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Reading the Salem Witch Child: The Guilt of Innocent Blood by Kristina West

2023; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 16; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/hcy.2023.0014

1941-3599

Darcy R. Fryer,

Gothic Literature and Media Analysis

Reviewed by: Reading the Salem Witch Child: The Guilt of Innocent Blood by Kristina West Darcy R. Fryer Reading the Salem Witch Child: The Guilt of Innocent Blood. By Kristina West. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. xix + 233 pp. Cloth $119.99, paper $119.99, e-book $89. In Reading the Salem Witch Child, Kristina West sets an ambitious goal: to "investigate the multiple, overlapping, and sometimes contradictory roles of children in the Salem witch panic of 1692" (vii), to apply a theoretical lens to the [End Page 152] concept of "child," and to examine how writers have envisioned child witches in a variety of texts that are more or less closely associated with the Salem witch crisis. The resulting book is complex and somewhat muddled. West persuasively demonstrates that young people were deeply involved in the Salem witch crisis, both as accusers and as accused, and that authors of both historical and literary works have continued to wrestle imaginatively with the idea of child witches, but the book's historical dimensions are not fully contextualized or convincing. One of the most valuable aspects of this book is the marshaling of evidence. On the historical front, West has identified fifty-one individuals aged seventeen or younger who participated in the Salem witch trials as either accusers or accused, as well as several more who were in their late teens. On the literary front, West has assembled an intriguing array of fictional works that, she avers, respond to the Salem witch crisis. These works range from the obvious—Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel The Scarlet Letter—to the more surprising—J.K. Rowling's screenplay Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them—and include several other books written for a young adult audience. Although some of the identifications and literary connections are tenuous, West's lists provide a thought-provoking starting point for exploration. West falters, though, in her grasp of the social context of late-seventeenth-century New England. Even as she acknowledges that it is quite hard to determine who counted as a child in this society, she deploys a simple, age-based cut-off of eighteen. (Chart 1.4 extends the age cut-off to twenty.) This age cut-off had little legal or social significance in seventeenth-century New England, and the very concept of an age-based transition to adulthood is inapt for a society in which social adulthood emerged gradually and depended on factors such as role in the household, strength and skill as a worker, and marital status more than chronological age. Late-seventeenth-century New Englanders typically spent several years working, socializing, and experiencing different communities after puberty and before settling down. Yet surprisingly, West offers no discussion of adolescence as a life stage distinct from childhood—even though most of the youthful accusers and accused were teenagers in the midst of this period of their lives. West mentions several classic analyses of the Salem witch crisis that are much more deeply grounded in the historical setting. These include Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum's Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft and Mary Beth Norton's In the Devil's Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692, as well as Holly Brewer's By Birth or Consent: Children, Law, and the Anglo-American Revolution in Authority, which delves deeply into the complexities of defining childhood in the seventeenth century. But she does so mainly to take issue with them, sometimes over minor points. [End Page 153] A deep analysis of the Salem witch crisis centered on its youthful participants seems like a worthwhile project. If it is to be historical, though, it must be carefully grounded in the extensive existing scholarship on family and community life in seventeenth-century New England and in a well-informed understanding of age, rank, and life stage in this society. If the analysis is to come from a literary-critical perspective, it needs to grapple with how much conceptions of childhood have changed since 1692—and had changed even by the publication of The Scarlet Letter in 1850. Reading the Salem Witch Child poses some provocative questions, but its conclusions do not shed much light. Darcy R. Fryer...