Date of Award

2016

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Humanities

First Advisor

Wallace, Miriam

Keywords

Witches, American Fiction, Literature, Other, Social Anxiety

Area of Concentration

English

Abstract

This thesis examines the process of constructing the identity of “witch” in American fiction by delving into the historical implications of labeling a character a “witch” throughout American history. The designation “witch” is used throughout English and American literature to construct a repository for communal anxiety by singling out a community member to embody those fears. I begin by analyzing two seventeenth-century English plays, The Witch of Edmonton and The Late Lancashire Witches, where early modern English beliefs still held that magic was real and possible. Next, I look at two canonical American texts from the twentieth century, The Scarlet Letter and The Crucible, to observe the evolution of literary representations of witches from literal to allegorical figures. Finally, I examine two novels written by Black, female authors in the 1990s, I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem and Paradise, where the authors reclaim of the identity “witch” through historical revision and imagination. These novels use “Othered” or “witch-like” bodies to carve out a space for alternative, specifically Black and feminine, forms of knowledge and self-identification. This thesis traces the evolution of what types of social anxieties can be embodied in “witches” depending on the historical and social context at the time a text is produced.

Download

Share

COinS