Critical Notes on Vinegar Tom

1.  Dramaturgical note offered in the program by Terry Prewitt

2.  Lecture by Robin Blyn before the February 22 performance

1.  These notes appeared in the program of the play.  Because the play is, in places, quite difficult to watch, we wanted  to prepare the audiences for the idea that they would not be watching a strictly "period" work engaged in historical interests.  My brief thoughts on the relevance of Vinegar Tom for our audiences links to my other work in the areas of phallocentric and sexual violence:

Vinegar Tom dramatizes not only the formal system for witchcraft trials of early modern Europe, symbolized especially in the Malleus Maleficarum or "Hammer of Witches," but also some of the persistent folklore of English and Irish culture at that time.  Indeed, in many parts of Europe and North America, witchcraft trials depended especially upon the common "charms" used widely for protection against agricultural losses in rural areas.  But some areas, especially southeast England and New England, were more prone to actual witchcraft allegations.  There was little concern with such magic in the Virginia and Carolina colonies, for example, and a more pragmatic concern with spells and charms in Appalachia.

Caryl Churchill’s play preceded Anne Barstow’s confirming history, Witchcraze: A New History of the European Witch Hunts (1994), by almost twenty years.  The play includes more "ethnographic" material on fear of neighbors and "stealing butter" well-attested in such works as Kevin Danaher’s The Year in Ireland: Irish Calendar Customs (1972).  Most important, the use of terror and rape as tactics of "righteous trial," directed mainly against women who were not under the protection of men, offers the starkest kind of institutional misogyny in our cultural history.  There is little also doubt that such gender violence was justified by narrow, phallocentric biblical readings.  We should not forget that the only "trial by ordeal" in the Torah (Numbers 5: 11-29) was for a woman accused of adultery—though the penalty was not death.  The scenes of humiliation and mistrust endured by the "witches" of the 15th century, however, is not far removed from the forensic investigation after a rape endured by women in our time.

Anthropology and theater share at least one common goal, the elucidation of cultural potentials by representing in immediately accessible ways the premises through which we conduct our lives.  This play has been called "preachy" by some critics.  But our production of Vinegar Tom has pursued an end of heightening awareness of history, culture, and humanity.  And though parts of the play may present difficult actions and language, we encounter only our own ghosts and fears.

"Making a Spectacle: Women Take the Stage"

Robin Blyn, Assistant Professor
Department of English

Evil Women
Is that what you want?
Is that what you want to see?
On the movie screen
Of your wet dream
Evil Women

Evil Women
Is that what you want?
Is that what you want to see?
In your movie dream
Do they scream and scream?
Evil Women
Evil Women

These are lyrics from the song that ends Caryl Churchill’s Vinegar Tom.  They are provocative lyrics, to say the least, lyrics that collapse the distance between the spectacle of "evil women" in the witch trials of the 17th century and the more contemporary spectacle of "evil women" on the "movie screens" and "movie dreams" of our own historical moment.   Evil Women…Is that what you want to see?  By posing such a question, Churchill’s play challenges us, the audience of her own play.  We are the "you" it addresses; we are the people who have purchased tickets to watch the spectacle of "evil women" as a form of entertainment.  In so doing, these lyrics imply, we have revealed our likeness to the 15th, 16th, and 17th century crowds who gathered to witness so-called witches as they were tortured, drowned, hung, and burned at the stake.

The spectacular destruction of "evil women," this play thus insists, is not a bit of sordid history that we have long ago left behind. Rather, with us still is both the demonization of criminalized women and the pleasure of seeing such women "scream and scream," the pleasure, that is, of seeing them burned at the stake of the Hollywood box office and the Broadway theater.  By emphasizing the links between our own historical moment and the 17th century drama it performs on the stage for our enjoyment, Vinegar Tom leaves us finally with a profoundly troubling insight. For the extent to which we desire to see women rendered evil and destroyed suggests that we still harbor fears about women that are as irrational and as ingrained as those which sustained witch hunts on both sides of the Atlantic some 300 years ago.  Behind our pleasures in "evil women" lurk our collectively unacknowledged fears.

Ironically, in the play it is the character named Alice who voices the larger social attraction to the spectacle of "evil women" and the desires that inform the pleasure of seeing such women "scream and scream."  In the very first scene, when her illicit and mysterious lover reveals that he has seen a witch burnt in Scotland, Alice can’t contain her curiosity.  "Did the spirits fly out of her like bats?," she asks, "Did the devil make the sky go dark? … Did she fly at night on a stick?"  Her lover counters this kind of cultural fantasy surrounding witches with details about "cords that wrench the head" and "boots that break the bones." Yet, rather than shrinking from the prospect of such a spectacle, Alice sounds downright wistful.  " I long to see that," she says, "Nothing ever happens here."  At this point, Alice approaches the idea of the suffering and execution of a woman much as contemporary audiences approach, with "fatal attraction," a horror film in which "evil women" get their due in the end.  The entertainment value of the spectacle of "evil women" as they are subjected to pain emerges here as a compensation for a boring life, a bit of excitement that Alice herself is denied.

