Bewitched

The Politics of History in Bewitched

99 The Politics of History in Bewitched academic criticism) seventh season trip to seventeenth-century Salem where Samantha confronts the illogic of the Salem witch trials. Here, the time travel analysis returns us squarely back to the realm of gender issues, as the show is deliberate in its representation of the gendered components of the Puritan persecution of the witches: the judges are all male, while Samantha eloquently argues the case for the witches to these angry men. The Politics of History in Bewitched If identity politics in general, and gender politics in particular , is not the sole focus of Bewitched, it remains to be established what other themes the show’s textual strategies engage . Thus far, I have discussed episodes dealing with race, class, and gender, but what remains is the most interesting of Bewitched’s textual strategies: the episodes dealing with the magical manipulation of history. Bewitched is such a complicated textual system because it investigates history in its traditional sense while also exploring the show’s very own history as a representational system. While there are famous modernist films that explore such issues, such as Last Year at Marienbad (Alain Resnais, 1959), the notion that a popular sitcom would perform work exploring history and memory remains unconsidered. Generally, history impinges on Bewitched in two ways. First, Samantha and/or some of her relatives travel into the past. The eight episodes that begin the seventh season, in which Sam and Darrin travel to Salem, at times during the twentieth century and at others back in the seventeenth, form the most important cycle of episodes in which the potential of backward time travel is explored. The show’s engagement with the historical reality of Salem is made all the 100 Bewitched more real by the location shooting used in creating the episodes. TV Guide did a cover story on the opening of the seventh season of Bewitched because the show went on location to shoot in Salem, a very unusual occurrence for a cheaply produced telefilm sitcom. Gilligan’s Island, for example , relied on a Los Angeles island set for all one hundred of its episodes, and dream sequences on that show were filmed using barely disguised (with smoke machines) soundstages. This cycle of Bewitched episodes begins with the twopart season opener, “To Go or Not to Go, That Is the Question ” and “Salem, Here We Come.” These episodes involve surveillance of the Stephenses’ marriage by the witches’ council, a surveillance that ends in the grudging acceptance of Samantha’s love for Darrin when Hepzibah, Queen of the Witches, falls in love with a mortal herself and realizes, in a nutshell, that mortals are people, too. The next two episodes consist of another two-part narrative, “The Salem Saga” (#203, 10/8/70) and “Samantha’s Hot Bed Warmer” (#204, 10/15/70), in which an enchanted bed warmer follows Samantha and Darrin out of the House of the Seven Gables. The artifact turns out to be a warlock whom Serena transformed during the witch trials. Seeing Samantha, he assumes she is his tormentor. Sam then has to summon Serena to fix the mess she has inadvertently caused: Darrin has been thrown in jail for stealing the priceless artifact. Sam sends Serena back in time to Puritan Salem to remember the spell. Serena then returns to the present, changes the warlock back, and (since the bed-warmer evidence has disappeared) allows Darrin to escape a jail sentence. The idea that Serena could have turned a man into a bed warmer during the Salem witch trials and then completely forgotten about it for over three hundred years is remarkable . Given the gender reversal it implies, Serena’s power is best compared to a film such as Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958), also about the power history has on the 101 The Politics of History in Bewitched present. In his reading of the film, Robert Corber states that Vertigo fixates on a “counter-history of the United States” (155) that emphasizes how Hispanics such as the discarded Carlotta were denied representation in the American West. Her Anglo lover could get away with such a thing because “men could do such things in those days,” the nineteenth century, declares the Argosy bookshop owner, Pops Liebl, in the film. Every bit as concerned with the significance of history on the present, Bewitched offers a gender reversal of this Hitchcock masterpiece. Whereas the...