Musk and petrichor waft from the pages of Olga Ravn’s third novel, The Wax Child. The novel details the tragedy of 17th-century Danish women condemned for witchcraft, as told in first-person by a wax child—a beeswax puppet stuffed grotesquely with the nails and hair of the dollmaker’s enemies. The plot follows Jomfru Christenze Axelsdatter Kruckow, our narrator’s “mistress,” and Christenze’s interlocutors, Ousse, Maren (and her daughter Karen), Apelone, Dorte, and Mette. We learn early on that their story ends in death and flames—that the women are ruthlessly tried and killed and only the wax child lives on, carrying with her longing and scorn. Its two parts, “A Rumour of Witchcraft” and “A Witch Trial,” draw on the historical persecution and burnings of its named characters but speculate as to the relationships these women might have had with one another and to their sorcery. Were these witches enraptured by the Devil, harnessing dark powers to wound and control their patriarchs? Or were they sisters and lovers, finding comfort and respite in one another’s company while cleaning herring, carding wool, and sharing stories and recipes to sustain themselves? Her deftness with language itself a form of alchemy, Ravn breathes new life into her earlier rendition of this story, written first as a play called “HEX” with the Royal Danish Theatre. Ravn consulted grimoires, ledgers, and historical documents, compiling information about the persecution of Christenze and her contemporaries to build a narrative in which the sensuous middles, not the sensational endings, most resonate.
Throughout the story, Christenze sometimes uses her witchcraft to lighten the suffering of other women (for example “holding” the “skin girdle,” meaning to bear the pains for a woman in labor) or to connect with them through the hexing of a common enemy. Ravn highlights the ways that women collaborate with one another to create, to find interstices of love and play, and to be invigorated by labor: “everything was better, more fun, and easier, when you were more than one.” Paradoxically, this “more than one” is leveled by the limited narration of the doll who functions for Ravn as a mouthpiece and narrative device: “who is it who speaks? Someone said. It is only me, someone said. Who is that. It is us.” Here, as elsewhere, the women are represented as both “more than one” and yet as one homogeneous entity that speaks their collective story. This us prevails until “A Witch Trial,” the second part of the book, largely set in a dark cell, where the women are held together to await judgment and are tortured and coerced until they betray each other. The most fervent antagonist to the women in The Wax Child is the preacher, Klyne, whose wife Elizabeth joins ranks with the women to escape Klyne’s physical abuse before herself wavering and becoming a turncoat. Klyne wields his faith as justification to enact violence on all witches: “Where there are many women, there are many witches.” The story demonstrates that categorizing and persecuting women is not a matter of safety or justice but sadistic punishment. “Is that what harmful magic is? The thing everyone did to stop the hiccups? Was that heresy? Forgive us.” Not without irony, this passage reflects both that the women are unified in solidarity, and yet, by that logic, interchangeably culpable for each other’s crimes. The interdependence they had cultivated mutates into desperation when pressed under the weight of the Church and state.
As in My Work—Ravn’s sophomore novel, which is ambivalent (to say the least) about motherhood’s trappings—the characters in The Wax Child too show themselves to be angry and selfish, growing indignantly righteous in their individual quests for emancipation despite the beauty behind moments of collectivity—the collective and the individual are always in tension and sometimes at odds. In the opening pages, Anne Bille suffers from pregnancy losses, losing fifteen children by age thirty-two. The madness of this loss leads her to blame Christenze, publicly accusing her of witchcraft and inciting Christenze’s flight from Nakkebølle. It’s revealed Christenze and Anne had been lovers, and the former did curse Anne, impeding the latter’s capacity to bear children either as a vindictive trick or to impose her own anti-natalism. In either case, Christenze is capable of petty and violent incantations. In either case, this reveal does not justify Christenze’s eventual beheading. The Wax Child isn’t straightforward apologia for innocent witches: the women turn on one another, lashing out just as swiftly as they provide care. Ravn thus refuses to champion witches without too representing them as occasionally cruel yet nevertheless deserving of integrity.
Like Ravn’s other longform works, The Wax Child consists of short poetic prose—it croaks and breathes and slithers. Its images are vivid and visceral. Spells written in the imperative interspersed through the novel implore the reader to gather materials and use them, to make magic. Yet the book’s poetics are far more cogent than its politics. Christenze indeed challenges ideas about normative femininity and reproduction, expressing her desire to be a man and a reverence for masculinity while pushing against biological procreation as the only—or even the best—means of forming kinship, favoring instead her amicable and erotic ties to other women and her reliable wax child. Undergirded by a general malaise with the tedium of sexism and heterosexuality and a critique of hypocritical patriarchal structures, the book nevertheless traffics in regressive tropes that suggest sapphic love can occur only at the expense of motherhood or to the detriment of a child. There is, in other words, no sense that women might love one another and also be mothers; Anne is cursed with infertility and Karen is removed from Maren and made to testify against her mother during the witch trial. The wax child—who changes hands through the text, who preserves their stories and is used to curse many of the women’s antagonists—may signify an alternative to oppressive kinship models, granted: one predicated not on the compulsory iteration of the heterosexual nuclear family but instead, troublingly still, on scorning one’s enemies. Karen does carry on the wax child and perhaps with it her mother’s legacy, but we know that the wax child is eventually abandoned to gather dust.
There’s an urgency and an intimacy to the book and its story: “Do not ask for whom I speak. Do not ask on whose behalf. I speak for you.” Given Denmark’s fraught relationship to feminism, a story that takes up and complicates the vilification of women, female friendship, and motherhood does some feminist work by virtue of injecting into the literary landscape questions (if not answers) around sexist oppression, and may provide a stepstone to raising consciousness. In the first pages, the narrator remarks: “I was an instrument,” but “no one was carrying me anymore.” Perhaps the doll—stuffed with detritus and meaning, tucked against bodies and inside garments, buried into the ground—sustains purpose as well as history. I hear a call, an invitation to keep the story going, to pick up the wax child and her fraught legacy and revisit the bewildering power of a coven.