The critical irony of Alice’s desire to see the execution of a witch, however, is one which we can only appreciate later in the play, when Alice herself becomes the object of a witch hunt that is not far away in Scotland.  Rather, the witch hunt erupts, as it were, in her own backyard.  Alice’s desire to see the spectacle of the evil woman thus not only misses the prejudices that define "evil women" in the first place, but also the relevance of those executions to her own life. Evil Women… Is that what you want to see?  By asking this question of us, Churchill’s play forces us to see what Alice cannot.  It forces us to see that our own attraction to the spectacle of evil women is based upon a dangerous cultural fantasy as relevant to our own lives as it is to the long ago and far away context of rural England in the 17th century.

Vinegar Tom, I am suggesting, is a play that is as much about 1976, the year it was written, as it is about 1676.  As a product of the sexual liberation movements of the 1960s and the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s, the play takes part in a larger project: the efforts on the part of women to reclaim the stages of spectacle culture from the control of a partriarchal society.  In this larger project, we can find a liberation of spectacle from its emphasis on "evil women" to an emphasis on the social conditions that would render women evil in the first place and cause popular audiences to take pleasure in their "screams."  By making a spectacle of such a society, Vinegar Tom makes visible that which contemporary culture continues to hide from itself: the fact of its repressed and repressive sexuality.  In Vinegar Tom, such repression leads to an eruption of misogynist energy wherein women who provoke desire, or dare to have desires of their own, become scapegoats, villains who maintain the patriarchal order through their identification and spectacular destruction.  In Vinegar Tom, the way that women become "evil" has everything to do with sexual anxieties and desires that must be either contained or repressed.

One useful way of understanding the link between the witch hunt and the perception of sexual deviance is by way of a term that has been used to describe both: hysteria.  When Arthur Miller wrote The Crucible, he dramatized the Red Scare of the 1950s allegorically as a witch hunt.  In this way, he implied that the fear of communism in the U.S. had reached hysterical proportions nurtured by a notion of evil that sacrificed human rights in the name of preserving the power of petty tyrants. Like the fears of women that underwrite the witch hunts of the 17th century, The Crucible suggests, the fears of communism had reached a level of irrational panic. Vinegar Tom similarly associates the idea of a witch hunt with irrational fears and with the demands of preserving a power structure, one in which the petty tyrants are part and parcel of a patriarchal society.  However, Churchill’s play adds a new dimension.  It links the hysteria of the witch hunt to a much more precise definition of hysteria, one which has enjoyed a much longer history: hysteria as a female disorder defined in terms of sexual aberration.

The word "hysteria" is derived from the Greek "hystera," which means "uterus." At the time of its earliest usage, hysteria thus referred to a specifically female condition and the link between hysteria and the female remains powerfully present in the long history that follows the term.  Evens though hysteria’s symptoms-- paralysis, paroxysms, trances, fleeting pains, and the inability to speak—could be observed in men as well as women, the  diagnosis of "hysteria" has most often been reserved for female victims.  In ancient Egypt and in the Greco-Roman era, hysteria is understood in terms of the "wandering womb," a malady wherein the uterus, likened to a small animal, migrates from its proper position in the body.  According to the Greeks and Romans, the disorder was thought to occur most often in "mature women who were deprived of sexual relations" (10).  Widows and spinsters are hence particularly vulnerable to hysteria.  While the Greco-Roan understanding of hysteria as an anatomical problem will ultimately be rejected by later ages, the notion that hysteria arises as a matter of female sexual dysfunction remains powerfully influential.

In the context of Medieval Christianity, the Greco-Roman view of hysteria undergoes considerable revision. Rather than being an anatomical problem caused by sexual deprivation, hysteria serves as evidence for a woman’s alliance with unholy powers, as evidence that is, of her dalliance with the devil. Bewitched by the devil, the hysterical woman transforms from a victim of sexual deprivation to a carnal and sexually over-active victimizer. Here, "evil women" voluntarily prostitute themselves to the devil.  Yet, the text of the Malleus Maleficarum, a tome written in 1494 and known in England as "The Witch’s Hammer," admits that men, too, can be possessed by the devil. Indeed, the text struggles with the question of why women are so much more likely to be identified as witches than men.   The answer the text arrives at is the very one articulated by Susan, in Churchill’s Vinegar Tom.  Sprung from Eve, women are simply more carnal than men and more given to deception.  As the Malleus Maleficarum intones:

What else is woman but a foe to friendship, an unescapable punishment, a necessary evil, a natural temptation, a desirable calamity, a domestic danger, a delectable detriment, an evil of nature, painted with fair colours! (qtd in Veith 63).

