Salem Witch Research Articles

Rupturing Salem, Reconsidering Subjectivity: Tituba, the Witch of Infinity in Maryse Condé’s <i>I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem</i>

The Salem witch-hunt, invoking the “red hunt” analogy of the McCarthy era, has been a persistent metaphor for persecution, a symbol of fanatic excess in policing the community boundaries. In American cultural history, however, Salem is regarded American only insofar as it proves un-American—as an exception to American exceptionalism. In particular, Tituba, the only non-white “witch” of the trials to whom the unleashing of the hysteria itself has often been attributed, embodies what is negated in Salem against which Americanness is to be affirmed. Maryse Condé’s 1986 novel, I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem recuperates Tituba from this darkness not only to reconfigure American identity but ultimately to reconsider human subjectivity. In Condé’s Salem, New England Puritanism showcases the primal scene of American identity formation, in which the personal, national, and religious subjectivities are fused to form the American self as the autonomous self-possessed individual. Tituba, in contrast, exemplifies an alternative subjectivity as an embodied being constituted in relation to others. Similar to Emmanuel Levinas’s ethical subject, Condé’s Tituba highlights the primacy of the other in the formation of the human subject, ultimately rupturing the totality of history with a counter-history of silenced voices or the infinity of the other.

‘We’re more than just pins and dolls and seeing the future in chicken parts’: Race, magic and religion in American Horror Story: Coven

Abstract This article will examine intersecting representations of race, magic and religion in American Horror Story: Coven. Coven traces the presence of witchcraft and voodoo in New Orleans from the nineteenth century to the present day. The season presents two conflicting and racially divided modes of magic: the predominantly white coven who are descendants of the Salem witches and the African American voodooists, led by the most infamous voodoo queen in the United States, Marie Laveau. These two sects are sworn enemies who have competed for power in the city since the coven first arrived in New Orleans. Following a truce between the two groups, the city was divided and white and black spaces were created in which the two groups could practice their magic separately. This article will discuss the way in which Coven presents magic in the city as racially and physically segregated and will pay particular attention to the depiction of African American magical practices. This article will interrogate the ways in which Coven echoes historical accounts of Marie Laveau and how it presents the nature and function of voodoo in New Orleans. It will question in what ways Coven conforms to and deviates from established voodoo tropes, arguing that in some ways Coven perpetuates pejorative impressions of voodoo whilst disrupting others. It will argue that, through Murphy and Falchuk’s depiction of ceremonies, rituals and the voodoo deity Papa Legba, Coven sensationalizes voodoo and presents its practices as spectacle. It proposes that this contemporary image of voodoo is part of a cultural tradition established through nineteenth and twentieth century treatments of African American magic that includes depictions of black culture based on the tradition of blackface minstrelsy, Harlem Renaissance recoveries of folk traditions and popular ethnographies of the city. It will suggest that in a similar way to these historical representations, Coven draws on racialized stereotypes of the primitive and the savage to present voodoo as dark and dangerous. Yet, primarily through the figure of Marie Laveau, it will also argue that Murphy and Falchuk depict voodoo as a symbol of resistance to racialized and gendered violence and oppression, and that in many ways Coven grants agency to voodoo women. Using voodoo as a lens, this paper will address broader debates around intersecting hierarchies of race and religion, the representation of race and the visibility of black culture in America.

