Feminist perspectives on the persecution of witchcraft in Bernardo Santareno's "O crime de Aldeia Velha"

Abstract

Inspired by the real-life case of a girl who was burnt alive in Soalhães, in northern Portugal, in the 1930s, Bernardo Santareno’s O crime de Aldeia Velha (1959) stages the persecution of a young woman by the female members of the rural community in which she lives. Accused of being a witch who is possessed by the devil, Joana will ultimately be burnt to death on a pyre supposedly lit in the hopes of delivering her from evil. The objective of this study is to analyse this play in the light of feminist theories developed from the 1960s onwards regarding the persecution of witches. In so doing, we aim to identify points of contact between these theories and Santareno’s play, as well as the particularities of the Portuguese dramatist’s vision of the underlying questions of gender in supposed cases of witchcraft. Special attention will be paid to the specific implications of the setting of Santareno’s play – a mid-twentieth-century Portuguese village – insomuch as it diverges notably from the focus of the aforementioned theories, which, for the most part, were developed in northern Europe and the United States, and concern themselves primarily with the proliferation of witch trials in these regions in the early modern period.