants of individual tales in depth, demonstrating that the meanings communicated by fairy tales and their variants can reveal insights into contextually specific identity construction practices.[6],[7],[8]

Because of this shape-shifting power, fairy tales can serve as a way to construct or reinforce ideas about categories of identity including roles surrounding the family, gender, class and the nation, which can be both challenged and legitimised through magical and fantastical ways. They do this through the use of familiar character tropes. The fairy tale princess is such a figure through which these shifting meanings of national and gendered identities are projected. Gender and nation are inherently linked, particularly with regards to the reproduction of the nation, and the princess provides a site through which we can examine constructions of aspirational national girlhood.[9] While many older and ‘original’ fairy tales do feature girls who are princesses either by blood or marriage, the positioning of almost all heroines or young female protagonists in contemporary fairy tales as princesses has been cemented in the Western public imagination. This idea is especially apparent in the Disney animated fairy tale films, to the point where even a character like Disney’s Mulan, who is neither born of nor marries into a royal or ruling family, is placed within the Disney Princess franchise. The privileging of the princess figure above other roles means that we must go beyond looking at princesses simply as fairy tale girls. Princesses are not just girls, or even girls with riches, but ones who have a special status within a kingdom; they combine girlhood with ideas of citizenship. As members of leading or ruling families, they become models for good girl citizenship and their very identities are tied to the ruling and reproducing projects of the kingdom.

Even if she is placed in an aspirational position, the fairy tale princess has been received with varied reputations. There is an ambivalent perception of the fairy tale princess as both “a dangerous threat to gender equality” and a figure who “displays admirable assertiveness and authority”, complicating the earlier perception of the fairy tale princess as “a totally powerless prisoner” by identifying in late Victorian writing an “emancipated fairy-tale princess”. [10],[11],[12] Disney princesses in particular have been criticised for the damsel-in-distress characterisations of their early princesses. However, contemporary Western princesses have evolved, often in self-referential ways, to be icons of girl power media whose narratives borrow neoliberal, postfeminist language to encourage free choice and self-definition as strategies for empowerment. At the same time, they are surrounded by sparkle, the bright and glittering aesthetic trend which Mary Celeste Kearney poses as “the primary visual signifier”of postfeminist girls’ media culture, which is commodified as a “marketplace [choice] in the neoliberal, post-feminist subject’s construction of her individual feminine identity” that can allow her to signify capability.[13][14] Contemporary fairy tale princesses are a demonstrative example of Emilie Zaslow’s model of girl power media culture which combines elements of conventional (usually physical) femininity with counter-representations of traditionally feminine characteristics. The feminine aspects that are retained, and even highlighted, are physical traits such as beauty and sexiness, while behavioural stereotypes like passivity and dependency are discarded in favour of representations of agentic and active girls.

Magical Shōjo

While fairy tale princesses are often located within magical worlds or able to interact with magical creatures, rarely do they wield magical power themselves. As such, there is limited scholarship on magical fairy tale princesses. To develop an analytical framework to explore the relationship between wieldable magical power and agency in fairy tale princesses, I turn to pre-existing work on magical girls. Research on magical girls is often framed around the context of Japanese shōjo media culture, in which the magical girl genre is prevalent. Shōjo, the Japanese term for girl, is “a shorthand for a certain kind of liminal identity between child and adult”.[15] Shōjo theory, like Western theory on girls and girlhood, often focusses on the socially resistant or liberating opportunities for girls who do not have a firm social role. The idea of liminality recurs in key studies on shōjo culture, with Honda Masuko’s seminal work using the imagery of fluttering ribbons, frills and swaying clothing (expressed using the onomatopoeic term hirahira) to describe the shōjo aesthetic as one that can cross borders and boundaries.[16] The shōjo is also characterised by her “social, cultural and sexual ambiguity and liminality; arrogance and strong yearning for freedom; and subversion and resistance to the structures imposed by the adult male” and her desire to “escape the restraints of tradition, family, and male control”, defying confinement to the structure of the modern family and bound to the guiding value of “good wife, wise mother”. [17],[18],[19] Like the fairy tale girl, who is often of marriageable age but not yet married at the start of the tale, the youth of the shōjo provides the potential for escape from, or even resistance to, patriarchal social structures, since girls, who have “still-amorphous identities” and are not yet women, have yet to be inducted into the processes of social womanhood, which include those that contribute to the production and fortification of the nation such as biological and cultural reproduction.[20]

Kumiko Saito’s mapping of the uses of wieldable magical power in magical girl anime reveals that there is a relationship between magical girl power and the pre-adult, pre-domesticated shōjo identity. She argues that the magical girl genre in Japanese television programming “has been an active site of contesting ideas surrounding gender roles and identities”, demonstrating how changing ideas of gender in Japanese society can be understood through analysing different constructions of magical girls and how their power is used.[21] Likewise, Susan Napier asserts that through the figure of the magical girl, Japanese audiences “are able to project issues of identity construction onto the attractive and unthreatening figure of the shōjo”, noting that the magical girl – like the fairy tale princess – is a site of contestation for complex gender identities.[22]  Another component of the magical girl and the shōjo is its temporariness, which, as Saito argues, “endorses the premise that the magical power is condoned as far as it is merely an interim period for enjoying shōjo-ness before undertaking female duties” such as domestic and reproductive labour.[23]

Furthermore, shōjo culture, like fairy tales, draws on imagination and fantasy. For example, Honda’s hirahira aesthetic involves “dreaming of fantasy and alternative worlds”.[24] Helen Kilpatrick combines Honda’s work with Takahara Eiri’s concept of “girl consciousness,” explaining that the liminality of the shōjo allows her a position in which “her imaginative aspirations render the space between girlhood and adulthood as a place of liminality in which to dream freely and resist her societal confines”.[25] For these reasons, shōjo theory readings of the magical girl that highlight the liberating potential of liminality are particularly appropriate for examining fairy tale princesses, particularly those who possess magical agency through their wielding of magical power, in relation to girlhood and national citizenship.

Sun Flower Girl Power in Tangled

Disney Princesses are the fairy tale princesses in film that are most often studied and discussed, perhaps due to their widespread presence and impact. These princesses, particularly those from Disney’s Golden and Silver Eras (1937-1970) such as Snow White, Cinderella and Aurora, are most often labelled as passive and conforming to gendered stereotypes of women as submissive and powerless. The princess characters from the Disney Renaissance films (1989-1999) such as Ariel, Belle, Jasmine, Mulan and Pocahontas are seen as more assertive and rebellious; Alexandra Heatwole proposes that this is in response to third-wave feminism and Girl Power trends in which the girl became “a point of convergence for conflicting debates about risk and empowerment” and that Disney’s response “appears to have drawn on the public imaginary, constructing an image of girlhood appropriate to its time”.[26] Dawn England et al.’s content analysis of Disney Princess films argues that Disney’s latest film at that time (and the first film in the new wave of Disney animated films known as the Disney Revival), The Princess and the Frog (Clements and Musker, 2009), conveys mixed gendered messages, although their study relies on essentialised and uncontested gender stereotypes.[27] Rather than responding to third-wave feminism, Caroline Leader determines that from the Renaissance onwards, Disney draws on post-feminism, explaining that “the company structures the Princess brand story and its products around post-feminist girl power popular culture starting in the 1980s and 1990s – allowing girl audiences to indulge in hyper-feminine glamorous bodies onscreen with the assurance that these characters are also strong female role models for modern girls” but also that “these progressive agendas conflict with overriding masculine ideologies”.[28] More recently, the studio has been reimagining their princess figures, co-opting popular discourses about girlhood and highlighting their girl power attitudes and independence from men. Tangled is one such film in which the princess protagonist is characterised by her girl power abilities and hyper-feminine visual design, but ultimately does not stray far from conservative ideologies.

Tangled is Disney’s version of the Rapunzel tale. One day, a drop of sunlight falls to the earth and sprouts a magical sundrop flower which has the ability to heal any sickness and restore a person to youth. A woman, Gothel, finds the flower and regularly performs a ritual to utilise the flower’s power to renew her youth and life. When the queen of the kingdom falls ill, the king sends his guards to find the flower to heal her. Rapunzel is born with hair that holds the same power as the flower. Gothel kidnaps her to use for her life-restoring ritual and keeps her contained in a tower, raising Rapunzel as the daughter to her “Mother” Gothel, although Rapunzel yearns to leave at least for one day to see the floating lanterns that are released in the kingdom every year on her birthday. She escapes with a thief, Flynn Ryder, but Gothel finds out and hunts them down. Ryder and Rapunzel go on a turbulent adventure, evading both Gothel and Ryder’s enemies, and fall in love. Gothel lays out the condition that she will let Rapunzel heal the stabbed and dying Ryder if she remains in the tower forever, but rather than letting Rapunzel be trapped in the tower again, Ryder cuts her hair himself, destroying the healing and restorative powers of her hair and reducing Gothel to dust as she is no longer kept alive by the flower’s magic. Rapunzel cries over Ryder’s seemingly dead body, and that last tear contains what is implied to be the last remnants of the flower’s healing magic and it brings Ryder back to life. They return to the kingdom and reunite with the king and queen, becoming a family once again.

Tangled, the second film of the Disney Revival, is the first Disney fairy tale film in which girl power is invoked through the central princess figure demonstrating magical agency by the use of seemingly innate magical powers. The magical agency of earlier Disney princesses is limited to interaction with magical worlds and creatures, such as the ability to communicate with animals; they do not have the ability to activate magical power. Rather, wieldable magical power is afforded to parental characters, as in Cinderella’s Fairy Godmother and King Triton, or villainous characters such as Ursula and Maleficent. Thus, the use of magical power in Disney fairy tale films is used only as an initial catalyst for change, cast by an external source, and/or is loaded with danger. Tangled begins a new wave in the Revival of princesses that can be seen as having magical agency with Frozen continuing the trend, although Elsa’s relationship with power is fraught with anxiety. Even though this anxiety appears to be appeased in Frozen, the trailer for Frozen 2 (Buck and Lee, 2019) shows the troll Grand Pabbie warning Anna of Elsa’s magic, saying “Magic is very alluring. Without you, she may lose herself to it.”[29] Elsa’s magical power and power ballads are used to highlight her status as a girl power role model, but the tension surrounding the activation of her wild power communicates that girls cannot have full agentic control of their magical abilities and they must be contained within appropriate guidelines of femininity. In Frozen¸ this tension is only resolved when Elsa’s magical power becomes contained and controlled through the expression of love, a typically feminised emotion. Rapunzel’s relationship with her magical power is also one that is riddled with tension, indicating that Disney’s fairy tales still operate on a contradiction of reliance on glittering hyper-feminine fantasy worlds and girl power narratives while also treating magical power and its resistant potential for girls with caution.

