The Crucible - Arthur Miller - Episode 1 - Witch Hunts In Two Centuries! - Pulitzer Prizes! - Allegories Everywhere!
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The Crucible - Arthur Miller - Episode 1 - Witch Hunts In Two Centuries - Pulitzer Prizes - Allegories Everywhere!
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Hi, I\\u2019m Christy Shriver and we\\u2019re here to discuss books that have changed the world and have changed us.
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I\\u2019m Garry Shriver and this is the How to Love Lit podcast.\\xa0 Today is new book day, and I always love new book day.\\xa0 We are starting our series on Arthur Miller and his timeless classic about human hysteria, The Crucible.\\xa0 I\\u2019m particularly excited about this series because it\\u2019s both extremely historical as well as psychological, as lots of things are- but in this case- it\\u2019s heightened.\\xa0\\xa0
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For sure, The Crucible is Arthur Miller\\u2019s most produced play worldwide becoming one of America\\u2019s most popular plays in the 20th century.\\xa0 Ironically, it failed at the box office in its initial production in 1953, so what does that tell you?
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Initial box offices don\\u2019t always get it right.
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Miller would say, almost never. He was very critical to how we organize theater in this country. \\xa0 I watched an interview he did with Charlie Rose later in his life and he talked about the problems he saw with American theater.\\xa0 It was kind of interesting to me. He complained that, as a nation, we could never get good at play writing and acting because of the financing piece.\\xa0 He wished we had a national theater- I\\u2019m not saying I advocate for that idea, because I can see a lot of problems in other ways- but he did make an interesting point. \\xa0 He made the analogy that if you took another profession, like plumbing or something, for example you create a plumbing company and hire people to be professional plumbers- they would have security and work continuously- finishing one starting another- seamlessly- and with each new job, they would learn to perfect their craft- obviously getting better and better all the time and the trade itself would progress in technique and so forth.\\xa0 He said today, our theater does things by the job- and he said it would be like the plumbing company going out and hirng new plumbers every time they have a different job to do, and in the between time the plumbers are out of work doing something else, getting out of practice with no time or incentive to work on things that would have a long term improvements.\\xa0 He says, this financial piece keeps actors from getting better, play writes from getting better, and theaters from taking chances on things that might take more than one week to get popular.\\xa0 He said, doing theater project by project makes that initial box office too important because the immediate return on investment is too high.\\xa0 But anyway, I hadn\\u2019t thought of it like that.\\xa0 Maybe he\\u2019s right.\\xa0 There\\u2019s certainly quite a bit of sequels and redundancy in the movie industry.
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That is one great thing about researching a person who only died in 2005- which is when Miller died.\\xa0 He was born in 1915 and lived until 2005- there is a lot of video footage of him, especially with his second wife, Marilyn Monroe.\\xa0\\xa0
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Oh my gosh, I know and I guess this is a good of time as any to get into a little bit of the facts about his personal and professional life, although we won\\u2019t spend too much time on that today.\\xa0 We can get into the Marilyn Monroe stuff when we talk about the Mccarthy era stuff.\\xa0 But for starters, Miller was a native New Yorker, originally from a well to do family who owned a manufacturing company.\\xa0 Unfortunately, during the depression, his family went bankrupt and to the poor house they all went, not an uncommon depression era story inAmerica.\\xa0 One fun fact about Miller\\u2019s early life for all your burgeoning students out there is that- Miller was a terrible student, which is something I always find interesting. He failed Algebra three time.
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So there you go- there\\u2019s hope for us all- even the non-mathematical types.
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For sure, it took him two years to raise enough money to pay for his college tuition, but He did finally go to a great school- the University of Michigan- all you Blue fans out there- (if you\\u2019re not from the US, Michigan is famous not only because it\\u2019s a prestigious university but their American football team is very good- although not as good as their SEC counterparts \\u2013 if you ask me!\\xa0\\xa0
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HA!!\\xa0 Well, they likely could have beat the University of Tennessee this year.
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Ouch- why would you say something like that??
