Of Women and Witches: Performing the Female Body in Caryl Churchill's Vinegar Tom

Of Women and WitchesPerforming the Female Body in Caryl Churchill's Vinegar Tom Mamata Sengupta (bio) In patriarchy, women's attempts at recording their personal and collective stories against the metanarrative of recorded history have often been met with severe sociocultural prohibitions. From Lilith and Medusa to Joan of Arc, the examples of female persecution in mythology and history on grounds of their exceptionality and defiance are numerous. The British playwright Caryl Churchill takes issue with the seventeenth-century tradition of witch hunting in her 1976 play Vinegar Tom. The present article attempts to reread the play to understand how patriarchy interprets women's attempts at self-actualization as symptomatic of different incurable and inbred "feminine" abnormalities like physical sickness, psychological derangement, and spiritual corruption. I also address how Churchill's female characters in the play revolt against all such patriarchal stereotypes and thereby register the tales of their potentially disruptive experiences in the official history of the "malekind." Vinegar Tom premiered on October 12, 1976, at the Humberside Theatre, Hull, under the direction of Pam Brighton. The play, as Churchill notes, is the first of her collaborative projects: "Early in 1976 I met some of the Monstrous Regiment, who were thinking they would like to do a play about witches. … Soon I met the whole company to talk about working with them. … I leftthe meeting exhilarated. My previous work had been completely solitary—I never discussed my ideas while I was writing or showed anyone anything earlier than a final polished draft."1 Vinegar Tom, therefore, is a product as much of Churchill's [End Page 141] creative imagination as of Monstrous Regiment's critical instinct. On the one hand, Churchill's reading of books such as Witches, Midwives and Nurses: A History of Women Healers, by the American writers Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, and Witchcraftin Tudor and Stuart England: A Regional and Comparative Study, by the British anthropologist and historian Alan Macfarlane, provided the play with its theoretical/thematic background. On the other hand, the decidedly socio-feminist stance of the Monstrous Regiment guided Churchill's treatment of the theme. Two other notable influences were the 1968 Ford sewing machinist strike by the female employees against Ford's discriminatory wage structure and the 1970 Equal Pay Act that came into effect as a direct offshoot of the 1968 strike. Undoubtedly, the "witches" of Vinegar Tom have inherited a lot from these deviant female employees of Ford whose sheer determination, persistence, and hope for a better tomorrow paved the way for the 1970s Equal Pay Bill. Set in a small seventeenth-century English village, Vinegar Tom deals with the struggle between truth and superstition. It attempts to see through the sociocultural discourses of female insanity and corruption to show how patriarchy manipulates these categories in order to fulfill its sexual, social, and religious needs and aspirations. As the alternative theatre critic Catherine Itzin comments, Churchill's Vinegar Tom "may be set in the world of seventeenth-century witchcraft, but it speaks, through its striking images and its plethora of ironic contradictions, of and to this century's still deep-rooted anti-feminism and women's oppression."2 Vinegar Tom is divided into twenty-one scenes that tell the tale of five women—Alice, Joan, Susan, Ellen, and Betty—who are accused of practicing witchcraft. The first of these "witchy" women is the twenty-year-old village girl Alice, whose headstrong nature, uninhibited sexuality, and constant questioning of the social givens attempts to dismantle the patriarchal categorization of women as either "bloody whores" or "pious virgins." As a self-assertive woman, Alice rejects both these categories and demands a place in society independent of her gender-identity. The play opens with her postcoital conversation with an anonymous man regarding the "sin"-fullness of their relation.3 While the man, as a representative patriarch, has no qualms in using Alice as a sexual object but refuses to accept her responsibility or to take her to London, Alice has no such problems in acknowledging both her sexual needs and the absence of paternal affiliation to her child, "I'll do what gives us pleasure."4 And again, alice: I've...