A desirable calamity

Abstract

Representations of Salem Witches were popular in the nineteenth-century in America, and were directly linked to fears and anxieties related to changes in a woman's place in society, the evolving definition and changing nature of domesticity, the expansion of the frontier further into Indian territory, and the enslavement of Africans and their later emancipation. While often discussed as an anomalous set of events and circumstances in American history, the story of the Salem Witch Trials provided artists with a means of depicting women's bodies in various incarnations, but always under the purview of some form of captivity, whether as defendants, as Indian captives, as victims of their own physicality, or as women enslaved. The visual culture that enlivens the Salem witch trials has strong, underlying ties to other tropes in American artistic production that transcends the geography where the historical event occurred and the personalities involved. Images of captivity, hysteria, magical practices, and religious allusions can all be readily found in Salem Witch Trials imagery, and were subjects that were deeply tied to women in the American imagination. American artists were dedicated to the discourse of the captive woman, and this is evident in the enormous popularity of Hiram Power's The Greek Slave, a sculpture that could arguably be described as one of the most popular and influential of the nineteenth century. Indian captivity narratives were also immensely popular at the time, with the continued expansion of the country and the removal of Native Americans further west. These images, and the issues with which they areintricately intertwined, caused a great deal of anxiety with regard to women's purity, sexuality, and domesticity. The professionalization of the medical field had also taken the care of women's bodies out of the hands of midwives and placed it into the hands of male doctors. This too would figure into the interest in imagery of the Salem Witches, whose accusers have variously been described as hysterics, a diagnosis popular to describe all manner of women in nineteenth-century American medicine, a burgeoning field heavily invested with controlling the female body. It is my contention that all of these kinds of female bodies, of imprisoned 'witches', Indian captives, female slaves, and women transgressing traditional domestic, physical, and intellectual boundaries, sparked the impetus for a resurgence in popularity of the Salem Witch Trials in the nineteenth-century and this can be clearly seen in that century's visual culture. The vast majority of scholarship devoted to the Witch Trials has been historical in nature, and while indispensable to the period, when this scholarship includes visual representations these are utilized as illustrative with little or no analysis of the image itself. However, this imagery is vastly important to the experience of, and attitude toward, women in America. There is no scholarly work that examines the images of the Salem Witches, and as such there is no current scholarship that places these artworks within the discourses of the female body in American visual culture. This dissertation will fill that void. --Author's abstract