Piedade fairies and salem witches

Piedade fairies and salem witches

The Salem Belle: A Tale of 1692 by Ebenezer Wheelwright

Reviewed by: The Salem Belle: A Tale of 1692 by Ebenezer Wheelwright Dawn Coleman ebenezer wheelwright. The Salem Belle: A Tale of 1692. Ed. Richard Kopley. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016. Pp. x + 210. America remembers 1692 as a grim year. The story is infamous: girls twitching, writhing, and shrieking, soon followed by trials at which they named witches and reported seeing their familiars and being tortured by them, soon followed by hangings. The hysteria crested in summer and early fall. Accusers pointed fingers at those they begrudged, judges solemnly heard testimonies that invoked spectral evidence, and ministers—most notably, Cotton Mather—urged on the collective effort to defeat Satan. Salemites with misgivings hesitated to speak out lest they, too, be accused of covenanting with the Prince of Darkness. Before Governor Williams Phips ended the admission of spectral evidence in late October, nineteen people were hanged, one was pressed to death, and five more had died in custody. These events form a misty backdrop to this 1842 novel. Originally published anonymously, it is now attributable, thanks to editor Richard Kopley's sleuthing, to Ebenezer Wheelwright, a Boston-based West Indies merchant who petitioned for bankruptcy to the tune of more than thirty-three thousand dollars the year he published The Salem Belle. In the foreground is Mary Graham, the eponymous belle, whom a rejected suitor outrageously accuses of witchcraft to avenge his wounded ego, an all-too-plausible motive that [End Page 116] points up the risk women have always run in saying "no." Mary's efforts to mitigate the sufferings of other accused citizens and her scorn for the charges against her only deepen public suspicion. She is sentenced to hang, but true to Romantic convention, the faultless heroine escapes her unjust sentence. The night before her scheduled execution, her fiancé Walter Strale rescues her from imprisonment by masquerading as Satan and frightening the superstitious watchmen—contempt for superstition is the book's hallmark—with a costume that involves hooved feet and glowing eyes in a jailbreak-through-disguise device that echoes James Fenimore Cooper's Last of the Mohicans (1826) and Catharine Sedgwick's Hope Leslie (1827). Notwithstanding this salable melodramatic plot, Wheelwright seems to have turned to authorship for reasons beyond filling his empty coffers. He avows admiration for the Puritan forefathers—"a nobler race was never seen on the globe"—yet presents his story primarily as a warning: "Follies equally great with those of the witchcraft delusion may yet infest a land as enlightened and civilized as ours" (27). Much of the narration evinces fascination with the non-rational as a force in public life: the collective paranoia operates as "an unseen yet terrible influence, before whose mysteries Reason was overthrown, and Religion herself was staggered" (106). Such meditations, while speaking to any period baffled by open animosities and state-sanctioned untruths, echo other critiques of the Salem witch hunt from the 1830s and 1840s. In The Specter of Salem: Remembering the Witch Trials in Nineteenth-Century America, Gretchen Adams details how these decades appropriated the Salem witch hunts as a cautionary tale about fanaticism, and Kopley proposes Robert Mackay's Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions (1841), which has a few pages on Salem, as a possible source for Wheelwright, especially in its fixation on "the power of the irrational" (198n2). As a representative of an important strand of antebellum American cultural memory, Wheelwright's engaging novel is well worth reading. Kopley's introduction frames The Salem Belle less as a work to be appreciated for its historical value than as a vital source for The Scarlet Letter (1850). His introduction convincingly highlights three scenes in Wheelwright's novel that seem to have shaped passages in Hawthorne's, an argument that revisits Chapter 3 of his book The Threads of the Scarlet Letter: A Study of Hawthorne's Transformative Art (Newark, Del.: University of Delaware Press, 2003). In the first borrowing, Hawthorne modeled the final private meeting in the forest between Hester and Dimmesdale on a similarly melancholy moment in The Salem Belle when Mary and her brother James walk in the forest and James urges Mary to flee the colony. Secondly, Hawthorne...

