Transatlantic Traffic and (Mis)Translations

3. The Monstrous Transatlantic Witchcraft Narrative: Elizabeth Gaskell’s Lois the Witch

63 chapte r thr ee The Monstrous Transatlantic Witchcraft Narrative Elizabeth Gaskell’s Lois the Witch Louisa Jayne Foster M B efore she became an established household name, Elizabeth Gaskell published in the journal of her friends Mary and William Howitt under the pseudonym “Cotton Mather Mills.”1 This was, in many ways, an apt choice for Gaskell, cleverly combining a reference to the factories that littered the Lancastrian landscape of her home with a nod to her lifelong fascination with narratives of witchcraft through the figure of Cotton Mather, the Puritan minister and author who played a significant role in the New England witchcraft trials of the late seventeenth century. Gaskell’s pseudonym, while humorous, can also be read as a pithy exemplar of transatlantic material and ideological exchanges as they operated between Britain and the United States in the nineteenth century. The figure of “Cotton Mather Mills” relies upon, and attests to, the economic networks that facilitated the exchange of material goods: in this context “cotton” and “texts.” As a more than interested observer in the cotton trade that dictated life in the industrialized areas of Northern England and New England, Gaskell was cognizant of the interdependency of the mills in Manchester and the U.S. cotton houses with which they traded.2 Cotton was not, however, the only transatlantic trade that interested Gaskell. A burgeoning American literary marketplace had been both enabled and hindered by an influx of British texts into the United States, while numerous U.S. bestsellers, such as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), made a significant impact upon a British reading public.3 This marketplace 64 louisa jayne foster embraced many of Gaskell’s fictions, particularly Cranford (1853).4 Choosing a pseudonym that emphasizes the potential of these trade links as a basis for material success, Gaskell astutely positions her work within a transnational literary marketplace. “Cotton Mather Mills,” however, also reflects a history of witchcraft that was implicitly transatlantic. The ideology underpinning the persecutions of witches in Salem was based on legal precedents brought directly from European courts. As P. G. Maxwell-Stuart demonstrates, while witchcraft was never a monolithic set of beliefs and practices, convictions on both sides of the Atlantic were secured by demonstrating three key components: the accused’s malevolent intentions, the performance of harmful magic, as well as their Satanic alliance.5 These legal and cultural discourses were disseminated across national borders through highly influential texts such as the Malleus Maleficarum (1486). Cotton Mather’s treatises On Witchcraft: Being, The Wonders of the Invisible World (1692) and Memorable Providences: Relating to Witchcraft and Possessions (1689)—texts with which Gaskell was more than likely familiar—built upon and compounded these European literary and legal traditions. Both the history of witchcraft and the textual productions that disseminated it were, therefore, rooted in a complex transatlantic dynamic that resonated well into the nineteenth century. Concentrating upon Gaskell’s transatlantic novella Lois the Witch (1859), and some of the literary sources she (most probably) used in the composition of her fictional history of the Salem witchcraft trials—Cotton Mather’s Memorable Providences: Relating to Witchcrafts and Possessions (1689); Charles W. Upham’s Lectures on Witchcraft: Comprising A History of the Delusion in Salem, in 1692 (1831); Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850); and John Neal’s Rachel Dyer (1829)—this essay traces the symbiotic relationship between the witchcraft narrative and authorial agency as it was constructed within and through the nineteenth-century literary marketplace.6 I focus on these witchcraft narratives as they neatly illustrate the reciprocal exchange of literal and ideological material between Britain and the U.S, and furthermore , because they offer a self-reflexive commentary upon nineteenthcentury literary identity and authority. Gaskell’s U.S. literary sources, I will demonstrate, use the narrative of witchcraft to negotiate literary identity by reclaiming a local history through (trans)national paradigms. Lois the Witch, a highly unusual British account of an American historical event, also Monstrous Transatlantic Witchcraft Narrative 65 attests to these transatlantic literary histories. However, where Gaskell’s counterparts use the witchcraft narrative to affirm their distinct cultural authority , Lois explores the witch-as-author with varying degrees of (literary) agency. Establishing a metafictional commentary on the positioning of the female writer through her protagonist, Gaskell thereby maps the boundaries of authorial production within a transnational marketplace. One of the reasons why the witchcraft...