The Resurgence of the Witch and Her Monstrous Potential

“That which does not ‘respect borders, positions, rules’,
that which ‘disturbs identity, system, order’”
— Barbara Creed on the monstrous feminine, The Monstrous Feminine (8)

“Witch [is] not just a word but a cluster of powerful images”
— Margot Adler, Drawing Down the Moon (76)

Notes

[1] See Asaph’s review “Big God” for online magazine Pitchfork.

[2] Ghosting is “the practice of ending a personal relationship with someone by suddenly and without explanation withdrawing from all communication” as defined in the online Oxford English Dictionary.

[3] See Klaver (1-6) for a more in-depth analysis of this phenomenon.

[4] Similarly, Hélène Cixous wrote “You only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her. And she's not deadly. She's beautiful and she's laughing” (893).

[5] She is drawing from Kristeva (17).

[6] Referring to Kristeva’s idea of social reason as “the communal consensus that underpins the social order” (65).

[7] The 2018 reboot is titled Chilling Adventures of Sabrina.

[8] See Sister Outsider, especially 53-59.

Fig. 1. Still from Autumn de Wilde’s videoclip Big God for the band Florence + the Machine (2018). Screenshot.

Introduction

            On the 20th of June 2018, the British band Florence + the Machine premiered the videoclip for their song “Big God” on Apple Music. Both song and videoclip are part of the band’s fourth album High as Hope and provide a moment of grandeur and darkness amidst a line-up of unusually simple, gentle (or even “beige”[1]) musical efforts. While packaged as a song about the modern phenomenon of ghosting[2], tying in neatly with other relatively superficial themes found on the album, the video and lyrics together seem to be articulating something far more profound about the power of desire that lies within what feels like an unfillable hole in the soul. Written to provide a tense atmosphere with a substantial release at the end, and accompanied by a haunting video from director Autumn de Wilde, “Big God” is darker than anything the band has done in the past, invoking not only the supernatural, but also witchcraft and female monstrosity:
            As the video starts, we find ourselves in deep black surroundings. Ominously but melodiously howling wind frames the experience and a rattling sound emerges when the camera moves closer to lead singer Florence Welch, who is flanked by eight female dancers and stands eerily still in a pool of water until the piano comes in. While the sinewy choreography by Akram Khan starts out calm and controlled, it is unfalteringly forceful and commanding throughout. Florence’s movements are shadowed by her dancers and whenever she flexes her muscles, they flex with her. Looking brazenly into the camera whenever they please, thrashing around in the water with building zest, the group is soon passionately, animalistically dancing in the darkness while Florence sings about needing a big God to fill her void. When she howls “Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, it hurts!” (20) her dancers are suddenly lifted off their feet and levitate above her, invoking Francisco Goya’s oil painting Witches’ Flight. The music swells and then drops at the moment the coven plunges back into the water. Fully embracing the darkness, Florence lunges forward, sensually gliding over the surface and throwing herself on her back. Stretching her voice into a demonic sound, she looks upward and caresses her body to then finally raise herself from the water as the camera drifts away.
            While Big God, unlike the other songs and videos on the fourth album, adheres to Florence + the Machine’s musical legacy of grandeur it is by no means a simple continuation of an old formula. Although her sound and appearance have always been magical, mystical and even otherworldly, and she has been lovingly called a modern witch on many occasions (Grigoriadis “Florence Welch, the Good Witch”), lead singer Florence Welch has never embraced the more sinister, animalistic and even monstrous side of the supernatural quite so fully. Even though she is dressed in a gold lace nightgown, her hair long and wavy with dancers wearing nothing but lingerie and coloured veils, the clip itself is far from innocent, soft or stereotypically feminine. On the contrary: in Big God we see Florence move into monstrous territory and dance as if the patriarchal gaze is a thing of the past. Exceeding the bounds of what is deemed modest female behaviour in the Western cultural symbolic, she forcefully lunges at the air around her, pushes her fingers into her mouth, exhales loudly and dances with stringy hair covering her face, perhaps a nod to the terrifying women found in horror films such as The Ring.
            However, although her style is quite distinct, Florence Welch is far from the only woman embracing monstrosity, darkness and even abjection at the moment. On the contrary, while femininity by definition used to exclude all forms of monstrous behaviour (Creed 5) and women’s anger, sexuality and in fact everything that was deemed “sinister, smelly, confused and upsetting” (Lorde 10) had to be repressed, something seems to have shifted in women today. Unwilling to bow to patriarchy any longer, the last few years have seen a true rise of female monstrosity, not only in tv-series, films, books and art, but also for example in rallies against oppressive regimes (Bovenschen 83). Women are collectively waking up from their torpor to take their fate into their own hands, reject the traditional gender roles assigned to them and release themselves from oppression.
            Taking Barbara Creed’s umbrella concept of the monstrous feminine as a starting point, the female monster knows many forms, such as the vampire, the castrating mother, the beautiful but deadly killer and the possessed body (Creed 1). However, as exemplified by Florence Welch’s reputation as a modern witch and the imagery playing on witchcraft in Big God, it seems to be especially the figure of the witch that is the feminist monster of choice at the moment (Doyle 234). While the witch-hunt has long been called off, the figure of the witch has lived on in ideas, images, myth, allegory and symbols (Bovenschen 109) and she has re-surfaced with newfound popularity in the Western world ever since the start of the women’s movement, but with renewed zest today (83; Benincasa “Double, Double”; Fry “Many Faces”; Suslovic “Uplifting Tituba”). Following Silvia Bovenschen, this experiential appropriation of the past does not seem to address the historical phenomenon of the witch, but rather its symbolic and political potential to “rupture, disturb and change” (Bovenschen 116). In this paper, I would therefore like to pay attention to the resurgence of the witch figure and the ways in which she is currently mobilized. 
            Moreover, I am interested in drawing from Gloria Anzaldua and especially Audre Lorde’s work as sources of female wisdom and guidance regarding the large-scale suppression of women’s supposedly darker feelings and emotions. While suppressing these feelings might make them imperceptible to patriarchy’s eye, it will not keep them from stirring below the surface, resulting in something dark and powerful that is buried deep within women and has been given many names and seen many forms in female writer’s history (Gilbert and Gubar 76). Anzaldua has named this reservoir of our unacceptable parts “the Shadow-Beast that lurks beneath the surface” (20), while Lorde has repeatedly and more positively articulated belief in what she calls the deep dark female: an ancient reservoir of unexamined emotion and feeling that women have come to distrust in themselves but might be mobilized as a great source of power and non-rational, bodily knowledge (37). Following Anzaldua and especially Lorde will work to illuminate that the return of the monstrous feminine and the witch are deeply connected to the suppression of women’s unsanctioned feelings and emotions, and that ultimately, the void that is addressed in Big God, might be something that runs far deeper than the pain of a lover lost.
            To summarize, this paper will explore the resurgence of the monstrous feminine, specifically the figure of the witch, in relation to the notion of the deep dark female as articulated by Audre Lorde to theorize how this conceptual web might function as a resistance to respectability and internalized oppression with Florence + the Machine’s videoclip Big Godas a powerful object to illuminate the trajectory of the paper.

