[On March 1st,
1692, authorities in Salem, MA questioned Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne, and
the slave known as Tituba over allegations of witchcraft, the first event in
what would become the
Salem Witch Trials. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of Salem
Witch Trials contexts and legacies.]
On two very
different but not disconnected ways to remember the Salem Witch Trials.
As this week’s
posts have illustrated, the Salem
Witch Trials comprise one of America’s lowest points, a moment when the
kinds of discrimination, hatred, and over-zealous self-righteousness that can
characterize any human community (especially a self-defined “city on
a hill”) congealed into a period of frenzy and terror which left a score of
innocent people dead. The question of how 21st century Americans
reconnect with that extreme period, with indeed whether it’s even possible for
us to recognize and analyze the kinds of individual and communal attitudes and
perspectives that can lead to such madness, is to my mind a profoundly
important one, not only for our understandings of American history but also for
our ability to analyze our own identities and communities. Few questions are
more serious and significant.
So of course the
primary way Salem has chosen to remember the Witch Trials is deeply, deeply
silly. The so-called
“witch city” has entirely embraced that designation, from semi-highbrow
institutions like the Salem Witch
Museum to thoroughly lowbrow ones like the numerous occult shops and
t-shirt vendors and the like. For the entire month of October the city becomes America’s unofficial but undisputed Halloween
headquarters. One of its prominent squares even features a statue of Bewitched’s Samantha (donated by the
cable network TV Land, in honor of the two-part Bewitched special episode set in Salem that
helped turn the city into the tourist attraction it now is), for crying out
loud. For AmericanStudiers like this one, the city’s embrace of the occult can
seem irritatingly trivial at best, and downright offensive to the victims and
memories of the Trials at worst. Yet it’s also possible to argue that the Witch
City moniker has brought much more attention and tourism to Salem than would
otherwise be the case—and, this argument might proceed, once that awareness and
those visitors are present, it’s entirely possible for them to gain additional
and more complex perspectives on the city’s history.
Without doubt,
at least to my mind, the city’s best opportunity for such shifts and
strengthenings of perspectives lies in the Witch Trials Memorial.
As I wrote in this
post, I think the Memorial represents the very best of what public art can
be and do; and like all such public art, it depends on your presence to achieve
those effects (so nothing I write here, nor even the photo at the first link in
this paragraph, can do it justice). Moreover, unlike another complex and
powerful work that seeks to remember the Trials, Arthur
Miller’s The Crucible (1952), the
Memorial does not in any way link the Trials to 20th or 21st
century events, nor make any other concessions to a contemporary audience;
instead, its great success lies in its ability to transport its visitors into a
combination of emotions (holiness and horror, peace and pain, calm and chaos,
injustice and inspiration) that capture both the heart of the Trials and their
continued presence and effects in our collective consciousness. But of course
it can’t achieve that success if folks don’t visit it—and maybe the Witch City
narratives, silly as they can seem, can bring a lot more such visitors to the
Memorial.
February Recap
this weekend,
Ben
PS. What do you
think?
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