Abstract
This paper examines Jeanette Winterson’s 2012 novel The Daylight Gate, which depicts the witch hunts of early 17th century England, as a feminist Gothic text that constructs the witch figure as an emblem and product of a backward and tyrannical patriarchal system. Drawing on Mary Daly’s concept of the “indigestible elements,” the paper analyses the aesthetics of the enchanted body, the representation of bisexuality and lesbianism, women’s place in religion and medicine, and the Gothic double, to argue that Winterson’s novel foregrounds the misogyny inherent in the witch craze and the body as a temporary, contested site of female identity.
Keywords: Jeanette Winterson, The Daylight Gate, witches, female identity, Gothic, patriarchy, lesbianism, Lancashire witch trials
Introduction
In Winterson’s 2012 novel, The Daylight Gate, which depicts the turbulent and controversial witch hunts of early 17th century England, a monstrous, but fascinating facet of female identity is outlined: the witch figure is constructed as an emblem and product of a backward and tyrannical patriarchal system, where woman is only appreciated because of her reproductive capacities, willingness to abide by men’s rules and religious affiliation. The witch is an instance of transgressive femininity; she is an illustration of what Gilbert and Gubar pinned as the paradox of femininity: if a woman speaks out, she is a monster; if she remains silent, she is an angel condemned to isolation and hysteria (Leitch 2022). The conundrum of female identity is rooted in this ambiguity of roles: assuming femininity has to do with isolation in both cases, whether femininity is understood as active or passive. By taking on “masculine” attributes such as power, agency, violence, a woman is rejected as ill-fitted; there is an inappropriate gap between her sex and her gender. By embracing the culturally-imposed characteristics of submission, silence, discretion, a woman fits her gender, but is excluded from power structures.
Set in 17th century Britain, during the time of the 1612 Trial of the Lancashire witches, the novel centers on the figures of four witches awaiting trial, and a noble woman, Alice Nutter, who uses all her influence to defend them. Initially constructed as a mysterious, Gothic heroine who possesses an unnatural youth, and who stands up for the rights of poor women, she comes across as a feminist of her times, but pieces of her story gradually come together to reveal a tale of Faustian and lesbian sacrifice. Once in love with a beautiful Elizabeth Device, now turned into the old hag Demdike, Alice is the beneficiary of a pact with the “Dark Gentleman”: she seems to mysteriously preserve her youth, while Elizabeth is turning into a frightening witch. Alice holds onto that “lesbian continuum” that stands so feeble against the patriarchy which brands poor women as monsters or prostitutes and leads them to assume that the supernatural can be their only weapon: “Such women are poor. They are ignorant. They have no power in your world, so they must get what power they can in theirs. I have sympathy for them” (Winterson 55). Ultimately, in a medley of magic, superstition and conspiracy, she loses her youth as the spell breaks down, and she prepares for death as a form of rebirth: “the daylight gate” opens to welcome her in a new dimension, where she can be re-united with her lover.
The Hag and the Sorceress: The Aesthetics of the “Enchanted” Body
Throughout the novel, aesthetics seems to regulate women’s worth and categorize them into “ugly-therefore-guilty” and “beautiful-yet-suspicious”. Poor witches are muted and denied any freedom of expression, while Alice Nutter’s unusual youth and beauty may place her close enough to the brink of sorcery, yet at the same time allow her to stand above the squalor of the rabble and exercise the power that wealth offers her. As Eco suggests in his analysis, ugly women had a much higher incidence of being condemned as witches simply because of their physical appearance (212). Although Nutter loses her beauty towards the end of the novel, her ending is Romantic and majestic, in contrast to the grotesque and wretched fleshly reality of the other convicts. It’s a death by choice, a proud, monumental ending with hints of hope and regeneration as “the daylight gate” opens and promises a new beginning.