Despite Rapunzel being the first Disney Princess who can be seen to control and wield magical power, I suggest that rather than having innate magical power, Rapunzel uses magical objects, one of which happens to be connected to, or embedded in, her body. Since Rapunzel’s magic draws from the sundrop flower whose power is manifest in her hair, it is not inherently part of her, as indicated by the loss of power when her hair is cut – what the foreign status of the flower means for Rapunzel’s princess identity will be examined in later in the paper. However, while not necessarily her own innate magical power, this object does provide her with magical agency: she uses it to escape her tower and throughout her adventures, making use of its magical resilience in addition to its healing and glowing powers. What is notable is that the objects that provide Rapunzel agency are conventionally feminine: her hair is perhaps even hyper-feminine. Leader positions princess hair as an embodiment of Zaslow’s girl power in which girls are both “traditionally feminine objects and … powerful feminist agents”, arguing that it acts as “an extension of this implicitly sexual, powerful, and feminine body”. [30],[31] Even the non-magical object that Rapunzel uses on her adventures relies on this post-feminist position between the traditionally feminine and the empowered and confident agent. She uses a frying pan, not for any domestic purposes, but rather to bash the heads of her pursuers.

Although long hair itself is already a symbol of femininity, magical power provides Rapunzel’s hair with a hyper­-feminised treatment. Her magical hair is evocative of Kearney’s sparkling aesthetic, the shining visual trend that is characteristic of post-feminist girls’ media. In fact, Kearney even singles out Disney in her discussion, noting that “virtually every female-centred product distributed by The Walt Disney Company in the last decade is resplendent with sparkle”.[32] Of particular interest to note is that in merchandise and other intertextual material, Rapunzel’s hair is restored to its long, blonde state, even though it is cut into a messy brunette bob at the end of the film. Leader points out, in her work on princess hair, that Tangled’s senior software engineer’s preoccupation with ensuring Rapunzel’s hair was, first and foremost, beautiful. Long, blonde and glowing, Rapunzel’s hair is definitively the means by which she becomes “sparklefied”, which involves the way in which “embodying or surrounded by light, young female characters are stylistically highlighted in ways that make them visually superior to virtually all else in the frame”.[33] Rapunzel’s blonde hair is the visual focus throughout most of the film, literally taking up most of the frame with its shining mass (figs. 1 and 2).

Figure 1: Tangled (Byron Howard & Nathan Greno, 2010)

Figure 2: Tangled (Byron Howard & Nathan Greno, 2010)

As the object through which her magical agency is invoked, this hair is also instrumental in furthering Rapunzel’s adventure narrative and escape from Gothel’s containment. Even when it has been cut, the magic is still tied to her hair. This is most evident when she wields her power for the last time; although the magic is activated through her tear, tendrils of the last of the healing and resurrecting luminous golden magic of the sundrop flower curl up and around her like hair (figs. 3 and 4).

Figure 3: Tangled (Byron Howard & Nathan Greno, 2010)

Figure 4: Tangled (Byron Howard & Nathan Greno, 2010)

Furthermore, Rapunzel’s hair also demonstrates some of the fluttering properties of Honda’s hirahira aesthetic, the visual symbolisation of the liminality of the shōjo and her resistance to containment within social roles. It is the case that even more than its healing power, Rapunzel uses her hair as a gag or other form of binding, and devises pulley systems for her hair to operate as a rope for herself, Gothel or Ryder to climb. However, although arguably the use of her hair highlights its resilience and strength more than its flexibility or “flutteriness,” Rapunzel’s perpetually silky and never-tangled hair, always moving, shifting and slithering, is what grants her the girlish liminal potential of crossing borders and boundaries, and escaping the grasps of kingdom guards, Gothel and her other adversaries.

Although the sparkling and hirahira properties of Rapunzel’s hair are tied to her magical agency, the film does not allow for Rapunzel to explore the socially resistant potential of girls’ creative agency that Kearney and Honda hope for in their discussions of girl/shōjo cultures’ aesthetics. Rapunzel’s magical agency is curbed through the loss of her power when her hair is cut. Moreover, it is significant that Rapunzel loses her hair and subsequently her magical agency not by self-sacrifice but rather by Ryder making the decision for her. Rather than being allowed to explore the selfish, liminal and perhaps even disruptive potential of the magical agency provided by her hair, her power is contained and taken from her by the primary male character of the film. The loss of power is legitimised through the strategy of heterosexual romance, endorsing Saito’s identification of romance as a “reward after a bittersweet farewell to shōjo-hood”.[34] In cutting her hair, Ryder is positioned as saving Rapunzel from Gothel’s grasp at the cost of his own life due to his love for her, thereby both overshadowing Rapunzel’s disempowering loss of magical agency and situating it as a worthy exchange for Ryder’s love.

Magical power in Tangled is used as a device that relies on hyper-femininity but is still used to contain the figure of the girl. Rapunzel’s hair provides her with agency but is something that must ultimately be discarded in order for her to re-join collective society. She becomes contained within the system of the kingdom almost immediately after the loss of her power; the film cuts from Ryder’s resurrection and the final invocation of Rapunzel’s magical power directly to the couple returning to the kingdom’s castle for Rapunzel to be reunited with the king and queen. As such, a direct consequential effect is drawn between Rapunzel’s loss of power and her reinstatement as not just a citizen of the kingdom but its princess and heir, the position through which she can now finally contribute to and reproduce the nation and its royal lineage. As is typical of a Disney fairy tale film, marriage is part of the glittery and rewarding package of the Happily Ever After ending in Tangled. The final seconds of voiceover narration imply that Rapunzel and Ryder are now engaged, soon to be – or already – married, thus cementing the loss of Rapunzel’s position as a shōjo and placing her firmly within the containment system of the kingdom.

The loss of Rapunzel’s magical agency and re-acquisition of her “princesshood” also serve to communicate biologically essentialist ideas about her citizen identity. Throughout the film, the sundrop flower (and, subsequently, Rapunzel’s hair) is treated as a colonial object. The image of the king’s guards hunting down and tearing the sundrop flower out of the ground by its roots to bring back to the kingdom for the queen’s exclusive use is reminiscent of colonisers pillaging indigenous land for personal use. Moreover, the sundrop flower is used to protect the future of the kingdom, and the birth of the crown princess Rapunzel after the queen’s consumption of the flower signifies that the monarchic structure of the nation will be maintained successfully; the queen has carried out her reproductive duty to the kingdom. It is also important to note that while Gothel uses the flower for her own individual longevity, she leaves it in the ground. On the other hand, when the flower is brought to the kingdom for the queen’s use, it is dissolved into tea, never to be used by anyone else ever again.

The magical power granted by this alien source is something that is positioned as both beautiful and useful but also dangerous in the “wrong” hands, reminiscent of colonial Othering and appropriation strategies. Consider the difference in the representation of power when it is held by Gothel versus Rapunzel: in Gothel’s hands, the power is positioned as selfish and dangerous as she is using it outside of the borders of the sovereign kingdom, but in Rapunzel’s, it is seen as selfless and good (although still ultimately must be contained). This is most evident in the song used to activate the power. When Gothel sings, it is in a more sombre G minor key, while the first time we hear child Rapunzel singing it, she sings it in a friendlier and more innocent-sounding C major.

Finally, the colonial treatment of magical power is most evident through the embedding and removal of the sundrop flower’s magic within Rapunzel’s body. Even though the magical agency provided by her hair is the driving force for most of the film’s plot, it ultimately must leave her very DNA before Rapunzel’s princess citizenship can be re-acquired. The sundrop flower has served its limited purpose for allowing Rapunzel to play with power and reinstate her princesshood but it becomes discarded when she is re-introduced into the kingdom. The cutting of her hair is not enough; the very last remnants of the flower’s foreign substance are wrenched out of her body before she is able to become her true brunette self and reclaim her citizenship. Tangled ultimately shies away from the powerful potential of princesses with magical agency, continuing to position magic as alien and dangerous and instead privileging a symbol of post-feminist girl power: it is telling that the hair and magical power no longer serve a purpose after the climax of the film, but the royal guard’s swords are replaced with replicas of Rapunzel’s cast iron frying pan.

Borrowing the Moonlight in The Tale of the Princess Kaguya  

While Studio Ghibli’s films, like Disney’s, are known for their young heroines, they tend to focus on a variety of girls in different roles rather than the princess figure specifically. Kaguya is one of few princesses within the Ghibli body of work, alongside Laputa: Castle in the Sky’s (Miyazaki, 1986) Sheeta and arguably Princess Mononoke’s (Miyazaki, 1997) San, although San is positioned as a princess only by the film’s title.[35] In addition, despite often being associated with magical girls, Ghibli’s films too mostly position girls as adjacent to magic or mostly interacting with magical worlds rather than in control of, or activating, magical power. The exceptions here are the eponymous girls from Kiki’s Delivery Service (Miyazaki, 1989), Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea (Miyazaki, 2006) and, of course, Kaguya. Magical agency in Ghibli films is also a site through which contested ideas about girl identity are played out: Kiki struggles with her magical powers as they are limited by her affective state and feeling of self-worth, and Ponyo’s own transformative powers are temporary and only initially kickstarted by the blood of a human boy and her father’s chemical magic. Similarly, Kaguya’s agentic magical potential is tied to her identity as princess – both shōjo and citizen. Her power both grants her with liminal shōjo potential and leaves her as an indebted citizen to her kingdom.

Kaguya is based on the oldest extant Japanese written tale, The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter, and is about a girl who is found by a bamboo cutter, Sanuki no Miyatsuko, in a bamboo shoot. She grows up to become a renowned beauty and is moved by her father to the city to be courted by numerous suitors, including the emperor, but rejects them all. She escapes to the hometown in the countryside in which she grew up and reunites with her childhood friend and love interest Sutemaru and they share a day together flying in the sky. It is revealed that she is actually from the moon and deliberately became exiled in order to experience mortality but is reclaimed by the moon, and a magical coat is placed on her to wipe her memories of the earth.