PART I: The Monstrous Feminine

1.1  The Repression of All Things Sinister and Upsetting

            Woman’s wild nature has been repressed and restrained for centuries: her sexuality was restricted, her intuition and bodily knowledge made suspect, and no matter how badly she was treated, her voice was not allowed to rise and her blood was not allowed to boil (Lorde 101). The privilege of rage and all other emotions considered dark were reserved for men, and men only. The source of this suppression can be traced back to Christianity and in fact most other major religions in which women were deemed “carnal, animal and closer to the undivine” (Anzaldua 17), meaning closer to animal impulses such as sexuality and the unconscious. As a result of fear of the supernatural, both the divine (the superhuman) on the one hand and the undivine on the other, the female body capable of creating life and bleeding without dying was made suspect (17). Woman was stranger, Other, and that meant she had to be protected from herself (17). Even up until very recently, young girls were taught to only identify with the good mother, the passive princess or the harmless fairy godmother in fairytales, while the figures of the old hag and the witch were off limits and the psychic power they could transfer lost from the start (Rădulescu 1090).
            This old-fashioned view on women and the restriction of what they might be, has left its marks. It still has a place in our subconscious and in that of men, and it is still anchored in our culture, religions and society (Smit 84). Even our current fourth wave of emancipation cannot completely wash that inheritance away. To avoid rejection, many of us have conformed to the values of the culture we grew up in. Afraid of being improper, unacceptable or simply too much, we have moved our unacceptable parts into the shadows (Anzaldua 20). We do not speak up. We do not raise our voices. We are afraid of being too sexual. It was Audre Lorde who, as early as 1978, warned us that having been shielded from it all our lives and having been taught to shield ourselves in the process, we have come to distrust our darker feelings and therefore “the power which rises from our deepest and nonrational knowledge” (53) as well. We are shackled, blocked, paralyzed: “that writhing serpent movement … the very movement of life, swifter than lightning, [is] frozen.” (Anzaldua 21) and we are frozen with it.

