#mona chollet

One way to interpret the scenario of the woman rejected in midlife is to understand that her partner can no longer bear to see in her, as if in a mirror, the signs of his own ageing. Or perhaps he leaves his middle-aged wife so that he is free to rejuvenate himself via a new partner: ‘Loving the next generation is a kind of vampirism’, according to Frédéric Beigbeder, for example, who takes pride in his 'Dracula side’. But we may also consider a different theory: he sees his wife's ageing, but not his own. 'Men have no bodies' - so says Virginie Despentes, who, in my opinion, we should be taking at her word. Men's dominant position in economics and politics, in love and family relationships, but also in the artistic and literary worlds allows them to be absolute subjects and to make women into absolute objects. Western culture decided early on that the body was repulsive - and also that it was female, and vice versa. Theologians and philosophers projected their horror of the body onto women, and were thereby able to disavow the claims of their own bodies. Saint Augustine explains that, in men, the body reflects the soul, but that this isn't the case for women.

La femme reste. Parce que. Ce n’est pas qu’elle n’ait pas les armes. Elle les a. Elle l’a lu, elle a réfléchi. Mais elle croit peut-être encore qu’il est de son devoir et de son pouvoir d’aimer, d’aimer plus que tout. Elle croit que l’amour rachètera le mal. Elle a lu l’histoire de Pénélope attendant le retour d’Ulysse, celle d’Ariane offrant une pelote de fil à Thésée pour lui permettre de s’échapper du labyrinthe. Elle pense que la patience, la douceur, l’assistance sont des vertus inaltérables. Elle pense, sans se l’avouer, que les femmes sont douées pour cela – peut-être même pense-t-elle qu’elles sont faites pour cela. Elles se trompe. Elle ne voit pas qu’elle s’engouffre dans des schémas archaïques, des schémas qu’il la réduisent, et qui pourraient l’anéantir. Qu’elle s’engouffre dans sa propre désagrégation. 

The first feminist to disinter the witches’ story and to claim this title for herself was the American Matilda Joslyn Gage, who fought for women's right to vote and also for the rights of Native Americans and the abolition of slavery—she was given a prison sentence for helping slaves to escape. In Woman, Church and State (1893), she offered a feminist reading of the witch-hunts: “When for ‘witches’ we read ‘women’, we gain fuller comprehension of the cruelties inflicted by the church upon this portion of humanity.” Gage inspired the character of Glinda, the good witch in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which was written by her son-in-law, L. Frank Baum. When he adapted the novel for cinema in 1939, Victor Fleming created the first "good witch" in popular culture.

But independence is not the sole preserve of widows and singles. It can also occur in the home itself, right under a husband's nose. This is indeed the symbolism of the witch's nocturnal flights, which lead her to desert the marital bed, escaping the sleeping man's vigilance, to straddle her broomstick and take off for the sabbath. In the demonologists' tirades, which betray the masculine obsessions of their times, the witch's flight, as Armelle Le Bras-Chopard describes it, respesents: "...a freedom to come and go, not only without the husband's permission but generally without his knowledge (unless he is a witch himself) and even to his disadvantage. By picking up a broomstick or chair leg and placing it between her legs, the witch awards herself a simulacrum of the virile member that she lacks. And by artificially stepping outside her sex and giving herself that of a man, she is also stepping outside her female gender: the witch is able to accord herself the ease of movement that, within the standard social order, is the unique privilege of men. [...] Granting herself this autonomy, and thereby escaping the man whose principal freedom is manifest through his dominance over her, the witch spirits a portion of the man's power away from him: her liberation is also a larceny."

Back from a trip to Hydra, a Greek girlfriend tells me that, on display in the local museum, she saw the embalmed heart of the Hydriot sailor who most fiercely fought off the Turks. "Do you think, if we were to eat it, we could become as brave as he was?" she asks me, thoughtfully. [...]