Moorings 2020

When You Witch Upon a Star: An Analysis of the Relationship Between Perceptions of Early Modern Witches and Portrayals of Disney Witches Kelley Northam In Disney’s 1992 animated film, Aladdin, the villainous Jafar manically says; “Trust me…you’ll get what’s coming to you” (Aladdin). Though set in a thoroughly historically inaccurate Middle Eastern country, complete with magic carpet rides, talking animals, and a schizophrenic, all-powerful Genie, Jafar’s dialogue could have been easily taken directly from an Early Modern witch trial record, for many accused Early Modern witches were burned alive for uttering those same words. This paper outlines the perceptions, classifications, and intricacies surrounding accused Early Modern European witches as defined in Brian P. Levack’s book, The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe. Then, after identifying and examining the witch or witchlike characters in the following animated Disney films: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Cinderella, Aladdin, and Frozen against these classifications, it is determined that Early Modern perceptions of witches strongly resemble the portrayals of witches in Disney films, suggesting that not only are these Early Modern perceptions of witches alive and well in Post-Modern media but that an innate human enchantment with witchcraft and the occult continues to shape and influence mainstream society hundreds of years later.

The infamous European witch-craze or witch-hunt, from approximately 1450- 1750, thousands of Early Modern people, the vast majority of them women, were tried for practicing witchcraft (Levack 1). Many historians have analyzed this intriguing historical phenomenon from a variety of lenses to attempt to identify a leading cause of these trials. Historians, such as Holmes, strongly contend that the rise in witchcraft accusations during this period is due to women breaking conventional, feminine gender roles and subsequently being tried by a Moorings 67