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the Vietnam War, but simultaneously most of these same Americans were firmly against public protests or displays of resistance against the government (Laderman, 2020:95). Nixon referred to these individuals as the ‘Great Silent Majority’ (Laderman, 2020:95). According to Scott Laderman (2020:96) the silent majority implied “that the radicalism that seemed to be everywhere by late 1969 was not actually representative and that those Americans who were ‘silent’ had in fact been silenced.”
The protesting and ‘shouting’ left were blamed for silencing the rest of America (Laderman, 2020:95- 96).
The silent Americans were described as white, Christian, conservative, and middle to upper class families (Laderman, 2020:96). These people conformed to societal norms, had sober habits, were patriots of high moral standing, and respected power structures (Laderman, 2020:96).
The above describes the sociocultural context of the American suburbia in which we find Joan. She lives a comfortable conservative life, but this life stifles her. She is bored, sexually frustrated, and uses medication to dull her senses. She is also unable to voice her discontent as that would align her with the protesting left leading to stigma and isolation. Interestingly, by practicing witchcraft she finds her voice and gains agency and autonomy. Witchcraft reframes her protest and makes it palatable for her peers as we see in the final scene of the film where she reveals that she is a witch.
Instead of being shunned by her friends, their admiration for her grows. In other words, in this instance witchcraft reframes a challenge to patriarchal power structures as acceptable and even worth revering. In the films discussed up to this point the witch is shown to challenge patriarchal power structures resulting in extreme forms of isolation like death. In Jack’s Wife an unpredictable change is made in this regard, making it an example not only of Bloom’s clinamen but also of a feminist film.
The film is not without problems however, and distributors and the viewing public at the time were unable to identify the socio-political statements the film was aiming to make, as is discussed in the sections below.
Literature review
Much has been written about George A. Romero’s oeuvre, yet considerably less about Jack’s Wife, though it is regarded as an early example of feminist films. Romero mentioned in a 1973 interview with Cinemafantastique’s Sam Nicotero that he believes that Jack’s Wife is a better film than his Night of the Living Dead (1968) and The Crazies (1973) (Nicotero, 1973:22).
Romero has stated that the two sex scenes in Jack’s Wife were not intended to titillate, nor was the film an exploration of the pornographic film genre (Nicotero, 1973:27; Yakir, 1979:57). The sex and scenes of nudity had a definite meaning for him and were deliberate in an effort to give the audience a
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glimpse of Joan’s private life (Nicotero, 1973:27). Romero also mentioned that the X certification the film received in 1973 aggravated him deeply as it grouped his film with “meaningless pornography”
(Nicotero, 1973:27). He wanted the film to be an intelligent commentary on the suburban housewife of the time (Nicotero, 1973:29). Jack’s Wife was too complex for the film distributers at the time, resulting in a new edit of the film as well as a new title, Hungry Wives (Cutrone, Hacket, & Lebowitz, 1973:37, 38). A new film campaign was also launched for the film by the distribution agents
reframing it as a soft-core erotic film, much to Romero’s chagrin (Cutrone, Hacket, & Lebowitz, 1973:38; Yakir, 1979:57).
The idea for Jack’s Wife came to Romero while researching a project for a public television show in Pittsburgh (Lippe, Williams, & Wood, 1979:61). He said: “A lot of the people surrounding me there were these suburban women. Feminist awareness was beginning. These all came together when I did the script.” (Lippe, Williams, & Wood, 1979:61). According to Romero the title of the film suggests what is at the heart of the film, namely that Joan is nobody to the world, in her own right, and that she is simply Jack’s wife (Lippe, Williams, & Wood, 1979:62).
Tony Williams’s The Cinema of George A. Romero: Knight of the Living Dead (2015) is lauded by some as the most thorough study of Romero’s oeuvre (Sharrett, 2017:141). It is also one of two more recent available academic studies I could find in which an in-depth analysis of Jack’s Wife is carried out. Tony Williams (2015:1) explicitly mentions in his introduction for the abovementioned text that Romero’s work can only be fully understood by analysing his films through a socio-historical lens and how these circumstances affected Romero’s films from the 1960s to the present day. The problem with this statement is that it sets the reader up to believing that Williams will be discussing Romero’s films from a socio-historic perspective which does not happen. Though there are some interesting observations, Williams mostly opens each chapter with a short history of the production and release of each film and then proceeds to transcribe the events of said films in detail while making occasional observations as to these events. In the next paragraphs I discuss and expand upon the ideas from this study that are most relevant for my own project.
