📘 Olga Ravn, The Wax Child
She fully believed they would never seize her. That she was as invincible as a star. But I saw clearly that a star such as she was a star made of hair, and the hair wound slowly outwards like the shoots of the bindweed, latching onto everything in its path, twisting, sucking the capacity from its surroundings, that it be delivered to its own starry middle, the empty void where wax children live. They will do right to fear me, Christenze thought; but to me my mistress was harmless, as invincible as the foam that tops the wave as it crests into its final peak.
My problem with The Wax Child is simple, i've read a handful of books which employ the narrative device of (historical) witchcraft to explore women's oppression, and each one explored these themes better. Let me name a few that cross my mind, so readers may understand where i'm coming from: The Crucible (admittedly, this is a play, but we'll get to that), I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem, and, Hurricane Season.
Witchcraft as a narrative device has become rather ubiquitous in our times, a shorthand, to explore the othering of women. We might even go so far as to say that Silvia Frederici's theoretical work, Caliban and the Witch (which i have certain reservations about, in retrospect), might have been partially responsible for the concatenation of witchcraft with women's oppression. If its influence was indirect, Frederici certainly had at least one finger in the pie.
The Wax Child re-treads some well-worn ground, Christenze, the protagonist, is a lesbian, unmarried in her thirties, and a resident of Funen. She resist the ordained place of women in her day, and for her defiance, she is accused of witchcraft. Christenze avoids her first arrest and leaves behind her pastoral place of birth and begins living in a city where she makes the acquantaince of a number of other women, who go on to form what is later renounced as a witch's coven. After a period of happiness and idyllic coexistence, the women are arrested and tried for their alleged crimes, we know how it goes.
Ravn's historical setting is well appointed, she paints a backdrop of the wane of feudalism and first stabs at capitalism as it began to take shape with the advent of Dutch colonialism. This aspect Ravn weaves in very well, i think, she neither underplays, nor belabours the fact. Unfortunately, at least in my eyes, it conforms to the theoretical thrust of Frederici's argument very closely, a little too closely. The story somehow seems to be going through the motions, rather than breaking new ground. This is evident from the fact that it employs historical figures drawn from archival documents, and in addition to that, the novel is based on a play by Olga Ravn, HEX. Do you see why i said we'd be returning to The Crucible?
The one point of interest is the other narrative device of note, the titular wax child, the inanimate narrator of Christenze's ordeal. While the child is a very evocative narrator (the book is very beautifully written, i think, though a little hollow), we've seen Ravn employ inanimate objects as the fulcrum of her narrative before in The Employees. It's just that this time, instead of the employees reporting on the stones they found on an alien planet, it is the inanimate object reporting on the woman who shaped it. In this, Ravn is reflecting on her own prior work, which is interesting, to say the very least. i would be interested to learn of Ravn's reflections on this aspect.
But overall, i was disappointed, The Employees was a very surprising read for me, back in 2024, i want to say? And while i haven't read My Work yet, The Wax Child was a bit anti-climactic for me.