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For those who don\\u2019t know, Christy and I are big football fans and Christy\\u2019s daughters both attend the University of Tennessee which also is a big and good school with a very historically important football team- although not so much recently.\\xa0 Football rivalries never die!\\xa0 Her best friend\\u2019s husband attended the University of Michigan- so she has a little personal vendetta!!\\xa0 Anyway, it was at the University of Michigan that Miller started writing drama.\\xa0 By 1947, he was lucky enough, fortunate to use a Machiavellian phrase- to have a play open on Broadway.\\xa0 The name of that play was All My Sons.\\xa0 It was an immediate hit- and there you go- back to Machiavelli, Miller, being a man of great virtue was able to maximize his opportunity.\\xa0 Two years later he came out with Death of a Salesman and won the Pulitzer prize.\\xa0
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I want take just a second to talk about that play.\\xa0 I would say, most critics consider Death of a Salesman to be his most important play.\\xa0 It\\u2019s been called \\u201ca modern American tragedy\\u201d maybe even the greatest play of his generation. It\\u2019s about angst, the frustrations of middle class life, maybe the death of the American dream.\\xa0 It\\u2019s dark really and the main character is unheroic- and this is a big difference. \\xa0 Where, the protagonist John Proctor of the crucible is heroic, Willie Lowman of Death of a Salesman is not.\\xa0 Death of a Salesman is not plot driven but character driven- Biff and Willie Loman are absolutely two of the most iconic characters in modern theater- everyone remembers them.\\xa0 So, Death of a Salesman has been very influenctial and critically acclaimmed, but it hasn\\u2019t been as widely produced as the crucible.\\xa0 Charlies Rose in that same interview with Miller asked him what was his most important play, and Miller responded by saying well, it depends how you\\u2019re measuring.\\xa0 Rose tried to get him to name Death of a Salesman or the Crucible, but Miller wouldn\\u2019t do it.\\xa0 He said, well, world-wide, the Crucible is produced far more- but many people identify more with Death of a Salesman personally- so there\\u2019s that question for people who want to debate such things.\\xa0 What makes a play more important?\\xa0 Which of his is?\\xa0 I don\\u2019t know what I would say.\\xa0 I will say, I like The Crucible better.\\xa0 IT\\u2019s more entertaining, but in the words of one Memphis\\u2019 greatest English teacher, Amy Nolette- Death of A Salesman is just achingly human.\\xa0\\xa0
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Yikes, well both Death of a Salesman and The Crucible are extremely famous now and both are widely produced.\\xa0 Of course, The Crucible wasn\\u2019t\\xa0 popular when it came out,\\xa0 but looking back that likely had more to do with things way outside of the theater. Than the quality of the play itself.\\xa0 This play was a victim of the political climate at the time.\\xa0 People were afraid of it, in some sense.\\xa0 Here\\u2019s a play where Miller is talking about hysteria surrounding the witchcraft trials in Puritan New England, but the allegorical nature of the play was obvious. He was talking about his current moment and only veiling it slightly.
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Yes- and let me define that word\\xa0 allegory for a second.\\xa0 We\\u2019ve talked about this before. Lord of the Flies is an allegory, animal farm is an allegory- but just in case you haven\\u2019t listened to those series yet or are simply unfamiliar with the term, an allegory is a story that has two levels of meaning- on the first level you\\u2019re literally talking about what you are literally talking about- a door is a door, an island is an island but then there\\u2019s this second level- the symbolic level.\\xa0 Lots of stories use symbols but if everything in the story is a symbol, then we have an allegory.\\xa0 So, for example, in Animal Farm- the story was about animals on the literal level, but it was really about communism and specifically the Soviet Union- every animal represented something or someone else- Napoleon was Stalin, Boxer was the working man, etc..\\xa0 Here, in the Crucible-we have the same thing- this play is literally about the Witch trials of the 1690s, but it\\u2019s also about the postwar climate of McCarthyism in the United States.\\xa0
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Yes- and he had something very specific in mind, just like Orwell did.\\xa0 This play is about Alger Hiss, Owen Lattimore, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg as well as Joseph McCarthy.\\xa0 Actors had lost their jobs- they had been canceled, to use the language of today- because they didn\\u2019t share the proper political views of people who were in power- political power, economic power, artistic power.\\xa0 Innocent people were literally being convicted of crimes and sent to literal prison for opinions and associations with people that were considered bad or to use their word \\u201cun-american\\u201d a word everyone knew was bad and elite people, the nobles to get back to Machiavelli,\\xa0 got to\\xa0 define what it meant to be such.