Kaguya’s innate magic attempts to pull her into womanhood: she grows magically quickly from a baby to a girl, with the film invoking traditions tying femininity with nature, drawing on what Napier calls “the myth of Japanese as living in harmony with nature, often expressed through a union of the feminine with the natural”.[36] For instance, her father figure Miyatsuko comments at the beginning of the film that the plum blossoms have not yet bloomed; however, they bloom in the presence of the baby Kaguya. Developments in nature such as flowers blooming or birds leaving the nest are often used as transitional cutaways between scenes showing Kaguya’s rapid growth from baby to girl. The bamboo shoot from which Kaguya was found and “birthed” provides Miyatsuko with resplendent fabrics and gold that he uses to build Kaguya a palace in the city and dress her like a royal. It is in this palace and social position as a princess on earth that the magic of her birthing place and body lead her to, but it is in this social space and position from which Kaguya’s magical agency is used to escape.

Where Rapunzel’s powers are healing, glowing and resilient, the power that Kaguya chooses to activate allows her to phase through physical space, disappearing and reappearing at will, moving through space at a supernatural pace and flying through the sky. Where the resiliency granted by the magical properties of Rapunzel’s hair is used to provide her agency through active means, such as an escape rope or a gag, Kaguya’s magical powers are passive and evasive. Where Rapunzel’s magical agency is used to bring her towards her goal of re-joining her family and ultimately her social roles as woman and citizen, Kaguya uses her magical agency to evade these social roles within the patriarchal society of feudal Japan.

The liminality of Kaguya’s girlhood is certainly expressed through Honda’s hirahira aesthetic. She is often dressed or surrounded by floating fabrics. The exception is when she is draped in heavy kimono layers, figuratively and literally weighed down by the responsibility demanded of her as a girl transitioning to maturity and the role demanded of a woman. When Kaguya first escapes to the countryside, she flings off all her heavy layers until she is left in her (relatively) casual red and white outfit. Of course, this outfit is loose-fitting with a flowing silhouette. More importantly, Kaguya activates the resistant and liminal potential of the shōjo through magical liminality. The liminal properties of Kaguya’s girlhood are best seen when the emperor attempts to capture her. He embraces her from behind and demands that she allow herself to be taken back to his palace to marry him. As he tries to carry her away, the colouring of the frame turns a ghostly blue tone and Kaguya slips from the emperor’s grasp, sliding away and disappearing, leaving him holding her outermost robe (fig. 5). Here, Kaguya literally turns translucent in a ghostlike manner, as though moving through an entirely different plane, and places herself back into physical space at her own will. She activates the fluttering hirahira capabilities provided by girlhood to escape being forced into a confined position within the patriarchal social structure.

In another scene where Kaguya flees her naming banquet and, in a moment of magical realism, sprints all the way from the city to her home village, the visual style also changes, reflecting the liminality of her power and her girlhood. The lines lose the previous delicacy and hair-thin precision and become jagged and charcoal-like, and Kaguya’s figure warps out of shape as she tears across the landscape and the frame (fig. 6). Again, she is invoking magical agency, escaping the boundaries of her physical body as well as the realistic constraints of the space in order to resist societal confinement.

Not only does she resist her own confinement, Kaguya’s magical agency allows her to disrupt Sutemaru’s family unit, tearing him away from his wife and newborn child for their magical flight. Napier identifies the significance of flight in Ghibli films: “it is in images of flying that the possibilities of escape (from the past, from tradition) are most clearly realized”.[37] Kaguya and Sutemaru’s flight is a joyous escape from both of their social roles, realised by Kaguya’s selfish activation of her liberating magical powers.

Figure 5: The Tale of Princess Kaguya (Isao Takahata, 2013)

Figure 6: The Tale of Princess Kaguya (Isao Takahata, 2013)

However, like Rapunzel, Kaguya’s power must be limited. Despite Kaguya’s magical agency being used for liminal and liberating purposes, her power comes at a cost. Kaguya’s use of magic is enabled by her requesting the moon for power, and ultimately the cost is her life on earth. Thus, while Kaguya does allow magical girlhood to explore its subversive and resistant potential, the transience of the magical girl that Saito recognises as characteristic of the genre is still a significant component of the film. During Kaguya’s flight with Sutemaru, they approach the moon and as it looms large overhead, Kaguya begs it to give her more time on earth, but her power is taken from her and she plummets back to the earth. Saito argues that “the underlying theme that the heroine is foredoomed to say farewell to magic in the end … transforms latent power of the amorphous girl into the re-appreciation of traditional gender norms by equating magic with shōjo-hood to be given up at a certain stage”.[38] Rather than leading to gender expectations such as marriage, however, the expiration of Kaguya’s magical agency is tied to her identity as a princess: more than becoming a married woman, Kaguya is contained by her citizenship and duty to her kingdom. In activating magical agency, Kaguya borrows power from the moon, her home kingdom, accruing a debt that must be paid back by her return. Essentially, Kaguya’s magical agency is granted by contract of citizenship. It does not matter what potentially gendered role Kaguya has to fulfil when she returns to the moon, it only matters that her homecoming must happen.

Instead of focussing simply on the tense space between girl and woman, the film also places her in contention between her roles as girl and princess. Kaguya’s agency, magical and otherwise, is rendered useless in the face of the debt and duty she owes to her kingdom. Like Tangled’s Rapunzel, Kaguya demonstrates a final instance of agency through her tears. The film becomes increasingly grey as Kaguya forgets her memories of life on earth and rises towards the moon, but she enacts one last agentic act of defiance and turns back to look at the earth, resisting for a moment the memory-forgetting powers of the coat. Colour returns briefly before fading again when Kaguya turns back towards the moon, but Kaguya’s magical agency is undermined as she succumbs to what appears to be unchangeable fate but is actually the fulfilment of her contract to her kingdom as citizen and princess. (figs. 7 and 8)

Figure 7: The Tale of Princess Kaguya (Isao Takahata, 2013)

Figure 8: The Tale of Princess Kaguya (Isao Takahata, 2013)

Conclusion

In Tangled and Kaguya, magical agency is used by the princess protagonists to aide in their journeys. Kaguya’s innate magic draws her to maturity, speeding up the time of her girlhood, but her agentic use of magic is evasive and liminal, granting her the agency to explore the liberating and resistant potential of girlhood and avoid the confinement of the gendered role of womanhood. She uses it to escape her social responsibilities within a patriarchal system, disappearing from the imprisonment of court life, banquets and the emperor’s grasp, and disrupting Sutemaru’s family unit for her own desires. Romance is not a priority but rather a secondary reward enabled by Kaguya’s selfish shōjo-hood.

On the other hand, Rapunzel’s magic is a combination of the active physicality and resilience usually afforded to male protagonists and more feminine healing and restoring properties. Disney’s brand of post-feminism is evident in Tangled in the positioning of Rapunzel as both a hyper-feminine object by the glamorisation of her hair and a spunky Girl Power idol. In the film, Rapunzel’s magical agency is reliant on the hyper-feminine sparkly symbol of her glowing blonde hair, but the subversive potential of her girlhood must still be contained through her loss of power by Ryder’s hand. However, this loss is disguised by romance, which is used both as a reward for the loss of girlhood as well as a way to situate Rapunzel firmly within her gendered role.

In both films, the magical princesses are ultimately contained and re-absorbed back into the kingdom. By losing their magical agency, Rapunzel and Kaguya lose their shōjo-ness and its accompanying potential for liminal resistance and freedom from social structures and re-instated into their roles as princesses whose lives are owed to the nation. Kaguya and Rapunzel do demonstrate magical agency to aid them in fulfilling their desires but ultimately the power does not belong to each of the girls. For Rapunzel, the power belongs to an alien object that is appropriated with colonial treatment and her citizenship and princess status are re-acquired almost immediately after, and arguably under the condition of, losing her magical agency. Only when she is stripped of her power and rid of the foreign-ness temporarily embodied within her can her wish to be re-instated as the kingdom’s princess be fulfilled. For Kaguya, the power is borrowed from the kingdom and thus owed back to the kingdom. Kaguya’s position as a citizen of the moon is re-established contractually due to her activation of magical agency. Even though magical agency is used to resist gendered social roles, in the end her attempts at escaping the contract of citizenship are rendered futile and she is re-instated against her wishes as princess of the moon kingdom.

There appears to be a trend towards increasing numbers of contemporary princesses in fairy tale films demonstrating magical agency, which is both influencing and being informed by girl power trends in wider media spheres. My analysis of two such princesses demonstrates that even though they can wield agentic magical powers and appear to be models for powerful girlhood, they are still limited by containment strategies such as romantic love and contract of citizenship.

Notes

[1] Bronwyn Reddan, “Thinking Through Things: Magical Objects, Power, and Agency in French Fairy Tales” Marvels & Tales 30, no. 2 (2016): 191-209

[2] Maria Tatar, “Why Fairy Tales Matter: The Performative and the Transformative,” Western Folklore 69, no. 1 (Winter 2010): 56.

[3] Maria Tatar, Secrets Beyond the Door: The Story of Bluebeard and his Wives (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2004), 11.

[4] Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and their Tellers (London: Vintage, 1995), xix-xx.

[5] Cristina Bacchilega, Postmodern Fairy Tales: Gender and Narrative Strategies (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 1997), 146.

[6] Lucy Fraser, The Pleasures of Metamorphosis: Japanese and English Fairy Tale Translations of “The Little Mermaid” (Detroit: Wayne State University Press 2017).

[7] Catherine Orenstein, Little Red Riding Hood Uncloaked: Sex, Morality, and the Evolution of a Fairy Tale (New York: Basic Books 2002).

[8] Tatar, Secrets.

[9] Nira Yuval-Davis, Gender and Nation (London: SAGE Publications 1997).

[10] Lori M. Campbell, Portals of Power: Magical Agency and Transformation in Literary Fantasy (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2010), 46.

[11] Jennifer Waelti-Walters, “On princesses: fairy tales, sex roles and loss of self” International Journal of Women’s Studies 2, no. 2 (1979): 180.

[12] Campbell, Portals, 47.

[13] Mary Celeste Kearney, “Sparkle: luminosity and power-girl power media” Continuum 29 (2015): 266. https://doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2015.1022945.

