Widdershins

Two middle-aged women Bostonians—one a suburban matron and the other an academic—meet in a class on witchcraft and witches, “benders of reality.” Bored and hemmed in—the matron by the mundane duties of the housewife and the academic by the cramped, book-filled carrels of the library—they are looking for sources of renewal. In studying women’s ancient culture and traditions, they are irresistibly lured from classroom, kitchen, and carrel into the woods (a woods whose existence is threatened by property-development interests that one of the women leads a resistance against). There, in touch with the fecundity of nature and with the help of a lust-inducing, golden-headed man they both tangle with, these duty-ridden women rediscover their own appetite for life. Then, when the man proves unworthy, they take a witchy revenge on him. Emerging from the woods, they return to their lives, but they bring a spirit of renewal with them. With the help of widdershins, the spell of undoing, the matron has been freed from the clutches of the Farmwife (a personification of the housewife’s work ethic) and the academic from the curse of her authoritarian mother.

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