Tituba of Salem Village

All the bad guys in Salem are actually the good guys. The Massachusetts Bay Colony was founded as a theocracy, started not as a political or economic colony but rather as a religious experiment with its government directed by God’s laws as enunciated in Scripture. In the novel, those who pray most fervently do the most damage, and those who are most certain are most wrong.

Within the Puritan community, those most convinced of the viability of God and the need for the colony to remain pure in its ways see in the suggestion of the presence of Satan among them the implication that their entire enterprise, their quest to establish a New World, was under attack. In the name of their God, they act in ways that reflect that blessed assurance. The arrests of the three women and their trials reveal the power of hypocrisy. As Abigail performs her fit in the meeting house, the judge charges Tituba to touch the child—if she touches the child and the child quiets, she is a witch; if she touches the child and the child does not quiet, then Tituba is innocent. The wise God-fearing men of Salem do not see the hypocrisy in the touch test. Nor do they recognize how their intolerance of others—the poor, the mentally ill, the slaves—justifies acting against those same people.

Those who direct the trial against the three women are university educated (Reverend Parris is proud that he at least attended Harvard); these judges and ministers are book smart and well-read in the theology of Protestantism. These are holy, upright men who prayed diligently and left behind in England all the comforts of their established lives to commit to trying to start a new world in the forbidding wilderness of Massachusetts. They also believed that their neighbors consort with the Devil in the dark woods outside of town, that Tituba can fly to Barbados at night and still remain in her bed fast asleep, that she can converse with a feral cat, and that the Devil himself cut Mercy Lewis’ hair. All reveal the power of overzealous religious conviction and how such conviction can easily corrupt into hypocrisy and intolerance and short-circuit rational thought.

It is important to remember that the men and women caught up in the hysteria of the Salem witch trials were innocent of wrongdoing. That point the novel makes clear. Sarah Good is a widow, an outcast from the village because she has no means of income, no home, and is driven to beg just to feed her daughter. Goody Osburne is an old woman who wants Tituba’s iris root for tea to help with her arthritis. Tituba dreams of a beautiful tropical home she was taken from; loves to tell exotic folk tales about magic monkeys to amuse bored children; grows the finest fruits and vegetables in Salem because of hard work; talks to a cat for company; and practices her spinning until her fingers fly across the loom. The only crime these three women commit is walking into the parish kitchen at exactly the wrong time.

The novel offers evidence of the enormous problems these settlers in Massachusetts faced. Crops died, the weather turned, and valuable farm animals took sick and died. One household prospers while another goes broke. Wolves attacked, and the village always faced the possibility of attacks by Natives displaced by the colonists. The Puritan government disdained advances in the new sciences and believed fervently that the universe itself was a constant struggle between agents of Good and Evil. The people of Salem need to blame something or somebody for their hardships, disasters, misfortune, and bad luck. In singling out these three women, each in their own way outcasts, the three became scapegoats, handy and convenient explanations for everything from withered crops to illness, from a house fire to a cow that suddenly stops giving milk. These community leaders were hardly scientists, but they hungered for the same logic of causality, the comforting notion that there are no accidents in a universe divinely ordered. When Tituba is being led to the jail, a “great oak timber” (218) that had for years rested against the side of the meeting house suddenly and without explanation tumbles over and crashes to the ground. Tituba concedes how much easier the world would operate if the huge timber was “pushed by invisible hands” (219). That need for explanation, to deny the intrusion of misfortune or the unpredictable into God’s universe, compels the town to scapegoat three women as the reason for numerous incidents of misfortune, bad luck, and poor judgment.