A Mirror for Witches

Rating:
Summary: A very good novel of the Salem witch hysteria
Review: Looking back through the perspective over three hundred years, it seems incredible that so many people could have been caught up in the ignorance and mass hysteria of the Salem witch trials in colonial Massachusetts, but this very fine novel by Esther Forbes (better known for her book for young people, "Johnny Tremain") is a well-researched and well-written account of the fictional Doll Bilby, rescued in France as a small child after seeing her own parents burned alive as suspected witches, and brought to America by a sympathetic ship captain. The shock of witnessing her parents' horrible deaths wreaks mental and emotional havoc on Doll that sets her up as one of the victims of the Salem witch-hunts. In an era when mental illness was often seen as being possessed by devils, and anyone possessed by demons must therefore be in league with them, Doll doesn't stand a chance. Forbes writes her book in the style of a 17th-century text and evokes both the time and the place so accurately that we feel we have been transported back to colonial times. Forbes manages to steer clear of any moralizing tone, and lets her story tell itself; her understated tone conveys a powerful message of a young girl destroyed by the combined forces of ignorance and prejudice. Reading this book, one realizes who was really doing the devil's work in Salem.

Rating:
Summary: A fascinating perspective on the Salem incidents
Review: The story is one often told: a high-spirited young girl rouses the jealousy and suspicion of her Puritan neighbors. Her non-conformity gives rise to an occassion for her to be accused as a witch, and once accused, she is doomed. The real genius of this book is not in the plot per se (though the addition of the lover who takes advantage of the situation to convince Doll that she really is a witch and he as a demon is her appointed mate is a plausible and original twist. It is often overlooked that many of the people who perished in the witch-crazes believed themselves to be guilty, whether because of mental illness, infectious mass hysteria, or the confusion brought about by their terror during interogation and torture.)

But, as I was saying, the real genius in this book lies in the narrative style and tone. Esther Forbes makes the risky but ultimately successful decision to structure this book like those of the era for which the events of the plot would be recent past: readers of Defoe's Moll Flanders will feel a jolt of recognition at many of the odd capitalizations and lengthy chapter headings. In keeping with this, the narrator appears always to disapprove of the 'witch' and approve of the pious townspeople who persecute her. However, Forbes' skill is such that the underlying message - that Doll has been entrapped and destroyed by prejudice, superstition, and spite - is always clear in the subtle ironies of situations. The result is that the tone throughout is one of impending doom, and the sense of the injustice done to Doll is far keener than it might have been had the narrator railed against it.

Rating:
Summary: Forget "Johnny Tremain" -- and forget Salem too...
Review: This is a haunting, exquisitely crafted, work of fiction, which should be judged on its own considerable literary merits rather than for its imagined relationship to any particular set of historical events. I'd especially recommend to it to those who have enjoyed "Lolly Willowes", by Sylvia Townsend Warner, or the work of Shirley Jackson ("The Lottery", "The Haunting of Hill House") Forbes does a marvelous job at creating a voice which belongs to the seventeenth century, while subtly incorporating a very modern concern with the darker impulses of human nature. (Come to think of it, fans of "A High Wind in Jamaica" should like this as well.) Forbes recreates the form, atmosphere, and tone of a seventeenth-century chapbook, in which the most uncanny events are presented as literally true, but the twentieth-century reader will have their own perspective on the short and tragic life of Doll Bilby, "who took a fiend to love."