UBC: A Delusion of Satan
Jan. 30th, 2008 09:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyHill, Frances. A Delusion of Satan: The Full Story of the Salem Witch Trials. New York: Da Capo Press, 1997.
Books I am currently in the middle of:
*McPhee, John. Assembling California.
*Wright, Austin Tappan. Islandia.
The McPhee is interesting, but since my knowledge of geology is basically nil, it's kind of hard going.
And the thing about Islandia is, it's freaking HUGE. I finished Part 1 and just needed a break. (John Lang has just begun his visit to the Moras, if anyone wants to play along at home.)
This book is a nice counter-balance to Salem Possessed; it makes some of Boyer and Nissenbaum's agenda much clearer by contrast. For one thing, insofar as is possible, Boyer and Nissenbaum avoid talking about the examinations and trials. Partly this is because (point two), they are bending over backwards to de-sensationalize their subject matter. The exceedingly dry tone of Salem Possessed shows up as a careful and deliberate choice when put against Hill. They have purposefully leached out as much of the melodrama as they can. Boyer and Nissenbaum (point three) are also bending over backwards not to take sides. They treat the Putnams and Samuel Parris with as much impartiality as possible. In an odd but quite real sense, Boyer and Nissenbaum aren't interested in the trials at all. Their interest is in what led up to the accusations. Once a person had been publicly and legally accused of being a witch, the thing that Boyer and Nissenbaum are analyzing has run its course.
Hill, on the other hand, as her subtitle shows, is telling the story of the trials, from the first "fits" of Elizabeth Parris and Abigail Williams to the anticlimactic struggles of accused and exonerated witches to get released from prison (since in Puritan New England, prisoners had to pay for their food, clothing, and manacles--and since being accused of witchcraft and thrown in jail for months, while your property was seized by the sheriff, had a deeply deleterious effect on your solvency--the prison seems to have been kind of like a pitcher plant). And Hill is partisan, favoring the accused witches as a matter of course, but scathing about Samuel Parris and Thomas Putnam in particular, whom she sees as semi-deliberate masterminds behind the explosion of accusations. (I've just started Entertaining Satan by John Demos, and he's got a handy little statistic: excluding Salem, there were 93 witchcraft cases in New England in the seventeenth century. Including Salem, there are 234 cases. That 93 is from all of New England, mind, and from 1630 to 1700. The 141 that Salem adds to the total are from a single place and a matter of months.) She is also trying, as Boyer and Nissenbaum are not, to give as fully rounded a picture as possible, meaning that she speculates freely about various persons' psychological states and motivations.
A Delusion of Satan also has a polemical agenda: Hill is trying to draw a line from witchcraft to the clinical hysteria of the nineteenth century to the modern bogeyman, never proven, of Satanic ritual abuse and to the phenomenon of "recovered memories" (Hill's quotes, referring to the adult patients of psychotherapists who are led by their therapists to believe that they remember being sexually abused as children). I think the parallel between the afflicted girls of Salem and the hysterics studied by Charcot and his colleagues is a valid one, particularly the point Hill makes about the performances of hysteria: Charcot's hysterics could and did perform on cue, but that doesn't mean they were shamming. The connection with recovered memories is much more tenuous, and she doesn't really explain why we should believe there to be a connection at all.
Her psychological model is not sophisticated, leaning mostly on the popular filtering of Freud through feminism. (Repression is the key word here.) And I think, ultimately, she ascribes to malice (Thomas Putnam and Samuel Parris's, mostly) what needs to be at least partly understood as a radically different worldview. She tends, as other writers on the subject I've read have tended, to treat the people of Salem as if they can't really have believed in this witchcraft nonsense. But they did. It's easy, 400 years later, to say Putnam and Parris acted out of greed and wounded pride and psychological imbalance, just as it's easy to say that the twelve year old girls who sent 20 people to their deaths were more or less insane as a result of the hard, repressed, and oppressive lives they led. But we don't believe in witches the way the Puritans did.
I agree, actually, that Hill and Boyer and Nissenbaum are right in arguing that the accusations of witchcraft were directed at particular people for reasons that were based on economics and class and parochialism. But I also think it's much more complicated than that.
I am reminded, actually, of Hitler's Willing Executioners, and the thing I took away from that, which was that the Nazis sincerely believed in their own rightness. That shows very clearly in Hill's descriptions of the ministers and magistrates, particularly William Stoughton and--of course--Cotton Mather. They believed fully that what they were doing was right. And that may look disingenuous or false to an impartial observer, but the point is that these men (I'm not excluding the women, but it's the men whose responses Hill provides, except for Ann Putnam's public and pathetic confession in 1706) were not impartial.
It is possible that self-righteousness is the most dangerous human emotion.
Books I am currently in the middle of:
*McPhee, John. Assembling California.
*Wright, Austin Tappan. Islandia.
The McPhee is interesting, but since my knowledge of geology is basically nil, it's kind of hard going.
And the thing about Islandia is, it's freaking HUGE. I finished Part 1 and just needed a break. (John Lang has just begun his visit to the Moras, if anyone wants to play along at home.)
This book is a nice counter-balance to Salem Possessed; it makes some of Boyer and Nissenbaum's agenda much clearer by contrast. For one thing, insofar as is possible, Boyer and Nissenbaum avoid talking about the examinations and trials. Partly this is because (point two), they are bending over backwards to de-sensationalize their subject matter. The exceedingly dry tone of Salem Possessed shows up as a careful and deliberate choice when put against Hill. They have purposefully leached out as much of the melodrama as they can. Boyer and Nissenbaum (point three) are also bending over backwards not to take sides. They treat the Putnams and Samuel Parris with as much impartiality as possible. In an odd but quite real sense, Boyer and Nissenbaum aren't interested in the trials at all. Their interest is in what led up to the accusations. Once a person had been publicly and legally accused of being a witch, the thing that Boyer and Nissenbaum are analyzing has run its course.
