In the first printed edition of William Shakespeare’s thirty-six plays, the First Folio, we read: “Sisters Wayward, hand in hand / Posters of sea and land, / So go, oh, oh, / Thrice to yours, thrice mine, / And thrice more, to make nine. / Peace, the spell has started.” “Weyward” was later replaced by “Weird,” a term we now use to refer to whimsical art. Thus, the fatal sisters who are in Macbeth they walk in circles until the spell is complete, three mysterious women to whom today the Anglo-Australian writer pays tribute on their behalf.
Wayward“, translated by Enrica Boudetta for Fuzzy, is a successful debut, highly acclaimed by a bestseller like Abi Dare, and it’s not hard to see why: it gives a voice to abused, persecuted and humiliated women. There are three voices, and they alternately cover different time periods: there is Alta, whom we meet in the middle of a witchcraft trial in the seventeenth century, then Violet, a little girl in the 1940s who dreams of becoming an entomologist but cannot. t because she is a male profession, and Kate is a young modern woman fleeing an abusive relationship.
illustration by Mara Serry
For each of them, the writer Emilia Hart found a language and a symbolic animal, for each she identified obstacles and enemies and identified a challenge, but these are not women winners. Witches neither win nor lose, real witches often don’t even know they are one unless nefarious circumstances force them to look deeply into their own being and therefore into their own history.
It is Kate, the most fragile and farthest from magic, who ties the threads. Lost in loneliness, which becomes cramped, she rearranges stories, connects details, until she regains her surname, a woman’s surname, which was lost over time. Wayward’s W shines again in an enjoyable and engaging novel whose most successful pages are those that connect the feminine to the earth, to the natural world.
Comes to mind Years of Memories (How to sew an American blanket), a 1995 film starring Winona Ryder as a student who, to finish her thesis and reflect on her personal life, takes refuge in the house of her grandmother and great-aunt, and there, through weaving a blanket, she understands more about herself and her roots. When Kate is in Waywardlocked herself in her great-aunt’s dacha, I thought that yes, it was time to update the image that we girls of the nineties had not forgotten.
illustration by Mara Serry