Pictures and Reactions

When Alexandra is recalling her former husband, now turned to multicolored dust in a jar, the first thought that came to mind for me personally was a jar full of layers of colored sand. I found this ironic because colored sand is always associated with childhood: innocence and the unadulterated joy of the carnival from which one traditionally makes jars of layered sand.
"By the time of their actual divorce her former lord and master had become mere dirt...some polychrome dust she swept up and kept in a jar as a souvenir."[pg 9]
I wonder if Updike planted this image on purpose to give the impression that Alexandra considered the men she went through as nothing more than playthings, and the termination of their lives meant nothing to her besides adding a new colorful jar to her archive.






























The first of these pictures is how I pictured the beach that Jane visited as Updike was just starting to describe it. The book has a greyish and gloomy tint that requires the author to use vividly colorful and cheery adjectives to break the dark tone and create an image that doesn't look like it's covered in soot. However once Updike made a conscious attempt to describe the day as "warm...[with] old cars and VW vans with psychedelic stripes fill[ing] the narrow parking lot...and many young people wearing bathing suits [lying] supine on the sand with their radios as if summer and youth would never end"[pg 24], I pictured a far less depressing beach. That is, until he went into more detail about the trash scattered everywhere on the beach:
"...high tide, which had also left above the flat sand beside the sea a wrack of Clorox bottles and tampon sleeves and beer cans so long afloat their painted labels had been eaten away..."[pg 24]
This vivid depiction is where I got the second picture.






I got the feeling the East Beach mansion will play an important role in the characters' ensuing lives as the book continues. Its extensive description never failed in its intention of depicting the building as a delapidated one with a mysterious yet dignified past, with the possibility of a few skeletons being shoved hastily in the closet and potentially unsightly dust quickly being swept under the rug.
"The house had a forbidding, symmetrical face, and the chimneys needed mortar and were dropping bricks. Yet the silhouette the mansion presented from afar was still rather chasteningly grand..."[pg 22]
After reading this concluding sentence of Updike's portrayal of the mansion, I was left with an image in my head quite similar to this one.

Suspicion

Before he is even formally introduced, the character of "the man with the hairy backs to his hands" is surrounded in intrigue. In an already ambiguous beginning, the characters' curiosity about this newcomer shrouded in mystery builds the reader's interest to a paramount. The man is an inventor, has no wife or family, and owns what seems to be an unnecessarily sizeable number of pianos. While his name escapes Jane when Alexandra inquires, she does remember that his name has a "''van', 'von', or 'de' in it'"[pg 7]. Which gives the inevitable impression that this man is one of old money, and though the audience may not admit it, the thought of the possibility that this new character could be a vampire crosses the mind.
He is a descendant of the once grand and influential Lenox family that has dimished to a sparse, unknown and somewhat depressed rag tag of straggling leftover progeny. The generation of the Lenoxes elder to him consists only of a widow by the name of Abigail who is serving out the rest of her miserable existence in Eastwick. Among children, she has the ironic reputation of a witch and she "[goes] about the lanes muttering and cringing from the pebbles thrown at her by children who, called to account by the local constable, claim they are defending themselves against her evil eye".[pg 19]

Not only do the remnants of the Lenox family itself possess an eerie and haunted air, their former residence, the East Beach Mansion, is described in a manner that sketches it in the reader's mind as a dangerously delapidated building that has been "slipping into disrepair since the early 1920s"[pg 21]. The mansion in many ways mirrors the family itself, once luxurious and admired, only to decline into nothing more than a cold and drafty foundation. Updike encourages the cultivation of this image by using contradicting extravagant and gloomy adjectives to contrast the mansion's formerly glamourous state with its current decrepitude:

"The great roof slates, some reddish and some bluish gray, came crashing unobserved in the winter storms and lay like nameless tombstones in summer's lank tangle of uncut grass; the cunningly fashioned copper gutters and flashing turned green and rotten; the ornate octagonal cupola with a view to all points of the compass developed a list to the west; the massive end chimneys, articulated like bumdles of organ pipes or thickly muscled throats, needed mortar and were dropping bricks." [pg 22]
The deteriorated glory of both the Lenox family and the East Beach mansion add to their overall feel of gloomy hauntings and eerie suspicion. The reader can't decide if this new man in the witches' lives is going to be a friend or foe.

