Many people know of, if they do not remember, the classic 1960s television show Bewitched, starring Elizabeth Montgomery. However, for those of you who don’t remember it, here is a quick refresher on the premise: Montgomery plays Samantha, who is highly independent. Her husband, Darrin, bids Samantha to hide her superior self-sufficiency, and for the most part, Samantha complies. Sometimes she doesn’t, and wacky hijinks ensue.
The premise is laid out in the very first episode. On their wedding night, Samantha reveals to Darrin her cosmopolitan background. With her mother, Samantha has lived in a bohemian style that differs from many women of the early 1960s. She’s used to supporting herself, and has a college degree. She’s willing to give it all up to be married to Darrin, but Darrin is disturbed. Soon his attraction to Samantha overwhelms his qualms, but after the wedding night, he warns Samantha, “It won’t be easy. It’s tough enough being married to an advertising man if you’re normal. [. . .] I mean you’re going to have to learn to be a suburban housewife. [. . .] You’ll have to learn to cook, and keep house, and go to my mother’s house for dinner every Friday night” (1×01, “I, Darrin, Take This Witch, Samantha”).
“Darling, it sounds wonderful!” Samantha tells him. “And soon we’ll be a normal, happy couple with no problems, just like everybody else. And then my mother can come and visit for a while and—” At this point Samantha stops, seeing the look on Darrin’s face. Realizing her mother is the very person who instilled her with the fiery independence Darrin so loathes, Samantha backs down.
In the second half of the episode, an old flame of Darrin’s—Sheila Summers—learns that he is recently married. Sheila knows how to keep house, cook, and act as hostess—which she proves by inviting Darrin and Samantha to a dinner party. At the party, she attempts to outclass Samantha. Her experience in entertaining is obvious, she flirts with Darrin, and she continues to let fly clumsy verbal barbs in Samantha’s direction. At last, unable to contain herself, Samantha lets loose against Sheila, delivering such an articulate dressing-down that the entire table remains stunned and incredulous in the face of Samantha’s lingual acumen and wit. Darrin, however, reprimands her she promised to give up that “stuff.”
Not only does he ask her to hide her intelligence, but he is appalled even when she uses it in the privacy of her own home. He is not just asking that she give up the trappings of her former life: a career or any life she might have had outside of caring for him. Housewifery, indeed, can be a career, and Samantha would make it an intriguing one. He is asking instead that she give up something more intrinsic: the very power and abilities that would give her the means to live without him. The message is clear: she is meant to exist only as an accessory to Darrin.
Darrin appears to desire this because it is “normal.” Again and again, Bewitched tells us that it is “normal” that a woman should exist as a mere ornament to cook and clean for her husband, and make him look good at parties. When Samantha acts outside of these parameters, Darrin reprimands her. When she acts within them, but uses special skill or intelligence to solve problems, Darrin again reprimands her.
The subtext—at times, explicitly made text—is that Darrin resents the fact that his wife is more savvy and talented than he is. While Darrin makes it clear that he finds Samantha’s ability to fend for herself unnatural, it also becomes evident that he asks her to hide her skills less because they are strange in and of themselves, and more because the fact that she is, in effect, more powerful than he is damages his ego.
The “unnaturalness” of Samantha’s abilities is fundamental to the central premise. At one point Darrin tells Samantha that he loves her for herself, and doesn’t need any of the “extra,” revealing that he does not regard anything that makes Samantha strong as a part of who she is. He demonstrates a complete lack of understanding of the various factors which may have informed Samantha’s character.
No doubt Samantha’s self-sufficiency is related to her socioeconomic status. While the focus of Bewitched is on Samantha’s powers of intellect, we are given hints that she also may be powerful due to wealth. Wealth gives Samantha a financial autonomy that Darrin demands she forsake. In fact, there is an episode in which Darrin receives the benefit of Samantha’s wealth: he is laid up from a sprained ankle; Samantha buys him everything he requires, including a nurse to see to all of his needs. While Darrin obviously enjoys being pampered, by the end of the episode he decides he would rather work in order to earn what he wants, and Samantha takes back everything she purchased. Again, this is what is considered “normal” (1×17, “A is for Aardvark”).
