Rite as Social Myth in The Witches of Eastwick

I wrote this in May '05 as a free topic paper for a fascinating class on church ritual; as may be apparent, I was kind of desperate for a topic. Sort of like a Socialist analysis of Hamlet, only less learned. It may get you into that '84 zeitgeist, though.

For a book about witchcraft, John Updike’s The Witches of Eastwick barely focuses on the three title witches’ rituals together, not even in the third of the book entitled “The Coven.” Rather, the book functions as an exploration of liberated womanhood, and imagines what happens when that womanhood bumps into a masculinity whose power can challenge it. (A couple caveats if you’ve seen the movie: book and movie are virtually nothing alike, aside from some almost coincidental similarities; and I’m pretty sure the witches’ literary masculine counterpart Darryl Van Horne is not the devil.) At the beginning “The Coven,” though, Updike does show us one of the witches’ Thursday night meetings, and, at “The Coven”’s end, counterpoints it with the first of the sexually charged, Van Horne-sponsored meetings that will soon take over their lives. If you want (and you understandably might not), you can read the witches’ pre-Van Horne Thursday night gatherings as parodies of rite, with their founding myth the women’s liberation from unfulfilling marriages and subsequent realization of all their feminine powers.

Here’s a basic “Coven” plot outline. Alexandra, Jane, and Sukie are witches in the small Rhode Island town of Eastwick. They’ve been witches ever since their marriages ended and they felt their powers expand to engage the natural forces of the world. (From pages 77-8 of the Fawcett Crest mass market edition: “Then in mid-marriage [Alexandra’s] own body disgusted her. It was the body outside, beyond the windows, that light-struck, water-riddled, foliate flesh of that other self the world to which beauty still clung; when divorce came it was as though she had flown through that window… The morning after the decree, she was up at four, pulling up dead pea plants and singing by moonlight… This other body too had a spirit.”) Since then, they’ve been regularly meeting on Thursday nights to drink, gossip, and act out this forming myth of their new union with nature and each other. In their private lives, they sleep around with most of the married men in town and practice their respective arts of sculpture, cello playing, and newspaper features writing. When the repulsively alluring New York millionaire scientist/ musician/ art collecter Darryl Van Horne moves into the town mansion, they are drawn to him and eventually focus their sexual and spiritual energy on him. At chapter’s end, the witches have the first of many regular orgies at the mansion, and these orgies will eventually supplant their Thursday rituals together. This leads to plenty of jealousy, guilt, and evil spells that make an annoying townswoman spit out feathers, but those are other chapters.

So what do these Thursday night rituals consist of? Not much, but Updike tells us enough to infer that some regular activities take place. They eat junk food and drink liquor in someone’s living room, cattily talk (notably with the TV off) about the townspeople and the men they’re sleeping with, complain about their many children, and eventually attain a sort of spiritual high. Updike establishes that the three have a well-established relationship: “Alexandra tended to dominate, when the three were together, by being somewhat sullen and inert, making the other two come to her” (p.34). He goes on to describe the culmination of all this togetherness: “On those Thursdays the three friends would conjure up the specters of Eastwick’s little lives and set them buzzing and circling in the darkening air. In the right mood and into their third drinks they could erect a cone of power about them like a tent to the zenith, and know at the base of their bellies who was sick, who was sinking into debt, who was loved, who was frantic, who was burning, who was asleep in a remission of life’s bad luck…” (p.36). Updike is taking a parodistic view of a divorced women’s support group (sort of like the overly loud and annoying ladies who meet in the movie Jerry Maguire to get in touch with their anger) and turning the group’s meetings into rite. The women meet because they have rid themselves of their men; this riddance frees them to realize the full power of their formerly constrained womanhood, which is intimately tied into the forces of nature; the symbols of their together-liberation are those things women do on a “girls’ night out.” The junk food, drinks, sex talk, and complaints about the kids all point to the fact that the women are unattached to those things that formerly bound them, and they also bring about the women’s repeated weekly re-liberation. Through these acts the women “erect a cone of power” and unify themselves with each other and the forces that control their surroundings.

When the meetings with Darryl replace the Thursday nights, the women don’t immediately feel the loss. After all, a large part of their regular conversation is devoted to discussing their affairs, so regular sexual activity in the exotic setting of Darryl’s mansion must seem like a positive development. We realize in the later chapters, though, that without their regular witches’ meetings--without regularly acting out their myth of independence-through-divorce-leading-to-formerly-unrealized-power--the women’s lives take on an emptiness. Their spirits grow smaller and meaner, and they become cruel towards their neighbors and one another.

If there’s an analog in our Christian worship, it may be when we mistake the things we do in worship for the reason we worship. The reason the witches of Eastwick “worship” is to enact their continuing feminine liberation power. They do this through practicing a hedonism previously forbidden them by the demands of responsible marriage. When they practice this hedonism for its own sake and in a setting that renders impossible their myth’s enactment (i.e., an orgy with a man), they escalate the myth’s obvious trappings but make its true fulfillment impossible. A direct Christian parallel is difficult, but we might experience something similar if we replace our worship with a steady diet of hymn-sings or contemporary Christian concerts. Or if we allow a pastor or musician to become the inappropriate focus of our worship--a “Darryl Van Horne,” to be sort of crass. In the former situation, worship may still be possible, but it will be harder; and if it leads to the second situation, our worship rite won’t work.