The Enemy Within (28 page)

 
Salemwitchcraft as mental illness

 
Occasionally, Upham gestured in yet another direction, by offering “the supposition that they [the afflicted children] were more or less deranged.” From conscious and calculating imposture, they had gradually been led into a kind of “sickly mania.” To be sure, they were “sinners” first and foremost, yet “sin . . . in all cases, is itself insanity.” (This last came straight from Upham the clergyman and Christian moralist.)

The same theme—derangement, or, in a phrasing more congenial to our own day, mental illness—would be taken up by George M. Beard, author of
The Psychology of the Salem Witchcraft Excitement of 1692
, published in 1882. Beard was a physician; his book was designed to reflect then-current trends in clinical practice. The keyword in its title was “excitement”; the afflicted girls, he believed, had been so overstimulated by Puritan tales of “the invisible world,” of devils and hellfire, that they became “partly insane and partly entranced.” (The latter term referenced a growing public interest in hypnosis.) Beard also introduced the concept of hysteria, which was just then beginning to acquire serious professional currency and would later become central to witchcraft interpretation.

The larger motive behind
The Psychology of the Salem Witchcraft Excitement
was to buttress the use of the insanity defense for murder suspects; this, in turn, had been prompted by the recent trial and conviction (and execution) of Charles Guiteau, the assassin of President James A. Garfield. Beard's sympathy for the Salem accusers was somewhat tempered by his belief that in their case (unlike Guiteau's) “the genuine symptoms of real disease were supplemented by malignity and crime”; like other commentators before and after, he read an element of “intentional deception” into the mix.

 
Salemwitchcraft and cultural “provincialism”

 
As a new century opened, Americans were caught up in what became known as the Progressive Movement, with its burgeoning spirit of change and reform. The rise of “modern science,” to which Upham had so confidently referred decades before, was continuing apace; under its bright light, traditional perspectives of every sort were being fundamentally reconsidered. The newest part of modern science was the systematic study of societies, including their histories. And when the “progressives” turned, in particular, to American history, they quickly identified Puritanism as a special sort of bogeyman. Never previously had the repute of the New England colonists sunk so low, linked as they now were with ignorance, intolerance, and across-the-board cultural backwardness. Moreover, the Salem witch-hunt seemed, by this reckoning, the very epitome of its time and place.

Among the many writers who advanced such views, two can be seen as representative: the historians James Truslow Adams and Vernon L. Parrington. Adams, for his part, saw “the witchcraft frenzy” as a matter of “superstitious fanaticism” brought on chiefly by the “ravings and goadings” of the clergy. It reflected throughout “the extraordinarily large sphere accorded to the devil in Puritan theology, and that theology's virtual repudiation of science.” The result, in addition to “shedding the blood of innocent victims,” was “lasting political and intellectual damage” to the community as a whole. Parrington hit virtually the same note. New England culture, he wrote in his masterwork
Main Currents of American Thought
, was “infected . . . [by] a common provincialism.” In this regard, “the ministers were no better than their congregations; they were blind leaders of the blind, and they lent their sanction to the intolerance of mass judgment.” The result was a building wave of “stark reaction”; and “the Salem outbreak was the logical outcome of the long policy of repression, that had . . . destroyed independent thought, in its attempt to imprison the natural man in a strait-jacket of Puritan righteousness.” There was, in this bleak portrayal, no single gleam of redemption.