Samantha’s socioeconomic status may be related to her culture, though obviously the latter is not causal to the former. Bewitched suggests that Samantha and her mother may be of a different ethnicity or religion. Samantha is attempting to “pass,” whereas her mother demands that she embrace her heritage. Darrin, in typical fashion, requests that Samantha hide all evidence of her background, and sometimes is outright bigoted toward her culture. In “The Witches Are Out,” Darrin’s art for an ad-campaign portrays the very stereotype that has been applied to Samantha in the past (1×07). He doesn’t understand why she finds his ad offensive. In the same episode, Darrin suffers a nightmarish vision in which all of his children take after Samantha, demonstrating the more stereotypical behaviors of someone of her background.
Although Samantha is frequently offended or angered by Darrin’s prejudices, she submits to the ultimatum that she refrain from using her superior intellect or skills, and that she hide her background from other people. Not only does Samantha submit, she seems eager to participate in this form of indentured servitude. When she uses her powers to solve a problem, give people their just due, or enjoy herself a little, she seems apologetic, often admitting she shouldn’t have done so. Her ultimate goal, she claims, is to be a normal wife, which apparently means cooking and cleaning without bringing any of the creativity or flare to it that her heightened intellect might warrant.
A prime example of Samantha’s desire to submit is the episode, “Witch Or Wife” (1×08). Samantha goes to Paris with her mother (again, a reference to her wealthy background) without informing her husband first. He is upset, but Samantha going to Paris causes him not only to reflect on her behavior, but the entire circumstances of their marriage. At last he concludes that he is standing in her way: “You can’t expect to snatch an eagle out of the sky, tie it to the ground, clip its wings, and expect it to walk around with a smile on its beak.”
Samantha tries to apologize, but Darrin goes on to say that no one could blame her for her behavior. It’s one of the only times that Darrin seems to understand that his terms for their marriage dictate that she behave in a way that is not natural to her. “This is a poor swap for Europe, glamor, and gaiety,” he says (again referencing Samantha’s rich—and cosmopolitan—background).
But Samantha replies by saying, “All I want is the normal life of a normal housewife.”
“I’m saying I’m not going to stand in the way of your freedom,” Darrin goes on, “and that’s obviously what you want.”
“That’s not true,” Samantha says, making it very clear that Darrin standing in the way of her freedom is precisely what she does want.
Samantha, as an intelligent an independent woman, has obviously made this decision of her own accord. She claims she wishes to give up her intelligence and skill because she loves Darrin. The implication that love demands submission and sacrifice of our assets and skills is upsetting, but this is Samantha’s individual choice.
More unsettling is the sense from the show that Darrin’s expectation that she make that choice—that she accept the clipping of her wings—is perfectly normal. There are very few moments where the audience is given to question why Darrin would want her to be less than she is; instead, the premise seems to be just a given. The idea that what they both want is “normal” is never called into question. A “normal” household in the 1960s, Bewitched suggests, is one in which wives, if they are more intelligent or skilled than their husbands, hide their abilities such that their husbands are shone in the best light, and their egos don’t get bruised.
The only one who questions this situation is Endora, Samantha’s mother. Endora, rather than rejecting her freedom as Samantha does, embraces it. In doing so, she makes use of her considerable intelligence and wealth. She also does not seem to care if she appears “unnatural,” almost always appearing in eccentric dress (possibly culturally influenced). Over and over again Endora tries to point out to Samantha that she is enslaved; Darrin is denying her her freedom. Samantha, however, thinks her mother is wrong, as does Darrin.
The text of the show itself seems to suggest that Endora is wrong. Her frequent protests are met with the sound of a laugh track, and the characters react to her with a typical, “this is how mothers-in-law will be!” attitude. And yet, on some level the writers of the show seem cognizant of the indignity of Samantha’s situation, and Darrin’s unreasonableness in demanding that she submit to it. Darrin’s speech about the eagle in “Witch or Wife” is evidence of that.
Yet the premise of the show must be maintained; Samantha must refrain from using her powers and pretend she does not have them, and Darrin must continue to ask that she do so. By the end of every episode, we are returned to the status quo: a world in which it is normal to request that a woman never be more powerful than a man, and to forsake her intelligence, wit, and talent in order to cook and clean.