Williams (2015:53) suggests that Romero “intelligently recognises the importance of contemporary modes of conduct influencing the behavioural patterns of all characters who appear in his various films”. In other words, Romero has shown through his films that he understands contemporary socio- normative shifts and how to incorporate these shifts into the narrative. We see this skill of Romero’s manifesting with regards to the subtle incorporation of Nixon’s silent majority as sociocultural context for the film. According to Romero (Gagne, 1987:49) and Williams (2015:52-52) Jack’s Wife centres on a suburban housewife who attempts to redirect her life, but ultimately fails due to her
unwillingness to accept that her personal choices are to blame for the course her life has taken. Like
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most of the characters in Romero’s films, Joan’s denial is detrimental to her personality resulting in an inability to realize her full potential as a free person (Williams, 2015:53).
Joan is middle-aged and has never worked since she married Jack. She is a stay-at-home mother and wife and her husband is financially secure enabling her to live a comfortable life. Furthermore, she is bored, lonely, under-appreciated, sexually frustrated, and has a low self-esteem. Her comfortable life is a cage which she can’t escape, nor is she allowed by her husband or society to voice objections to this lifestyle. This is emphasised by the opening dream sequence of the film where Joan walks submissively behind Jack through the woods. As they walk Jack completely ignores her and allows branches to scratch Joan’s face and skin as he pushes them aside to make way for himself. Along the road she finds an abandoned baby, which according the Williams (2015:54) represent the patriarchal prison created by motherhood. Similarly the organ music playing in the background of the scene represents the oppression religion exerts over the western world and how it can stifle women like Joan (Williams, 2015:54, 55). When Joan sees a swing, an object of freedom and liberation, Jack hits her nose with a newspaper and sets a dog collar around her neck – effectively reducing Joan to the status of a household pet (Williams, 2015:54). Ironically, after Joan accidently kills Jack by shooting him with a shotgun, she is led into the secret meeting place of a coven by a leash tied around her neck and placed naked and on her knees before an altar. The very last scene in the film shows Joan in an opulent living room with the same friends she had before, indicating that nothing has really changed and that she is still trapped in the very same suburban context. Her friends still introduce her as Jack’s wife as the film ends with the camera zooming in on her face exuding utter sadness and discontent.
The only difference in her life is that she now inherited a lot of money and is without a husband. Her husband was not emotionally or physically available so nothing has really changed. Joan has not made anything of her life, except becoming a self-proclaimed witch. Her freedom thus becomes another prison – both beginning and end sequences of the film forming a circular narrative with no resolution or liberation, suggesting a never ending nightmare (Williams, 2015:55).
Williams (2015:56) argues that Joan is not any different from the zombies in Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, as her husband and daughter do not notice her. There is also the hefty supply of
tranquilizers in Joan’s bathroom cabinet suggesting that she might be in a drug-induced haze to make her life bearable. Tranquilizers like Valium was a major problem in the United States during the 1970s among women who sought to escape the trappings of their middle-class lifestyles and sexist social structures (Herzberg, 2006:79, 95-96). Interestingly she decides not to have her daily dose when her daughter compliments her on her “great body”.
Williams (2015:57) also draws attention to Joan’s general unhappiness about her appearance and body, but it runs short of making any meaningful conclusions about Joan’s appearance. For instance, Joan Mitchell is not an unattractive woman, but in the film she is made to look stern, unhappy, and
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older than she really is. Her hair is tightly bound into a bun and the clothes she adorns throughout the film seem more suited for older women (figure 12).
Figure 12. Jack’s Wife. 1972. Directed by George A. Romero. [Film still from DVD] USA: Anchor Bay.
As the film progresses her appearance changes and she literally lets her hair down along with her stern demeanour. After accidently killing her husband there is a long and lingering scene where she appears naked in front of the coven and is inducted into their fold by being whipped while on her knees – again submitting control to others. Though this submission is problematic, there is more to Joan’s exposed naked body.
