Post by Graveyardbride on Jul 27, 2014 12:01:29 GMT -5
Book Notes: Local novelist sees ‘conversion’ syndrome in witch trials
The parallels between 1692 and today are so close, they’re frightening. That’s one conclusion you could draw from reading Conversion, Marblehead resident Katherine Howe’s new novel, which compares the world of the Salem Witch Trials to the life of teenagers today.
The main characters are high school girls in Danvers, whose classmates at a fictional St. Joan’s school develop bizarre behaviors, including tics, twitches and verbal outbursts. “We don’t use ‘hysteria’ anymore,” Howe said. “The technical term for the group thing that happened is mass psychogenic illness.”
Howe started thinking about this affliction, also known as conversion syndrome, when it appeared in the news in 2011. She was teaching a writing seminar in historical fiction at Cornell when a group of teenage girls in Le Roy, New York – about an hour away – displayed unusual physical and verbal behavior. While she tracked developments, she was also teaching The Crucible, Arthur Miller’s 1953 play about the Salem Witch Trials. “It was around the time they finally announced, yes, this was conversion disorder,” Howe said. “I went bounding into the classroom.”
But she was surprised when her students didn’t see similarities between the behavior of the young women in Miller’s drama, and the high school girls in Le Roy. “They thought what was happening to the girls in the present was real, and what was happening in the past was less real,” Howe said.
Conversion moves back and forth between the high school girls on the North Shore and Ann Putnam in Salem Village, in 1707. Putnam helped inflame the anxiety that led to the Witch Trials, and in Howe’s novel, she looks back at that time with regret. “She faces this moment where she feels herself being pulled into this group thing, and consciously chooses to let herself be pulled in,” Howe said. “Part of what I’m trying to explore with Ann’s character is that moral ambiguity.”
There is no way to know if the girls in Salem in 1692 were faking or not, Howe said, but she thinks it makes sense to see them as displaying conversion syndrome. “The way I represent it, there is some combination of faking that then kind of becomes real and spins out of control,” she said. “As control is taken over by adults, the incident is bent to the adults’ agenda.”
Source: Will Broaddus, The Salem News, July 25, 2014.