The figure of the witch is forever ingrained in American history and culture, and her powers still hold much strength today as she manages to linger and scratch at the American psyche. Though she represents many things, this thesis examines the relationship between witches and nature—specifically, the discarded parts of nature. Throughout American history, men have worked to maintain certain expectations for what it means to be an American man. This has often left men, from generation to generation, in a continuous existential angst over their position within their home, community, and nation. Worry cultivates fear, and both untamable nature and women have been feared, since together they threaten masculine identity and the structure of American patriarchy. The texts I analyze, Robert Egger’s 2016 film The Witch, L. Frank Baum’s 1900 children’s book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and Andrew Fleming’s 1996 film The Craft, are American products from the twentieth and twenty-first-century; however, my research spans from the seventeenth-century to contemporary time. This research has revealed how the figure of the witch has moved through multiple narrative forms across the history of American literature and culture as a figure for the ugly, the wicked, or the abject side of nature. She is a figure who is both marginal and marginalized—a non-normative threat to the social order. The figure of the witch is a force of nature and a part of nature. With this in mind, this project reveals ecophobia as a lynchpin of American manhood.
