Witches in the Young Adult Fiction: Between Cautionary Tale and the Historical
Truth
Amy Lee
(pp. 590-600)
The Asian Conference on Education
Official Conference Proceedings 2011
ISSN: 2186-5892
Proceedings URL: http://iafor.org/ace_proceedings.html
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The International Academic Forum
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The Third Asian Conference on Education 2011 Official Proceedings
Witches in the Young Adult Fiction:
Between Cautionary Tale and the Historical Truth
Amy Lee Wai Sum
Hong Kong Baptist University
[email protected]
Humanities Programme, Hong Kong Baptist University,
224 Waterloo Road, Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong
(Multiple Literacy Education)
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Witches in the Young Adult Fiction:
Between Cautionary Tale and the Historical Truth
Amy Lee Wai Sum
Hong Kong Baptist University
I am Tituba, you may not know anything about me but I can tell you I am probably
the most famous witch in history – because I was one of the first to be accused as a
witch in Salem village in 1692. I was put on trial, together with two other
unfortunate women, but I was smart enough to confess! I confessed that I was a
witch, whatever that meant in those days, and I survived!
My home was Bridgetown, Barbados, but later I was sold by Susanna Endicott to
Samuel Parris, although she referred to me and my husband John Indian as her
“jewels” and her “dearest friends” (Petry, 1964, p.5). We packed quickly and join
the Reverend Parris on the Blessing bound for Boston in the Bay Colony. Later we
discovered that Parris’ dream of becoming a minister in Boston did not materialize
and we had to settle for the small village of Salem. My main duty was to take care
of the sickly mistress, and two girls, their daughter Betsy and an orphaned cousin
Abigail. Life was difficult enough in the harsh weather conditions, but not long after
we settled down, the outbreak of some girls’ unknown illness escalated into a
whirlwind, bringing out the deepest of man’s fears and the worst in our nature. The
situation stormed completely out of control and people started to suffer – some
sacrificed their lives, some their family, and some their names. I, being an outsider
twice over, was inevitably caught up in it, and it took me the last drop of effort to get
out of the mess relatively unharmed. Believe me when I say that I was not proud to
have the need to lie, but the public confession gave me what I needed, and the foolish
people in charge of the trials did not seem to care too much whether I was telling the
truth or not. So I did my best to give them what they wanted, and I saved my own
life!
By now you should have recognized what I am talking about. Yes, the unfortunate
incident was The Salem Witch Trials (1692-1693), which happened more than 300
years ago. And I, Tituba, confessed witch, am talking to you now. Does it mean
that their accusation and my confession were both right? That I am genuinely a
witch and my power allows me to move beyond the constraints of time and space?
Well, I am not going to discuss the fine distinctions between names such as witch,
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healer, medium, barefoot doctor, or even the devil’s servant now. The simple
answer to why I am here still is simply that you won’t let me die. Yes, you people,
won’t let me, or my fellow sisters, die. We live in your hearts – the historical event
at Salem had come to an end long ago, and there had not been any more witch trials in
the world after this event, but somehow you refuse to let us go. On the one hand you
people made every effort to seek us out, condemned our existence in the name of God
and banished us from any decent society, but deep in your hearts you are secretly
fascinated by me and my kind because you don’t have the same wisdom and power as
we do. We can read nature like a book, and communicate with the smallest elements
in nature. We know the sentiments of the flowers, the work of the insects, the will of
the winds, and the emotions of the water. And we are not afraid to celebrate life
lived in the midst of these natural elements. But you people insisted on a grim
picture of living, as if you were afraid that once you celebrate life, it would be taken
away from you. I can assure you that the life that you think you were living was no
temptation to me, and I would not trade anything in the world for your life. You
could have it all to yourself.
In fact, you are so fascinated by people of our kind that almost every year some books,
verses, play scripts, or pictures will come out talking about us, about the terrible
mistake that you called The Salem Witch trials. Don’t you know that I can read you
like a book? You know very well that the outbreak in 1692-1693 was only an
inevitable release of the fears and anxiety repressed for too long, and you had no idea
how to handle it. The trials, and the so-called witch tests (i.e. the pin test, the touch
test, the specter test, the devil’s mark, and the test of saying the lord’s prayer) were
laughable attempts to instill some semblance of discipline and authority in the court
when the accusing girls put themselves on exhibition shouting and wriggling on the
floor as if that was their performance stage. And meanwhile you were hoping that
the girls’ thirst for drama and attention would expire soon, and the accusation would
stop at some point before everybody was dragged to the court to make false
confessions.
