49 pages • 1 hour read
Helen OyeyemiA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Content Warning: This section of the guide mentions suicide, self-harm, and disordered eating.
Food and eating are key to White Is for Witching. From Luc Dufresne’s peach pastries to Sade’s cooking in the Silver House, food represents care, affection, and familial bonds. The son of a pastry chef, Luc courts Lily Silver with peach tarts; Sade bonds with Miranda Silver through fried dough mixed with chilies. However, food becomes complicated for Miranda and her female ancestors, as they live with pica and, consequently, have a somewhat different view of food.
Pica is a medical condition that triggers compulsive eating and swallowing of non-foods. People who live with pica often chew on fabric, plastics, or other materials. All the Silver women in the novel exhibit symptoms of pica, beginning with a woman in their distant past who practices self-harm and consumes her own flesh. As the Silver House describes her, this “woman was thought an animal,” and her “way was to slash at her flesh with the blind, frenzied concentration that a starved person might use to get at food that is buried” (27-28). This woman disappears from the family’s known history, only remembered by the house. After Anna Good marries Andrew Silver, her loneliness in the Silver House manifests as pica symptoms, as she consumes acorns, leaves, and pebbles. Anna’s daughter Jennifer, granddaughter Lily, and great-granddaughter Miranda share this experience.
The compulsive consumption of non-foods by the Silver women highlights their relationship with the house itself. Just as they eat that which is foreign and unhealthy, so does the house attempt to consume those who are “too” foreign or othered for its idea of a “pure” English person. But in the process, the house also consumes the Silver women, imprisoning them within its walls and slowly digesting their spirits.
The relationship between the Silver House and pica is further reinforced by the red-and-white apples that grow on the property. These apples represent the house’s destructive power, as all who eat the fruits fall under the house’s control. Although a natural process, eating becomes dangerous for both characters with pica and those threatened by the Silver House.
White Is for Witching expands on the horror genre. Horror is a genre meant to frighten readers with descriptions of death, monsters, or human evil, and can be further divided into subgenres such as Gothic Horror. Gothic Horror concentrates on death and the supernatural, usually in a specific setting, and is dependent on metaphors of darkness. Oyeyemi’s novel shares many of these characteristics, but also moves beyond the genre.
Settings like castle-like structures feature prominently in Gothic Horror. The victims of these bleak landscapes or structures can’t escape their power and reach. The Silver House and its malevolence provide the ideal setting, serving as the locus of haunting with its eye-like windows, trap doors, and floors full of “looking people” (66). Oyeyemi’s inclusion of Cambridge University demonstrates her understanding of the Gothic Horror genre and develops it further. The university has Gothic architecture and is central to the horror of the folkloric soucouyant (an aged woman whose vampiric spirit leaves her body to attack at night in Caribbean folklore). Through Miranda, the Silver House hunts for victims on campus, and Miranda and Ore both research the depiction of the soucouyant in other folk traditions on campus. Even at Cambridge, Miranda and Ore can’t escape the pull of the house.
Metaphors of darkness are key to Oyeyemi’s novel, as they are in other examples of Gothic Horror, but Oyeyemi changes how they function. Rather than fear and haunting being designated to dark places, her novel explores the effects of the color white and how it swallows other colors: She frames chalk, a pale mannequin, and red-and-white apples as symbolic of horror.
Born in Nigeria and raised in South London, Helen Oyeyemi currently lives in Prague. Her father is a teacher, and her mother works for the London Underground. Oyeyemi wrote her first novel, The Icarus Girl, as a student at Cambridge University. In interviews, Oyeyemi has discussed the difficulty of her teenage years in England, where she was bullied based on her appearance. These memories and the depression she experienced in her youth are reflected in Miranda and Ore.
Oyeyemi’s life is most reflected in Ore, the adopted Nigerian daughter of two laborers in England. Like Oyeyemi, Ore attends Cambridge and finds horror and magic fascinating, especially the folkloric soucouyant. Bullied by the Silver House because of her appearance and identity, Ore embodies the outsider role that Oyeyemi often claims in interviews. Her personal story also surfaces in Miranda’s experience with her mental health. Furthermore, her story is used to expand on traditional horror through a less represented culture in horror fiction. While the novel centers the vampiric power of the Silver House, Oyeyemi moves beyond the English tradition of vampiric horror to include Afro-Caribbean folklore and magic and traditions of West Africa, such as juju (using objects to instill bad or good luck).
By Helen Oyeyemi
Appearance Versus Reality
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European History
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Family
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Fantasy
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Hate & Anger
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Horror, Thrillers, & Suspense
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Immigrants & Refugees
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LGBTQ Literature
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Magical Realism
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Memory
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Mental Illness
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Religion & Spirituality
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Science Fiction & Dystopian Fiction
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Sexual Harassment & Violence
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