Posted on by TracyC

Witch Week

Witch Week by Diana Wynne Jones, 1982.

This is the third book in the Chrestomanci series.  In this series, there are many different worlds, and in each of those different worlds, there is a copy of every person.  Different versions of our world can differ dramatically in their history, and individual people’s lives can differ dramatically between the worlds. However, there is one person in each generation who has no duplicates in any of the other worlds.  This person is called the Chrestomanci.  All of the talents, abilities, and lives that would have been spread across the other worlds are now centered on that one person, giving that person, literally, nine lives.  The Chrestomanci fills an important role, being better able than anyone else to travel across the dimensions and between worlds, and he acts to keep a balance between them and make sure that the different worlds keep their proper course.

This story takes place in a world where witches are being burned at the stake in the 1980s. At a boarding school for troubled children and orphans, everyone is aware of what an accusation of witchcraft can mean. One day, one of the teachers finds a note in a social studies book saying that one of the students in class 6B is a witch. It’s a serious accusation, but how seriously should anyone take it? This is, after all, a school for troubled children, and children in general play pranks. Mr. Crossly finds the note worrying. Some of the teachers are convinced that this is just a prank or someone playing up for attention. Miss Hodge says that there is a sick mind in class 6B. Mr. Wentworth, whose own son, Brian, is in that class, says that he’s sure that all of the kids in class 6B have sick minds, but that’s just typical. He thinks it’s best if the teachers take no notice of the note. But, the note is correct. There is a witch in class 6B.

Strange things start happening in class 6B and to the students in that class. A flock of assorted birds swarms into their music class. In gym class, Nan Pilgrim can’t manage to climb the rope, no matter how hard she tries. When she and two other students are called to have lunch with the headmistress, Nan finds herself making disgusting comments about the food without her even wanting to say anything, but for some reason, the headmistress can’t hear a thing she says, even though the other students can. Then, it is revealed that Nan’s real name is Dulcinea, which is the name of a famous witch. Could Nan secretly be the witch in class 6B?

Although she can’t openly admit it, Nan is descended from the famous witch Dulcinea, who tried to stop the persecution of witches, and she is also what is called a “witch orphan”, meaning that her parents were witches. However, Nan insists that she’s not a witch herself, and Nan isn’t the only suspicious student in the class. Everyone there is troubled in some way. Brian Wentworth is often picked on for being the son of a teacher. Simon Silverson, Dan Smith, and Theresa Mullet are bullies. They are all eager to point fingers at Nan for being a witch, but could that be to cover up for themselves?

Charles Morgan was sent to the boarding school because his parents think that he is troubled and disobedient and a bad influence on his younger brother. In a way, he is very troubled, but he can’t explain what is really troubling him. When he was younger, he witnessed a witch being burned, something that still traumatizes him. Then, he helped another witch who was being hunted to escape. He can’t admit to his parents that he helped this witch because it was illegal, but the witch promised him good luck for doing so. So far, he hasn’t noticed any good luck, and he feels terrible every time he hears about another witch being burned, thinking that it might be his witch. It all makes him angry and depressed, and he hates the boarding school and everyone there.

Miss Hodge tries to investigate the students by having them act out witchcraft inquisitions. Since most of the children don’t know what happens at an inquisition and aren’t very good actors, most of them are terrible at it. But, she comes to think maybe Charles is the witch because he gets angry at Nan over all the disgusting things she said at lunch and taunts her about them in a way that makes it sound like he’s saying some kind of spell.

When Miss Hodge tries to tell Mr. Wentworth about it, he shrugs it off because he also heard the things Nan said at lunch. Mr. Wentworth interviews Nan about why she said all those things at lunch, but she can’t explain herself. She doesn’t know what made her say those things. Sometimes, she just can’t seem to help herself, and she felt almost possessed. Mr. Wentworth knows about her family’s history and warns her to be careful.

Then, when Charles is trying to escape from some bullies, he somehow manages to turn himself invisible. He doesn’t understand it, but he tries to do something else magical as a test. Since Dan Smith hid his spiked shoes earlier, Charles tries making Dan’s spiked shoes disappear. To Charles’s horror and astonishment, he succeeds! Somehow, he has apparently been a witch the whole time without knowing it. Charles thinks maybe he did some of the other strange things without knowing it, too. He’s always heard that witches are evil, and he thinks maybe he has secretly been evil this whole time and had better confess. An accidental mix-up when he goes looking for the headmistress stops him from confessing immediately, but it leaves him unsure what to do.