1.2  The Disruptive Quality of the Monstrous Feminine

            However, because the subjugation of our inner nature takes place for no sound reason, our nature is, in the words of Max Horkheimer: “not really transcended or reconciled, but simply suppressed” (94). As a result, that which Western patriarchy omitted and tabooed did not just disappear (Bovenschen 85) but stirs below the surface. As mentioned in the introduction, the history of female authorship holds a myriad of examples of women who dared to address these unsanctioned, supposedly monstrous feelings. In their stories and poems about the female struggle with self-definition, that which is suppressed often appears in a monstrous shape and frightens the speaker until she finally comes to realize that the monster is in fact a part of herself (Gilbert and Gubar 77).[3] Mary Elizabeth Coleridge for example, witnessed a terrifying and despaired wild woman in the mirror only to realize “I am she” (30), Sylvia Plath encountered a “terrible fish” (“The Mirror” 27) when she looked at her reflection in the sea, and Gloria Anzaldua literally wrote that the parts of ourselves that we try to repress, turn into a “Shadow-Beast” (20) that is seemingly terrifying and serpent-like, but tender once we dare to meet her eyes.[4]
            In mainstream media it is the arena of the horror film that has provided a space for the return of the repressed (Harkins-Cross 55). However, whereas female writers tried to discover the lie in old-fashioned patriarchal ideas about female monstrosity, horror films constructed the monstrous feminine using those very ideas. Barbara Creed argued that while the function of purifying the abject was historically religion’s domain, the secularization of society has now made it the ideological project of art, including modern horror film (14). [5]It may come as no surprise then, that unlike the male monster, a human female can be monstrous simply by acting angry, greedy or sexual and therefore breaking her assigned social role (Lundoff “Monstrous Females”). Moreover, drawing from old-fashioned religious ideas about abomination, the modern horror has also deemed the feminine body – alongside incest, murder and the corpse - to be abject (Creed 9). Bleeding, leaking, and oozing, the female body in horror is yet another example of a woman monstrously exceeding her boundaries.
            However, women showing their emotions and needs are of course not by definition monstrous creatures, and it is not a lack of cleanliness or health that causes their bodies to be codified as abject. Abjection as theorized by Julia Kristeva, refers to that which is rejected by or disturbs social reason (65).[6] Often, the abject confronts one with the corporeal reality of the biological cycles of life and therefore the inevitability of death. The corpse figures as a prime example of this but it also includes the female body’s maternal functions that acknowledge its “debt to nature” (Creed 11). The abject thus threatens life and thereby highlights the fragility of the law. Therefore, abject things, not unlike that which women had to suppress, must be radically cast outside and are only allowed to exist in a liminal space that humans keep separated from the self (Kristeva 2), holding their rejected pieces.
            In horror films, the monstrous is produced at precisely this border of separation, with the symbolic order on the one hand and the abject on the other (Creed 11). It is the border between human and inhuman, good and evil, normal and abject body, and between those who take up their proper gender roles and those who do not (11). Essentially, the female who supposedly steps out of bounds, either by embracing all (or some) things sinister or evoking the natural, animal order with her body, is thus monstrous because she does not respect the borders, positions and rules of the cultural symbolic that patriarchy carefully laid out for her (Kristeva 4), disturbing not only identity, but system and order as well.