Yale Will Not Save You

Yale Will Not Save You Esmé Weijun Wang (bio) The moment I received my acceptance letter from Yale University was one of the happiest of my life. I stood at the bottom of my driveway, where two tin mailboxes nestled against one another, and found a large envelope waiting inside. Large envelopes from publications were a bad sign; they almost always bore my own handwriting, and usually held a rejected manuscript and a perfunctory note. But a big envelope from a university — an envelope with instructions, with welcome, with a full-color look-book — that was news. I stood at the mailboxes, shrieking. I was not the type of girl to shriek, but I was seventeen, and I had gotten into Yale. I was to be in Jonathan Edwards College, Class of 2005. ________ I was an overachieving child, the daughter of twentysomething Taiwanese immigrants who came to Michigan and then California with their baby girl. My parents were broke. They applied for food [End Page 18] stamps; they told one another that someday they'd be rich enough to eat at Pizza Hut any time they wanted. Eventually we moved for the sake of a different school district, and while raising me and my baby brother in a largely white small town, my parents told me that school was all-important and that I should always do my best. In elementary school, I assigned myself essays to write while on vacation. In fifth grade, I wrote a two-hundred-page novel about a kidnapped girl who becomes a cat. Soon my parents were both working in tech jobs at the height of the boom in Silicon Valley, and were no longer broke. They never spoke the words "American dream," but that was what their lives signified, and so in middle school I chose to take a 7:30 a.m. class in C++ programming, and I wrote a short story that my English teacher went on to teach even four years after that. In high school, when I told my mother that I was thinking of suicide, she suggested that we kill ourselves together, which I didn't fully recognize as the bizarre response it was until I told the story again and again over the following decades of my life. I won a gold medal at the Physics Olympics, was a California Arts Scholar, and crossed the stage at graduation with a GPA that belied the hundreds of self-inflicted scars lurking beneath my nylon gown. I chose to go east for college because I wanted to get away from the chaos — the accusatory fights, the sobbing — that occurred inside our home too often to take note of. ________ I dated someone briefly at the end of my senior year of high school who broke up with me because I was undiagnosed and frightening. Before he ended our relationship he invited me to a poolside barbecue. He wore girls' jeans. We stood around the glassy pool at his apartment complex and his mother asked me what I was doing after graduation. [End Page 19] "I'm going to Yale," I said. She did a double take. "Good for you," she said. Even back then my instability was clear to most. ________ "I went to Yale" is shorthand for I have schizoaffective disorder, but I'm not worthless. ________ Yale is the third-oldest university in the country, after Harvard, which is the oldest, and the College of William & Mary, which was established in 1693. Yale used to be called the Collegiate School, but was renamed for Elihu Yale after a succession of gifts from the English merchant and philanthropist, including books, exotic textiles, and a portrait of George I. These generous donations, the sale of which helped to fund the construction of Yale College in New Haven, were vigorously encouraged by Puritan minister Cotton Mather, who also vigorously encouraged the Salem witch trials. In troubled Salem, babbling and odd movements could signify witchcraft. The bewitched Goodwin family children, he said, "would bark at one another like Dogs, and again purr like so many Cats." We all know what happened to the witches. ________ I was diagnosed with bipolar...

A Question of Time: American Literature from Colonial Encounter to Contemporary Fiction ed. by Cindy Weinstein

Reviewed by: A Question of Time: American Literature from Colonial Encounter to Contemporary Fiction ed. by Cindy Weinstein Kelly Ross WEINSTEIN, CINDY, ed. A Question of Time: American Literature from Colonial Encounter to Contemporary Fiction. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019. 360 pp. $105.00 hardcover; $84.00 e-book. A decade after the publication of such field-defining works as Wai Chee Dimock’s Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time (2006), Thomas Allen’s A Republic in Time: Temporality and Social Imagination in Nineteenth-Century America (2008), Dana Luciano’s Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-Century America (2007), and Lloyd Pratt’s Archives of American Time: Literature and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (2010), temporality studies has become a crowded field, leaving one to wonder whether its time is up. The fifteen essays in A Question of Time emphatically prove that there is still much to explore, offering innovative approaches to representations of time in a wide array of literary genres from lyric poetry to serial sketches to the novel. The volume is divided into four sections that highlight the “processual aspects that go into understanding time” (7): Materializing Time, Performing Time, Timing Time, and Theorizing Time. The three essays in Materializing Time examine the relationship between the temporalities depicted in a text and the publication history of that text. Performing Time’s four essays analyze the “theatricalization of time” (8) in specific cultural spaces such as courtrooms and dance halls, while the four essays in Timing Time focus on formal aspects of the texts they consider, from a specific word (“and”) to the narrative equivalent of cinematic slow motion. Finally, Theorizing Time’s four essays foreground a variety of theoretical frameworks, including narratology, cognitive psychology, and postcolonial theory, to make broader claims about literary time. Three of the volume’s key strengths, which I discuss below, are chronological breadth, transnational approaches, and an attention to narratology. Cindy Weinstein notes that the collection offers a corrective to “the heretofore scholarly focus on nineteenth-century America, especially the antebellum period, which has been fertile ground for the temporal turn” (5). The chronological breadth of these essays—covering texts from the late-seventeenth to the twenty-first century—is indeed salutary. Nan Goodman investigates the problems that arose for the justices of the Salem witch trials when accusers claimed in court that “the harm inflicted by the accused and the experience of affliction of the accusers occurred simultaneously” (77). Although accusers were claiming to present empirical evidence of witchcraft, their emphasis on the simultaneity of cause (witchcraft) and effect (affliction) undermined the court’s assignation of blame, since the law required that the cause precede the effect. Stefanie Sobelle’s analysis of Richard McGuire’s 2014 graphic novel Here provides the collection with a chronological bookend to Goodman’s essay. Sobelle also explores simultaneity in Here, which depicts the same circumscribed location (the corner of a living room in the twentieth century) at multiple points in time from [End Page 467] 80,000,000 BCE to 2213 CE. By juxtaposing the familiar sense of time as linear and progressive (what Sobelle calls “human or anthropocentric time”) against “a vaster sense of deep time,” McGuire historicizes progressive time and reveals its destructive potential as it “emerges through colonialism, capitalism, and ultimately neoliberalism” (208). Both Sobelle and Goodman denaturalize “human” time: Goodman by identifying the moment at which causation became crucial to legal proceedings and Sobelle by demonstrating how McGuire uses the graphic novel form to elucidate “cross-temporal intimacy” (212). A Question of Time is all the more valuable for the unexpected connections that emerge from treating such a wide swath of literature in the same volume. There is a productive tension between the volume’s project as Weinstein describes it in her introduction and as Robert S. Levine reflects on it in his afterword. Although Weinstein proposes that “American literature, from its beginnings to the present, might provide a particularly rich set of texts to examine” in regard to temporality (1), Levine commends several of the essays for thinking comparatively rather than focusing exclusively on the US nation-state. Angela Calcaterra’s essay on the...

