Review by Will Preston
The Witches: Salem, 1692
by Stacy Schiff
Little, Brown and Company, 2016
Some years ago, on the southwestern tip of England, I stumbled across a little stone chapel overlooking the sea. It was a gorgeous, still evening; the sun slipped slowly away. A carved plaque on the side of the building read that this was the chapel of St. Nicholas, and that it had “stood upon this site from time immemorial.”
Time immemorial! I couldn’t wrap my American brain around the thought: what most of us consider ancient history is scarcely 400 years old. Other countries—and indeed, cultures within America—have histories which, stretched far enough back, dissolve into myths and legends, stories lost and re-remembered. By contrast, the entire history of the States is young enough to have been scrupulously examined under the microscope. We live in a hyper-documented time; few stories have slipped past the reach of evidence to assume the aura of legend. The Wild West, Pocahontas, George Washington and the cherry tree: there’s remarkably little myth in the mythos.
The Salem Witch Trials of 1692, the subject of a new history by Stacy Schiff, remain an obvious exception. Contrary to most events of the last three centuries, which have gained a sort of retroactive clarity, Salem has only grown hazier with time. Its ghost is visible everywhere, milked for allegory and jump scares ad infinitum. It even has its own TV show, Satanic summonings and all. But with each reimagining, our understanding of Salem has morphed and mutated, a hydra growing new heads.
So let’s get a few things straight, Schiff writes on page one of The Witches. “No one burned at the stake. No midwives died. The voodoo arrived later,” as did “the casting of spells, the chicken blood, and the boiling cauldron.” (3) But even once we clear away the detritus, we’re still left mostly with fog and guesswork. Amazingly, almost no original documents survive from the trials. The court records, in their entirety, have been lost. Diary entries have been torn out, church records excised. Most accounts were written years after the fact: the most comprehensive retelling comes courtesy of the 29-year-old preacher Cotton Mather, who never actually set foot in a Salem courtroom and had no qualms about inventing details where he saw fit. The last 300 years have given America independence, forty-three presidents, and the atom bomb. And for all that time, Schiff writes, “we have not adequately penetrated nine months of Massachusetts history.” (5)
We all know the basics. In early 1692, a series of accusations, somewhere between 144 and 185 altogether, erupted across the state: first in Salem, then spreading like smallpox to nearby towns. Witchcraft! The main accusers, in one of the few details to remain unaltered over the years, were a group of teenaged girls, held in the grip of some terrible vise. They contorted in pain. They shrieked. Unseen forces yanked them under tables. The girls had been cursed, they said, by others in the town, who had signed pacts with the devil. These witches held ghoulish rituals, morphed into animals, rode brooms across the countryside—all the while clearing the way to overthrow the church and install Satan on earth. The town imploded in panic. Neighbors accused neighbors. Families turned on each other. By the time the dust settled, nineteen people had been executed for witchcraft. The oldest was nearly eighty. One was a minister.
How does one begin to comprehend such an incomprehensible event? Faced with a dearth of reliable first-hand accounts, Schiff focuses her attention outwards, scanning for clues in the broader societal forces at play. What she finds is a world already primed for apocalypse. Salem, Andover, and the other affected villages were outposts, isolated villages scattered along the edge of a hostile wilderness. Cornered on all sides by savage weather, wild beasts, and inexplicable maladies, paranoia sprouted like a crop. And to make matters worse, those doing the harvesting were Puritans, deliriously pious folk who earnestly believed that if the Indians didn’t get you, the Devil would.
Terrified of everything, suspicious even of each other, and conditioned to read divine wrath into every misfortune, there were no cooler heads to prevail when witchcraft accusations began sweeping through the town. But it’s here that Schiff’s account—in many ways a patient, admirable untangling of information—begins requiring some untangling of its own. For while many of the accusations were certainly fuelled by “whispered resentments, long-incubated grudges,” and small-town score-settling, few of the surviving records offer any sort of context for this. (5) On the contrary—either because they believed the girls, or because it was in their best interest to—the accounts often recount the “bewitched” girls’ testimony as literal, gospel truth. They even go so far as to duly record acts of witchcraft supposedly occurring at that very moment in the courtroom, from Satanic conferences to levitation. Faced with an utter breakdown of the line between legend and primary source, Schiff opts to present the historical record at face value, resulting in scenes that boldly conflate fantasy and reality without so much as a wink. For example, she stages one courtroom scene thus:
“The bewitched delivered up their accounts with difficulty, falling into testimony-stopping trances, yelping that [Burroughs, the accused] had bit them. They had the teeth marks to prove it! They displayed their wounds for court officials, who inspected Burroughs’s mouth. The imprints matched perfectly. Choking and thrashing stalled the proceedings; the court could do nothing but wait for the girls to recover… [they] were equally bewildered when ghosts began to flit about the overcrowded room. Some who were not bewitched saw them too. Directly before Burroughs, a girl recoiled from a horrible sight; she stared, she explained, at his dead wives. Their faces bloodred, the ghosts demanded justice.” (275)
The term “novelistic” is increasingly overused in descriptions of contemporary nonfiction. But it feels particularly apt for The Witches, which often has more in common with magical realism than, say, Erik Larson. Throughout the book, suspects float into the rafters, goblins warm themselves by the fire, and men draw swords and stab wildly at spirits they can’t see. It’s an innovative approach, if one that requires more effort than it should to parse what is true from what is not. (Schiff’s winding, baroque prose, while dizzying, doesn’t help.) But it’s also audacious. The book is carefully researched, and frequently fascinating. But Salem literature is already a crowded pantheon—there are some 500 books written about it. And ultimately, it’s voice, rather than content, that The Witches brings to the table.
This has its drawbacks. One waits for a distinctive argument to emerge, but an early, tantalizing hint at a feminist angle—that we’ve turned “a story of women in peril to one about perilous women”—goes largely unexplored, and Schiff’s final analysis that the “bewitched” girls suffered from conversion syndrome (hysteria, essentially) is viable if underwhelming. (10, 386) Still, the author’s gamble generally pays off. While The Witches may lack in fresh interpretation, Schiff is an indisputable master of atmosphere, and in Salem, she has found the perfect outlet. Her cinematic rendering of the courtroom is chaotic and disconcerting—but then so were the trials themselves, a perfect storm of societal misunderstandings, religious extremism, and mounting claustrophobia. In Schiff’s hands, they become the ultimate mystery: unsolvable then, unknowable now.
“Salem is the story of what happens when a set of unanswerable questions meets a set of unquestioned answers,” Schiff writes early on, and therein lies the rub. (9) The Witches may not bring us any closer to penetrating those nine months of Massachusetts history. But it captures, perhaps, a hint of what it might have been like to be caught in the middle of it all. And, perhaps most importantly, it nods to Salem as one of our few remaining myths, where the truth of what happened may not be as important as what we glean from it. With its ghosts and its strange apparitions, The Witches acknowledges the enigma at its own core. And so it examines and probes, but ultimately leaves Salem in the fog, where it belongs.
A native of Williamsburg, VA, Will Preston has since lived in Oregon, England, and the Netherlands. He has written extensively on travel, music, and history, and was most recently published in Rowan University’s Glassworks Magazine. He is currently an MFA candidate at the University of British Columbia.