Etched on the body: Fear of the female in Ainsworth's The Lancashire Witches

This thesis explores the textual and discursive construction of the witch figure in 16th and 17th century Europe through William Harrison Ainsworth's The Lancashire Witches (1848). As a Victorian representative of English literature, the novel accounts a fictionalized version of the Pendle witchcraft trials that were held in 1612 while taking its characters from the only 'historical' recount of the trials, Thomas Potts' The Wonderful Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster (1613). Using Michel Foucault's theory of "power-knowledge interrelationship", this study argues how the concept of witch hunt had become synonymous with women hunting, made possible by, what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak calls, the "epistemic violence" that was exercised by patriarchy over the female body. This defilement of the constituted knowledge of women is explained with the depictions within the novel that shows how the female sex was branded essentially evil and sinful by their nature, through discursive and textual means that Christian theology, demonology, and the inquisition had manufactured. The character Thomas Potts highlights how the agents of patriarchy hinged their arguments on the discourse that is created by the dominant power during the trials, especially for their own political benefit. The main aim is to show how the female sex was epistemically violated by the produced knowledge of these institutions because of the castration anxiety that the "abject" female body emanates for the male dominance, which is underlined by the visually 'unnatural' descriptions of certain witches. The torture scenes featuring the witch Nan Redferne reveals how patriarchy applies coercion and fetishizes the "abject" body of the witch to overcome this castration anxiety. The characters Mother Demdike and Alice Nutter reveal the figure of the witch to be another "monstrous-feminine" that threatens the patriarchal order and male dominance through their gender transgressive behaviour as prime examples of the "castrator woman".