Reading the Salem Witch Child: The Guilt of Innocent Blood

245 Pages·2020·2.165 MB·English

by  Kristina West

PALGRAVE HISTORICAL STUDIES IN WITCHCRAFT AND MAGIC
Reading the
Salem Witch Child
The Guilt of
Innocent Blood
Kristina West
Palgrave Historical Studies in Witchcraft and Magic
Series Editors
Jonathan Barry
Department of History
University of Exeter
Exeter, UK
Willem de Blécourt
Meertens Institute
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Owen Davies
School of Humanities
University of Hertfordshire
Hertfordshire, UK
The history of European witchcraft and magic continues to fascinate and
challenge students and scholars. There is certainly no shortage of books
on the subject. Several general surveys of the witch trials and numerous
regional and micro studies have been published for an English-speaking
readership. While the quality of publications on witchcraft has been high,
some regions and topics have received less attention over the years. The
aim of this series is to help illuminate these lesser known or little studied
aspects of the history of witchcraft and magic. It will also encourage the
development of a broader corpus of work in other related areas of magic
and the supernatural, such as angels, devils, spirits, ghosts, folk healing
and divination. To help further our understanding and interest in this
wider history of beliefs and practices, the series will include research that
looks beyond the usual focus on Western Europe and that also explores
their relevance and influence from the medieval to the modern period.
‘A valuable series.’ - Magic, Ritual and Witchcraft
More information about this series at
http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14693
Kristina West
Reading the Salem
Witch Child
The Guilt of Innocent Blood
Kristina West
CIRCL
University of Reading
Reading, UK
Palgrave Historical Studies in Witchcraft and Magic
ISBN 978-3-030-49303-5 ISBN 978-3-030-49304-2 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49304-2
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For Mike, Daniel, and Liv, with all my love
P
reface
The purpose of this book is to investigate the multiple, overlapping, and
sometimes contradictory roles of children in the Salem witch panic of
1692. While many may assume that child witches are a modern African
phenomenon, Salem’s history (and, indeed, many histories of European
witch trials) shows that children as both accused witches and accusers of
others date back to the early modern period and well beyond, as discussed
in works such as Ronald Hutton’s The Witch.1 Scores of histories, scholarly
articles, and popular investigations of America’s most shocking witch trials
have been written over the centuries; however, these have focused primar-
ily on the roles of the afflicted, of the accused and executed, and of the
judges in instigating and perpetuating the witchcraft trials in Salem, while
largely overlooking the role of children as a distinct group. Most histories
take one of two approaches to Salem’s children: either they demonise the
‘afflicted girls’ while ignoring the accused children altogether or they dis-
miss Salem’s children as of little importance to the progress of the trials.
As such, childhood in Salem has received almost no sustained analysis, an
absence that this work aims to fill.
One work that dismisses the importance of childhood in the Salem tri-
als is Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum’s influential Salem Possessed. It
claims: ‘[W]e think it a mistake to treat the [afflicted] girls themselves as
decisive shapers of the witchcraft outbreak as it evolved’. However, this
statement leaves areas of enquiry: were the girls ‘decisive shapers’ at the
beginning, if not ‘as it evolved’; and if so, where does the decision of their
status as such lie? Who were ‘the girls themselves’? And why did the
authors feel the need to point this out as ‘a mistake’ according to their
vii
viii PREFACE
understanding? The minimal focus on children as either accusers or vic-
tims in Boyer and Nissenbaum’s work supports this early authorial asser-
tion; instead, they argue that the ‘decisive shapers’ of the events were,
variously, social factions, religious conflict, a breakdown in Puritan values,
and geographical factors.2 Beneath these arguments, the accusing girls
were simply pawns in games far beyond their understanding and victims of
a social structure that—like Boyer and Nissenbaum—minimised their
importance.
And those children accused of witchcraft in Salem garner even less
attention than the accusers, rarely meriting more than a passing mention
in many histories.3 They were not among the 19 people hanged, and
Abigail Hobbs, the only child convicted of witchcraft, was pardoned soon
afterwards. And while the only child known to have died as an effect of the
trials—the infant daughter of Sarah Good, who died in jail on an unre-
corded date prior to July 10—merits a mention to herself on the Danvers
(formerly Salem Village) witch trials memorial, she is an afterthought or
an absence in most histories.
However, given that some 27 under-18s accused adults and other chil-
dren of witchcraft and another 24 or more were accused of witchcraft
themselves, they formed a significant group, even if such easy categorisa-
tion of what constitutes a child in Salem needs much closer analysis. My
work therefore aims to fill this gap in Salem scholarship with a close analy-
sis of childhood in and around Salem at the time of the trials, to establish
who we are talking about when we talk about Salem’s children; how their
roles affected their own lives, the wider community, and the process and
outcome of the trials; and how they have been portrayed in writing since
the trials’ conclusion.
In considering childhood in this work, rather than creating a new his-
tory in which children are simply placed at the forefront of the Salem
story, my approach will be a close analysis of the many and varied narra-
tives of the trials that concern Salem’s children, including contemporary