Mr. Wentworth has a private conversation with Charles about Miss Hodge’s suspicions about him. He knows what Charles was really talking about when he was arguing with Nan, but he points out to Charles how bad it might sound to someone who didn’t know what he was talking about. Information about witches and the past witch uprisings is drastically censored. There is almost nothing about it in the school library, but Mr. Wentworth understands the situation and explains it to Charles in a no-nonsense way. Nan’s ancestress, Dulcinea Wilkes, had been an advocate for witch’s rights in the 18th century, particularly the right not to be murdered. She said that witches couldn’t help being witches because they were born that way, and it wasn’t fair for them to be murdered for something they just couldn’t help. She said that witches would only use their powers in good ways if people would stop hunting them and burning them, but the murders and burnings continued, and Dulcinea lost her temper. She retaliated with violent spells that frightened people so much that they also murdered Dulcinea by burning her. In remembrance of that, people still continue to burn effigies of her, like they do of Guy Fawkes. Mr. Wentworth says that he thinks what happened to Dulcinea was unfair, but he is worried about his students because there has never been so much stigma against witches at any earlier point in history. Although his students wouldn’t remember it, there was a major witch uprising around the time they were all born. The news of this uprising was largely hushed-up, but the witches attempted to take over the entire government. The revolutionaries were all civil servants, and they were all burned when the uprising was crushed, but the government has been paranoid about anyone with any sign of witchcraft since. When they learned that the leader of the uprisings started showing signs of witchcraft when he was about 11 years old, they even started allowing children to be arrested for witchcraft, even on slight suspicion. The inquisitors have powers that go largely unchecked. Mr. Wentworth knows that any of his students can be hauled away and executed with little recourse.

Even though Mr. Wentworth is concerned with protecting Charles, Charles gets angry with him for giving him a black mark as a reminder to control his behavior, and he glares at Mr. Wentworth. It’s a terrible mistake. It turns out that Charles has the evil eye, and it seems like he accidentally makes Mr. Wentworth disappear. Although Charles tries to pretend like everything is normal, he is desperate on the inside. Soon, someone will realize that Mr. Wentworth is missing and that Charles was the last person to see him. He even tries burning his own finger on a candle to remind himself that burning hurts, and he needs to control himself to avoid being burned to death. When he tries to fix what he’s done with magic, Mr. Wentworth does return, but everyone’s shoes mysteriously disappear.

To Charles’s surprise, the memories of the witch he saw burned and the witch he helped to escape stop bothering him so much after he knows and accepts that he is a witch himself. It’s like he’s always known, inside, that he would be a witch, and once he becomes reconciled to his true nature, he becomes calmer and more self-confident. He knows that he can’t stop being a witch. He can only try to avoid being caught. However, it turns out that he is not the only student who has witchcraft, and when the desperate students seek help or a method of escape from this prison-like school, they accidentally summon Chrestomanci to straighten everything out.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies, including some in different languages).

My Reaction and Spoilers

Alternate Worlds

Like all of the books in the Chrestomanci series, this book takes place in an alternate world or alternate reality. It explores not only the suspicion and paranoia that go with witch hunts but also the mechanism by which these alternate worlds or realities are created. When the students who have realized that they are witches try to escape, they are given a spell that calls Chrestomanci from his world to theirs. Chrestomanci is accustomed to being summoned to random places on short notice (it’s just one of the hassles that come with the job), but he finds this particular world puzzling. He knows from the similarities between this world and others in the series of worlds that contains his own that he must be in that particular series of worlds, but he recognizes immediately that there is something wrong with it. It has way too many similarities with the world that is “our” world in the series, but yet, there shouldn’t be any witch trials or burnings in the 1980s. He explains that alternate worlds are created when there is some major event that has only two outcomes with an equal chance of happening. Every time that happens, the world splits into two separate worlds where each of the possibilities happen. Because this world is so much like the world that is “ours”, he knows that whatever event caused the split happened fairly recently in history, but for some reason, the split wasn’t complete. There is no real magic in “our” world, but this odd, dysfunctional, split-off world is full of it.

By talking to the students about what they know about the history of their world, Chrestomanci is able to pinpoint the event that caused the problem. As with other Chrestomanci books, Chrestomanci doesn’t just magically solve the problem all by himself, but once he understands the situation, he shows the students at the school where the problem lies and what they need to do to fix it themselves, making use of their own powers, and even some of the mistakes they’ve made, to set their world right and re-integrate their world with “our” world. Once their world is repaired, it’s as if all the witch trials never happened. People who were burned are alive again, and people who were in prison are living perfectly normal lives. The children must sacrifice their magical abilities and all or most of their memories of their old lives to join with our world, which some of them are initially reluctant to do, but once they do it, all of their lives change for the better. Orphans have their parents back, the school is now a day school instead of a boarding school where the children were basically prisoners, and the children are all much friendlier toward each other now that they are no longer part of that toxic atmosphere, where suspicions always surrounded them and everyone is afraid of exposure.

