"Something Wicked This Way Comes" by Caroline Hagood
by Caroline Hagood
My love affair with monsters can be traced to my eccentric childhood, of course. My obsession with the female monster in particular was intensified by witnessing the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz with my parents one fateful evening. See, people use the word fateful without really meditating on its life story. The fates of Greek mythology include Clotho who spins, Lachesis who measures, and Atropos who cuts—her Greek name translating to something like unturnable, representing the inevitability of death and maybe even life itself. Shakespeare later echoed these fates in his three witches, the weird sisters of Macbeth, just boiling boiling toil and trouble all through the night. Which is the long way of saying, in its folds fate holds all women with the power to predict that something wicked this way comes.
Like many weird kids, I didn't have television growing up, but we did have some tapes to insert in the ancient VCR. One of them was The Wizard of Oz. When you only have a few films, you become a scholar of those movies. Even then I saw the need for a woman-made mythology, a man’s world rewritten by women, a wizard’s world rewritten by witches. Most importantly, I saw that the Wicked Witch of the West was a writer, which is what I wanted to be more than anything. As Virginia Woolf knew, “When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs…we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Bronte who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to.”
In the movie, above Emerald City the witch writes in black smoke with her broomstick, surrender Dorothy. When I read the book I found that the Witch of the North, too, was a scribe: “She took off her cap and balanced the point on the end of her nose, while she counted ‘One, two, three’ in a solemn voice. At once the cap changed to a slate, on which was written in big, white chalk marks: ‘LET DOROTHY GO TO THE CITY OF EMERALDS.’” In this moment, I started seeing a connection between women, monsters, and creativity.
It only occurred to me in adulthood that not only are all the people of Oz perhaps parts of Dorothy, but also—maybe most of all—the witches. It’s easier to project the bedeviling parts of women onto witches. At the end of the day, a wart-nosed old hag mounting a broomstick, screwing the devil, and shooting fireballs is far less frightening than your complex, layered, unknowable wife.
The historical feminist underpinnings of Oz’s enchantress underscore the struggle for a woman’s right to be at all multidimensional. One inspiration for L. Frank Baum’s 1900 book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was his mother-in-law, women’s rights activist Matilda Joslyn Gage. In her 1893 book Woman, Church and State, Gage wrote about how, with the religious belief system that gave man God-sanctioned power over the supposedly weaker and more sinful woman, came the saying, “one wizard to 10,000 witches,” and thus the witch hunt became mostly about women. We see women’s expected ancillary role from the beginning of Baum’s book when we discover that, “Dorothy lived in the midst of the great Kansas prairies, with Uncle Henry, who was a farmer, and Aunt Em, who was the farmer's wife.” But the witch didn’t have to be any farmer’s wife. That’s the thing.
The night I watched The Wizard of Oz was fateful because it inaugurated my fascination with this green-faced, tale weaving female monster. She seemed to hold inside her a constellation of things about being a woman and being a writer, something to do with my deep dark desires and the almost sexual excitement I got when I wrote.
When I scribbled in my childhood diary about how the wicked witch was an author, I put her words in red because otherwise I couldn’t tell them from my own. I told the world, surrender, but it never did. I marvel that even so early in my life I had streaked my page, that supposedly innocent white land, with witchy blood. It seems I’d caught myself being monstrous again. I didn’t even intend it. It just happened, and I was helpless to hinder it. As Hélène Cixous so perfectly puts it, “Who, surprised and horrified by the fantastic tumult of her drives…hasn’t accused herself of being a monster? Who, feeling a funny desire stirring inside her (to sing, to write, to dare to speak, in short, to bring out something new), hasn’t thought she was sick?”
And what of my own inner monster? I loved and feared her, I hid her and showed her off. Even the mention of her sends a thrill through me. But I’m scared to tell you too much about her even now. It seems risky to let you too near. Like all monsters, her survival has depended on the distance I’ve given her from the pitchfork-wielding villagers. She started as a monster infant, but now she’s an adult and her tenure there has become problematic. She’s ripping me to shreds, requesting room service, hookers, cigars. What frightens me most, though, is I’ve gotten to a point where everything I write is tattooed with her escape attempts. I’ve come to see her as my creativity freedom fighter, the one who will cut you if you suggest women writers are inferior or should be in a kitchen or something instead of at a writing desk.
In the movie, Dorothy’s description of her first witch-spotting is pretty wonderful in its upheaval of the order of things—the way the film’s world is remade by her arrival in it. And let’s not forget that Dorothy is accused of being a witch herself at various points in the story. Dorothy sings the tale to the Munchkins, again recalling a writer recounting a narrative: “What happened was just this: The wind began to switch—the house to pitch. And suddenly the hinges started to unhitch. Just then, the witch—to satisfy an itch—went flying on her broomstick thumbing for a hitch.” Whoa and the sexual innuendo. I never saw that as a kid. That’s another thing that will get a woman labeled monstrous: even the slightest whiff of horniness.
I have always felt some deep sense of creativity and power to be found in monsters and haunted houses, in learning to dwell in darkness without reaching after light. At night when we drove in the car, I cocked my head, squinted my eyes, and the taillights became evil fairy things. As all the adults who visited my house reminded me, I was such a “sweet girl,” but there appeared to be some sort of nascent insurrection inside of me.
I claimed my own creative witch power at the age of ten when I wrote my first novel, with pencil in a Marble composition notebook. My magnum opus was abysmal of course, but it was a start. The night I finished writing my book, I read Anne Sexton’s “Her Kind” for the first time: “I have gone out, a possessed witch, / haunting the black air, braver at night; / dreaming evil, I have done my hitch / over the plain houses, light by light: / lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind. / A woman like that is not a woman, quite. / I have been her kind.” I couldn’t stop talking about the poem with my parents that evening. Not that I could articulate it then, but what strikes me now is this: here’s this she-monster-poet persona who can soar around the neighborhood and is therefore amazing, but she’s disqualified from being considered either a woman or amazing because of her monstrousness. If my parents had been a different sort, they might have contacted a mental health practitioner or maybe even the police at that point, but they knew the mythos I’d grown up on. They were aware that I was an only child, but my real siblings were monsters. What’s more, I could have sworn I recognized Sexton’s “hitch” in her witchy description from that catchy witch-slaying tune in The Wizard of Oz, and its magic woman who “went flying on her broomstick thumbing for a hitch.” Had Anne Sexton and I been salivating over that same green-faced marvel? The guy who wrote Wicked certainly had.
Caroline Hagood’s first book of poetry, Lunatic Speaks, was published in 2012, and her second poetry book, Making Maxine’s Baby, a small press bestseller, came out in 2015 from Hanging Loose Press. Her book-length essay, Ways of Looking at a Woman, also a small press bestseller, came out in March of 2019 from Hanging Loose. Her writing has also appeared in The Kenyon Review, the Huffington Post, the Guardian, Salon, and the Economist. She’s a Staff Blogger for the Kenyon Review, a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow at Fordham University, and a Creative Writing Instructor at Barnard and Fordham.
