It’s no surprise that Marvel’s latest series focuses on a witch. So many women are vibing with witchcraft. From “witch lit” to “Witchtok”, more and more of us are turning to the witch as a figure of injustice and rebellion, or as a form of wish-fulfilment at a time when women’s rights seem to be under threat: living vicariously as the maiden, mother, crone has never been so appealing.
Enter Agatha All Along, which sees Kathryn Hahn reprise her WandaVision performance as a centuries-old magic wielder. Except that she’s had her mind (and powers) wiped after losing an epic battle of wits, and needs to undertake a quest to get them back, while flanked by a ragtag coven – the first she’s belonged to since the Salem witch trials.
Witches themselves have been on quite a journey when it comes to their portrayal. From accusations and ritualistic burnings to “Once Upon a Time” crookback hags in pointy hats – and beyond – tales of witches have weaved their way through our culture ever since humankind first began sharing stories.
We can learn a lot about the evolution of pop culture’s witches by throwing things back to 800BC, when Homer’s Odyssey gave us one of our very earliest “wicked” sorceresses in Circe, a beautiful (but treacherous) enchantress who lured sailors to her lonely island so that she might “unman” them. Literally: she turned them into wolves, lions and pigs.
This predatory female – the sexually liberated woman who skirts the edges of society – formed the blueprint for all the so-called witches that would come after her. Indeed, the medieval church became so obsessed with the idea of sexually liberated women as witches that they offered them as an explanation for the moral problem of wet dreams (yes, really), insisting that “evil” women were in cahoots with sperm-stealing demons. They were described as ugly, old, eccentric outcasts, resulting in the classic “elderly woman in league with the devil” archetype that drove the widespread witch trials of the 16th and 17th centuries.
It makes sense, then, that early pop culture’s most famous witch took the form of a hideous hag. The Wizard of Oz’s Wicked Witch of the West (played by Margaret Hamilton) appeared on the big screen in 1939, replete with sickly green skin, warts, pointy black hat and a grating voice – the perfect mirror to the film’s real-world villain, Almira Gulch (also Hamilton), an embittered older woman who despises children … and their little dogs, too.
Roll the timeline on to 1964, though, and second-wave feminism inspires a new kind of witch: Samantha Stephens. Portrayed by Elizabeth Montgomery, the Bewitched character looks much like any woman of the era, right down to the coiffed blond bob. “Her efforts to balance the demands of a suburban housewife with her husband’s frail ego and her own supernatural abilities charted a course for women weighing the challenges of home, hearth and their own awakening ambitions,” literary critic Chris Norris wrote in The New York Times in 2005.
Come the Girl Power movement of the 1990s, the witch was no longer seen as a legitimate threat, and was thus given something of a symbolic makeover. Her magic was no longer obtained through consorting with the devil, but via learning, education and books … all of which would probably have been denied the women accused of witchcraft in the 1600s.
As such, pop culture really leaned into (the 1995 novel and/or 1998 film) Practical Magic’s idea that “there’s a little witch in all of us”, offering up myriad relatable teen girls attempting to get a handle on their innate powers. To that end, there was would-be technopagan Willow Rosenberg (Alyson Hannigan) in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Melissa Joan Hart’s eponymous misfit in Sabrina the Teenage Witch. The precocious Muggle-born Hermione Granger (Emma Watson) in the Harry Potter film franchise – who manages to defy the odds and exceed her “pure blood” peers thanks to her voracious appetite for wizarding textbooks. The Craft’s infamous quartet of outcast Catholic schoolgirls (and so on).
It’s little wonder the idea of the witch has evolved as feminism has shifted and changed; both are rooted in the idea of female autonomy and rebellion. Because, while some historians claim otherwise, the majority agree that the original witch hunters were “both obsessed with and terrified by female sexuality [and liberation]”, writes Mona Chollet in her book In Defence of Witches. They used the trials as a means of snuffing out any spark of rebellion.
“In addition to being a household item turned upside down, the phallic form of the broom that witches sit astride bears witness to their sexual freedom,” writes Chollet. “The sabbath is understood as an occasion of wild, untrammelled sexual exhibition.”
Is it any wonder, then, that there was a significant proportion of single women accused of witchcraft – or, to put it in Chollet’s words, “women not formally bound and subordinate to a man”? That most of those burned for being witches were of menopausal (or post-menopausal) age – a time of huge upheaval and transformation? That many, too, were childless? And that the term “witches” is still used to demonise women who fail to conform to patriarchal standards even now?
As the word “witch” continues to be weaponised and used as an insult, then, it makes sense that some film-makers have sought to reclaim the OG witch archetype and bring her forward into the 21st century. Indeed, A24’s chilling period horror movie The Witch wound things back to the idea that witches are born when society doesn’t make space for those women who refuse to be pigeonholed. In Elaine (Samantha Robinson), the pulpy, 60s B-movie styled The Love Witch gives us a protagonist who’s more than willing to bend to every cliched male fantasy, so long as he loves her the way she wants to be loved. Both find horror in traditional gender roles; both play with men’s fears of women, and specifically powerful women. And in Netflix’s Wednesday, our eponymous heroine learns about her own bewitching heritage via her ancestor Goody Addams, who was accused of witchcraft in the 1600s. All three, in the process, reclaim the idea of the “wicked woman” for feminists everywhere.
Agatha All Along continues this journey, offering us a coven of larger-than-life spellcasters capable of moral ambiguity as they traverse worlds to which they are naturally opposed but are also structured to include them. Indeed, our eponymous sorceress and each of her newfound sisters feel like one big Agatha Harkness-style wink to pop culture’s most famous witches, from Macbeth’s Weird Sisters to Hocus Pocus’s diabolical Winifred Sanderson.
Not one of them, however, feels wholly good or bad. Instead, they straddle that same wonderfully grey area as the likes of Fleabag, Queenie and Mare of Easttown’s Detective Sheehan – who, incidentally, is given a satirical strip-down in the Agatha All Along premiere.
All of this means that Agatha and her coven somehow manage to be victims and villains, perpetrators and targets, likable and wholly unlikable … and it is this, coupled with their spellbinding abilities, that feels revelatory. A series about messy, complicated, powerful women! Taking hold of their destiny! Aged 38 and older! And all without a love interest in sight!? Honestly, in the world of TV, that’s a feminist act in itself.
• Agatha All Along is on Disney+.