Themes and Spoilers

Parts of the story were stressful because of the bullying among the students and the constant threat of imprisonment or death for any child who was proven to be a witch. Most of the adults are not that concerned with the welfare of the students because this entire society is engulfed with paranoia, and everyone is desperate to protect themselves at all cost. The adults are often so preoccupied with saving themselves that they would be willing to throw the children to the wolves rather than face imprisonment or death themselves. The major exception is Mr. Wentworth, who tries to warn children who show signs of witchcraft that they need to be careful. His efforts to protect the children are touching because he has more to lose than some of the other teachers who play along with the politics and paranoia of their society. (Spoiler!) Mr. Wentworth and his son Brian are both witches, and Mr. Wentworth is being blackmailed for most of his salary by the headmistress. Mr. Wentworth advocates self-control to the students as the best way to avoid being caught, but it soon becomes apparent that nobody with witchcraft abilities can fight using them forever. That’s why some of the children’s abilities come out unconsciously, without them even being fully aware of what they’re doing. That’s where the mystery of the story comes in.

Chrestomanci books always contain an element of mystery in some way or other, and from the beginning of the story, there are the questions of who wrote the note about there being a witch in class and who the witch is. We never learn who wrote the note (I don’t remember that being definitely revealed), and in the end, it doesn’t really matter. When Charles realizes that he is a witch, that seems like the answer. However, Charles is not the only witch in class. As one of the other students points out, all of the weird things that have been happening at the school are very different in character, so there is more than one person involved. By the end of the book, it is revealed that (spoiler) the vast majority of the students at the school are witches. Some have been doing magical things unconsciously as their powers have started asserting themselves, and some have done things on purpose because they know they can. Chrestomanci realizes that many more people in their society in general are witches than these paranoid people ever suspected, and witches are only regarded as a minority because of the atmosphere of fear they live in. Everyone has been trying so hard to conceal any sign of abnormality that they all have a warped view of who they all really are and what their society is actually like.

I couldn’t help but notice that, witch or not, absolutely nobody in this society can be called an innocent person. Everybody is doing something illegal, unethical, or simply deceptive. They all have secrets, and they all do things to cover up what they’re doing. Even non-witches are often doing horrible things that they have to cover up. The apparently sweet and proper headmistress is actually a cold-hearted blackmailer. Teachers are manipulative for personal and professional reasons. The so-called “normal” (or “real”, as Nan thinks of it) children are all either secret witches or just horrible bullies and rotten human beings. Like their elders, the “normal” children are sneakily manipulative and practice blackmail and brutality against the other students, knowing that’s the way to get to top of their social heap. As I said, the entire society is toxic, not just the school, and everything the children do is a reflection of their elders (and vice versa, when you think about it). Grown-up witch hunters are like overgrown child bullies, and people like the headmistress probably started their blackmail and manipulation at a young age, just like the students, as tools of survival and self-promotion in this cold, toxic, pitiless world.

The normalization of the toxic parts of this world is both stressful and worrying. People can adjust to many awful things if they are not given any alternative, and that’s what this dysfunctional world represents. There are moments of lightness, though, and some characters are more caring than others. The story is told from the point-of-view of different characters, and much of this book is a psychological study in the different ways people deal with bullying, suspicion, and paranoia. As I said, Mr. Wentworth risks himself sometimes to help students in danger and make them see the seriousness of their situation. Some of the students band together to try to help each other survive their mutual risk, while others are more self-centered, prepared to throw each other under the bus to save themselves. It’s a relief to see all of that end when the world is set right, but it occurs to me that the story has exposed all of the characters’ true characters, what each of them are capable of doing in extreme circumstances. The extreme circumstances brought out the worst in some characters, while others were more creative and caring in spite of everything.

Posted on by TracyC · 2 Comments

The Witch of Blackbird Pond

The Witch of Blackbird Pond by Elizabeth George Speare, 1958.

This is a book that is often used in American schools or recommended to students, but because of the complexity of the story and dark subject matter, I wouldn’t recommend it to young children. It’s more appropriate for middle school level children and older.