Bewitched could have been a metaphor for many different things. It could have been a very insightful show about a woman who has to keep elements of her background a secret, and the partner who has to help keep that secret. But because the secret that has to be kept is the fact that Samantha is more powerful than her husband, it is instead a show about gender politics, and repression in the 1960s.
I was watching Bewitched with a man approaching sixty years of age the other day. As we incredulously viewed the spectacular amount of sexism unfolding before our eyes, he said, “Just think: I was raised on this.”
The series itself is charming: Elizabeth Montgomery is as bewitching as the title suggests; her intelligence and wit truly sparkle, and Darrin is a bumbling fool who is amusing to watch. It would be possible to view this program, even today, and forget what the show is really about. But as magical as our media is these days, it is important to consider the true implications of what our symbolism and metaphors mean.
As a child I wanted desperately to like this series. It was what I was raised on, as well. But the constant of attractive, smart woman demeaning herself to keep nebbish-y guy made it impossible. In my head, I would bed Samantha to just witch Darrin into being a decent guy.
Interestingly, that premise is alive and well – King of Queens also has a loser guy with a hot, intelligent wife, as do many other sitcoms.
The same premise lives on in harem manga, as well – Love Hina enraged me when the girls didn’t just toss the loser out the door and have done with it.
Oh my god, I heard of this show but hadn’t actually watched it, it sounds like a real horror scene, and not because it involves witches! Give up bohemianism to live in the suburbs with some d-bag who expects you to hide your intelligence, and also to not react when his narcissistic ho-bag friend is all insulting her AND flirting with her husband RIGHT IN FRONT OF HER? A truly good husband would neither expect her to take that NOR tolerate such behavior himself. I bet this guy cheated on her. And if they didn’t show that in the show, I bet in reality such a man would be cheating on her.
“Spectacular amount of sexism” indeed! A fine summary, and fair-mindedly also pointing out how “on some level the writers of the show seem cognizant of the indignity of Samantha’s situation, and Darrin’s unreasonableness in demanding that she submit to it.” And Endora makes a compelling embodiment of her perspective, being flamboyantly individualistic, delighting in her powers; seeing Darrin for the clod he is.
Re “in need of a consciousness-raising” Samantha, can’t help but be reminded of the premise of “Bell, Book and Candle”: that if a witch falls in love, she loses her powers. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell,_Book_and_Candle )
How many women have abandoned friends, family, career, interests, even moved across the country, for the convenience/ego satisfaction of a male? (Gawd forbid he should make any sacrifices.) Less so these days, but it still goes on.
On a similar vein…
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I Dream of Jeannie…starred Barbara Eden as a 2000-year-old genie, and Larry Hagman as an astronaut who becomes her master, with whom she falls in love and eventually marries.
…The series was created and produced by Sidney Sheldon in response to the great success of rival network ABC’s Bewitched series, which had debuted in 1964 as the second most watched program in the United States. …
The show’s popularity really exploded in the fall of 1971 when the series began playing in syndication. In reruns, it became one of the highest-rated series during the 1970s. …
[Captain Tony Nelson] at first keeps Jeannie in her bottle most of the time, but finally relents and allows her to enjoy a life of her own. However, “her” life is devoted mostly to his, and most of their problems stem from her love and affection towards “Master”, and her desire to “please” him and fulfill her ancient heritage as a genie – especially when he doesn’t want her to do so. [Not out of enlightened thinking, but because she might get caught doing magic, and get him in trouble, as I recall.]
… Early in the fifth season…Jeannie is called upon by her Uncle Sully (Jackie Coogan) to become queen of their family’s native country, Basenji. …With Jeannie gone, Tony realizes how deeply he loves her. That outweighs all concerns he has had about Jeannie’s threat to his career. He flies to Basenji to win Jeannie back. Upon their return to NASA, Tony introduces Jeannie as his fiancée. The two get married several weeks later. The public introduction of Jeannie heralds a change in the series continuity: the secret is no longer Jeannie’s existence, but merely that she possesses magical powers, contrary to the mythology created by Sidney Sheldon’s own Season 2 script for “The Birds and Bees Bit” in which it was claimed that upon marriage, a genie loses all of her magical powers.