\\xa0 In the introduction to Miller\\u2019s book, Collected Plays, Miller describes how he felt about America at that point.\\xa0 He says this, \\u201cIt was as though the whole country had been born anew, without a memory even of certain elemental decencies which a year or two earlier no one would have imagined could be altered, let alone forgotten.\\xa0 Astounded, I watched men pass me by without a nod whom I had known rather well for years; and again, the astonishment was produced by my knowledge, which I could not give up, that terror in these people was being knowingly planned and consciously engineered, and yet that all they knew was terror.\\xa0 That so interior and subjective an emotion could have been so manifestly created from without was a marvel to me.\\xa0 It underlies every word in the Crucible.\\u201d\\xa0 And of course, as we\\u2019ll get into during the series, Arthur Miller was investigated and called to testify before the House Committee of Un-American Activities which we\\u2019ll talk about later.\\xa0\\xa0
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Exactly, in 2000 when Miller is in his 80s, he published a book called Echoes Down the Corridor.\\xa0 In that book he says this, \\u201cIt would probably never have occurred to me to write a play about the Salem witch trials of 1692 had I not seen some astonishing correpondences with that calamity in the America of the late forties and early fifties..my basic need was to respond to a phenomenon which, with only a small exaggeration, one could say was paralyzing a whole generation and in an amazingly short time was dying up the habits of trust and toleration in public discourse.\\xa0 I refer of course to the anticommunist rage that threatened to reach hysterical proportions and sometimes did.\\xa0 I can\\u2019t remember anyone calling it an ideological war, but I think now that that is what it amounted to.\\xa0 Looking back at the period, I suppose we very rapidly passed over anything like a discussion or debate and into something quite different, a hunt not alone for subversive people but ideas and even a suspect language.\\u201d\\xa0 He went on to detail how one day he found a book called The Devil in Massachusetts by Marion Starkey about the Salem Witch hunts- and he saw the parallel from history to his present experience.
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Something Machiavelli says if you will read the stories, writings and histories of the past you\\u2019ll see your current moment over and over again.
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Exactly.\\xa0 Miller had actually already heard the story of salem from studying American history in school, but because of what was going on in the United States, it struck him differently as he read about it as an adult.\\xa0 He went to Salem.\\xa0 And he says this, \\u201cAs I stood in the stillness of the Salem courthouse, surrounded by the miasmic swirl of the images of the 1950s but with my head in 1692, what the two eras hd in common was gradually gaining definition.\\xa0 It both was the menace of concealed plots, but most startling were the similarities in the rituals of defense and investigative routines.\\xa0 Three hundred years apart, both presecutions were alleging memberships in a secret, disloyal group; should the accused confess, his honesty could be proved only in precisely the same way- by naming former confederates, nothing less.\\xa0 Thus the informer became the very proof of the plot and the investigators necessity.\\u201d\\xa0\\xa0
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And yet, the reason why this play is likely produced all over the world, is that this is not an American phenomena- although, we\\u2019re very prone to hysteria here obviously, but it\\u2019s human one.\\xa0 It\\u2019s political, but not only political- hysteria, manipulation through fear, evil people deliberately using other people\\u2019s goodness and naivete against them, the use of logical fallacies over deductive reasoning= these are universal and timeless realities of being human.\\xa0\\xa0
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True- and we get to talk about every bit of that.\\xa0 This week, we\\u2019ll focus on the back history that led up to the trials chronicled in the play- the actual story of what happened in Salem.\\xa0 Miller takes several liberties that add a little spice to the play that likely didn\\u2019t happen in real life, and we can point those out as we get to them- at least the obvious ones.\\xa0 But it\\u2019s important to know that the people in the play are actual people and what happened to them as far as the legal system goes actually happened.\\xa0 The John Proctor/ Abigail sexual plot line is of course a big a liberty- he actually changes the ages of both john and Abigail.\\xa0 Abigal was younger in real life, John much older. \\xa0 And although Miller defends the affair could have happened and he found a line in a transcript that maybe suggests that- it\\u2019s not part of the record.\\xa0 The question of why Miller made his main character an adulterer in a Puritan town is interesting in its own right- and makes its own statement- but also is a conversation for another episode. So, are we ready to go back to the 1690s and see what New England was like in that time period- a far cry from the Renaissance of last week.