Dear Ozzie to Dust?

While the fact that Alexandra, Jane and Sukie are all witches is a little jarring at first, it can be expected, considering the title's implications. However when Updike looks into Alexandra's mind as she considers the deceased lovers she's taken, the reader is thrown for a violent loop. The idea that the death of the husband or companion is the simple presence of the witch herself solidifies the notion of witchcraft being a natural part of these women's daily lives to the consistency of rubber cement: the reader is still suspicious of the author's use of metaphor despite the overwhelming number of occurrences pointing to the supernatural conclusion. it becomes difficult to define the difference between the events Updike wishes to come across as metaphor and the ones he intends to communicate are actually happening in the plot. Alexandra's thoughts on her archive of companions is a direct example of this:
"By the time of their actual divorce her former lord and master had become mere dirt--matter in the wrong place, as her mother had briskly defined it long ago--some polychrome dust she swept up and kept in a jar as a souvenir." [pg 9]
Since the entire passage consists of recollections and musings in the ambiguous and fanciful winding passages of Alexandra's own brain, the reader is unsure of the legitimacy of these occurrences. Did "Dear Ozzie" actually turn into dust or did Alexandra simply 'sweep' him out of her life?

Meticulous Descriptions

Updike often uses metaphor and personification to help explain a character's manner of speaking, describing the character's tone, enunciation, or the overall flow of the dialogue. This become evident in the very first sentence of the novel,

"...each s seemed the black tip of a just extinguished match held in playful hurt, as children do, against the skin."[pg 1]

The author applies personification by giving dialogue characteristics of a living thing, for instance on page four:

"Her voice bristled like a black cat's fur, iridescent." [pg 4]

"'The papers were passed in Providence,' Jane explained, pressing the nce hard into Alexandra's ear." [pg 4]

Not only does Updike take care to describe the ebb and flow of conversation, he also makes sure his audience is aware of exactly what type of accents his three 'witch' characters have:

"'From New York, " Jane hurried on, the last syllabel almost barked, its r dropped Massechusetts style." [pg 7]

The authors attention to detail in dialogue description not only helps establish a knowlege of the main characters in the readers' mind, it also greatly contributes to the image that is beginning to be constructed in Updike's exposition. By describing the simple vocalization of words so meticulously, John Updike crosses the line between the reader reading the lines and the audience actually hearing conversations.

The Hook

At the start of his novel The Witches of Eastwick, John Updike jumps right into his thickening plot, assuming the reader already knows essentially everything about the three "witches", Alexandra, Jane and Sukie. He makes a fair amount of references to the realm of fantasy and witchcraft, which paints an ambiguous portrait of these characters for his audience. This begins to occur on the second page, when Updike uses a simile comparing Jane's offended voice to "a black cat's fur, iridescent..."[pg 4] and continues throughout the exposition. At first, I made the assumption that these metaphors of foreshadowing were exactly that, just metaphors. However soon it is made clear that these three middle-aged suburban women are not quite on the ordinary side of the spectrum of normalcy. It was a pretty conspicuous tip-off when Alexandra sees her future through a cabinet door:

"...she was concious of the atomic fury spinning and skidding beneath such a surface, like an eddy of weary eyesight. As if in a crystal ball she saw that she would meet and fall in love with this man and that little good would come of it."[pg 4]

When the author then begins to delve into Jane's musings on the discintegrations of the three witch friends' lovers, the idea that these women are witches is no longer just a possibility. It establishes itself as fact in the story.

This is effective in that it reels the reader in through the constant stemming of questions, relentless in that the answer to one inquisition inevitably leads to the inspiration of another. Updike plays on his audience's natural sense of curiosity to maintain intrigue.