Switching Sides: How a Generation of Historians Lost Sympathy for the Victims of the Salem Witch Hunt. By Tony Fels. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018. xi + 249 pp. $29.95 paper.

Switching Sides: How a Generation of Historians Lost Sympathy for the Victims of the Salem Witch Hunt. By Tony Fels. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018. xi + 249 pp. $29.95 paper. - Volume 87 Issue 3

Vexed with Devils: Manhood and Witchcraft in Old and New England

Vexed with Devils: Manhood and Witchcraft in Old and New England

Female Piety and the Invention of American Puritanism by Bryce Traister

Reviewed by: Female Piety and the Invention of American Puritanism by Bryce Traister Zach Hutchins (bio) Female Piety and the Invention of American Puritanism bryce traister Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2016 232 pp. As Bryce Traister rightly notes, an increasingly secular academy now relates to American Puritanism primarily from the perspective of disavowal, rejecting the efforts of John Winthrop and his contemporaries to regulate civic and social life according to the dictates of the Bible as bigoted and narrow-minded. In an exceptionally ambitious book, Traister works to renegotiate our relation to Puritanism, arguing that the seeds of American secularism were sown by the same preachers and magistrates now caricatured as ecclesiastical oppressors and that we might recognize the discourse of dissent and liberty characteristic of modern society in both their language and the language of the women who argued with them. To that end, he presents the New England Way "as both a story of profound and controlling American religiosity and an equally American story of religious tolerance and secularism" (20). [End Page 602] But the New England Way of Traister is very much not the brand of American Puritanism served up by prior generations, which looked to the sermons of John Cotton, Thomas Shepard, John Eliot, and other ministers as the best sources on Puritan thought and culture. Instead, Traister reads the records of five events as indicative of the ways in which radical female piety shaped American Puritanism: Anne Hutchinson's trial, the Quaker invasion of the 1650s and 1660s, the Halfway Covenant of 1662, Mary Rowlandson's captivity, and the Salem witch trials. Christian theology has long placed believers in a feminine position, characterizing the church and its members as the bride of Christ, but Traister suggests that New England Puritans adopted a more radically feminized piety than many other Protestant sects and makes the development of this deeply gendered theology, through key moments when women challenged or questioned their ecclesiastical leaders, central to his secularist thesis. In the five episodes he treats, Traister contends that the feminized piety of seventeenth-century New England Puritans "articulated and helped to imagine categories of personhood, cultural politics (including feminism), psychological realism, and even natural rights discourse we characteristically associate with 'modernity,' 'secularism,' and 'Enlightenment.' By reading the feminine back into Puritanism, we will also be reading religion forward into secularism" (11). Three projects—reading these five key events, tracing the evolution of a feminized piety, and searching for the influence of American Puritanism on modern secularism and postsecularism—are interwoven into a single thesis. Brilliant insights are scattered throughout Traister's work, and it should be required reading for those investigating the texts or historical moments he treats as well as those with an interest in the role of gender in early American literature and theology. Among these many fine moments is a close reading of Rowlandson's Narrative centered on a passage in which Rowlandson compares her desire to look back toward her own town of Lancaster with the desire of Lot's wife to look back toward Sodom. This comparison, Traister notes, positions Lancaster (and New England more generally) as a latter-day Sodom, separating Rowlandson's experience of providential punishment from that of the larger society to which she belongs and establishing her spiritual autonomy. Traister concludes, "Her implied criticism of New England establishes the sovereignty of Mary Rowlandson not just as an author-recorder of her own experiences, but [End Page 603] as a person claiming a personal religious experience independent of New England's spiritual discipline" (154). In a text for which Increase Mather supplied the preface and in which "a more intrusive Matherian presence" has long been suspected, Traister's reading is delightfully subversive, empowering readers to hear Rowlandson speaking to and against the ministerial culture with which her Narrative has long been identified (133). This insight and similarly innovative readings throughout his book should meaningfully shape the ways in which we discuss and teach the texts that Traister examines. However, the larger claims that Traister links together in his introduction and conclusion are more provocative than persuasive. Enough evidence is presented that his claims with respect to American Puritanism, female...