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So true, first let\\u2019s get the geography right in our heads.\\xa0 Salem is a little seaside town of about 40,000 people in Massachusetts which is in New England.\\xa0 If you\\u2019re looking at a map of the United States it\\u2019s north of New York- that area.\\xa0 To this day, if you go to the town website, it\\u2019s still famous for the Salem Witch Trials we\\u2019re going to be reading about in the play.\\xa0 In fact, the little town gets over a million visitors a year- and they have all the markings of a place that has commercialized an event: a museum, there\\u2019s a witch brew caf\\xe9- all the fun stuff.\\xa0 I\\u2019ve never been, but Salem is definitely on my list of places to visit.\\xa0 Of course, for an American city, being founded in the 1600s is old.- we\\u2019re babies compared to India, Egypt or even Europe for that matter.\\xa0 Salem was issued its charter by the English monarch in 1629.\\xa0 Like most of America at the time, most people survived by farming, but Salem at this point was up and coming and there were mercantile interests- it was a seaside town and they traded cod to the West Indies starting in 1637 and that\\u2019s a big deal.\\xa0 There is a fort, Fort Pickering, so it\\u2019s militarily important and if you remember, it was in the Salem Custom house that Nathaniel Hawthorne sets his story The Scarlet Letter which was the first book we ever featured.\\xa0
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Of course, and most people rarely miss the irony of our first Puritan settlers who arrived here in the 1600s searching for religious tolerance\\xa0 because their identities were being persecuted in Europe, and yet had no tolerance of their own\\xa0 for the different identities of the people who were already here nor any new settlers.\\xa0 And for that- history has been really hard on them- as we\\u2019re obviously going to be as well. But, as in all things,\\xa0 it\\u2019s must more complicated than you might think. Isn\\u2019t it?\\xa0 And unlike people think, there were good people that were also Puritans.\\xa0\\xa0
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There most certainly was-\\xa0 and we can\\u2019t forget that- when we look back with the arrogance of our present moment- there is a lot of good still imbedded in the American psyche that we owe to this group of people-\\xa0 but -having said that- this story- highlights a negative- and even though we are not a religious people anymore, Americans are notorious for our moral posturing- we just have a secularized way of doing it now- De Toqueville made that observation 100 years later when he said\\u2026\\u2026\\u2026\\u201d Americans live in a perpetual state of self applause\\u201d
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nevertheless, in Miller\\u2019s case and he said so many times, we can use puritans as our straw man because we\\u2019re 300 years removed, but Miller\\u2019s point is that everyone- including puritans- are human- and because they also were human- they were much more complicated than any oversimplified understanding of their lives would make you think.\\xa0\\xa0
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And Miller opens his play, immediately delving into all of this complexity of character, people\\u2019s personal histories, their histories with each other-\\xa0 by providing an introduction- with a narrator most productions don\\u2019t use because they are long and interrupt the flow of the story.\\xa0 So, if you\\u2019re watching the play, you have a little less insight than if you\\u2019re read the Crucible.\\xa0 But even if you do read the long narrator commentary, it\\u2019s a little bit like listening to someone tell you about a long family saga and it\\u2019 somewhat overwhelming- there are just so many players involved.\\xa0 In fact, Miller himself worried that the play- as stripped down as he tried to make it- wouldn\\u2019t be accepted by Broadway because it has a cast of 21 different characters and several sets.\\xa0\\xa0
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For sure- and keeping the characters straight is no small feat- so we need to take baby steps- I think\\xa0 it\\u2019s worth starting with the lay of the land- or the physical geography because that helps keep the alliances straight. \\xa0 We should first understand that Salem is two places.\\xa0 There is Salem Town and Salem Village. Today Salem village has another name- it\\u2019s called Danvers and it\\u2019s about half the size of Salem. \\xa0 But, these are two distinct places and there is antagonism between the two which is at the heart of the scandal.\\xa0 The witch accusations first surfaced in Salem village which is the more rural of the two.