[14] Melanie Kennedy, “Come on, […] let’s go find your inner princess”: (post-feminist generalisationism in tween fairy tales” Feminist Media Studies 18, no.3 (2018): 435.0020https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2017.1367704

[15] Susan Napier, Anime from Akira to Howl’s Moving Castle: Experiencing Contemporary Japanese Animation (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2005), 148.

[16] Honda Masuko, “The genealogy of hirahira: liminality and the girl” in Girl Reading Girl in Japan, eds. Tomoko Aoyama and Barbara Hartley (New York: Routledge, 2010), 19-37.

[17] Tomoko Aoyama, “The Girl, the Body, and the Nation in Japan and the Pacific Rim: Introduction” Asian Studies Review 32, no. 3 (September 2008): 286. https://doi.org/10.1080/10357820802294149.

[18] Kawasaki Kenko, trans. Lucy Fraser and Tomoko Aoyama, “Osaki Midori and the Role of the Girl in Shōwa Modernism” Asian Studies Review 32, no. 3 (September 2008): 298. https://doi.org/10.1080/10357820802299684.

[19] Kawasaki, “Osaki Midori”, 297.

[20] Napier, Anime, 149.

[21] Kumiko Saito, “Magic, Shōjo, and Metamorphosis: Magical Girl Anime and the Challenges of Changing Gender Identities in Japanese Society” The Journal of Asian Studies 73, no. 1 (February 2014): 145. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021911813001708.

[22] Napier, Anime, 150.

[23] Saito, “Magic, Shōjo, and Metamorphosis”, 151.

[24] Kazumi Hasegawa, “Falling in Love with History: Japanese Girls’ Otome Sexuality and Queering Historical Imagination” in Playing with the Past: Digital Games and the Simulation of History, eds. Matthew Wilhelm Kapell and Andrew B. R. Elliott (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), 138.

[25] Helen Kilpatrick, “Envisioning the shōjo Aesthetic in Miyazawa Kenji’s ‘The Twin Stars’ and ‘Night of the Milky Way Railway’” PORTAL: journal of multidisciplinary international studies 9, no. 3 (2012): 3. https://doi.org/10.5130/portal.v9i3.2136.

[26] Alexandra Heatwole “Disney Girlhood: Princess Generations and Once Upon a Time” Studies in the Humanities 43, no. 1 (December 2016): 3.

[27] Dawn Elizabeth England, Lara Descartes, and Melissa A. Collier-Meek, “Gender Role Portrayal and the Disney Princesses” Sex Roles 64, no.7 (April 2011): 555-567. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-011-9930-7.

[28] Caroline Ferris Leader, “Magical manes and untamable tresses: (en)coding computer-animated hair for the post-feminist Disney Princess” Feminist Media Studies 18, no.6 (December 2018): 1087.

[29] “Frozen 2 | Official Trailer 2,” Walt Disney Animated Studios, uploaded September 23, 2019, video, 1:43, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwzLiQZDw2I.

[30] Emilie Zaslow, Feminism Inc.: Coming of Age in Girl Power Media Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 3.

[31] Leader, “Magical manes”, 1088.

[32] Kearney, “Sparkle”, 264.

[33] Kearney, “Sparkle”, 264-265.

[34] Saito, “Magic, Shōjo, and Metamorphosis”, 157.

[35] Although Ponyo is an adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s mermaid princess, she is never positioned or referred to as a princess (or a mermaid) within the diegesis of the film or its official marketing texts.

[36] Napier, Anime, 233.

[37] Napier, Anime, 156.

[38] Saito, “Magic, Shōjo, and Metamorphosis”, 150.

Bibliography

Aoyama, Tomoko. “The Girl, the Body, and the Nation in Japan and the Pacific Rim: Introduction.” Asian Studies Review 32, no. 3 (September 1, 2008): 285–92. https://doi.org/10.1080/10357820802294149.

Aoyama, Tomoko, and Barbara Hartley, eds. Girl Reading Girl in Japan. London ; New York: Routledge, 2009.

Bacchilega, Cristina. Postmodern Fairy Tales: Gender and Narrative Strategies. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997.

Campbell, Lori M. Portals of Power: Magical Agency and Transformation in Literary Fantasy. Critical Explorations in Science Fiction and Fantasy 19. Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2010.

England, Dawn Elizabeth, Lara Descartes, and Melissa A. Collier-Meek. “Gender Role Portrayal and the Disney Princesses.” Sex Roles 64, no. 7 (April 1, 2011): 555–67. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-011-9930-7.

Fraser, Lucy. The Pleasures of Metamorphosis: Japanese and English Fairy Tale Transformations of “The Little Mermaid.” Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2017.

Frozen 2 | Official Trailer 2. Accessed October 15, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwzLiQZDw2I.

Hasegawa, Kazumi. “Falling in Love with History: Japanese Girls’ Otome Sexuality and Queering Historical Imagination” in Playing with the Past: Digital Games and the Simulation of History, edited by Matthew Wilhelm Kapell and Andrew B. R. Elliott, 135-150. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013.

Heatwole, Alexandra. “Disney Girlhood: Princess Generations and Once upon a Time.” Studies in the Humanities 43, no. 1 (December 2016): 1-VII.

Kawasaki, Kenko, translated by Lucy Fraser, and translated by Tomoko Aoyama. “Osaki Midori and the Role of the Girl in Shōwa Modernism.” Asian Studies Review 32, no. 3 (September 1, 2008): 293–306. https://doi.org/10.1080/10357820802299684.

Kearney, Mary Celeste. “Sparkle: Luminosity and Post-Girl Power Media.” Continuum 29, no. 2 (March 4, 2015): 263–73. https://doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2015.1022945.

Kennedy, Melanie. “‘Come on, […] Let’s Go Find Your Inner Princess’: (Post-)Feminist Generationalism in Tween Fairy Tales.” Feminist Media Studies 18, no. 3 (May 4, 2018): 424–39. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2017.1367704.

Kilpatrick, Helen Claire. “Envisioning the Shôjo Aesthetic in Illustrations of Miyazawa Kenji’s Literature.” PORTAL Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies 9, no. 3 (January 2, 2013). https://doi.org/10.5130/portal.v9i3.2136.

Leader, Caroline Ferris. “Magical Manes and Untamable Tresses: (En)Coding Computer-Animated Hair for the Post-Feminist Disney Princess.” Feminist Media Studies 18, no. 6 (2018): 1086–1101. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2017.1390688.

Napier, Susan J. Anime from Akira to Howl’s Moving Castle: Experiencing Contemporary Japanese Animation. Second Edition, Revised edition. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2005.

Orenstein, Catherine. Little Red Riding Hood Uncloaked: Sex, Morality, and the Evolution of a Fairy Tale. New York, NY: Basic Books, 2002.

Reddan, Bronwyn. “Thinking Through Things: Magical Objects, Power, and Agency in French Fairy Tales.” Marvels & Tales 30, no. 2 (2016): 191. https://doi.org/10.13110/marvelstales.30.2.0191.

Saito, Kumiko. “Magic, Shōjo, and Metamorphosis: Magical Girl Anime and the Challenges of Changing Gender Identities in Japanese Society.” The Journal of Asian Studies 73, no. 1 (February 2014): 143–64. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021911813001708.

Tatar, Maria. Secrets beyond the Door: The Story of Bluebeard and His Wives. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 2004.

———. “Why Fairy Tales Matter: The Performative and the Transformative.” Western Folklore 69, no. 1 (2010): 55–64.

Waelti-Walters, Jennifer. “On princesses: Fairy tales, sex roles and loss of self.” International Journal of Women’s Studies 2, no. 2 (1979): 180-188.

Warner, Marina. From The Beast To The Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers. New Ed edition. London: Vintage, 1995.

Yuval-Davis, Nira. Gender & Nation. Politics and Culture. London: Sage Publications, 1997.

Zaslow, Emilie. Feminism, Inc.: Coming of Age in Girl Power Media Culture. Springer, 2009.

Filmography

Bancroft, Tony, and Barry Cook, dir. Mulan. 1998

Buck, Chris, and Jennifer Lee, dir. Frozen. 2013.

Clements, Ron, and John Musker, dir. Aladdin. 1992.

Clements, Ron, and John Musker, dir. The Little Mermaid. 1989.

Clements, Ron, and John Musker, dir. The Princess and the Frog. 2009.

Gabriel, Mike, and Eric Goldberg, dir. Pocahontas. 1995.

Greno, Nathan, and Byron Howard, dir. Tangled. 2010.

Miyazaki, Hayao, dir. Kiki’s Delivery Service. 1989.

Miyazaki, Hayao, dir. Laputa: Castle in the Sky. 1986.

Miyazaki, Hayao, dir. Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea. 2006.

Miyazaki, Hayao, dir. Princess Mononoke. 1997.

Takahata, Isao, dir. The Tale of the Princess Kaguya. 2013.

Trousdale, Gary, and Kirk Wise, dir. Beauty and the Beast. 1991.

About the Author
Christine York Hei Hui is a doctoral candidate in Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Sussex. She is originally from Australia and Hong Kong. Her research interests include animation, national and transnational identity, popular culture, girls’ culture, marketing and merchandising, cross-cultural distribution, and otome games.

There are fissures. There are cracks in the surface. We realize suddenly we are weeping. I heard a wail, she said, my voice. Alluvial Cone. Alluvial Fan. (Sediment, Sand, Silt.)[1]

Of all the glad new-year, mother, the maddest, merriest day;
For I’m to be Queen o’ the May, mother, I’m to be Queen o’ the May.[2]

The Blooming

I’d like to talk about revenge. Not the kind of revenge that is well thought out or strategized, but revenge that spills out in excess of the event that caused it, a reflex, an initiation, an incendiary action in the most literal of senses – revenge writ so large it turns mythical. Ari Aster’s Midsommar (2019) opens and extends like a spilled wound. Hoarse wailing, blood-soaked rocks, and ritual burnings fill in the background of what in the forefront is an exhale of tears. All this under a blistering sun, a waxing and shimmering portal into an endlessly exteriorising labyrinth. “What poetry that it’s now the hottest and brightest summer on record”, announces Siv (Gunnel Fred) during her speech to welcome the guests into what they perceive as a quaint pagan festival – and, as everyone who has seen Midsommar knows, is actually a nine-day sacrificial rite, whose victims are the guests themselves. But even more pointedly, the victims are the bonds and affects that we hold closest and dearest – those between family, lovers, friends – a purging and exorcism of the ties we create in order to keep ourselves contained. The film, which director Ari Aster has described as “an operatic break-up movie and a dark, contemporary fairy tale”, centres around five graduate students visiting a midsummer festival in the secluded community of Hårga in Hälsingland, Sweden.[3] Dani (Florence Pugh), the protagonist of the film, has only just experienced the death of her family – a murder-suicide carried out by her sister – and is stuck in a relationship with Christian (Jack Reynor), whose emotional availability fluctuates between near affectlessness to active gaslighting. In the midst of this, Dani is loosely invited to accompany Christian and three of his male friends and PhD colleagues on their trip – which also happens to fall on her birthday. By the end of the film, Dani will be the only one of the visitors to survive.