Like Häxan this film starts with an older witch, but ends with a youthful witch in the nude. In Jack’s Wife beauty and youth is again a theme, like all the witch films of the 1960s discussed so far. After the death of Jack, Joan is perceived as younger and more beautiful by her peers, and the audience, by the end of the film. The only difference is that unlike Asa in Black Sunday and or Stephanie Bax in The Witches, Joan succeeds with her sacrifice and gains her youth, sex and attention from a younger man, and is liberated from her oppressing husband. The audience sees this transformation occurring slowly through the film and at the end Joan exposes her body to the audience as proof that though she is middle-aged she is still beautiful and a viable sexual partner. The film ends with Joan gaining what she thought she had lost, but she is still alone. The crux of the matter is that she believes the occult
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gave her back her youth and beauty, while it was always there from the start. She remains unhappy in the final scene of the film because she believes that she had to submit to an external locus of control again to gain what she had lost. Williams (2015) does notice the inherent self-denial in most of the characters Romero created over the decades, but fails to follow through on this in his analysis.
Another reason for Joan’s unhappiness might have to do with the way witchcraft is used in the film.
Williams (2015:58) makes an interesting observation by stating that the ladies in Jack’s Wife, including Joan, treat witchcraft like a fad and not as a system which can assist in challenging societal norms or structures. In other words, Joan’s unhappiness at the end is the realization that her trust in witchcraft is unfounded and did not lead her to freedom. This is different from reality as feminist witchcraft, or Wicca, a popular past-time, or self-help method, for women during the late 1960s and early 1970s, did influence contemporary feminist movements of the time (Feraro, 2013:31; Murphy, 2009:63). Williams does not take into consideration the popularity of Wicca at the time leading up to the film’s release.
Where Williams’ study at time tends towards the superficial, Bernice M. Murphy’s The Suburban Gothic in American Popular Culture (2009) is though-provoking and thorough scholarly work.
Murphy (2009:1) suggests that injecting the gothic or supernatural into the suburbs is especially disturbing to the viewer as it is the last place you would expect phenomena like this to be present. She suggests that the gothic and supernatural are actually parallels for the dark things that hide under the veneer of polite and peaceful suburban society (Murphy, 2009:1).
With The Suburban Gothic in American Popular Culture Murphy attempts to define and illustrate the sub-genre category of the suburban gothic and describes her focus as the unease and anxieties of the white middle classes and how these fears manifest in popular culture (Murphy, 2009:2). Murphy (2009:2) explains:
In the Suburban Gothic, one is almost always in more danger from the people in the house next door, or one’s own family, than from external threats. […] Unlike the small town horror tales of Stephen King, in which the danger invariably comes from a monstrous ‘Other’, here, it is one’s fellow suburbanites, family members and personal decisions which pose the most danger.
One of the central characteristics of the witch is that she is able to hide in plain sight, which draws similarities between her and Murphy’s statements. The witch is not a monster that originates from space, a dark dimension, or even a different country. The witches in all the films discussed thus far are all locals to their geographic regions. The witch is someone’s sister, daughter, mother, aunt, or
grandmother. She infiltrates society without any effort. And just as easily as someone can keep the
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most mundane of secrets, so does the witch have her own secrets hidden away in her suburban dwelling. Like Tansy proves in Night of the Eagle, no dirty basement or musty attic is required to house occult paraphernalia. It can be hidden in plain sight.
Much of Murphy’s study delves into the psychological influence of the suburban landscape. She ascribes the anxiety of the suburban populace as originating from sudden changes to the old patterns of existence in western society’s lifestyle during the 1950s and 1960s (Murphy, 2009:2). The horror hence originates from home or the dwellings of the neighbours with their immaculate lawns, wide smiles, and inviting tuna casseroles. She delineates suburban gothic within a set of eleven
contradictory attitudes/binary oppositions which are: homely/haunted; home ownership/crippling debt; nice neighbours/neighbours who are hiding something; utopian setting/place of entrapment and unhappiness; safe place for children/obvious haunt for paedophiles/child murderers; a place to make a fresh start/a place haunted by the communal past; refuge from the overpopulated and polluted
city/destroyer of the environment; family focused/breeding ground for abuse and dysfunction;
proximity to like-minded people/a place of mindless conformity and materialism; white picket fences and perfect lawns/basements, crawlspaces, and back yards; protected from outside world/hidden dangers that strike from within (Murphy, 2009:3).