1.3 The Embrace of the Female Monster  

            Fortunately, we find ourselves in the fourth wave of emancipation and women are no longer passively undergoing their faith as informed by patriarchy. We are adamantly fighting restrictive ideas about proper female behaviour, questioning the values we are supposed to embody and challenging the ways we ought to look (Smit 82). In Western popular culture, in the workplace and in our personal lives, we are breaking the dictated mold of the sweet, kind and caring woman (82). We demand the right to look any way we want, whether that is sensual and enticing or plain and simple, and much better yet: we redefine what it is that femininity might be. More than ever, women provoke, demand, fight for and go after, using and drawing power from precisely all those emotions and feelings that we were once made to repress.
            It might not be a coincidence then, that we have also seen a resurgence of the monstrous feminine during the last few years (Williams “The Resurgence”), and while the monstrous feminine in much popular horror spoke to us more about male fears than female desire or subjectivity, the tide seems to have turned. Take for example the magical nude women of Dorothea Tanning in Tate Modern, the vampires of Daisy Johnson’s Fen and also Julia Armfield’s uncanny stories in Salt Slow. Even more notable however, is the current resurrection of the witch figure that has its roots in the era of Stevie Knicks (Bovenschen 83), but has recently gotten a new lease of life. While the Western world already knew many women practicing rituals, drawing on mysticism, plant-based healing and the occult, the dawn of the Trump administration caused a rise in witches in all shapes and forms (Doyle 232). Women have started using the word witch with pride, Florence Welch is crowned as the new leader of the musical coven (Grigoriadis “Florence Welch, the Good Witch”) and pop culture has exhumed every witch it could find. Take for example the dark coming of age movie The VVitch and reboots of Charmed, Sabrina the Teenage Witch[7] and Susperia (Doyle 233). “This is the time for getting scary”, writer Andi Zeisler told Elle magazine on the eve of the 2017 Women’s March. “We need to go full witch” (“Pussy Hat”).
            This new and spectacular resurgence cannot but beg the question: why is it that the witch figure is suddenly back at the top of our cultural consciousness?

PART II: The Witch

2.1 Reclaiming the Witch

            Before (folk) medicine reached professional status and was subsumed under the control of men, it was practiced exclusively by women. During this time the word witch was simply the appellation given to both old and young women healers (Rădulescu 1088). However, in the Middle Ages the term lost its neutrality as it was appropriated by the Christian Church to brand those who still clung to the old cult beliefs of pagan Europe as worshipers of the devil, guilty of “the sins of the flesh” (Bovenschen 103). Since then and up until relatively recently, the word witch did not have a very pleasant ring to it (86). Still intimately associated with a negative female figure, the word evoked childhood fears about dangerous women in the woods and practically everything that goes bump in the night. Moreover, because the term still belonged to “an internalized repertoire of masculine invective” (85), women have for a long time tried to stay away from it.
            As of recently however, the word witch has experienced a transformation similar to those of the words proletarian and queer (Bovenschen 86): it was adopted by the minority affected by it to be used against the enemy who had savagely wielded it against them. Appropriating this frightening apparition is therefore nothing if not a deeply political act: “The word witch carries so many negative connotations, that people wonder why we use it at all, but to reclaim the word witch is to reclaim our right, as women, to be powerful, to know the feminine within as divine” (Miriam Simos qtd. in Doyle 235). By collectively taken back what was ours to begin with but has been used against us in a great many terrifying ways, the individual is freed from the power it held over us.  
            However, as becomes apparent in the many pop culture appearances of witches both old and new, but for example also in the way participants of demonstrations have dressed up as witches (Bovenschen 87), it is clearly not just the word that has resurfaced. It is also the witch figure, the archetype, appearing in the form of image, myth, allegory and symbol (109). What is most interesting about this is that women have been drawing from every possible version of the witch at once: the mythical, the monstrous, the witch in feminist academia, the horror aesthetics, only to blend all these different shapes together in “one large, angry, intentionally ugly repudiation of patriarchy” (Doyle 236), completely anarchical and rebellious in its rejection of chronology and historical accuracy.