But survive is the wrong word. Dani transforms throughout the course of Midsommar and quite literally expands or grows in excess of herself, her environment, and the structures that both bind her and hold her. By the end of the film, Dani will not only externalise her rage, horror, and grief, but incrementally become covered in a lush overgrowth – livid, grotesque, campy (and sometimes even pulsating) blossoms.

Midsommar (Ari Aster, 2019)

Christian, in turn, externalises his own monstrosities: “Mighty and dreadful beast”, Christian hears, as he is stuffed into the hollowed-out carcass of a freshly killed bear, “with you we purge our most unholy affekts”.

Midsommar (Ari Aster, 2019)

What are these externalisations? These unholy affekts? And how do they speak of the horror and necessity of the transformative process of vengeance in its most raw, most ancient forms?

Midsommar could be broken down into three separate sections, which is a structure indicative of ancient rites of the underworld: the first is the loss and the search, the second is the descent, and the third is the transformation, accumulation, or ascent.[4] The first part of the film, so demarcated from the rest as to be an autonomous short, ends at 13:00, where a picture of waxing and waning moons hangs behind a wailing and traumatised Dani held (but not held) by Christian, pointing perhaps to the thirteen full moons in a year: cyclicity, magic, luminosity. The transition to the last part of the film is a fade to black, a saccade before the real festivities begin and Dani, as the Hårga community’s new May Queen, will choose her sacrificial victim. This tripartite structure invites not only a discussion of underworld themes, but Dani’s transformation also opens an examination of the magical women who dwell there in their darkest and most vengeful forms: the banshee, the furies, the goddess Persephone, and the ghostly May Queen herself. Like Midsommar and like the magical women I will be discussing throughout, my methodology will move in the direction of extreme variations. I mean to pull out themes of vengeance, grief, and even joy in their most visceral forms: fluids. Blood, potions, tears, and fire flow throughout Midsommar not only as imbrications between the various bodies within the film, but as voids, as loss, as the very real need for separation that is at the heart of vengeance.

In their essay “An Inventory of Shimmers”, Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth speak of a “bloom-space of ever-processual materiality” as well “an inventory of shimmers”, the latter of which they borrow from Roland Barthes, pointing to the quick inflection of affects passing one to another so quickly that they appear as shimmerings. [5],[6] Both terms are more than at home in Midsommar, as bloom-space is exactly Dani’s point of extension, both in costume (designed by Andrea Flesch) and in affect, while shimmerings suggest the drenched-out light that pervades the frames of the film. “As much as we sometimes might want to believe that affect is highly invested in us”, write Gregg and Seigworth, “… as if affect were somehow producing always better states of being and belonging – affect instead bears an intense and thoroughly immanent neutrality”.[7] Though “neutrality” may seem a stretch in a film filled with such overt purging of emotions, it is precisely the neutral of horror, of grief, of separation, and of ultimate metamorphosis that unholy affekts point to. The neutral quality of affect is also the quality that makes Aster’s Midsommar hit similar tones of melodrama and terror as ancient tragedy.

When asked how he pieced together the festivities of the nine-day festival that takes place in the film, Ari Aster answered: from “tradition, folklore, and pulling from many spiritual movements … hundreds of things woven together”.[8] As such, my focus will not be on pulling out the facts of Swedish midsummer festivals but rather exploring the mythical underworld that the film conjures forth. In their examination of the Eleusinian mysteries, Wasson et al. write that in the Minoan-Mycenaean period of Greek mythology, there is a theme of the “visionary experience [being] encountered by women engaged in rituals involving flowers”.[9] To this mythical bloom-space, Midsommar offers itself as a shimmering and immediate canvas. The excess of fluids in the film signal both transformation and vindication, both of which reach baroque heights. The May Queen comes forth in the final scene, drenched in light and wreathed in seething, outrageous blossoms, alive and wild and fully exterior in a place where it is always day, the maddest and merriest May.

Blood and Potions

In case one starts to feel too sorry for Christian right out of the gate, it is important to announce that Dani is not the only character in the film who has an axe to grind with him. For Josh (William Jackson Harper), however, vindication is less sweet. In this section I will be speaking of fluid in the forms of blood as well as potions – both being markers or harbingers of underworld journeys and the affect of fear. Blood and potions are connected, ironically, by a love spell: the blood that is also a potion, the menstrual blood used in a spell by Maja (Isabelle Grill). In Midsommar, both potions and blood are gateways between destruction and creation. Each have their own rubrics, their particular alphabets. Josh is the character in Midsommar most connected to written language, both in his profession and in the way he is killed. He is the one student out of his group of friends with the most investment in visiting Sweden: he is writing an anthropology dissertation directly on European midsummer festivals. He is also one of the few people of colour to show up at the festival, along with Connie (Ellora Torchia) and Simon (Archie Madekwe), both of whom are the first to be killed off. As such, Josh presents the greatest counterpoint or exteriority to the inhabitants of Hårga, and could be seen as having a fluid role: he who overflows from a community that has become ostensibly so tight-knit that the residue of their culture is a burning molten core, the fire of daylight, a death current. And ultimately, Josh knows too much.

Shortly before he is murdered, there is a close-up of Josh’s fieldnotes. They have to do with the strangeness of the Hårga runes, a language that Josh mostly cannot make out – but a glimmer in his eyes suggests he could. In Rebecca Onion’s article, aptly titled “Midsommar’s Real Villains Aren’t Murderous Pagans. They’re Grad Students”, she notes that “[n]one of these students are going to save the day”, and yet, in an alternate ending, Josh just might have.[10]  Were it not for Christian. The first of the unholy affekts are pointed to as Christian decides to piggyback on Josh’s hard work and write his own thesis on the Hårga culture, dazzled by the violence and poignancy of an Ättestupa ritual in which elders plunge to their deaths from a rock. Apathy and passivity are major motivations for Christian, which are violent in their own right – it is Christian’s decision, perhaps, that drives Josh to such a point of competition that he oversteps the Hårga’s boundaries. For trying to understand their most well-guarded secrets, for trying to literally read their codes, to lift their knowledge from secrecy to the light of academic thought – a light that has been, in the hands of anthropologists, equally as garish as the light that saturates the all-white community of Hårga – Josh must go. Josh’s blood is spilled by Ulf (Henrik Norlén), who is wearing the skin of Josh’s friend, Mark (Will Poulter), a move that brings to mind Frantz Fanon’s 1952 book Black Skin, White Masks – yet in Midsommar it is a white man wearing a white mask. A smear of Josh’s blood on the ground as he is dragged away vaguely resembles a viscous rune.

Midsommar (Ari Aster, 2019)

“I ascribe a basic importance to the phenomena of language”, writes Fanon. “To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of civilization”.[11] He continues: “A man who has language consequently possesses the world expressed and implied by that language”.[12] With the spilling of Josh’s blood, the spilling of the Hårga community into the outside world is contained – whether that be the claustrophobic confines of their racial lines or their well-guarded customs and rites, produced and kept guard over by Ruben (Levente Puczkó-Smith), an inbred oracle. The Hårga’s books that Josh is trying to photograph when he is killed are filled with a writing system that Aster in part created and calls “affect runes”, which are, according to the director, “a combination of runes and emotional hieroglyphs”.[13] It is no accident that language seals Josh’s fate: in trying to grasp the morphology of their culture – a tactile description on Fanon’s part – Josh is expelled from the Hårga community with the force of a blunt blow to the head, to the brain, to the part of Josh that was trying (and succeeding) to understand the community. Josh is violently expelled not only by the Hårga with their white-upon-white ancestral masks, but also by his own friends: by Christian mostly obviously, and also by Mark through the fact that his skin covers Ulf’s face when Josh is killed.

There is something both artful and garish to Josh’s spilled blood on the floor (garish because artful), and it is reminiscent of the Hårga’s own artwork that the viewer encounters previously in the film: a depiction of a love ritual drawn on fabric (by artist Ragnar Persson), wherein droplets of menstruation blood are shown as ingredients in a love spell.

Midsommar (Ari Aster, 2019)

This love spell, later put into actuality by Maja, who desires to be impregnated by Christian, is a contrast to Josh’s death. Whereas Josh’s blood is the signal that he is being drawn out of the film, removed, Maja’s blood serves to draw Christian ever further in, an inward spiral that will eventually swallow Christian whole. Whether in the grips of the death current or the life current, there is no escape from Hårga. In her thoughtful and intimate article “The Satanic Death Cult Is Real”, Sophie Lewis breaks down the ways that Midsommar, and Ari Aster’s previous film Hereditary (2018), rile against the family structure. “[T]he family is not an innocent organism upon which traumatic events descend from the outside”, Lewis writes. “Ari Aster … knows what I’m talking about”.[14] Blood in both Josh’s death scene and Maja’s love spell is not a binding material, but one of separation. It is not Christian that Maja wants, but his seed, her own mother-child relationship, perhaps, that Dani has just lost. The creation of family in the Hårga community, including the exclusion of those not desired in this structure, is in Aster’s film a move of isolation rather than union.

