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- The woman-as-witch in nineteenth-century american women´s historical fictionPublication . Gonçalves, Inês Tadeu Freitas; Costa, Jaime Becerra da; Abreu, Maria Zina Gonçalves deThe counter-memorialisation of the women perceived as witches in the Salem witch hunt of 1692 in New England began soon after the happenings were over, in non-fiction, namely in history tracts. However, it was only by the nineteenth century that the cultural memory of the woman-as-witch of Salem became more broadly memorialised, using American fiction as its medium. This dissertation addresses the question of the counter-memorialisation of the woman-as-witch of Salem as Romantic heroines in nineteenth-century Romantic historical fiction, particularly by lesser-known American women authors. Thereby I aim to bring to light their contribution to advancing and establishing the (trans)cultural memory of the woman-as-witch of Salem. A cultural descriptive analysis of the corpus of literary mnemonic (re)imaginations is used to outline the transcultural, and counter-memory characteristics of Salem’s woman-as-witch as (re)created by the authors studied. Our selected corpus includes the following Romantic historicals, listed chronologically: Delusion, or The Witch of New England by Eliza Buckminster Lee; Philip English’s Two Cups by M.B Condit; Salem: A Tale of the Seventeenth Century by D.R. Castleton; South Meadows by Ella Taylor Disosway; Martha Corey: A Tale of the Salem Witchcraft by Constance Goddard Du Bois; Dorothy the Puritan: The Story of a Strange Delusion by Agusta Camplbel Watson, and Ye Lyttle Salem Maide: A Story of Witchcraft by Pauline Bradford Mackie. By complementing the existing comparative and contrasting studies, which assess mainly the historical accuracy of the literary representations of the events and key figures of the Salem witch hunt of 1692, our study goes beyond its history or the fiction about its history. It discusses its cultural memory instead.
- New “Old” woman-as-witchPublication . G., Inês Tadeu F.
- The (Re)imagined Shades of Alice Gray: The Counter-Memory of a Woman-as-Witch in Stacey Halls’ The Familiars (2019)Publication . Gonçalves, Inês Tadeu FreitasHistorical fiction is a way of dealing with painful pasts and traumatic events as counter-memories. Long-forgotten events are (re)created in a safe space in historical fiction. Set in seventeenth-century Lancashire, in her modern historical fiction The Fa miliars (2019), Stacey Halls narrates Alice Gray‟s painful past as a woman-as-witch into existence. Halls achieves it by (re)imagining Alice Gray‟s plight within the historical context of the Pendle Hill witch-hunt in 1612 Lancashire. Not only does Halls give Alice her historical voice back, but she sets the historical record straight by counter-memorialising Alice Gray as a woman-as-witch, i.e., a seventeenth-century woman othered and presumed to practise witchcraft, in this instance, merely for being an impoverished unmarried woman and a midwife. In this way, Halls‟s narrative invites us to empathise with Alice‟s plight, to understand the injustices she faced, and to appreciate her resilience. Besides, (re)creating Alice‟s witchcraft story, Halls fleshes out her heart-wrenching emotional turmoil. Moving away from the cold historical recorded facts, Halls interweaves Alice‟s troubled personal past as an abused young woman and a grieving and loving stepmother with the unfortunate contemporary events of the Pendle Hill witch hunt. As a result, we are offered a more than plausible (re)imagined rationale for Alice‟s witch hunt predicament and acquittal, which cannot be found or is even hinted at in the historical records. Thus, Halls culturally endows Alice‟s seventeenth-century marginalised historical counterpart with a contemporary gender-empowered mnemonic (re)imagined counter-memory. Moreover, Hall‟s active remembering of Alice Gray politically (re)contextualises and (re)frames this woman-as-witch of the Pendle Hill witch hunt of 1612 previously wanting. Also, the (re)imagined counter-memory of Alice Gray challenges the dominant historical narrative and underscores historical fiction‟s power in reshaping our understanding of the past. Ultimately, Halls endears and humanises this woman-as-witch of Pendle Hill and provides us with the many shades of Alice Gray.
- The Salem witches (re)created as nineteenth-century: romantic heroinesPublication . G., Inês Tadeu F.In the nineteenth century, women remained invalidated as authors, and their work was often reviewed as unremarkable. Despite being dismissed both as authors and historians, they engaged creatively in retrieving the archival narra tives about the Salem witch hunt of 1692. They contributed, on the one hand, to the preservation of a transcultural memory of the women as witch from Salem and, on the other, to the construction and recreation of the countermemory of the Salem witch hunt as a significant cautionary tale in nineteenth-century America and beyond. This chapter discusses the relevance of nineteenth-century histori cal fiction as a medium for the portrayal of the countercultural memory of the woman as witch and her recreation as the romantic witch-heroine in the historical novels Salem: A Tale of the Seventeenth Century (1874) by D. R. Castleton, the pen name of Caroline Rosina Derby, about Rebecca Nurse and Martha Corey: A Tale of the Salem Witchcraft (1890) by Constance Goddard Du Bois. However, the ap propriation of these Salem women as witches by Castleton and Du Bois goes be yond mere historical representations. Nurse and Corey are mimetically recreated and represented as either victims of discrimination or romantic woman-as-witch heroines. The work of Castleton and Du Bois further suggests that, like their counterparts, the authors were firmly present in the nineteenth-century network of American fictional “herstories” as both writers and vicarious characters. While endeavoring to counter the dismissal of the woman as witch from Salem’s her story, Castleton’s and Du Bois’s additional depictions of her as a romantic heroine offered both themselves and their contemporary female audience a stirring solace to slacken the clasp of their own “corseted” standing in society. Indeed, Castleton and Du Bois, like several others, may have also made the nineteenth-century American woman more mindful of the likelihood of a shift in her own social and cultural status quo.