Made for Strength

Irene Katz Connelly argues for a new approach to witch hysteria via two recent novels, Olga Ravn’s ‘The Wax Child’ and Irene Solà’s ‘I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness.’

By Irene Katz ConnellyJanuary 10, 2026

• SF

• Politics

• Gender & Sexuality

LAST MARCH, a Georgia woman was arrested and charged with “concealing the death of another person” and “abandonment of a dead body.” In reality, she had suffered a miscarriage in her apartment, and fell unconscious while placing fetal remains in the trash outside her building. When, in 2023, another woman faced criminal charges for a miscarriage, the prosecutor’s allegation that the fetal remains had been significant enough to clog her toilet resulted in a media frenzy; similarly, after the Texas legislature proposed testing wastewater for birth control and medication abortion last May, an anti-choice activist made the unsubstantiated claim that “we are all drinking other people’s abortions” via the water supply.

These lurid accusations seem grossly of a piece with the events in Catalan author Irene Solà’s sophomore novel, 2023’s I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness (published in Mara Faye Lethem’s English translation last June, and which, incidentally, I was reading when I learned about the Georgia woman’s case). That’s not because Solà’s novel is a realistic one—to the contrary, it depicts generations of women haunting their family home in rural Catalonia as ghosts. In the opening, the ghost of Margarida, born sometime around the 17th century, is waiting for her elderly, present-day descendant Bernadeta to die.

A pious woman with a Manichean outlook, Margarida sees evidence of female evil in everything from Bernadeta’s strangled snores to the routines of the old woman’s own granddaughter and caregiver, Marta. “[S]hameless Marta had been sitting on the floor like an infidel,” Margarida reports early on, “with her eyes closed and her hands on her folded knees, breathing as if she’d never learned how.” Marta is simply practicing yoga—yet a horrified Margarida relates that “soon she was making heretical sounds, Ohhhm, ohhhm, ohhhm.” Layering this pearl-clutching polemic over what the reader recognizes as a common (and innocuous) pastime, Solà’s novel begins by exploiting for comedy the gap between what’s actually happening and how it’s described. The chasm between the experiences of the pregnant and miscarrying women above and the criminal charges leveled against them—and too many others in the United States since the overturning of Roe v. Wade—are this fictional incident’s extremely unfunny corollary.

Like I Gave You Eyes, Danish author Olga Ravn’s 2023 novel The Wax Child (published last September in Martin Aitken’s English translation) also concerns 17th-century women suspected of witchcraft by their communities. Like Solà’s, this novel abounds with grotesque motives, behaviors, and characteristics attributed to the novel’s female protagonists, usually by men. In the 17th century, as at the time of writing this, an understandable first response might have been to try to disprove these kinds of accusations point by point: to argue, for instance, that early modern women’s behavior is not deviant, but is a response to circumstance; that people in post-Roe America get pregnant (and miscarry) every day for reasons beyond their control; or that no one is “drinking” abortions. What is so striking and effective in Solà’s and Ravn’s books, however, is that they take the opposite approach. Not only do they “admit” their characters’ deviance; the novels also seem to embrace the pejorative and sensationalized vocabulary with which those characters’ persecutors accuse them of witchcraft. In societies designed to punish women down to the level of language, these novels suggest that protesting innocence is not a viable defense.

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Both I Gave You Eyes and The Wax Child take place during the peak of European witch hysteria: the 17th century, a time of post-Reformation religious turmoil, bloody conflict (the Thirty Years’ War), and deprivation and famine due in large part to the “Little Ice Age.” In her 2004 book Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany, historian Lyndal Roper notes that communities of the time both fetishized and feared motherhood. (On one hand, they needed to overcome abysmal mortality rates and ensure social continuity; on the other, they risked producing more children than they could materially sustain.) Roper contends that demographic pressures engendered “anxieties about fertility and motherhood,” and that witch hysteria “project[ed] these terrors outward on to other people”—especially women who were old, infertile, unmarried, or poor.

Hysteria spreads fast; witchcraft was quick to accrue a fairly consistent set of tropes and characteristics in early modern Europe and America. Witches were thought to harbor insatiable sexual desire, an appetite that seemed particularly aberrant in older women for whom sex could not serve the social end of reproduction; they supposedly gained supernatural powers through pacts with the devil, often sealed with sex, and enticed others to do the same. Since witches rejected their “natural” role of raising or caring for children, they might turn supposedly maternal acts into vehicles for harm; if a new mother or baby died, the women who tended to them (or even gave them gifts) could face accusations of wrongdoing. Self-styled “demonologists” published scatological descriptions of leering, belching, incontinent witches, using many of the conventions of what we would now call “body horror” to associate regular physical functions, especially in older women, with witchcraft.

