We miss the 90s. It was a wealthier, sweeter, frumpier era, when fashion trends tended towards a joyful eclecticism that at times veered gently into the occult. We're back there at least in our dreams, and our slip dresses and tech bubbles; it's a magical intention we write every day in lip liner, because many of us imagined ourselves as teen witches. We were instructed by the CliffsNotes of paganism, the 1998 book Teen Witch ("Wicca for a New Generation"), written by Silver RavenWolf, "one of the most famous witches in the United States today." (We welcomed the book as a departure from the dorky 80s movie musical of the same name, in which a quiet nerd uses her powers to get a boyfriend and hair as big as Cyndi Lauper's.) The cover art of RavenWolf's Teen Witchis unforgettable, a painting of five witchy teens in the greatest hits of 90s fashion: backwards baseball caps, velour, thigh-highs, mom jeans, crop tops, overalls, a yin-yang chain belt.And we found as we practiced secretly in our bedrooms, trying to make an altar from a nightstand and a candle from Claire's, that the book's sublime cover was inevitably a bait and switch.RavenWolf writes at all times with mom-ish concern, insisting at length that "drugs and alcohol don't mix with magic." Her "Glamour Spell" is mostly practical advice on avoiding ridicule through better hygiene: "If someone is making fun of you because you smell, maybe you do. Keep your gym clothes clean. Use a spray in your sneakers." More than half the book is spent trying to dissuade 90s teens from thinking witchcraft is another goth fashion accessory. She explains that Wicca is a source of positivity, that the only legitimate magic helps others and connects a person to the greater Spirit; it is, in other words, just another religion, and one that RavenWolf suggests is best practiced quietly.Read more: Witches of America: One Woman's Journey into the Secret World of Modern Magic
A lot of the folk magic instructions RavenWolf offers feel like the compulsions anxious children take part in anyway: obsessive prayer, carrying lucky objects, hiding things. Her "My Castle Spells" are several ideas for magical protections for the Teen Witch's house, including chanting and making the sign of the pentacle over every window and door in the house every night. This legitimizes the restless avenues teenage anxiety takes, the rituals of vigilance and control children are prone to. I'm reminded of Merricat, the teenage witch who narrates Shirley Jackson's classic novel We Have Always Lived in the Castle, as she describes her own protective magic: "Always on Wednesday mornings I went around the fence. It was necessary for me to check constantly to be sure that the wires were not broken and the gates were securely locked."Witch identity is something deeper, something touching the heart of loneliness.
She wants to protect herself and what's left of her family, her older sister Constance and her feeble Uncle Julian, from the ignorant townspeople in the hostile village beyond their land. Merricat embodies the intersection of alchemy and anxiety as she uses her self-invented witchcraft as a way to express her extreme emotions, but not to control them. When her routine is threatened early in the book, she says, "I could not breathe; I was tied with wire, and my head was huge and going to explode." She immediately reacts by smashing a milk pitcher, as smashing things into glittering shards is one source of her power. Her sinister girl-magic is far from RavenWolf's benign Teen Witches. We learn that someone poisoned her father, mother, younger brother, and aunt at dinner one day. Constance was tried but acquitted for the crime, but Merricat is the reader's only suspect. This is Jackson's uneasy feat in the book: the reader's sympathetic intimacy with our strange and murderous teenage narrator.thickly inhabited just below the surface with my marbles and my teeth and my colored stones, all perhaps turned to jewels by now, held together under the ground in a powerful taut web which never loosened, but held fast to guard us.
Constance's domestic abundance is what binds her and Merricat. In her New York Review of Books essay on We Have Always Lived in the Castle, "The Witchcraft of Shirley Jackson," Joyce Carol Oates describes Merricat as "like an unweaned infant," totally dependent on Constance for food. They enact their food fetish at the dinner table and in the garden and in their magic. When Merricat chooses magic words for protection, of course she consumes them, writing one on her toast in jam and whispering one in a glass of water. The sisters seek to shield the power and eros of food, living exclusively towards the back of their house, where the garden and kitchen are secluded, and Merricat dislikes eating in front of other people at all. In this refusal, she resembles many teenage girls. It's not hard to understand: In more ways than one, food is a domain of feminine control. In Elissa Washuta's Starvation Mode, which she calls "A Memoir of Food, Consumption, and Control," she describes how her lifelong food obsession was connected to her untamable emotions. A rule remembered from her childhood, "only cry if you are hurt or scared," caused nothing but confusion. "While I knew how to count to three," she writes, "I did not know the boundaries of pain and fear." Her food compulsions—from tasting a salt lick she found in the forest as a child to the binging, restriction, and obsessive dieting she vacillated between for years—all had the same appeal: "to beckon toward the impossible dream of making my own microscopic and mysterious cells change according to my will."Read more: Can Pro-Anorexia Websites Actually Help People with Eating Disorders?
Washuta's book is revelatory on women's disordered relationship with food, a subject that would seem to have been covered. She describes how her first "diet," a dangerous 600-calorie-a-day restriction, made her feel empowered and safe, "like good St. Catherine in her iron girdle." Eating disorders are a kind of penance and a kind of fortification and a kind of disguise. It is a paradox of womanhood that women have been so long associated with the private sphere, the home and the family, while our bodies are considered public property. In the climax of We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Merricat sets fire to her house to oust her hateful cousin Charles from her space, ironically opening the house to the citizens of the village, who invade it first to put out the fire and second to ransack it, smashing and destroying all of the sisters' belongings. "It seemed that all the wealth and hidden treasure of our house had been found out and torn and soiled," Merricat says. What was private is made public.Throughout the novel, we are ambivalent about what her relationship with Merricat is doing to Constance. Constance completely shuts herself up in the house after the trial, and though it is clear she longs at times to leave, she knows the world is too dangerous for Merricat—or that Merricat is too dangerous for it. But what Merricat did in the annihilation of their family was promote Constance to the head of the household, freeing her from waiting on ravenous men. The able-bodied men in the novel are described as having monstrous appetites: "The boy ate hugely," Uncle Julian says of their dead brother Thomas, and their cousin Charles is shown "eating hugely of ham and potatoes and fried eggs and hot biscuits and doughnuts and toast." What woman has not wished to be free, at least temporarily, of male appetites? As Washuta writes, she learned from the Disney movieIt was a wealthier, sweeter, frumpier era, when fashion trends tended towards a joyful eclecticism that at times veered gently into the occult.
In its most disordered form, Washuta's dieting in Starvation Mode is transformed from an enforcement of the male gaze to a kind of purifying fire, reducing her body to what cannot be consumed or destroyed. "I wanted a body that was a plywood box," she writes, "one that, even if it were broken open, might be full of nothing fragile." In the same way, the fire has diminished Merricat and Constance's house to its necessary parts, specifically the areas of the house that revolve around food: the kitchen, the cellar, and the garden. Like in the hunger-addled body, they have achieved a unity of fortification and vulnerability, a perfect isolation, as their house becomes "a castle, turreted and open to the sky."It is a paradox of womanhood that women have been so long associated with the private sphere, the home and the family, while our bodies are considered public property.