 
Salemwitchcraft as period piece

 
But redemption would come in due course, as the Puritans gained a new set of revisionist interpreters. Among professional historians the leader (at least in chronological sequence) was Samuel Eliot Morison, whose pathbreaking work,
The Puritan Pronaos: Studies in the Intellectual Life of New England, in the Seventeenth Century,
appeared in 1936. Morison strove, above all else, to take the Puritans on their own terms, without superimposing modern (and “progressive”) standards of value. Seen in that light, their achievements, intellectual and otherwise, were distinctly impressive. And also in that light, witchcraft beliefs—even witch trials—did not appear incongruous; to the contrary, they were “typical of the seventeenth-century situation.” The Salem trials, moreover, were the product of an especially “troubled period” in New England history, when “the people were uneasy with rebellions, changes of government, and Indian attacks.” The “afflicted children” had acted an insincere part, while their elders “kept a cowardly silence.” Such moments of “mass madness” had occurred also in other times and places. Indeed, Salem recalled, for Morison, “a recent miscarriage of justice . . . in the same commonwealth [Massachusetts],” the Sacco-Vanzetti trials of the 1920s; this parallel “compels us to be charitable” to the perpetrators. All things considered, the 1692 “outbreak” was no more than “a small incident in the history of a great superstition.” And, when it was done, New England was “left . . . much as it had been before.” In short: unfortunate, yes; regrettable, yes; but not very significant overall.

Morison's colleague on the faculty at Harvard, Perry Miller, took a more complex and nuanced position. Miller would eventually become the most important of all contributors to Puritan studies; in ways unimagined by his predecessors, he plumbed the depths of a collective “New England mind.” The witch trials, however, left him in a somewhat divided frame. At certain points he seemed impatient with the popular interest they inevitably aroused—a product, he thought, of rank sensationalism. In that connection he could say, with a faint air of contempt: “The intellectual history of New England can be written as if no such thing ever happened. It had no effect on the ecclesiastical or political situation, it does not figure in the institutional or ideological development.” Like Morison, Miller hoped to wish the matter away by denying its importance. The elaborately developed Puritan theology, on which he lavished his own extraordinary powers of analysis, counted for so much more.

Yet in other parts of his oeuvre, a different, and less dismissive, assessment appeared. He sensed in some of his clergymen subjects—Hale, for one; Cotton Mather, for another—a virtual crisis of faith in response to the witch trials. Hale, of course, had come to acknowledge “error,” and Mather had approached the same point without quite getting there. Both had been led, in Hale's words, to “a more strict scanning of the principles . . . [they] had imbibed.” Once such a process began, Miller wondered, where would it stop? He concluded as follows: “The onus of error lay heavy upon the land; the realization of it slowly but irresistibly ate into the New England conscience.” The passing years brought “an unassuageable grief that the covenanted community should have committed an irreparable evil. Out of sorrow and chagrin, out of dread, was born a new love for the land which had been desecrated, but somehow also consecrated, by the blood of innocents.” For Miller, the witch-hunt had finally been transmuted into a strange kind of romantic myth.

Salemwitchcraft and the vulnerability of children

 
A slender article, little noticed at the time of its publication in 1943, deserves at least brief mention here, if only because it anticipated later developments. Entitled “Pediatric Aspects of the Salem Witchcraft Tragedy,” it appeared in a scientific journal; its author, Ernest Caulfield, was a medical doctor. Caulfield's chief aim was to counter the still-prevalent emphasis on “fraud” in explaining the witch-hunt; his approach reflected his professional specialty in pediatrics. A foremost point about the accusers, he believed, was simply their position as children subject to the extreme pressures created by a “gruesome theology” of sin and death. Key Puritan doctrines such as predestination “involved a complex mental process that no child could experience, much less enjoy.” As a result, young New Englanders were obliged to live in a state of “constant, gnawing fear.” Some, for whom the demands were too great, plunged into “the worst sort of mental distress.” And the bizarre antics seen at Salem were “only the outward manifestation of their feeble attempts to escape from their insecure, cruel, depressive . . . village world.”

 
Salemwitchcraft as hysteria

 
The cumulative effect of witchcraft-related writing through the first half of the 20th century was almost to remove the topic from public view. The progressive historians had buried it, along with everything else in Puritanism, as being unworthy of serious consideration. The opinions of revisionists like Morison and Miller were at best ambivalent; moreover, embedded as they were in a scholarly literature, they could not command wide attention. Hence it fell to a non-scholar, Marion L. Starkey, to bring Salem back out where general readers might again take its measure. Her book,
The Devil in Massachusetts: A Modern Enquiry Into the Salem Witch Trials
, was published in 1949, and quickly gained a large audience.