\\xa0 \\xa0 At this time in American history things were changing- mostly for the better for the European settlers. The seaports that I mentioned were thriving especially in Salem Town.\\xa0 Merchants were making money and gaining power. One particular family is the Porter family- an old family- very distinguished and very prosperous. \\xa0 You can think of their Team Salem Town-\\xa0 Then there is Salem Village. It was not a part of the thriving mercantile economy. It was full of farmers without trading interests, and many of them were struggling. \\xa0 This is the poorer side of town. BUT, There is a second family- that\\u2019s just old and distinguished as the Porters, except\\xa0 they were on the farmer side of them and their financial fortunes were in decline.\\xa0 The family name for this family is\\u2013 the Putnams- .\\xa0 The Putnams like many in Salem Village weren\\u2019t benefiting from the economic growth.\\xa0 This matters because behind the witch saga, there is a financial piece.\\xa0 And one big point that even Miller brings up, is that the Putnams are losing land via an inheritance thing- and this doesn\\u2019t sit well.\\xa0 So, there is a money piece that we need to keep straight.\\xa0 So, we have the family feud piece, we have the financial piece but we have one more layer- we have a religious piece- the people in Salem Town were more secular- at least in their terms- by our standards they are not secular at all, but\\xa0 up and coming people of Salem Town weren\\u2019t like the older generation who were committed to following all of these very strict guidelines designed to make the new world a religious safe haven, and although the changes they were in favor of today don\\u2019t seem like anything, anytime there is changing values, there\\u2019s a threat.\\xa0
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\\xa0And in some sense, it\\u2019s understandable.\\xa0 Coming to America because of persection was a big thing to do.\\xa0 Many people died in the process. I can\\u2019t even imagine how bad things would have to be for me take my family get in a wooden boat and cross an ocean knowing my chances of survival were so small.\\xa0 The Puritans were coming to America to create this perfect settlement.\\xa0 They called it a \\u201cCity on a Hill\\u201d which is a\\xa0 term they are getting from the Bible.\\xa0 In the Bible, Jesus is prophecied to come and build a New Jerusalem, Jerusalem is a city on a hill.\\xa0 And in the New Jerusalem, Jesus would rule and the government would be perfect. Of course, there are countless dystopian movies, communes, heck there are even countries that have tried to do this.\\xa0 The thinking was thst with the help of God and by following all these rules, the people would be perfect.\\xa0 Well, and of course, all of this is so ironic from our vantage point in history, and what Nathaniel Hawthorn made much of in the Scarlet Letter, but these people thought they were creating this perfect society-\\xa0 unfortunately, a perfect society isn\\u2019t easy to make.\\xa0\\xa0
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No, I\\u2019d say not- perfect societies seem to require perfect people- and that\\u2019s been an issue from the beginning.\\xa0 And, as it often does, it came to factions and disputes about shared space. \\xa0 Salem Town and Salem Village had to attend the same church, but the church was in Salem Town.\\xa0 For some of the residents of Salem Village that meant they had to make a 10 mile trip (round trip)- every Sunday- which is annoying.\\xa0 They had been trying to get their own church- apparently for almost two years- but had not been successful.\\xa0 So, there\\u2019s that grudge, but the real mess started when a new minister showed up who was not easy to like and the church is split- now you have to remember- in the American settlements during this period- church attendance was mandatory- and there was a strong connection between church and state.\\xa0\\xa0
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So, in Salem, things were divided into two factions.\\xa0 One of the factions was led by the Putnams; the other by the Porters.\\xa0 The Putnams (who you\\u2019ll recognize that name from the play almost immediately) were the more conservative, they were losing their influence in the community, they were losing their financial place in the community. \\xa0 Then you had the Israel Porter faction-\\xa0\\xa0
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Porter is NOT a name you\\u2019ll see in Miller\\u2019s play.\\xa0 But you will see the Porter faction represented through the character of John Proctor.\\xa0\\xa0