You think that because I was a woman, a slave, and I confessed, that I really felt
guilty of the crimes those wicked little girls accused me of? I told them stories about
life in Barbados, I taught them to look into water, and I read cards for them because I
pitied them. Poor things, to live in such harsh weather, not to be allowed any fun at
all in their lives, and all cooped up in this small place working like slaves, and taught
to hate the sinner in themselves, was too much for them. So I gave them some
entertainment, something to look forward to and something to dream about at night.
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I was only trying to maintain their sanity and basic human dignity – otherwise they
would soon have forgotten that they were human!
But I don’t really need to tell you this, right? You know very well that it is the same
human need for meaning, the need to make sense not only of the world we live in but
also ourselves, that spurs writers and historians from all around the world to keep our
story alive these three hundred years. The new books still coming out every decade
either offer a learned explanation of the cause of the whole event or to use the same
historical setting to tell some rewritten human tales of love and hatred, life and death,
and the past and present are the best proofs that we know The Salem Witch trials
embody some fundamental human drama. Although the people involved in the
incident were just ordinary people, their situations, their dilemmas echo across time
and space and finds identification in peoples hundreds of years away. Even when
times change, when social and cultural situations are different, human beings are still
haunted by the same problems and found themselves landed in the same collective
fear. Arthur Miller, for example, was perceptive enough to see that although witches
like us are no longer part of the 20th century American society, the hunt for witches
has in fact never stopped. The Crucible (1952) and its subsequent dramatic
productions and filmic adaptations show us very clearly that modern society is still
haunted by problems that are hundreds of years old.
Yet admitting the continual existence of old problems does not have to mean giving
up or proclaiming defeat. Maryse Conde’s novel I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem
(1986) was a breath of fresh air, not only because it was the rare novel featuring me as
the protagonist but also because of its liberating ideas. While I was usually the most
marginal character in stories of this puritan colony, in Conde’s novel I was allowed to
open my mouth and speak for myself. Oh, how refreshing it was to be able to speak!
To be able to tell what I see and what I hear, sometimes things so obvious that I
wonder if you people are quite blind and deaf, makes my life much more tolerable
because I feel alive. I speak of our fears, I speak of our desires, and I speak of the
many ways of fulfilling our desires beyond the permitted channels. I was
imprisoned but I felt liberated, with Hester by my side. Because of my liberating
words, free souls composed songs in my honour and the lyrics kept me and my spirit
alive even when my mortal life came to an end.
So this is how come I am still here talking to you. While my supposed witch power
does not make me immortal, your continual fascination with us whom you label as
witches, and our wisdom, grant us immortality in your efforts to keep us current in
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your cultural products. Every known personality in the original trials, be they
accusers or accused, young or old, were given a new life many times over in the
novels written of the incident. The accusations, the attempted defense, the drama of
conflict inside and outside the court, and the judges’ hopelessness in the face of these
indefensible yet dubious crimes were all rewritten, refocused and re-sequenced in the
fictional stories written in these three hundred years. Into the 21st century, novels
about The Salem Witch trials have a new common trend, which is a historical and
personal consciousness of being linked to the incident that took place more than three
hundred years ago. Contemporary fiction fully recognizes the time-gap between our
age and that of Salem Village, but it also consciously extends a hand to the past and
tries to find a narrative from a different angle, or about a different personality, that
can mean something to us as individuals or a collective now. Thus we see novels
published in the recent decade feature a young person, usually a woman, who through
deliberate or accidental encounter, stumbles into some (secret) records by people
related to the witch-hunt, and after some investigations, comes to claim a nearly
hereditary/maternal connection between herself and the foremother whose record she
has discovered and studied. It is interesting that despite the many progresses in
almost all aspects of life, the 21st century literary outputs still exhibit a sentiment of
being lost and needs to claim an identity in relation to a past. The historical events
become points of orientation for the wandering present, just as the young protagonists
in the novels seek to find themselves in the mothers who were engraved in history and
who left, in their secret diaries and hidden writing, a pool of thoughts and feelings
which the younger generations seek to follow and to identify with. This literature
written in the aftermath of The Salem Witch trials discloses a yearning for the wisdom
as exhibited by the women who had been accused to be witches three hundred years
ago. It is like daughters trying to find strength in the mother’s stories, although the
mothers had been condemned as having violated the permissible code of behavior and
being the impermissible beings.
