Weird Women
A.K. Blakemore, The Manningtree Witches
Granta, 304pp, £12.99, ISBN 9781783786435
reviewed by Jess Payn
A.K. Blakemore’s poem ‘MAY’, published in The White Review in 2018, begins:
It’s not really a poem about witches or witchiness; still, the witch’s presence intrudes by way of displacement, powerful and cunning. Her smock arrives on the sly slidings of sibilance, a suspect garment which makes a (s)mockery of the naked body and sabotages our ideas of consequence; the analogy that began with ‘you’ is startled by sudden transfiguration into a bright-white orb. The hurly-burly’s done ere the set of sun. That saucy pedantic wretch, as John Donne would say.
This moment in Blakemore’s poem also speaks to the warped logic of the weird: a deflection that serves to welcome the outside in. Witches are Weïrd Sisters, from the word’s original meaning of ‘fate’, a hidden knot whose threads the Moirai tug at and tangle. In the Folio edition of Macbeth, ‘weird’ is sometimes spelled ‘wayward’, indicating the evasive movement of the witches: their resistance and ‘purposeful retreat from the centre’, as folklorist Laura Shamas writes. Driving towards the margins, the weird clings to those who are seen to broach the boundary between the inside (security, community) and the outside (the magic and terror of darkness). Widows, unmarried women, those who have not borne children, or who otherwise exist outside the circuits of social reproduction or patriarchal control feel its charge: it’s the point at which feminine power merges with suspicion of the supernatural. Mark Fisher argues in The Weird and the Eerie that the weird signals ‘that the concepts and frameworks which we have previously employed are now obsolete’. It’s in this way that the weird rewrites our categories. This is its threat, as well as its promise.
In her first novel, Blakemore slides into the genre of historical fiction to consider the idea of weird women: destitute, ageing women living at society’s outer edge, rebel women who are seen to undermine the ideals of femininity and domesticity, and whose cunning — the means by which they survive — is both their salvation and their curse. A fictionalised account of the Essex witch trials, The Manningtree Witches is built from the testimonies of women hunted by the Witchfinder General Matthew Hopkins during the English Civil War. It hovers through the fog and filthy air of Manningtree and Mistley, ‘some few dozen houses hunched along in various states of disrepair and flake, all mouldy thatch and tide-marked’. The picture is one of general dilapidation. Hunger breeds and gossip thrives. Rebecca West, Blakemore’s protagonist, knows herself to be ‘peculiar’ — and her mother, too. Fatherless and husbandless, they are two women living alone together. ‘When women think alone, they think evil, it is said,’ Hopkins pronounces, his misogyny buttressed by the belief that ‘a tendency to the heresy of witchcraft is passed from mother to daughter’. Still, in Blakemore’s telling, what is truly ‘peculiar’ about the Beldam West, Rebecca’s mother, is her defiant pride: her contempt for ‘the virtues of modesty, obedience, cleanliness and continence’, her refusal to be cowed by authority, and her ‘reckless taste for surviving, that makes her like an animal, wild and unknowable’. It is this, more than anything, that offends Hopkins. She is one of the ‘strange’ husbandless women, ‘past breeding’, who gather in ‘ragged coats’ by the quay wall to gossip about the town’s inhabitants, and laugh in Hopkins’ face when he comes to intercede. They all stand among the accused when unsettling events disrupt the nervous town (he does not forget the slight).
This is a familiar tale: the hysterical crowd closing in on the powerless. A boy’s paroxysms are blamed on the Devil, with widows and other miscreant women named as his handmaidens. Yet the supple idiom in which Blakemore casts this lends a fertile, febrile immediacy to the telling. Dreams figure memorably. Satan intoxicates: ‘it makes sense to them then, when he puts it like that, how the Devil might thicken like butter and slide under the pantry door to cover a man all over.’ There’s a thrilling and funny incident with a fortune-telling cabbage, its surface ‘cool and fibrous and ridged and veined and carven’. It’s the moment Rebecca realises ‘something is begun, and I am tangled in it’. Woven patterns, unruly threads: the weird knot of fate is glimpsed sideways: ‘There is a pattern to it, like with knitting, a language of it, and it is women’s, and held secret and grey-pink as guts.’
