First Impressions
“The Wax Child” is extremely odd (in a good way) and it’s genuinely a wild ride. The overall story is easy enough to grasp, but a lot of its details are so curious and strange that I had to really focus to understand what was going on and what it all ultimately meant. And the impact of the story builds to something much bigger than just an individual tale from the past.
This book is a novel, but it also feels like a piece of poetry, not just in its language but in how certain phrases repeat and build a real lyricism, especially in sections structured like incantations or based on real historical superstitious practices woven throughout the text. It also feels a bit like a play, since Ravn apparently began working on this as a dramatic piece before it evolved into prose. It's a historical story, but I found it carries a surprising amount of modern relevance and urgency, and it functions, too, as a kind of horror story: genuinely horrific things happen in it, and its larger meaning and impact are quite terrifying in their own right.
Premise and Perspective
The novel begins in the late 1500s in Denmark, though most of it takes place around 1620–1621. It follows a woman named Christenze, but not from her own point of view. Instead, the story is narrated from the unique perspective of a wax child, an object Christenze creates out of beeswax mixed with human hair and nail clippings. It's such a different way of building a narrative about the past: most historical novels are either objectively or omnisciently narrated, or told from a particular character's subjective viewpoint, but here the narrator is an object with a strange kind of objectivity, formed from both natural and human elements, able to see into the minds and motivations of the people around it as well as into the natural world, without making value judgments. It has emotions, but no real point of view to impose on what it observes; it simply records.
Christenze, whom the wax child considers its mistress, is of noble birth but not wealthy, living a fairly humble life with a well-off woman desperate for children, who has lost fifteen of them to miscarriage or early infant death. After all this loss, that woman goes looking for a scapegoat and settles on Christenze, accusing her of witchcraft. That accusation forces Christenze to flee, and she ends up connecting with other women living on the margins of society, women quite different from the mainstream, and forms a real bond with them. The first half of the novel follows the connection that grows between these women as they live and work together, preparing fish, singing, sharing stories and superstitions. Every character in this book is based on a real historical figure.
The Witch Trials
Because of the patriarchy and misogyny of the era, alongside larger societal shifts, these women become targets and scapegoats in the witch hunts, something the book signals early on and that isn't really a spoiler given the imagery on the cover itself. The novel follows them into suspicion, persecution, and torture, rendered in small, carefully chosen details rather than extended, graphic description, which somehow makes it more horrifying: a red-hot pincer, a leg screw tightened further, a woman returning to her cell with a broken hand. Confessions are extracted this way, and women are made to give up the names of other women in turn.
What struck me most is how this persecution wasn't just superstition or mass hysteria, as it's sometimes framed, but part of a deliberate expansion of power. Christian IV of Denmark instituted laws and actively pursued these witch hunts as part of centralizing his authority, creating convenient scapegoats to position himself as protector of the righteous against supposed agents of the devil, while simultaneously imposing standardized behavior and belief that would knit the population into a unified, obedient nationhood. England and Ireland's King James I pursued similar witch trials around the same time, part of a broader pattern in how modern nation-states and power structures were forming, built in part on enforcing gender norms and conformity, with women who didn't conform serving as convenient targets. It's not hard to draw a line from this to how authority figures today still identify "bad people" to demonize, rallying segments of a population under a leader by scapegoating marginalized groups, transgender people among them, generating a kind of protective paranoia in the process.
Hypocrisy and Autonomy
I loved a section that exposes the hypocrisy at the heart of this authority: a woman convicted of witchcraft and awaiting execution is brought to the pregnant wife of the king, who asks for advice on ensuring a quick, healthy birth. The condemned woman recites a series of common superstitions, and the wife responds that she already knew all of that, it's common knowledge, only to be met with the unspoken irony that this same "common knowledge" is what got the woman condemned as a witch in the first place. Later in the novel, when Christenze is made to defend her own life in an unjust trial, she declares, "I love life. It belongs to me," a powerful assertion of the one thing she still has any claim to, at the same time as it's being taken from her. Ravn doesn't flatten these women into simple victims, either: Christenze at one point tries to set herself apart from the other accused women by invoking her noble birth, hoping it might spare her, and while she is treated somewhat differently in her execution, she ultimately meets the same fate. The novel is also honest about how some of this persecution came from other women, part of how patriarchy actually functions, including a heartbreaking moment where a young girl testifies at trial without really understanding that her words are helping convict the accused.
Ravn's Method
There's so much in this book that's enticingly strange while also being clearly built on real historical research. I loved hearing, in an interview, how Ravn described reading original documents from this period and being unable to make sense of one particular text until she realized it was actually a set of dance instructions, at which point she got up in the middle of a library reading room and started performing the movements herself to understand what was being conveyed. It's a funny image, and also a good encapsulation of her creativity as a writer: this book resists being pinned to a single genre, weaving together enough different elements to give a real, distinct understanding of this period of history and, in turn, our own present moment.
Verdict
Beyond the sheer immediate weirdness and pleasure of this unique story, which is satisfying in its own right, thinking through its larger implications made this feel moving and impactful to me. I think Ravn is a hugely talented writer; I also loved her earlier novel “The Employees”, which seems entirely different on its surface, a story set in outer space narrated by both humans and robots or beings somewhere between the two, but which shares this same technique of narrating from the perspective of objects or non-human entities, offering such a distinct outside view of the human condition. I'd love to know if you've read “The Wax Child” and what you made of it.
