White Is for Witching

White Is for Witching frames time as abstract in haunted places, with the past intruding on the present. Beginning with the end, these opening chapters announce Miranda Silver’s almost-certain death and entombing in 29 Barton Road, doing away with suspense and explaining Miranda’s tragic place in a line of Silver women who met the same fate. While Miranda disappears, her death remains uncertain, highlighting the Silver House as an entity that resists conclusion and explanation. In the Prologue, the house appears omniscient, participating in a dialogue with Ore and Eliot and influencing their questions, even as it hides the truth of Miranda’s disappearance by claiming “Miranda has pica she can’t come in today, she is stretched out inside a wall she is feasting on plaster” (3). Speaking outside of time, the house employs language and syntax that avoid endings and punctuation, with evasive run-on sentences. The house and its spirits also defy natural endings, and the plot progresses in a nonlinear way.

The personification of the Silver House and its inescapable pull on characters introduce the novel’s theme of dehumanization. A racist structure, the Silver House eats away at the humanity of the Silver women trapped in its walls and denies the humanity of nonwhite people who enter its doors. After the house rationalizes Miranda’s capture by arguing she’s wronged it, the house discusses her mother Lily. Lily’s death reveals the house’s inhuman hatred of others, as it frames her trip to Haiti as responsible for her death—that the trip was “Stupid, stupid; Lily had been warned not to go to Haiti. I warned her. Why do people go to these places, these places that are not for them?” (9-10). The house understands space and place as racially segregated: Lily didn’t “belong” in Haiti, and people from other places don’t belong in Dover. As the house traces the deaths of Miranda and Lily, it returns to racist imagery, claiming Lily’s death proves that “black wells only yield black water” (10). White remains the house’s only marker of humanity and nature.

Furthermore, the novel’s narrative structure connects to the Silver women’s disordered eating, their experiences with pica highlighting how unnatural the house is. The house explains that Miranda eats plaster while locked within its confines. The structure is very much alive, and its interventions slowly kill its inhabitants, subverting natural order. These opening chapters detail Miranda’s symptoms of pica, and suggest that the Silver women themselves have become food for the Silver House. In tracing its own history and how it connects to pica, the house links the novel’s instances of vampirism with these symptoms. The Silver House claims a forgotten ancestor once hungered for her own flesh and blood, reinforcing the Silver women’s symptoms of pica as a kind of self-consumption. Miranda is the last member of the Silver women and eats chalk, a bone-like substance. The Silver women have been eaten from flesh to bone, and by the end of the novel, the house has exhausted its food supply.

In these chapters, food is both problem and solution. While Luc is often unable to help, he attempts to counter the consumption of non-foods by the Silver women: His peach tarts attract Lily, and the house doesn’t see his French background as anything of interest or a threat (reflected in him not being a narrator). He chases the idea of happiness that the Silver House represents to him, becoming lost in a future with Lily and a bed and breakfast. Almost every food-related element in Dover invites danger, from the apples that the house places everywhere to the house’s kitchen. Later in the novel, Ezma and Sade both fail to overcome the house’s hateful soul in the kitchen—as the only “food” the house can stomach are the Silver women themselves.