Session 4A: Magical (D)evil Women

1st Global Conference

Friday 1st May 2009 – Sunday 3rd May 2009
Budapest, Hungary

Conference Programme, Abstracts and Papers

Satan as the Liberator of Woman in Four Gothic Novels: William Beckford’s Vathek (1786), M. G. Lewis’ The Monk (1796), Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya, or The Moor (1806), and Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820)
Per Faxneld
Department of the History of Religions, Stockholm University, Sweden

Women’s intimate relationships with Satan play an important part in several Gothic novels. The moralizing authorial voice typically equates female empowerment with Satanism, condemning it harshly, and in the final chapter of the novels, horrid punishments are meted out to the offending self-assertive females. But at the same time, both Satan and his female minions are frequently given a sublime grandeur as well as the opportunity to utter monologues criticizing Christianity, Western civilisation and patriarchal culture – sometimes so persuasively worded that the author deems it necessary to insert a footnote denouncing these sentiments. The paper will examine the tensions inherent in this gendered theme – between condemnation and fascination, subversion and repression – in four Gothic novels.

Carathis in Vathek is Vathek’s mother, as well as a relentless demon-worshipper, and the cheery and gleeful descriptions of the wicked deeds of mother and son (for instance the obvious delight the authorial voice takes in the humiliation of figures of religious power), serve to drastically undermine the moralistic statements and sombre punishments in the last pages of the book. Vathek could be read as an ironic tribute to a transgressive ”evil” lifestyle, where woman as the Devil’s helper leads man into a realm of amoral freedom, a freedom that comes to a tragic end.

Matilda in The Monk gives several eloquent monologues on the value of love and pleasure, as opposed to the unnatural state of celibacy practised by monks, and on the happiness in living in the present rather than hoping for a possible reward in Heaven. She is the only creature of female gender (even if she in the end is revealed not to be a ”real” woman, but a demon) in the story who succeeds in being self-assertive and dominant without getting punished – and she does so by being in league with Satan.
Victoria, the heroine of Zofloya, is described in terms reminiscent of Satan: as a proud and self-sufficient angel. When Satan himself enters the story, in the guise of the moor Zofloya, he repeatedly praises her inflexible spirit. Such a spirit is not only Satanic, it is also masculine, thus making her a devilish defier of gender roles. This masculinity makes her unattractive to the man she loves, who instead prefers a more conventional woman. Perhaps it is because she ultimately chooses to submit to a man (Zofloya) that Victoria in the end is punished by Satan – she is not satanically self-sufficient enough.

Unlike Carathis, Matilda and Victoria, the heroine of the central episode in Melmoth the Wanderer, Immalee, is not an evil woman. Melmoth, the title character, plays the part of the Devil, arriving at the desolate island where Immalee has been shipwrecked and giving her an ambiguous initiation into knowledge of good and evil, expanding her register of emotions: ”I weep and my tears are delicious”, she states. Melmoth acts as a satanic mentor and voice of cultural criticism, opening the eyes of the innocent Immalee

Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)

Women as Exorcists of Evil within the South African Literary Context: Devil’s Valley (1998), The Rights of Desire (2000) and Praying Mantis (2005) by André P. Brink
Neil Cochrane
Department of Afrikaans and Theory of Literature, University of South Africa (UNISA)

Except for Breyten Breytenbach perhaps, André P. Brink is one of the few writers within the Afrikaans and broader South African literary system who enjoys a high degree of international status. He has been nominated twice for the Booker Prize, has received the Prix Médicis Étranger, the highest French reward for international literature and was awarded with the Commonwealth Writers Prize for The Other Side of Silence (2002). As a South African author he is on par with acclaimed South African authors like Nadine Gordimer and J.M. Coetzee.

After the publication of his ground-breaking novel, Lobola vir die lewe (1962) (translated as Dowry for life), Brink has published a further 18 novels (written and/or translated in both Afrikaans and English). From a general point of view, his novels mainly deals with aspects of existentialism, the narrative/fictional representation of history (story versus history), voicing South Africa’s colonial past (especially with regard to slavery), the abuse of power and the corrupt psyche of the Afrikaner regime during the high tide of the Apartheid’s era (1960-1991) and disillusionment with destabilising horrors in post-Apartheid’s South Africa (1994 – the present).