Setting aside the genre of fantasy, the literature of witch panic has often sought to rehabilitate victims through “rational” explanations. Arthur Miller famously cast the Salem witch trials as a symptom of a backward society in his 1953 play The Crucible; Maryse Condé’s award-winning 1986 novel, I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem, illustrates that same society’s further complicity in slavery. Another microgenre—what might be seen as the literary progenitor of shirts denoting their wearers as “daughters of the witches you couldn’t burn”—characterizes witches as midwives, healers, or otherwise liberated women penalized for living ahead of their times. In Geraldine Brooks’s Year of Wonders (2001), two midwives are scapegoated and executed during the 1665–66 Great Plague of London; set some decades earlier, in 1618, Rivka Galchen’s Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch (2021) follows a spunky, older herbalist fending off those all-too-familiar accusations in the German principality of Württemberg.

Distinct in many ways, these works converge in the belief that witchcraft is an offense, even crime, from which their protagonists must be exonerated. But the women of The Wax Child and I Gave You Eyes are not victims—nor are they proto-ob-gyns operating early modern urgent cares. Rather, Solà and Ravn’s women behave more or less like the witches their communities fear.

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Unmarried, childless, and poor despite her high birth, the protagonist of The Wax Child—named for and inspired by a real 17th-century Danish noblewoman, Christenze Kruckow—creates forbidden talismans by moonlight, including the titular wax child, who narrates the novel. In the small Danish village where the book begins, Christenze is known for her uncanny abilities: when local women give birth, Christenze undertakes a practice known at the time as holding the “skin girdle,” a method of assuming their labor pains herself, which may or may not be literal. Christenze’s patients take great comfort in this folk ritual (even if Ravn doesn’t specify how its effects actually compare to those of, say, an epidural).

Yet after a childhood friend loses a dozen infants in as many years, she accuses Christenze of sabotaging her pregnancies. Barely escaping prosecution by dint of her class status and connections, Christenze flees to the city of Aalborg. There, she falls in with a group of women who host all-night gatherings during which they card wool, gossip, and perform mysterious rituals that—though the specifics, to say nothing of their efficacy, are never quite elucidated for the reader—appear to be aimed at men they don’t like. Maren, the group’s charismatic leader—with whom Christenze begins a relationship that may or may not be romantic—instructs her to come to the first session wearing a white dress embroidered with a red mark (a symbol that inevitably summons the story of Hester Prynne, fictional inheritor of similar hysteria across the Atlantic in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1850 novel The Scarlet Letter) and a crown with her name written backward in red ink.

As my equivocations suggest, Ravn appears more interested in evoking atmosphere—the subversive camaraderie between the women, then the mounting tension as new and more serious accusations against them accrue—than describing definitively what Christenze is doing or thinking. Interspersed with the book’s more narrative chapters are earthy folk spells Ravn adapted from period texts: “Cast some blood of a hare into the fire, so that it makes a smell, then all the girls of the house will piss themselves.” The wax child, who remains hidden from Christenze’s enemies but speaks freely to the reader, uses the singsong refrain “I saw” to communicate everything from its mistress’s midwifery practices to its own prescient visions of the future: “I saw the great black tongues of oil advance […] I saw steam locomotives, the smallest particle split and exploded.” The wax child is most straightforward when describing the women’s “witchy” practices—like the costume Christenze must wear to Maren’s gathering—but never explains the motives behind them or the results (if any) they produce.

This ambiguity makes it almost possible to interpret the novel as a purely metaphorical exploration of early modern misogyny—were it not for the wax child’s distinct mimicry of the language of witch trials. In particular, the doll’s constant repetition of “I saw” across the novel invokes the notes and testimonies produced as part of such trials, during which accusers and suspects would relate the deeds they claimed to have observed or committed. Likewise, the wax child’s scrupulous attention to the specifics of Christenze’s rituals recalls the exhaustive detail with which authorities and demonologists recorded the “typical” behaviors of witches. (Ravn writes in an afterword that she drew directly from court documents and texts on witch trials in Europe.) Yet Ravn presents the wax child as more direct—even, for our purposes as readers, “trustworthy”—than those sources: it is unafraid of either black magic or torture, shows loyalty to Christenze, and has apparently foreseen the rise of train travel and atomic physics. That this narrator employs the rhetorical style of witch trials to affirm standard claims about witches—saying, for example, that it was “made for strength, made for harm,” and that Christenze gave it “hair and fingernail parings from the person who is to suffer”—gives credence within the novel to accusations that can never be substantiated in real life.

The wax child’s confessional tone sometimes seems at odds with Ravn’s refusal to answer basic questions: How did Christenze understand her seemingly supernatural powers? What were her goals? Did she really think she could evade the predictable consequences of imprisonment, torture, and execution? Yet by admitting easily to witchcraft but withholding the details, Ravn rejects the lurid spectacle that witch hunts and trials once provided. Instead, she directs the reader’s attention to the social rewards that witchcraft, as practiced in this novel, offers: namely, friendships with other women and the chance to enact (if not achieve) rebellion against the men and social forces that have circumscribed their lives. If we don’t know exactly what Christenze and her friends have done, we understand why they felt it was worth the risk.

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I Gave You Eyes is comparatively brazen, affirming tropes about witches as if ticking them off a list. Born into a perilous time when wolves snatch children from their beds (hostile environment threatens generational continuity: check), family matriarch Joana learns from the town spinster (check) that in order to bargain with the devil for a husband, she must stuff a dead cat’s eyes and anus with fava beans, bury it, and urinate on its grave (check). The devil promptly appears and rustles up a husband (check), but Joana’s satanic pact compromises her fertility (check). Each of her descendants lacks some physical or psychological attribute—a liver, an ear, the faculties of speech or empathy.