The oppression of women by men takes many faces in this novel. They are sexually harassed, called names, rejected as outcasts and condemned to ignorance. The beginning of the novel sees the young Sarah Device raped and physically abused by Tom Peeper as she is suspected of having contributed to the death of John Law, the pedlar of the village. Because of the marginal status Sarah and her family have, they are poor and have to survive using any possible means. In this physically and morally squalid environment, Demdike’s little girl, Jennet accepts to be Tom Peeper’s sexual slave in exchange for food. Once the witches are condemned and taken to prison, they are kept in ghastly, filthy conditions. The vicious circle of abuse seems to be never-ending.
The witch trials of seventeenth century England illustrate an important point in the history of male oppression. As Hester keenly demonstrates, periods that were generally considered “progressive”, such as the Renaissance or the development of the modern European states were times when women were considered inferior or suffered a loss of status. She goes on by arguing that witch hunts were sex specific (Hester 111). Rosen upholds the same view, alluding to the fact that women’s bodies were mysterious and more likely to be dealing with the occult, precisely because their supposed intellectual shortcomings kept them away from science and medicine.
The figure of the witch is sculpted into an intricate cultural archaeology and has survived as one of the most compelling and iconic avatars of “evil” womanhood. Eco astutely draws attention to the chronic misogyny inherent in witch folklore:
Right from the start, although it was recognized that black magic was practiced both by men (warlocks) and women (witches), a deep-rooted misogyny tended to identify the malefic creature with women. In the Christian world, a union with the Devil could only be perpetrated by a woman. In the Middle Ages there was already talk of the Sabbat as a diabolical assembly in which witches not only cast spells but also indulge in full-blown orgies, having sexual relations with the Devil in the form of a goat, a symbol of lust. Finally the image of the witch astride a broomstick […] is clearly a phallic reference. (203)
Witches and Bisexuality
The lush sexuality of the witch, or “sorceress”, is represented, here, as in traditional Gothic texts, as deviant and laden with the attributes of lesbianism and bisexuality. Catherine Clement associates the witch with a repressed Imaginary and by extension, with the figure of the hysteric in their similarity regarding confinement and death; the sorceress pertains to the domain of Nature, as she “executes her transit imaginarily, perched on the black goat that carries her off, impaled by the broom that flies her away; she goes in the direction of animality, plants, the inhuman” (Clement 8).
Women are among the social categories that do not fit into the symbolic order and hence, they are affected by a dangerous symbolic mobility from which, as stated above, witches and hysterics are excluded. However, this is not their only coordinate: in fact, they are excluded, just as much as they are included in the symbolic order because of their capacity for reproduction; “they are allied with what is regular, according to the rules, since they are wives and mothers, and allied as well with those natural disturbances, their regular periods, which are the epitome of paradox, order and disorder” (Clement 8). And in the crevice thus created by their simultaneous exclusion and inclusion springs women’s proclivity for magic, their body instated as a natural catalyst for the supernatural.
An edifying anthropological study on magic by Mauss lists women among social classes that are more susceptible to magic because of their special qualities. He continues by highlighting the passive role that women occupy in religion and the gender biased exaggeration of women’s contribution to witchcraft, resulting in many innocent women being accused of sorcery while in fact, greater numbers of men practised it than women.
The main characters of the Daylight Gate are clearly “the indigestible elements” Daly talks about; the strong and independent Alice Nutter thwarts male supremacy through her self-attained wealth and influence, whereas the witches threaten the stable patriarchal construct of marriage. As single and ugly women, they are self-sufficient, deviant aspects of femininity, living as outcasts on the outskirts of Pendle Hill and being absorbed into a dark local folklore.
”The Mother Church” and the Male Doctor: Women’s Place in Religion and Medicine
As the trials progress, we discover that the women turn against each other and that the mother-daughter and mother-son bonds are contaminated with betrayal. Elizabeth Device allows her son, James Device, to sell his sister Jennet to Tom Peeper, and thus accepts that her own daughter will get raped by this man. As Daly suggests, “The Mother Church” becomes an instrument of sowing contention, it turns sons and daughters against their mothers, thus warping the feelings of women into a love-hate relationship. By invoking the metaphorical and institutional “Mystical Body” of the “Mother Church”, males covered their own sadism and control and destroyed the sacred connection with the mother.