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Yes, the group of farmers had ties to Salem Town and business connections, sometimes even personal connections. They are the up and coming group.\\xa0 John Proctor, btw, in real life owned a tavern and his wife Elizabeth was an herbalist.\\xa0 They were a prominent family.\\xa0 Oh, and on that note, another curiosity that seems out of place- the puritans had no stigma against alcohol.\\xa0 The history of Americans stigmatizing alcohol comes much later out of the burned over district in new york, and we may talk about that with another piece of literature- but the fun fact is everyone drank beer, whiskey, ale, any sort of alcohol, and even though girls weren\\u2019t allowed to speak unless spoken to with all kind of strict rules to follow, they could run around the local tavern and drink- which they did- in fact- the first time Elizabeth was ever accused in real life with being a witch was in a tavern.\\xa0 But that is an aside that has nothing to do with the play-\\xa0 just a little fun fact.\\xa0 American social critic once said\\xa0 \\u201cPuritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.\\u201dAnd that\\u2019s where we begin maligning the Puritans in US History.\\xa0
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Fun fact indeed, well This next part really fascinates me because it involves the minister.\\xa0 Of course, my father is a Christian minister so I find this man, the Reverend Samuel Parris, a particular hideous and particularly evil kind of human.\\xa0 Samuel Parris is a loser by any outside definition.\\xa0 He has been unsuccessful at business and at life in many ways.\\xa0 He also is a particularly greedy man- he\\u2019s totally obsessed with money and made excessive financial demands of his congregation- which isn\\u2019t an endearing trait if you are a struggling farmer who does hard physical labor alone six days a week and this is your one day off.\\xa0 There is a written\\xa0 He had\\xa0 demanded land, cash, cut up firewood, of farmer.\\xa0 \\u201dWhen money shall be plentiful, more money shall be paid to me.\\u201d\\xa0 That\\u2019s a quote.\\xa0 I also want to point out that he\\u2019s the only one in this story that has slaves.\\xa0 In Miller\\u2019s Crucible, he has the slave Tituba which I know you\\u2019re going to talk about in a minute, but in real life he also had a male slave, John, who may have been Tituba\\u2019s husband, but either ways was also Parris\\u2019 slave.\\xa0 Here\\u2019s what makes people cynical about his true religious sentiment-, everything that happened in Salem, revolved around this preacher, Samuel Parrish- he is not just the instigator, but he is also the perpetuator of the witch hunt.\\xa0 Now back to politics, the Putnams supported this preacher.\\xa0 The Porters were against him.\\xa0 In October before the chaos breaks loose the Porter camp\\xa0 gained control over the church and were done with Parris.\\xa0 They proceeded to cut off his salary and his firewood.\\xa0 They also questioned his claim to the village parsonage and land (when you read or watch the play, you\\u2019ll hear references to the firewood and the parsonage).
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You must remember, these are congregationalists- which unlike Catholics or presbyterians are governed by majority, so they can do that sort of thing.\\xa0\\xa0
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From my perspective, and I know I\\u2019m dangerously bordering on the arrogance of the presence and getting too far ahead in the story, but from my perspective, I just find it very coincidental and very curious that everything that happened- started with this preacher that I find a sacrilege and where it really makes me angry- because he is only able to do what he can do because the people in his congregation are actually good, Godly, moral people and he\\u2019s using their goodness against them.\\xa0\\xa0
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Well, obviously you\\u2019re not alone. It all started in the winter of 1692, first of all it\\u2019s incredibly cold.\\xa0 But one evening after dinner, at Parris house, his daughter, Betty- age 9 and his niece, Abigail age 11,\\xa0 and maybe even some other girls, but for sure these two go upstairs with his Indian slave, Tituba.\\xa0 And likely for fun, but we don\\u2019t know how things started, they begin doing things they called\\xa0 \\u201cblack magic\\u201d- telling fortunes , inviting spirits to come that sort of thing- which is totally forbidden in Puritan society- and in the Christian faith at all times since forever, btw.\\xa0 But the account goes that all of a sudden they saw something. They saw a specter- a ghost.\\xa0 Betty began to have convulsive fits.\\xa0 She apparently struggled like she was being attacked.\\xa0 Abigail also began to have these fits too.\\xa0 The word they used was \\u201cafflicted\\u201d Parris got frightened and sent for the village doctor who told him there was nothing physically wrong with the girls and that this was witchcraft. .\\xa0\\xa0
