The books take us back to earlier times of crisis and blame – the Reformation, the English civil war, Puritan New England. Women writers, in particular, are recovering these voices. When “one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs”, Virginia Woolf wrote in A Room of One’s Own, “I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet”. Because most of all, witch-hunts have been about controlling women’s sexuality and their tongues. Those least responsible become most at fault: the wanton, the widow, the shrew.
The White House witch-finder might like to tweet that he’s the hunted, but in reality it’s the marginal, the outspoken, those who lack a voice or upset their neighbours who get pursued. All those pious fantasies of women suckling their familiars! Witch-hunts are just a metaphor now, we hope, but we’re drawn to them as much as we ever were. Stories of witch-hunts show us how the dark is given a name they talk to us about anxiety and belief and our hunger for scapegoats.
‘I t is easy to blame the dark,” Sylvia Plath writes in Witch Burning.
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