The “Trouble” with Female Power: Witchcraft, Sexuality and Magic in the Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (Netflix, 2018-2020)

The first magical TV heroines were those of 60s sitcoms like I Dream of Jeannie (NBC, 1965-1970) and Bewitched (ABC, 1964-1972). They were created in the wake of major shifts in consciousness about female roles and sexuality and Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963). Though possessing magical powers, the lead characters in these series were told not to use their powers, and Susan Douglas believes that through these representations “a significant proportion of the pop culture moguls were trying to acknowledge the impending release of female sexual and political energy, while keeping it all safely in a straightjacket.” Moreover, she adds that, since viewers had been socialized to regard female sexuality as monstrous, TV producers addressed concerns surrounding female sexuality by domesticating the monster, by making her pretty and sometimes wildly subservient, by shrinking her and keeping her locked up in a bottle, and by playing the situation for laughs. Linda Baughman, Allison Burr-Miller, and Linda Manning, note that Bewitched and its witches are part of our “media history” and that all the modern-day witches are viewed through our “media memory” of this show, which affects all current representations of witches through “intertextuality.” In contrast, the atmosphere in the Chilling Adventures of Sabrina is meant to be disturbing. The landscape is bleak, and the sides of the shots are often blurry and out of focus. Sabrina’s family runs a mortuary out of their home, and the series is filled with horror tropes, many of which, as Barbara Creed notes, are associated with female reproduction. How is women’s power expressed and possibly also contained by the narrative, and what do these representations show about the evolution of gender roles on TV? What messages about women’s power and agency could be conveyed by the series? At first, the narrative clearly opposes Sabrina and the patriarchal figure of the dark lord, whom she resists before ultimately signing his book, but will, Sabrina, like many of her predecessors, ultimately be punished in the narrative for enjoying using magic and thus exercising power? How does this new series both conform to and break with other TV representations of witches and witchcraft, and what is the significance of this new conception of female power?