Hill, on the other hand, as her subtitle shows, is telling the story of the trials, from the first "fits" of Elizabeth Parris and Abigail Williams to the anticlimactic struggles of accused and exonerated witches to get released from prison (since in Puritan New England, prisoners had to pay for their food, clothing, and manacles--and since being accused of witchcraft and thrown in jail for months, while your property was seized by the sheriff, had a deeply deleterious effect on your solvency--the prison seems to have been kind of like a pitcher plant). And Hill is partisan, favoring the accused witches as a matter of course, but scathing about Samuel Parris and Thomas Putnam in particular, whom she sees as semi-deliberate masterminds behind the explosion of accusations. (I've just started Entertaining Satan by John Demos, and he's got a handy little statistic: excluding Salem, there were 93 witchcraft cases in New England in the seventeenth century. Including Salem, there are 234 cases. That 93 is from all of New England, mind, and from 1630 to 1700. The 141 that Salem adds to the total are from a single place and a matter of months.) She is also trying, as Boyer and Nissenbaum are not, to give as fully rounded a picture as possible, meaning that she speculates freely about various persons' psychological states and motivations.
A Delusion of Satan also has a polemical agenda: Hill is trying to draw a line from witchcraft to the clinical hysteria of the nineteenth century to the modern bogeyman, never proven, of Satanic ritual abuse and to the phenomenon of "recovered memories" (Hill's quotes, referring to the adult patients of psychotherapists who are led by their therapists to believe that they remember being sexually abused as children). I think the parallel between the afflicted girls of Salem and the hysterics studied by Charcot and his colleagues is a valid one, particularly the point Hill makes about the performances of hysteria: Charcot's hysterics could and did perform on cue, but that doesn't mean they were shamming. The connection with recovered memories is much more tenuous, and she doesn't really explain why we should believe there to be a connection at all.
Her psychological model is not sophisticated, leaning mostly on the popular filtering of Freud through feminism. (Repression is the key word here.) And I think, ultimately, she ascribes to malice (Thomas Putnam and Samuel Parris's, mostly) what needs to be at least partly understood as a radically different worldview. She tends, as other writers on the subject I've read have tended, to treat the people of Salem as if they can't really have believed in this witchcraft nonsense. But they did. It's easy, 400 years later, to say Putnam and Parris acted out of greed and wounded pride and psychological imbalance, just as it's easy to say that the twelve year old girls who sent 20 people to their deaths were more or less insane as a result of the hard, repressed, and oppressive lives they led. But we don't believe in witches the way the Puritans did.
I agree, actually, that Hill and Boyer and Nissenbaum are right in arguing that the accusations of witchcraft were directed at particular people for reasons that were based on economics and class and parochialism. But I also think it's much more complicated than that.
I am reminded, actually, of Hitler's Willing Executioners, and the thing I took away from that, which was that the Nazis sincerely believed in their own rightness. That shows very clearly in Hill's descriptions of the ministers and magistrates, particularly William Stoughton and--of course--Cotton Mather. They believed fully that what they were doing was right. And that may look disingenuous or false to an impartial observer, but the point is that these men (I'm not excluding the women, but it's the men whose responses Hill provides, except for Ann Putnam's public and pathetic confession in 1706) were not impartial.
It is possible that self-righteousness is the most dangerous human emotion.
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no subject
Date: 2008-01-31 06:02 am (UTC)And tying back to Nazism a little, IIRC there was a wave of suicides as the Soviets advanced through Germany, because people believed all the dehumanising stories about Slavs being nothing but animals and thus that they would be better off avoiding the terrible retributive violence they were bound to suffer.
no subject
Date: 2008-01-31 06:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-01-31 01:01 pm (UTC)I am also reminded of something one of T. E. Lawrence's biographers said about him--that sometimes an individual under stress adopts behaviors which appear to the outside observer to be entirely dysfunctional--because these behaviors do, in fact, help them to function.
& remember...
Date: 2008-01-31 05:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-01-31 03:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-01-31 04:39 pm (UTC)A very plangent observation.
it's not that long...
Date: 2008-01-31 06:02 pm (UTC)Re: it's not that long...
Date: 2008-01-31 06:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-01-31 08:27 pm (UTC)There's a recent book, In the Devil's Snare by Mary Beth Norton, that examines the Salem incident in the context of the colonial frontier and war with the Indians -- I haven't read it yet, but it's said to be both interesting and persuasive.
St. Anthony's fire
Date: 2008-02-01 04:38 am (UTC)Re: St. Anthony's fire
Date: 2008-02-01 05:51 pm (UTC)One, I saw that X-Files episode, so the word ergot automatically makes me think of Scully getting a tattoo. ...
...
Right. I'm back.
Two. I think it's certainly possible that ergot was a contributing factor in at least some episodes of witch hysteria. (Saying that it's always the cause seems to me to be pushing the bounds of coincidence a little too far.)
But, three, if the ergot caused the fits and hallucinations, it did not cause the interpretive responses of the witnesses. Boyer and Nissenbaum make an excellent point that the same phenomena, some fifty years later, led not to witch hunts but to religious revivalism. So it's not so much the phenomenon that needs analysis--the phenomenon is in fact fairly opaque to analysis--but the responses of the community.