The Murderess – Alexandros Papadiamantis (1903, trans. Peter Levy 1983) 127 pages

Trigger warning: mentions infanticide

I’ve long been interested in how witches are portrayed. It’s seems so often bound up with women on the edge of (patriarchal) society – single, childless, conventionally unattractive, isolated; perhaps with the suggestion of healing knowledge that threatens male medical practitioners. It’s something brilliantly sent up in the Blackadder II episode Bells where Blackadder gives up on his doctor who prescribes courses of leeches for everything, and instead visits the wilds of Putney (!) to consult the wise woman:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HX0im3vJaqg

In The Murderess, Alexandros Papadiamantis draws on some of these stock characteristics and makes his protagonist an older woman, a mother who is also a healer, whose actions cause her to become a murderer living in wild environments. Like many ghouls, she has several names: Hadoula, Jannis Frankissa, Frankojannou.

“She provided herbs, she made ointments, she gave massages, she cured the evil eye, she put together medicine for the sick, for anaemic girls, for pregnant women and women after childbirth and for those with women’s diseases.”

At the start of the novella she is completely sleep-deprived, helping her daughter care for her sickly newborn:

“For many nights Frankojannou had permitted herself no sleep. She had willed her sore eyes open, while she kept vigil beside this little creature who had no idea what trouble she was giving, or what torture she must undergo in her turn, if she survived.”

Papadiamantis takes us back and forth in time to show the oppression of a patriarchal society. Female babies mean dowries to be found, and once married, hard lives keeping homes and raising children, often with little or no support from male spouses.

Something inside Hadoula snaps, and she kills her granddaughter, unable to contend with the life the child will have ahead of her:

“Frankojannou’s brain really had begun to smoke. She had gone out of her mind in the end. It was the consequence of her proceeding to higher matters. She leant over the cradle.”

This is the start of her killing the young female babies and children of the island. It is set on Papadiamantis’ home island of Skiathos, its beauty contrasting with the horrors:

“Below her the river cut deep through the Acheilas ravine, and its stream filled all the deep valley with soft murmurs. In appearance it was motionless and lakelike, but in reality perpetually in motion under the tall and long-tressed planes. Among mosses and bushes and ferns it prattled secretly, kissed the trunks of trees, creeping like a serpent along the length of the valley, green-coloured from leafy reflections, kissing and biting at once the rocks and the roots, a murmuring, limpid stream, full of little crabs which ran to hide in piles of sand, while a shepherd, letting little lambs graze on the dewy greenery, came to lean down over the water.”

The Murderess is carefully balanced: it doesn’t condone Hadoula but nor does it make her a monster. She is a desperate woman driven by the life she has led and the oppression she foresees for women in her society, to undertake the most monstrous of acts.

Papadiamantis makes it clear she has lost her sanity (although she continues to act by her own rationality), and also that she has guilt and regret, but also never remotely excuses or justifies what she does.

The story has a fabulist element but without detracting from Hadoula’s murders. I felt the author was drawing on centuries of storytelling to reframe the witches of folklore and ask what it was in societies that had brought them to that role in the first place?

“But mostly she was gathering herbs to forget the grief which tormented her.”

A challenging and haunting tale.