Mallory Page

“I’ll get you, my pretty, and your little dog, too!” – The Wicked Witch of the West 

As a child, I was terrified of the Wicked Witch of the West, hiding under blankets when the witch would pop up and threaten Dorothy and the Munchkins.  If I were to ask you to draw a witch, you would most likely draw an old woman with warts, long gray hair, and a hooked nose. She’would probably be holding a broomstick and wearing a long, pointy hat. Maybe, if you also watched the Wizard of Oz too many times as a child or had a preteen Wicked obsession, you would also color her skin green. But where does this image come from?

The Witch is the result of millennia of discrimination against minorities. She is an amalgamation of  fears: fear of Jews, fear of postmenopausal women, fear of Satan. Since its earliest years, Christianity has gendered sin as distinctly feminine. After all, it was Eve who tempted Adam into eating the apple. In the Malleus Maleficarum, the handbook in the 15^th century for identifying witches, the authors cite both Church Fathers and ancient pagan philosophers for why women are more likely to practice witchcraft. Women’s own nature “know[s] no moderation in goodness or vice.” When women are good, they are saints; when they are bad, they are witches. Malleus Maleficarum asserted that women’s high libidos tempted them to fornicate with demons: “Wherefore for the sake of fulfilling their lusts they consort even with devils.” Their status as the weaker sex made them more susceptible to the Devil’s temptations, just as the snake seduced Eve. In the Christian mind, Eve was the original bad girl.

This corrupted woman, the witch, became the inversion of the proper woman—the wife and mother. In addition, with the high infant mortality rates ,  grieving parents looked for someone to blame for their tragedy. The witch was a ready scapegoat. Europeans viewed older women as being jealous of the beauty and fertility of younger women, feeding into the idea that post-menopausal women were witches. Malleus Maleficarum points to female vanity as a motivator for witches, writing, “There is no man in the world who studies so hard to please the good God as even an ordinary woman studies by her vanities to please men.” While the Malleus Maleficarum allowed for the possibility of girls becoming witches, the association of witches with older women stuck. After defending his mother at trial for witchcraft, astronomer Johannes Keppler pointed to her appearance as a key factor in her neighbor’s fear of her, calling her appearance “ungestalt,” or deformed.

In addition to her older appearance, the witch also commonly has warts on her face. Christian thought asserted that warts and freckles were results of entering a pact with the Devil. The Malleus Maleficarum illustrates in great detail the witches’ nightly “sabbath”. In order to join this exclusive get-together, witches had to sign their name in the Devil’s book, a dark parody of the parish book. Once signed, the Devil would bestow upon these women a mark, appearing as a mole or freckle, to show their membership. 

Accusations that witches would sacrifice babies at these “sabbaths” resembled accusations made against Jewish people in parts of Europe, notably Spain. Townspeople accused both witches and Jews also of defaming Hosts squirreled away from Mass, perverting Communion at night.  Research in the association between antisemitic iconography and witch iconography is lacking. Both witches and Jewish people were depicted with large, hooked noses in medieval European art, but there were not strong associations between witches and large noses. Like witches, Jewish women also were accused of being lascivious and bestial, a well established antisemitic trope. While the merging of antisemitism with witchcraft helps explain some of the depictions of witches, it does not explain the large numbers of non-Jewish women accused of witchcraft throughout Europe.

Where does her iconic green skin come from? L. Frank Baum does not describe the Wicked Witch of the West as green in the book. Although there were some lesser-known legends of green witches, like the English story of Jenny Greenteeth, a woman who resided in shallow bogs, dragging naughty children to a watery grave, the real answer is less rooted in witch iconography. The short answer is green looked better in the nascent Technicolor technology used in the 1939 film.The Wicked Witch of the West formed from this miasma of prejudices formed in early modern Europe and carried down through generations via fairy tales. Pop culture and the advances of the feminist movement have hijacked the traditional witch, changing the stereotypical image of this supernatural woman. One feminist organization in the 1960’s even named themselves W.I.T.C.H.– Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell. Bewitched transformed the witch into a young wife and mother, trying to hide her powers while living in quiet suburbia. The Wicked Witch of the West herself had a rewrite in Wicked by Gregory Maguire, adapted into a hit Broadway musical by Stephen Schwartz. The witch was a scary archetype used to punish women, but it changed into an empowered woman, one that could exert control over her own life with the help of her magical powers.

Image: The Wicked Witch of the West, Warner Bros., 1939.

Mallory is the Social Media Director and a second-year Master of Arts student in Global and International History (MAGIC). She studies 18th and 19th century Japanese cartography and its ties to imperialism. In her free time, Mallory enjoys knitting sweaters and hanging with her cat, Mabel.