May 8, 2006
The Crucible, Salem, and Today Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 12:25 PM EST This past weekend I saw the Royal Shakespeare Company’s new stage production of Arthur Miller’s classic work The Crucible, in London. It’s been some time since I last saw the play, and even longer since I’ve read it. On the whole, I was deeply impressed by the just about every aspect of the show, from the players (who performed their parts expertly), to the set design (which was haunting), right down to the costumes. Seeing The Crucible again inspired me to revisit some of the historical literature on the famous Salem witch trials, which formed the backdrop for Miller’s undeniably present-minded criticism of the anti-Communist hysteria that gripped key American institutions and regions when the play was written. The fever of witch denunciations began in Salem Village, an outlying area of Salem, Massachusetts, in the winter of 1692, when a group of young girls, including the niece of the local minister, Samuel Parris, began exhibiting signs of seizures and fits. When witchcraft was diagnosed as the source of their troubles, the girls began fingering increasingly prominent, propertied, and religiously observant members of the community, 30 percent of whom were men. By late fall approximately 150 Salemites had been arrested, and 20 executed, largely on the basis of “spectral evidence” in the form of visions and apparitions that the afflicted girls claimed to see. The proceedings at Salem had been controversial from the start, and in October, when a number of prominent Massachusetts clergyman, including Increase Mather, called for their suspension, the game was up. By the following spring, all remaining prisoners were released from jail, and in 1697, recognizing the great wrong that had been committed at Salem, the Massachusetts General Court declared a day of atonement. Historians have grappled for explanations of the Salem witch trials. Perhaps the most famous interpretation was proffered by Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum, whose 1974 study, Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft, argued that the events of 1692 owed to the social dislocations accompanying economic and demographic growth in Massachusetts. Their painstaking examination of the trial records revealed that the accusers tended to hail from Salem Village (known formerly as Salem Farms), a semi-autonomous area to the west of Salem Town that was populated by pious, Puritan farmers. As residents of the interior—Salem Town—moved steadily toward mercantile and commercial activities (prospering, all the while), and away from the organic community sensibility that had marked out New England’s Puritan enclaves since their founding in the early seventeenth century, a moral and interest-driven controversy split the residents of east and west Salem. Ultimately, Boyer and Nissenbaum found, the trials pitted the people of Salem Village, who were uneasy over the mercantile and individualist orientation of Salem Town, against supporters of the emerging order. Cries of witchcraft were not calculated falsehood. In the context of the time, Puritans genuinely believed it was logical and sensible to explain contemporary events through the lens of spirituality and religion. Boyer’s and Nissenbaum’s interpretation won wide praise for its deep research and originality, but subsequent historians have presented challenges to it. Mary Beth Norton, a professor of early American history at Cornell University, found that the socioeconomic analysis does not hold up when one considers the witch trials as a regional, not local, event. Since a plurality of the accused witches in 1692-93 were residents of nearby Andover—not of Salem Town and Salem Village—the events should properly be termed the Essex witch trials. Norton argues instead that many of the accusers’ descriptions of the devil emphasized his “tawny” appearance, and that they and their supporters were either refugees of the bloody Indian wars engulfing nearby northern Massachusetts and Canada, or justifiably ill at ease about the conflict then encroaching on the outlying areas of their county. (Abigail Williams, the villain in Miller’s drama, saw family members hacked to pieces in Maine, which was then still the northernmost part of Massachusetts, just years before the trial.) In Norton’s analysis, the Indian wars did not “cause” the witchcraft crisis, “but rather . . . the conflict created the conditions that allowed the crisis to develop as rapidly and extensively as it did.” As Essex County residents increasingly came to fear a very real, physical threat (Indians), they filtered some of those fears through the imagined invasion of spectral forces (witches). There is a third major explanation for the events of 1692. The historian Carol Karlson’s book The Devil in the Shape of a Woman examined witch trials in and outside of Salem and found that many of the accused were property-holding women who claimed no male kin. In a period of demographic pressure and sweeping economic change, both of which threatened the stability of New England’s small Puritan villages, these women posed a threat to the orderly transfer of wealth and property from one generation of men to the next. To oversimplify a very layered and important argument, the citizens of early colonial Massachusetts understood this problem as best they knew how, by interpreting human events as the devil’s motive. It only complicated matters further that the accusers—particularly in Salem—were often powerless young women who worked as servants in other families’ households. Any way you consider it, the professional historians have moved well past Arthur Miller’s scheme. Yet in his defense, the playwright himself denied any pretensions to scholarly credibility. “This play is not history in the sense in which the word is used by the academic historian,” he said at the time. Even as historians continue to sift through the grains of evidence, The Crucible still has a great deal to offer. In a time when foreign nationals and U.S. citizens are rotting in American prisons unable to learn the charges against them, consult with counsel, or receive a fair trial (or any trial at all); when an American President draws a line in the sand and declares that one is either with America or against it (much as one of Miller’s characters argues, in the play, that townspeople are either with or against the court); and when we run the risk of confusing a very real threat for wholly imagined ones, the events of 1692 are a good way to frame political drama. In explaining his opposition to the Salem trials, Increase Mather, the great seventeenth-century Puritan minister, put it this way: “It were better that ten suspected witches should escape, than that one innocent person be condemned.” Substitute “terrorist” for “witch,” and one suspects that, today, Mather might just receive an unwelcomed knock on his door.
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