Abstract
This chapter will expand on the exploration of the relationship between child witch and accused adult family members in the Salem witch trials. Beginning with an analysis of what constituted a family in late seventeenth-century Salem, I take the premise of the ‘leaky female’ body proposed by theorists such as Mary Douglas and Judith Butler and expand it to discuss how children and other family members are, by definition, implicated in and part of the mother-body, with a particular focus on the relationship between the mother, the child, and the familiar. Further, this chapter will explore how these assumptions have been brought to bear on narratives of the afflicted girls and their place within the family structure.
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Notes
- 1.
See Chap. 1 for details of analyses on New England childhood.
- 2.
C. John Sommerville (1992) The Discovery of Childhood in Puritan England (Athens and London: The University of Georgia Press).
- 3.
Anna French, ed. (2020) Early Modern Childhood: An Introduction (Oxon and New York: Routledge).
- 4.
Boyer and Nissenbaum, Salem Possessed, p. 145.
- 5.
Hite, p. 89.
- 6.
Cotton Mather, A Family Well-Ordered, p. 10.
- 7.
Morgan, pp. 75–76.
- 8.
Morgan, p. 78.
- 9.
Richard Weisman (1984) Witchcraft, Magic, and Religion in 17th-Century Massachusetts (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press), p. 82.
- 10.
Boyer and Nissenbaum, Salem Possessed, p. 149.
- 11.
Freud’s construct of the uncanny is, indeed, one that revolves around the home, with the German word ‘unheimlich’ the opposite of ‘heimlich’ [‘homely’]. Freud, S. (1919). The ‘Uncanny’. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVII (1917–1919): An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works, pp. 217–256.
- 12.
Deborah Willis, (1995) Malevolent Nurture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press), p. 6.
- 13.
Cotton Mather, Wonders of the Invisible World, p. 69.
- 14.
Judith Butler (1993) Bodies That Matter (New York: Routledge), p. 25.
- 15.
Such problemtisation of the woman’s body in relation to witchcraft continues even now. On the day of writing, January 27, 2020, President Trump’s spiritual advisor, Paula White, called for ‘all Satanic pregnancies to miscarry right now’; Satanic in the sense of belonging to mothers who do not support Trump. Both women and children continue to be condemned and have their bodies appropriated for political purposes in terms of witchcraft.
- 16.
Roach, The Salem Witch Trials, pp. 18, 59.
- 17.
Purkiss, p. 120.
- 18.
Cotton Mather, A Family Well-Ordered, p. 14.
- 19.
Purkiss, p. 108.
- 20.
Purkiss, p. 131.
- 21.
Rosenthal et al., p. 660.
- 22.
Rosenthal et al., p. 541.
- 23.
Rosenthal et al., p. 540. Mary Toothaker, in contrast, tried to protect her daughter, Margaret, by blaming her husband for reading with the child and claiming that she was unsure if she had signed the devil’s book, although she named many others, including her sister and nephew, who did. Rosenthal et al., p. 492.
- 24.
Cotton Mather, Memorable Providences.
- 25.
Renner, p. 95.
- 26.
Jacqueline Rose (2014) ‘Mothers’, London Review of Books, https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v36/n12/jacqueline-rose/mothers [accessed 31 March 2020].
- 27.
Lawson in Burr, p. 154.
- 28.
Rosenthal et al., p. 257.
- 29.
It is worth noting that physical examinations also revealed accused men to have teats for sucking familiars: George Jacobs Sr. was said to have three teats on his body, although George Burroughs had none. Rosenthal et al., p. 517.
- 30.
Shakespeare, Macbeth, p. 46.
- 31.
Purkiss, p. 135.
- 32.
Rosenthal et al., p. 574.
- 33.
Howe (2019) The Daughters of Temperance Hobbs (New York: Henry Holt and Company).
- 34.
Schiff, p. 243.
- 35.
Rosenthal et al., p. 198.
- 36.
Hite, p. 144.
- 37.
Starkey, p. 207.
- 38.
Baker, p. 234.
- 39.
Rosenthal et al., p. 674.
- 40.
Rosenthal et al., p. 675.
- 41.
Rosenthal et al., p. 676.
- 42.
Hite, p. 151.
- 43.
Schiff, p. 307.
- 44.
Calef in Burr, p. 361.
- 45.
Calef in Burr, p. 371.
- 46.
Upham, p. 384n.
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West, K. (2020). Disturbing Boundaries: Witches, Mothers, and the ‘Leaky’ Family. In: Reading the Salem Witch Child. Palgrave Historical Studies in Witchcraft and Magic. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49304-2_5
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