According
to Palmer, people in the early modern period knew witches as those who had been
“marked by the devil...,” people, often times women, who “...could effect harm
simply by thinking it or by casting a spell, or curse. (49)” They were believed
to commit such evil acts as flying, eating children, or even having sex with
Satan himself. We recognize witches today as “...personifications of
transgression (49)” and now see that they were often used as an excuse to get
rid of individuals who exhibited undesirable, unruly, or "abnormal" behavior as
well as to scare everyone else into behaving themselves.
There
are many contemporary representations of witches today that, like the witches
of old, are wicked and evil, such as the White Witch from Narnia, but there are
also many portrayals of witches that are the exact opposite. I’ll be looking at
one such portrayal in the animated movie Kiki’s Delivery Service. This is a
coming-of-age film that follows a young witch named Kiki as she leaves home on
her 13th birthday, moves to a new town, and begins doing deliveries
for people on her flying broomstick to make a living. Kiki is a witch who, at
first glance, doesn’t show even the slightest resemblance to the witches from
the early modern period. Where the old version of the witch is evil and
satanic, Kiki is well-mannered, kind, and very likeable. If she didn’t have the
power to fly and talk to cats, she’d be a totally normal teenage girl. However,
there are some characteristics Kiki has that can be connected to the witches of
the past.
As
she sets out on her own and essentially discovers who she is, she also
discovers her independence and becomes more confident in herself. Independence
and confidence in oneself were not desirable attributes in women in the early
modern period and I’m sure they could even be seen as abnormal enough behavior
to suspect and/or accuse a woman of being a witch. Abnormal behavior was not
limited to a woman acting independent. As stated in the text, contentiousness
was what marked a witch during the events in Salem (63). Women who were
quarrelsome and did not follow gender rules were not accepted by society and
were labeled witches. They were different and being different during that time
was scary and bad.
Though
Kiki does not act contentious, I think she, being a magical witch in a world
full of regular humans, still represents deviation from the norm. That seems
to be what “good” witches today represent: being different from others and how
that is not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, being a witch is shown in a
positive light. Nobody in the movie fears Kiki. On the contrary, they think she
and her power of flight are cool and amazing. The purpose of the witch started
as a way to scare people into not straying from norms but in modern times, at
least in the case of Kiki’s Delivery Service, it appears the witch is being
used to inspire the opposite, that it’s good to be unique and different. Rather
than telling women that straying from gender norms will get you in serious
trouble, as the witches of old would have done, Kiki encourages it. This modern
representation of the witch reflects not only how much women’s place in society
has improved since those male-dominant times but also how much more accepting
of differences between people we have all become in general. Women in our culture now can be as independent or as unladylike as they want without having to worry about being put to death and people of all kinds of races and sexual orientations are accepted by a large percent of society today, at least from what I've experienced.
This is a great post! I also love this movie, so it caught my eye more so than others. I really like how you related Kiki to the modern women in society today. I had never even thought of that symbolism when I had seen the movie before. I think you could take this a step further and relate how Kiki had lost her ability to fly to how women were treated in the past. In the movie she was told by Ursula that she needed a purpose in life to regain her ability to fly, so you could possibly relate that to how women began to play much bigger and equal roles to men as society moved forward. The women back generally were house wives, and once World War 2 came along and the men went away to war, they started to fill in the jobs that were originally held by men. Because of this, they started to have more equal roles to men... in America at least. This comparison may be a stretch however, and I apologize if any of my comment offends anybody!
ReplyDelete