In folklore and mythology, witches are often depicted as powerful individuals who possess magical abilities and can cause harm to others. One of the commonly known abilities of witches is the power to transform individuals into different forms, including turning a man into a woman. This idea of a man being transformed into a woman by a witch can be seen in various stories and legends from different cultures around the world. In these tales, the transformation is often used as a punishment or a means of teaching a lesson to the individual. The reasons for such transformations can vary. Sometimes, it is due to the man's actions that have angered or displeased the witch.
From JW Waterhouse’s portrait of Circe Invidiosa. Photograph: Alamy
But what is most notable is her moral ambiguity though she begins the episode as a figure of menace, after she and Odysseus become lovers, she transforms his men back and offers vital resources and advice to Odysseus for his journey home. Such accusations were a clever and effective way for a woman s political enemies to smear her since, as countless other women accused of witchcraft learned, it is impossible to offer definitive proof that one is not a witch.
Sometimes, it is due to the man's actions that have angered or displeased the witch. Other times, it may be a result of a curse or a spell cast upon the man by the witch. Regardless of the reason, the transformation into a woman is seen as a drastic change that alters not only the physical appearance but also the identity and experiences of the individual.
From Circe to Clinton: why powerful women are cast as witches
A misogynist insult in Washington and Westminster, a force for good in Hollywood … for centuries, witches have personified fear of assertive women. But why does the stereotype persist?
Sat 7 Apr 2018 09.00 CEST Last modified on Sat 7 Apr 2018 18.35 CESTD uring the 2016 US presidential election, American social media was flooded with images of Hillary Clinton wearing a black hat and riding a broom, or else cackling with green skin. Her opponents named her The Wicked Witch of the Left, claimed they had sources testifying that she smelled of sulphur, and took particular delight in depictions of her being melted. Given that the last witch trial in the US was more than 100 hundred years ago, what are we to make of this?
In the late 19th century, the suffragette Matilda Joslyn Gage asserted something revolutionary. The persecution of witches, she said, had nothing to do with fighting evil or resisting the devil. It was simply entrenched social misogyny, the goal of which was to repress the intellect of women. A witch, she said, wasn’t wicked. She didn’t fly on a broomstick naked in the dark, or consort with demons. She was, instead, likely to be a woman “of superior knowledge”. As a thought experiment, she suggested that for “witches” we should read instead “women”. Their histories, she intimated, run hand in hand.
Obviously, she was on to something. When we say witch, we almost exclusively mean woman. Sure, men have also been accused of witchcraft, but they are by far the minority. Further, the words used to describe men with magical powers – warlock, magus, sorcerer, wizard – don’t carry the same stigma.
A witch transgresses norms of female power – punishing her makes others afraid to follow in an unruly woman’s footsteps
A better parallel to “witch” is the word “whore”. Both are time-honoured tools for policing women, meant to shame them into socially prescribed behaviour. A whore transgresses norms of female sexuality; a witch transgresses norms of female power. Witches are often called unnatural because of their ability to threaten men. With her spells, a witch can transform you into a pig, or defeat you in battle. She can curse you, blight your crops, ignore you, refuse you, correct you. Punishing witches accomplishes two things: it ends the threat and makes others afraid to follow in the unruly woman’s footsteps.
Yet, despite all the attempts to stamp out witches, they are as strongly with us as ever, from Wanda Maximoff, the Scarlet Witch in the Avengers movies, to the recent film The Love Witch, to the television series American Horror Story, to non-fiction books such as Stacy Schiff’s The Witches: Salem, 1692. The stereotypical image of the witch – green skin, pointed hat, warts, black cat – has become entrenched, but beneath that surface lies a dazzling variety; a rich diversity of women who have frightened, possessed and inspired us over the centuries.
Bones of contention … montages of Hillary Clinton as a witch have flooded social media
Let’s start with the classic: the evil, aged crone. This image took firm root in the Christian era, when witches were women who consorted with the devil; but old and ugly witches predated Jesus. Roman literature portrayed witches as pathetic creatures with false teeth and grey hair, who dug in the ground by moonlight, tore animals with their teeth and used the organs of boys they starved to death for their spells. They had two main pastimes: making love potions, and casting curses. The poet Ovid blamed a disappointing sexual performance on a witch using a sort of Roman voodoo doll to take away his potency. (Sure Ovid, that was my first thought, too.)
The most famous of this type must be Shakespeare’s weird sisters from Macbeth. They are repulsive “midnight hags”, with skinny lips, chapped fingers and beards. Their spells – eye of newt and toe of frog – are as disgusting as their appearances and curse anyone who crosses them. The classic fairytale witch, like the one in the story of Hansel and Gretel who eats children, also fits into this category, as does the Slavic Baba Yaga, and the Wicked Witch of the West from L Frank Baum’s Oz series, made famous by actor Margaret Hamilton. The role was originally offered to the glamorous Gale Sondergaard, but she turned it down because she didn’t want to appear ugly.
