“When I stepped out into the bright sunlight, from the darkness of the movie house, I had only two things on my mind: Paul Newman and a ride home.”
While this quote from The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton has nothing to do with 17th century witchcraft allegations, I feel like it is applicable to a memorable moment during my trip to Salem.
When I stepped onto the cobblestone street of Salem from the Town Hall, I had only two things on my mind: lunch and shopping. Ironically, while I somehow ended this trip without purchasing a single trinket, my friends left packing rubber-ducky soap and authentic Mongolian boot daggers. Now, back to the story: Defaulting to our unspoken group leader, Lauren, we found ourselves on a mission to track down a small Greek cafe recommended to us by the ever reliable TikTok. Every step the juxtaposition of Salem became more apparent. Here were these buildings, all intricate trim and red brick, packing $5 fortune tellers and special-FX. I couldn’t take a step without running into some sort of horror movie character. Pennywise, Michael Myers, witches, Joe Biden, a labubu. We stopped to take pictures with most of them, laughing as we planned out what to eat. But it was as the eerily animatronic-looking Frankenstein jumped out and scared me so badly that I screamed that I realized that fear would always be intertwined in Salem’s history.
Here was this town, whose history was rooted in fear. I could argue that the majority of the characters’ decisions in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible were motivated mainly by fear. Reverend Parris backs up Abigail’s accusations to protect his already poor reputation in Salem. Neighbors turn against each other so as to not be accused of witchcraft first. Abigail Williams, a teenage girl wrapped up in an affair with a man twice her age, forced to sell out innocent people. And if you look where this all stems from, you find a group of girls trying to find fun in a town set on oppression.
To set the scene: In the very woods they’d been warned against for being home to the unfamiliar and uncontrollable, the daughters of Salem gathered. The only ones who truly know what happened out there were forced to lie to protect their own lives. But for the first time in their lives, they were free. As I imagine it, these girls were drunk on the danger of it. They were breaking every rule they were raised to adhere to: dancing, nudity, conjuring. From an outside Puritan perspective, this was clearly the work of the Devil. To these girls though, this was likely their first experience of autonomy. In Salem, Massachusetts, 1692, a woman’s fate was decided solely by a man and the church. Abigail is painted to be the villain of this story, all for being put in an impossible situation, because she wanted to experience the inherent fear that comes with freedom.
Reverend Parris backs up Abigail’s accusations to protect his already poor reputation in Salem. Neighbors turn against each other so as to not be accused of witchcraft first. Abigail Williams, a teenage girl wrapped up in an affair with a man twice her age, forced to sell out innocent people. And if you look where this all stems from, you find a group of girls trying to find fun in a town set on oppression.
So Salem culture became rooted in fear. The Puritans feared everything. The world outside of Salem, the Native Americans, God, the Devil. Below the surface though, they were scared of opinions. They are the colonial high school girl, constantly worried what other people think. I can relate. The Salem witch trials might have been about cleansing the town of impurity, but they were fueled by public opinion. As I’ve gathered from our reading, there developed this obsession with uniformity. Nobody wanted to be perceived as different or strange, because it was basically a death sentence. This is where I tie in my own experiences.
My Salem experience, while brief, was that the people there relished in being different. From the intricate costumes to the wicca enthusiasts, you could’ve convinced me I was in a metropolis city with the variety of people I met. The Puritans would’ve dropped dead. It’s my theory that this is the Salemites way of reclaiming their history. It is without a doubt important to honor the innocent who were unjustly killed during the witch trials, but by reclaiming fear and using it to their advantage, the people of Salem are able to create a new legacy for themselves, one that can live intertwined with the one of the Puritans. Fear is now used not as a weapon, but as a tool.
This tool, which has now given a group of school kids from New York stories of monsters and murderers walking alongside them, which they will carry with them long after this year is over.
At the core of this story will always be teenage girls. And from dancing on the wharf despite the dirty looks of passersby to cutting our curfew so close that we had to run to make the bus, I have never understood the girls of The Crucible more, laughing under the Salem moon.
