Fantasies of Gender and the Witch in Feminist Theory and Literature

201 Pages·2008·4.315 MB·English

by  Justyna Sempruch

Fantasies of Gender and the Witch
in Feminist Theory and Literature
Comparative Cultural Studies,
Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek, Series Editor
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Volumes in the Purdue series of Books in Comparative Cultural Studies
Justyna Sempruch, Fantasies of Gender and the Witch in Feminist Theory and
Literature
Kimberly Chabot Davis, Postmodern Texts and Emotional Audiences
Philippe Codde, The Jewish American Novel
Deborah Streifford Reisinger, Crime and Media in Contemporary France
Imre Kertész and Holocaust Literature, Ed. Louise O. Vasvári and Steven Tötösy
de Zepetnek
Camilla Fojas, Cosmopolitanism in the Americas
Comparative Cultural Studies and Michael Ondaatje's Writing, Ed. Steven Tötösy
de Zepetnek
Jin Feng, The New Woman in Early Twentieth-Century Chinese Fiction
Comparative Cultural Studies and Latin America, Ed. Sophia A. McClennen and
Earl E. Fitz
Sophia A. McClennen, The Dialectics of Exile
Comparative Literature and Comparative Cultural Studies, Ed. Steven Tötösy de
Zepetnek
Comparative Central European Culture, Ed. Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek
Justyna Sempruch
Fantasies of Gender and the Witch
in Feminist Theory and Literature
Purdue University Press
West Lafayette, Indiana
Copyright 2008 by Purdue University. All Rights Reserved.
Printed in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sempruch, Justyna.
Fantasies of gender and the witch in feminist theory and literature / by Justyna
Sempruch.
p. cm. -- (Comparative cultural studies)
Includes index.
ISBN 978-1-55753-491-0
1. Feminist criticism. 2. Women in literature. 3. Witches in literature. I. Title.
PN98.W64S46 2007
305.4201--dc22
2008004050
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
Chapter One
Functions and Risks of Radical Feminist "Witches" 12
Chapter Two
Splitting the Feminist Subject 59
Chapter Three
The Embarrassed "etc." at the End of the List 119
Conclusion 172
Works Cited 174
Index 183

Acknowledgements
I thank foremost Valerie Raoul, for her unrelenting support and complex dialogue on
feminist writing and literature throughout the various stages of the project, as well
as her accessibility that has helped me to transcend the many difficult moments in
putting the manuscript together. I owe a special debt of appreciation to Sneja Gunew
for her inspiring work on diaspora and cultural representation, thoughtful guidance,
and deeply resonant responses to my writing. Nasrin Rahimieh first introduced me to
women's world in comparative literature and has provided thoughtful comments on
the initial theoretical dimensions of my study. Nancy Frelick and Elisabeth Bronfen
have inspired me with psychoanalytical insights, which became central to my read-
ings of feminist literature. Daphna Arbel provided an abundance of classical ref-
erences and has been a crucial interlocutor in my thinking about intersections of
femininity and sacredness in Western mythology. Bożena Karwowska has provided
valuable insights into Polish literary and cultural contexts and made significant com-
ments on my first readings of the narratives analyzed in my book. I am especially
thankful to my life companion, Sebastian Szachowicz, whose ongoing numerous
comments and unfailing encouragement were and continue to be indispensable; to
my parents and my sister Aleksandra, my friends Catherine Rab and Milja Gluhovic,
for their faith. A very particular appreciation goes to Carmen Quennville for inspir-
ing me with her enthusiasm in the most difficult moment of my writing and her
critical rereading of the entire study that unfolded subsequently into the first draft
of the manuscript. I would like to express my gratitude to the University of British
Columbia for the fellowships that made this work possible and for the courtesy that
I enjoyed from both faculty and staff. I am especially thankful to Gabriele Griffin,
Tamara Trojanowska, and the anonymous evaluators of my manuscript, their en-
thusiastic comments, and valuable guidance in the final stages of this manuscript.
Last but not least, I would like to thank the editor of the Purdue series of Books in
Comparative Cultural Studies, Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek, for his interest in my
work and the publication of my book in the series.
Earlier versions of sections of this book have previously been published in the
following journals as follows: "The Sacred May Not Be the Same as the Religious.
Angela Carter's 'Impressions: The Wrightsman Magdalene' and 'Black Venus'" in
Women: A Cultural Review 16.1 (2005), "The Sacred Mothers, the Evil Witches
vii
viii Acknowledgments
and the Politics of Household in Toni Morrison's Paradise" in the Journal of the
Association for Research on Mothering: Mothering, Religion and Spirituality 7.1
(2005), and "Feminist Constructions of the 'Witch' as a Fantasmatic Other" in Body
and Society 10.4 (2004).
Introduction
Theoretical Points of Departure
Focusing on the contemporary representations of the "witch" as a locus for the cul-
tural negotiation of genders, in this book I revisit some of the most prominent traits
in past and current feminist perceptions of exclusion and difference. I examine a
selection of twentieth-century North American (U.S. and Canadian) and European
narratives to reveal the continued political relevance of metaphors sustained in the
fantasy of the "witch," widely thought to belong to pop-cultural or folkloristic for-
mulations of the past. Through a critical rereading of the feminist texts engaging
with these metaphors, I develop a new concept of the witch, one that challenges
stigmatized forms of sexuality, race, and ethnicity as linked to the margins of cul-
ture and monstrous feminine desire. I turn instead to the causes for radical feminist
critique of "feminine" sexuality as a fabrication of logocentric thinking, and show
that the problematic conversion of the "hag" into a "superwoman" can be interpreted
today as a therapeutic performance translating fixed identity into a site of continuous
negotiation of the subject in process. Tracing the development of feminist constructs
of the witch from 1970s radical texts to the present, I explore the psychoanalyti-
cal writings of Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva, and Luce Irigaray, as well as Judith
Butler's and Rosi Braidotti's feminist reformulations of identity complemented with
narrative analyses of different cultural contexts.
While early feminist representations of the "witch" fit into the paradigm of
US-American feminists helping their "sisters on the periphery," current feminist
theory suggests that sociocultural transformations affected by the recognition of
difference cannot simply include only those who are usually excluded. They must
equally dislocate the centrality of the dominant subject that is not strictly defined
by gender. Radical feminist configurations of the "witch" as a herstorical fantasy
and as an archaic mother mark a turning point in feminist philosophy by indicating
new processes of responding to the nullification of "woman" in the social structure.
They allow us to move forward today in contesting metaphorical representations
of the female subject by undermining the very structure of female subjectivity, as
well as the social relations and collective imagery that preserve these representation.
Each of the selected texts in my study attests to a particular relationship between
the witch and representation (identity), and enables us to read the self-fashioning of
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