Abstract
Witches are better than you and I. Well, popular culture witches, anyway. The “real” ones, the ones at local county fairs who are too thin with the inevitable red hair, and the ones in cities with their own tarot reading studio are, admittedly, a bit mystifying. But the television witches and the movie witches are amazing. When we are not busy being more than a little afraid of these powerful women—after all, who wishes to cross the Wicked Witch of the West in Oz, or the Blair Witch?—we want to be like them. Who would not want to control flying monkeys, command armies, terrify campers, alter time and space, materialize needed objects from thin air, and fly?
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Notes
See Lana Thompson’s book The Wandering Womb: A Cultural History of Outrageous Beliefs about Women (Amherst, MA: Prometheus Books, 1999)
Lynn Spigel argues that beautiful supernatural women like Samantha and Jeannie (and the witches of I Married a Witch and Bell, Book and Candle) are not just feminine but hyperfeminine. They have amazing beauty and powers unknowable to men. Yet, they chose the domestic life over adventure. They settle in the home, the space of the feminine. Lynn Spigel, Welcome to the Dream House: Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 128.
Lawrence Grossberg, Dancing in Spite of Myself: Essays on Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 1997), 130.
For an extended discussion of television viewing habits see Waller’s argument about audience flow versus the reading of media genre. Gregory Waller, “Flow, Genre, and the Television Text,” Journal of Popular Film and Television 16.1 (Spring 1988): 9.
For further discussion of how media texts enter into conversation with one another, see also Horace Newcomb, “On the Dialogic Aspects of Mass Communication,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 1 (1984): 34–50.
Julia Kristeva, “‘Nous Deux’ or A (Hi)story of Intertextuality,” Romantic Review 93.1 (2002): 7–14.
Other authors have seen the connection between Bewitched, its place in our media history, and more contemporary representations of magical women. See, for example, Rachel Moseley, “Glamorous Witchcraft: Gender and Magic in Teen Film and Television,” Screen 43.4 (2002): 403–422.
David Marc, Comic Visions: Television Comedy and American Culture (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 135–136.
David Allen Case, “Domesticating the Enemy: Bewitched and the Seventies Sitcom,” in The Seventies: The Age of Glitter in Popular Culture, ed. Shelton Waldrep (New York: Routledge, 2000) 196.
Dana Heller, Family Plots: The De-Oedipalization of Popular Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), 54.
Alice Jardine, Gynesis: Configurations of Women and Modernity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), 26.
See Stuart Hall, “Problem of Ideology: Marxism without Guarantees,” in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, ed. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen (London: Routledge, 1996), 42.
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© 2007 Sherrie A. Inness
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Baughman, L., Burr-Miller, A., Manning, L. (2007). Back to the Future: The Brilliant Witches in Bewitched. In: Inness, S.A. (eds) Geek Chic: Smart Women in Popular Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-08421-7_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-08421-7_7
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