While the adult book market shows a favour for the historical elements of the witch
trials, and then recently a tracking down of the historical mothers and her sense of self
in the face of mortal danger, the teenage book market similarly shows a shift in the
focus of attention in fictional texts produced at different times. The “magical”
approach of the current 21st century young adult literature using The Salem Witch
trials setting can be easily explained as responses to the magic following created by
the Harry Potter stories where teenagers with the power of magic are the main
characters in the stories. But even before the Harry Potter phenomenon, the Salem
Witch Hunt lent itself pretty readily to adaptations as teenage fiction because many of
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the major players in the incident were teenagers. Although I quite frequently found
myself featuring in adult’s fiction set in 17th century Salem, very often as the
marginalized servant of the house, sometimes as the simpleton who was is only fit to
be a companion to the stupid giggling girls, and usually just a token black character
who had been a natural choice to blame when witchcraft was suspected; I did not see
myself so much in the teenage fiction. In teenage fiction the main focus is on the
teenage characters – whether the rewritten Salem story is a serious attempt to render
the historical moment of Salem on fire in the 17th century or whether the
contemporary writer is only interested in borrowing the setting and the complex
network of human relationship for dramatic or didactic purposes. In other words, the
teenage fiction in the aftermath of The Salem Witch trials gives a very different
feeling from those of the adult fictions. It is a world inhabited by teenagers, and
adults are either the cause of their problems, or are there to stop them from finding
solutions to their problems.
But there is one particular young adult story which I like very much because I was
there, not only in the plot development, but moreover in the title! Ann Petry’s
Tituba of Salem Village (1964) gives me a description the depth of which unsurpassed
by any other teenage fiction of the same subject matter. Although it does not give
me the first person control of the narrative as in Conde’s I, Tituba, Black Witch of
Salem (1986), I was gratified by not only the amount of attention Petry has given me,
but also her effort in making me a rounded person and not just a slave woman who
falls as an early victim in this chaotic human drama of fear and accusation. Besides
this kind of attentive rendition of the historical event, there are also tales of teenage
growth and development loosely referring to The Salem Witch trials as the
background to facilitate the unfolding of the buldungsroman. The Witch of
Blackbird Pond (1958) by Elizabeth George Speare is such a tale. The story is set in
“the cold, bleak shores of Connecticut Colony” (Speare, 1958, backcover), with the
main protagonist a teenage girl escaping from an arranged marriage in the
“shimmering Caribbean Islands” to go seek her aunt in the puritan town of
Wethersfield. Her visit, itself shocking enough as she was alone and the trip
unannounced, found the town in a moment of outcry of witchcraft accusations. Kit
the girl found her independence and free spirit painfully challenged by the
narrow-mindedness and the puritanical practices of the town. Although Kit’s story
happens away from the limelight of the main actions of The Salem Witch trials, her
experience touches on exactly the same issues as present in the trials. In the
following I will discuss these two mid-20th century teenage novels from my position
as an actual participant in the Salem Crisis, to try to analyze the uses that posterity has
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made of the historical event after so many years.
Although I call it a teenage novel freely, Petry’s work is more than a teenage fiction
showcasing common problems felt by teenagers of different times. Trudier Harris
raises the issue of its classification in “Before the stigma of race: Authority and
witchcraft in Ann Petry’s Tituba of Salem Village,”
“Is it an historical novel, an adolescent biography, or simply a novel that evolved
from a historical tidbit,… Even Ann Petry has at times seemed to waver in the
classification. In autobiographical statements, as well as in critical commentary
on her works, she has referred to the book as an “historical novel.” She has also
called it a “researched biography” and discussed it in several places as a
children’s book”. (Harris, 1997, p.106)
Although finally it was marketed as a children’s book, Petry’s attempt to make the
story as much historically accurate as possible within the framework of the tale has
been noted by many readers and critics.
