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MALEVOLENT NURTURE: Witch-Hunting & Maternal Power In Early England

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Bianca
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« on: January 17, 2009, 08:16:56 am »











                                                              Malevolent Nurture:


                                       Witch-Hunting and Maternal Power in Early Modern England





I found the most exciting and suggestive arguments in Willis's book to be the ones she herself gives prominence.

She starts with the surprising degree to which village accusations of witchcraft feature ambivalent pictures of mothering (the witch nursing her familiars at a teat, for instance).

Accused witches are called "Mother Staunton" or "Mother Grevell" (p. 34). While clear about the reservations others may have toward her Kleinianism, Willis here pushes it fairly strongly; she thinks it possible that some of the symptoms of magical harm experienced by women and men who thought themselves cursed by old women they had insulted or denied help to may arise from ambivalence about maternality: "Before the curse took effect, the accuser might consciously feel the older woman was a 'bad' mother who deserved to be rejected; unconsciously, however, she might also feel that she herself had injured the 'good' mother of childhood. Ultimately, the accuser sensed the two were the same; to preserve her attachment to the 'good' mother, she must accede to the 'bad' mother's request or be overwhelmed by anxiety. Many of the physical ailments interpreted by accusers as bewitchment may have been anxiety related" (p. 49).

Willis then points to the way elite representations of witchcraft - influenced by reforming Protestant suspicions of Catholic forms of "idolatry" and superstition, added "to the mother-child dyad suggested by the pairing of witch with familiar . . . a third figure, a Satanic 'master' who embodies what resembles a child's fantasies of the father's phallic-aggressive powers" (p. 91). In the pamphlets Willis analyses, the Protestant authors simplify and polarize witchcraft into a struggle between Satan and God, in which witches take an oath to Satan (kissing his buttocks at the altar) which puts them in quasifeudal service to an aristocratic male rival to proper authorities (p. 90). This, she points out, introduces an element of oedipal fantasy to the pre-oedipal elements she stresses earlier.

One of her strongest specifically interpretative chapters concerns James VI & I, who involved himself personally
in an important witchcraft trial in the early 1590s (in which a coven was accused of attempting to sink his ship
as he returned from Copenhagen) and later wrote a treatise on demonology. Willis very plausibly relates James's ideas about witches to his vexed relationship with maternal figures, above all Mary Queen of Scots (his mother) and Queen Elizabeth.

When Willis turns to Shakespeare, what she has to say remains convincing and interesting (she's especially good on Margaret as a witch-like aristocratic mother in the first tetralogy and on the perils of aligning Macbeth squarely with James's views on either witchcraft or royal absolutism), but as far as her main thesis is concerned she has entered quite well-mapped terrain, since ambivalence toward maternal power has been a prime area of psychoanalytic feminist Shakespeare criticism for a long time. Willis is, as usual, forthrightly aware of this (Janet Adelman is a much-cited former teacher).

Malevolent Nurture is strikingly well-annotated, as scrupulous in scholarship as it is in argument.

Its autobiographical coda extends the emerging mini-genre of the clarifying personal encounter on a moving vehicle, showing Willis attentive to the example of another former teacher, Stephen Greenblatt.







Lars Engle is associate professor of English at the University of Tulsa, where he directs both graduate studies in English and the University Honors Program and was recently elected a Henry Kendall Fellow for outstanding teaching. The author of Shakespearean Pragmatism: Market of His Time (Chicago, 1993), he is currently completing The Political Uncanny, a study of contemporary South African literature, and working on Renaissance Drama and the Problem of Agency.



COPYRIGHT 1997 Rice University

COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning



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Bianca
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« Reply #1 on: January 17, 2009, 08:45:48 am »








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<a href="http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Malevolent+Nurture:+Witch-Hunting+and+Maternal+Power+in+Early+Modern...-a019793582">Malevolent Nurture: Witch-Hunting and Maternal Power in Early Modern England.</a>







Deborah Willis's book straddles history - English witchcraft trials under the statute of 1563 - and literature - representations of witchcraft in plays of the period, primarily those of Shakespeare. Her unifying interest is the variety of discourses in both, approached in terms of feminism and psychoanalysis. The results are new and stimulating readings, especially of the gender roles defined in the historical tracts.

