Preternatural Puritanism
Johannes Plenio / Unsplash
When young Caleb walks into the woods with his father on a forbidden hunting expedition, he finds out a horrible truth about his religion. His own “corrupt nature,” inherited from Adam at birth, isn’t the worst of it. Rather more difficult to process are the implications of Original Sin for the recent disappearance of Caleb’s baby brother, Samuel. "Was Samuel born a sinner?" Caleb asks. The thought of his infant brother suffering eternal torment compounds the trauma of a lost life immeasurably. Refusing his father’s aversion to the question, Caleb commands "Tell me!" His father’s reply accords with the doctrine of their faith, "I cannot tell thee that. No one can." The true source of horror in “The Witch” is not from the shadowy spectral presence of an old woman who lives in the woods, thrives off of the blood of sacrificed infants, transforms herself into an irresistible temptress to adolescent boys, and sucks blood from goats. A modern audience doesn’t believe in such things. The horror of “The Witch” derives from its realist portrayal of the psychology of Calvinism.
“The Witch” presents a world governed by the theology of John Calvin. Original Sin is a foundational tenet of Calvinist theology, but even more horrifying is the condition of uncertainty that Calvinists had to live with. For the Puritans, both election and God’s plan were utterly unknowable. The invisible world governed their lives with complete omnipotence while also remaining elusive and beyond the scope of human comprehension. In “The Witch,” the woods that loom on the edge of the meager family settlement loom large as a palpable, gothic inversion of the invisible world, refashioned as a realm of supernatural horror. Samuel’s disappearance becomes a catalyst through which characters and audience realize the true implications of this Puritan cosmology. No longer a theological abstraction, the unknowable dimensions of divine grace becomes the personalized reality of infant damnation.
Following Samuel’s disappearance, the family unravels. Unable to accept her son’s probable fate, Katherine's "heart has turned to stone" with a "sad weakness of faith." The woods become a post-lapsarian realm of temptation. Tomasin, Will, and Caleb repeatedly enter, unable to resist the promise of food from hunted animals. The woods simultaneously beckon and ensure the family’s demise.
The twins, Jonas and Mercy, take the causal explanation of Sam's disappearance into their own hands, acting out a script of their older sister's bewitchment, claiming to see shapes moving in and out of the forest, and conversing with Black Philip. When Caleb disappears into the woods and then reappears in a state of demonic possession, he presents embodied, visible proof of witchcraft that is both undeniable and too much for Will to bear. Defying the very doctrine that he lives by, Will exclaims at Jonas and Mercy's accusation of Tomasin's bewitchment, "I'll have proof or heaven help thee."
The problem is that such proof does not exist, and it is “prideful”—Will’s original transgression against the Puritan community—to think that it does. There is no way of locating the supernatural force orchestrating the course of events in the film. But within a Puritan cosmos, humans are condemned to transgress the limitations surrounding what can be known, as a condition of their fallen status. They seek evidence of the invisible world that plays such a central role in shaping the events of their lives on earth and in the world to come. In the film, the consequence of this transgression is a sequence of preternatural evidence that accrues through the effects of Calvinism on the human imagination: animals behave in unnatural ways, teats and breasts bleed instead of give milk, shadowy and unholy bodies of old, forest-dwelling women become young temptresses. This preternatural realm creates a haunting space between the visible, earthly world, and the invisible worlds of both God and Satan. It plays upon the minds of both characters and audience alike, appearing as one thing, such as Samuel delivered back to his mother from the dead, and then becoming another such as a crow tearing at her breast.
Knit out of a fragile and paradoxical cosmos, Puritan faith proves impossible to live with. Will's opening line of the film, "What went we out into this wilderness to find?" meets a bleak reality by the end of the film. His dictum, "We will conquer this wilderness. It will not consume us," turns out to be entirely false. The film leaves both characters and audience in a state of unknowing. Abandoned, alone, and with the blood of matricide on her hands, Tomasin chooses the dark demonic world for the knowledge and sensory experience it promises her--“to live deliciously,” “to see the world,” “to taste butter” and “to wear a pretty dress”—over a realm of relentless uncertainty that has disposed of everyone she loves.