…The series was created and produced by Sidney Sheldon in response to the great success of rival network ABC’s Bewitched series, which had debuted in 1964 as the second most watched program in the United States. …
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Emphases added; from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Dream_of_Jeannie
“Bewitched” and the hoary cartoon trope of goofy-looking males surrounded by beautiful women certainly reveal the massive male insecurity which demands that women be kept in a subservient position. (“For their own good,” of course…)
Nowadays, if a “real world” woman — as opposed to a fantasy figure like Lara Croft — is powerful, she routinely must also be lonely and miserable, or flawed in significant ways. “The more things change…”
Thank you for writing this. It has been a thorn in my side since then…I have at times modeled myself on Endora. She brilliantly called Darin anything but Darin, Durwood, Durwin, Darwin, as she refused to even name him(a strategy I have used more than once). As an artist, I was outraged that Samantha signed her work away to Darin, who happily took credit for her ideas when his own imagination failed. The series condoned plagiarism with the deeper indicator that not only body, but her mind belonged to the husband. I could not understand why she would stay with this creepy guy. Larry Tate’s(Darin’s boss)wife was always popping tranquilizers, which was some how normalized and they all drank a tremendous number of Martinis.
In fact, alcohol fueled many of the plot lines, as when people were convinced they were high when they saw unusual things.
“Irony– it’s good for the blood, dearies!”
–The Old Witch, ‘The Haunt of Fear’, E.C. Comics.
Hasn’t anyone noted that Darrin always loses? Not ‘mostly loses’, but ALWAYS loses? The female is shown as literally magical and all-conquering in ‘Bewitched’, the male as powerless.
I love Endora, but Darrin is absolutely right to resent her. She is the mother-in-law from Hell.
This article is interesting to me, because I recall having an argument with people on the Internet who were claiming Bewitched was a proto feminist show or feminist show (I forget which), I guess the idea being that the husband’s control is extremely tenuous and constantly slipping.
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norb says:
…Hasn’t anyone noted that Darrin always loses? Not ‘mostly loses’, but ALWAYS loses? The female is shown as literally magical and all-conquering in ‘Bewitched’, the male as powerless.
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In a Jules Feiffer cartoon, one woman tells another: “Beware of weak men; they’ll destroy you.”
Which partner in that TV relationship is constantly suppressing their nature in order to please the other?
And as for making Samantha so magically powerful, it’s like the empty Victorian rhetoric of “the female of the species is more deadly than the male” (Kipling), and “The Hand That Rocks The Cradle Is The Hand That Rules The World” ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hand_That_Rocks_the_Cradle_%28poem%29 ). Which merely covered up the actual, real-world condition of women.
Any pro-woman messages in “Bewitched” are mixed as in this Thomas Nast cartoon:
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http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_IXSpjcXQk4M/S7zXBr9y1MI/AAAAAAAAA3U/–yRVclg9LE/s1600/Victoria_Woodhull_caricature_by_Thomas_Nast_1872%5B1%5D.jpg
“Get thee behind me, (Mrs.) Satan!”
Wife (with heavy burden). “I’d rather Travel the hardest Path of Matrimony than follow your Footsteps.”
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On the one hand, marriage is criticized, the husband shown as a drunken infant, a burden; on the other, any alternative other than enslavement as a beast of burden is rejected.
(The colorful career of the model for “Mrs. Satan,” Victoria Woodhull, the first woman to run for President, described at the April 7th entry in http://virtualvictorian.blogspot.com/2010_04_01_archive.html )
I feel the need to defend the honor of this fair-minded, progressive television program. Stay tuned tomorrow morning…
When I saw the first season of Mad Men, I thought it functioned as something of a critique or at least a reimagining of Bewitched. Darren, Samantha, and Larry Tate seemed to have been inverted into the Don Draper, Betty Draper, and Roger Sterling characters.