Yet, while Blakemore’s limber use of seventeenth century idiom is lyrically exact, she is more drawn to the filth and crawling creatures that surround her characters; the ‘dark stuff’ of women's bodies, and their stench, itching skin and matted hair. The provocation of this vision not only parallels Hopkins’ insistence on the virtues of cleanliness and continence (witches he views as ‘a nasty something to sweep up’) but also speaks to enduring anxieties about the female body as a site of disgust. In her essay ‘The Songs of Hecate: Poetry and the Language of the Occult’, Rebecca Tamàs considers the 2014 British Museum exhibition ‘Witches and Wicked Bodies’ — a title that indicates how much the unruly physicality of the witch was the centre of her horror and her threat. ‘In the room full of witches, I am meant to be disgusted,’ she writes. ‘Disgusted, or scared, or even, perhaps, aroused.’ Blakemore’s novel assimilates this logic to explore the abjection of the female body by the patriarchal social order. After all, a woman’s body is what condemns her: the discovery of a mark ‘from which no blood could be drawn, red and swollen as though sucked upon’. Hopkins inspects hundreds of them: ‘Thin and fat, old and young, in all their fleshy actualness.’
This space of simultaneous horror and fascination finds articulation in the book’s dreams, where desires run free and twisted. In his sleep, Hopkins watches the suspected witches arrive at a great feast, or ‘sulphurous spread’, their ‘naked bodies silvered by moonlight.’ Following dream logic, the language becomes like alchemy — liquid, playful and illicit: ‘Tiny human ears strewn about the table like rose petals.’ The scene is a knowing tableau of the seven deadly sins: a fantasy of fulfilment for Hopkins, an endorsement of his suspicions. It’s in passages like this that Blakemore’s wordcraft fully shows its powers: in the strange zone of transgression where boundaries grow thin, and lust might become ‘an image . . . of a baby, falling to the bottom of a well, where it melts like a cube of sugar’. In this ‘upside-down time’, decay and danger are legible on every surface. The churchyard, for example, ‘is glutted with the last fallen leaves, shades of leathery brown and livid yellow, the earth turning up a leprous cheek’.
While its concerns are deeply serious, it’s evident that Blakemore had fun with this novel, particularly with the task of inhabiting the past and crafting a language appropriate to its conditions. In one memorable phrase, Rebecca describes how she feels ‘my humours rise and tangle like stockings in a laundry pail’. Or later: ‘My mind is glittering like a coin set on its side to spin.’ Within the subtle web of rich and careful detail, Blakemore’s characters (almost all of them real people) come alive. Rebecca West most of all. She is enigmatic: watchful, reserved, as shrewd as she is level-headed; increasingly ‘pleased . . . to be peculiar’, she learns the radical power of being uncompromising. She moves from disgust at her mother’s habits, anxious to writhe free of their entangled life, to recognising the gifts of her inheritance. Hopkins, the famous Witchfinder General, is an equally full portrait, this time of hubris and misogyny (his dog he names only ‘my bitch’). He is immediately drawn to her out-of-place-ness, her obscure distance from the domestic hearth: ‘She has a weird look to her, as though she’d be more comfortable up in the sky, perched on a ragged limb of cloud, than in a provincial church pew.’ He wants to possess this wildness, whatever in her that is resistant. But Rebecca ends the book with ‘the wind of many seas’ in her hair, fierce in her own self-image: triumphant, free.
It is from this that we understand how the witch, as much as she is maligned, offers ‘a site of resistance, a way out of silence and silencing’, as Tamàs continues in her essay. She defines a witch ‘as someone who uses language to cause change in the material world’ (which finds a cousin in the Beldam West’s observation that ‘witch is just their nasty word for anyone who makes things happen, who moves the story along’). Common to both is the idea of the witch as a storyteller, whose language has power and whose actions have purchase. Through her ability to speak, the weird woman becomes a centre for radical alternative power, a challenge to oppressive hegemonies. Blakemore writes in her afterword that the novel stands as a memorial for those ‘who have otherwise gone voiceless, or else been muted by victimhood’. In giving them back that voice, she performs her own radical act. Silvia Federici in Caliban and the Witch (1998), her seminal text on European witch-hunts, notes that the witch was ‘the rebel woman who talked back, argued, swore, and did not cry under torture’. Blakemore’s troublesome, proud, voluble characters fulfil this archetype to the last, the Beldam West most splendidly of all: a true ‘Hecate’, she ‘stands at the bar, gorging on the wails of the multitude as happy as Lililth might’.
