The Salem witches (re)created as nineteenth-century: romantic heroines

G., Inês Tadeu F.

http://hdl.handle.net/10400.13/5318

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Authors

G., Inês Tadeu F.

Abstract(s)

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.