Halloween, of course, is a good time to talk about witches. Little
girls today may trend toward Disney princesses for their Halloween costumes,
but their moms and big sisters who want to put va-va-voom into their holiday
attire often choose leggy Sexy Witch outfits. The movies are full of witches: cute
witches (Bewitched), sultry witches (The Witches of Eastwick), scary witches
(who can forget Margaret Hamilton in The
Wizard of Oz?), even a maybe-not-there-at-all witch (The Blair Witch Project). In any case, movies that deal with
witchcraft are generally going for fun, whether of the benign or the exciting
variety.
But there was a time when to be named a witch was akin to a
death sentence. Throughout European history outspoken women (and some men) have
been accused of witchcraft, and few of them survived to refute the accusation.
And that tradition unfortunately persisted in the New World, most famously in
Puritan Massachusetts, where in 1692 dozens of local citizens were condemned to
the gallows by tribunals determined to purge all witches from their midst.
Years ago, I was featured in several productions of The Crucible, Arthur Miller’s hit 1953
play that draws from the Salem witch trials an indirect parallel to the witch-hunting
being done by Senator Joseph McCarthy and the members of the House UnAmerican
Activities Committee in his own day. The experience made me want to know more
about the reality of the historical event, in which almost twenty locals (14 of
them women) were sent to the gallows. Some of the victims were town renegades
and cranks, but others were solid citizens known for their piety and good
works. How did they come to be accused?
The answer lies in bestselling author Stacy Schiff’s
fascinating narrative, The Witches: Salem
1692. Schiff, author of biographies of everyone from Véra Nabokov to
Cleopatra, digs deep into the historical record to reconstruct the deadly
doings in that small New England town. Much of her focus is on the
pre-pubescent girls whose testimony before the witchcraft tribunal brought down
so many members of their community. Today we diagnose their writhing and
screaming as mass hysteria, but Schiff goes further, seeing in the strict rules
of Puritanism the seeds of a covert rebellion that evolved into an impulse to
undo others. Conditions in Salem were harsh: not only was daily life an ongoing
challenge but a rigid religious system allowed for few emotional outlets.
Schiff notes how many of the accusing girls had previously suffered the loss of
a parent. She also grasps how easy it was for bereaved children to accuse their
father’s new wife of witchcraft.
As an historian, Schiff makes a shrewd observation: “History
is not rich in unruly young women; with the exception of Joan of Arc and a few
underage sovereigns, it would be difficult to name another historical moment so
dominated by teenage virgins, traditionally a vulnerable, mute, and
disenfranchised cohort.” Noting that these young accusers’ testimony is often rich in details of brightly colored clothing supposedly worn by
the witches on their revels, she wonders: were the accusers themselves so
desperate for color in their lives that they turned their forbidden longings
into accusations of others?
The first filmed version of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible was made in France in 1957.
It featured French-speaking actors like Yves Montand and his wife, Simon
Signoret. Hollywood didn’t dare film Miller’s play until the Daniel Day-Lewis
version, based on Miller’s own screenplay, appeared in 1996. It contains the very
sexy love triangle that Schiff doesn’t find anywhere in the chronicles of Salem
Town.