Witchcraft and Gender. The Depiction of Women and Witches in Contemporary American Movies

Bachelor Thesis from the year 2018 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Other, grade: 2,3, Technical University of Braunschweig (Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik), language: English, abstract: What makes a woman a witch? What kinds of stereotypes do witches in movies share with women? What is the source of these stereotypes? How are good and bad witches portrayed in movies and how is 'white' magic depicted? In order to investigate these questions, I am going to conduct an analysis of the witches' depiction in three different, contemporary movies. My hypothesis is that despite multiple attempts to reform the movie character of the witch, for example via the introduction of 'white magic' or good-hearted witches who support the protagonists, their depiction still consists of mainly negative, female stereotypes, so that an unchanged negative representation of the female gender can be observed in the movies I am going to analyse. This paper is structured as follows. First, I am going to start with a historical contextualization of the topic. In order to investigate the origin of the idea of 'witchcraft' there will be an analysis of the historical events that led to its creation. Hereby, I will investigate the sources of the stereotypical 'witch'. Therefore, I will provide an overview of the persecution of a 'heretical' movement, which correlates with the later witch-hunts. Then, I will investigate the mental frame that led to the witch persecutions and the influence of the Catholic Church on the common sense in order to understand the development of this phenomena. After that, I will have a closer look on the characteristics of 'witches' as women in order to clarify the stereotypes concering gender. Furthermore, I will introduce and discuss specific aspects of film theory, which are essential for the following analysis of the movies. Subsequently, based on the film theoretical aspects, I am going to analyse the depiction of witches in the movies 'Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters', 'The Last Witch Hunter', and 'The Witch'. Finally, I will finish this paper by concluding the overall outcome and by answering the research questions and the question whether my hypothesis was confirmed, based on my findings.