Paula Rego's witches

Mulvey-Roberts, Marie

Abstract

This paper will argue that Paula Rego’s illustrations of Blake Morrison’s Pendle Witches (1996) make counter-intuitive and subversive interactions between image and word, to reveal unexpected connections with women and witches. I will suggest that her attraction to seventeenth-century witch-hunts paralleled the network of spies and informers in her native Portugal, operating under a Fascist military dictatorship. From having lived in a country in which women were denied their human rights and subjected to an enforced femininity, Rego compensates through her art by portraying dominant and defiant women.
Rego’s etching, Witches at their Incantations after Salvator Rosa (1991), transposes colour into monochrome and casts darkness into light, to give greater visibility and satiric resonance to Salvator Rosa’s exposure of the secret rites of witches (c.1646). Thirty years earlier in 1612, the Pendle Witches trial took place in Lancashire. Chief witness for the prosecution was Jennet Device, a nine-year-old girl, whose testimony sent her mother and the rest of her family members, amongst others, to the gallows. Two of the condemned witches, her grandmother, “Old Demdike” and “Old Chattox”, were the octogenarian heads of two separate families. This paper will discuss how their confessions perpetuated the stereotypes of hag-like post-menopausal women and how, at the same time, these attributes could be empowering, as indicated in Morrison’s poem, “Old Witches”:
The more blind, deaf, lame, arthritis,
hairy-chinned, bowbacked and incontinent,
The greater the power they have.

Similarly, it will be shown how Rego recuperates the power of the witch or hag through her representations of the aging woman.

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (unpublished)
• Conference Name: Crones, Crime and the Gothic
• Start Date: Jun 10, 2022
• End Date: Jun 11, 2022
• Deposit Date: Apr 29, 2024
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/11930321