Childhood and Witchcraft: A Brief (and Literary) History
In 2018, the Royal Shakespeare Companyâs most recent production of Macbeth met with harsh reviews, many of them focusing on the decision to cast children as the three witches. â[I]t sounds as though they have no idea what the words mean and are just up beyond their bedtimeâ, said The Guardian.1 â[T]heyâre quite sugar and spice and all things nice, and something unkind in me whispers that they rather look as if theyâve wandered in from a Matilda auditionâ, commented Whatâs On Stage.2 The Independent added: âThey dart about in hooded crimson onesies, each cradling a doll, their prognostications sounding an eerie sing-song note of innocence knocked, snaggingly, out of kilter.â3 Despite their varying points of focus, each review that comments on the children has focused on their status as anomalous, out-of-place, wrong. The problem, therefore, appears to be an assumed disconnect between children and witchcraft; specifically in the assumption that children should notâcannotâbe witches, with their casting as such raising issues of compromised innocence and sweetness that the reviewers have themselves constructed as their ideas (and ideals) of what childhood both is and should be. There is also a sense that the childrenâs performance as witches was somehow lacking; that they were not sufficiently convincing; that the audienceâor, at least, the reviewerâjust did not buy it. As such, the idea of what a witch should be pre-exists and influences any attempt at criticism.
However, while Shakespeare may not have written his witches specifically as children (âYou should be women / And yet your beards forbid me to interpret / That you are soâ, comments Banquo), there is a correlation between childhood and witchcraft across literature from fairy tales to twenty-first-century young adult (YA) literature.4 As Lyndal Roper comments:
As such, what Roper reads as the imagination of children that populated their real-life accusations of witchcraft with familiar s and witches has informed much later fiction and formed a new correlation between witchcraft and childhood in fiction . In fairy tales, the child is often constructed as the innocent victim of the elderly, crone-like, evil witch: think Snow White , Hansel and Gretel , and more recently The Wizard of Oz . Yet even in modern, Disney-led retellings of tales rooted in a much grimmer tradition, in which the unassailable innocence of the child lends itself more to post-Romantic than early modern literary constructions of childhood (although I will trouble such categories throughout this work), these stories tell us that the children can, and do, win. Dorothy drops a house on one witch and melts another, even as the constructions of witches as evil are troubled by the presence of a helpful âgood witchâ and Dorothyâs identification by Marion Gibson as a âwitch-like heroineâ.6 After being tempted in by their greed for candy and cake, Hansel and Gretel manage to bundle their witch into her own oven.7 And Disneyâs Snow White witch-queen dies through her own misdeeds, a victim of her evil against the snow-white innocence of the child (despite that childâs subsequent move into an ostensibly adult sexuality through an unsought kiss while unconscious from a man in a position of power, one that would never pass muster in the days of #MeToo). Storybook children triumph over their witches, denounce them, and frequently kill them; but here, the seemingly unassailable line between the guilt of the malefactor-witch and the innocence of the child victim becomes somewhat hazy. Is this the triumph of good over evil or, in frequently becoming the killer, is the child morphing into the witch in its turn, moving out of its socially approved hierarchical place (as the frequently female literary witch so often does too) to achieve its own ends and exert its own power, while the witch takes the childâs place as victim?The stories about witches, wands, mice, and demons [testified to be children in European witch trials], which people were starting to purchase for pleasure in the late seventeenth century, would in the end become part of a nineteenth-century canon of folklore and fairy tale to be purveyed to children, and they still hold their place in childrenâs fiction today.5
In literature aimed at older children from the twentieth- and twenty-first-century YA market, the correlation of childhood and witchcraft troubles the binary of evil witch and innocent child victim with even more conviction. In novels such as J. K. Rowlingâs Harry Potter series and Adriana Matherâs How to Hang a Witch, the childrenâparticularly the teenage girls who are also assumed to encompass the booksâ primary readershipâare witches, if not witches in the stereotypical evil old crone type. Rowlingâs Hermione Granger may not be the central character in the series, but she is the cleverest witch in the school.8 And in Adriana Matherâs modern-day reimagining of the events in Salem, the âDescendantsââof both accused and accusersâexhibit magical powers, each of them questioning and playing with the binary of good versus evil that we have come to expect.9 While the malevolence of the fairy tale crone-witch is frequently absent from these child witch characterisations, the assumption of a childâs right to supernatural power is unquestioned in these texts, in contrast to those reviewers of Macbeth who were unable (and unwilling) to reconcile the two.
The relationship of childhood and witchcraft across history is no less complex than that of literature. Children are most frequently positioned as passive victims of witchcraft in historical accounts, targeted in their cots or even before birth either to avenge some alleged or imagined slight from mother to witch or to gain power over the new mother, with the childâs loss to its family figured as both emotional and economic. The infamous 1487 witch-hunting treatise, the Malleus Maleficarum...