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I want to interject here, because most modern Americans don\\u2019t understand this sort of thing.\\xa0 But growing up in Brazil and living in Zimbabwe as a child, this sort of thing is not strange to me at all.\\xa0 And I really don\\u2019t think it\\u2019s strange to many people around the world.\\xa0 It\\u2019s estimated that 40% of the world today is animistic- that just means 40% of the world believes and occasionally engages with the spirit world- the invisible world, but one where people interact with spirits.\\xa0 In Brazil we call this spiritism, and two people of the total population opening identify as such, but it\\u2019s practiced under many different names, in every culture on earth- including all Western countries.\\xa0 And I want to point out that it has been practiced in the Americas long before European settlers showed up.\\xa0 Tituba, although in Miller\\u2019s play she\\u2019s African American woman, was in real life a Native American woman- this means her religion was animistic- something still practiced all over the world.\\xa0
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\\xa0And although no Puritan would have openly confessed to messing with spirits, we know that lots of people do- even\\xa0 those devoutly religious ones. We know this happened because there is historical records of it.\\xa0 There are documents referring a neighbor of Parris by the name of Mary Sibley who asked John Indian, Parris\\u2019 male slave, to make a witch\\u2019s cake using Betty and Abigail\\u2019s urine.\\xa0 And although in the cases of these two girls, the witch cake didn\\u2019t reveal anything, it goes to show that this sort of thing existed.\\xa0
Well today, people who are not familiar with any version of animism or who have never met a witch doctor\\xa0 just can\\u2019t understand any of the thinking around this sort of thing, and it feels strange.\\xa0 And I have read a lot of articles trying to scientifically especially what made these girls convulse- which they most certainly did- were they possessed, did they eat ergot a fungus that\\xa0 that is linked to LSD, were they just emotional and pretending because they were going to get in trouble for messing around with Tituba- all sorts of theories have floated around over the last 300 years- obviously no one knows what happened- in Miller\\u2019s Play, he goes with the theory that they were faking it- a very plausible theory to me, but I won\\u2019t take a side here.
Dr. Griggs diagnosed witchcraft- to the ministers daughter and niece.\\xa0 That is not good for the minister who is already in a lot of trouble.\\xa0 What we know for sure is that, however, it happened, Betty and Abigail began to name names of people who they claim they saw spirits of- specters as they called them.
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The concept of specters was nothing something I was familiar with.\\xa0 Can you explain for a second what that means.
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Absolutely, and remember, don\\u2019t let the arrogance of the present cloud how you view this, because for us this might seem strange and unreasonable, but is absolutely NOT unreasonable.\\xa0 Here\\u2019s how it worked, the people, a religious people, definitely believed in a spirit world, and they believed that all spirits were devils.\\xa0 They believed that the devil would come and would make deals with people thus making the people powerful enough to send their specters or spirits to haunt godly people.\\xa0 So, Someone could say, \\u201cChristy\\u2019s specter came to me in the middle of the night and tried to kill me.\\u201d\\xa0 You could say, but I was at home, Garry was there he can prove it, and the accuser could say, I didn\\u2019t say your body was there- your specter was there.\\xa0 As you can imagine, it\\u2019s difficult to defend an accusation like that-\\xa0 there\\u2019s nothing to verify what you did except the word of the accuser.\\xa0 They called this spectral evidence.
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And this is where, as we look back at Parris and then Putnam, the story gets suspicious looking from the point of history.\\xa0 Parris, the minister under attack, started to accuse people- and what we will see over time, historically they were ironically the same people that were opposing him in all of these religious disputes- in other words most of the accusers are of the Putnam faction and almost all of the accused were of the Porter faction.\\xa0\\xa0
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Well, then this poor Indian woman, Tituba, gets thrown into the mix.
