Similarities Between Betty And Betty

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Betty
Betty’s lack of desire to marry or perform womanly duties results in an accusation of witchcraft, explicating the ways in which women suffer due to societal expectations. Betty is bled by the village doctor in scene six, a process believed to reveal witches, which Vinegar Tom’s production note advises “is one of humiliation rather than torture and Pack is an efficient professional, not a sadistic manic” (134). Later, Betty visits Ellen’s cottage, where she laments, “I don’t know what I’m here for. I’ve had so much treatment already. The doctor comes everyday” (156). Betty has sought out an alternative healer to the doctor who torments her everyday. She is not looking for treatment, she is simply looking for comfort. Churchill first shows the humiliation pricking inflicts upon Betty before revealing that it is horrifically a part of Betty’s everyday routine.
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During a later visit, Ellen advises “You get married, Betty, that’s safest … Your best chance of being left alone is to marry a rich man, because it’s part of his honour to have a wife who does nothing” (169). Ellen knows that Betty cannot succeed alone as a poor woman but a position as a trophy wife will afford her all the alone time she needs. Ultimately, Betty is rehabilitated after allowing herself to be convinced that her unwillingness to wed and perform wifely duties is due to bewitchment (Basourakos 281). Of the five women accused of witchcraft in Vinegar Tom, Betty is the only survivor. This implies Betty took Ellen’s advice and recanted her anti-marriage sentiments. If she marries rich, she will be left alone but at the cost of doing the one thing she was determined not to do. This further explores the relationship between gender and poverty, exploring the coercion of women into marriages that effectively operate as financial transactions. The conversation between the seventeenth century and the present is interrupted in the final scene with the appearance of Kramer and Sprenger, based on Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger, authors of Malleus Malleficarum, a medieval instructional manual for witch hunters. Churchill’s Kramer and Sprenger perform an Edwardian music hall inspired stand-up routine based on extracts from Malleus Malleficarum: SPRENGER: Here are three reasons, first because KRAMER: woman is more credulous and since the aim of the devil is to corrupt faith he attacks them. Second because SPRENGER: women are more impressionable. Third because KRAMER: women have slippery tongues and cannot conceal from other women what by their evil art they know. (179) The production note advises casting Kramer and Sprenger as women and suggests doubling the roles with Joan and Ellen, hanged in the previous scene (134). John Basourakos argues in his 2012 paper “Witches, Matriarchs, and Whores: Casting Intrasexual and Intersexual Oppression in Caryl Churchill’s Vinegar Tom" that cross-casting Kramer and Sprenger, reminds the audience of the disrupted and distorted nature of the historical images projected onto women (281). Kritzer agrees with this argument, adding “the entire recorded history of women has created in and through patriarchal ideology.” She suggests that in the cross casting of Churchill’s Kramer and Sprenger, the characters create for themselves “a privileged marginality … as do token women … by memorising and repeating the patriarchal ‘party line’” (92), exploring the way in which privilege and marginalisation intersect for women who have internalised patriarchal values. Vinegar Tom’s closing

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