American History to Reconstruction

¶ … witchcraft trials of Salem, and those that occurred on the other side of the Atlantic as well, have long been framed and understood as misogyny made visible in law. On that level, Karlen's The Devil in the Shape of a Woman adds little to scholarly analysis on the subject. However, Karlen's research presents evidence related to core Puritan beliefs that predicated the witchcraft trials, and discusses some of the economic and demographic contexts within which the trials occurred.

The book relies heavily on primary source evidence, but the author's biases and points-of-view are also plainly evident throughout the text. Karlsen does accomplish the primary goal of elucidating the intersections between gender, class, and social power. In so doing, the author substantiates related research on the subject. Fundamental to an understanding of the witchcraft trials that took place in the 17th century is an understanding of how, why, and when they came about. Karlson shows that there are two separate issues at stake.

One is the prevailing belief about witchcraft, which is always framed within a Christian perspective for the Puritan. Another is the prevailing belief about the role, status, and nature of women in Puritan society. By the 17th century, witchcraft became a stigmatizing label that was essentially synonymous with deviance, criminality, and sinfulness. However, witchcraft and witch were labels that applied substantively if not exclusively to women. "The witch, after all, was the behavioural opposite of the stereotypical role model of the 'good wife.'"[footnoteRef:1] [1: Louise Jackson.

"Witches, Wives, and Mothers." Women's History Review. Vol. 4, No. 1, 1995, p. 63] However, Karlson avoids oversimplifying the witchcraft trials by depicting them as solely as the arena in which men acted out their fantasies of aggression and dominance. The witchcraft trials and the sociological and political factors they represented were far more complex than basic displays of male hegemony.

As Swales and McLachlan point out, the accused were not mere scapegoats, and to present them as such strips the women further of their power, places the male center stage, and may even go so far as blaming the victim. Narratives related to witchcraft trials should focus on the women themselves as actors, rather than depicting them as passive recipients of harsh and unjust treatment.

In fact, women were frequently participants on the side of the prosecution, and sometimes incriminated themselves in ways that reflected the supremacy of Puritanical Christian beliefs. Based on trial records, Jackson notes that there are often "references to infanticide, suicide and possible abuse."[footnoteRef:2] Some women may indeed have been punishing themselves for abuses they had committed, or were accusing their fellow females of witchcraft rather than stating the more concrete accusations like abuse or murder. However, such cases would have been isolated.

More likely, the tendency for some women in the Salem community to speak on behalf of the prosecution would stem from basic social pressures, social psychology, and sociology. Many women in Salem may have been eager to prove their allegiance to the commonly held precepts of Christian Puritan identity. Those precepts would have included a fear of God and a simultaneous fear of the Devil.

As long as priests and other powerful leaders of their communities asserted that the women on trial were engaging with the Devil, pious members of the community would have been loathe to disagree. Whether they believed it or not, members of the Salem community were pressured to support the views of the people in power. [2: Louise Jackson. "Witches, Wives, and Mothers," p. 63.] It is possible, if not likely, that the trials were reactions to deep social and political transformations.

Karlsen certainly makes a case that the trials did represent a backlash against progressivism. Some of the women on trial were outspoken members of the community, whose values and beliefs might have threatened the social order. Witchcraft is a term nebulous enough to signal its potential to be abused and applied to any situation seemed demonic or devilish enough.

Threatening the social order in any way, such as by subverting gender roles, claiming that women and men were equal to one another, or demanding rights, would have been labeled as witchcraft. Witchcraft had already been designated a crime; it was also a convenient blanket term with an emotional and religious appeal. In other words, it was not necessarily possible to put a woman on trial for being uppity, but it was possible to put one on trial for being a witch.

Women did not have access to economic or political power in Puritan society. They were also socially handicapped, and lacked the ability to garner widespread support for their causes.[footnoteRef:3] Concurrent with the imbalance of power between men and women was the imbalances of power between landowners and the poor. As idealistic as Puritan society may have been, it also lacked some of the core features of a modern democracy such as freedom of speech and of the press.

In fact, there were no local magazines or newspapers at all in Puritan New England, and news spread primarily via gossip and other unreliable mechanisms.[footnoteRef:4] Bereft of democratic rights and powers, women had little recourse against their accusations. Centuries before the Bill of Rights were penned, the Salem witchcraft trials did not provide the accused with the basic rights to fair trials including the ability to shift the burden of proof to the courts.

The witchcraft trials were largely extensions of a medieval past, as opposed to being harbingers of an enlightened future. Accusations would have been arbitrarily made without just cause, no due process ensued during the trial, and the guilt or innocence of the defender would have been arbitrarily decided. Decisions, as Karlsen points out, would have been made in conjunction with prevailing social norms as opposed to the facts of the case, evidence, or reason. [3: Matthew Madden. "The Devil in the Shape of a Woman." [Review].

Retrieved online: http://salem.lib.virginia.edu/karlsenrev.html] [4: Mary Beth Norton. In the Devil's Snare. ] The women who found themselves in the awkward position of accusing their neighbors or themselves being accused would have been reacting to prevailing social norms. Their only frame of reference would have been to contextualize moral transgressions as having supernatural origins.[footnoteRef:5] A more serious underlying problem with the Salem witchcraft trials was the fact that they revealed the conflict within Puritanical society with regards to the role, status, and nature of women.

For one, Puritans struggled to distance themselves from their Catholic brethren and did not want to believe that women were "innately more evil than men."[footnoteRef:6] Perceiving themselves are more spiritually enlightened than their Christian counterparts in Britain, Europe, and in other colonies, the Puritans also put men on trial for witchcraft, as Karlsen points out in The Devil in the Shape of a Woman. However, there was no social.