Unlike Ravn, Solà leaves little to equivocate over: across generations, the women of the house not only evince characteristics explicitly associated with witches but also practice witchcraft outright. After two infants die for want of crucial body parts, Joana “quell[s] that flow of defective babies” with herbal remedies. Blanca, her daughter and Margarida’s sister, nurses a prurient interest in animal mating and eventually falls in love with a woman. (Roper reports finding only one archival instance in which accused witches were explicitly labeled as lesbians, but in the context of The Wax Child and I Gave You Eyes, romantic relationships among women that exclude men challenge social norms in much the same way as witchcraft.) Blanca’s granddaughter, Bernadeta—who lacks eyelashes but possesses a terrifying ability to see the future—sleeps with the devil in bestial, shape-shifting form, eventually bearing his child. Margarida, who adopts her husband’s misogynistic proverbs (“when the devil can’t make it, he sends a woman in his stead”) in order to cope with his cruelty and violence, constantly tries to distance herself from these “nasty” relatives. Nevertheless, she casts the novel’s most powerful spell during a moment of rage, calling on the forest to isolate their home from the outside world, thereby protecting its inhabitants for generations.

Where The Wax Child metabolizes the stark syntax of witch trial testimonies, the exuberantly grotesque language of I Gave You Eyes reads like a rebellious riff on the writings of early modern demonologists. The women’s bodies are hairy, hunchbacked, “twisted,” and frequently bestial: Joana looks like a “toothless mare” and is given to “braying like an ass.” Margarida discerns the devil’s approach by “the nauseating stench of nether regions;” Bernadeta’s lashless eyes weep “discharge hard as croutons;” Joana tells vulgar tales about women cursed with debilitating farts; and Margarida describes Joana as the woman who “ripped her from her entrails” and herself gives birth “opened, with her ass in the air and the baby halfway out, squatting, pissing, and shitting herself.” Rare occasions of sexual pleasure carry a carnivorous quality: Blanca’s hands on her lover are ferrets that “descended into her valleys and devoured all they found there. […] Skin, feathers, bones, and entrails.” In short, if demonologists worked to cast women’s bodies as repulsive and then associate that repulsion with the occult, Solà’s ghosts enact everything they fantasized and more.

Still, though Solà and Ravn may seem to concede a litany of textbook transgressions, they do so to argue that these aren’t, in fact or fiction, transgressions at all. Christenze’s spells cement the friendships that help women endure the domination of their husbands. Joana’s summoning of the devil and her self-managed abortions are crucial to achieving reproductive and social agency. Margarida turns to witchcraft after the authorities disembowel her husband (himself a brigand and rapist) and imprison her, and the spell she later casts over her home is the family’s chief safeguard. In these novels, witchcraft is not something to be denied or disproved, but rather to be embraced as a method of self-assertion against a brutal and misogynistic world.

What’s the point, in the here and now, of lionizing the perpetration of imaginary acts? Though they depict the supernatural in different ways, Solà and Ravn agree that attempts to exculpate women from bad-faith accusations are not defenses so much as concessions, suggesting that the fears and fantasies created by witch hysteria are in some sense justified. Instead, these authors use the tools of misogyny—its tropes and its language—to circumvent the terms of the debate entirely. Solà, especially, uses pejorative language to compel the reader to sympathize with her protagonists: one can’t help but delight in the nonchalance with which the women of I Gave You Eyes inhabit their stigmatized bodies; and while violent descriptions of conception, pregnancy, birth, and abortion might have originally been intended to limit women’s agency, here they emphasize the terrible difficulties these characters surmount in bearing children or simply surviving their pregnancies. By creating protagonists who really are doing everything their persecutors fear yet making the reader root for them intensely, the novels reveal how hateful, violent, and ultimately laughable those fears really are.

As the reader’s sympathy arrives far too late to save centuries of already-persecuted women, none of the characters achieve justice within their own narratives. Still, while rooted in their own cultural contexts, rather than writing guides to our American labyrinth of travel bans and crisis pregnancy centers, both authors issue a salient warning for our moment. Both Ravn and Solà repurpose the vocabulary of witchcraft hysteria to emphasize the power and absurdity of the same kinds of rhetoric now being deployed across our country, a language that seeks to make abortion and reproductive healthcare seem grotesque and sinister so that they can be criminalized.

Lawyers and advocates are contesting these accusations vigorously; in the Georgia case, they did so successfully. Those of us who aren’t in the courtrooms but find ourselves reading headlines that shouldn’t exist must, Solà’s and Ravn’s novels urge, learn to parse this language differently—as a set of clues telling us where to direct our questions, and discern what is truly grotesque in these incidents. Why did that Georgia woman have to risk criminalization to get medical attention? Why did authorities respond with suspicion and blame to the sight of a woman bleeding and unconscious after a miscarriage? Why does her story sound like it belongs in the 17th century?