- "Good in the way witches enjoy being good":The Reality of Morality in Eleanor Estes's The Witch Family
Eleanor Estes's The Witch Family (1960) has been called "a salute to the transforming power of a child's imagination" (Shute, qtd. in SATA 68). Six-year-old Amy and her best friend, Clarissa, create through their drawings and stories the imagined world of Old Witch, whom Amy has "banquished" (Amy's word combining "banished" and "vanquished") to a bare glass hill as punishment for her wickedness. Little Witch Girl and Weeny Witchie subsequently arrive (summoned into existence by Amy's abracadabra) to form the full witch family. Little Witch Girl attends witch school, where Malachi, a magic bumblebee, helps protect her from bullying by the other witch pupils (jealous that Little Witch Girl resides with the Head Witch of all witches); Little Witch Girl has a birthday party, with Amy and Clarissa as guests; in the climactic chapters of the book, Little Witch Girl comes down to Amy's street on Halloween for trick-or-treating, while Amy, in her Halloween witch costume, takes Little Witch Girl's place in Little Witch Girl's world. The central dramatic question of the story is whether Old Witch can learn how to be good enough to earn a reprieve from Amy's sentence; there is considerable doubt on this point when Old Witch indulges in an episode of ravenous attempted rabbit-eating for Easter. But in the end, Amy decides that Old Witch is sufficiently reformed so that the glass hill can be transformed into a grass hill and the Witch Family can live happily ever after—at least until the next story begins.
At points the narrative voice seems to endorse the independent reality of the witch family. As Amy speculates that Old Witch is probably busy making an herb cake for Little Witch Girl's birthday party, the narrative voice confirms, "Amy was right. That was what Old Witch was doing right then" (57). Or after Amy tells Clarissa that Little Witch Girl is arriving late at her [End Page 320] first day of Witch School, the narrative voice signals a transition from Amy's introductory conversation with Clarissa into the dramatic action of the chapter by announcing, "Today was the little witch girl's first day of school. And she really was late" (39). Amy has difficulty controlling the unfolding events in the witch world once she has become embroiled in them. For example, Amy and Clarissa, transported to Little Witch Girl's birthday party by Little Witch Girl's birthday wish, cannot simply leave Little Witch Girl's party once they decide they have had enough and want to go home: "Since they did not know how they had got here, naturally they did not know the way to get back. They were sorry to have caused such a hurly-burly, but after all they had not asked to come" (80). This kind of recurring commentary suggests that the witch world has its own reality beyond Amy's imagination. As a young child reading the book, I myself took the stories of the witch family to be "real."
At other points, however, the narrative voice is ruthless in its blunt reminder that the entire witch family is completely a product of Amy's imagination. The witch rule "about always having to keep their peaked witch hats on," we learn, may have been made up by Amy (26). Even more explicitly, when Old Witch hopes that Amy will not discover her rabbit-eating wickedness, we are told in a parenthetical aside that this hope is doomed to be in vain: "how could Amy help but discover [Old Witch's wickedness], since Amy was in charge of all that was going on?" (115-16).
This ambiguity between the reality and imagination of the witch family has both disturbed and pleased critics of the novel. Virginia L. Wolf writes, "much of the novel involves the construction of a fantasy world that parallels the girls' reality, differing significantly as they wish either to contain their fears or to fulfill their desires" (153). She notes that while some critics...