Spectrality, Violence and Self-consuming Motherhood in Sayak Aman's The Flower of Mist

This paper seeks to read the intricate relationship between motherhood and witchcraft in Sayak Aman's Bengali novel The Flower of Mist (2023), with a strong reference to the text’s enumeration of the wrongs and miseries attendant upon assumed witches, unconventional women and mothers. Aman’s novel recounts a partly fantastical story of a Bengali woman named Ganga who, owing to the effect of an ancient elixir associated with a supposed witch, births childbearing all her repressed rage and anxieties. Her desperate measures to save her child led her to unwanted directions, which ultimately demonstrates her motherly fortitude. From a supposed madwoman in the attic, a social and cultural outsider living on the periphery of the village, the wronged and villainised mother Ganga, who was a victim of repeated rapes in her early life, ultimately emerges as a pitiful figure rendered powerless by a patriarchal system in which men treat her like a commodity. In the end, in an act of self-sacrifice, she lets herself get caught by an angry mob who set her on fire, reasserting the idea of motherhood as a violent process of self-erasure. The novel's historical thread goes back to the physical and sexual violence and social disgrace endured by the hapless women during the Salem Witch Trials in America and interweaves these into a harrowing contemporary tale of modern motherhood. Taking into consideration Justyna Sempruch’s conceptualisation of the hag as a superwoman and feminist reconfigurations of abject women as strong individuals, this paper will interpret the physical violence towards and social ostracisation of Ganga on the outskirts of the village as discriminatory gender-based practices that cripple the m(Other). Although Aman ultimately deflates the hoax of witchcraft, he nonetheless retains some eerie, Gothic elements in a feministic attempt to reimagine the transgressive figure of the witch as a self-effacing mother and a gentle woman always caring for her fellow humans and relieving them of their troubles whenever required. The paper will further seek to illuminate the ways Aman Gothicizes the concept of motherhood to subvert the Gothic’s traditional propensity to demonise senile women.

Keywords: Violence, Spectrality, motherhood, witchcraft