The year is 1687, and a sixteen-year-old girl named Kit (short for Katherine) Tyler is traveling by ship from Barbados to the Connecticut Colony. Kit was born in Barbados, where her grandfather owned a plantation, which he received in a grant from the king. However, Kit was orphaned at a very young age, and now, her grandfather has died, so Kit is on her way to live with her Aunt Rachel, her mother’s sister, who is married to a Puritan and is living in Connecticut.

In Barbados, Kit was part of a prominent, slave-owning family, but in Connecticut, she’s just another girl. The people in Connecticut are Puritans, which puts Kit on the opposite site of a political conflict. Her father’s side of her family in Barbados was on the side of the Cavaliers, who supported the king against the Puritans, or “Roundheads” in the English Civil War (1642-1651). Because her Aunt Rachel has married a Puritan, Kit’s Connecticut relatives are on the side of the Roundheads. When Kit first sets off on her journey, she has very little idea of the difference between the two and what it’s going to mean for her future life.

People in Connecticut do things differently, and from the very beginning, Kit strikes them as strange and unpredictable. She is impulsive, and even her grandfather used to warn her about thinking before she acts. Kit is accustomed to living in luxury, giving orders to slaves, and generally being allowed to do as she pleases. It comes as a shock to her that not only can she no longer do these things, but others may heap harsh judgement on her for behaving oddly, even when she does it in the name of a good cause.

Kit gets her first impressions of what life in Connecticut will be like when she talks to the ship captain’s son, Nat Eaton, and an aspiring clergyman named John Holbrook. John Holbrook is the son of a tanner who has had to work by day and study by night since he was young, and he struggles to complete his education because his family doesn’t have enough money to send him to college. Because Kit’s grandfather was wealthy, Kit has never really had to think much about money before. She never had to work or even do chores when she was young, and when she tries to talk to John Holbrook about the books that she’s read, he disapproves of her choice of reading material because he thinks that reading should be reserved for the serious study of religion.

Kit’s naivety and views of slavery are challenged when Nat Eaton talks her about the horrible conditions slaves endure when they are transported from Africa to the Americas and how many of them don’t survive the experience. Kit is accustomed to owning slaves and having them work for her, but just as she has never had to think about the cost of the fancy clothes and other luxuries that her grandfather gave her, she realizes that she’s never given a thought to where slaves come from and how. Kit learns that, while there are people in the North American colonies who own slaves, there are others who vehemently disapprove of the practice, including Nat Eaton. He says that if his family had dealt in slaves, they could have a lot more money, but they’re doing fine carrying more humane cargo and passengers.

Note: Racial issues are more of a side issue than the main part of the story, and this is the part of the story that addresses the issue the most. I can’t say that Kit ever comes to reverse her early view of slaves completely, but this is the beginning of a revelation to her, one of the first indications to her that the life she previously lived is actually the exception instead of the norm, and not everyone looks favorably on people who live the way she used to live. None of the main characters in the story are black.

Kit is dismayed that there seem to be few topics from her old life (politics, money, slaves, the luxuries she owned, the relative freedom she had, not having to work, having plenty of time to read whatever books she liked whether they were useful or instructive or religious or not, etc.) that don’t cause some awkwardness, discomfort, or disapproval from the people who live in the community she is about to join and who will now be playing significant roles in her life. People don’t seem eager to be friends with her, and they look at her suspiciously as a stranger.

As her ship nears its destination, a little girl on board loses her doll overboard and Kit jumps into the water to get it back, alarming everyone. Most of the other women and girls don’t know how to swim, and they think it’s strange when Kit says that her grandfather taught her how to swim when she was little. The sea around Connecticut is too cold for swimming, so they’re not used to the idea of recreational swimming. (This time period was part of the Little Ice Age, so the area was even colder then than it is today.) Some people also consider that one of the tests for witchcraft involves seeing if a woman could float in water, and they begin whispering that Kit might be a witch.

When Kit finally arrives at the town where her Aunt Rachel and Uncle Matthew Woods live, Wethersfield, she is disappointed to see that it’s much more rural than the community where she used to live. The streets are not paved. Kit is dressed in an overly-elegant way for the community and even for her own family. When she finally meets her aunt, she thinks that she must be a servant at first because she is dressed so plainly. Aunt Rachel is happy to see her, and Kit meets her cousins, Judith and Mercy. Judith is very pretty, and Mercy walks with crutches. Kit is surprised at the very simple way they live, and they are taken aback at her fine clothes and all of the possessions she brought with her in her trunks from Barbados.