There’s a lot to be said about Darren/Don and Larry/Roger, but this post is about Samantha, so let me focus on her. She is sort of the Superman fantasy of Betty Draper’s Clark Kent. Both are intelligent, strikingly good-looking women who come from a higher station than their husbands–Betty comes from an upper-class background while Samantha is from a race of demi-gods. However, both are completely stifled in their marriages to a domineering husband. They have to suppress their own talents and skills, play the role of suburban housewife and upper-class hostess, and act against their own natures to maintain appearances for the sake of their husbands and marriages. Samantha, though, is the wish-fulfillment fantasy of women caught in that situation: she’s infinitely more powerful than her husband, could leave him without a second thought, and could frankly obliterate him with a twitch of her nose. Betty, onthe other hand, is helpless: she knows her marriage is a lie, her husband is effectively her legal guardian, and she responds to this by heading into the beginning stages of a nervous breakdown. Betty is the dark reality of upper-middle-class women of the period; Samantha is the escapist dream.
But what are Betty’s “talents and skills”? I don’t think we ever get any indication of what she could be doing instead.
As Mad Men continues, it is revealed that Betty Draper has a bachelor’s degree in Anthropology from Bryn Mawr, and she speaks fluent Italian. Consider that relative to her husband, who may not even have a high-school diploma.
Must have missed (or forgotten) that fact. I wish they would play up her education/intelligence a little more.
I think it comes up in the third season, when Betty and Don take a trip to Italy. Mad Men is pretty inchoate generally, and I don’t think creator Matthew Weiner has ever gotten a good hold on the character. Don Draper and Roger Sterling are much better developed.
It’s perhaps no accident that Bewitched first went on the air at about the same time that Betty Friedan’s book, The Feminine Mystique, came out. I never thought that show was intentionally feminist, yet the story lines often corresponded to the kinds of things that Friedan was writing about at that time.
Mad Men, Betty Friedan, and “bewitched” come together in this article, which mentions how…
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…historically, women had a large role in creating advertising campaigns targeted toward other women…
What Betty Friedan and other feminist critics later deemed as sexualizing American women and stereotyping their role in society as mothers, wives, and servants of men was not an all-male development by men’s institutions and advertising—that is, solely the work of the businessman and the ad man. For one thing, these commercial images were largely created for women by women.
[Shirley Polykoff wrote advertising slogans for] Clairol [which] bought thirteen as pages in Life in the fall of 1956, and Miss Clairol took off like a bird. That was the beginning. For Nice ‘n Easy, Clairol’s breakthrough shampoo-in hair color, she wrote, “The closer he gets, the better you look.” For Lady Clairol, the cream-and-bleach combination that brought silver and platinum shades to Middle America, she wrote, “Is it true blondes have more fun?” and then, even more memorably, “If I’ve only one life, let me live it as a blonde!” (In the summer of 1962, just before “The Feminine Mystique” was published, Betty Friedan was, in the words of her biographer, “so bewitched” by that phrase that she bleached her hair.)
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http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/backissues/2011/08/cinema-reel-mad-men-and-women.html
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I really like Bewitched. But it’s, of course, not because of Darrin. In fact I was searching through the net to find exactly this kind of critic and I must say despite being such a big show there’s certainly quite less critic written about that issue. (This article was on page 4 if you google “bewitched darrin”.)
And regarding what you described I’ve also some issues with Samantha. The key issue is that instead of being that character-driven awesome personality she used to have been in the past, she now became nearly completely plot-driven. Out of the hundreds of episodes, despite being that intelligent and powerful woman, there are only a few episodes where Samantha actually is responsible for the overall episode plot.
Instead the plot of way too much episodes just revolves about dealing with aftereffects of magic cast by others (I love Endora btw) and Darrin getting his client of the week.
Speaking of “You can’t expect to snatch an eagle out of the sky, tie it to the ground, clip its wings, and expect it to walk around with a smile on its beak.” – regarding this it’s just cringe-worthy how both Samantha and Darrin treat their children, especially Tabitha.
Let’s face it. They both are horrible parents. Because they just clip Tabitha’s wings, instead of allowing her to learn to fly properly. Despite the fact that – as seen in one episode – you can even get ill if you hold it back and don’t use your magic properly.
Another cringe-worthy moment for me was in the episode with this Japanese businessman where Samantha even got that far to give him halluzinations and make him believe he was ill – just in order to become Darrin’s client. I felt so sorry for that poor man and even had to pause because I just couldn’t bear it anymore.
I really like the show, but not because of Samantha or Darrin. (Though especially how I view Samantha heavily varies from episode to episode.) When I start watching an episode, I always hope for Endora to be part of it.