Where the Aunts Are: Family, Feminism, and Kinship in Popular Culture

4. Wisdom and Witchcraft: Magical Aunts and Nieces

75 4 Wisdom and Witchcraft MAGICAL AUNTS AND NIECES Among the most intriguing of the popular aunt figures are those whose explicit identities are as powerful benevolent witches who share feminine knowledge—both magical and mundane—with their niece(s). Witch aunts are featured in a wide variety of popular texts, such as the TV classic Bewitched,1 Sabrina, the Teenage Witch, a popular 1990s teen TV sitcom,2 the popular novel Practical Magic3 and the movie of the same title,4 and in the recent popular novel A Discovery of Witches,5 among others. Two popular television sitcom examples spring to mind immediately: Sabrina, a teenaged witch-in-training who lives with and is mentored by her two witch aunts, and Bewitched’s Samantha, who has frequent visits from her outrageous yet lovable Aunt Clara. In addition, the magical aunt is a common character in children’s fiction . For instance, the popular children’s novel Island of the Aunts features magical aunts who kidnap children (with great affection) to help them care for all the magical creatures who seek refuge on the aunts’ island—and of course, in this case, the women are honorary aunts to the children.6 The story Auntie Claus is about little Sophie’s efforts to discern the magical secrets of her glamorous Great-Aunt Claus and her annual “business trip” during the holidays.7 In this chapter, we explore the witch aunt and her witchcraft as a powerful cultural trope with an enduring legacy of feminine power, mystery, and danger. Popular 76 WHERE THE AUNTS ARE narratives of the witch aunt demonstrate postfeminist themes while accommodating alternate readings of otherness, sensuality, feminine wisdom, and witchcraft. Any reading of the witch is tinged by the popular legacy of this figure. We discuss the narrative politics of this legacy before exploring contemporary witch aunts in popular media. The Tale of the Witches The witch has long been marked specifically as a feminine figure in Western cultures.8 “Within a gendered society, the idea of an ungendered witch [is] unimaginable.”9 While some men were accused of witchcraft, the vast majority of the people tried for witchcraft were women. This gendered rendering of the witch is a mainstay in the received history of the persecution of witches in Europe and the American colonies.10 Thus, witches in the contemporary popular imagination tend to be women, rather than men. Further, it is not unusual for witches to be aunts rather than mothers in domestic narratives featuring witchcraft. Her marked outsider status makes the witch more suitable in cultural imagination to being an aunt, who is peripheral to the nuclear family, than to being a mother, who is supposed to occupy the heart of the family home. Thus, witchcraft legends and lore often feature women who are biological (mother’s sister), legal (uncle’s wife), or honorary (community member) aunts. While tales of the history of witches and witchcraft vary in details, several common threads persist in traditional stories. They feature a traditional healer, always an unmarried wise woman and often a midwife , who is under suspicion by her village for living on the margins of society, vilified by the church and socially rejected even by those who go to her for healing. She is persecuted especially by men and by masculine institutions—governments, the church, and (later in history) the medical establishment. She is deeply associated with the earth (e.g., she keeps undisciplined gardens, has extensive knowledge of herbs, and often lives in a forest). She threatens the institution of motherhood through sexual knowledge, including birth control and abortion, yet her knowledge comes from generations of women before her, clearly bonding her to her female ancestors and framing her magic as a birthright steeped in a family legacy. When she is accused of witchcraft, WISDOM AND WITCHCRAFT 77 she is tortured to elicit a confession11 and then burned at the stake by cruel men who mistakenly accuse her of devil worship, black magic, and threatening the very social fabric of their village, when in fact she alone has the feminine wisdom and magic to help her people.12 Popular conceptions of the history of witchcraft in Europe and the U.S. include various stories drawing on the elements above.13 And popular belief often includes claims that hundreds of thousands of women, half a million women, even as high as the “mythic nine million,” were...