"Evil women" are identified so often as witches, the Malleus Maleficarum concludes, because they are simply more prone to evil.  That such a view of women might constitute a prejudice that makes women more suspicious is apparently a view never countenanced in the Middle Ages.  Hysteria, embodied in the medieval witch, is a metaphysical condition manifested in the form of a sexual license that is perceived as both deviant and dangerous to the social body.  Vinegar Tom bears witness to the staying power of this peculiarly sexual construction of "evil woman."

By the end of the 19th century, however, hysteria had become the object of scientific study.  In fact, hysteria plays a central role in the emergence of psychoanalysis and its rise to legitimacy.  Interestingly, as it transforms from a metaphysical malady to a psychological one, hysteria retains its essential link with sexual aberration.  Women who are diagnosed with hysteria, the scientists conclude, are acting out socially unacceptable sexual desires and fears.  In the hysterical fit, repressed desires and sexual anxieties are revived.  As Sigmund Freud would have it, the hysterical response continues to be a response to sexuality that the female subject can neither adequately repress nor recognize. What clerics of the Middle Ages identify as a female evil, 19th century scientists identify as a female sickness.  Despite all of their differences in points of view, both associate their female subjects with sexual deviance.  Vinegar Tom ultimately makes a case that challenges both sets of experts.

In this play, hysteria ceases to be a female disease, a deviant female sexuality that turns women into witches or mentally ill victims of incomplete repression.  Rather, in Vinegar Tom, it is the sexual fears and desires of men that both represent a hysterical response and which provoke the mass hysteria of the witch hunt.  Projecting their own sexual anxieties onto the women who they desire, these men protect themselves against acknowledging their own socially unacceptable desires and the fears that women provoke in them.  Instead of seeing themselves as deviant or criminal, these men choose to see themselves as "bewitched" by "evil women."  In Vinegar Tom, this pattern is inescapable.  As you view the play this evening, you will see men who desire that which their society prohibits.  You will see unmarried men who desire sex without marriage and married men who prefer unmarried women to their wives.  Each of these men will name the woman they desire a "witch."  So, too, you will see men who fear their own impotence and choose to blame their own sexual dysfunction on the spell of a female "witch," a woman who denies their sexual advances.  If hysteria is a sexual dysfunction, in Vinegar Tom it is the dysfunction not of women or the devil, but of men frightened of their own desires.

Moreover, Vinegar Tom portrays the ways in which women who do not conform to the containment of sexuality in the form of marriage pose a particular threat to a patriarchal society.  These women, including the sexually active Alice, who no one will marry, and the sexually disinterested Betty, who refuses to marry, pose challenges that can only be met in two ways.  Either the woman is condemned as a witch or identified as ill, in need of a cure.  In the play’s treatment of Betty, the link between the hysteric and the witch is most explicit.  Imprisoned in her home and treated by doctors who bleed her with leeches, Betty’s unwillingness to marry is diagnosed as hysteria, a sexual disorder.  Her refusal to marry and thus enter into the social contract that requires her sexual participation is merely the mirror image, the opposite extreme, of Alice’s sexual license.  In this society, both are equally deviant; both are equally dangerous.  Ultimately, Betty’s only choices are to be "cured" of "hysteria" by the good doctors and to agree to the marriage arranged for her, or to become subject to the hysteria of the witch hunt.  Through its depiction of Alice and Betty, Vinegar Tom challenges both the metaphysicians and the psychoanalysts.  Hysteria ends up not to be a female malady at all.  Rather, it ends up to be a male response to fears about sexuality, fears that manifest themselves in the mass hysteria of the witch hunt.  In the process, "evil women" become the scapegoat for men who can neither repress nor acknowledge socially unacceptable desires.

Evil Women…  Is that what you want to see?  Vinegar Tom suspects that the answer might well be "yes."  It interrogates us with its questions in order that we might interrogate ourselves and the desires and fears about women that continue to define our popular culture and which bear witness to prejudices we would rather not admit.  By staging this play in the year 2003, our theater program at UWF similarly asks us to consider these prejudices and their relationship to a long and troubled history. It is not merely a matter of the legacy we inherit. At stake is the legacy we choose to pass on.