UBC: Tituba, Reluctant Witch of Salem
Jun. 8th, 2010 08:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyBreslaw, Elaine G. Tituba, Reluctant Witch of Salem: Devilish Indians and Puritan Fantasies. New York: New York University Press, 1996.
I was hoping to be able to make a post about how much better this book was than The Mysterious Death of Mary Rogers, and for about half the book, that was looking really likely. The first half of this book, in which Breslaw traces Tituba's probable early life, is quite good. She explains very clearly the speculative leap she's making in assuming that the slave Tattuba listed in the inventory of a Barbados plantaion is the same as the slave Tituba Samuel Parris brought to Salem Village, and she not only convinced me that the leap was justified, she demonstrated that even if Tituba and Tattuba were not the same person, the reconstruction Breslaw managed of Tattuba's life was still worthwhile, in that it illuminated a great deal about what Tituba's experiences would have been like.
Then we hit 1692, and the thing just fell apart. Breslaw has the Salem historian's disease, in which the one cause on which the historian has focused is proclaimed to be the ONLY cause. In Breslaw's case, she asserts that the reason the Salem witchcraft crisis exploded in the way it did, mushrooming to nineteen executions and well over one hundred arrests, the only important reason is Tituba's testimony. Even without the other problems (which I'll get to in a moment), I would disagree with this thesis; I think the crucial moment is when the adult authority figures asked the afflicted girls who had bewitched them and accepted their answers as unquestionable truth. I also think that moment has a tremendously complicated genesis of its own, as well as very complicated consequences. And I would certainly agree that Tituba's testimony encouraged the spread of suspicion. But she didn't cause it, and she certainly didn't create the ground-breaking paradigm of social upheaval that Breslaw claims.
So I disagree with the argument. But I also find that the argument is very shoddily put together. She talks a great deal about the impact of the story Tituba told, the importance of the words she used, and the ways in which her testimony was repeated, embroidered, and modified by the afflicted girls and the confessing witches, but she uses almost no direct quotes. It's all described in indirect discourse. The generalizations are breathtaking in their sweep, particularly in discussing the culture of "American Indians." She makes no effort to distinguish between the Arawak Indians of South America (Tituba's probable tribe)--whose folklore and beliefs she claims influenced Tituba's testimony--and the Indians of north-eastern North America (unlike with the Arawak, she never specifies which tribes are under discussion) whom the European settlers were intermittently at war with throughout the second half of the seventeenth century--whose folklore and beliefs she claims influenced the magistrates' reception of Tituba's testimony; I find it hard to believe that "American Indians" in her argument are anything more than a locum tenens for ... well, for something that Breslaw hasn't done enough work on.
And Breslaw is particularly inconsistent on the historians' bugbear I have complained about before: the nature of the participants' belief in witchcraft. She assumes that the nightmares Tituba describes in her testimony are real, and that she made the witchcake in a sincere effort to help Betty Parris. But she also assumes that Tituba deliberately and consciously tailored her testimony to give the magistrates what they wanted to hear, and that she equally deliberately constructed it as a subversive and subtle attack on her master, Samuel Parris. She also insists on describing it is a "model for resistance" (180). And when she talks about the confessing witches using Tituba's testimony, it is always as if they were in conscious control of a sophisticated strategy of resistance. I will give one example:
She assumes "resistance" to be behind all the confessions (though, oddly, she doesn't spend much time applying the idea to the afflicted girls, where I think it can be more plausibly deployed--although still with much more caution than Breslaw shows), without ever acknowledging that as a method of resistance, confessing to witchcraft is a dismal failure, and without doing any of the work necessary to show how her modern, theoretical concept of "resistance" actually applies to the lives and words of her subjects. And she consistently makes assertions about Tituba's motivations that she does not prove--and couldn't prove if she tried. Unlike with the identification of Tituba and Tattuba in the first half of the book, these speculative assertions are not defensible either historiographically or rhetorically. Like Srebnick, Breslaw overstates the importance of her central figure, and like Srebnick, rather than supporting her grandiose argument with evidence and careful reasoning, she supports it with buzzwords and academic obfuscation.
What really irks me about this book is that it could have been so much better. Not just in the general sense in which a poorly written book can always be a better book, but quite specifically. Mary Beth Norton's In the Devil's Snare (which I posted about here) has some excellent and provocative work on a subject one could encapsulate by Breslaw's subtitle: Devilish Indians and Puritan Fantasies; Norton's work makes clear that the Puritan construction of Indians, particularly in relation to the Devil, probably did have a profound influence on the Salem crisis, and that is a topic that I think could and should be written about more--and should include Tituba. But Breslaw, while she mentions various facets of Puritan beliefs about Indians, doesn't examine them carefully, or make any sustained or persuasive effort to show, at the nuts and bolts level, how those beliefs influenced what happened at Salem.
So half of this is a good book and half of it is a mess. Unfortunately, the good half, while good, isn't great, and the mess is really kind of awful. Unless you're a Salem-completist like me, I can't recommend this one.
I was hoping to be able to make a post about how much better this book was than The Mysterious Death of Mary Rogers, and for about half the book, that was looking really likely. The first half of this book, in which Breslaw traces Tituba's probable early life, is quite good. She explains very clearly the speculative leap she's making in assuming that the slave Tattuba listed in the inventory of a Barbados plantaion is the same as the slave Tituba Samuel Parris brought to Salem Village, and she not only convinced me that the leap was justified, she demonstrated that even if Tituba and Tattuba were not the same person, the reconstruction Breslaw managed of Tattuba's life was still worthwhile, in that it illuminated a great deal about what Tituba's experiences would have been like.
