The late John Updike’s eponymous work, The Witches of Eastwick (1984), is magical realism par excellence. The mystical and the supernatural are woven into the mundane with so much deft and ease, the little spells and tricks cast by the witches seem a given in the lyrical world Updike has created. Sukie nonchalantly turns milk into cream for her coffee, Lexa wills a foraging squirrel to die just because she can, and Jane, in almost cavalier clichéd fashion, can fly to spy on her neighbours. All this is staged in fictitious Eastwick, Rhode Island, a sleepy American suburb replete with post World War Two battles over civil rights, women’s rights, and the Vietnam War.
Contrary to the idea that being a witch is liberating or self-empowering, and even though Updike continually poeticizes the female psyche, this work is neither sympathetic to women, nor the human condition for that matter. In the proposed situation and premise of The Witches of Eastwick – what would the modern woman do if bestowed with powers centuries of civilizations past have vilified and executed females for possessing? – Updike paints a bleak literary scenario.
The manifestation of power, independence, and talent is squandered in the witches’ mediocre attempts at parenthood, financial ineptitude, and creative failure. Where in this misogynistic novel is the smart, successful woman? The witches are consumed instead by petty grievances, and disdainfully victimize other women (while the men are off abusing their power in the backdrop of Vietnam too, of course). The only woman who has any political convictions whatsoever is bludgeoned beyond consciousness (literally) by her disgruntled husband. This is not before the witches had reduced her diatribes to mere fluff though– feathers, thumbtacks, and other dusty sweepings start spilling out of her twisted mouth days before her violent demise.
Joined in their lust for consummated cruelty, the witches of Eastwick can be likened to the horrifyingly sublime nature of, well, Nature (which is much rhapsodized in excruciatingly beautiful detail by Updike). As Lexa muses, “Nature kills constantly, and we call her beautiful” so too can we describe the witches of Eastwick. Equally callous is Van Horne, the oft-suggested devil who drives the story forward with his arrival and subsequent orgiastic trysts, where ass-kissing (his) and phallus worship (his) by the coven is de rigueur. Much can be said about his using the women and later running off with his brother-in-law to do a little unholy supplication of his own too.
Perhaps the question isn’t so much what women would do if they had supernatural gifts, but what the world would do when faced with powerful witches. John Updike’s foray into the magical speaks starkly of our reality and its gender politics – Eastwick, and the world in allusion, has no room or imagination for women of greater (and greater use of) power. The muttered curses, social disquiet and political rumblings of the Eastwick majority still reverberate and bubble away in the early 21st century, ascending to a vehemently persistent hiss of “Burn witches, burn!”
Contributed by: Diana Long