Her relatives are stunned when they find out that Kit plans to stay with them. They had not even expected her to come for a visit, and they had not heard about her grandfather’s death. Uncle Matthew asks why she didn’t write to tell them that she was coming, and Kit admits that she was afraid to write to them because she didn’t want them to tell her not to come and she didn’t have any other choice but to come to them. After her grandfather’s death, the overseer of the plantation sold off the entire crop and kept the money for himself, and all of the other plantation owners in the area presented Kit with debts her grandfather had with them that needed to be repaid, so she was forced to sell off the slaves and almost everything else to pay them. (From Kit’s description about the sudden influx of supposed debts after her grandfather’s death, I wondered whether at least some of these supposed debts were fraudulent and if Kit was simply too young and naive to challenge them, being accustomed to her grandfather handling all of the family’s money and business arrangements, but I can’t really be sure. She doesn’t go into detail about what proof the creditors offered of the debts or if she simply took them at their word, and its only real importance is in helping to provide her with a reason for going to live with her relatives.) Aunt Rachel says that Kit did the right thing by repaying the debts and coming to them, but Uncle Matthew seems less sure. He disapproves of Kit’s grandfather for being a royalist and seems reluctant to take on a now impoverished relative accustomed to a luxurious life.

Kit tries to share some of her fancy clothes with her cousins when they admire them, and Judith and Mercy love the new clothes, but Uncle Matthew puts a stop to it. He disapproves of Kit’s clothes because they are just too fancy and he thinks they encourage vanity. Uncle Matthew is very direct with Kit, explaining to her that people in this family and in this community live a very different life from the one she is used to, and she is going to have to adjust to their ways if she wants to live with them. Adjusting to this new life, which is so different from everything she knew before, is a major struggle for Kit throughout the story.

Privately, Kit confides in Mercy that she had another reason for wanting to leave Barbados. There was a man there who was a friend of her grandfather’s. Her grandfather also owed money to him, but he would have forgiven the debt and paid the other debts if Kit had agreed to marry him. Other people in Barbados said that it was a smart match and that she should marry him, but he was fifty years old, and Kit couldn’t bring herself to marry someone so much older than herself. That’s why she wanted to leave Barbados in such a hurry and didn’t want to wait even long enough to write to her relatives. (The issue of the girls’ marriage options and what they mean for their family and future lives is a major focus of the story. It is taken for granted throughout the story that all of the girls will get married at some point and that their primary future occupation will be being someone’s wife. However, what being a wife means for them depends on who they marry, what their husband’s occupation and position in society are, and the type of lifestyle they can support.) Mercy says that Kit did the right thing by leaving Barbados and that her Uncle Matthew will get used to her being there if she can demonstrate that she can be useful (an important factor in the occupation of being a wife or daughter of a Puritan family).

Being useful is a problem for Kit, who is unaccustomed to doing work of any kind. She doesn’t know how to do even basic chores. People need to explain to her how to do everything, and even then, Kit is extremely clumsy and lacks the patience to follow their instructions properly. Judith loses her patience trying to teach her and isn’t happy to learn that they’re now going to have to share a bed. Kit appreciates Mercy for her understanding and her quiet strength. Even though some people disregard Mercy because of her disability, Kit knows that Mercy has valuable skills and that she can work as hard as anyone. Life with the Woods family is a monotonous series of chores that previously Kit would have thought of only as labor for slaves that she would never have to do.

Then, there are religious differences between her and her relatives. When Kit lived with her grandfather, they never attended regular church services, but Uncle Matthew’s Puritan household is strictly religious, so Kit is expected to go to church with the family. At the church services, she sees that other people in the community are wearing clothes that are about as fashionable as her own, so not everyone in the community is as strict in their dress as the Woods family is. However, Kit is bored by the services (which last all day), the other parishioners don’t seem very friendly, and it seems like word has spread that Kit is a charity case that her aunt and uncle have taken in. However, she does attract the attention of a young man named William Ashby, and Judith meets John Holbrook for the first time.

As Kit spends more time with her relatives, she discovers that Uncle Matthew is a local selectman but that he has political disagreements with some of the other men in town, and some of them think that he is less loyal to the king than he should be. Kit also becomes involved in the romantic interests of her cousins and confronted with some choices she needs to make about her own future. William Ashby is from a wealthy and socially prominent family, but Uncle Matthew dislikes the Ashby family for being Royalists. Kit learns that Judith was interested in William Ashby before she came, and she worries that Judith will be angry with her for attracting his attention, but Judith tells her not to worry about it because she is now in love with John Holbrook. Kit still feels uncomfortable at William’s sudden interest in her because she has only just come to live in the area, she knows very little about William, and the two of them don’t seem to have much to talk about during his visits with her. However, Aunt Rachel and her cousins encourage her to pursue the relationship because William Ashby’s family is prosperous and he can provide a good living for her. Kit is flattered by William’s attention because he admires her whether she is “useful” or not. With his family’s money and position, William Ashby could give Kit a life similar to the one she had before with her grandfather with nice clothes and relative freedom from routine household chores.

