Witchcraft as a metaphor for female power, and for the traditionally female
power of storytelling, is as old as storytelling itself. When this power is
rendered positively, nature and home become woman’s demesne, a metaphor for
the healing power of love and nurturing, and the importance of husbanding
one’s resources. But the oldest fairy tales also have a resounding darkness,
in which power can undo its bearer, and evil lurks all around. It was this
darkness that John Updike sought in his novel The Witches of Eastwick
(1984), a parable about the dangers and seductions of feminism, set during
the late 1960s and focusing on a coven of three suburban witches. Updike
used the metaphor of witchcraft to get round the problem of writing about
the opposite sex, and relied for good measure on the escape route of comedy:
if his three female protagonists often seemed cartoonish, this could be
excused as part of the joke, their weirdness ascribed to their witchery. The
suspicion that the term “witch” substituted for a word it rhymes with was
partly offset by his cheerful lampooning of the male characters. A spirit of
egalitarian contempt prevailed, which helped neutralize the sense of
misogyny underpinning the novel’s attitudes toward its coven, whose
propensity for evil increased with its power.
The Witches of Eastwick started from the mischievous idea that divorce
transforms women into witches, liberated but bored, discovering their
potential for malice. It related the adventures of Alexandra, Sukie and
Jane, three witches living in a small New England town, rebelling against
conventional femininity (especially maternal domesticity) by taking married
lovers and neglecting their children, while selfishly cultivating their
minor artistic talents and dabbling in a bit of magic. The American
twentieth century found in the figure of the witch not just a metaphor for
female power, but a more specific image of the rebellious woman in conflict
with a domestic bliss imagined as both infinitely desirable, and infinitely
inimical to powerful women. From René Clair’s film I Married A Witch (1942),
to Bewitched (1964–72), the television series it spawned, the figure of the
witch came to suggest in shorthand the cultural tension between power and
submission, urban exile and suburban domesticity, woman and man, regressive
and progressive, Puritan and liberal, reality and deception, conformity and
choice, and normal and aberrant. Examples of the genre, including not only
The Witches of Eastwick, but also Practical Magic, Buffy the Vampire Slayer,
Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Charmed and The Da Vinci Code, used the witch to
imagine a female force that is self-destructive, lost, uncontrollable, or
submerged. In those works, the witch as a symbol of reclaimed female power
pre-supposes a prior demonization superseded by a more enlightened gender
politics.
By contrast, Updike’s novel was unable to decide whether its three main
characters were good witches, or bad, but was enriched by this ambiguity.
The unholy trinity of Alexandra, Sukie and Jane were artists manquées,
seduced by vanity into an affair with the sulphurous Darryl Van Horne, who
exposed their weaknesses and tried to turn them against each other. The
crisis of the tale involved the coven reuniting in an ultimate act of
cruelty against a fellow witch; after their maleficia, they separated and
left Eastwick, the Puritanical, seaboard town behind them, in search of
further adventure.
Set thirty years later, in the present day, The Widows of Eastwick reunites
the three women, whose adventures, we learn involved the renunciation of
their powers in favour of domestic happiness: Jane with a wealthy East Coast
aristocrat, Sukie with a nouveau riche salesman and Alexandra with a
cowboy-sculptor in arty Taos, New Mexico. Newly widowed and grieving, the
widows return to Eastwick, to revisit the scene of their “prime-crimes”, as
Jane says in a pun that one can only assume is not meant to be funny.
But first, the witches decide, like many an American retiree before them, to
see the world. The novel opens with an extended longueur: for a hundred
pages we trail listlessly in the widows’ wake, subjected to lectures about
glaciers, the Pyramids, the Great Wall of China, and the Terracotta Army.
Along the way we are told that Jane now snores, but Sukie doesn’t, and that
the Great Wall “is the only work of Man that could be seen by observers on
the moon”, which isn’t even true. In Canada, Alexandra almost flirts with a
man who turns out to be gay and also newly bereaved; “this fag had been
wasting her time”, she reflects. In fact, all of the characters we meet in
the novel’s opening section are a waste of time; they pause long enough to
reinforce a few stereotypes then disappear, as if by magic. A stylist of
John Updike’s skill can be forgiven much, but not the first third of The
Widows of Eastwick. Readers who survive these passages will not be surprised
to learn that Updike himself has been on such tours. It is safe to assume he
took notes.