2.2 Where Did She Come from?

            As the new feminist identification with witches seems to be drawing from a large reservoir of images, it is no surprise that there has been much speculation from both scholars and other sources about where exactly the contemporary figure of the witch came from. Some have suggested that she might have sprouted from Hollywood iconography, or the optics of the 2016 US election in which Hillary Clinton was marked as a witch by a man who moved crowds to chant the words “lock her up” (Doyle 236). Others have suggested that the witch might have arisen from feminist history, something scholar Silvia Bovenschen has actively argued against. As she sees it, the revival of the word, the image and the motif of the witch must be at least somewhat tied to the women’s movement, but not in a sense that women thoughtfully turned to academic, historical work on the witch pogroms: “It was not the flood of theoretical works which initiated the frequent and exemplary use of the word and image that brought about the astonishing renaissance of the witch” (84). Instead, she sees the assimilation of the witch into feminist visual and linguistic language as something that happened spontaneously, not as part of any plan.
            This however is not to say that when women began to deliberately assume the witch role they did so behaving arbitrarily, but rather that “this experiential appropriation of the past deals with something other than what traditional information, sources and commentary have to offer” (Bovenschen 85). While women today reach back into history, they do not seem to do so for the historical phenomenon of the witch but rather for her symbolic potential. Similarly, while they are interested in mythological images, the witch trend does not seem to be based in mythology (Bovenschen 87). Given also that most empirical witches of today - the women applying the term to themselves and/or invoking the witch archetype -  have very little in common with the historical witches and probably know very little about their existence in the past as well, there appears to be a more direct preconceptual link between the witch archetype on the one hand and today’s women on the other.
            The current experiential appropriation of the past seems to draw from old gynocratic ideas and images that still represent “a reservoir of unresolved desires and longings” (Bovenschen 114). They are the forbidden images that still strike a chord, the archetypal surplus that still lingers and flashes up when revisited (Benjamin 257). These images and our human qualities of imagination go far beyond what a theoretical discourse could ever transmit. As concise ornaments of an unfulfilled utopian message, every time they are called upon “the unfulfilled part of the archetype emerges and becomes recognizable” (Bloch 70). Through the fantasy component of the figure of the witch, blocked experience becomes animated and conscious, freeing what is prevented by reason alone: “fantasy, as far as it protects, against all reason, the aspirations for the integral fulfillment of man and nature, repressed by reason, the unreasonable images of freedom become rational” (Herbert Marcuse qtd. in Bovenschen 87), assisting a resistance which was denied to the historical witch.

2.3 What Might She Do?

            By using both the word witch and invoking images surrounding the witch figure it seems as if, after decades of patriarchy conjuring up women’s demonic potential, this potential has finally turned against it (Bovenschen 87). The de-mythification of the witch that has taken place allows the witches and the ancient feminine myths of the past to become something relevant to the present and the future as well. Invoking the witch has become a way to establish autonomy today, a “liberation from enforced role behaviour and diffuse anxiety” (90) and a method to dismantle the evaluation of femininity as it was built up during centuries of patriarchal rule (90). It is a moment of resistance that is both contemporary and political, and it makes perfect sense for it to be released in full force right now, given that the global rise of hard right authoritarian regimes such as the Trump administration have showed patriarchy not only to be alive and well, but also out for blood.
            The one moment in which the patriarchal structure was seriously threatened by women was before and during the witch trials, resulting in the extreme and brutal annihilation of hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions of women (Dworkin 130). It was not until the advent of the women’s movement that the patriarchal system of domination has again been challenged so severely (Bovenschen 115). Seen in this context it is no wonder that the feminist movement today is choosing to invoke the witch, for she is the very embodiment of a world of female subjects patriarchy had to destroy: “the heretic, the healer, the disobedient wife, the woman who dared to live alone, the obeha woman who poisoned the master’s food and inspired the slaves to revolt” (Federici 11). And although speaking of witchcraft today might sound silly to some, the old dark power, the active choice to invoke the witch figure and “to worship something other than patriarchy’s gods [and] reject the narratives of dominant culture” (Doyle 237), is still here.
            Julia Kristeva wrote that “the masculine, apparently victorious, confesses through its very relentlessness against the other, the feminine, that it is [actually] threatened by [her] asymmetrical, irrational, wily, uncontrollable power” (70) and while ancient female figures of abjection such as the vampire and castrating mother continue to provide similarly compelling images, it is the figure of the witch that is the ultimate embodiment of that female force. She especially is an unyielding enemy of the symbolic order: out to unsettle the boundaries between rational and irrational, the symbolic and the imaginary, the normal and the abject (Creed 76). The witch is dangerous, and of course her evil powers are part of her female essence: she is closer to nature than man, in touch with her sexuality, and her dark powers control tempests, hurricanes and storms (76). Witches are the fever dream in the middle of the night, the villainesses of the highest order, a cautionary tale about what happens when women have power (Gailey “Why We Write”). Because ultimately that is what we talk about, when we talk about witches: power.
            For men, the witch embodies their fear of the dark dangers that must be controlled in the mystery that is woman. For women, the witch is a feminist fantasy about having a mystical, but very real power that might create change in a world that would rather take power away from her (Donahue “Feminist Heroes”).

