By Keri O’Shea
(For the first part of Keri’s article on the historical basis of this film, please click here. As with Part 1, please note that you should read this article after seeing the film.)
Those observant Christians who began to arrive in New England during the middle decades of the 1600s had – as you might expect from people taking such a serious step – high hopes for their new lives. Newly unfettered from an English monarch whom religious leaders believed was fundamentally unsympathetic to their needs, the Puritan settlers were determined to establish themselves in their new land and to do things very differently there, hopefully with their example acting as a model and a beacon to those still in Europe who might also seek a truly reformed, fairly-governed commonwealth. To maintain their religious vision it was important to settlers, from the outset, to organise themselves along rigid and highly formalised lines, with clearly-understood rules, regulations and responsibilities. Patriarchal structure was largely transplanted to the New World intact and for the new colonies to stand a chance at success it was deemed necessary for convention to be promoted, including having the traditional family placed on a high pedestal. Men worked hard on the land, women were expected to extend their broods within wedlock and everyone had to work wholesale to raise up the next generation of true Christians.
As much as these new communities sought to throw off their shackles, then, they still retained those they felt were useful. A culture of legislature, social codes and punishments which hinged upon policing the behaviour of peers soon developed. It was necessary perhaps, to instill order in a harsh and unfamiliar environment which had a native population of heathens as a constant reminder that God’s path could be a precarious one, and certainly not one followed by all. In-group and out-group sentiment in amongst all of this soon became a matter of life and death.
There were those who dared defiance and many people didn’t want to simply pick up their old roles in this new haven, as they hoped for still greater reform and change. They argued with their elders, and some – notoriously – were eventually banished from the protection of their communities completely. As with being outlawed in medieval England, this was a very serious thing to face, and like the rebellious real-life female preacher Anne Hutchinson, a first-generation emigre from Lincolnshire who arrived in America at around the same time as the film’s family, the family in The Witch are excommunicated and banished from their settlement because of father William’s outspoken and socially-unacceptable version of Christian belief.
Taking his family into the wilderness as a result of this banishment, William sets about establishing his own farmstead. It is worth mentioning here that, according to the consensus among early Puritan thinkers, “overt repudiation of ministerial authority…could be interpreted as signifying a covenant with the Devil” (Karlsen, p.120). To many in a community of this kind and at this time, this type of rejection of the new order was suspicious, even damning. And as such, William’s actions could be seen as paving the road to Hell with good intentions, as the idiom goes. His real-life contemporaries certainly thought so: in any case, banishment, isolation and deprivation can do plenty to convince people that they are under otherworldly attack, particularly in such a hostile and lonely environment as New England. If what befalls the family is genuine supernatural interference, then they’ve certainly been set up well to receive it; if not, then they have been given enough very real calamity to perceive that they suffer it.
As for the role of the witch in general in these communities, we have discussed already how Puritan society – this brave new world – had yet taken with it age-old beliefs about magic which it fell back on in its frequent times of difficulty and despair. In many respects, what communities saw as malign interference was blamed for equally age-old phenomena: blighted crops, ailing livestock, curdled milk, spoiled beer, poor weather; these are all things which could harm the progress of an agrarian society such as the Puritans had established but constituted natural, yet deeply frustrating events which could still be pinned on outsider influences. Witches were frequently blamed for such calamities, and hundreds of women (and men, and children, but primarily women) were tried and often executed for their ‘crimes’. Witches could also, we are told, cause animals to behave in uncharacteristic ways, such as being “taken with strange fits” or “behaving in a strange or affrighting manner” (Witchcraft Papers 1:94). All of these things could spell doom for farms which were meant to be completely self-sufficient.
All of these phenomena occur for the family in The Witch; they run out of food, cannot grow more, and their animals either keel over or worse, have a malign affect on the family in different ways – as that rare old beast the black goat known as ‘Black Philip’ demonstrates. Black Philip, incidentally, encapsulates lots of old ideas of devils as goats or he-goats – more than could be feasibly included here; the goat has biblical-era ties to Satanic mischief (see Revelations for mentions of the ‘lambs’ gathered on the right-hand side of Jesus and the ‘goats’ on the left). Black Philip, at first a regular farm animal, helps to sow the seeds of doubt in William’s mind regarding his much-loved eldest daughter Thomasin – after the younger children begin to claim they’ve been talking with the creature and he’s accused Thomasin of being ‘wicked’. He’s a striking creature whose influence on the family feels utterly believable, even as the narrative moves forward and his role transforms.
With regards to the prevalence of witches in New England, there are still further reasons why the ideas of enemies-within began to take hold there. One interpretation is that witchcraft accusations became prevalent where a widow, wife or daughter stood to inherit large amounts of land and property. Whether the intentions were overt or not, naming a woman as a witch made for an easy way to grab and distribute material wealth from ‘unorthodox’ families which had subverted the preferred order of things, in a society where means were still limited. Whilst not a direct factor in The Witch, true, it’s yet more evidence of the precarious, often ruthless society in which their real-life contemporaries existed. Add sex, sexuality and sexual jealousy to this kind of mix, and it isn’t difficult to see how and why women often lived particularly risky lives in 17th Century America; in danger of plausible accusations by well-respected members of communities, in danger when ostensibly in a position of financial gain, in danger of sexual attention, life was hardly straightforward for many. By the same token, for those who really believed they had sealed a covenant with Satan (and I believe many did think this) then who can blame them for wanting it? The promise of ease and fulfillment away from their mundane world of toil and threat must have seemed a welcome proposal for many, whatever the cause.
