![]() ![]() It was probably during gay director George Cukor’s stint as production consultant on Oz that the Wicked Witch got her final look: a sharp nose and jawline, green face and body makeup, a scraggly broom, clawlike fingernails, and a tailored black gown and cape. This quintessential witch is threatening in her otherness because she has power that refuses and exceeds the standards of femininity.Īlexander Doty, “‘My Beautiful Wickedness’: The Wizard of Oz as Lesbian Fantasy” from Flaming Classics: Queering the Film Canon (Routledge, 2002) Standing imperiously in head-to-toe black next to the brightly colored and approachable looks of other magical adults, Hecate inhabits the classic witch stereotype. Rowan-Webb is trans), and I ask you to bear with me through a theory. I would never call Hecate butch in today’s terms – she’s so glamorous with her sensuous fabrics and heavy eyeliner – but think 1930s notions of butch. We’re offered a spectrum of witchy genders (headcanon: Mr. ![]() I’m sure I don’t have to convince you that witches are the most obvious gay element in The Worst Witch. Margaret Hamilton as The Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939) ![]() Thus the heritage of genre cues us to suspect that whatever repressed feelings animate Hecate’s stern control must be tinged with forbidden desire, a queer allusion that is irresistibly seductive. This resonance “haunts” The Worst Witch with “lesbian excess” that can only be seen obliquely, and may even suggest “heterosexuality… as terror” (see s2e11 “Love at First Sight”). Danvers (a little too obsessed with an inappropriate crush from her past). Hecate Hardbroom’s reserved and gloomy vibe – and indeed, her “goth” style – evoke characters like Mrs. The severe domestics and governesses of gothic mysteries harbor the story’s secrets under their grim austerity, and these secrets always seem to have the flavor of sexual deviance. This narrative can be seen to encode the dramas of desire and identification at stake in female spectatorship and the lesbian excess that haunts them, to remind us that we can’t always believe our eyes (72). Patricia White, “Female Spectator, Lesbian Specter” from UnInvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability (Indiana University Press, 1999)Ī genealogy of The Haunting –and of the haunting of classical cinema by lesbianism–leads us to Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940), a key example of the female gothic, a genre that as a whole is concerned with heterosexuality as an institution of terror for women (64)… the heroine’s desire is channeled toward Rebecca as a powerful presence-in-absence by, who enjoys a peculiar and intense relation to her former mistress and who functions as a sort of regent of Rebecca’s reign at Manderly (65)… In the gothic narrative, the heroine’s look is central yet unreliable, precisely because the female object sought by her gaze is withheld. Gothic references coalesce in Hecate Harbroom, the literally and figuratively dark presence with an uncanny ability to materialize at the moment of peak disobedience (she usually says “Mildred Hubble” but she might as well be saying “boo”). The adults are dealing with family secrets, spectral paintings, authoritarian patriarchs, and of course, magical peril. It may be counterintuitive to link this cotton candy show to the gothic, but try shifting your point of view from the students to the teachers. Danvers in Rebecca (Alfred Hitchcock, 1940) This is written in the style of a grumpy old teacher, so each section includes an example from film history with a corresponding academic citation (Tumblr blocks posts with outside links I recommend searching Google Books). I’m proposing three longstanding lesbian motifs that resonate with Cassidy’s interpretation of Miss Hardbroom, hopefully helping to illuminate why everyone is reading it as hella gay. I can’t stop thinking about how Cassidy masterfully deploys tropes with a deep history of queer connotation, so I wanted to situate Hecate in this genealogy. ![]() My fellow useless lesbians, can we take a moment to appreciate Raquel Cassidy’s stunning performance as Hecate Hardbroom? The fact that we’re all here for HB attests to the rich queer coding of this character, and moreover, to the continuing vitality of lesbian decoding practices. ![]()
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