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1 results

  • Chapter 8 - The Demonization of Domesticity:

  • from Part II - Walter Scott Bewitched
  • Orianne Smith, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
  • Book:
    Romanticism Bewitched
    Published online:
    26 April 2026
    Print publication:
    04 June 2026, pp 235-252

  • Summary

    Romanticism Bewitched concludes with a discussion of Joanna Baillie’s Gothic tragedy, Witchcraft, written as a response to what she believed to be a missed opportunity by Scott in his novel, The Bride of Lammermoor, to explore the psychological and social dimensions of the rise of witchcraft. The first section outlines the similarities between Scott’s novel and Macbeth. Both Scott’s novel and Shakespeare’s tragedy take place in Scotland in a politically precarious moment with squabbling factions and dwindling confidence in the central authority of the government. In the second section, Baillie argues that the decidedly unsympathetic treatment of the female supernatural by Scott and others perpetuates damaging stereotypes and diverts our attention from the real problem – a social structure founded on inequity. Baillie’s tragedy explores the outbreak of accusations of witchcraft as the consequence of a diseased patriarchy and the abdication of the responsibilities of fathers, literally within the family unit and figuratively as the representatives of the authority of church and state.