Post by Joanna on Oct 23, 2015 17:35:45 GMT -5
Interview with Author of The Witches: Salem, 1692
As darkness falls a few days from now, children of America will take to the streets, dressed as all manner of ghosts, ghouls and goblins. Some, mostly girls, will wear tall black hats and carry broomsticks, cackling wickedly enough to make our blood run cold – or so we'll say, just to please them. It will be a fun festival of the macabre, our annual sendup of whatever might be lurking in the dark, which on any other night might legitimately leave the hairs on the back of our necks standing on end.
In The Witches: Salem, 1692, historian Stacy Schiff whisks us back to a time and place where the nights were darker than anything we can imagine today, and when witches – flying over fields on broomsticks, transforming themselves into animals, and afflicting the good, God-fearing citizens of a small village with every kind of malady – seemed as real as the actual broom in the corner, the ashes on the hearth or the black boar rooting in its pen. In one of the most shocking and poorly understood episodes of American history, the imaginings of a group of young Puritan girls in Salem metastasized into accusations, trials and finally executions: 19 in all, with both men and women hanged for the alleged crime of witchcraft.
The event has been used as a metaphor for all sorts of American ills, most famously in The Crucible, Arthur Miller's stage parable of McCarthyism. But what really happened, and why? Schiff, whose previous books include the best-selling Cleopatra (2010) and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Vera (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov) (1999), returns to the original primary sources and finds some unexpected answers. Printers Row Journal recently discussed these with Schiff, 53, who spoke by phone from her office in New York. Here's an edited transcript of our chat:
Question: Of all of your books, this one seems as if it might appeal to the largest audience. A lot of people who maybe wouldn't read a book about, say, Mrs. Nabokov, might pick up a book about the Salem witch trials.
Answer: There's certainly a richness there – if anything, an over-richness, at least from a writer's point of view. You could go off in any number of different directions – socially, politically, economically, psychiatrically; it has so many angles, it's round.
Q: It's an episode that almost everyone knows at least a tiny bit about, but it's also much mythologized and misinterpreted.
A: We've all been misinformed, yes. I think most of us come to the Salem witch trials through (Nathaniel) Hawthorne or Arthur Miller, but we forget sometimes that those sources are fiction – which means we don't have any reason to look back at the original documentation, the original history. Part of my curiosity was just the question: How could this have happened? We think of our Puritan ancestors as enlightened men who founded this Biblical commonwealth, but here they are in the broad light of day, hanging each other for a crime which they are convinced is real but we tend to think of as delusional. So part of my goal was to solve this riddle that I didn't think had been sufficiently solved.
Q: It seems, in retrospect, remarkably imaginative of the people of Salem – both the accusers and the accused – to have come up with the stories they told.
A: The Puritans were heirs to this English idea of an old crone as a witch, and there was some Swedish lore along similar lines that had been seeping into the groundwater. But they also had these fire-breathing ideas they were being fed regularly from the pulpit. Of course, if you or I were to imagine a witch, we'd be imagining pretty much the same creature, even though you and I have never seen one, presumably.
Q: Then there were false confessions.
A: Yes, when the victims were told they had done something, they often came up with an incredibly detailed version of how they did it. Martha Carrier, for example, told how she flew over the fields on a pole with her neighbor, had a crash and suffered an injury. There's just an amazing need that we all have to put the pieces of the puzzle together and make it all make sense. In this case, the need is to make sense of a story you're being fed by someone in authority.
Q: You make the point that in the days before electricity, the Puritan imagination was fueled in frightening ways.
A: That's right. The darkness of 17th century Massachusetts was incomprehensible to us who live in a world of artificial light. When you're living on the edge – including temperamentally on the edge – and it's dark, and things move and bustle all around you, you jump to the obvious conclusion. That smudge on the wall, you could turn into a monster very readily. But you know, it was really important to me to make clear in the book that these people were not unlike us. They were not some benighted, illiterate people from the Dark Ages. And we, too, in our own time, have come up with ideas that don't quite pan out. We, too, have spread rumors as fact. That the Puritans could come up with such a false narrative is something I think we can all relate to, after what we've experienced over the last 15 years or so.
Q: Do you see application of the witch-hunt metaphor in more recent history?
A: Well, jumping to conclusions about intruders and invaders is something we also have done. We all have the itch to know how and why something happened, and that's exactly the kind of thinking that has gone into, yes, recent missteps, political and otherwise. You see it all the time today. There's a huge frustration at not being able to answer a pressing question, so you come up with a theory – which later is superseded by another theory.
Q: Our recent and ongoing witch hunts, perhaps, are focused on Muslims and immigrants.
