Blasted, Bound, and Bald: the Abject Properties of Witch Hair

Abstract

The witch’s blasted hair in Early Modern visual culture is moving and evolving. Her hair is untamable, animated by a wind and a force unknowable to the viewer. The artists who captured this “blasted” hair in the 16th century, including Hans Baldung Grien, Hans Sebald Beham, and Albrecht Dürer, found themselves working in opposition to what appears, at first glance, a formidable “other:” women’s agency and sexuality, frozen in bodily form as strands of hair. Little research has been dedicated to an earnest analysis of the witch’s amorphous hair so this paper consists primarily of original research and the application of philosophical and anthropological theory. Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection is a key tenet of this paper’s central argument. The witch is not an “other” directly opposed to a mainstream, she is a third intermediary thing: Kristeva’s “abject.” She is a personification of the skin on the surface of sour milk, instilling disgust in the potential consumer. She is the abject precisely because she is embedded in the object; her hair is the most explicit vehicle for this argument. Friedrich Speevon Langenfield’s accounts of forced hair removal and contemporary literature from Raymond Firth, Barbara Baert, and E.R. Leach inform this reading of witch hair as the abject. This paper concludes that the visual translation of blasted hair is an attempt to remove it and its female sexual connotation from the imagination to a more accessible visual medium. The artist’s renderings are meant to turn the abject into an easily digestible object, a complete “other.”