“Solid All the Way Through”: Margaret Mahy's Ordinary Witches

Abstract

In The Haunting, The Changeover, and The Tricksters, Margaret Mahy fuses supernatural iconography of witchcraft and magic with images of ordinary and domestic adolescence. This article argues that Mahy's “fantastic realism” illuminates aspects of female teenage experience through a blend of myth, fairy tale, folklore, and history, as well as conventional representations of adolescent development and archetypes of young adult literature. The heroines are ordinary witches who find freedom, empowerment, and sexual knowledge in their magical identities but who also remain firmly positioned as schoolgirls, daughters, and sisters. Although possibilities of excess or black magic are implied by the author's use of witches, such implications are contained by frameworks of real and domestic ordinary life, and this article concludes that witchcraft is a motif that Mahy manipulates in order to describe growing pains, developing sexuality, and an intriguing form of female power.