The Witch: Allegory of Female Suppression

Rating: 10/10 (19 February 2016)

The Witch renders the world described in Nathanial Hawthorne's Young Goodman Brown and The Scarlet Letter as well as Arthur Miller's The Crucible. This is a film with roots in the great American literary tradition with a twist that leaves the viewer wrestling with some important questions, and like great literature it does a marvelous job posing questions, providing differing view points, but ultimately leaves the answering of the questions to the viewer.
The Witch can be consumed as a ghost story and, as such, it is top notch. It has enough spine chilling moments and frightening images to rank among the great horror movies. If, however, one looks at the metaphysical aspects of this tale, it is very much a warning of the dangers of suppressing and subjugating the feminine in a society and how this practice leads to destruction. It also demonstrates the folly of relying on belief over thinking.
This movie is literally dripping with symbols representing the feminine, the givers of life: teats, breasts, lactation, an egg, and suckling young are featured throughout the film. We also see the damage that is being done to the feminine over the course of this movie. A babe at it's mothers bosom is lovingly shown at the start of the movie and by the end we see that very same bosom being pecked apart by a crow while the mother believes she is nursing her dead baby which has inexplicably come back to life. We see a hen's egg looking diseased and when it is dropped a bloody half formed chick issues forth from the egg. The life sustaining goat milk which nourishes the family sprays into the milking can as a stream of blood towards the end of the movie. In short, the movie is symbolically yelling at us that the feminine is being snuffed out by this family environment. The female characters in play include Thomasin, the teenage daughter, Katherine, the mother, and, of course, the title character herself, The Witch.
If femininity is under attack, it is under attack by the prideful, faithful and incompetent males, most notably the father, William, and the brother, Caleb. One feels for Katherine as both she and the audience begin to understand that William is taking on challenges for which he is clearly not equipped. He is a stubborn man with a fool's notion that with prayer and confession, God will provide and have mercy in the wilderness. William lacks honest, integrity and let's his prideful theological musings be the catalyst for the family being jettisoned into the wild. Caleb admires his father and is working to understand his religious dogma as well as the survival skills that William cannot teach. Additionally, William spends much of his time chopping wood; the only survival activity he has mastered. Perhaps breaking apart organically structured forms is all he is really good at.
The female repression is most clearly illustrated with Thomasin. She is working hard to win her mother's approval and support her father's dream even though she most clearly sees the hypocrisy and overall weakness that her father represents. To add to Thomasin's mental strain, we see Caleb straining to look down her shirt and the young twins calling her a witch. All of this comes to a breaking point when Thomasin overhears that her father is planning on bringing her to town to either marry her off or enlist her in to some type of indentured service.
The forces at play have Thomasin near or beyond her mental breaking point. We also have The Witch who is shown in the opening scene murdering the baby of family and rubbing the youthful renewing blood all over her naked body under a bright moon. The Witch hounds this family and ultimately is their undoing. She seduces young Caleb and the power of their union leaves him naked, cold, and babbling incoherently. Caleb ultimately dies, but only after vomiting up an apple which clearly symbolizes his sin and also evokes thoughts of the original sin where the feminine was held solely responsible for getting humanity kicked out of the garden of Eden. Silly females, if only Adam had been around to think through the devil's bargain for Eve things may have gone very differently. Perhaps Adam was busy napping, praying, or chopping wood, who knows.
After Caleb dies, things go equally badly for the rest of the family until only Thomasin is left. She meets the devil, signs his book, and joins a coven of witches dancing naked in the woods. This is a clever twist on the old tales where we are led to believe this naked woodland dancing is the fabrication of repressed school girls seeking to add a little excitement to their lives.
This movie holds blind belief and faith up as a poor strategy for survival against knowledge and know how. It's the mocking of believing over thinking that provides a clue to the real events in this movie. The film is called The Witch and we come to believe and except that this supernatural being exists. If we spend some time thinking though, we see a much more clever ending - THERE IS NO WITCH! Thomasin is the murderer.
William treats the women in his life badly, he demonstrates pride and immaturity by leaving the safety of the village and he pays the ultimate price for this folly. If he had listened to his wife and daughter and displayed a modicum of empathy for them, these events never would have happened. Sadly though, the story of the masculine overpowering and ignoring the feminine is very much with us today, and it is one we need to evolve past or we risk unleashing the destruction symbolized in the character of The Witch.