Bewitched

Identity Politics and Bewitched

77 Identity Politics and Bewitched household. While many domestic family sitcoms, including The Dick Van Dyke Show, rely on cutting back and forth between the husband’s place of work (the comedy show in Rob’s case) and home, in Bewitched, the plotlines are forced back to the Stephenses’ household with a vengeance. Larry regularly brings clients over to Sam’s space with little to no notice, so that she may woo the client into signing the evervaluable contract. And thus, whether it announces Larry, Gladys Kravitz, or a door-to-door salesman, the doorbell serves as the first aural cue of the surveillance threat, and as such complements the visual use of the front doorway as a threshold between public and private that I have analyzed previously. Identity Politics and Bewitched Bewitched was a popular television show that provided its viewers with 254 separate glimpses into the Stephenses’ household over an eight-year time span. The show bridged an important cultural era, from the assassination of President Kennedy to the Nixon years, from civil rights struggles and the rise of second-wave feminism to free love and landing on the moon, and those real-life highs and lows could not help but filter into the ordinary suburban home (and its not-soordinary residents) at 1164 Morning Glory Circle. Because Bewitched witnessed so much cultural change in the time it was written and filmed, it provides a particularly fertile ground for understanding the cultural currents that flowed through 1960s U.S. society. Reducing Bewitched’s textual systems to a pithy summary robs the show of, among other things, its potentially important status as a collection of cultural historical documents that uncompromisingly negotiate the political climate surrounding it. I first want to investigate 78 Bewitched the ways in which Bewitched as a cultural historical document grapples specifically with the changing identity politics of the 1960s. Dana Heller contends that a “fragmentation” of the family occurred in America after World War II, which in turn resulted in a shift in popular culture’s representations of the family. She labels the representations of the family that develop after World War II “post-family romances,” and sees these texts as reactions to the prewar Freudian family romances . Heller specifically links the shift in the family romance to postwar developments in the politics of identity: “The post-family romance emerges in American culture as early as the mid-1950s when postwar promises of domestic unity began to degenerate with the emergence of an AfricanAmerican civil rights movement, demographic changes in the American workplace, and the increasing articulation of American middle-class women’s discontent with the intensified structuring of their domestic roles” (7). Heller uses three social crises to define the post-family romance: the conflicts over race, class, and gender. In this and the next two sections , I will investigate Bewitched as a show about the postfamily romance in its negotiation of these three social crises, beginning with the show’s intersection with racism. Sylvia Moss identifies “the comedy of in-group and outgroup ” and notes that Bewitched is one example of this type of comedy, arguing that the show’s humor is built around conflicts between social outcasts, the out-groups (“this small, alien culture”), and the “normal” Americans, the ingroups (“modern society”). Although Samantha, as a witch in a mortal world, clearly belongs to an out-group, Bewitched refuses to firmly situate the specific reasons for Samantha’s out-group status. In separate episodes, it is intimated that her “deviance” from the modern society represented by Darrin has to do with, variously, racial, class-based, and/or gender identity. 79 Identity Politics and Bewitched In one collection of episodes, Bewitched represents Samantha and Darrin’s marriage as “mixed,” that is, multiracial . The best example of this is the two-episode season opener of the crucial seventh-season plotline involving the Stephenses’ visit to Salem, “To Go or Not to Go, That Is the Question” (#201, 9/24/70) and “Salem, Here We Come (#202, 10/1/70). Those episodes directly invoke the mixed marriage metaphor as Hepzibah, the queen of the witches, comes to visit the Stephenses’ house to determine whether the mixed marriage needs to be dissolved. As a result of her close observation of Darrin’s life, she ends up falling in love with airline magnate Ernest Hitchcock (Cesar Romero), one of Darrin’s clients, and decides that...