Murphy (2009:4) describes suburbia as an in-between space that occupies the border between urban city and the rural countryside. It bridges the gap between primitive nature and developed
industrialisation – a strategic point of entry for the dangers of both settings. She argues that the most prominent fears the suburban individual experiences are a loss of identity, paradoxical comforts, the dangers of conformity, and destruction of the environment (Murphy, 2009:4).
The abovementioned fears are also embodied by the cinematic witch in horror films. Through the use of supernatural possession the individual loses their identity. The witch threatens the creature and societal comforts of the western lifestyle by being able to conjure objects and wealth out of thin air.
Similarly she is able to influence relationships to such an extent that she can break up marriages or cause miscarriages. She can also increase someone's fertility to such an extent that the size of a family outpaces the breadwinner’s salary leading to spiralling debt. The witch as an avatar for the other represents profound and extreme individualism, but her ability to possess or control the mind of others leads to conformity on a larger scale, like when Stephanie possesses most of the villagers in The Witches. The boredom and comfort suburbia offers can also lead to a weak society unable to fend off the supernatural dangers the witch might wreak on them. The witch also represents the Dionysian and nature. Her natural habitat is the forest, her playground is the clearing in the woods under a full moon, and like nature she is violent and turbulent. With all of the associations one can draw between the witch and the suburbs, it seems more than plausible that suburbia is the most natural place for the witch to inhabit. There are numerous suburbs that pepper the landscape in every country around the
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globe. Furthermore, the long commutes and the hours thrust upon the husbands and fathers to afford to live in the suburbs means that there are armies of bored, trapped, lonely, depressed, and sexually frustrated women just waiting for the promise of a better life (Murphy, 2009:7). The suburbs are thus a perfect breeding ground for witches, women who are expected to remain silent about their
discontent – ground zero for the destruction of the Apollonian western world as we know it.
Murphy applies her theories about gothic suburbia to the Bewitched sitcom, Jack’s Wife, and the novel Conjure Wife (Frist Lieber’s 1952 novel that Night of the Eagle was based on) in the second chapter of her text. She specifically focusses on the combination of the witch with the suburban wife during the 1960s and 1970s. The suburban witch is a fascinating hybrid that combines the modern, maternal, and domesticated with the unruly, ancient, and powerful – a complex figure representative of the western woman (Murphy, 2009:41). The suburban witch, Murphy (2009:41) says, is evidence of the extent to which gothic texts mirror societal truths. In the past the witch was confined to our
imaginations where she operated from her base in the woods, but by placing her in the suburbs (during the 1960s), her threat is made more real (Murphy, 2009:43). In order to placate these fears the cinematic witches of the sixties and early seventies were depowered or made less threatening by giving them a choice between being a lonely witch or having a comfortable life with man to love (Murphy, 2009:43).
This comfortable suburban married life in which Joan finds herself in Jack’s Wife leads to Joan becoming a witch due to many of the fears Murphy describes. Murphy (2009:58), like Williams, describes Joan as trapped in a bored and lonely suburban existence. Joan’s fears are shown throughout the film to dwell on her supposed aging appearance and the jealousy she harbours towards her
daughter who is on the cusp of an independent and sexually fulfilling lifestyle (Murphy, 2009:58).
After considering Joan’s circumstances, Murphy (2009:58) questions the origins of the witch and if witches are born or formed by societal pressures. She also finds it ironic that Joan uses a Mastercard to buy all the accoutrements deemed necessary to become a witch (Murphy, 2009:59). Murphy (2009:60) argues that Joan had fooled herself into believing that she has supernatural abilities but that this had positive consequences as it gives Joan an escape from mundane suburban life, but also a new- found confidence. The confidence she portrays in the final scene of the film soon disappears from her face as the incessant chattering of all the women about mundane and superfluous things makes her realize that nothing has changes and that she is still trapped. She is exasperated when she overhears one of the guests refer to her as Jack’s wife, solidifying this fear into reality. Murphy (2009:61) stresses that the real horror in the film is not in the supernatural, but “…the soul-destroyingly tedious reality of life as a middle-aged woman in 1970s suburbia”. Even if Joan’s supernatural abilities were found to be real, they are not enough to facilitate an escape from her suburban prison (Murphy, 2009:61).