However, Kit’s views and ambitions in life begin to change when she starts helping her cousin Mercy to teach young children in the community’s dame school. Basically, a dame school was when a woman of the community would teach children basic lessons, such as reading and writing, informally in her own home for a fee. (For more information, see Going to School in 1776.) Mercy explains that after children learn to read in the dame school, they can go on to the more advanced lessons in the community’s formal grammar school. Kit always enjoyed reading and discovers that she likes working with the children. As a dame school teacher, Kit earns fees from the students and performs a useful service that she enjoys much more than weeding gardens, scrubbing floors, and other household chores. Kit was not raised to have a profession, but there is more than one kind of work in the world and even in this small community, and this particular kind of work suits her. It pleases Kit that the students appreciate her and enjoy her lessons and stories.

The girls’ romantic dreams and life decisions as they come of age and begin making lives for themselves in the community could make for an interesting historical novel by themselves, but there is more to this story. This is a witch trial story. Kit has already had people making witch comments about her because of her odd behavior, but through her work at the dame school, she demonstrates other odd habits that cause her to get on the wrong side of community members. When she gets the idea of having students act out the story of the Good Samaritan instead of simply listening to it, the situation gets out of hand. She is criticized for using the Bible for play-acting, and the dame school is temporarily closed. Then, Kit befriends Hannah Tupper, a somewhat eccentric widow who lives in an undesirable area near Blackbird Pond that often floods. Nobody understands why she wants to live out there, all alone with her cats, and people in the area say that she’s probably a witch. The truth is that she is known to be a Quaker, and the Puritan community doesn’t like to associate with her because of her religion. Kit likes Hannah because she is kind and understanding to her and calms her when she is upset, but her family doesn’t like her to associate with Hannah, saying that evil can seem innocent at first. Kit also realizes that, while William Ashby admires her, he is also scandalized by her behavior. Hannah, on the other hand, is supportive of Kit and helps her continue to secretly teach a young girl whose mother doesn’t want her to have reading lessons.

Kit’s friendship with Hannah gets her into trouble with community and even puts her life in danger. People in Wethersfield start to die from a disease that has struck the community, and Hannah is blamed. Kit risks her life to save her from an angry mob. Although she successfully gets Hannah to safety, Kit is also accused of witchcraft and put on trial.

I often find stories of people falsely accused frustrating, but this one has a good ending. There is a note in the back of the book that explains the historical background behind the story. Kit Tyler is a fictional character, but there are some real historical characters in the book, and the political situation involving the colony’s charter is real.

The book is a Newbery Award Winner. It’s available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).

My Reaction

The time period of the story is a time of witchcraft suspicions, like those that sparked the infamous Salem Witch Trials in Massachusetts (1692-1693). Historically, suspicions of witchcraft and actual witch trials were more likely to occur in communities suffering from internal divisions and instability, especially when the community suffered some further calamity with no apparent explanation, such as a sudden epidemic of illness (possibly ergotism in Salem), heaping panic on top of existing community tension and anger. Then, the community would take out its feelings on someone who was generally disliked by a majority of community members, usually targeting someone who lacked resources to fight back against the allegations of witchcraft, like a poor woman or a widow. Basically, the community wanted someone who could serve as a convenient scapegoat (as described by the Salem Witch Museum) or whipping boy for the commu,nity’s roiling emotions and real problems that they either didn’t want to address or lacked the means to address. Even when it became obvious in hindsight that they had killed innocent people, most of those involved wouldn’t even suffer feeling guilty or bad about themselves for murder because there was always Satan and his trickery to blame for their own actions and decisions. No one could prove that they hadn’t been honestly deceived by the devil, so they would not be held responsible by their friends, who liked them personally and had been actively involved in the entire episode themselves. The community would already be accomplished at mental blame-shifting, so their minds would be relatively untroubled by personal responsibility. Knowing that they didn’t experience regret or remorse for their actions, that they felt right and good about their personal choices, doesn’t help the people they killed, the families of their victims, or people vicariously experiencing the injustice through history or historical novels. Miscarriages of justice are deeply frustrating, which is why I don’t normally like this type of story, although in the past, I’ve been fascinated by the historical background of this incidents, which is why I wrote a couple of papers on witchcraft trials, both American and European, in college, back when I majored in history. (Don’t make the mistake of saying anyone was burned at the stake for witchcraft in America. It’s not true, not even at Salem. The accused were hanged, and some were pressed to death with heavy rocks, but nobody was burned at the stake for witchcraft in the American colonies. That happened in Europe but not America, and it always annoys me when people get that wrong.)

