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The Witch of Blackbird Pond | Witchy Girls and Witchy Women: Training for Domesticity in Elizabeth George Speare’s The Witch of Blackbird Pond

Deborah Moreland received her doctorate in Literary Studies at the University of Texas at Dallas, writing her dissertation on the connection between high culture and low culture in early twentieth-century British literature. She now teaches and chairs the English department at a private school in Dallas. In this essay, she demonstrates that, part fairy tale and part frontier myth, The Witch of Blackbird Pond celebrates traditional notions of womanhood by depicting it as both transgressive and domestic.

On a morning in mid-April 1697, the brigantine Dolphin left the open sea, sailed briskly across the Sound to the wide mouth of the Connecticut river and into Seabrook harbor.

So begins Elizabeth George Speare’s The Witch of Blackbird Pond. Although generally understood as historical romance, the novel could as easily open with “once upon a time in a land far, far away” for its similarity to the sort of myths constitutive of many fairy tales.1 In its skeleton form, the fairy tale often popular with young girls offers an orphaned...

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