Betty Putnam: An Unpublished One-Act Play by William Carlos Williams

ABSTRACT Betty Putnam is a short play by William Carlos Williams set during the Salem witch trials. Known chiefly as a poet, Williams once thought he would make his name as a playwright. Between 1909 and 1912, he composed several plays based on early American history, which show he was already considering the usable American past that he would later construct in In the American Grain (1925). Betty Putnam was his first literary exploration of Salem, and Williams dealt with the subject twice more, in In the American Grain and in Tituba's Children (1950). By tracing Williams's engagement with Salem and how it changed from the Progressive Era to the Cold War, one sees that it mirrors that of American culture generally. The Progressive Era Betty Putnam, with its happy ending and assertive new woman, seems far removed from the dread and violence of the McCarthy period writings.

The Trans-Atlantic Slave Experience in Prince Justice’s Tutuoba: Salem’s Black Shango Slave Queen

This article employs Linda Hutcheon’s notion of historiographic metafiction (1988. A poetics of postmodernism: History, theory and fiction. New York: Routledge) as a theoretical construct to interrogate and destabilize the official history of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the Salem Witch Trials (1692–1693) in Prince Justice’s Tutuoba: Salem’s Black Shango Slave Queen (2007. London: AU Media). Justice reconceptualizes the Salem Witch Trials as an offshoot of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, making gendered discourses on slavery, racism, identity, justice, socio-economic realities and the African diaspora relevant to the twenty-first century reader. A framework of historiographic metafiction demonstrates how Justice seeks to reconstruct the experiences of the eponymous character, subvert traditional historical viewpoints and install plausible alternative narrative accounts, which connect the Salem Witch Trials to the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The conscious effort of Justice to interrogate official historical and legal documents directs attention to the contemporary discourses and interdisciplinary links between literature and subject areas such as history and law, as well as cultural and diasporic studies.

Review: A Storm of Witchcraft: The Salem Witch Trials and the American Experience by Emerson W. Baker

Review: A Storm of Witchcraft: The Salem Witch Trials and the American Experience by Emerson W. Baker

Trauma Legal en el Teatro Americano del Siglo XX: The crucible de Arthur MillerTrauma Legal en el Teatro Americano del Siglo XX: The crucible de Arthur Miller

Basing on the interdisciplinary approaches of law and literature studies and trauma theory, in particular Felman’s repetitive legal trauma, we advocate that The Crucible demonstrates a past and a modern «legal trauma» in which the judicial hearings and trials of the post-World War II remarkably rehearse the Salem witchcraft trials. We engage with the play’s significant analogy to Communist witch-hunts to show how the justice system, in both periods, proceeds in engendering legal traumas. To prove this claim, we explore the legal narrative and the shared procedures, dramatically leading to accusation and/or execution. We discuss the judiciary’s articulation of law and justice, guilt and innocence within traumatic atmosphere, stressing the point that trauma yields nothing but another trauma, doomed to be repetitive when similar conditions arise. Also, we highlight the role of the play as a universal mode of testimony to Salem’s legal spectre and to any similar hysterical practices.