The imbrication of death with life, and the way that fluids have of transporting the visitors either to their deaths or to hallucinatory visions (or both), is indicative of mythical ordeals. As the visitors cross the solar portal into the community of Hårga – literally a giant wooden sun, which has an oval, mirror-like shape – they cross over into another world, one that only Dani and Pelle (Vilhelm Blomgren) (returning to his people) will survive. As Aster notes, “for the characters visiting the festival, this is a folk horror movie”, but for Dani, “it’s a sort of perverse wish fulfilment fantasy”.[15] Once over the threshold, the visitors are given small strings of red berries. These berries could be any variety native to Sweden, such as cranberries or lingonberries, but the red berry also points to the pomegranate seed, which is sacred to rituals involving Persephone’s trip to the underworld, enacted by initiates of the Eleusinian rites in ancient Greece. The Greek goddess Persephone is interesting to Midsommar in part for her connection, like Dani, to the worlds of both the living and the dead, but she bears other similarities. Often, Persephone is depicted as a young woman carrying a torch, not unlike the torch Dani carries after being crowned May Queen. Persephone, furthermore, is associated with spring growth and is the mistress of the Furies, or Erinyes, the daimones of revenge.[16]

Midsommar (Ari Aster, 2019)

Bride of the underworld, Persephone is the goddess who ties the fecund to the funereal. It is while picking flowers that Persephone is abducted by Hades, specifically the narkissos flower of a hundred heads, and it is by eating pomegranate seeds while in the underworld that Persephone is subsequently bound, at least for half of the year, to the place where the berry grew.[17] Thus, one of the oldest, most complicated, and even most poignant mythical journeys is triggered, where Demeter, Persephone’s mother, goes to search out her daughter and bring her home. At the heart of the Eleusinian mysteries is the mother-daughter relationship. And particularly the gulf that lies between them. Dani’s family is the missing part of Midsommar, the mystery at the heart of the film, the loss. It seems significant that just after Dani is crowned May Queen, the ghost of her mother passes her in the crowd – she is dressed in Hårga clothing, and she touches Dani as if to mournfully welcome her. There is another layer to this scene that the Eleusinian mysteries bring forward into Midsommar: though it is Dani’s grief that is the most pronounced in the film, there is perhaps some ghost of grief that her mother is expressing here as well, grief for the fate of her daughter, not to the Hårgas (she is, after all, dressed as one of them, and perhaps even ancestrally connected), but grief for Dani’s relationship with Christian, which she must have been privy to during life.

The potions throughout Midsommar can be seen as affect runes all their own: a language, like blood, that signals the descent or ascent into another state. There is a mythological component to the flora and fauna in Midsommar in general, and one that brings the viewer closer to the world of the dead. Production designer Henrik Svensson has noted the importance of plants to the film and mentions the pervasiveness of rapeseed on location as inspiring, in part, an homage to yellow that runs throughout the foliage of the film.[18] But the potions throughout the film are largely unnamed, which leaves the arena open to speculation. Out of curiosity, I asked Montreal horticulturalist Brendan Birkett to help identity some of the plants in various scenes. He isolated Atemisia ludoviciana or white sagebrush, a sibling to mugwort that itself “has long been used by skyers”, according to alchemist Heliophilus, “for awakening the third eye prior to ritual”.[19] Birkett identified Solidago or goldenrod as the yellow flowers spread out on the Hårga dining tables throughout the film and noted that the flowers ground into potions in a mortar and pestle bear a resemblance to Hamamelis or witch hazel. The variety of potions in Midsommar seem to have an equal variety of functions – Dani drinks a potion infused with yellow flowers before beginning her dance around the Maypole, and a yellow potion is coaxed onto Christian by Ulla (Liv Mjönes) before he is used to impregnate Maja. Psilocybin mushrooms literally start the visitors’ “trip”, and solar fluids are mixed and presented to the guests throughout the festival.

Midsommar (Ari Aster, 2019)

These potions could be classified as entheogens, a term coined in the 1970s to describe “a chemical substance, typically of plant origin, that is ingested to produce a nonordinary state of consciousness for religious or spiritual purposes”.[20] The most ancient entheogens were also a component of the most ancient rites of mourning.

 In his Essay on the Eleusinian Mysteries, 19^th-century scholar Sergey Uvarov notes that the Eleusinian rites, like “most ancient ceremonies were expressive of grief and lamentation”.[21] These rites of lamentation were divided into three distinct parts: the loss or the disappearance; the search; and the finding.[22] Carl A. P. Ruck posits that the initiates of the ritual drank a psychoactive potion called the kykeon at the outset of the ceremony in order to travel to the underworld to encounter the goddess. “After their descent”, he writes, “she [the goddess] would surface back up with them all, amidst a brilliant light, a fire”.[23] Ruck suggests that potash, or ash, could have been an ingredient in Eleusinian potions, as “[f]iery immolation of the human so-called volunteers and funeral pyres are frequent in the traditions of Eleusis”.[24] The other known ingredients of the kykeon are listed in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, written seven hundred years after the first enactment of the ritual: water, barley, and pennyroyal. [25]^,[26] The psychoactive component of this drink would then have most likely been ergot, barley’s rust.

What are the Eleusinian mysteries? No one knows exactly. They are the “most famous of the secret religious rites of ancient Greece”, and associated with the goddess Demeter’s search for her daughter Persephone, kidnapped by Hades. According to Ruck, some 30,000 initiates may have participated in the rites, which involved a procession from Athens to Eleusis.[27]^{, [28]} “The final solution”, according to Wasson et al. “is to heal the universe into which death has now intruded by admitting also the possibility of return into life. Rebirth from death”, they continue, “was the secret of Eleusis”.[29] It is curious that the painting Phryne at the Feast of Poseidon in Eleusis (1889) by Polish painter Henryk Siemiradzki bears more than a resemblance to cinematographer Pawel Pogorzelski’s sun-drenched atmosphere of Midsommar.

Henryk Siemiradzki, Phryne at the Feast of Poseidon in Eleusis, 1889, Oil on canvas, 390 × 763.5 cm, St Petersburg, Russian State Museum.

There is something here about otherwordly light: not of life, and not of death, but of rebirth. It is also curious that there are several instances in the film where the visitors to Hårga are given mysterious herbs, potions, and mind-altering substances that, in the end, could be seen to fatally bind them, like Persephone, to the place where those herbs have grown.

Among all the mysterious potions in the film, there is one overt reference: to the sap of the Yew tree, which is given to the sacrificial Hårga men before they are burned up in the temple, purportedly to ease their pain. The Yew tree is significant as one of the only named substances – it is the sacred plant of the Furies, who are under the guidance of Persephone, and exclusively sent out on errands of blood and vengeance.[30] The tie between Persephone, potions, blood, and the underworld points, on the one hand, to the different perceptions that can arise from the spillage of conscious experience, and, on the other hand, to the way that such spillage re-evaluates units such as family, friend, couple; loss and mourning. It is not, perhaps, that Dani longs to have her mother back (we know nothing of their relationship), but she longs to feel the longing, the rite, the search. It is through loss that Demeter and Persephone are reunited at all, and that spring blooms from winter, and that the Eleusinian rites were put into enactment for thousands of initiates through the ingestion of the kykeon. With Josh and with Maja, the spilling of their blood – in death and in bringing forth new life (no matter at what cost) – signals the malefic conservatism of traditional family units. The fluids that speak most to Dani’s experience are neither blood nor potions, but private tears that turn to vengeful flames. These are shimmerings and bloom-spaces not for the shy of heart.

Tears and Fire

If we counted all the tears that Dani sheds throughout Midsommer we may fill a well, a pupil, a moon. Tears are often an inner affect, like grief. Yet in a film where all the darkness is unleashed into the garish light of day, tears, too, become a public phenomenon, a rite. One of the most visceral moments in Midsommar comes after Dani is crowned May Queen. Here, Dani’s full grief and rage spill over and are mimed back at her, not by Christian, but rather by a group of Hårga women who are not there merely to listen to or comfort her, but to mirror her rage, to conjure it up and throw it out into exteriority, to awaken and vanquish it. Dani has seen too much. Through a keyhole, she witnesses Christian’s ritual sex scene with Maja, and we as viewers witness Dani’s eye pressed up against the keyhole witnessing. This distance with which Aster allows us into Dani’s encounter is a preface and reversal to the absolute closure of distance that the Hårga women will receive Dani’s grief with. At the moment that her tears finally flood in, Dani’s reflex is to flee, cat-like, to nurse her wounds. But she is quickly caught up and carried off by a group of Hårga women who have a different way of emoting. Hanna (Louise Peterhoff) holds Dani’s face in her hands and wails back at her while other women surround Dani in a physical, emotional group lament.

Midsommar (Ari Aster, 2019)

At last: here is the real horror at the injustice Dani has faced so far – the murder-suicide carried out by her sister, as well as Christian’s inability to face up to his own emotions, leaving Dani alone and often scrambling for affection – it can all, now, be released.

“To keen” derives from the Gaelic caoine or caioneadh, meaning a “vocalized cry”, and is an “ancient Irish funeral lament”[31] performed by groups of women at wakes and prevalent in pre-Christian Ireland.[32] Keening is both a “sacred improvised chant” and an extremely raw mode of mourning – it is a song, a poem, a wail, and is made up of the salutation (introduction), the dirge (verse), and the gol (cry). [33]^,[34] Its purpose is grounded in “waking the dead”[35] and helping spirits cross over into the afterlife.[36] Mary McLaughlin, in her essay “Keening the Dead”, notes that keening women, called bean chaointe, are often likened to banshees, bean sí, “an otherworldy harbinger of death”, widely “considered to be a bad omen”.[37] The banshee as a death messenger is most often encountered through aural manifestations of women crying; a cry so well-known and so intimate to certain communities in Ireland that, as Patricia Lysaght notes in her ethnographic study of the banshee, the sound is signified not just by one word, but “by a variety of terms in English and Irish”. To list them offers something of an onomatopoeia of grief: “cry, gol, wail, lament, olagón, ochón, lóg, logoireacht caoineadh, keen, moan, roar, scream, shriek, screech, screech, béic, glaoch, liú”.[38] These words paint the picture of a sonorous and deeply wounded externalisation. The banshee’s appearance is not so different from her wail. Rosemary Ellen Guiley, in The Encyclopedia of Ghosts and Spirits, notes that the banshee appears either “all in white or all in red. Her eyes are fiery red from continual crying for the about-to-be-departed … The cry reportedly is so mournful that it is unmistakably the sound of doom”.[39] Dani, dressed all in white in her Hårga dress, her eyes constantly red from crying, and her voice hoarse from wailing, is not dissimilar to the bean sí, especially in this scene where she is surrounded by the bean chaointe, the keening women. Her cry is so mournful that it does, eventually, become doom, at least for Christian. Her mourning transforms to retribution. Before it does it so, it must be witnessed.