Starkey was a writer of considerable imaginative gifts, and she tried especially to develop the dramatic possibilities inherent in the story. Her focus throughout was the “circle” of afflicted girls. In this, she reinstated the emphasis of the 18th- and 19th-century writers on Salem, and her question was also theirs: How to explain the “fits” and similar “actings” that had proved so crucial to the entire affair? Her answer, however, was diametrically opposed. Where many others had seen “fraud and imposture,” Starkey (like Caulfield a few years before) diagnosed involuntary, not to say unconscious, motives at work; her circle was composed of true hysterics. The modern in her “modern enquiry” was a quick shot of Freudianism, flavored with a dollop of developmental psychology. The special “adolescent” status of the afflicted accusers seemed to Starkey a key element. They were at the mercy of biological and hormonal change, familial stress, and community neglect (this last because teenage girls were so little acknowledged in pre-modern culture); at one point she referred to them as “a pack of bobbysoxers on the loose.” They sought excitement, notoriety, adventure—and their fits did, in addition, convey a certain protest—but all without any form of planful intent.

 
Salemwitchcraft as political repression

 
Starkey's work was also shaped, at least implicitly, by the political environment of the post-World War Two era—the aftermath of violent struggle against Nazism, and the beginnings of the Cold War. Soon this environment would inspire another treatment that was both similar and different. Its form would be that of the theater, its creator the playwright Arthur Miller. The play itself, an immediate sensation when first performed in 1952, was entitled
The Crucible
. Miller's version of the witch trials was a superbly crafted parody of the Red Scare—the government investigations of Communism—in the late 1940s and early '50s. Indeed it joined, to an astonishing degree, the history of those two widely separated periods.

Miller had begun his preparations for the play with a careful reading of Upham (all 1,000 pages); he had also spent a week at the old courthouse in Salem itself, wading through the trial records. He altered certain of the original facts in order to suit the needs of the stage—elevating John Proctor, for example, to a central role, and adding a love interest. But the play as a whole remained remarkably faithful to the spirit and emotions of actual events; even the speech patterns rang true. (There is no better way to “hear” the people of 17th-century New England than to attend a performance of
The Crucible
.)

The play took no position on the motives of the afflicted girls; they might, or might not, have been
bona fide
hysterics. But it strongly suggested that much of the community, judges, clergy, and ordinary citizens alike, had succumbed to a particularly malignant form of
group
hysteria—and then, in the name of conformity, had carried out a ruthless program of social and political repression. Rampant suspicion, spiraling panic, a thirst for vengeance: thus the ingredients of witch-hunting, in the 1690s and again in the 1950s. As Miller would put it many years afterward, his aim was to spotlight “the primeval structure of human sacrifice to the forces of fanaticism and paranoia that goes on repeating itself forever as though imbedded in the brain of social man.” The important word here is “forever”; the stakes were now raised to a level approaching universality.

Taken as a whole,
The Crucible
has done more to shape popular perceptions of Salem witchcraft than any other single writing; for many in the present day, it is the only real source. It has, at the same time, greatly enhanced the metaphorical power of the
term
witch-hunting. And it continues to remind us that, behind the term, there does indeed lurk something spanning many otherwise disparate historical and cultural circumstances.

 
Salemwitchcraft and shifting cultural boundaries

 
In 1966, Kai T. Erikson published an important work of historical sociology,
Wayward Puritans: A Study in the Sociology of Deviance,
in which the witch trials played a conspicuous part. Erikson's main theme was social and cultural “boundary-setting.” He decided to take 17th-century Massachusetts as a “laboratory” for investigating the way communities, during periods of crisis, seek to redefine themselves and redraw their cultural boundaries; Salem would serve as a test case. His conclusion, after careful examination of the pertinent records, was that Massachusetts in 1692 had indeed reached a crucial turning point. Its imperial charter was in doubt, its cultural fulcrum was shifting from the spiritual to the secular, outbursts of “angry dissension” were on the rise, and so forth. Ministers, for their part, had developed a distinctive sermon type appropriate to such difficult times, the so-called jeremiad, with lament over moral shortcoming as its dominant motif; this, in turn, served only to heighten the general mood of anxiety.