My story, however, cannot be told as a straight-forward narrative as usually done in
the case of a historical figure whose life is well-known, for although I was one of the
first to be accused, not much about my life was recorded in the copious records of the
trials. Petry’s daughter recalled that,
“Tituba of Salem Village came about by another sort of “accident.” The story of
the woman from Barbados, who was blamed for starting the hysteria that led to
the Salem witchcraft trials, began when mother’s editor at Thomas Y Crowell
asked her to write about Samuel Sewall, one of the judges who convicted and
condemned to death a number of witches, then recanted”. (Petry, 2009, p.87)
But when Ann Petry started doing research about the Salem hysteria, her attention
was drawn to me the slave woman, she recorded in an undated draft of speech that
“I knew then that I was not interested in writing a book about judge Sewall that I
had to write a book about Tituba, one of the people caught up in the Salem
witchcraft trials, unlike the others in that she was a slave”. (Petry, 2009, p.88)
Ann Petry had a special perception about slaves, as she wrote in a draft of a speech
that,
“If there is an underlying idea behind the books that I wrote about slaves its
origin lies back all those years ago when I was in high school….both of these
books present slaves as people of courage, integrity, determination, committed to
the idea of freedom – human beings”. (Petry, 2009, p.29)
I am more than happy that the writer Petry took this approach, for it was time to take a
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break from all those stereotypical brief mention of me as the silent and cowardly slave
who did just about everything I was told to. Petry’s approach inevitably contains her
own agenda of presenting the thoughts and feelings of a slave woman who was almost
heroic in a certain situation, and to a certain extent it compromises the factual
accuracy of my origin. Morsberger in The New England Quarterly commented on
my transformation in the hands of different writers:
“Chadwick Hansen documents the process by which Tituba and her husband
john Indian, … were metamorphosed from Carib Indians to half-Indian and
half-black to voodoo-practicing negroes, with increasing defamatory
characterizations which, he says, justify some black militants’ accusations of
racism. The next logical step in historical revisionism is for Blacks to adopt
Titbua and turn her into a heroine of their race”. (Mosberger, 1974, p.456)
And my story, as told in Petry’s Tituba of Salem Village, is doing exactly this,
according to Mosberger.
While there were critics not entirely happy with these transformations of myself,
some did congratulate Petry on her rendition of me as:
“a sturdy, indestructible, and wonderful part of America, woven into its heart and
into its soul. …and in the process she gives the African-American novel its first
realistic rendering of Caribbean consciousness”. (Rahming, 2003, p.25)
As Petry (and some other writers) had never claimed that the stories they wrote were
my biography, I did not think too much about the accuracy of details in that respect.
What is more important to me, as someone being repeatedly mentioned and described,
is to get out of the two-dimensional descriptions, and to be able to show people a
richer picture of who I am. Petry had chosen to present me as an overwhelmingly
down to earth and sensible woman who was intelligent and capable enough to be a
good house-servant and a responsible wife. Instead of focusing on the acts of
witchery that I allegedly had performed, Petry allowed me to explain in various
situations that what seemed to be results of witchcraft could have very common sense
explanation. Those who could not see these explanations were either too foolish to
recognize their validity, or too prejudiced to allow these opportunities of accusation
and revenge to go away.
It was the same with the girls and the other accusers. Anyone with eyes could see
that the first to make accusations were bound girls and boys, those who inhabited the
lower rungs of the social ladder, and those who had no way of relieving their
accumulated grievances. Later other accusers who joined all had an interest in
seeing the accused being hurt and stripped of their usual privilege. I thought it was
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crystal clear that the accusations were too convenient, but no one seemed to care
before more people, and more “ordinary” people who had no idea what witchcraft was,
were sent to be hanged because they were accused of practicing it. As for the trials
at court and the tests that supposedly would expose the witches, I really could not find
anything more absurd. Of course I did confess that I was a witch at the end, but it
was only because Samuel Parris was beating me hard, and I said those words to stop
his actions. When the girls were allowed to point their fingers at anyone they
wanted and made all sorts of baseless accusations, how much weight was there left in
words? I could confess and I could take back the words if I like, as long as I know
what I am doing. Petry had chosen the witch hunt as the setting, but there was no
magic, no witchcraft, and no devil – instead the teenage novel celebrates good sense,
integrity, understanding, and a sense of personal identity.
The Witch of Blackbird Pond (1958) was a very different kind of story from Petry’s,
for not only was it not set in Salem, the “witch” in the title was not an important
player in the story, and the business of accusation and confession regarding witchcraft
was no match to the aggression seen in Petry’s story.
Young Kit Tyler took the ship Dolphin from the Caribbean to the small town
Wethersfield, of the Connecticut colony area all by herself, to seek her aunt Rachel.
Her visit was unannounced, for she was escaping from an arranged marriage after her
grandfather, who was her guardian, failed his business. While her sudden
appearance at the door of her puritan uncle Matthew was shocking, Kit herself was
also in for a terrible shock when she came into the experience of life at the puritan
household. Even on board of the Dolphin, Kit had begun a journey of personal
maturity and understanding that was to gain momentum at her aunt’s place, which
was in the midst of a puritan community quite the opposite of the sunshine and
freedom she had enjoyed in the Caribbean.
