UNIVERSITY of CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE Manly Martyrs and Pitiful Women: Negotiating Race, Gender, and Power in Salem Witchcraft
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE Manly Martyrs and Pitiful Women: Negotiating Race, Gender, and Power in Salem Witchcraft Tourism Since 1880 A Dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History by Sarah Elizabeth Junod September 2020 Dissertation Committee: Dr. Molly McGarry, Chairperson Dr. Catherine Gudis Dr. Alexander Haskell The Dissertation of Sarah Elizabeth Junod is approved: ____________________________________________ ____________________________________________ ____________________________________________ Committee Chairperson University of California, Riverside ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Manly Martyrs and Pitiful Women: Negotiating Race, Gender, and Power in Salem Witchcraft Tourism Since 1880 by Sarah Elizabeth Junod Doctor of Philosophy, Graduate Program in History University of California, Riverside, September 2020 Dr. Molly McGarry, Chairperson This dissertation considers the ways in which tourism associated with the Salem Witch Trials of 1692 have represented the intersections of gender, race, and class since the nineteenth century. Representations of classed masculinity, femininity, whiteness, Blackness, and indigeneity engage the perceived threats to, and the threats of, white patriarchy in the face of shifting racial and gender roles. This analysis utilizes travel guides, souvenirs, travel diaries, popular histories, television shows, newspapers, brochures, travel reviews, and marketing materials from the nineteenth century through the present to reconstruct dominant tourist narratives of the Salem Witch Trials. Investigations of contemporary tourism also utilize site visits and participant observation at tourist attractions. Interpretations of the trials reflect the assumptions that predominantly white, middle-class Americans have had towards problems of authority and identity at particular iii moments in history. The Salem witch trials disrupt ideas of New England exceptionalism and undermined the mainstream public history work of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that asserted white patriarchal dominance and facilitated middle class bourgeois norms and values. Therefore, tracing the evolution of discourses in witchcraft tourism afford a useful opportunity for considering the fractures, ambivalences, and reconciliations present in New Englanders’ constructions of a usable past and identity. Tourist narratives have largely served to legitimize white patriarchal authority in the present, evolving in response to shifting attitudes towards identity and authority and perceived moments of social upheaval such as the Civil Rights Movement. In seeking to valorize bourgeois masculinity, however, travel boosters have often marginalized their treatment of the accused women and interpreted colonial femininity in ways that validated patriarchal gender values or constructed issues of colonialism and misogyny as problems of the past. These narratives also scapegoated an enslaved indigenous woman, Tituba, for instigating the witch trials with superstitions from the Caribbean, thereby shifting blame for the witchcraft panic from Anglo-American culture and intellectualism to an unruly woman of color extrinsic to New England. iv Table of Contents Introduction 1 Chapter One 44 “Such Illustrious Men”: Upholding White Patriarchy in Early Tourism, 1880-1950 Chapter Two 116 Heroes and Hysterical Girls: Evolving Witchcraft Tourism c. 1950-2000 Chapter Three 176 Fun and Informative: Education and Entertainment in Witchcraft Attractions Chapter Four 270 Myths and Misconceptions: “Real” History at Historic Sites and Non-Profits Chapter Five 340 Haunted by Heritage: The Presence of the Past in Historical and Paranormal Walking Tours Conclusion 400 v Introduction The Salem Witch Trials permeate American popular culture. Featured in television shows from the 1960s series Bewitched to the 1990s show Charmed, as well as in literature from the nineteenth century to the present, the trials have long been used as a shared cultural metaphor for persecution and fanaticism. Academics are not exempt from this fascination with Salem, and scholars have produced a massive historiography seeking to explain the causes of the events of 1692, and/or to determine why, or whether, Salem was exceptional to New England witchcraft. This dissertation will analyze the witch trials through the lens of public history. Public history offers a unique framework for studies of the events in Salem by allowing historians to trace shifting understandings of Salem witchcraft, and to explain why social memories of 1692 resonate at particular historic moments. Furthermore, the study of public memory allows for inter-disciplinary