"Speaking for the Witch" by Natalie Johansen

Speaking for the witch

Natalie Johansen The Witch of Eye, by Kathryn Nuernberger, Sarabande, 2021.

If I had to pinpoint the origin of my fascination with witches, it would be the moment I discovered The Complete Grimms’ Fairytales on my parents’ bookshelf, a volume filled with stories of heroes facing old crones or evil queens. These witches were easily the most interesting part of any story, providing the necessary conflict to propel the tales forward (which, of course, gave the heroes something to do). It wasn’t until much later that I discovered, in the pages of history, real-life “witches,” the people—mostly women—who were accused, interrogated, and condemned for perceived crimes of witchcraft. The more I learn their stories, the more I carry them with me.

In The Witch of Eye Kathryn Nuernberger examines these historical witches, the midwives or herbalists or sages or women who glanced sideways at the wrong neighbor or lived too far up or down the social ladder or existed as other in some way.

One of the many ways this collection surprised me was how timely many of the essays felt. Throughout the book, Nuernberger interrogates historical accounts, using the past as a mirror for modern audiences. This is brilliantly displayed in “Agnes Waterhouse,” an essay that examines the function of interrogation and confession in both past and present:

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Of course the tribunal believed this testimony [against Agnes]. People knew the devil to be real, and his magic, his witches, his familiars, his blood spells and poison. Their whole lives they knew the devil was coming for them. This century is not so different. Consider the mug shot and some blurry footage from a gas station calling into being that archetype of white America’s inquisitions. The officer will say in the deposition that he was ‘like some sort of superhuman beast bulking up to run through the shots.’

That’s the only way such tribunals can imagine a now-dead Black teenager. ‘Like a demon.’ The mostly white jurors will nod like people who know, and then they will acquit.

Another essay juxtaposes the historical confessions Johannes Junius, a man convicted of witchcraft in the 17th century, with a Title IX report investigating the sexual assault of an undergraduate student. Neurnberger narrates her struggles to write about Johannes Junius while simultaneously attempting to create a “poetic translation” of the Title IX report, ultimately reflecting on how society fails to believe women and how impossible it is to translate truth and humanity into words.

As Nuernberger fuses together past and contemporary accounts, she pulls herself into the narrative and becomes a central figure in the collection. The parallels between personal and historical are evident in the first essay, “Hag, Crone, Cunning Woman, Witch,” where Nuernberger writes, They called the old women crones, hags, cunning women, and witches. Names to make a daughter think she should devote herself to becoming something, anything, other than what she is. Like the women I descend from, the ones called hysterics and manics, obsessives and depressives, I feel as if I have an aspen grove that stretches from my stomach to my throat. Sometimes I can hardly speak for trying to hush those leaves.

In “The Aristotles that Never Were,” Nuernberger muses on the myriad existing texts, called “Pseudo-Aristotelian,” that

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potentially but not definitively belong to Aristotle himself while reflecting on all of the possible versions of her own life that could have been: “When I am thinking about leaving my husband, my friend reminds me of that poem we both like where you sit and watch the boats on the horizon that are all the lives you might have lived.” Nuernberger later returns to this idea of possibility by imagining herself in the place of women interrogated for witchcraft, pressured to confess anything to save themselves. She writes, I wonder which of these I would have been and I wonder which I am now. I might have fallen in love, I might have been burned, I might have given up the name of my own dear friend, I might have set the hour of execution . . . I might have looked around at all I owned and wondered how I could ever hold onto it all.”

Throughout each essay in the collection, Nuernberger blends personal and universal, past, present, and potential, into a single narrative. The collection manages to feel intimate, expansive, and necessary all in one flick of the wrist.