Bewitched

Love the House, Hate the Work: Bewitched and Feminism

92 Bewitched thing she may desire, but also by the show’s regular undermining of the whole business culture. Advertising is often portrayed as crass, and Larry is a comically over-the-top huckster. Most intriguingly, Samantha, even without witchcraft , turns out to be much better at the advertising game than Darrin. The subversive undercurrent of the show is that money, material goods, and advertising are aspects of human culture that are absurd to the witches, who can manipulate time and space and have instant access to anything they desire . Love the House, Hate the Work: Bewitched and Feminism Bewitched criticism has thoroughly assessed the gendered component of the domestic versus workplace conflict. As with the race and class issues, the political implications of the show’s grappling with gender roles is fundamentally ambiguous , as evidenced in the opposing stances on these issues by different academic critics. In the show, Samantha demonstrates significant discontent with the domestic role she is assigned , not in her outward dialogue, but in her actions. For despite her promises to abstain from witchcraft, she often “twitches” to do housework rather than doing it the “mortal” way (i.e., the way all American housekeepers, who happen to mostly be women, are forced to, through tedious labor). Yet nearly every episode ends with Samantha endorsing Darrin’s patriarchal dominance as appropriate for her. This polysemy—the short-term episodic plots endorse patriarchy while the long-term stakes of the serial narrative endorse feminist discontent with patriarchy—is what Dana Heller’s approach to popular culture, as articulated in the concept of the post-family romance, brings into view. In 93 Love the House, Hate the Work terms of a feminist position, Heller contends that family romances “need to be read as fields of competition or as stages on which feminism may be said to compete for the spotlight along with numerous other performers or kinds of discourse ” (10). This struggle between discourses and political sensibilities is evident when multiple episodes of Bewitched are juxtaposed. The most obvious, and most discussed, episodes in the Bewitched typology are those that deal with Samantha’s contradictory position as a witch and a housewife. The academic critical debate around Bewitched has almost exclusively centered on the show’s gender politics, arguing over whether or not the character of Samantha is a progressive gender representation . This work results in two diametrically opposed readings of Bewitched, and critics are almost evenly split as to whether the show represents a progressive or conservative representation of gender. Darrin's home is most definitely not his castle, in “Long Live the Queen” (9/7/67). 94 Bewitched The argument for the show’s conservative nature with respect to gender usually focuses on each episode’s ending. Samantha and her family are positioned as the gender troublemakers who throw Darrin’s patriarchal control into question , a control that is restored each week as Samantha resubscribes to the legitimacy of Darrin’s power. Of the seven major academic essays about Bewitched, three of the authors (Darrell Hamamoto, David Marc, and Gerald Jones) view the show as articulating this conservative message: Hamamoto claims that the show is about, “The control of transgressions against a normative social order based on male dominance” (63), but does not offer any specific episode of Bewitched as evidence for his analysis. Marc argues for Bewitched’s conservative ideological position, seeing Darrin Stephens as “the most ideologically committed sexist of them all” (135). Marc further argues that Darrin enforces a “puritanical order” (134), without ever considering the fairly large beating that Puritan repression takes in the “return-to-Salem” episodes. As for Samantha, Marc reads her as a suffocating, ideological stooge (“Sam professes to agree with Darrin that what is normal is indeed proper: the status quo as platonic ideal. . . . A rare and extraordinary being living in a colony of conformist slugs, Samantha can develop no real ties to her ‘normal ’ neighbors” [136–37]), relying on just episode two, “Be It Ever So Mortgaged.” Jones continues this positioning of Samantha as cultural dupe, claiming that she “personified mass culture’s ideal wife, in that last moment before mass culture tried to encompass the woman’s movement” (177). Jones makes no bones about what he thinks of the show: “Bewitched was as anti-feminist, anti-sexual, and pro-centrist as a sit-com could be” (177). Importantly, Jones does open up the possibility of...