Men are afraid of powerful women. This statement could be verified in the fairy tales. We could find gender biases in each fairy tale, they permeate the ideology of patriarchal culture, in which the role of the princess/queen is created through male’s own imagination and value judgments towards women. The typical heroine is the embodiment of ideal women under the control of patriarchal society and develops into a set of “femininity” about ideal women: beauty, loyalty, mild, obedience and passive. The fairy tales intentionally or unintentionally strengthen and transform the patriarchal social value to the formation of female roles such as princesses or any “good woman”, so that they can grow up accordingly to the roles expected by men. The negative characters in these stories are typically the witches. Since their birth, the witches in Grimm fairy tales have labeled as evil, the representatives of the dark forces, and the villains need to be slaughtered and cut up. Evil nature, ugly appearance, this is the witch images we all know very well now.
The witches’s appearance in the fairy tales also indicates the witch deal in the mid-century, which these women were depicted as the similar way in the fairy tales as witches and were executed. The gender biases caused by patriarchy are the reason why people were accused of witchcraft. Even though people are no longer accused of witchcraft and people are aware of feminism, double standards still exist. What is a witch? Years ago, I read a book called Witch Phenomenon In Fairy Tale by Luo Ting. Ting mentioned that in the past, there are some women in Europe who know how to heal headaches with oil and water, how to remove the pimples from the skin, and they even know how to help a lovelorn person find a new love. They have rich life wisdom and a wealth of physiological knowledge. They connected society and played an important social role. Jia Tolentino also talked about this aspect of witches in “The Truth About Witches.”
“It was part of a larger intellectual and spiritual system; it had a function, both on the higher end of culture (in terms of reifying sexist dogma and power structures) but it also had a function on an interpersonal level (to help people cope with tragedy and unfairness)”. We could see that witches are needed in these times, and they could gain a good social status because of it. How could their situation get so terrible from the beginning that they are respected? I suggest some reasons from what I researched and from my thoughts. In the Middle Ages, the West was dominated by men. Women’s status in social life was declining, and patriarchal ideology was becoming more and more deeply rooted. On the other hand, since the Middle Ages, Europe has been suffering from disasters, wars, and people had no scientific understanding of natural and human-made disasters. The lack of understanding made them feel uneasy, helpless and afraid. These uneasy people connected the seemingly supernatural healing skills of witches to the idea that witches secretly manipulate people to do cruel things.
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Under this background, the witches’ particular identity and ability made them more suitable to become the ideal victim of the people, so that those who lacked a sense of security blamed all kinds of misfortunes on them, such as natural disasters, war, and plagues. For all these reasons, cases of witch hunting raged. Once a woman was suspected of being a witch, she was rarely released, and every answer at the trial could be arranged as evidence of guilt. They were forced to admit the ‘witch’s crime.” That is, to associate with the Satanic devil, doing things against the villagers and using incantations to make the whole village seriously ill, and so on. For instance, Katharina Henot was one who was sentenced to death for being a ‘black magic witch” 391 years ago. Henot was a noblewoman in Cologne, Germany. She inherited her father’s position as secretary of the post, and was probably the first female Postmaster in Germany. However, she was attacked by rumors: she was first believed to have been linked to insect infestation and death in a monastery;
Then, a nun reported to the authorities that Henot was the witch who performed sorcery. She did not plead guilty, but she was convicted only because of the oral testimony of two witnesses. In the end, she was hanged, and the body was burned in the fire until it was turned to ashes (baijiahao.baidu.com). From this case, we can believe that the “crime of witch” was also the fear of the male authorities that females would challenge their status. In an interview with Der Spiegel magazine, the retired German pastor Hartmut Hegler, 67, who has written 17 books for the notorious history of witch trials in Germany, said, “Of course, there is no such thing as a wizard. All charges are fictitious…In the difficult years, the witch became the scapegoat of the local authorities”.
Since last century, more and more people start to recognize gender equality. Feminism became more well known. In bell hooks’s essay, “Come Closer to Feminism,” she said that “Each time I leave one of these encounters, I want to have in my hand a little book so that I can say, read this book, and it will tell you what feminism is, what the movement is about”. People who support this gender equality theory, like bell hooks, advertise it to their family, their friends, and people they met. For the modern society, feminism is not only about equality between males and females, but also about groups such as LGBTQ.