The Salem Witch Trials: Sociopolitical Hysteria, Systematic Persecution of Women, or Ergot Poisoning?

The Salem Witch Trials: Sociopolitical Hysteria, Systematic Persecution of Women, or Ergot Poisoning?

Six Lessons from the Just Teach One Project on Recovering Susanna Rowson's <em>Sincerity</em>

Six Lessons from the Just Teach One Project on Recovering Susanna Rowson's Sincerity Lisa West Lesson 1: You might not be teaching the classes that provide the easiest contexts for the Just Teach One project (jto), but that does not mean that you cannot participate in the opportunities jto provides for involving students and faculty in collaborative recovery work. Were I creating a course in which to teach Sincerity; A Novel in a Series of Original Letters, I would have taught a topics class for English majors on early American women writers or literature of the early American republic, courses that would have historicized the text and raised issues prominent in the recovery of Susanna Rowson as a prolific author, an educator, a playwright, and an editor. My ideal course would have included Rowson's Charlotte Temple, Foster's The Coquette, and some writings by Judith Sargent Murray, as well as secondary sources about women's education in the 1790s, early American magazines, conduct literature, and coverture. Instead, my predetermined course assignments for fall 2015 included "The Salem Witch Trials" (an upper-level course for majors), "Approaches to American Literature" (a lower-level course with a diverse population, ranging from education majors seeking their English endorsement to non-majors taking it to fulfill university "written communication" requirements), and a topical first-year seminar titled "Jane Austen: Property and Propriety." I decided I could insert Rowson's Sincerity into the "Approaches to American Literature" course, which I was teaching as a course focusing on social issues of the 1820s. I placed it after Hope Leslie, Hobomok, and a unit on the Boudinot-Gold letters collected in To Marry an Indian. Students would already have encountered both nonfiction letters and letters within novels, and our earlier texts would have invited discussion about marriage, women's education, women's economic rights, and the ways texts rhetorically and structurally critique patriarchy. Although Sincerity clearly stuck out on the syllabus as the only primary text not written in the 1820s, I figured there was enough thematic connection with other texts to make it work. I then took a hard look at my first-year seminar class. These are classes that do not fulfill major requirements, so there is more leeway to adjust course goals and experiment with pedagogy. I announced on the first day that we would [End Page 172] be reading Mansfield Park, Northanger Abbey, and Sincerity. The last novel, I explained, would replace Pride and Prejudice on the reading list. It was not written by Jane Austen; it was not even (really) British. But it was set in England and Ireland and in roughly the same time period as the Austen novels, and, in fact, a later version (retitled Sarah, or The Exemplary Wife) was actually published in the very same year as Austen's most beloved classic: 1813. No one complained, but I was worried. I wish I had already (re)learned my Lesson 2: Susanna Rowson is indeed a transatlantic figure, and her writings were published and read in both England and America. Rowson created memorable British and American characters; her settings likewise demonstrate her awareness of life on both sides of the Atlantic. The recovery of Rowson as a transatlantic figure remains underexplored territory. The 2006 Pearson anthology Transatlantic Romanticism (Newman et al.) includes excerpts from Charlotte Temple but no other Rowson texts. Rowson is not included in this anthology's series of "transatlantic exchanges" on republicanism, women's rights, or other issues, nor is she featured in the sections on transatlantic reception of authors. Rowson is similarly underrepresented in other transatlantic collections. Arguably, Rowson's is a voice that belongs more firmly in such discussions. Why not teach Rowson with Austen? My Austen class provided a wonderful opportunity to consider Rowson outside of strictly American contexts. Class discussions of narrative voice in Northanger Abbey informed students' approach to the text. They noted that Sarah's letters could express intense emotion. They connected these moments to Catherine Morland's indulgence in the gothic as a way to exert agency in her mundane life. For example, in the first letter, Sarah describes her marriage to Darnley: "A coach was at...