Then we hit 1692, and the thing just fell apart. Breslaw has the Salem historian's disease, in which the one cause on which the historian has focused is proclaimed to be the ONLY cause. In Breslaw's case, she asserts that the reason the Salem witchcraft crisis exploded in the way it did, mushrooming to nineteen executions and well over one hundred arrests, the only important reason is Tituba's testimony. Even without the other problems (which I'll get to in a moment), I would disagree with this thesis; I think the crucial moment is when the adult authority figures asked the afflicted girls who had bewitched them and accepted their answers as unquestionable truth. I also think that moment has a tremendously complicated genesis of its own, as well as very complicated consequences. And I would certainly agree that Tituba's testimony encouraged the spread of suspicion. But she didn't cause it, and she certainly didn't create the ground-breaking paradigm of social upheaval that Breslaw claims.
So I disagree with the argument. But I also find that the argument is very shoddily put together. She talks a great deal about the impact of the story Tituba told, the importance of the words she used, and the ways in which her testimony was repeated, embroidered, and modified by the afflicted girls and the confessing witches, but she uses almost no direct quotes. It's all described in indirect discourse. The generalizations are breathtaking in their sweep, particularly in discussing the culture of "American Indians." She makes no effort to distinguish between the Arawak Indians of South America (Tituba's probable tribe)--whose folklore and beliefs she claims influenced Tituba's testimony--and the Indians of north-eastern North America (unlike with the Arawak, she never specifies which tribes are under discussion) whom the European settlers were intermittently at war with throughout the second half of the seventeenth century--whose folklore and beliefs she claims influenced the magistrates' reception of Tituba's testimony; I find it hard to believe that "American Indians" in her argument are anything more than a locum tenens for ... well, for something that Breslaw hasn't done enough work on.
And Breslaw is particularly inconsistent on the historians' bugbear I have complained about before: the nature of the participants' belief in witchcraft. She assumes that the nightmares Tituba describes in her testimony are real, and that she made the witchcake in a sincere effort to help Betty Parris. But she also assumes that Tituba deliberately and consciously tailored her testimony to give the magistrates what they wanted to hear, and that she equally deliberately constructed it as a subversive and subtle attack on her master, Samuel Parris. She also insists on describing it is a "model for resistance" (180). And when she talks about the confessing witches using Tituba's testimony, it is always as if they were in conscious control of a sophisticated strategy of resistance. I will give one example:
Tituba's unidentified evil presence, the imputations of elite responsibility, a witches' meeting, and assorted strange creatures provided a forum for the exposure of discontent with Puritan theology and ministerial intellectual demands; with the social class system and degradation of servants; and above all with the traditions of the late medieval world that valued communal goals above individual efforts. Tituba may have omitted sexual references because Indian cultures never made the erotic side of human behavior a factor in witchcraft prceedings. Others followed her lead for different reasons--sexual exploits might have negated their intent to parody Puritan values by conflating the godly and demonic realms. In this technique, as in others, Tituba again had supplied the outlines of a method that could be embellished and reformulated to fit the mental baggage of other cultures.
(Breslaw 155)
She assumes "resistance" to be behind all the confessions (though, oddly, she doesn't spend much time applying the idea to the afflicted girls, where I think it can be more plausibly deployed--although still with much more caution than Breslaw shows), without ever acknowledging that as a method of resistance, confessing to witchcraft is a dismal failure, and without doing any of the work necessary to show how her modern, theoretical concept of "resistance" actually applies to the lives and words of her subjects. And she consistently makes assertions about Tituba's motivations that she does not prove--and couldn't prove if she tried. Unlike with the identification of Tituba and Tattuba in the first half of the book, these speculative assertions are not defensible either historiographically or rhetorically. Like Srebnick, Breslaw overstates the importance of her central figure, and like Srebnick, rather than supporting her grandiose argument with evidence and careful reasoning, she supports it with buzzwords and academic obfuscation.
What really irks me about this book is that it could have been so much better. Not just in the general sense in which a poorly written book can always be a better book, but quite specifically. Mary Beth Norton's In the Devil's Snare (which I posted about here) has some excellent and provocative work on a subject one could encapsulate by Breslaw's subtitle: Devilish Indians and Puritan Fantasies; Norton's work makes clear that the Puritan construction of Indians, particularly in relation to the Devil, probably did have a profound influence on the Salem crisis, and that is a topic that I think could and should be written about more--and should include Tituba. But Breslaw, while she mentions various facets of Puritan beliefs about Indians, doesn't examine them carefully, or make any sustained or persuasive effort to show, at the nuts and bolts level, how those beliefs influenced what happened at Salem.
So half of this is a good book and half of it is a mess. Unfortunately, the good half, while good, isn't great, and the mess is really kind of awful. Unless you're a Salem-completist like me, I can't recommend this one.
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Date: 2010-06-09 03:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-09 05:53 pm (UTC)Jeez. Not that I have opinions or anything.
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Date: 2010-06-09 06:56 pm (UTC)Maybe these people just can't build an argument for beans, and don't have anyone who can call them on it read the work until it's OMG TOO LATE!!!!!. God knows what passes for public discourse these days doesn't have any requirement for well-supported arguments.
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Date: 2010-06-09 09:02 pm (UTC)Your post about Tituba
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Re: Your post about Tituba
Date: 2010-06-09 09:15 pm (UTC)