questions raised by museum and tourism studies, display, performance theory, media studies, and American studies that make my project useful for an array of scholars. Americans have attached particular narratives to the witch trials that allow them to make meaning of contemporary events, comment on cultural values and ideas of national progress, and work through social anxieties by engaging with a historical crisis. This dissertation intervenes in this literature by analyzing the ways in which public histories of Salem witchcraft engage the issues of gender and colonialism that informed the course of the witch trials of 1692 from the nineteenth century to the present. Witchcraft tourist sites use discourses of victims and victimization to delimit norms of gendered behavior, particularly as it intersects with race and class. Representations of 1 these norms reflect an ambivalence and unease about threats to, and the threats of, racialized and gendered power. In turn, touristic narratives – as represented in travel guides, museums, and walking tours – variously reify or challenge assumptions about authority, power, religion, and codes of gendered, raced, and classed decency at particular historical moments as well as the value Americans place on those at the axes of these identities. Salem Witchcraft The Salem Witch Trials are unusually well-documented, and historians typically agree on a basic narrative of events. Broadly, the witch trials began in January 1692, when nine-year-old Betty Parris and her eleven-year-old cousin, Abigail Williams, began to exhibit erratic behavior. Betty’s father, Reverend Samuel Parris consulted with doctors and colleagues and ultimately concluded that the girls had been bewitched. Shortly thereafter, their neighbor, a white Englishwoman named Mary Sibley, tasked the Parris’ slaves, John Indian and his wife Tituba, with carrying out an act of counter-magic, namely, a ritual that allowed people to break or “counter” a malefic act of witchcraft. On Sibley’s orders, John and Tituba prepared “witch-cakes,” made of the girls’ urine and rye. When fed to a dog and set alight, the children would be able to see the one who bewitched them and identify them to the community. Though Parris condemned the use of a witch-cake as diabolic itself, the children were suddenly able to identify the ones afflicting them, seemingly confirming the presence of witchcraft for the people of Salem Village. Other young girls began exhibiting symptoms of witchcraft. Abigail and Betty 2 accused Tituba of bewitching them, while other afflicted girls identified Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne of tormenting them. Judges Jonathan Corwin and John Hathorne investigated, and eventually pressed Tituba into confessing that she, Good, and Osborne had made a covenant with Satan.1 Sensationalist narratives in tourism and popular culture since the nineteenth century have often portrayed Tituba as African, at the center of a circle of teenage girls practicing an African form of witchcraft, conducting dances or rituals in the woods. However, Tituba was indigenous, likely Arawak, and brought to Barbados from South America after being enslaved.2 Samuel Parris seems to have purchased her there and brought her with his family to Massachusetts as a young woman, likely placing her somewhere in her late twenties at the time of the witch trials.3 As historian Elaine Breslaw has shown, while Tituba seems to have drawn upon English, indigenous, and African cultural influences in shaping her testimony upon being accused of witchcraft in 1692, there is no historical evidence for the clandestine fortune-telling circles and voodoo so often attributed to her.4 The acts of magic attributed to Tituba in seventeenth-century sources – the witch-cake and diabolic conspiracies with the Devil – came from Anglo- American beliefs. As historian David Hall demonstrates, colonial New Englanders believed in a complex web of supernatural and religious forces at work in the world, and many could easily reconcile the use of folk beliefs, superstitious rituals, and acts of 1 Benjamin Ray, Satan and Salem: The Witch-Hunt Crisis of 1692 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2017), 15-43. 2 Elaine G. Breslaw, Tituba, Reluctant Witch of Salem: Devilish Indians and Puritan Fantasies (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 5-38. 3 Breslaw, Tituba, 39. 4 For analysis of Tituba’s confession and origins, see Breslaw, Tituba and Ray, Satan and Salem, 33-43. 3 outright magic with Puritan faith.5 Indeed, no documents from 1692 describe the children of the Parris household practicing illicit fortunetelling tricks at all. These notions seem to derive from a reference in the Modest Inquiry into the Nature of Witchcraft, written in 1697 by Reverend John Hale, a resident of nearby Beverly, Massachusetts, who observed