ARTS
Witchcraft and hysteria in Salem
Does it matter if historical fact merges with fiction in films? Frances Hill believes it does The source of most people's knowledge of one of the darkest episodes in American history, the Salem witchcraft trials, is Arthur Miller's play The Crucible. Nubile Abigail Williams plots to have Elizabeth Proctor hanged as a witch so she can marry her husband. But the plan badly misfires. Elizabeth is spared and John Proctor hanged. He makes a false confession, which would have saved his life, but then recants. Now the Hollywood film (which Opens next week), scripted by Miller him- self and following the play closely, is bring- ing this story of murderous love to a huge new audience.
In real life in Salem, Mas- sachusetts, in 1692, Abigail Williams was 11 and John Proc- tor 60, and there is no evidence that they met except in court. The first girl to name Elizabeth Proctor as a witch was not Abi- gail but a 12-year-old called Ann Putnam. John Proctor never falsely confessed but, from first to last, protested his innocence. . As a playwright, Arthur Miller 15, of course, at liberty to diverge from the historical facts and, in pointing out differences between film and reality, I am implying no criticism. But the film is so pow- erfully convincing that it will become the historical reality in many people's minds and this is a Piry. The true story of the Salem witch-hunt teaches valuable lessons about the ways in which - human beings in groups persecute each other and the reasons they do so. The film begins with a group of adoles- cent girls running out of their wooden vil- lage houses into the woods. Led by a West Indian slave called Tituba, they gather round a fire and begin calling out the names of the boys they hope they will marry. Excitement mounts and soon they begin taking off their clothes and dancing naked. The youngest of them, Betty, begins i screaming hysterically and falls into a trance from which she cannot awake. Later, Samuel Parris, the pastor, accuses Tituba of witchcraft. After initial denials, she launches into a highly dramatic 'confes- sion,. Abigail has been watching all this and spots her opportunity. A long-term strategy already in mind, she leads the little group of girls who danced in the woods in hysteri- cal fits. They scream that they are being tortured by witches and start to name names.
The Salem witch-hunt did indeed begin With a small group of girls going into fits after dabbling in magic. But the girls were On trial: a scene from The Crucible' not teenagers and were aged 9, 11 and 12. Only one was older: Elizabeth Hubbard, who was 17. The occult activities were not voodoo, brought by Tituba from Barbados, but a method of fortune telling, using water and egg white, which had come with the Puritans from England. The girls became hysterical when the egg white they had dis- solved in a glass of water settled into the shape of a coffin. This happened in the depths of winter. Sub-zero temperatures would have made outdoor sorcery impossi- ble, even with clothes on. The accusations of witchcraft came not almost at once but weeks after the fits started, prompted by the questioning of adults, who had despaired of finding a physical cause for the fits.
These differences suggest other causes for the girls' hysteria than that of the emerging sexuality implied by the film. The girls were driven to fits by the repression, boredom and anxiety of a rigid Calvinist society in a New World in which they were allowed no autonomy or self-expression, and lived in constant fear of Indian attacks, illness and death and eternal damnation. All the girls were specially vulnerable. Abi- gail Williams and Elizabeth Hubbard were living with relatives other than their par- ents and were probably orphans. Their par- ents may well have been killed in Indian raids. Betty Parris was the daughter of the hellfire preacher Samuel Parris, and Ann Putnam of a seriously disturbed mother, who later, together with ten or more other women, girls and men, also had fits and saw visions. Most importantly, the girls' accusations against innocent scapegoats were not truly theirs but those of the adults around them. There are hints of this adult complicity later in the film but the dominating motive for the continuing hysteria remains Abigail's desire to destroy Elizabeth Proctor.
Miller, of course, had a political dimen- sion in mind when he wrote The Crucible. The play was inspired by the McCarthy witch-hunt of the Fifties against Commu- nists: But at that time historians had not yet unearthed the particular political back- ground to the persecutions of Salem. Both play and film show us the enormous power of fear to promote conformity to what is evil and murderous, to befuddle judgment and to silence scepticism. But it does not show us the intricate pattern of cynicism and self-delusion among reasonably decent people with vested interests, which makes possible and perpetuates any persecution of one group by another.
The film ends with John Proctor's hang- ing. Afterwards, these words go up on the screen: 'After nineteen executions the Salem witch-hunt was brought to an end, as more and more accused people refused to save themselves by giving false confessions.' Sad to say, such bravery was not, in fact, the reason the witch-hunt was brought to an end. The real reason was that the accus- ing girls and their mentors began over- reaching themselves, pointing the finger at the mightiest in the land. After they had accused the mother-in-law of one of the magistrates, the wife of an important cleric and the wife of the Massachusetts Gover- nor, the Boston elite ruled that 'spectral evidence' against accused witches was no longer admissible. 'Spectral evidence' was the claim by a witch finder that she had seen the 'spectre' of the accused, spectres being non-corporeal doubles of witches. These could fly, walk through walls, inflict grievous bodily harm and generally do the devil's bidding while the witches themselves stayed at home. Once spectral evidence was no longer admissible, the cases against the accused witches collapsed and the witch-hunt was over.
Frances Hill's book A Delusion of Satan, The Full Story of the Salem Witch Trials is published by Hamish Hamilton at £18; it comes out in Penguin on 27 March.
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