13 - The Witches of Eastwick

Summary

ALEXANDRA SPOFFORD, THE HEROINE OF The Witches of Eastwick (1984), is not Updike's first female protagonist. Couples occasionally presents the thoughts of its female characters, especially Foxy Whitman and Janet Appleby; Rabbit, Run periodically, and sympathetically, enters the consciousnesses of Janice Angstrom and Ruth Leonard; and another Ruth, Ruth Conant, takes over Marry Me for nearly half of its length. But The Witches of Eastwick is the first novel in which Updike solely follows female consciousness. He does so, at least in part, in order to examine the flip side of the sort of lusty male imagination limned so expertly in the Scarlet Letter trilogy and in many of his short stories of the 1960s and 1970s. That is, The Witches of Eastwick is a novel about female power, a power that is explicitly presented as a form of imagination, a projection of the female mind on the natural world. But this projection is itself projected on by the male imagination, in the form of the disruptive and dismantling presence of Darryl Van Horne, which systematically interrupts and destroys the power of the novel's heroines.

The power of the witches in this novel is heavily connected with the natural world. We are told early on that “this air of Eastwick empowered women.” Updike often describes the magic of the natural world in feminist terms. For example, he hints that there is something special in Rhode Island that will foster natural female power: “Once you cross the state line, whether at Pawtucket or Westerly, a subtle change occurs, a cheerful dishevelment, a contempt for appearances, a chimerical uncharing. Beyond the clapboard slums yawn lunar stretches where only an abandoned roadside stand offering the ghost of last summer's CUKES betrays the yearning, disruptive presence of man” (9). The word man does double duty in this passage—it suggests, on the one hand, all of humanity, suggesting that much of Rhode Island is a world apart from human civilization. But on the other hand, it suggests a specifically masculine humanity and suggests that women can prosper in an uncivilized world to a degree that men simply cannot. Women are thus in tune with nature at its smallest and most intricate level; for example, as she looks at a cabinet door, Alexandra is “conscious of the atomic fury spinning and skidding beneath such a surface, like an eddy of weary eyesight” (4).