“I am undone, before her, and for her”, writes Sara Ahmed while describing how she witnessed the pain of her mother during a prolonged illness.[40] Ahmed includes a whole chapter on pain in her book The Cultural Politics of Emotion, noting that pain itself “involves the sociality of bodily surfaces”. This means both that the literal surface of the skin is sensate to pain and that pain needs a way to surface “in relationship to others, who bear witness to pain, and authenticate its existence”.[41] This may sound a lot like empathy, but I am not convinced that is what is at stake here. For empathy, Ahmed writes, “remains a ‘wish feeling’, in which subjects ‘feel’ something other than what another feels”.[42] Witnessing, however, could be something more cathartic. For it is through witnessing, as Ahmed notes, that pain is granted “the status of an event, a happening in the world, rather than just the ‘something’ she felt”. And while pain “may be solitary”, Ahmed continues, “it is never private”.[43] No-one seems to know this better than the Hårga women; when they keen with Dani, they witness Dani; when they witness Dani, they activate the alchemical transmutation of pain from solitary emotion to shared event. “Our question becomes not so much what is pain, but what does pain do”.[44] The sociality of bodily surfaces that Ahmed speaks of becomes the bloom-space that springs alive, like Persephone emerging from Hades and invoking spring. It is only after the keening that Dani’s surface stretches out, making her ever larger-than-life, both mythical and vegetal. Her pain is not only evident, but shared, felt – and finally held. It is given room to flow, to flower.

The keening scene in Midsommar is perhaps one of the heaviest in the film, but it is also one of the most cathartic, and would be less so if it did not have a bit of camp and melodrama in its tone. Midsommar, though packed with dark themes, is also filled with dark humour – the too-muchness of the film, from the costumes to the at-times slapstick reactions of the characters, gives breathing space and giddiness to the film’s more uncomfortable moments. In this sense, it is worth noting that the bean chaointe had a counterpart at ancient Irish wakes, the borachán, also known as the “joker”, the “fool”, or the “idiot”, usually a man who organised and directed “the pranks and games of the wake assembly”.[45] “Wherever the trickster appears”, writes McLaughlin, “the premise is the same, the ‘actors’ put aside their daily identity to don a mask that permits them to have a foot both in this world and the (mythical) Otherworld”.[46] The character of the fool in Midsommar is perhaps best embodied by Mark, Christian’s best friend, whose sole purpose it seems is to annoy the audience. He is brash, inconsiderate, self-occupied, and ridiculous, and thus can be seen as a liminal or trickster figure. When the nine sacrificial bodies are placed in the funerary temple at the end of the film, it seems no mistake that Mark is wearing a jester hat. Whereas the trickster or the fool makes merriment a priority on an otherwise devastating occasion, the mourner, she who keens, is the mirror, the ultimate avatar who expels grief by overwhelming it. It is no wonder that this tradition was violently ruled out in the middle ages by a polite and subdued Christian establishment. “If the wake games irked the clerical establishment”, writes McLaughlin, “then the keen inflamed them, as it was considered an example of unbridled paganism that had no place in a Christian society”.[47] No place for keening in Christian society and ironically no place for Christian in this all-female scene of mourning and rage.

In her 1978 book Woman and Nature, Susan Griffin mimics two main levels of discourse: on one hand, the voice of the rational yet ultimately destructive patriarchy, and on the other, “an embodied voice, and an impassioned one” – one that belongs, to Griffin, more to women and to nature.[48] In a chapter called “Transformation”, Griffin opens on a woman at various stages of her life asking questions, fairy-tale style, to her mirror. “When she was small she asked, ‘Why am I afraid of the dark? Why do I feel I will be devoured?’ And her mirror answered, “Because you have reason to fear”.[49] In relation to Christian, Dani’s reason to fear is more pernicious than magic mirrors have historically warned us perhaps: her reason comes in the form of his affectlessness rather than his affect, one that abandons her while failing to release her. Yet in taking on mythical, fairytale proportions, her grief is bigger than Christian – systemic even. Like an emic ethnographer, or like an initiate first stepping into a rite, Griffin gets inside the voice of the patriarchy in order to take it on. We could say that these two voices, patriarchy and embodiment, also relate to different kinds of logic, day logic and night logic. On two separate nights, Dani asks Josh for sleeping pills, a repetition that serves in a way to mark time in the film, but also puts the two characters together in the realm of the night and that particular syntax of sleep: dreams. Both Dani and Josh long for a way into a secret language they do not know how to decipher. Whereas Josh, ever an anthropologist, endeavours to capture the Hårga’s well-guarded runes, Dani yearns for a language of grief and rage, a language all her own that is a foreign tongue to her. Under the heading “Nightmare”, Griffin writes (italics her own), “We dreamed we were speaking in tongues. That all we had ever felt our whole lives became clear to us … That we were singing. That we wept to recognize ourselves in these voices”.[50] Death is intertwined with sleep in the film from the very beginning, where the opening shot shows Dani’s dead parents ostensibly sleeping in bed – it follows, then, that death must also be intertwined with waking up, with rebirth. Awakening the dead is awakening. And the voice of the night – the keening voice – is the voice that triumphs.

McLaughlin mentions folklorist Arnold van Gennep’s theory of “the tripartite nature of a separation rite”, [51] which fits with the Eleusinian mysteries. In van Gennep’s words, these include “preliminal rites (rites of separation), liminal rites (rites of transition), and postliminal rites (rites of incorporation)”.[52] The women of Hårga, in being a mirror for Dani, ignite her final transformation, for better or for worse: the movement of incorporation, the postliminal; the lifting back up of the goddess, in Eleusinian terms, into the brilliance of the light, the flames. Both the bean chaointe (the keening women) and the borachán (the fool) are liminal figures, “threshold people”;[53] like the banshee, they occupy the world of spirits and the world of the living; they are excessive and external to an ethos of polite Christianity and even to the perimetres of “realism” or “normalcy” levelled against daily life; they invite spillage, bloom-space, in which the release of all the unholy affekts – in Dani’s case, attachment, inhibition, misguided or unrequited love – are invited out to play, then burned off, wailed through, wrung out; ritual purification.

In an interview with Michael Koresky, Ari Aster characterises both Midsommar and his preceding film Hereditary as “intuitive in a way. They kind of spilled out of me”.[54] Spillage is key to transition; and “[t]ransition”, writes McLaughlin, “is the keynote of death”.[55] Dani, by the end scene, has grown into a different being altogether. Her dress of garish blooms is a pyramid, an entire structure, an alluvial cone, and it looks as deep as her emotional demons. Aster captures Dani as she wretches in both grief and joy in front of the funeral pyre wherein Christian, stuffed into the corpse of a bear, goes up in flame.

Midsommar (Ari Aster, 2019)

The blossoms that extend Dani’s body meet the flames that extend Christian’s body, and both their transitions are actuated: “… her body a body of rage”, writes Griffin, “her body a furnace, an incandescence, her body the exquisite fire”.[56] The act of keening is still alive, McLaughlin ventures, but mostly in the highly Gaelic regions of Ireland, in An Ghaeltacht.[57] More prevalently, keening has been used as political action: in 1984, a group of women protested US cruise missiles in Greenham, England, by forming a peace camp and keening in demonstration. “We weaponised traditional notions of femininity”, writes Suzanne Moore for The Guardian.[58] The banshee is hated and feared for a reason: she shows that grief and tears are not a harmless emotion, but can be an active remonstration, one that bears as much fire as water. Tears, often seen as the ultimate in private behaviour, bring with them the power of the flood, of the end.

The May Queen

“Oh look! The sun begins to rise! The heavens are in glow; / He shines upon a hundred fields, and all of them I know”.[59] In Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s 1868 poem “The May Queen”, a girl continuously addresses her mother in order to pronounce that, though she is facing immanent death, she is going to be crowned “Queen o’ the May”, an event she echoes throughout the poem in various registers of glee and eerie anticipation. The poem, like Midsommar and like rites of lamentation, breaks down into three parts; in all of them, the May Queen appears ghostly (“He thought I was a ghost, mother, for I was all in white”) and has somewhat of an ominous character (“They call me cruel-hearted, but I care not what they say”). In the third part of the poem, which could echo the Eleusinian “ascent”, the May Queen speaks from beyond the grave, washed in sun: “O, sweet and strange it seems to me, that ere this day is done / The voice that now is speaking may be beyond the sun”. The poem is spatially disorienting and trickster-like: who is the May Queen? Where is she? Where and who is her mother? What is the space beyond the sun, and why does she seem so “merry”, so “mad”, and so ominous?

In the last scene of the film, the viewer watches Dani’s face move in a shimmering of emotions: disgust, grief, and the closest thing we have seen to joy for the entire film. For me, watching Midsommar hit a personal note; I felt a prickle of elation at Dani’s pure, joyous smile. Leaving Cinéma du parc in Montreal, it seemed Midsommar had galvanised some kind of inner wrath within the audience as a whole, one that came out in nervous giggles, diffuse clapping, and small cheers (this is Canada after all) – one that felt lightly explosive. The film opened questions in me that were not so much critical as emotional: whose anger is so lush? Where is the rage, I wondered, that takes root under the skin like fungi, like hives, and fruits up from the pores in blinking, olfactory shoots? What is it that smoulders, writhes, and overflows from just beneath the surface until it cannot keep silent anymore, until it cannot keep the shelter of invisibility it has tried so fastidiously to build? In retrospect, these questions point to concerns about how individuals contain love, or mourning, or grief, or vengeance within a neoliberal affective space that requires us to keep up the appearance of being contained: self-sufficient, self-caring. Yet these affects are too large for each person alone to build and hold together; they collapse, spill, or if held in become like the silent, billowing black smoke that Dani dreams of when she arrives in Hårga, pouring out of her mouth in the place of a scream. The affect runes that run throughout Midsommar become a way to look at containers and their spillages, for affect is that fluid that has no chalice. In the context of spillage, it may not be enough to say that new family structures are what is needed in our present system. I would posit that before the new, we need a reworking of the very oldest; transformation rites that allow us to come undone. Loss or separation allows reintegration. Ari Aster describes a break-up he was going through as being a major catalyst for making Midsommar: “I wanted to make a film”, he says, “that felt as big as a break-up feels”.[60] By the end of the film, it is Dani who gives the green light to Christian’s sacrifice – the ninth. After all his gaslighting, he is literally lit on fire. Dani gets full revenge on Christian, and not just any revenge but lavish, garish vindication.