Since the publication of Lobola vir die lewe different manifestations of the female figure have played and continue to play a prominent role in Brink’s novels. The most prominent manifestations include the Beatrice-figure (Nicolette in File on a diplomat (1967),  the feminist orientated woman (Elisabeth in An Instant in the Wind (1976), the exile (Andrea in The Wall of the Plague (1984) and Kristine in Imaginings of Sand (1996), the magic realist exorcist of evil (Jeanne in On the Contrary (1993), Emma, Tant Poppie and Mooi-Janna in Devil’s Valley (1998), Anna Vigilant in Praying Mantis (2005) and Antje of Bengal in The Rights of Desire (2000), the roaming picara (Tessa and Magriet in The Rights of Desire and Hanna X in The Other Side of Silence (2002).

The focus of my paper will not fall on woman as harbingers or representatives of evil, although the broad theme of this conference entails Evil, Women and the Feminine. I wish to take a different stance on this issue – mainly that women and/or different manifestations of the feminine may serve as powerful agents against evil. Such a viewpoint does not disregard the existence of inherent evil or a capacity towards evil in women within a literary context (there are many literary examples), but pleads to thoroughly recognise the broad (and often ironic) spectrum of evil within the literary context.

The paper will indicate how different manifestations of the feminine are used as an opposing force against evil in selected novels by André P. Brink. Among others, the following female figures will be involved – the medicine woman, the enchantress, the picara and the female trickster ghost.

Secondly, the paper will demonstrate how these subversive and socially marginalized figures continuously use their subversive nature (which may be defined as a form of evil in terms of socially accepted norms) in an attempt to exorcise evil (crime, corruption and violence in South African society) from various intimate and societal settings.

Witchcraft in East-Central India: A Juxtaposition of Opposed Perspectives
Radhika Borde
Media Cell Co-ordinator B.I.R.S.A, Ranchi, Jharkhand, India

A perusal of news articles related to the state of Jharkhand in east-central India cannot fail to draw one’s attention to the many reported instances of violence directed against women suspected of witchcraft by their communities. According to recent studies, a quarter of all murders attributed to witch-hunting nationwide, occur in Jharkhand (over 900 since 1991) – despite the institution of a state law to curtail this phenomenon (Prevention of Witch Practices Act). Those removed from the socio-cultural locale within which this violence takes place, find explanation for these acts in reasons such as the exercise of patriarchal control, the attempt to grab a widow’s land etc. But within the communities (constituted largely by marginalized indigenous people-groups) that dominate the state culturally and are most commonly reported to persecute suspected witches, witchcraft is the source of a very real fear. The fact that indigenous Indian or adivasi society evidences instances of lynchings and beatings of suspected witches is particularly striking, when one considers that it is understood to be far less gendered in comparison with the dominant Indian Hindu culture. The sociological discourse that has attempted to discuss this problem finds itself unable to understand the magico-religious language employed by the communities within which it occurs, and reconciles itself to this disconnect by dismissing the idea of witchcraft as primitive superstition. Administrative measures aimed at protecting Jharkhandi women come up hard against a deep-rooted belief system of which they take little cognizance – thereby encouraging the defensive stance adivasis can now be seen to be adopting with respect to this issue. This attitude has even begun to influence the way adivasi society views women who undertake positions of leadership in indigenous religious movements. This paper purports to present the issue of witchcraft in Jharkhand using both the emic perspective of the believer and the etic understanding of the corpus of academic work, bureaucratic reports and media coverage that has been highlighting the issue for many decades. A historical analysis of this phenomenon as documented in written forms will be juxtaposed with oral accounts of the same, collected from members of the adivasi community. Extracts from interviews with both adivasi men and women will be presented, with particular emphasis on proffered explanations for why women would choose to abuse any sacred technology they may possess. In Jharkhand today, leadership is being undertaken by some to encourage a rationalistic understanding of witchcraft and by others to assert politically that it is a real crime that deserves punishment – this paper will attempt to give both views space. Folklore regarding the misdeeds of witches and the mechanisms by which they are believed to have harnessed powers of evil will be presented along with descriptions of the rituals by which their communities identify and punish them. The aim of the paper is to discuss a controversial issue with crucial relevance to Jharkhandi women, from perspectives that derive from ostensibly opposed epistemes – it will also attempt to tentatively investigate the possibility of a discursive reconciliation.