At heart, The Manningtree Witches is a story of survival. It refuses to let ‘the character, humour and pride’ of these weird women go unsung, speaking to the witch’s radical agency, her private motives and her ability to magic wit and stoicism from violence.
you slid into my life as though
a witch’s smock – a sun poem.
It’s not really a poem about witches or witchiness; still, the witch’s presence intrudes by way of displacement, powerful and cunning. Her smock arrives on the sly slidings of sibilance, a suspect garment which makes a (s)mockery of the naked body and sabotages our ideas of consequence; the analogy that began with ‘you’ is startled by sudden transfiguration into a bright-white orb. The hurly-burly’s done ere the set of sun. That saucy pedantic wretch, as John Donne would say.
This moment in Blakemore’s poem also speaks to the warped logic of the weird: a deflection that serves to welcome the outside in. Witches are Weïrd Sisters, from the word’s original meaning of ‘fate’, a hidden knot whose threads the Moirai tug at and tangle. In the Folio edition of Macbeth, ‘weird’ is sometimes spelled ‘wayward’, indicating the evasive movement of the witches: their resistance and ‘purposeful retreat from the centre’, as folklorist Laura Shamas writes. Driving towards the margins, the weird clings to those who are seen to broach the boundary between the inside (security, community) and the outside (the magic and terror of darkness). Widows, unmarried women, those who have not borne children, or who otherwise exist outside the circuits of social reproduction or patriarchal control feel its charge: it’s the point at which feminine power merges with suspicion of the supernatural. Mark Fisher argues in The Weird and the Eerie that the weird signals ‘that the concepts and frameworks which we have previously employed are now obsolete’. It’s in this way that the weird rewrites our categories. This is its threat, as well as its promise.
In her first novel, Blakemore slides into the genre of historical fiction to consider the idea of weird women: destitute, ageing women living at society’s outer edge, rebel women who are seen to undermine the ideals of femininity and domesticity, and whose cunning — the means by which they survive — is both their salvation and their curse. A fictionalised account of the Essex witch trials, The Manningtree Witches is built from the testimonies of women hunted by the Witchfinder General Matthew Hopkins during the English Civil War. It hovers through the fog and filthy air of Manningtree and Mistley, ‘some few dozen houses hunched along in various states of disrepair and flake, all mouldy thatch and tide-marked’. The picture is one of general dilapidation. Hunger breeds and gossip thrives. Rebecca West, Blakemore’s protagonist, knows herself to be ‘peculiar’ — and her mother, too. Fatherless and husbandless, they are two women living alone together. ‘When women think alone, they think evil, it is said,’ Hopkins pronounces, his misogyny buttressed by the belief that ‘a tendency to the heresy of witchcraft is passed from mother to daughter’. Still, in Blakemore’s telling, what is truly ‘peculiar’ about the Beldam West, Rebecca’s mother, is her defiant pride: her contempt for ‘the virtues of modesty, obedience, cleanliness and continence’, her refusal to be cowed by authority, and her ‘reckless taste for surviving, that makes her like an animal, wild and unknowable’. It is this, more than anything, that offends Hopkins. She is one of the ‘strange’ husbandless women, ‘past breeding’, who gather in ‘ragged coats’ by the quay wall to gossip about the town’s inhabitants, and laugh in Hopkins’ face when he comes to intercede. They all stand among the accused when unsettling events disrupt the nervous town (he does not forget the slight).
This is a familiar tale: the hysterical crowd closing in on the powerless. A boy’s paroxysms are blamed on the Devil, with widows and other miscreant women named as his handmaidens. Yet the supple idiom in which Blakemore casts this lends a fertile, febrile immediacy to the telling. Dreams figure memorably. Satan intoxicates: ‘it makes sense to them then, when he puts it like that, how the Devil might thicken like butter and slide under the pantry door to cover a man all over.’ There’s a thrilling and funny incident with a fortune-telling cabbage, its surface ‘cool and fibrous and ridged and veined and carven’. It’s the moment Rebecca realises ‘something is begun, and I am tangled in it’. Woven patterns, unruly threads: the weird knot of fate is glimpsed sideways: ‘There is a pattern to it, like with knitting, a language of it, and it is women’s, and held secret and grey-pink as guts.’
