![]() ![]() 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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