Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered: Salem's Witches Haunt New England History

The missionary impulse from the City on a Hill; the democratic legacy of the town meeting; the founding of Harvard and the creation of a rich educational tradition—these are the towering monuments from Puritan America that should stand out on the historical landscape. And they do—as do many other lesser but important symbols: Thanksgiving, village greens, stone walls, and old taverns. But swirling about all of these icons are the murky mists of Salem witchcraft. Quite simply, the American public is bedeviled by the Salem trials because, try as they might, most people cannot really comprehend how decent, educated, pious, law-abiding New England villagers could hang their own neighbors for virtually no discernible crime. The witches of Salem will not go away; ask any historian who speaks and writes about Puritanism. Salem’s witches haunt public lectures on colonial New England, survey courses in American history, and any discussion of the Puritan origins of American identity. They are the ghosts in our historical attic.

These ghosts were brought out of the attic and put on the stage in 1953 when Arthur Miller discovered the roots of McCarthyism in Salem. His play, The Crucible, joined Nathaniel Hawthorne’s, The Scarlet Letter, as one of the two most important sources for communicating an understanding of Puritanism to the public. Hawthorne was explicit about his own inability to escape spectral images from New England’s past. “The figure of my first ancestor . . . still haunts me,” he wrote in “The Custom House” essay which prefaced The Scarlet Letter. “As their representative,” he continued, “I take shame upon my self for their sakes and pray that any curse . . . may be now and henceforth removed.” Salem’s witches are famous even in Europe. Jean-Paul Sartre wrote a screenplay for The Crucible (1958) that wrapped a Cold War European context around it. And The Crucible lives on in recent American film. Miller adapted his own play into a popular, critically acclaimed movie in 1996.

Professional historians also display an extraordinary interest in the witchcraft episode that Perry Miller once dismissed as essentially irrelevant to New England development. Every recent trend in scholarship has been applied to make sense out of what seems to be a nonsensical event. In Witchcraft at Salem (1969), Chadwick Hansen put the witchcraft accusers on the therapist’s couch and found that they suffered from clinical hysteria. In 1974, Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum reconstituted the kinship and political networks of the town of Salem and located the trials within shreds in the social fabric (Salem Possessed). John Demos’s enormously popular book, Entertaining Satan (1982), mounted a multi-disciplinary analysis that seemed to attempt to explore every possible perspective and tack. Demos examined the psychology of accuser and victim; the sociology of Puritanism and village life; and the colonial and European context of witchcraft. Demos also has a storyteller’s literary gifts and managed somehow to weave the tapestry together into a charming tale. A tour de force, Entertaining Satan seemed to whet the appetite for more research rather than satiate the public and professional hunger for new tidbits and interpretations. Carol Karlsen’s The Devil in the Shape of a Woman (1987), explicitly addressed a question everyone has asked since 1692: why were women more likely than men to be accused and found guilty of witchcraft? Most recently among major studies, Richard Godbeer’s The Devil’s Dominion: Magic and Religion in Early New England (1992), roots the Salem trials in the superstitions and folk magic of the ordinary men and women of the pre-modern world.

Thus, practitioners of the recent trends in social history, family reconstitution, psychology, feminism, and popular culture have all had their go at the Salem witchcraft trials. Mixed in with the above major studies, of course, are dozens of solid less-known ones. Finding something new and important to say about Salem is difficult. Elizabeth Reis...