The Narrator's Lament

“No one listens to a thing I say. Although I speak all the time.” So says the unnamed, inanimate narrator of Olga Ravn’s The Wax Child.

Who hears it then? Someone—more on this later.

What we know about this narrator is that it was created by Christenze Crucknow, who carried this wax effigy beneath her right arm as if it was a real human infant in utero. Why, you ask, would someone do this, making an effigy and treating it in this manner?  

“Wax effigies in witchcraft are figures representing individuals used in ritual magic to influence them through sympathetic magic. Historically, these dolls—often called poppets—were crafted from wax to cause harm, such as wasting away, by burning or pricking them, but they were also used for healing or protection rituals.” 

In The Wax Child, it seems a lot of the witchcraft that Christenze performs has to do with fertility and childbirth. She offers spells and herbal treatments, and we can infer that the Wax Child is a part of these treatments. Sympathetic magic refers to “a form of ritualistic magic based on the belief that objects or actions can influence target individuals or events through symbolic, mystical connections. Working on the principle that "like produces like," it uses symbols—such as dolls, items belonging to a person, or art—to create, heal, or harm from a distance.” So we can imagine Christenze trying to help someone undergoing a difficult childbirth by performing a ritual involving the Wax Child.

There’s no direct mention of this in the story, it's one of the things left out that the reader must imagine.  

However the Child says: “Whenever a woman nearby to me was about to give birth, I would lie in the ground and feel almost exalted, as if the arrival of every child was a chance for me to find a place in the world, for my soul to dart into one of those newborn infants, my mouth to open and expel its very fist cry.”

Well, this doesn’t seem entirely wholesome. In fact, the Wax Child comes across as rather parasitic and almost bratty, coveting living beings and the way they are cared for.

We are told that Christenze attempts to help a woman name Anne Bille, who delivers many babies, only to have them die within days. Christenze is unable to help her and Anne is shown jealously denouncing Christenze as a witch—the first legal problem she has.  

This is the inciting event of the story. Christenze is “outed” as a witch, as are her friends and associates. The King of Denmark learns of this and dispatches his lieutenants to eradicate the outbreak of witchery. They arrest and torture the women into confession, and they are, one by one, executed. Christenze, as a noblewoman, believes her life will be spared. She appeals to the King, as they are both aristocrats, but he nonetheless condemns her.

This sad tale is, as Ms. Ravn, reveals at the end, based on real events. Ms. Ravn chose to tell the story in a particular way, injecting an unusual narrator in the form of the Wax Child. Here’s a passage from the very end:

The narrator writes of her creator, her mistress, Christenze: “…the Beheaded Virgin, is what she later would call herself—after death, of course—her head, separated from her body, told me so from within the flames, when they tossed both it and the body, headless, into the fire. Farewell my child, the lips sighed on seeing me on the arm of another in front of the bonfire…”

Indeed, this is the end of the book. Well, almost. The whole story is told from the Wax Child’s position in time and space, and she is deathless and can effortlessly travel great distances and see into other characters’ heads—even beyond their deaths.

Here is the end of the story, after Christenza is killed:

“Had I eyes that could weep; I would have wept. But I am only a doll, a doll of wax. I cannot move my hands. My wax mouth cannot be opened. And yet I speak…To the dead I mean nothing. I meant little to them when they were alive. To my mistress I was only an instrument. Made for strength, made for harm. I am so stupid. Every evening I tell the same story, and I speak to the soil.”

The wax child is the storyteller, telling the story while buried in the soil, a kind of not-so-mute witness outside of time and place. But someone is hearing the wax child’s words and putting them into a book, and this doesn’t have to do with the story but how it’s told. In other words, it’s perfectly fine to just enjoy this fine story—the eerie voice of the Wax Child, the tragic persecution of the basically harmless witches by those in power—without fussing about the implications of having an inanimate narrator who behaves like a child.  

Let’s stop here, and next time we’ll have something for the fussers.

Till then.

#TheWaxChild #OlgaRavn #AlanBray