Malevolent Nature: Witch-Hunting and Maternal Power in Early Modern England.

Deborah Willis' Malevolent Nurture presents a broadly informed analysis of the Early Modern witch hunts in England that centers on an application of psychoanalyst Melanie Klein's theories about pre-Oedipal conflicts between mothers and children. Briefly stated, Klein theorizes that infants resent their mothers because mothers almost inevitably cannot satisfy their narcissistic needs. The infants project their anger onto their mothers, and fear their mothers' retaliatory power since they are totally dependent on them for succor and comfort. The results are repressed resentments, fear of occult maternal power, and persecutory fantasies that can surface later in life in a variety of forms. The form that specifically concerns Willis is a fear of malevolent female magic, or witchcraft.

After an introductory discussion of the historiography of English witch trials, historicist approaches to literature, feminist theories of witchcraft, and Kleinian psychology, Willis examines popular witchcraft fears, elite theories about witchcraft, James VI's activities as a witch hunter, and Shakespeare's depiction of witches in Henry VI, Richard III, and Macbeth. She uses Kleinian theory as a basic frame of reference, but draws freely on historical, literary, and feminist approaches, displaying an admirable eclecticism to supplement her main theoretical framework.

In considering popular fears, Willis suggests that repressed and redirected pre-Oedipal hostility rather than simple feelings of guilt led younger villagers to denounce demanding older women. This interpretation adds a rather more sophisticated psychological dynamic to the basic scapegoating mechanism posited by MacFarlane and Thomas a generation ago. Unfortunately, though, Willis does not discuss childhood in the sixteenth century sufficiently to demonstrate that it resembled childhood in Klein's milieu enough to prove the general applicability of Klein's theory, and none of the specific cases she discusses has clear enough psychodynamics to be more than suggestive either. Furthermore, the most persuasive link between witchcraft and motherhood she does cite, the popular belief that witches suckled their familiars on a third nipple, was far more important in England than elsewhere. She herself admits in a footnote (p. 7) that the maternal dimension may not have been as important on the continent as in England, which limits the value of her approach considerably. Anyone open to the idea that repressed childhood anger can play an important role in an adult's emotional life can accept the probability that pre-Oedipal resentments played some role in the persecution of some women as witches, but Willis does not make a compelling case that they played the predominant role she posits for them.

Willis laudably does not attempt to interpret elite theories in Kleinian terms, for as she readily admits elite writers exhibited little concern about malevolent magic. Instead, they emphasized the secular and spiritual treachery of allegiance to the Devil, which she interprets as an attempt to transform witches from powerful actors into mere adjuncts in an Oedipal struggle between masculine deities. This approach maintains the book's focus on gender psychology, but it does not shed much light on the crucial question of why elite thinkers became preoccupied with a spiritual Oedipal conflict in the late sixteenth century. If popular fears were, as Willis suggests, timeless, and resulted in trials only when the elite made the legal machinery available, the male elite's need to transform a pre-Oedipal into an Oedipal conflict in the late sixteenth century in order to make that machinery available has to be explained in terms of change over time. Neither Willis' psychological nor her gender-oriented perspective provides a compelling explanation for the historical changes, either in general or in relationship to the specific texts she discusses.

James VI of Scotland would seem to be the perfect subject for Willis' study. Few sixteenth century figures' lives are as well recorded as its monarchs', and this particular monarch both conducted a series of witch trials and published a witch tract of his own. And, indeed, Willis discusses aspects of his life that seem to support her thesis, in particular his difficult relationships with his natural mother, Mary, Queen of Scots, and his patron-mother, Elizabeth of England. She suggests that his concern about witchcraft came from displaced frustrations he felt from being hemmed in by these two powerful women.

Unfortunately, her analysis suffers from several weaknesses. First of all, while Klein's theories concern conflicts rooted in infantile experiences, the only difficulties in James' relationships with these two figures that Willis gives hard information about are adult relationships. Second, James' involvement with witch-hunting came after he had already succeeded in breaking free of both Mary and Elizabeth. Third, the most direct link Willis can trace between James, one of his mother figures, and the witches he prosecuted involves a labored series of postulated connections. James defied Elizabeth by arranging to marry Anne of Denmark. When Anne's voyage to England was blocked by storms, the Danes attributed them to witchcraft. According to Willis, James believed this attribution because he subconsciously feared Elizabeth's occult retaliatory powers. With the Danish witches out of reach across the North Sea, James displaced his fear and resentment onto some Scottish witches. Thus, the Scottish witches were surrogates for the Danish witches, who were surrogates for Elizabeth, who was a surrogate for Mary. While it is impossible to prove that this construct is wrong, it hardly seems like weighty evidence in favor of Willis' theory. This chain of suppositions is not unusual in Willis' presentation; one longs for examples that clearly and unambiguously show her theory in practice.

The last, and most astonishing, weakness of Willis' discussion of James is that she does not analyze his Daemonologie at all. It would seem that here if anywhere she should be able to find compelling evidence of a leading witch hunter's inner life in his turns of phrase, his figures of speech, his examples, and his lines of argument. There may be a good reason she does not use this source, but if so she does not give it. Instead, she turns in the book's last two chapters to the plays of Shakespeare. Whatever the merits of her treatment as literary criticism (and she seems to have a stronger mastery of method and material here than in her historical chapters), she uncovers in them little of value to the social history of witchcraft.

The most interesting historical point she makes in these last chapters is her suggestion that the theatrical staging of witchcraft and magic may have contributed to peoples' growing conception of witchcraft and magic as acts of theater rather than acts of power. Unfortunately, this is about the only point she makes about the decline of witch beliefs, which exposes another weakness of her approach, its inability to account for the decline of witchcraft in the seventeenth century. Did mothers become better mothers? Did children become more tolerant? Any account of Early Modern witch fears would seem to need to at least suggest an explanation for their eventual decline during the period as well as for their rise. Willis makes no attempt to account for this decline herself, and it is hard to extrapolate one from her thesis for her.

Malevolent Nurture centers on a persuasive theoretical construct, contains flashes of real insight, and gives some interesting glimpses of life at various levels of society in the sixteenth century. On balance, though, it contains too much speculation and not enough evidence. To borrow from Willis a passage from Othello, history like "the Duke requires a 'wider and more overt test / Than these thin habits and poor likelihoods.'" (p. 164)

Edward Bever Grolier Interactive