The Salem witch trials took place over the course of nine months in 1692 in a small Massachusetts village. Twenty men and women (plus two dogs) were eventually executed, most by hanging. It’s a comparatively short episode in American history, and yet we remain transfixed. The trials, in the popular imagination, have spread to encompass the entire state of Massachusetts, where witches were burned en masse.
In The Witches, Schiff transports her readers back in time to colonial America and forces them to “return the humanity” to the historical figures involved. Massachusetts was still covered with forests. At night, the world was very, very dark. Even candles and lanterns left shadows; you could never be quite sure what you were seeing. (Schiff notes that one house was actually “haunted” by a teenage boy who liked to throw things around the room and out the window while his grandfather was deep in prayer.) The European settlers were terrified of attacks by Native Americans. This was not an idle fear: several Salem residents had survived massacres in other towns. There was also a sense of unease throughout the Massachusetts colony—in 1692, it received a new charter that drastically reduced civil liberties, much to the dismay of the colonists.
Life in Salem was particularly difficult for young girls. “It was an extremely patriarchal society,” Schiff points out. Many of the girls could read, but they were never taught to write or even sign their names. Women had no voice in the community. Most of them spent their adult lives taking care of children and grandchildren, if they survived childbirth. “The girls had to watch their mothers having kids,” Schiff observes. “They were terrified.” Many of the afflicted girls had lost one or both parents—they had to deal with evil stepmothers, or they had no male protectors. Many orphaned women became servants in households where their masters felt free to beat them.
And then, for a few months, they became celebrities. The Witches makes it clear that the trials were definitely the best show going in Salem. The tavern did tremendous business on trial days. There seem to be some striking parallels to the 21st-century obsession with Facebook and Internet celebrities. (The day I interviewed Schiff, an Australian teenager made the news for renouncing her Instagram fame and claiming it was all a sham.) “There’s this increasing paranoia and sense of surveillance and the politics of fear,” Schiff says. “How much does Google know about you? Are you being tracked? It’s an easy way to feel haunted.”