Before any such covenant could be signed, however, it was common for Satan to tempt and to wear down prospective signatories via the phenomenon of possession.
Today, most of us would see this in rational terms, as a body and mind worn down with mistreatment and stifling social roles finding an hysterical outlet which would have seemed, to witnesses, something completely unnatural. Add hearsay to fright and voila, you have something recordable, transmittable and imitable, but no doubt exaggerated, hence so many possession yarns which fit the same bill down through the centuries which can still be used in a 21st Century setting to scare modern audiences.
The Puritans did not view possession as evidence of witchcraft in and of itself, though; rather, this was a step initiated by the Devil (or his witches) to lure their prey, to break the spirits of the pious and to eventually gain new recruits. The Witch uses this idea; whilst the possessed child is young (although the youngest person accused of witchcraft at this time was around seven) it happens as a direct consequence of his encounter with a beautiful lone female living in the woods – a warning sign if ever there was one that something is deeply wrong. His attempts to repel whatever-it-is which is nagging at him causes physical symptoms which chime with those described across numerous accounts of possession in Puritan New England; he repels the evil in the end, but at great cost. In this, he has much in common with those real-life figures who underwent the tortures of possession: observers spoke of them being subjected to “thousands of cruel pinches,” “visited with strange Fits”, “sometimes weeping, sometimes laughing, sometimes roaring hideously” (Karlsen, p.11). Many were unable to find their way back to God; many died, either of their own physical symptoms or via the interventions of the well-meaning. This is certainly the case for Thomasin’s unhappy younger brother.
Ultimately, however, it’s Thomasin who is the prize. Everything which befalls her family leads up to her final temptation, whilst also leading to the film’s striking final scenes. Contemporary figures for Thomasin in the 1630s are rather fewer than you might expect however, and this was generally the case. The main demographic group for accusations of witchcraft was women of maturer years, around forty as a general rule of thumb, and possibly due to the factor mentioned above – inheritance issues. A reasonable number of younger women are on record, though there are not many of them. There was, however, a young girl called Elizabeth Knapp who could conceivably be a source of inspiration for the character of Thomasin…
Knapp was just sixteen in the 1670s – albeit the generation after the film is set – when she first exhibited signs that something was seriously awry. The eldest child of her parents, from being a normal and normally-pious indentured servant in a reasonable affluent Puritan household, she at first began showing signs that she was possessed, speaking out against the system in which she lived. Knapp at first began “bursting into extravagant laughter” and complaining of the kinds of painful physical symptoms mentioned above; she explained her afflictions by saying that none other than the Devil – in the shape of various neighbours – was tormenting her.
Her fears were dismissed at first, largely because the woman she initially identified was well-protected and respected in the community (it’s always who you know), but what’s interesting here is that Knapp soon described her temptations by the Devil as overtly sensuous in nature. Knapp said:
“‘The Devil had appeared to her many times over the previous three years, that he offered to make her
a witch, and that he proffered to her ‘money, silks, fine clothes, ease from labor, to show her the whole
world…'”(Karlsen p.236)
Whilst far from the only woman to be teased away from the humdrum world by promises of comfort, and there are other possible individual inspirations for Thomasin’s character, Knapp’s assertions about what she had been offered give a strong reminder of Thomasin’s late words to the Devil, or to her ‘Black Philip’; after undergoing every horror, every loss, Thomasin wants immediate relief, sustenance, fine things to wear. Black Philip is keen to oblige, with the film’s strongest line of dialogue occurring as he finally leads her to give way with some simple, poignant words as he asks if she would prefer to ‘live deliciously’ Elsewhere, Knapp had talked of giving herself ‘body and soul’ to the Devil; this is as close as a young woman would dare to allude to sexuality in those stern, punitive times, but allude to it she does, I believe; Black Philip’s instruction to Thomasin to ‘remove her shift’ before calling her to the coven certainly does the same.
At the end of The Witch, as with the real-life contemporary figures who craved release from Puritan hardship, it’s hard to begrudge the character of Thomasin taking steps to gain her wishes; if the ensuing scenes are all just the death-gasp of a girl’s failing intellect, well, in many ways that feels like a shame. Somehow it’s hard not to find yourself on the side of the coven which has presumably thrown off hardship of its own at some cost, when it could finally accommodate a girl who is done with privation. But whatever you make of the glorious ambiguities of the ending of The Witch – whether this is indeed a supernatural film, or a tale of very human responses to an extreme situation – what we certainly have is a devotedly religious, loving family whose earnest prayers repeatedly fall on deaf ears; be it their nonconformity, their rebellious streak, their plain poor luck, or that they’ve been forsaken by God, their slow unravelling against an unforgiving backdrop makes for a startling piece of cinema.
Are there witches? Were there ever witches? That there are so many verifiable links to real historical accounts and to phenomena which people believed in so deeply (and died for) only adds to this film’s immense and deserved gravitas, and forever keeps us at arm’s length, doubting everything we see – just like Thomasin and her family.
“Handmaidens of the Lord should go so as to distinguish themselves from Handmaidens of the Devil.” (Cotton Mather, Ornaments for the Daughters of Zion, 1692).
Select Bibliography
Malleus Maleficarum by Heinrich Kramer & James Sprenger, trans. by Montague Summers (1928). Accessed online via http://www.malleusmaleficarum.org/shop/the-malleus-maleficarum-pdf/
The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England by Carol F. Karlsen (1987).
Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England by John Putnam Demos (1982).