Week 5: Witches and Women in Genre

Prompt: Discuss the witches in Aunt Maria. Are they stereotypes or archetypes? What do the characters say about the way our culture models women with power?

Response:

Aunt Maria in the book Aunt Maria by Diana Wynne Jones certainly embodies many of the classic stereotypes of a witch, a strong iron willed female who manipulates those around her to do her bidding and "zombifies" men. While these views of witches are in fact widely held in the collective unconscious they paint too one sided a character to truly be an archetype and thus remain relegated to stereotypes. This vilification of strong woman is not limited to witches, in fact if you think back to even the most benign movies you will see this fear perpetuated. Classic Disney Princess movies are a fantastic example of this particular portrayal of women; Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, and even The Little Mermaid all feed into the idea that that strong assertive women are evil while feminine and gentle woman are inherently good. (Snow white vrs Evil Queen, Aurora vrs Maleficent, Cinderella vrs  Lady Tremaine, and Ariel vrs Ursula) This relegation of strong alpha women to evil or "bitch" roles demonstrates our current patriarchal culture's fear of female power and as gender equality progresses you can see a direct correlation in the media of more positively portrayed strong women (Rey from The Force Awakens). This progress, however, does not erase the years long bias our culture has created. 

 (case in point, thank you Fox)

The cool thing about the book Aunt Maria is that even the vilification of Maria the overall message of the book does preach gender equality and balance between the masculine and feminine within one person as seen metaphorically through the sister and brother, Mig and Chris, ultimately needing to work together to become successful.