Enchantment

Enchantment

Volume 40, Numbers 3 & 4, Fall/Winter 2012
Amy Herzog, Joe Rollins
Excerpted from the Editor’s Note

Transformation, temporality, and power: these are our concerns here in the Enchantment issue of WSQ. But where shall we begin? With the amateurish Circe who set the bar too low? With the three weird sisters who pricked their thumbs and asked too little for themselves as a monarch fell to chaos? Or should we begin in Salem? Oz? Hogwarts? Through the looking-glass? Cocoa Beach? Perhaps we should begin in a time not so long ago, and in a place that is not so far away: 1964 in a suburb of New York City.

The television show Bewitched, starring Elizabeth Montgomery and featuring Agnes Moorehead, premiered in 1964 and ran until 1972. Set in the time of its production, Bewitched seems now, in many ways, to have been ahead of its time. The show offered viewers queer glimpses into an enchanted world where entrenched economies of power and resistance were realigned in unexpected ways. The show’s writers transformed 1960s tropes of inequality into narratives of anti-witch discrimination (fear of the unfamiliar; flawed and damaging stereotypes; disapproving families; worries about “mixed” progeny; an epistemology of the broom closet), and thus safely relocated politically contentious issues into the realm of comic fantasy.