Ian Iracheta

Facultad de Filosofa y Letras

Letras Inglesas, Colegio de Letras Modernas
Universidad Nacional Autnoma de Mxico

Inversions of Space in Penetrating to the Heart of the Forest by Angela Carter and The Witch,

directed by Robert Eggers

In this essay, I will analyse ideological inversions of symbolic space in two Gothic texts, a short story by

Angela Carter named Penetrating to the Heart of the Forest, and a period horror film titled The Witch. I

will mainly focus on the dyad of civilization / nature that is present in both narratives. Apart from that, the

link between the two of them is that they both reverse the cultural values of the forest and the place of

proper human habitation they depict in contrast to it.

The Witch

In a horror movie, we would expect the forest to be that uncanny space where human beings are at their

most vulnerable to attack, be it of the supernatural or otherwise. Opposed to it would be a village, or at

least a house, where a sense of community provides safety from danger. The forest is the space of the

macrocosm, what is outside of mans control; the house is the space of the microcosm, it has been created

by and for man.

While at first glance The Witch may seem another run-off-the-mill horror film with a strong

presence of the supernatural, in fact, most of the actual horror comes from the natural itself, or rather from

the microcosm, instead of than the macrocosm. Probably the most distressing scenes are the impromptu

witch trial Thomasin goes through and how she is made to murder her own mother in self-defence. Rather

than evoking images of the devil and witchcraft, these scenes call to mind witch trials where normal

human women were sentenced to death. This effect is strengthened at the end of the film when we are told

that most of the dialogue comes directly from these period sources [written accounts of historical

witchcraft, including journals, diaries, and court records]. When it comes to setting, we must remember

that all save perhaps one of the most brutal scenes in the film take place at the family farm.

The forest itself, in contrast, is strangely innocent, though undeniably macabre. However, every

single scene that has as its consequence human suffering is the product of human actions. The witch that

lives in the forest and who abducts and murders William and Katherines child and then seduces and

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 Ian Iracheta
Facultad de Filosofa y Letras
Letras Inglesas, Colegio de Letras Modernas
Universidad Nacional Autnoma de Mxico

hexes Caeleb is herself human, more so than she need be, in fact. She could have lived in a cave, which

would have been more natural, but instead of that she inhabits a hut of sorts, reminiscent structurally of

the main farmhouse building. Though she is a kind of liminal character, she is still part of humanity. It is

not nature itself that is terrifying, but humanity. The devil himself in the last few scenes abandons the

shape of the goat (which though violent, does not necessarily strike one as evil), to take the shape of a

man.

What the forest is is a source of goods. We often see William chopping wood that came from it.

We see him and his son hunt in it to provide food for themselves, etc. In fact, we never even see a

threatening animal in the forest. The wolf that takes Sam is a product of their imagination, and curiously

enough they think of a wolf reminding us of the sententia homo homini lupus. Black Philip, I must add,

is part of the microcosm because he has been domesticated (though not sufficiently).

In the previous page, I also mentioned the fact that human habitation is symbolic of a sense of

community that wards off danger, but in The Witch it is other people who are dangerous through their

fanatical beliefs. There is only one point where a harmonious sense of community is made blatant: the

final scene when Thomasin joins the coven. This, significantly, is also the only scene where we see her

smile.

Penetrating to the Heart of The Forest

In this short story, the dyad nature / culture is not so much related to safety and danger as much as it is to

the acquisition of knowledge. But just like in The Witch we can see an ideological inversion of space. A

scholastic tradition going back centuries tells us that knowledge is to be gained from books, from tutors,

and teachers, and, perhaps in the case of the natural sciences, the occasional field trip. However, this

coming-of-age tale narrates the process whereby two children learn about their own sexuality upon a long

excursion to the forest, rather than in a sex-ed seminar. Book knowledge and life experience are

contrasted in the tale quite literally, as the childrens father can only read about the flora his offspring can

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 Ian Iracheta
Facultad de Filosofa y Letras
Letras Inglesas, Colegio de Letras Modernas
Universidad Nacional Autnoma de Mxico

actually touch and bite into. But the children do not go into the forest because of botanical curiosity but

rather for ontological and epistemological reasons.

In this short story, Nature is where knowledge is, and the forest is there to be read like a symbol,

or rather a multiplicity of them. On the other hand, the space of the human is where we find ignorance,

and lack of curiosity. For the community, the groves that skirted those forests of pine in the central valley

[form] all of the world they wished to know (58). From the very beginning, a settlement of human

activity, wherewe would thinkknowledge is to be amassed and built upon, is portrayed as the locus of

ignorance. We are told that the inhabitants believed the name, Ocean, that of a man in another country

and would have taken an oar, had they ever seen one, to be a winnowing fan (58). Two details are worth

pointing out here. First, the fact that the inhabitants know the word ocean, but their knowledge stops at

the signifier. With a structuralist awareness of the arbitrariness of the relationship between the different

components of the sign, and a post-modern awareness of the inability of interacting conceptually with the

world in itself, Carter showcases the fallibility of language as an epistemological tool to gain knowledge

of the world. What is the use of knowing the word ocean if you do not know what it is?

The second detail worth picking up on is the reference to the winnowing oar in The Odyssey. In

Book XI, Tiresias instructs Odysseus to take an oar from his ship and to walk inland until he finds men

who ne'er knew salt, or heard the billows roar (645-71), and who will mistake his oar for a winnowing

fan. Upon reaching such a place, his journeys will be over and he will die. If we consider the acquisition

of knowledge as a journey, by dint of that allusion, Carter presents us a humanity that is dead and

apathetic of what is around it.

Conclusion

In Carters short story, the children must leave civilization is order to learn about themselves. In The

Witch Thomasin must leave her (now dead) family behind and join a coven to be happy and feel safe.

Both texts show us what we would think are wrong decisions, going off into the forest, and worshipping

Satan, respectively, but the narratives are framed in such a way that it almost seems like the only possible

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 Ian Iracheta
Facultad de Filosofa y Letras
Letras Inglesas, Colegio de Letras Modernas
Universidad Nacional Autnoma de Mxico

solution to solve the problems depicted. The children in Penetrating in the Heart of the Forest would die

from intellectual stagnation back home, and The Witch shows us the evil and utter misery of religious

fanatics.

References:

Carter, Angela. Fireworks: Nine Profane Pieces. New York: Penguin, 1987.
Print.
The Odyssey of Homer in English Verse Translation by Alexander Pope. London: Ex Fontibus
Company, 2015. Print.
The Witch. Dir. Robert Eggers. Perf. Anya Taylor-Joy, Ralph Ineson, Kate Dickie. Universal
Pictures International, 2016. DVD.