29

The 19th century witnessed the durability of the figure of the witch, as an imaginary figure projected onto ages past. Given her subversive potential, informed by practices and knowledge difficult to control, active at the front of some of the first ecologies, and at the birth of ecofeminism, what do the writings about her tell us about environmental conflicts, not to mention conflicts between different cosmologies ? The corpus studied here shows that this undefinable subjectivity requires an interdisciplinary retrospective, shared between literature and anthropology in its extended meaning, in order to explore the intersections between feminism, class struggle, and ecologies in the 19th century. Thus the figure of the witch will not cease to point to struggles still being fought amongst different visions of the world, nor will she cease to put into question the place of modern human beings on this earth.