‘I’m the witch, you’re the world’: Monstrosity and ‘Othering’ in Into the Woods

Abstract

I have always been intrigued by and enamoured of fairy tales. However, no Black person can ever have an uncomplicated relationship to these stories, which, due in large part to Disney, now are almost entirely identified with Western Europe. Fairy tales – highly adaptable and designed to speak to fundamental concerns – reflect, reinscribe and sometimes create societal ideals. As a Black girl, fairy tales are at once a reminder of everything you are told you are not by wider society – beautiful, desirable, worthy of status, admiration and often supernatural blessing. They also reinforce our notions of purity and justify dehumanization, and this is why James Lapine and Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods has always been particularly fascinating to me. Sondheim and Lapine take the fairy tale as a text and dissect it – taking a variety of tales in their older, darker iterations as retold by the Brothers Grimm and showing the way they navigate complicated dynamics of purity and corruption. The first time I watched Into the Woods, I found, rather surprisingly, that I identified most closely with the Witch and the Giantess, the villains of the story and those categorically revolted and feared as ‘Other’. Whereas the other characters in the musical – the ones who are attached to the notion that they are, in fact, good – ignore or justify their own terrible (and very human) behaviour in the name of righting injustices and obtaining their desires, the Giantess and the Witch are not accorded the same humanity.