Willis differentiates two levels of discourse on the basis of class, gender, and the personal and political anxieties they reveal. Her main concern is "village level," often arising from conflicts among peasant women, to explain the prominent role of women in making charges of witchcraft - of bringing sickness and death to their neighbors. These accusations attribute independent power to witches who reverse the nurturing role of mothers, most deafly by the suckling suckling

In mammals, the drawing of milk into the mouth from the nipple of a mammary gland. In human beings, it is referred to as nursing or breast-feeding. The word also denotes an animal that has not yet been weaned—that is, whose access to milk has not yet been  of familiars at a third breast. The accused often emerge as defenders of traditional neighborly values, the accusers as retaliating against charges of insufficient nurturing. This is related to Melanie Klein's description of fantasies of maternal persecution, especially associated with weaning. Unlike some feminists, Willis does not see village witches exclusively as victims of male power.

"Gentry-level" or elite discourse sees witches as subordinate to Satan, treasonably transferring political and religious allegiance to an alternate male figure. Willis illustrates this by analyzing pamphlets by George Giffard (1587, 1591) and William Perkins (1608), and the role of King James VI of Scotland at the North Berwick trials of 1590-91. The general direction of elite discourse is to differentiate Protestant from Catholic practice, part of a more general, national interest in social order and patriarchal hierarchy. James's involvement is linked to conflicts with two powerful women - his mother Mary Stuart and his cousin Elizabeth I - and his concurrent marriage to Anne of Denmark Anne of Denmark, 1574–1619, queen consort of James I of England (James VI of Scotland), daughter of Frederick II of Denmark and Norway. She married James in 1589. , which the witches allegedly tried to frustrate.

Willis's last two chapters concentrate on plays, especially Shakespeare's first tetralogy tetralogy /te·tral·o·gy/ (te-tral´ah-je) a group or series of four.
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tetralogy of Fallot  and Macbeth. She analyzes the women of the early history plays, those who are literally accused of witchcraft (Joan la Pucelle, Margery Jordan) and those who are metaphorically characterized this way, especially in Richard III. There is a separate chapter on Macbeth, developing the interpretation of Janet Adelman in Suffocating suf·fo·cate 
v. suf·fo·cat·ed, suf·fo·cat·ing, suf·fo·cates

v.tr.
1. To kill or destroy by preventing access of air or oxygen.

2. To impair the respiration of; asphyxiate.

3.  Mothers, on the maternal malevolence displayed by the lower-class witches and the aristocratic Lady Macbeth. Willis sees the end of the play as ambivalent about the order implicit in Malcolm's restoration of patrilineal patrilineal /pa·tri·lin·e·al/ (pat?ri-lin´e-il) descended through the male line.

All of this requires careful balancing. Witchcraft needs to be distinguished from sorcery (usually male) and the white magic of the cunning folk. Following earlier scholars, Willis differentiates English witch hunting from its Continental, Scottish, and American varieties. Much of the discourse is hybrid, with both peasant and gentry elements, as well as components from Continental, classical, and Biblical sources, which complicates the task of untangling them.

Missing from the discussion of Shakespeare are several prominent instances of witch hunting or much awareness that it could be turned to comedy. For example, Willis discusses the Duchess of Gloucester's visit to Margery Jordan the witch and Roger Bolingbrook the conjurer in Henry VI Part 2, but omits their sentencing (2.3) and the implications of the intervening comic scene of Simpcox's fraudulent miracle (2.1). Dr. Pinch of Comedy of Errors, one of the more ridiculous figures in the history of exorcism exorcism (ĕk`sôrsĭz'əm), ritual act of driving out evil demons or spirits from places, persons, or things in which they are thought to dwell. It occurs both in primitive societies and in the religions of sophisticated cultures. , becomes a "benign male magician" in a note, while Willis ignores the scene in which Antipholus and Dromio of Syracuse regard the Courtesan cour·te·san 
n.
A woman prostitute, especially one whose clients are members of a royal court or men of high social standing.


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[French courtisane, from Old French, from Old Italian cortigiana  as a witch, a sorceress, "the devil's dam" (4.3). More substantially, there is no discussion of the witch of Brainford scene in Merry Wives of Windsor (4.2), a play much concerned with class and gender.



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« Last Edit: January 17, 2009, 08:46:58 am by Bianca » Report Spam   Logged

Your mind understands what you have been taught; your heart what is true.
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