PART III: A Deep Dark Psychological Rebirth

3.1 Reaching into Our Dark Unconsciousness  

            For a long time, women’s wild nature has been stifled; we were pushed into proper female roles, our sexuality was repressed, and our intuition made suspect. Moreover, while we slowly lost sense of our own nature, we have commonly reacted to our fate, the violence that was done to us and the rules we “anachronistic creatures of nature” (Bovenschen 118) were given, in the only way that was expected of us: in submissive, passive, anxiety-ridden obedience (18). In a true victory for patriarchy, women even learned to distrust everything in themselves that had not been allowed and came to fear the unnamed, untamed hunger for something different: “that dark thing that sleeps in [us]” (“Elm” 31-32), as Sylvia Plath put it.
            However, in a great victory for women today, we learn more and more to stop living on external directives only and take fate into our own hands (Smit 55). We have begun to listen to and act on what patriarchy marked as inappropriate, shameful, absurd and monstrous, and we have steadily been allowing ourselves to wade in the muddy waters of our subconscious. In this process of reaching within we do not only touch upon a resource that is profoundly powerful and helps us to reach a new sense of wholeness, but we also do exactly that which is “female and self-affirming” (Lorde 59) in the face of a sexist, patriarchal society. Turning towards our so-called monstrosity becomes a form of empowerment, in Audre Lorde’s words “a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence” (57), which pushes us not to settle for what is deemed normal, decent, conventionally expected and safe (57), and most of all helps us to react more actively to the violence that is done to us.

3.2 The Witch as Psychological Rebirth 

            Existing in the margins, living between the dark and the daylight, the murmur of the village and the wild unknown of the woods, there is no better female figure to guide the way into our darkness than the witch. Dr. Ann Belford Ulanov argues that the roots of our consciousness reach deep into our unknown archaic unconscious and that it is the witch archetype who illuminates the very depths of the possibilities that exist there (5). She writes that the witch figure functions as a bridge, taking “energies from the consciousness and pull[ing] them toward the unconscious to forge a link between the two mental systems” (5). If this is indeed the case, the witch allows us to do exactly what Audre Lorde encouraged us to do all these years ago[8]: to connect to that deep, dark, ancient place within, that sunken subconscious which keeps our previously repressed and unexamined emotions and feelings among which our creativity, sexuality, intuition and anger (37). As a link between worlds, the witch may help us turn inwards, connecting with what scrapes the bottom or our soul, so that we might meet our shadows and in a way, our selves.
            Moreover, witches are “midwives to metamorphoses” (Grossman “The Year”), magical women who can change the world and  indicators of epistemic shifts (Weiss 124).  By invoking her archetype while searching the darkness within we also welcome a powerful force that does everything in her might to facilitate a new psychic rebirth (Rădulescu 1088). While the witch helps us to take a leap into the unknown spaces of our subconscious and meet with was has been submerged in our flesh, the shadows that have remained silent in their caves, she also burns everything that stands in the way of psychic renewal. She helps us tap into pain, which might be transformed into action. She helps us to admit our anger, which gives us great momentum, and she shows us how to make use of our sexuality as a kernel for growth. In other words, the witch is here to have us reconnect with the wild forces within, teaching us renewal so that a great leap of transformation might take place and a more powerful, complete self might emerge (1088). This is why, as Adina Rădulescu argued in her work on the archetypal feminine, “the witch within must live on as a vivid metaphor” (1089) reminding us of the importance of wholeness in our psychic life.