In the book, the community in Wethersfield has all of the historical elements necessary for producing a witch hysteria. From the beginning, Kit notes the the political divisions in the community. Particularly, her uncle is at odds with other prominent community members about specific local issues and the amount of loyalty owed to the king, and there is also a conflict over the colony’s charter. Even though Kit would be the side of those favoring the king, more so than her uncle, the feelings that community members have about her uncle’s political position would give them a natural prejudice and suspicion toward what they would view as the strangest and most problematic member of her uncle’s family. Then, there is a sudden sickness that causes community members to die. The community also has an outcast who would make a convenient scapegoat, Hannah Tupper. When Kit first hears about her, her cousin Judith tells her that some people already think that she may be a witch. As both a widow and a Quaker outcast, she would have been unable to save herself from the townspeople without Kit’s help. When Kit provided that help, and the community lost their first choice of scapegoat, they picked Kit as their second choice, an acceptable substitute.

On the one hand, my own anger at the injustices of the past leads me to return the witch hunters’ judgement with some harsh judgement of my own. Some of the world’s most judgemental people are so unaware of any other emotions besides their own that they are shocked to discover that other people actually have minds and feelings and an equal ability to look back at them and assess what they see. I suppose that these people wouldn’t have guessed what future people would think when they looked back at them because their views of themselves wouldn’t match what independent observers, seeing their actions and the consequences across time, would see. Human beings often have internal fantasies about themselves where they are more brave, clever, attractive, and on the side of moral right than they actually are, and I think the witch hunters are a definite example of that. I don’t like people who wriggle out of personal responsibility, no matter why they do it, and if I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times, I only consider people as “good” as their own personal behavior and the way they affect other people around them. Nobody’s “good” simply because they say they are or like to think of themselves that way, especially if their real actions say otherwise. Actions speak louder than words. There are many things about the people in the community in this story (as well as in real historical communities) that don’t live up to my high personal standards. Offending me isn’t a criminal offense, and there aren’t many consequences for doing it, but it does provoke a lot of griping.

I think that there’s little point in having standards if you don’t actively live them, and although I think some of that sentiment would have been in the witch hunters’ thoughts, I further believe that everyone has an equal responsibility for both the standards they have and how they choose to demonstrate them. If people would give more thought to the “hows” of their actions and the consequences of what they do, I think there would be fewer problems in the world in general. I also think letting people get away with harmful behavior and not at least clearly criticizing it sets a terrible precedent that is likely to lead to further harm. In the book, once Kit’s name is cleared, she is inclined to forgive her accusers, although she is offered the opportunity to charge them with slander. I understand the reasons why Kit would decide not to pursue these charges, but at the same time, there is clearly one person in the story who was more responsible than the others for the charges brought against Kit and who has also been shown to be hostile toward her own innocent young daughter, and this person does not receive punishment for her actions in this story. I did feel better that the father of the child, realizing that his wife has been wrong about their daughter, falsely labeling her as a half-wit and keeping her from the education that she should have, stands up for the child and her continued education in the end, but I still kind of wanted to see the rest of the community give the mother more of a direct, official warning or censure to bring it home to her that there would be consequences for further misbehavior on her part because of the serious consequences, even possible death, that she almost imposed on others. Sometimes, I feel like this sort of conflict comes to an end too quickly and easily in stories with kind of an air of “We’re all good here now” without some of the underlying problems really being confronted or resolved. It happens sometimes like this in real life, but it’s not very satisfying, and just because some people say “We’re all good here now” doesn’t mean that everything is really fine and everybody involved is really fine. I’m never comfortable with pretending that things are okay that are clearly not. The mother of the child seems to have some mental issues of her own and some kind of emotional conflict over her own child that gives her a warped view of reality. That isn’t fully explained or resolved in the story, probably because the other characters don’t fully understand it, either.

Perceptions are important, but a person’s perceptions don’t stop reality from being, well, real. I know that, in real life, all or many of the supposed witch threats probably seemed real to the individual accusers in the middle of their personal panic, but the reality of the situation is that they did a great deal of harm to innocent people who were unable to stop them. In fact, they specifically targeted people they knew couldn’t stop them, which sounds pretty calculating. They did it because of their own personal problems and the demons that lived in their own minds, whether or not those mental demons had any supernatural help. It’s frustrating because you can’t communicate completely rationally with determinedly irrational people any more than you communicate can with dead people or fictional people and convince them to change their minds. There are times when there’s just nothing you can do when there is no way for the other person to receive new information or they’re just determined not to and no way to help someone who not only doesn’t want help but doesn’t think they need it and would be deeply offended and suspicious at the mere offer. On the other hand, the psychology of such incidents is kind of interesting.