It is not only Updike’s plotting that has stalled; so have his gender
politics. If female power in the earlier novel was at once seductive and
threatening, here it is just bad. The women’s friendship has disintegrated;
their bond is now only asserted, rather than conveyed.(Updike is shaky on
the dynamics of female friendship, which rarely survives sexual competition
and virtually never survives the sort of bitchiness on display here.) What
was once viewed with some sympathy as unruliness is now damned as wicked.
The women are “forsaken souls” who cling together “with sinister closeness”.
Although the novel is seen from Alexandra’s perspective, there is also a
narrator, loosely affiliated with a collective Eastwick perspective, who
calls them “three villainesses” and describes them as “long consecrated to
evil and its callous self-absorption”. In an exchange between Alexandra and
her grown-up daughter Marcy, a stay-at-home mother who still
(understandably) resents her mother’s neglect, Alexandra defends her own
youthful lapses: “If we fell off the marriage bandwagon, there was nothing
much left for us but to ride a broomstick and cook up spells. Don’t look so
shocked, it was power. Everybody needs power. Otherwise the world eats you
up”. Marcy says: “What about children? Isn’t having them and loving them
power enough for most women?”. Alexandra responds by calling the Bible’s
injunction to women to bear children in sorrow and be ruled by their
husbands “disgusting” (instead of asking whether her daughter has actually
met any women).
Updike follows the standard pornographic tactic of projecting male self-regard
on to female desire. Sukie remembers “the clean scent . . . the beautiful,
fresh-furred, unfailingly responsive genitals” of the “beautiful and
monstrous . . . erect pricks” she used to worship. By grotesque contrast to
such phallic reverence, when the women, now in their seventies, decide to
summon their magic back, they have to do so naked, and this makes sitting
awkward, “without exposing, by putting their knees up or spread apart, their
nether parts, hairy and odorous”. Throughout we are presented with women who
greet male bodies with rapture, while feeling disgusted by their own. It is
hard to take seriously passages in which a nearly seventy-year-old woman
longingly remembers semen, “gobs of it”, “the ambrosial, eggy-tasting food
of a savage goddess . . . all over her smeared, dazed face as she crouched
there, hungry for more”.
It seems to be something of a trend: Updike and his contemporary Philip Roth,
with whom he is often compared, have between them produced three novels in
two years that not only imagine women glorying in semen, but make fellatio a
pivotal plot turn; Updike resolves his story by means of an old woman with a
strap-on dildo. More-over the youthful extravaganza of sex in the 1960s
depicted in the earlier novel has here deteriorated into cantankerous
assertions that husbands today are “castrated” because they share domestic
tasks, and women are “mulishly waiting” too long to have children.
And the younger people, the age we were when we were here – ssso [sic]
tiresome, just from the look of them, toned-up young mothers driving their
overweight boys in overweight S.U.V.’s to hockey practice 20 miles away, the
young fathers castrated namby-pambies helping itty-bitty wifey with the
housekeeping, spending all Saturday fussing around the lovely home. It’s the
’50s all over again, without the Russians as an excuse.
The Widows of Eastwick is a revenge narrative, but it has none of the unholy
glee with which the first novel skewered sexual politics. The witches try to
reconstitute their coven, motivated in equal parts by boredom, the desire to
make amends, and the need to defend themselves from a relative of their
victims from long ago who has returned to haunt them. Sadly, he has none of
the potency of the devilish Darryl Van Horne. Even his evil is explained
away, in lengthy passages on electromagnetics (“the quantum reality of
particulate entanglement over a distance could be extended to the
supra-particulate world as well”), but nothing comes of these gestures
towards metaphysics, any more than of the coven’s wanderings in China. The
novel is a tour of ideas, Updike’s narrator the bored guide with a
microphone, intruding on our observations with comments that aspire to irony
but achieve only archness. It isn’t only the witches who have lost their
magic touch.
John Updike
THE WIDOWS OF EASTWICK
308pp. Hamish Hamilton. £18.99.
978 0 241 14427 5
Sarah Churchwell is Senior Lecturer in American Studies at the
University of East Anglia. She is the author of The Many Lives of Marilyn
Monroe, which appeared in paperback in 2005.