documents, such as court records, public letters, and accounts written by
both supporters and opponents of the trials; histories written in the inter-
vening centuries, often which aim to discover the triggers for America’s
most famous witch-hunt; and literature—poems, plays, fiction—that uses
the events in Salem as a basis for a reworking, reimagining, or modernisa-
tion of the author’s understanding of the trials, their build up, and their
aftermath. The purpose and benefit of an approach that combines history
and literary analysis is to aid an exploration of how childhood is created as
PREFACE ix
and through cultural memory and to consider how such constructs con-
tinue to form our understanding of both the involvement of children in
historical events in Salem and of childhood in its relations to witch-
craft today.
In addition to this wide selection of texts for analysis, I will also con-
sider theoretical approaches that question what we understand a child to
be and that analyse the adult investment in knowing the child that so often
shapes its cultural and temporal form in order to explore further what we
might mean by childhood in Salem and how we continue to reproduce
and rewrite what that childhood might be. For example, Jacqueline Rose
debates ‘a form of investment by the adult in the child, and […] the
demand made by the adult on the child as the effect of that investment, a
demand which fixes the child and then holds it in place’.4 In this passage,
and in her wider text on the problems with children’s literature, Rose
considers the difficulty of the relationship between adult and child; the
problems with any assumption that the child is known, stable, and avail-
able to be retrieved as such by the adult writer or reader; and the terminol-
ogy of ‘adult’ and ‘child’, with each of these issues playing a significant
role in my own analysis. Such a theoretical approach allows us to question
received assumptions about childhood and to consider how Salem’s chil-
dren challenge what we think we know about both early modern and
modern childhood.
Both the presence and the absence of children in extant accounts, his-
tories, and reworkings of Salem’s darkest hours warrant closer analysis
than has been undertaken so far. So, too, does the narrative of guilt and
innocence that, while always present in any discussion of the trials, pursues
Salem’s children through these centuries of texts, sometimes favouring
one group as innocent, sometimes condemning another. As such, this
book will consider what is at stake in the textual portrayals of these chil-
dren; question the basis on which assumptions about childhood in history
are made; consider how such portrayals are frequently shaped by the need
to assign guilt and therefore ‘solve’ the trials; read the child as the site of
contested meaning in these narratives; and ask why an examination of the
role of children in the Salem witch panic is vital both to a more compre-
hensive understanding of the trials and to our engagement with child-
hood today.
Chapter 1 will examine constructions of the child and the witch
throughout history and literature, examining how the historical child is
frequently positioned as innocent victim, with its harm or loss figured
x PREFACE
primarily through any financial and emotional impact on its parents, while
the literary child rather challenges the witch and takes her place, disturb-
ing assumed boundaries between the two. It also summarises the processes
of accusation and trial with which Salem’s witch panic ostensibly began,
but also troubles any claim to such beginnings. The chapter further estab-
lishes the theoretical approach on which this work is based, questioning
how the child is constructed through narratives of the Salem trials and
debating the problems with pinning it down, including the very desire to
do so, although it also attempts to quantify the involvement of children (as
they are positioned in various contemporary, historical, and literary texts)
in the trials. Finally, I discuss how ‘child’ is constructed in language—here,
the language of court documents, histories, and fictional writings—and
consider how such constructions work to trouble any firm understanding
of what a child was in Salem in 1692 and our understanding of it since.
Accusations of witchcraft against both children and adults in Salem
were made primarily by those termed in courtroom documentation as ‘the
afflicted girls’ or ‘tormented children’, and much of the focus on children
in histories and other narratives of Salem has attempted to determine the
role these children played in the instigation and severity of these trials as
opposed to others in America’s history of witchcraft. Such narratives ask:
who were they? What role did they play? How were they perceived at the
time of the trials and how might we perceive them in hindsight? And how
can we understand them within a construction of what childhood is or
what we expect it to be? Chapter 2 therefore aims to consider the implica-
tions of the terminology of guilt and innocence in the trials and their
aftermath as they related to those termed ‘the afflicted girls’, noting how
language constructs the guilt/innocent binary that resulted from the trials
and that has shaped narratives of the panic until the present day. I also
consider the language of ‘performance’ so often applied to the girls, one
that frequently separates the assumption of innocence from that of guilt,
and examine how narratives have shifted since the time of the trials. Finally,
I consider how such a constant replaying of the trials—in attempting to
assure who is innocent and who, therefore, guilty—is based on our need
to assign children certain roles in society and how the ‘afflicted girls’ have
come to represent both an adult idealisation of childhood and a fear that
we might be wrong.
Chapter 3 focuses on Dorcas/Dorothy Good, the youngest child to be
accused of witchcraft in the Salem trials. Dorcas, also called Dorothy, was
between four and five years old at the time of the trials, according to the