Years ago, I attended a talk given by a team of professional ghost hunters where they said that people who call them to investigate hauntings in their homes tend to be people who are already troubled about something else in their life, such as money problems, marital problems, health problems (mental and/or physical), problems with their kids, or some combination of these. Then, when something happens that seems strange and inexplicable, they get startled by it because they’re already on edge. People who are more secure in their lives and are generally happy might brush off one or two odd things that happen as just rare oddities and forget about them, but people who are already upset about something else tend to seize on them. They become hyper-vigilant. They start noticing more and more odd things that they might otherwise have overlooked and draw connections between these things in their minds, actively looking for more. Soon, they have themselves convinced that they’ve got a full-blown haunting in their house, when at least some of what they’ve experienced is just the ghosts in their own minds. In one case, they said that a man was troubled by a mask he bought at a garage sale. He thought it was cursed because, soon after he got it, a bunch of bad things happened to him. (As I recall, his wife divorced him, he lost his job, and he had health problems.) The ghost hunters said, “To be fair, we don’t think that this mask was cursed when the man bought it. We think it became cursed because he bought it, and he continually blamed it for every bad thing that happened to him around that time, even though these things were probably going to happen anyway.” This is basically the same process that leads to witchcraft trials, except that in witchcraft trials, it happens on a larger scale. Witchcraft trials involve whole troubled communities instead of just a single troubled household.

This still happens in modern communities, but in places where people don’t believe in witches, it’s more likely to take the form of a kind of moral panic, where people get upset about a possible infiltration or excess of people seen as some kind of disruptive moral deviants, rather than a witch hysteria. In both cases, the community experiences extreme fear or paranoia about some perceived threat, but in moral panics, the perceived threat comes from some part of human society, like Communists during the Red Scare or some variety of criminal, not a supernatural force. Actually, I believe that we’ve been living in a state of moral panic in the US for at least the last few years, probably longer, on more than one front. I can’t help but notice that much of what’s been happening in modern times fits all the criteria and follows the typical stages of a moral panic, particularly the parts about the “hidden dangers of modern technology“, a belief in “a ‘hidden world’ of anonymous evil people“, and fear of an “evil stranger manipulating the innocent” (which, weirdly, is what I think is behind the willingness of some people to believe conspiracy theories in the first place as they accept stories that come from apparent “friends”, or at least people who look like people they might want to get a beer with or something – some people use them as their primary source of media, thus checking another box in the requirements for a moral panic and leading up to the final point). In my experience, the fear is particularly about evil people who want to “control” others and tell them what to do, the ultimate community boogeymen where I live. I’ve heard a lot about it for years from real people who habitually like to tell me what to do and how I should feel about things themselves.

This is kind of a digression from the story, but I put it here to illustrate that we might not have to question how people can get themselves into community hysteria over perceived threats, most of which prove to be not that threatening in the long term. Most people might not believe in witches anymore, but they’ve found plenty of creative substitutes for the same basic process over the years. A complete list would take too long to compile, but if you spend any amount of time on social media, you can come up with several “evil” or “deviant” groups or ideological concepts that people hate and fear in the space of a few minutes. Thanks to modern technology, you don’t have to wonder what’s going on in people’s heads. You can Google it. Many people will just tell you right up front what boogeymen are lurking in their minds, and they’ll gladly share that information with untold numbers of total strangers through Twitter, Facebook, and Quora, feeling validated and supported if faceless usernames agree and spread their stories, no matter why they do, and often raging against sinister forces trying to spy on them at the same time. It’s not rational, but it is recognizable. I put it to you that a few moments of honest self-reflection, considering not how you feel but what you’re actually going to do and what it’s going to mean in real terms, can be the stitch in time that saves nine. There are dangers to modern technology, but I don’t think they’re really that hidden. They’re the same dangers human society has caused itself in the past, just much faster, and they come mostly from the demons in the minds of the people involved. There is nothing online that wasn’t designed, written, promoted, spread around, and ultimately accepted by individual humans. It’s when people lose touch with the realities of the situation and the consequences that their actions have for real people around them in the real world that I really worry. It seems to me that blaming the Internet or the media for the things people have decided to do themselves has become the 21st century version of “The devil made me do it.”