Matthew Dennis and Elizabeth Reis show that while the law pretended to be gender- and color-blind, the execution of that law was not the case, in Salem, Mass. Bay Colony of the 1600s. “The Connecticut statute of 1642 conventionally designated it as a capital crime–defined in part by the Bible, but proscribed and prosecuted as a secular, criminal offense, punishable by death. Colonial Connecticut’s law, like similar codes in England, throughout Europe, and among various European colonies, gives the impression of gender neutrality–it applied its strictures to “any man or woman [who is found to] be a witch” (Dennis and Reis 66). These seemingly gender-neutral laws at their core were designed to, and did, result in European settlers’ exacting their control-freak, energy of fear upon their “pre-Enlightenment world, a ‘world of wonders’ in which the causes of trouble (ill health, personal misfortune, family trauma, community crisis) were not always clearly evident yet required explanation nonetheless” (69). The Enlightenment would bring other ways of prosecuting women, while logically justifying it and pretending it was in their “nature” to need to be educated properly and their passions and hormones reigned-in. Necropolitics could be deployed toward the “persecution [death] of strong women who might even be construed as proto-feminist” (67). 

In “Centers and Peripheries in English Maps of America, 1590-1685,” which we read forever/not that long ago, Ken MacMillan writes, “Through various rhetorical and semiotic devices, the maps could emphasize both the peripheries’ allegiance to the center and the center’s obligation to protect the peripheries, without diminishing the notion of peripheral independence and without making the center appear to be exercising tyrannical overlordship” (p. 92). Not only did this centering and periphery-ing occur in countries’ colonial visualizations in the form of maps overall, but also at the more micro level of Salem Town and the Village of Salem as illustrated in Salem Possessed. From 1973 to 2003-reprint of SP to 2011 “C&P,” the historian’s craft can be seen as an attempt at untangling the historical documents such as maps and less visual documents such as court records and testimonies so that the center is decentered and that the periphery is perhaps made centered, then moved to the side, so that we see history like our life experiences through multiple angles, (self) interested and disinterested, subjective and objective, micro and macro. In SP the authors stress that misogyny is not the only way we should see the witch trials in Salem. At the time they were occurring, the central position was that of the patriarchy, the same patriarchy who had crafted the maps of “Virginia” or the “Virgin Territory” of Jamestown–center being the virginal woman/territory/queen, peripheral being land to be later conquered (if not raped). The witch trials started at the center as a means to dispel and conquer–and vanquish–the periphery, be it race (indigenous, black) or gender/sex (witches being predominantly women though the law books stated they could be men). 

Boyer and Nissenbaum write, “Thus the merchant capitalists who controlled the Town–and to an extent the Village, too–were not outsiders; they were the outsiders whose careers could be seen as a violation of much that is contained in the word ‘Puritan'” (106) and that “While the Putnams were operating at the fringes of power in Salem Town by the 1680s, the Porters were increasingly moving to its political center by making common cause with the merchant group” (129). This shows the power dynamics of center/periphery in terms of the Town (center) and Village (periphery), casting a geographical, not merely gender-political, light on the misogynistic witch trials. Women have been scapegoated throughout the colonialist project/s, however, when that feminist, intersectional outlook is teased out, we can view it from multiple angles and for what it is: fear operating as a power-grab on women’s bodies, to the point of death, and on the land and the earth and the peoples who inhabit them/it, as we are still experiencing first-hand.

“Reading about the witchcraft trials without being aware of their pre- and post-history, as we came to realize, was somewhat like reading about the ‘Battle of the Bulge’ of late 1944 without knowing that it was a desperate German counter-thrust … Similarly, the men and women who have gone down in history as the witch-hunters of 1692 were already in retreat by that time, and … would soon be defeated,” Nissenbaum and Boyer write (XIII). The question I ask in light of all this is: is history really a “war”? Aren’t there more helpful, less misogynistic (hatred of women) ways of approaching our history to truly decenter it, without these harmful battlefield metaphors? If you want to heal a disease, you do not or should not “battle” the body. Similarly, if we want to heal this war-like mentality then it seems that there should be other, more constructive modes of conducting historical inquiry. What are they? What would this look like? Like the Hartman et al approaches we read last week? 

The following quote from the Dennis and Reis book chapter sheds some “Enlightenment” on your two-part question, “do you feel as though there was a larger fear of witchcraft in Salem or do you think the fear was of intelligent women?” and “We are all familiar with how in past time periods, science was often mistaken for magic so do you think that the trials and condemning of “witchcraft” was actually a religious excuse for the condemnation of women in academia?” They write that the witch trials were “persecution of strong women who might even be construed as proto-feminist” (67). 

Pre-Enlightenment, this persecution was supported by magical thinking: the “pre-Enlightenment world” was “a ‘world of wonders’ in which the causes of trouble (ill health, personal misfortune, family trauma, community crisis) were not always clearly evident yet required explanation nonetheless” according to Dennis and Reis (69). Post Enlightenment, there had to be more logical and less magical justifications for controlling and subjugating women and the power they represented via the law, and via Lockean logic such as the “tabular rassa,” or the blank slate on which men would write women’s education not unlike the Sound of Music “You are 16, going on 17” song in which a young aspiring Nazi mansplains, “Your life, little girl, is an empty page / That men will want to write on.” Eighteenth-century women writers such as Eliza Haywood, for instance, in her female bildungsroman, or educational-journey-novel, The History of Betsy Thoughtless pushed back against Locke. “Locke’s justification for male dominance of women would become the liberal ideological explanation for the subservience of women. But before it became entrenched, the notion was attacked by Tory polemicist Mary Astell, sometimes called England’s first feminist” (Muse 16-17) However, 1970s musical and the 2016 election of a serial sexual assaulter show that women still must occupy the same position as Haywood and Astell, and later Sarah Ahmed: the “feminist killjoy.” 

Works Cited

Ahmed, Sarah. The Promise of Happiness. Duke UP, 2010. 

Boyer, Paul, and Stephen Nissenbaum. Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft. Twenty-sixth printing, 2003 (Kindle edition). 

MacMillan, Ken. “Centers and Peripheries in English Maps of America, 1590-1685.” Early American Cartographies, pp. 67-92. University of North Carolina Press, 2011. 

Dennis, Matthew and Elizabeth Reis. “Women as Witches, Witches as Women: Witchcraft and Patriarchy in Colonial North America,” Women in Early America, ed. Thomas A. Foster. New York University Press, 2015. 

Muse, Susan, “Gender Politics in the Novels of Eliza Haywood” (2012). Dissertations (2009 -). Paper 201.http://epublications.marquette.edu/dissertations_mu/201.