The witches Salem, 1692

SALEM, 1692: The dateline is as recognizable as any in American history. Fourteen women and five men, convicted of witchcraft, were hanged, and one more, a man who refused to plead, was crushed to death, a day's ride from Boston, in a lesser county of a marginal British colony - the periphery of the periphery, from the perspective of London, let alone of Paris or Canton. "The population of New England in 1692 would fit into Yankee Stadium today," Stacy Schiff writes. And yet the plague of witches that besieged Salem and its environs that year has spawned more than 500 books, nearly 1,000 dissertations and twice as many scholarly articles (written in at least 10 languages, including Korean, Turkish and Mandarin), to say nothing of the novels, plays, ballets and movies based more or less loosely on that more or less true story. By almost any measure, Salem's crisis is more gripping than it was important. "The Witches," Schiffs glib, compendious and often maddening account of the events of that fateful year, does a great deal to punch up the story, but little to explore and still less to understand its significance. An acclaimed biographer of subjects as diverse as Cleopatra and Véra Nabokov, Schiff here broadens her lens, like an artist turning from portraits to teeming allegories: Rembrandt taking up the work of Bosch. But a crowded canvas does not a probing history make, as "The Witches" powerfully demonstrates. Historians, like terriers, are diggers, but Salem offers stony soil for discovery. Still, scholars have offered astonishingly fresh interpretations from sources long since chewed over. In "Salem Possessed" (1974), Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum revolutionized the field of social history with their patient mapping of the domestic and economic tensions that, they argued, explained the outbreak. More recently, Mary Beth Norton's "In the Devil's Snare" (2002) advanced an electrifying analysis of the witch crisis as a reaction to the Indian wars that consumed northern New England in the 1680s and 1690s. Schiff has read these works, and much more; her endnotes show that she and her team of researchers - she credits eight of them in her acknowledgments - have mined the literature voraciously. Schiff also shows a reporter's instinct, referring to interviews and email exchanges with leading scholars. She leans most heavily on the monumental "Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt" (2009), a thousand-page collaborative editing project led by Bernard Rosenthal. The documents meticulously compiled by Rosenthal and his team invite new questions, but Schiff does not pursue them. Those who think of history as a process of detection leading to original interpretation will find little new, and less of interest here. Historians are also storytellers, of course. Schiff sets scenes brilliantly, evoking the bite of cold so deep that "bread froze in communion plates, ink in pens, sap in the fireplace." Her prose swelters with the stifling heat of a summer during which the region's crowded jails grew noisome, and bodies swung, several at a clip, from a gallows hastily erected in a pasture. "It was not a summer when you wanted to appear in your neighbor's dreams," she writes, in a muted Gothic that raises the hair on your neck. The book crackles with sonic detail, from the pitiful sound of Giles Corey's groans as his inquisitors heaped stones upon him to the "rustle of doubt" too quiet to make a difference. And everywhere there is darkness: in the Salem Village meetinghouse with its broken and boarded windows; in nights that were "crow black, pitch-black, Bible black"; and, in Schiff's telling, in the hearts and minds and maybe the souls of New England's people, who spouted "parched Puritan prose" through "pursed Puritan lips." Schiff is what the Germans call a Menschenkenner: a knower of human nature, and her book is a tightly plotted character study. She peppers her narrative with lively sketches of the leading players, whose skin she tries to inhabit from the inside out. Samuel Parris, the Salem Village pastor, is an "obstinate man with a rickety ego," the sort of fellow whose "proclivity for tidiness ... creates a shambles." He is "the only villager to whom we can put a face"; working from his miniature portrait, Schiff describes him - "Just this side of handsome, with crisp, angular features, wide-set eyes, dark hair to his shoulders and a voluptuous mouth." Yet "little trace" survives of Parris's wife, Elizabeth, "beyond her initial on a fragment of dark pewter plate." In Schiffs hands, even absences take on weight, creating a yearning for the lost faces, especially, of the girls and women from whom the judges heard so much that they scrutinized so little. Schiff writes as if she has met those men and women, and she wants us to know them as she does. But that same longing for transcendence invites a powerful current of anachronism. Too often Schiff takes minds out of time and time out of mind. Schiff goes out of her way to make Salem intelligible to a contemporary reader, often by way of analogies, many of them forced, some offensive. The indigenous warrior was "the swarthy terrorist in the backyard." The Indian captivity narrative was "a kind of martyrdom porn." Increase Mather's 1684 treatise "Remarkable Providences" was "an occult Ripley's Believe It or Not," while the durability of a witchcraft accusation "resembled an Internet rumor." Tituba, the enslaved woman Parris brought from Barbados to Massachusetts, was "a sort of satanic Scheherazade," whose tales of witchcraft, presented "in supersaturated 3-D," featured characters with "various superpowers." Repeatedly we redound to "The Wizard of Oz": The accusers embellished their tales, "nearly conjuring ruby slippers"; the ebbing of the trials was "like watching the Wicked Witch of the West molt back into Miss Gulch"; the responses of accused witches in the courtroom resembled "Dorothy's wide-eyed, back-in-Kansas 'Doesn't anybody believe me?'" From Oz to Hogwarts: Albus Dumbledore and Harry Potter get walk-ons, too. Much of this effort to drag the past into the present amounts to pandering, earnest if schlocky. But it is also, all too often, misleading. "As would be observed much later," Schiff writes, such spasmodic incidents as the Salem trials "were 'painful, grotesque, but a scandal was after all a sort of service to the community.'" The endnotes - as confusing as they are copious - reveal that the observer was not a historical actor, nor a later analyst of Salem, but the title character of Saul Bellow's 1964 novel "Herzog," as he considers giving his