Yet, while Blakemore’s limber use of seventeenth century idiom is lyrically exact, she is more drawn to the filth and crawling creatures that surround her characters; the ‘dark stuff’ of women's bodies, and their stench, itching skin and matted hair. The provocation of this vision not only parallels Hopkins’ insistence on the virtues of cleanliness and continence (witches he views as ‘a nasty something to sweep up’) but also speaks to enduring anxieties about the female body as a site of disgust. In her essay ‘The Songs of Hecate: Poetry and the Language of the Occult’, Rebecca Tamàs considers the 2014 British Museum exhibition ‘Witches and Wicked Bodies’ — a title that indicates how much the unruly physicality of the witch was the centre of her horror and her threat. ‘In the room full of witches, I am meant to be disgusted,’ she writes. ‘Disgusted, or scared, or even, perhaps, aroused.’ Blakemore’s novel assimilates this logic to explore the abjection of the female body by the patriarchal social order. After all, a woman’s body is what condemns her: the discovery of a mark ‘from which no blood could be drawn, red and swollen as though sucked upon’. Hopkins inspects hundreds of them: ‘Thin and fat, old and young, in all their fleshy actualness.’
This space of simultaneous horror and fascination finds articulation in the book’s dreams, where desires run free and twisted. In his sleep, Hopkins watches the suspected witches arrive at a great feast, or ‘sulphurous spread’, their ‘naked bodies silvered by moonlight.’ Following dream logic, the language becomes like alchemy — liquid, playful and illicit: ‘Tiny human ears strewn about the table like rose petals.’ The scene is a knowing tableau of the seven deadly sins: a fantasy of fulfilment for Hopkins, an endorsement of his suspicions. It’s in passages like this that Blakemore’s wordcraft fully shows its powers: in the strange zone of transgression where boundaries grow thin, and lust might become ‘an image . . . of a baby, falling to the bottom of a well, where it melts like a cube of sugar’. In this ‘upside-down time’, decay and danger are legible on every surface. The churchyard, for example, ‘is glutted with the last fallen leaves, shades of leathery brown and livid yellow, the earth turning up a leprous cheek’.
While its concerns are deeply serious, it’s evident that Blakemore had fun with this novel, particularly with the task of inhabiting the past and crafting a language appropriate to its conditions. In one memorable phrase, Rebecca describes how she feels ‘my humours rise and tangle like stockings in a laundry pail’. Or later: ‘My mind is glittering like a coin set on its side to spin.’ Within the subtle web of rich and careful detail, Blakemore’s characters (almost all of them real people) come alive. Rebecca West most of all. She is enigmatic: watchful, reserved, as shrewd as she is level-headed; increasingly ‘pleased . . . to be peculiar’, she learns the radical power of being uncompromising. She moves from disgust at her mother’s habits, anxious to writhe free of their entangled life, to recognising the gifts of her inheritance. Hopkins, the famous Witchfinder General, is an equally full portrait, this time of hubris and misogyny (his dog he names only ‘my bitch’). He is immediately drawn to her out-of-place-ness, her obscure distance from the domestic hearth: ‘She has a weird look to her, as though she’d be more comfortable up in the sky, perched on a ragged limb of cloud, than in a provincial church pew.’ He wants to possess this wildness, whatever in her that is resistant. But Rebecca ends the book with ‘the wind of many seas’ in her hair, fierce in her own self-image: triumphant, free.
It is from this that we understand how the witch, as much as she is maligned, offers ‘a site of resistance, a way out of silence and silencing’, as Tamàs continues in her essay. She defines a witch ‘as someone who uses language to cause change in the material world’ (which finds a cousin in the Beldam West’s observation that ‘witch is just their nasty word for anyone who makes things happen, who moves the story along’). Common to both is the idea of the witch as a storyteller, whose language has power and whose actions have purchase. Through her ability to speak, the weird woman becomes a centre for radical alternative power, a challenge to oppressive hegemonies. Blakemore writes in her afterword that the novel stands as a memorial for those ‘who have otherwise gone voiceless, or else been muted by victimhood’. In giving them back that voice, she performs her own radical act. Silvia Federici in Caliban and the Witch (1998), her seminal text on European witch-hunts, notes that the witch was ‘the rebel woman who talked back, argued, swore, and did not cry under torture’. Blakemore’s troublesome, proud, voluble characters fulfil this archetype to the last, the Beldam West most splendidly of all: a true ‘Hecate’, she ‘stands at the bar, gorging on the wails of the multitude as happy as Lililth might’.
At heart, The Manningtree Witches is a story of survival. It refuses to let ‘the character, humour and pride’ of these weird women go unsung, speaking to the witch’s radical agency, her private motives and her ability to magic wit and stoicism from violence.