The White Witch Fan Club

In Celebration of a Villainess

I knew I shouldn’t be rooting for the White Witch, that it meant I was a bad child, a betrayal to Aslan himself.

And yet, even still, rooting for a villain made me feel good.

I must have been nine or ten when I first read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe — and followed it up by watching the animated adaptation, where the White Witch is elusive and volatile, a precursor to Disney’s Maleficent, who never raises her voice until she has to. Violence is spare, but lethal and controlled. Indeed, I’d seen many a villain before, but the White Witch was the first to leave me simultaneously terrified and beguiled.

With male villains, I was used to brute force: strength, weapons, the tyranny of masculine power. So, to experience a much more potent form of villainy—manipulation, persuasion, seduction—felt illicit and thrilling. What the White Witch had, more than any male villain, was intelligence. The ability to read one’s mind and motivations and stay ahead, acting the chameleon to become the genie of your desires. She is the false mother, the promiser of comfort and love in exchange for duty and loyalty, only to gleefully renege on that promise. Is there anything more terrifying to a child than an unmaternal mother?

All this during my own childhood spells with my mother: a young mom, who had three children under the age of 5 by the time she was 28, who was in graduate school so our family could have a second wage-earner, who like the White Witch, alternated between doting and ever-present and then agonizing periods where she wasn’t present at all. My mother was snowed under by an impossible burden. She had to keep secret the financial struggles of the household and her own anxieties of young motherhood. By all accounts, my mother was a good mother. Yet, the tremors of anxiety can seep through to the child. Invisibly, indelibly. No wonder then that the volatility of the White Witch resonated. The feeling that love could be there in full, beautiful bloom, and then taken away, abandoning you to the cold.

After my collision with the White Witch, I found myself entranced by other female villains. And yet, there were so few! Disney, out of their first 46 animated classics, only had 7 of them — and yet they were the 7 we remember (the Evil Queen, Cinderella’s stepmother, Ursula, Maleficent, Cruella, etc). I can’t name you more than 5 or 6 of the legions of male villains in Disney films, except Scar and Jafar, both of whom had more in common with the feminine wiles of the White Witch than any kind of totemic masculinity.

In the years that followed, I went to write my own tribute to female villainy in The School for Good and Evil series. The White Witch looms large in all ten books of that series — particularly in the character of Evelyn Sader, who commands spies all over the Endless Woods and revels in the White Witch’s trademark combination of beauty and manipulation.

And yet, somehow the craving to understand this kind of cold-hearted villain is never fully satisfied. Somewhere deep inside me — and likely in all of us — there is an attraction to her ability to insulate her emotions, safeguarding herself from the vulnerability of loving anyone but herself. And that in itself, is its own wonderful peril. That the White Witch activates some primal core, too deep to know, and that’s what explains her enduring allure.

- Written by Soman Chainani, the New York Times bestselling author of The School for Good and Evil series, which has sold over 4.5 million copies, been translated into 35 languages across six continents, and has been adapted into a major motion picture from Netflix that debuted at #1 in over 80 countries. His book of retold fairytales, BEASTS & BEAUTY, also debuted on the New York Times Bestseller List and is slated to be a limited television series from Sony 3000.