In Witches, Midwives and Nurses: A History of Women Healers, Ehrenreich and English argue that “women have always been healers” (25). They were seen either as wise women or as witches, yet their supremacy in this field has gradually been taken over by men, as the more knowledgeable sex: “we are told that our subservience is biologically ordained: women are inherently nurse-like and not doctor-like” (27). They suggest that witch hunts were a question of a political struggle to assert male supremacy and monopolization over the very profitable domain of medicine. In the Daylight Gate, those who deal with herbs or healing pertain to the domain of superstition, especially if they are women. Women’s contribution to medicine is thus dismissed as irrelevant on every level; no woman, not even the wealthy and high class Alice Nutter can escape this label, which brings into focus the importance of gender in the Puritans’ conception of sin and the body.
The Gothic Double
The Daylight Gate could be read as a Gothic tale, in which the two sorceresses, Alice Nutter and Elizabeth Southern are engaged in a narcissistic relationship with the former feminized, and the latter de-feminized, downgraded, turned into a feared monster. Although there is, from the beginning, a suspicion of sexless lesbian bonding between Alice Nutter and the other witches, Alice and Demdike are revealed as inverted mirror images of each other only later, when Demdike proves to be the degraded version of Elizabeth Southern. A ruse typical of Gothic texts, doubling adds to the interplays of identity as well as to the aesthetics of darkness and the sublime. As the women make a pact with the devil, they are ensnared in a dualistic identity game dominated by the “unheimlich”. When the old witch Demdike dies, Alice Nutter’s guarantee against death also becomes dysfunctional, and her vision of young Elizabeth Southern turns into a harbinger of her impending death.
The idea of doubling as a protection against death derives, as Freud has argued, from a deep narcissistic self-love, a need for the preservation of one’s self. By claiming that the double has changed its meaning from a guarantee against death to a herald of death, Freud shows that the fear of doubles is basically has irrational roots. “The ‘double’ has become a thing of terror, just as, after the collapse of their religion, the gods turned into demons” (Freud 631).
In Winterson’s novel, spectres appear while bodies are still alive, in a chronotope that is not meant to be unidimensional. The vision of the two women in love, Alice and Elizabeth, appears hauntingly in a chapter entitled “Shadows”, where hints of a pre-Oedipal conflict loom large. The male voyeurism in this scene does not entail pleasure on the part of the man. Lesbian love is a threatening concept in male ideology because men become utterly isolated from this exclusivist “club” and frustration sets in. In parallel with the beginning, the ending of the novel suggests the same duality of life and death: ultimately, the suggestion is that a body, be it male or female, beautiful or ugly, transgressive or normative, is a frivolous piece of matter waiting to be redeemed outside the boundaries that enclose it.
Conclusions
The Daylight Gate focuses on the figure of the witch as an aberrant and transgressive aspect of female identity. The discourses of religion and medicine shut the Demdikes and Alice Nutter out: the former are too ugly, therefore evil, the latter is suspiciously youthful — so both parties must be dealing with the Devil; both tamper with magic, hence they also acquire a negative connotation in medicine as healers. Winterson’s novel highlights the misogynism inherent in the witch craze: women are more likely to be sentenced to death when they are aging, deprived of the reproductive capacities which make them useful to society. As unmarried, independent women, they pose a threat to patriarchy and must be eliminated under the guise of heresy. The heterosexual norm is imposed through a paranoid and stern Church, but the two main characters escape it by uniting in a narcissistic, lesbian relationship, as they become each other’s doppelgänger. Their homosexual experience is represented through spectrality as a strategy of effacing carnal lesbian experience, but also as a reminder of the novel’s main point: the body is a temporary abode, and fulfilment lies in an atemporal, amoral and non-physical realm.
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