3.3 A Big (Dark) God(dess)

            Returning to the object that started the conversation about the figure of the witch and her current resurgence at the beginning of this paper, I would like to argue that Big God follows a similar trajectory. In the song, Florence sings that she needs a big God to fill the void she feels inside (1 – 4) as she has been ghosted by a lover: “You keep me up at night / to my messages, you do not reply / You know I still like you the most” (5 – 7), “you will always be my favourite ghost” (12). This void however seems to be something far more cavernous than we start out believing: “Sometimes I think it is gettin’ better / And then it gets much worse / Is it just part of the process? / Well, Jesus Christ, it hurts” (17 – 20). From that point on the musical intensity of the song begins to reach a boiling point and the soaring chorus erupts in what seems like a final plea for the God to fill the void inside: “Shower your affection, let it rain on me / don’t leave me on this white cliff” (32 – 33), ending in a bone-chilling vocal fry, perhaps best described as a drawn-out, guttural sound.
            While the song already makes one wonder about the extent of this void she addresses and gives some indication of a darker layer underneath, the videoclip gives a whole new meaning to both the void and the work as an entirety. Watching Florence dance in the darkness, it becomes quite clear that she is not a woman looking to find a person nor a God to help her with her problem. On the contrary, from the moment the video begins, she herself seems to be reaching into her void, that dark place that lies within. While wearing a pink lace nightgown - a symbol of femininity - her movements grow bolder, angrier, more sexual and more animalistic by the second, and when her dancers levitate above her, it feels nothing but logical and natural.
            It is the first clear nod to witchcraft, but the witch had been invoked all along. She is present in the absolute force of the dance, once described as “a war dance of the supernatural kind” (Briscoe “Big God”), in the way Florence moves as if the patriarchal gaze does not exist and in the complete lack of hesitation to be as monstrous as pleased. Gearing towards the end, the frontwoman seems to be completely in touch with herself, finding strength in the darkness. When she again sings: “Let it rain on me / And pull down the mountain, drag your cities to the sea … / Don’t leave me on this white cliff / Let it slide down to the … sea” (30 – 34), this time around it sounds quite differently, invoking something like Anne Carson’s desire to go “traveling in the total dark country of … the soul where the cliff just breaks off” (311), and most importantly, to do it on her own.
            During the song, Florence is in complete communion with her coven: the eight women in coloured veils that follow her every move. However, when she sings her final line “Let it slide down to the sea” (35), all nine of them lunge into the water, but while Florence glides toward the camera, her dancers are crawling out of sight. When the lead singer launches herself onto her back only moments later, all that is left of her dancers are their veils, eerily floating in the dark pool of the void. It is then we really come to understand that she had been dancing by herself all along, with her colour-coded dancers as visualizations of the powerful but unexamined feelings that were hidden at the bottom of the void, that dark place “where hidden and growing our true spirit rises” (Lorde 36). She is meeting her inner beast, her shadow, on her own, making the dance into a resistance against oppression and a celebration of a newfound freedom. As a true embrace of female monstrosity, she ends the song in a blood-curdling vocal fry, caressing herself, sliding her hands upwards into her mouth. Taking this final leap into abject territory, she completes her deep, dark, psychological rebirth.
            Guided by the witch figure, the vivid metaphor for our psychic completeness (Rădulescu 1089) it is perhaps no wonder that, in an interview with Studio Brussel, Florence describes her album as a new interpretation of love: “one that doesn’t come from a place of lack or need, but from a place of wholeness” (Cuvelier “Studio Brussel”).

Conclusion

            While monstrous femininity was at first mainly that which patriarchy deemed improper, frightful and abject in women and by means of adamant, long-term repression became the beast inside of us; ever since the first wave of the woman’s movement the monstrous feminine and especially the witch have been reclaimed and made into sources of resistance. In our current “backlash years” (Doyle 237) of the early twenty-first century, it seems as if recent events have revealed to women what deep down we already knew: although we have been loyal to the rules and dictates of patriarchy, no matter how far we thought we had come, we are still living in a system that misuses female bodies while simultaneously casting us as witches or monstrous beasts (239). It is in this context, that the word and image of the witch touched a sensitive nerve, flaming up in a moment of danger, resonating far beyond their historical significance (Bovenschen 84). As a cluster of powerful images, the witch is guiding women towards liberation from respectability and internalized oppression, helping us to say: if we are going to be monsters either way, we might as well make some magic out of it and head towards the woods.
            Moreover, turning towards sources of female wisdom and guidance such as Gloria Anzaldua and especially Audre Lorde gives entirely new depth to the resurgence of the witch. Both women are known for bringing more affective, non-rational bodily knowledge to the forefront as a mode of thinking, and looking at the resurgence of the monstrous feminine and the witch through their lens, a new level of understanding develops. Guided by Gloria Anzaldua and many other female writers, we start to see the (Shadow-)beast within for what she really is. Guided by Audre Lorde we come to understand the darkness inside of us as a potent resource, as exemplified by Big God. And it is at this point that the figure of the witch, the archetype, the cluster of images, starts to crystalize as facilitator, link between worlds, a healer to lead the way and let us dive into the darkness head first, making us unstring our bones and then rise up again: powerful, heaving, howling, reborn.


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