Introduction

Introduction Carrie Messenger There are stories we can't stop telling, and in the retelling, they become new stories and old stories at the same time. Fairy tales, with their once-upon-a-time and kingdoms that do not match our geography, are outside of our time and space. They live in the moment of the retelling. Myths explain why things are the way they are. History and geography are built into the idea of a myth. We are here now in this place, and the myth holds the past and present together for us, tying us to the time and the place before the retelling. Fairy tale and myth are two sides of the same coin, Janus-faced, the paired siblings of Artemis and Apollo, Hansel and Gretel. This Pleiades special feature has three fairy tales and two myths. The stories cover ground from Atlanta, Moldova, Appalachia—the Old World and the New. The contemporary fairy tale has a rich tradition, from the cities of Italo Calvino, the Gothic reworkings of Angela Carter, and the everyday atrocities of Lyudmila Petrushevskaya. Reworkings of myths range from James Joyce's Ulysses to Christa Wolf 's Cassandra. The stories we have here in this special feature retell Catskins, Hansel and Gretel, Golem, Sisyphus, and Baucis and Philemon. Catskins is a English fairy tale in the Cinderella family. Lucas Church's "Catskins & the Boy-King" takes the tale to contemporary Appalachia. Church has also incorporated a myth in The Frank C. Brown Collection of NC Folklore about a headless dog that would follow anyone who disturbed the place of its master's death. Compared to other Cinderalla stories, Catskins has an unusually active heroine, but in Church's tale, the boundaries between genders are blurred even further. The legend of the Golem, the clay creature brought to life with the power of a word to do his master's bidding, is taken from Jewish Prague and placed in early twentieth-century Atlanta in Maggie Nye's "We Made a Golem." It's after Leo Frank's 1913 trial for the murder of Mary Phagan. Leo Frank was Jewish; Mary Phagan was not. Mary Phagan was a child laborer in Frank's pencil factory. Leo Frank was lynched in 1915 and posthumously pardoned by the state of Georgia in 1986. The girls at the center of Nye's story might make a Golem, but their story echoes the Salem Witch trials as well. The Golem has many mistresses. My version of "Hansel and Gretel" is about the Moldovan Famine of 1947, using both Moldovan oral tales and some of the most famous Grimm tales on famine to provide a framework. I am interested in tales of famine because they are stories stripped down to their elements. What will characters do to survive? They speak to cultures in catastrophe, but also to environmental disasters and epic failures of government, providing a useful mirror to our own contemporary culture. When I first came to Moldova as a Peace Corps Volunteer, I kept noticing that people would refer to certain families as cannibals. I thought it was a joke, or some kind of slang insult I wasn't understanding, maybe some kind of reference to some kind of capitalist instinct, cannibalism as a metaphor. I'd never heard of the Moldovan Famine of 1947. "Hansel and Gretel" is a story that holds our memories of famine. "Hansel and Gretel" is a story that contains not only our fears of famine and cannibals, but our draw to dessert: that which we do not need, but that we crave for excess, the sugar that delights us. Sisyphus pushes his rock up the hill in Hades forever. In Teresa Milbrodt's "Sisyphus" this repetitive action has turned him into an old man who looks like he works out, an old man with freakish [End Page 64] strength. He's irresistible at the senior center. The story takes the classical epic move of the journey to the land of the dead. Fairy tales abound with stories of the test of whether or not it is possible to be kind to the ugly and/or annoying old woman in the woods, and...

The Opinion of the Cambridge Association, 1 August 1692: A Neglected Text of the Salem Witch Trials

The article analyses a neglected aspect of the Salem witch-trials. It evaluates the roles of the Mathers, father and son, in securing the condemnation of George Burroughs. Their temporary acceptance of the validity of spectral evidence was justified by their belief that Satan must have employed powerful agents, not simply stereotypical witches, in his attempt to subvert godly Massachusetts.