It was a bildungsroman with a 17th century setting, where witches and witchcraft were
at the periphery. The titular “hero”, the witch living beside the Blackbird Pond with
her cats, was an old widow called Hannah Tupper, who kept to herself, and who was
half-conscious most of the time because she was in deep mourning for her dead
husband. We did not see any witchery from Hannah, and in fact she had to rely on
Kit’s help when the people decided to burn her house and chase her out of the
community. Kit Tyler the young heroine was also accused of being a witch, but the
ferocity of the accusation was no match to that of the wicked girls in Salem Village in
Petry’s novel. She was accused of being a witch mainly because she demonstrated
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that she could swim, she was willful, and she “captured the heart” of young men – by
her bewitching charm, if you like. Although she had to defend herself in court, the
evidence supporting the accusation was much more benign and people’s attitude to it
much more lenient. Because the people in Wethersfield did not like strangers, Kit
really had to earn her acceptance into the community, which she did not try hard
enough at the beginning. People complained of strange behavior from Kit, and one
mother accused Kit for bewitching her daughter, because of the young girl’s slowness
in learning and simple-mindedness. Luckily, the magistrate and in general the public
were sensible enough to distinguish what was witchcraft and what was not. When
the girl demonstrated in front of all that she had learned how to read and write from
Kit Tyler, the cynical mother was the only person to shout, “The child is bewitched!”.
The proud father stopped her senseless exclamations and addressed the court:
“All my life I’ve wished I could read. If I’d had a son, I’d of seen to it he
learned his letters. Well, this is a new country over here, and who says it may
not be just as needful for a woman to read as a man? Might give her summat to
think about besides witches and foolishness. Any rate, I got someone now to
read the Good Book to me of an evening and if that’s the work of the devil, then
I say ‘tis a mighty queer thing for the devil to go working against himself”!
(Speare, 1958, p.221-2)
It was a very commonsensical way to look at and accept the incident. In fact, most
of the “problems” in the story were resolved with the same common sense, good
grace, and practical intelligence. Mercy the sickly cousin of Kit learned to be honest
with her feelings and finally accepted John’s proposal of marriage, Judith the pretty
cousin learned that she was not the centre of the universe and finally she won William
Ashby’s attention (William was the son of the richest family in Wethersfield), and Kit
had learned through hard work and persistence the really important things in life,
when Nat the free-spirited sailor came to ask for her hand. She was completely
different from the willful, self-centred and naïve girl who brought all her fineries from
her grand house to puritan Wethersfield. At the end of the story, all was well and
common sense ruled. In fact, the only “witchcraft” that had been performed in this
story was human understanding, determination, and a belief that a good future was
created by hardwork and persistence. All the major characters who believed in
hardwork and common sense came to a good end at the closure of the story. It is a
story very close to my heart for I share the same belief.
Ladies and gentlemen, I believe I have said what I wanted to say. The unfortunate
Salem Witch Hunt had caused a lot of damage to people living at the time and even to
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posterity. But we also have the good sense not to forget and keep reminding
ourselves our own weaknesses through repeated revisiting of this historical incident.
Some seek to understand the human psychology which led us into such trouble by
imagining ourselves in the shoes of the people involved. Others invent “hidden
diaries” victims of the trials to remind us of the resilience and dignity of human life.
For teenagers, this historical event has been re-created into narratives offering a good
opportunity for reflection because of the part played by young people – how they
responded to their immediate environment, how they sought relief for their
discontents, how their actions had an impact on other people’s lives, and finally
whether there were alternative ways to resolve their problems. The two books I
shared with you had made different stories from the rather unfortunate Salem event
(and one does not even feature me!), but finally in both cases, good sense and
understanding triumph. Perhaps that is the most important guide to young readers
after so many years.
References
Harris, T., 1997. Before the stigma of race: Authority and witchcraft in Ann Petry’s
Tituba of Salem Village. In: D. Hubbard, ed. 1997. Recovered writers/Recovered texts:
Race, class and gender in black women’s literature. Knoxville: The University of
Tennessee Press. pp. 105-115.
Morsberger, R.E., 1974. The further transformation of Tituba. The New England
Quarterly, 47(3), pp. 456-458.
Petry, A., 1964. Tituba of Salem Village. New York: Harper Trophy.
Petry, E., 2009. At home inside: A daughter’s tribute to Ann Petry. Boston: The
University Press of Mississippi.
Rahming, M.B., 2003. Phenomenology, epistemology, ontology, and spirit: The
Caribbean perspective in Ann Petry’s Tituba of Salem Village. South Central Review,
20(2/4), pp. 24-46.
Speare, E.G., 1958. The witch of blackbird pond. New York: Laurel-leaf.
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