SOURCE: "Magical Women: The Positive Force of Woman Power," in Breaking the Angelic Image: Woman Power in Victorian Children's Fantasy, Greenwood Press, 1988, pp. 111-32.

In the following essay, Honig explores the role of the magical female figure in Victorian children's fantasies, noting that it was in children's literature, rather than in adult fiction, that powerful, vibrant female characters were first portrayed.

In The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales, Bruno Bettelheim tells us that the powerful witch, the magical woman who appears most prominently in classical fairy tales, can be good as well as evil. She can, like the witch in "Hansel and Gretel," be at first motherly and giving, but then her overwhelming power for evil asserts itself. It is this evil aspect of the witch that Bettelheim stresses. Bettelheim explains that the evil witch can be an important image for the developing...