Ask the Author: Stacy Schiff
Answered Questions (10)
Stacy Schiff
Whenever we cast aspersions on or prosecute a particular demographic we engage in a kind of witch hunt. Have you heard the one about Muslims and terrorists? A parallel with Salem: Witches often appeared suspect in advance of their crimes. In other words, mysteries and misfortunes were attributed to whoever people already were inclined to accuse. The closest modern parallel to Salem is probably the McMartin daycare scandal in 1980s California.
Stacy Schiff
Almost every part of it continues to intrigue me. How a group of exceedingly wise, erudite, civic-minded men can go so wrong fascinates. So does our inability to escape our preconceptions. I was intrigued by the role Cotton Mather plays behind the scenes and the prominent role the girls are accorded on center stage. They are treated as witchcraft experts! Also fascinating: Who the heroes will turn out to be. And how suggestive -- if not delusional -- we all are. I'll stop now.
Stacy Schiff
What the girls experience could very well have been what we formerly called hysteria and today call conversion disorder. It would explain the convulsing, the sense of suffocation, the crawling, prickling sensations on the skin. But without the girls to examine, we have no firm diagnosis. Whatever caused their suffering allowed them to express in fits would they could not communicate in words. And whatever it was in no way impaired their health; they remained robust when not convulsing. No medical condition explains the synchronized hallucinations.
Stacy Schiff
A number of things, the first of which was that they seemed so urgently relevant. As much as the Salem shelf sags already, there was no modern narrative account of the witchcraft epidemic; most of the books are thesis-driven. I felt it was possible to burrow further into the early American mind, to make this cast of characters feel less one-dimensional. We have a great deal on paper of what they hoped for and what they feared; they reported as much to the court, when they described their conversations with the devil.
Stacy Schiff
It's crucial, I think, to follow the material. If you don't allow it to shape the book, you wind up shaping --possibly mangling -- the material. "Strong curiosity, weak affiliations," E.B. White counseled. That said, I wish I knew how to outline. Every once in a while I attempt to outline the next few stops in a chapter. Inevitably I start out in the right direction to wind up somewhere entirely different.
Stacy Schiff
Indeed and on many fronts. With this book it's the material that does NOT conflict that indicates something is amiss: When three convulsing girls see the same woman perching on a beam of the meeting house, working her witchcraft, you have some explaining to do. Some of the greatest conflicts come in Cotton Mather's accounts of the trials and in his accounts of prior witchcraft epidemics. It is fascinating to see an eminent minister attempting to shape the story, with selective passages and creative elisions.
Stacy Schiff
Given how little we have of Cleopatra -- one word in her handwriting, if indeed that is actually her handwriting -- almost anything would help. Some of what we know about justice in her day we know from legal documents that survived inside of mummified crocodiles. So more crocodile mummies, please! For years archeologists have searched for her tomb; it would not resolve the mystery of her death, but if found, it would tell us something of her life.
Stacy Schiff
On every level we've mangled the history. Partly I think the myths have grown up because no one wanted to talk about the trials for so long; partly I think the myths have grown up because we can't separate a Halloween witch from a 17th century witch; partly I think the myths are there to assure us that this happened in a far-away place very little like our America. Which of course isn't true. In short: Witches didn't burn, they hanged. They were not misfits, old women, midwives. Men hanged, as did young women. (And no midwives.) We have entirely forgotten the heroes. The most enlightened men in Massachusetts actively encouraged the witchcraft crisis.
Stacy Schiff
Usually I am in the archives for about 3 years before I begin to write. Other authors seem able to research and write simultaneously; I can't seem to see the shape of a book until the bulk of the archival work is done. And I never seem to finish with the archives; once I've begun writing there's always something I want to read again, or want to research more fully. Or at least I convince myself that there is: Research is thrilling. Writing is hard.
Stacy Schiff
Would could be better than a compliment masquerading as a question? Thank you for the kind words. I spend a ridiculous amount of time in the archives reading around my subject, trying to figure out what she saw when she got out of bed in the morning, what preoccupied her during her day, and what she dreamed about at night. It would be nice to think all that prowling about -- most recently, in 17th century America, a shadowy, chilly, dislocated place -- paid off.
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