In The Golden Bough, James Frazer speaks of the traditional Swedish May Queen as “a Midsummer’s Bride” who “selects for herself a bridegroom”, dressed all white to signal “wedding attire”.[61] Dani’s sacrifice of Christian, in this light, could also be seen as the ultimate tying of his fate to hers; a vow. Like Persephone to Hades. Wasson et al. note that agrarian religions, from whom the Greeks took up the reins of mythmaking, were largely focused on cycles of birth, death, rebirth, where the central event was the “Sacred Marriage, in which the priestess periodically communed with the realm of spirits within the earth to renew the agricultural year …. Her male consort was a vegetative spirit”.[62] It is perhaps no coincidence that, as Barbara J. King observes, “Greek tragedies were once known as goat-songs, perhaps because goats were given to winners of Athenian drama competitions–and then sacrificed”. The way that Dani blooms from grief into vengeance brings her at once closer to myth and closer to flora and fauna, the supernatural and the ultra-natural. King continues: “goat voices too may lament a death”.[63]

The excessiveness of Dani’s costume by the end scene of the film is a celebration of all the horror of anger let raw – like a dream, it looks different in the light of day: it looks campy, excessive. She is both bride and bridegroom, birth and death; complete union, complete loss. It only takes a word. We as an audience do not hear Dani condemn Christian to death, but by now many have wanted it so bad that condemnation has lost its lust for language and fuelled its own impetus: desire. This is also the power of realisation, total embodiment, total sublimation. Within all the fluids that are melting, brewing, twirling in the fire-hot light of enlightened day are held the hallucinatory entanglings of the poisons within – Venefica herself. The imbrication of alchemy and keening lies ultimately in their affective processes of transformation and healing – processes which, like the locals in Aster’s Hårga, seem anachronistic, storybook-like, yet are, by the end of the film, the most real, and the most, literally, alive; the locals thwart capture by the student anthropologists just as witches and magical women have escaped capture by the machineries of cultural taming. In a way, Midsommar points toward the nature of the anthropological and / or scholarly gaze-gone-wrong, one peeled of power in the face of a subject that proves too seductive to keep up the cultivation of distance or objectivity. This is a double-edged sword that runs, on the one hand, as a cautionary tale throughout the film, and, on the other, as an exposure of the tricks that presumed objectivity can play. Instead of three separate parts to the film, or even three separate rites of deep and transformative initiation, we could see these ultimately as bloom-spaces or shimmerings, the minute (or not so minute) processes of material transfiguring, transforming, and alchemising. Not so much a radical empathy as a necessary and terrifying encounter, a recognition of separation.

Shimmerings and bloom-spaces are points of excess (the neutral cocoon from which spills out the transformed moth), where healing is imbricated with destruction; potion turns poison and poison turns elixir. The neutral is after all the blunt force of awakening. “I’m worried I’ll have a bad trip”, says Christian as he is handed a concoction of solar herbs dancing in a shallow glass of water, and beckoning, calling him into exteriority, into his own desires. What is it that Christian wants? What is it to be Christian in this film, this scene and scenario, and not Dani? Who identifies with Christian here? Who admits to that? And then, what power does that admonish or burn off? It is perhaps more acceptable, more standard, to identify with Christian. Dani, after all, aligns with her sister in the end: where one has committed matricide, patricide, and suicide, Dani commits mariticide, the killing of her lover, and has undergone her own irreversible transformation as a consequence.  “Oh no, no, you won’t, you won’t [have a bad trip], trust me”, says Ulla as she coaxes the glass upon Christian. Drink up.

Notes

[1] Susan Griffin, Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 1978), 196.

[2] Alfred, Tennyson, “The May Queen” (1868), Bartleby.com, https://www.bartleby.com/360/3/181.html.

[3] “Exclusive: ‘Midsommar’ Director Ari Aster and Stars Preview the Highly Anticipated Horror Flick”, interview with Ari Aster, Florence Pugh, and Jack Reynor by Erik Davis, Rotten Tomatoes, June 18, 2019, YouTube video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1MSwudqdylA.

[4] See Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage, trans. Monika B. Vizedom and Gabrielle L. Caffe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 11; Sergei Semenovich Uvarov, Essay on the Eleusinian Mysteries (London: Rodwell and Martin, 1817), 122–23. Both of which are addressed in the section “Blood and Potions” in this paper.

[5] Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, “An Inventory of Shimmers”, in The Affect Theory Reader, ed. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 9.

[6] Gregg and Seigworth, “An Inventory of Shimmers”, 11.

[7] Gregg and Seigworth, “An Inventory of Shimmers”, 10.

[8] “Exclusive: ‘Midsommar’ Director Ari Aster”.

[9] R. Gordon Wasson, Albert Hoffman, and Carl A. P. Ruck, The Road to Eleusis: Unveiling the Secret of the Mysteries (Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2008), 49.

[10] Rebecca Onion, “Midsommar’s Real Villains Aren’t Murderous Pagans. They’re Grad Students”, Slate, July 12, 2019, https://slate.com/culture/2019/07/midsommar-graduate-students-villains-ari-aster.html.

[11] Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (1952), trans. Charles Lam Markmann (London: Pluto Press, 2008), 8.

[12] Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 9.

[13] “Ari Aster on Midsommar, Cathartic Endings, the Director’s Cut, and His Favorite Films”, interview with Ari Aster by Michael Koresky, Film at Lincoln Center, July 12, 2019, YouTube video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPGaPTdno10.

[14] Sophie Lewis, “The Satanic Death Cult Is Real”, Commune, August 28, 2019, https://communemag.com/the-satanic-death-cult-is-real.

[15] “Ari Aster on Midsommar”.

[16] All “Persephone”, Theoi Greek Mythology, ed. Aaron J. Atsma, Netherlands and New Zealand, 2000–19, https://www.theoi.com/Khthonios/Persephone.html.

[17] Wasson et al., The Road to Eleusis, 48.

[18] Rab Messina, “The Creepiest Character in the Midsommar Movie? It’s the Spatial Design”, Frame, August 19, 2019, https://www.frameweb.com/news/midsommar-production-design-henrik-svensson-interview.

[19] Heliophilus, Alchemy Rising: The Green Book (London: Scarlet Imprint, 2016), 176.

[20] “Entheogen”, Lexico, powered by Oxford, https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/entheogen.

[21] Sergei Semenovich Uvarov, Essay on the Eleusinian Mysteries (London: Rodwell and Martin, 1817), 122.

[22] Uvarov, Essay on the Eleusinian Mysteries, 122–23.

[23] Carl A. P. Ruck, “Mixing the Kykeon: Part 3”, Eleusis: Journal of Psychoactive Plants and Compounds, New Series 4 (2000): 22.

[24] Ruck, “Mixing”, 21.

[25] Wasson et al., The Road to Eleusis, 48.

[26] Homer, “Homeric Hymn to Demeter” (7^th century BCE), trans. Gregory Nagy, Harvard University, Center for Hellenistic Studies, December 12, 2018, https://chs.harvard.edu/CHS/article/display/5292.

[27] “Eleusinian Mysteries”, Encyclopedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Eleusinian-Mysteries#:~:targetText=Eleusinian%20Mysteries%2C%20most%20famous%20of,)%2C%20god%20of%20the%20underworld.

[28] Ruck, “Mixing”, 22.

[29] Wasson et al., The Road to Eleusis, 54.

[30] “Erinyes”, Theoi Greek Mythology, ed. Aaron J. Atsma, Netherlands and New Zealand, 2000–19, https://www.theoi.com/Khthonios/Erinyes.html.

[31] Mary McLaughlin, “Keening the Dead: Ancient History or a Ritual for Today?” Religions 10 (2019): 1.

[32] McLaughlin, “Keening”, 8.

[33] McLaughlin, “Keening”, 1.

[34] McLaughlin, “Keening”, 10.

[35] McLaughlin, “Keening”, 2.

[36] McLaughlin, “Keening”, 8.

[37] McLaughlin, “Keening”, 9.

[38] Patricia Lysaght, The Banshee: The Irish Supernatural Death-Messenger (Dublin: The Glendale Press, 1986), 67.

[39] Rosemary Ellen Guiley, “Banshee”, The Encyclopedia of Ghosts and Spirits (New York: Checkmark Books, 2007), 40.

[40] Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2015), 31.

[41] Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 31.

[42] Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 30.

[43] Both Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 29.

[44] Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 27.

[45] McLaughlin, “Keening”, 6. Citing Gearóid Ó Crualaoich, “The Merry Wake”, in Irish Popular Culture 1650–1850, eds. James S. Donnelly and Kerby A. Miller (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1999), 191.

[46] McLaughlin, “Keening”, 6.

[47] McLaughlin, “Keening”, 4.

[48] Griffin, Woman and Nature, xix.

[49] Griffin, Woman and Nature, 195.

[50] Griffin, Woman and Nature, 149.

[51] McLaughlin, “Keening”, 7.

[52] Van Gennep, The Rites of Passage, 11.

[53] McLaughlin, “Keening”, 6.

[54] “Ari Aster on Midsommar”.

[55] McLaughlin, “Keening”, 6.

[56] Griffin, Woman and Nature, 209.

[57] McLaughlin, “Keening”, 11.

[58] Suzanne Moore et al., “How the Greenham Common Protest Changed Lives: ‘We Danced on Top of the Nuclear Silos’”, The Guardian, March 20, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/mar/20/greenham-common-nuclear-silos-women-protest-peace-camp.

[59] Tennyson, “The May Queen”.

[60] “Ari Aster on Midsommar”.

[61] James George Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (1890) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 96–97.

[62] Wasson et al., The Road to Eleusis, 48.

[63] Barbara J. King, How Animals Grieve (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2013), 5.

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Filmography

Aster, Ari, dir. Midsommar. New York: A24, 2019.

About the Author
Sandra Huber is a PhD candidate in Interdisciplinary Humanities at Concordia University, where she combines Media Studies, Anthropology, and Fine Arts to look at communication with the dead within contemporary witchcraft. Through categories of glass, fluid, and inscription, Sandra examines how mediumship destabilises a post-psychoanalytic focus on “consciousness,” the fixity of signs, and biases around who and what can and cannot communicate, as well as in what ways this communication materialises. In general, Sandra is interested in approaching questions concerning the secretive or the occulted through embodied research. She is the author of Assembling the Morrow: A Poetics of Sleep (Talonbooks, 2014). She currently lives in Montreal / Tio’tia:ke.