Spellbound … Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra, who was accused of witchcraft. Photograph: Allstar/20th Century Fox
And ugliness, of course, is key. The haggish outsides of these witches are meant to match their evil insides, and testify to their unnaturalness, since women are supposed to be as neat, attractive and young as possible. But the association with age also contains a kernel of truth: many of the women accused of witchcraft were so-called “wise women”, older figures, often poor widows, who scratched out a living in the community with their experience as midwives, herbalists and hedge-doctors. Their solitary, vulnerable status and unusual knowledge made them perfect targets for people’s rage and fear when crops failed or babies died.
Foreign women were also vulnerable to accusations of witchcraft, and the association between immigrants and sorcery goes back at least to Greek mythology. The witch Medea was the princess of Colchis, on the eastern edge of the Black Sea, which to the notoriously xenophobic ancient Greeks was alien and suspect. When Jason and his Argonauts came to claim the Golden Fleece from her father, Medea fell in love with Jason and aided him with her spells, so that he and the Argonauts were able to seize the fleece and escape. In gratitude, Jason married Medea, but back home in his kingdom she was shunned, her witchcraft and foreignness merging into a single undesirable trait. The idea seems to have been: no wonder she’s a murderous sorceress, she’s from the east.
This type of nativism also pops up in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Sycorax, the witch mother of Caliban, is from Algiers, and though she never appears in the play, she is a harrowing, hideous figure, a “blue-eyed hag”, who is hunched over with “age and envy”. She was cast out from Algiers (the implication is that she was too wicked even for them), and came to the island, where she “litter[ed]” her deformed son, practised her magic and worshipped her pagan-sounding god, Setebos. Towards the end of the 17th century, the slave Tituba, who may have been South American, was blamed for leading the innocent (white) girls of Salem into evil. Her experience as an outsider among the witch-hysterical Puritans is brilliantly imagined in Maryse Condé’s novel, I Tituba, Black Witch of Salem.
Fears of witchcraft grounded in racism persist even today. The Roma, longtime outcasts in Europe, have frequently been accused of evil magic. And African-influenced voodoo is routinely used by Hollywood as a horror movie plot point.
But it wasn’t just vulnerable women who drew accusations of witchcraft. It was also women with serious political power. Joan of Arc led the French to victory against the English and was renowned in France for her purity, cleverness and faith in her “voices”. When the English leadership couldn’t beat her, they undermined her, crediting her success to demonic means, since, of course, a young woman could never perform such wonders on her own. When she was captured, they tried her for witchcraft, citing as partial proof of her unnaturalness the tremendous bravery she showed in battle, and her ability to outwit her examiners in debate.
Magic circle … the new Wrinkle in Time film features Mrs Which, Mrs Who and Mrs Whatsit. Photograph: Atsushi Nishijima/Disney/Kobal/Rex/Shutterstock
Cleopatra and Anne Boleyn were likewise accused of witchcraft, with rumours that Anne even bore physical marks of her compact with the devil, such as a third nipple, moles and a sixth finger on her right hand. Such accusations were a clever and effective way for a woman’s political enemies to smear her since, as countless other women accused of witchcraft learned, it is impossible to offer definitive proof that one is not a witch. Perhaps what is most shocking about this catch-22 is the way in which it continues to be played out today. Aside from Hillary Clinton, who has been called a witch since she was first lady, there was also the case of Julia Gillard, first female prime minister of Australia, who met with taunts of “ditch the witch” from protesters. Nancy Pelosi, the minority speaker of the US House of Representatives, has faced similar witch-related insults, and recently Theresa May was filmed laughing loudly, and her so-called “witch’s cackle” quickly went viral. The misogyny of all this is obvious. Debating and defeating these leaders politically isn’t enough – as women who show ambition, they are abominations who must be deemed evil and cast out.
From JW Waterhouse’s portrait of Circe Invidiosa. Photograph: Alamy
The tradition of the sexy witch, who lures men with her beauty, is beloved by modern-day adult costume-makers, but goes all the way back to the first witch in western literature: the divine sorceress Circe. She first appears in Homer’s Odyssey, after Odysseus and his crew have washed up on her island, exhausted and grieving for the loss of their comrades. They go searching for inhabitants and find a palatial house with tame lions and wolves lolling around in the garden. A shining goddess comes to the door, and invites them in. She gives them food and wine which she has drugged with spell-herbs, then lifts her wand and turns them into pigs.
Circe’s story brings together many classic witchy motifs: a skill with herbs and potions, a magic wand, control over animals. But what is most notable is her moral ambiguity – though she begins the episode as a figure of menace, after she and Odysseus become lovers, she transforms his men back and offers vital resources and advice to Odysseus for his journey home. Not all seductive witches show a similar ambiguity (CS Lewis’s White Witch certainly does not), but Morgan le Fay, Morticia Addams and Melisandre from Game of Thrones all fall into this category.