wife a good smack in the face. The testimony of the accused witch Bridget Bishop, Schiff tells us, "reinforces Somerset Maugham's quip: 'A woman may be as wicked as she likes, but if she isn't pretty it won't do her much good.'" It's a snappy line. But did anyone alive in 1692 believe any such thing? What did they mean by "pretty," and by "wicked"? Ruby slippers and flying monkeys come nowhere near the answers. The result of all this strenuous, pyrotechnic vivifying is curiously flat, as if all the color and the common sense resided in our world, while the Salem of 1692 was wan and dumb by comparison. The Puritans - who would have called themselves nothing of the sort - come off as cardboard characters, waiting for the magic wand of modernity to sweep the cobwebs from their cramped, dark lives. "A basic medical kit of the time looked little different from an ancient Greek one, consisting as it did of beetle's blood, fox lung and dried dolphin heart," Schiff writes, noting, with evident relish, that "snails figured in many remedies. They were at least easier to harvest than unicorn's horn." How rigid and trivial these people seem, how much less wise than we! How difficult it was, "plain-speaking John Procter would discover, to pry open a padlocked mind." Yet these closed little minds were, as Schiff acknowledges at other points, among the finest of their day. Poor Cotton Mather, cast by Schiff as a preening, ego-driven throwback who "reveled in the occult," was in fact not only a leading theologian, but also a fellow of the Royal Society of London - the first elected from the colonies - who helped pioneer the practice of inoculation against smallpox, thus transforming, quite literally, the face of the world, an achievement orders of magnitude more significant than his writings on witchcraft. The Massachusetts Bay Colony was, as Schiff concedes, arguably "the best-educated community in the history of the world before 1692." So it was during that annus horribilis as well. Theirs was, as she notes, a fretful, watchful culture. But it cannot fairly be said that "religion sometimes seemed a kind of halfway house between reason and superstition," because the wall between reason and superstition is ours; its seeming solidity organizes the modern West, making us feel safe inside its confines. Boyle, Newton and Locke, contemporaries of Mather's and, like him, harbingers of a new age of Enlightenment, all believed in witches and their awful works. Schiff makes a hero of Thomas Brattle, also a member of the Royal Society, who condemned the proceedings at Salem. But not even the most ardent rationalist lived in quite so disenchanted a universe. The confessors were not witches, the man of science argued. Rather, he said, they were "possessed (I reckon) with the Devill," who "imposes upon their brains, and deludes their fancye and imagination." The essential paradox of Salem - the very thing that makes it worth returning to - is that it took place so late, in the twilight of the long golden age of European witch-hunting, among sophisticated and ambitious people, who were in most ways radical and in some respects downright avant-garde. How could such a thing happen then, and there, among them? How do good people, reasonable people, do great evil? In Schiffs hands, the paradox becomes generic. But the agonies of Salem were bound in place and time, in ways that demand a knowingness about ideas, not just a feeling for faces and weather. For all her talents in sketching the who, what, where and when of the Salem trials, this vexed question of why is one that Schiff simply cannot manage. She makes a collage of previous scholars' answers. She proffers banalities: "Antipathies and temptations are written in invisible ink; we will never know. Everyone was on edge. Witchcraft localized anxiety at a dislocated time." She reverts to biography, dwelling on the vanity of Cotton Mather, and the "intransigence" of William Stoughton, chief justice of the special court that tried those who pleaded innocent, and found them uniformly guilty of consorting with the Devil. "Firm hands were in order," she writes; "Stoughton responded with clenched fists.... The only individual who could easily have slowed or reversed Salem's course, Stoughton elected not to do so." As if the doleful events of that terrifying year were, at root, failures of character, rather than parts of the intricate clock-works that constitute history. When "The Witches" tilts, as it does in fits and starts, from why Salem happened to why it matters, Schiffs tenuous grip on the period comes loose entirely. She hints at links between 1692 and 1776, calling the Salem trials "the Gothic genie-releasing crackup on the way to the Constitution." She tells us, "It is no surprise that the 17th-century Massachusetts authorities so often sounded like understudies for the founding fathers." If it were true, such a thing would be surprising indeed, both to the people living in Salem some four generations before the struggles that would produce the United States, and to the revolutionaries of that much later and far different age. There is also an attempt, no more grounded or sustained, to wring some sort of argument about female agency from the proceedings, which saw girls and young women take center stage in a play that was three parts contagion and one part deception. Women, Schiff writes, "fared poorly after Salem," as if they had somehow fared well during the trials in which they were afflicted, accused, jailed and hanged far more frequently than men, if at slightly less disproportionate rates than the norm where witchcraft was concerned. Equally risible is the claim that women quickly thereafter "went back to being invisible, where they remained, historically speaking, until a different scourge encouraged them to raise their voices, with suffrage and Prohibition." A large cast of female characters, from Queen Anne to Phillis Wheatley to Abigail Adams to Sally Hemings to Harriet Tubman, to millions whose names are less well known, would surely beg to differ. Schiff is good at people, and people make history. But history also makes people. To reckon with Salem, 1692, is to peer into a leaded 17th-century window, thick and cloudy and bubbled, not to stare, as Schiff does, in a mirror that reflects most brightly our own self-satisfied faces. ? The paradox of Salem is that its citizens were sophisticated, even avant-garde. JANE KAMENSKY is Pforzheimer Foundation director of the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America and a professor of history at Harvard. Her latest book, "Copley: A Life in Color," will be published next year.