A: Yes. That sense of being under siege – whether it's Mexicans at the border, or what happened in Texas this summer, where some people felt U.S. military exercises were a prelude to taking away Texans' guns – is always there. Somehow there's always a terrorist in the backyard. It's a frontier American mentality, and it shows up again and again.
Q: One of the interesting things about the actual Salem witch trials is that accounts of the trials are so fragmented and of such varying reliability. In some of the diaries people kept at the time, there are curious gaps between when the worst of the action started and the time it ended. Why was that?
A: In his diaries, you see Samuel Sewall, always so forthcoming about every other topic, just pursing his lips and not being able to write about this. If you look at his originals, you see him marginally writing, "Woe, woe, woe is witchcraft!" But he's clearly addled by his entire role in this, and by his uncertainty as to whether he's done the right thing. You're reading silences here, so you have to be careful, but the very fact that you can sense it rumbling under the surface in the years between 1692 and when he essentially says "I have done the wrong thing" and apologizes years later, his discomfort is there on the page. Cotton Mather is not writing in real time, so it's much harder to get a sense of what he's actually thinking. In most of his writing, he's a very accurate reporter, but sometimes you see him twisting things, adding bits of the supernatural here and there, making it conform to the way he sees it biblically. At other times there's a distaste for what he sees happening.
Q: You argue in the book this was one of the very few major episodes in American history in which women played a prominent active role.
A: It's interesting that you start out with a group of accusing girls – two, and then four, and then ultimately more, and then women. The fingers being pointed were being pointed mostly by those girls. The men joined in later, testifying in court, but the primary accusations came from this core group of girls. When men testified or made complaints against women, it tended to be in regard to things that happened in the past. They don't say, "Last week she appeared in my bedroom." They say, "Seven years ago, she appeared in my bedroom." It's clear that people are recycling names of people about whom they've had some skepticism in the past. It's a rolling stone; when someone mentions someone, a litany of previous transgressions comes to the surface.
Q: The girls were adolescent or preadolescent, which mixes all this up with the matter of sexual awakening.
A: It does often seem to be the case that with adolescent and preadolescent girls, the natural and the supernatural are a little bit blurred. It's a very spiritual, religious time of life as well, and it's easy for things to get blown out of proportion. It's also interesting how much imagery there was about women visiting men in their beds wearing black hats or whatever. Of course, it's much more often that women's bedrooms are invaded by men, but none of that comes up in the trials. In terms of the court testimony, it's the women who are the sexual predators.
Q: Another widely held misconception is that the Salem victims were burned at the stake. Where does that come from?
A: Part of that is that the trials got a huge workout around the time of the Civil War because of the slavery issue. The miscarriage of justice in the trials was a brilliant piece of shrapnel to throw at New England. "You can say what you like about our mistreatment of slaves, but you burned witches!" In fact, witches weren't burned in North America, although they were burned elsewhere. They were hanged, although we don't know exactly where the hangings took place – which tells you something about how deep the urge was to forget.
Q: If you believe in the Bible in the highly literal ways the Puritans did, it's natural, maybe, to believe in the devil and variety of other supernatural phenomena – which suggests that the stories of witchcraft that took root in Salem were not as fantastical to them as we might think.
A: It was not at all fantastical. They took the witchcraft narrative as literally scripture. And you were all the more pious for identifying this problem and helping to eradicate it. There was a lot of jumping on bandwagons here. How much would you feel that you weren't doing your Christian duty if you failed to turn in your neighbor? That's an awful thought, but if you take witchcraft literally – as almost everyone did at the outset – how much of an obligation do you have to look around you and think who else might be guilty?
Q: At least at first, most people who made the accusations truly believed them. But perhaps there were, especially later, people making accusations that they knew to be false, and which were made in the spirit of settling scores.
A: Well, I wouldn't want to undermine the end of the book, but there's no question of there being a bit of expediency here. Yes, you might be certain of witchcraft, but how do you decide whom to name? If you've suddenly been jinxed, who do you think put that jinx on you? If you thought about it long enough, you could probably come up with someone – someone you crossed, someone you disappointed, someone you did a disservice to. So yes, there has to be some degree of score-settling here; otherwise there's no way to explain how some of these names came up. Some of the women had been associated with witchcraft in the past, but then you have someone like Rebecca Nurse, who had never been accused of anything. She'd lived a very peaceable life and raised a remarkably functional family. But there's some lingering animus against her. Was it because all her children lived, and others didn't? Is it because she was a newcomer to the village, and she and her husband had more land than anyone else thought they should? Anyhow, her name comes up.
Q: Sounds like the 17th century equivalent of Internet bullying.
A: Absolutely. Today, the Internet allows us to do the same thing that was happening in Salem: to take a false accusation and broadcast it, very loudly and very widely. Exactly.
Source: Kevin Nance, The Chicago Tribune, October 23, 2015.