The image of the good witch is ascendant in popular culture at a time when women have made strides towards equality
This brings us to our last type: the good witch. Before we get to the famous examples, let’s start with the unknown ones – the countless women of history who used their knowledge of herbs, healing and midwifery to serve their communities as de facto doctors and chemists. In times when reliable medical treatment was scarce and expensive, they offered the first, and often only, help a suffering person would receive. Matilda Joslyn Gage, in her treatise Woman, Church and State, hailed this local herb-woman as “the profoundest thinker, the most advanced scientist” of her age. Gage’s name is largely unknown now, but her work lives vibrantly on: she was the mother-in-law of Baum, and directly influenced his creation of Glinda, one of the most iconic good witches in popular culture. Glinda is a sparkly, memorable presence in the 1939 movie, and plays a meaty role in the books, protecting the good people of Oz with passion and wisdom. We may likewise see Gage’s spirit in Gregory Maguire’s novel Wicked, which reimagines the Wicked Witch of the West, Elphaba, as a heroic, misunderstood character.
Of course no discussion of good witches can be complete without the superlative Hermione Granger. Throughout JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series, Hermione’s intellect, kindness, sense of justice and determination make her a role model for young girls – and boys – everywhere. And she’s only one of dozens of fascinating witches Rowling created, who run the gamut from good (Minerva McGonagall) to cruelly wicked (Bellatrix Lestrange).
Rupert Grint, left, and Daniel Radcliffe with Emma Watson as Hermione Granger in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004). Photograph: Allstar/Warner Bros
Which brings us back to the multiplicity and diversity of witches. The truth is that witches cannot really be contained by types; they leap over boundaries, bursting out of categories as fast we make them. They are constantly changing as we change, reflecting our ideas about women back to ourselves.
If this is so, then there is much to feel encouraged by. The image of the good witch is ascendant in popular culture (aside from Hermione, as exemplified by the Scarlet Witch, Willow from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and the new A Wrinkle in Time movie, prominently featuring Mrs Which, Mrs Who and Mrs Whatsit). Women have made powerful strides towards equality, and we are seeing an unprecedented awareness of sexual harassment, assault and the silencing of women. More of these secret abuses are coming to light every day, and more of the perpetrators are being removed from power.
Despite this progress, there is also sobering news. In the last decade, United Nations officials have reported a rise in women killed for witchcraft across the globe. In India the problem is particularly well-documented, with older women being targeted as scapegoats or as a pretext for seizing their lands and goods. In Saudi Arabia, women have been convicted of witchcraft in the courts, and in Ghana they have been exiled to so-called “witch camps”, an injustice movingly addressed in the award-winning film, I Am Not a Witch. And in the United States, a Gallup poll found that 21% of people believed in witches (and not the Hermione Granger kind).
In some stories, the transformed man must live as a woman for a certain period of time or until certain conditions are met in order to break the spell. During this time, the man-turned-woman often faces challenges and obstacles that they did not face before the transformation. They may have to navigate societal expectations and gender roles that are different from what they are accustomed to, leading to personal growth and self-discovery. The concept of a witch turning a man into a woman can be seen as a reflection of societal attitudes towards gender and the power dynamics between men and women. It highlights the belief that women have the ability to change the course of someone's life and exert control over them through their magical abilities. Overall, the idea of a witch transforming a man into a woman is a common theme in folklore and mythology. It serves as a cautionary tale about the consequences of one's actions and reminds us of the transformative power of magic and the importance of understanding and respecting different genders and identities..
Reviews for "Glamour and Fantasy: The World of Male-to-Female Transformations by Witches"
1. Sarah - 2 stars
While I appreciate the creativity and imagination behind "Witch Turns Man into a Woman," I found it to be problematic and offensive. The premise of the story seemed to reinforce harmful stereotypes about gender and perpetuated the idea that being a woman is somehow inferior. The humor often relied on outdated gender norms and derogatory tropes, which made it difficult for me to find any enjoyment in this film. Additionally, the lack of diversity and representation left much to be desired. Overall, I believe this film missed the mark and failed to deliver a progressive and inclusive narrative.
2. John - 1 star
"Witch Turns Man into a Woman" was an absolute disaster in my opinion. The story lacked depth, the acting was subpar, and the dialogue felt forced and uncomfortable. I was excited about the concept initially, thinking it could explore gender identity in an intriguing way, but sadly, it failed to deliver. The portrayal of a man turned into a woman leaned towards being offensive, as it relied heavily on stereotypes and cheap jokes. This film did not provide any valuable insight or entertainment, and I would not recommend wasting your time watching it.
3. Alex - 2 stars
As someone who appreciates films that push boundaries and challenge societal norms, "Witch Turns Man into a Woman" fell short. The story had great potential to explore themes of gender identity and fluidity, but it took a lazy and cliché route instead. The jokes were tasteless and insensitive, portraying being a woman as something to be laughed at or ridiculed. The characters lacked depth and felt one-dimensional, making it difficult to resonate with their struggles or triumphs. Overall, this film missed an opportunity to address important issues in a thoughtful and responsible manner.