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Her role is critical and really caused the thing to take off- but remember, Tituba is the one player here that we shouldn\\u2019t judge too harshly.\\xa0 Tituba and then her husband John have both been such an interesting part\\xa0 in the story.\\xa0 And Tituba has been quite misrepresented- even by Miller in his play.\\xa0 \\xa0 But, Tituba, before you feel too sorry for her because she did take a beating- literally and metaphorically, this is one player who managed to survive the scandal and did eventually, it seems she gets her freedom out of all this.\\xa0 She is the first accused, but also she\\u2019s the first real accuser- although history tells us she was likely\\xa0 coerced by Parris to make the accusations she made and she did recant them later in life.
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Tituba confessed to being involved in a Satanic conspiracy aimed at the minister.\\xa0 She confessed that there were several witches from Boston whose specters met invisibly at the minister\\u2019s house and they had recruited witches in the town.\\xa0 Tituba confessed that she spoke directly with the Devil, a man dressed in black, and that she signed something they called the Devil\\u2019s book.\\xa0 She said there were nine witches.\\xa0 When she was pressed, she\\xa0 named two older women who were not very well-viewed in the town- Sarah Osmond and Sarah Goode.\\xa0
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\\xa0Well I do think it\\u2019s important to tell right off that bat that Tituba would eventually claim that Parris physically beat her before her first examination and told her what to say.\\xa0 Anyway, whether he did that or not, what we know for sure is that Tituba was interrogated five times,\\xa0
more than any other defendant at great length.\\xa0 She was busted with the little girls and her life was in danger.\\xa0 She had to give the magistrates something, but to me, her story seems fanciful, and I can\\u2019t imagine believing it- but obviously people did.\\xa0 She told them how shoe rode upon a pole and flew through the air to the houses of two church familes and attached their children.\\xa0\\xa0
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Her testimony, whether it was coerced or not, set the stage for judicial conduct of future examinations.\\xa0 Tituba talked of \\u201csigning the Devil\\u2019s Book\\u201d \\u201c\\u201dwitches\\u201d \\u201cmeetings\\u201d all the things you\\u2019ll see in the play that sound so strange to our modern ears.\\xa0 By the end of March, Lawson, the former minister of Salem, who had come back to investigate had determined that the devil had come to wreck the church because of their internal dispute- and that this was the devil\\u2019s doing.\\xa0 He claimed with authority\\xa0 that there were 23-24 witches that had been spectrally seen in the village.\\xa0
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\\xa0But Garry, I know other towns had had witches before- it still seems so strange that this blew up so much larger than it had anywhere else.
True, and really there are a couple of really important legal reasons for this- which sound a little boring to talk about, but actually made a big difference.\\xa0 In the settlements- before this time, there had been rules.\\xa0 In the past, if you wanted to accuse a person you had to present a monetary bond for prosecution of the complaint.\\xa0 The purpose of this was precisely to keep people from running around charging people with all kinds of frivolous crimes.\\xa0 If you wanted to accuse someone of anything, you had to put some money on the table.\\xa0 For whatever reason, John Hawthorn (you\\u2019ll see his name in the play) as well as other powerful men in town-\\xa0 suspended this practice- so all of a sudden, it was cheap and easy to accuse whoever you want. \\xa0 And like you would expect, all of a sudden, the courts began to overflow with complaints, hearings , and arrests- apparently in this \\u201ccity on a hill\\u201d, there had been a lot of bitterness brewing up for a really long time. Many longstanding grudges and feuds were just waiting for an opportunity, and now they had one.\\xa0 But another legal precedent was changed, clearly a bad idea, that that affected how things turned in out.\\xa0 In Salem, unlike in other places they didn\\u2019t separate the accusers- from each other.\\xa0 So you could accuse people together- this allowed people to collaborate and intimidate the defendants.\\xa0 And so they did\\u2026.
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And so they did\\u2026. What a way to say it.\\xa0 Well, hopefully we have set the stage for the start of this, not too long, four act play.\\xa0 Next week, we will open the text and see how Miller chooses to represent the story as it really happened, but also the allegory he sees again evolving in his present day American context\\u2026.because for Miller\\u2026.the Puritans are not the only ones capable of witch hunting\\u2026..
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