WITCHCRAFT FOR WAYWARD GIRLS, by Grady Hendrix
What is a wayward girl? In American history, waywardism was a capacious category, large enough to contain all of our anxieties about young women and transform them into a network of laws, courthouses, prisons, asylums and extralegal institutions that have, since the time of the Civil War, targeted girls over infractions that are ignored or even celebrated in boys. Wayward girls were a dangerous rot in the moral heart of the country, we were told, and every time a young woman wore pants or had sex or spoke back to her parents, she took another step down a road that could only end in syphilis, sex work and bastard children.
This wild abhorrence of young women is the animating horror of Grady Hendrix’s superb new novel, “Witchcraft for Wayward Girls” — an unfortunately timely look at the lives of unmarried pregnant girls in the years right before Roe v. Wade was decided. Here, that examination comes with a leitmotif of witchcraft.
It’s 1970, and Fern, Rose, Holly and Zinnia are four of the “flowers” of Wellwood House, a private home deep in the Florida woods where teenage girls are sent to have babies in secret. Upon arrival, each girl is given a botanical name, forbidden from discussing her past and told that “if she was good, if she did exactly what they said, if she followed the rules and accepted her punishment, it would be like this never happened.” This is all framed as a kindness for the girls, but it’s mostly a gift for their irate fathers and feckless boyfriends. For the girls, it’s actually a mask of innocence they will be forced to wear for the rest of their lives. “Happiness isn’t about doing what you like,” Fern’s mother tells her, “but learning to like what you have to do.”
Wellwood House is managed by a group of well-intentioned, run-of-the-mill misogynists who believe that a certain amount of cruelty is necessary (or at least unavoidable) to get the girls to stop being lazy, dreamy, angry, hungry, disobedient, and — most of all — sexual and self-indulgent. But when a mysterious librarian gives the four girls a book called “How to Be a Groovy Witch,” their inchoate rage and shared desires connect them to a magical inheritance stretching back through generations of women and beyond the beginnings of history as recorded by men. “Power is the ability to act,” the book tells them. “Those who have power wish to keep it, and those who want power must learn to take it.”
Until now, these girls have had to take whatever was thrown at them; with the book (and one another) they are, for the first time, able to seize what they want. But what do you want when you’ve been told your whole life that your desires don’t matter? Magic or no, each girl must find her own answer to that question.
Hendrix’s genius as a horror writer is his ability to develop complex, human-scale emotional arcs. He gilds these dramas with a glorious, gory layer of monsters and magic, but in his work, the uncanny exists primarily to symbolize real-world issues. His characters are complex, particularly the women, and don’t fall into the easy tropes that often plague horror stories. He’s explored the fraught territory of girls’ friendships before (in “My Best Friend’s Exorcism”), and the routine dismissal of women’s experiences as well (in “The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires”). But never before has one of his books so aptly met the moment. “Witchcraft for Wayward Girls” is a powerful reminder that much of the debate around abortion boils down to this: Women will have children, and they will stop themselves from having them as well. The only question is how hard society makes both those decisions.
Tough choices abound in “Witchcraft for Wayward Girls,” which doesn’t shy away from unfair consequences or imperfect solutions. The wrath of the powerless is always terrible to behold because the costs are so high. To enact their rage, they must carve their weapons out of their own bones, and once they start fighting, they will never stop because they have already sacrificed everything just to be able to stand up. As one of the girls asks toward the end of the novel, “After everything she’d been through, after she’d created life, after they had taken her child, did they really think she was scared of something as small as God?”
At turns frightening, anxiety-producing, infuriating, beautiful and sad, “Witchcraft for Wayward Girls” is a perfect horror for our imperfect age.
WITCHCRAFT FOR WAYWARD GIRLS | By Grady Hendrix | Berkley | 482 pp. | $30