Reescrituras de los procesos por brujería de Salem en la literatura popular actual

Los procesos por brujería que tuvieron lugar en Salem (Massachusetts) en el año 1692 han sido objeto de gran interés por parte de los historiadores y de los autores de ficción, aunque no suceda lo mismo en la literatura crítica sobre su presencia en el ámbito literario. Muchas novelas históricas han utilizado este acontecimiento histórico como parte de sus argumentos. Pero no solamente la ficción histórica más canónica se ha ocupado de esta famosa caza de brujas; géneros populares como la novela romántica, la fantasía, la ciencia ficción y la novela de detectives han creado versiones literarias de la caza de brujas de Salem debido en gran parte a la falta de acuerdo sobre lo que realmente sucedió en Salem. El objetivo del presente artículo es mostrar cómo este acontecimiento histórico se ha introducido en la literatura popular actual con el fin de mostrar el interés que aún hoy en día sigue despertando y reivindicar la elaboración de más estudios centrados en la construcción literaria de uno de los acontecimientos históricos que más huella ha dejado en la mentalidad norteamericana.

Hawthorne's Attitudes Toward His Ancestors' Religious Belief As Reflected In "Young Goodman Brown"

This paper discusses Hawthorne's attitudes toward his ancestor's religious belief depicted in his work Young Goodman Brown. The analysis is conducted by using sociological approach as this approach concentrates on the social context of writing or on die literary text and its social meaning. It also explores the relationship between the artist and society as this approach believes that the writers are part of the world they describe. Thus, the biographical sketch of the author is also presented to support the analysis. Based on the analysis, it can be concluded that Young Goodman Brown reveals Hawthome's skepticism toward Puritanism, his ancestors' religious belief. The main character's inner conflict dealing with his religious belief portrays the writer's question on the worth of the very strict doctrine that his ancestors possessed. Expressing his anti-Puritan view, he creates the setting of the story which reminds his audience of the outrageous trials conducted by Puritans in 1692 known as Salem Witch Trials. He also borrows the characters' names from the victims of those trials. The downfall of his tragic hero caused by his distrustful feeling toward his own religion also indicates Hawthome's skepticism to Puritanism. Â

The big trial: law as public spectacle

The trial of O. J. Simpson was a sensation, avidly followed by millions of people, but it was also, in a sense, nothing new. One hundred years earlier the Lizzie Borden trial had held the nation in thrall. The names (and the crimes) may change, but the appeal is enduringuand why this is, how it works, and what it means are what Lawrence Friedman investigates in The Big Trial . What is it about these cases that captures the public imagination? Are the oheadline trialso of our period different from those of a century or two ago? And what do we learn from them, about the nature of our society, past and present? To get a clearer picture, Friedman first identifies what certain headline trials have in common, then considers particular cases within each grouping. The political trial z, for instance, embraces treason and spying, dissenters and radicals, and, to varying degrees, corruption and fraud. Celebrity trials involve the famousuwhether victims, as in the case of Charles Manson, or defendants as disparate as Fatty Arbuckle and William Kennedy Smithubut certain high-profile cases, such as those Friedman categorizes as tabloid trials , can also create celebrities. The fascination of whodunit trials can be found in the mystery surrounding the case: Are we sure about O. J. Simpson? What about Claus von Bulowutried, in another sensational case, for sending his wife into a coma? An especially interesting type of case Friedman groups under the rubric worm in the bud . These are cases, such as that of Lizzie Borden, that seem to put society itself on trial; they raise fundamental social questions and often suggest hidden and secret pathologies. And finally, a small but important group of cases proceed from moral panic , the Salem witchcraft trials being the classic instance, though Friedman also considers recent examples. Though they might differ in significant ways, these types of trials also have important similarities. Most notably, they invariably raise questions about identity (Who is this defendant? A villain? An innocent unfairly accused?). And in this respect, The Big Trial shows us, the headline trial reflects a critical aspect of modern society. Reaching across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to the latest outrage, from congressional hearings to lynching and vigilante justice to public punishment, from Dr. Sam Sheppard (the ofugitiveo) to Jeffrey Dahmer (the ocannibalo), The Rosenbergs to Timothy McVeigh, the book presents a complex picture of headline trials as displays of powerumoments of odidactic theatero that demonstrate in one way or another whether a society is fair, whom it protects, and whose interest it serves.