46 Veta Smith Tucker. Purloined Identity: The Racial Metamorphosis of Tituba of Salem Village.
p.628.
47 Arthur Miller. The Crucible: A Play in Four Acts, p.8.
Her ESP tells her
that Betty’s illness will bring her misfortune. When she is forced to confess it is
surprising that her testimony is so flawless. How could an uneducated slave express
her thoughts so fluently? The following section shows Tituba’s perfect performance:
Tituba pants and begins rocking back and forth again, staring ahead.
Tituba: There was four. There was four.
Parris, pressing in on her: Who? Who? Their names, their names!
Tituba, suddenly bursting out: Oh, how many times he bid me kill you, Mr.
Parris!
Parris: Kill me!
Tituba, in a fury: He say Mr. Parris must be kill! Mr. Parris no goodly man, Mr.
Parris mean man and no gentle man, and he bid me rise out of my bed and cut your throat! They gasp. But I tell him “No! I don’t hate that man. I don’t want kill that man.” But he say, “You work for me, Tituba, and I make you free! I give you pretty dress to wear, and put you way high up in the air, and you gone fly back to Barbados!”48
Here, we find that Tituba is ruthless in her anger and the reason why she performs
with a clear conscience is that she has neither privileges nor obligation to keep the
Puritan orders. What she wants to do is to defend herself. Being an uncivilized slave,
I believe that the self-protection power comes through her nature. The flowing
female sexuality and the vulnerable exotic color become a kind of shelter to let
Tituba loose herself from the gaze of her detractors. Tituba’s racial identity and
gender are a double-edged weapon that protects her from death. The fact that she is a
woman and a black makes the townspeople tolerate her manners more than other
girls. In addition, in the girls’ Sabbat, Tituba stands in a tricky position. She is just
like a priest when casting her “benison” on the girls who need the love miracles and,
at the same time, she is just like a mother who helps her daughters to be women. In
this sense, Tituba’s position even seems to be superior when she is asked to enchant
the girls. In other words, racial hierarchy does not exist in girls’ Sabbat. On the
contrary, Tituba is the oldest female and a mother figure to those girls. The Sabbat,
48 Arthur Miller. The Crucible: A Play in Four Acts, p.44.
in fact, transgresses national boundaries and race prejudice to weave mutual
experiences. Tituba administers her inherited talent to the girls and similarly the girls
provide the supportive atmosphere for Tituba. Tituba “is priest and altar and she is
the host with which all the people take communion.”49
Tituba, meanwhile, already metamorphoses into the image of a Black
Madonna. The Black Madonna is the sacred Roman Catholic icon who is portrayed
with black or brown skin. Obviously, Tituba has the same color as her. Moreover, it
is believed that the Black Madonna is the maternal and female archetype, or the
female divine, who holds the power of creation and destruction, for example,
healing and harming, protection and lack of protection. One of her immense power
comes from menstrual blood, that is to say, women’s menstrual blood has a power to
create and to destroy. Creation means fertility, and if the blood is touched by
someone, it would cause sickness and death, the destructive power. Furthermore,
“the original meaning of the Sabbath can be understood as "menstrual separation,"
particularly as related to the new moon”.
In this ritual, the girls
experience transformation through role playing.
50
49 Helen Cixous and Catherine Clement. The Newly Born Woman, p.31.
50 http://bailiwick.lib.uiowa.edu/wstudies/grahn/chapt01.htm.
In The Crucible, it is not hard to find out
that Tituba, in a large sense, is an emblem of the Black Madonna. For example, in
the scene of dancing party, Tituba gives Abigail the chicken’s blood to drink.
Though the blood is not Tituba’s own blood it could epitomize as menstrual blood.
In the very beginning of the ritual, the blood is a sort of might to fulfill Abigail’s
hope for being loved by Proctor. It is also blood that gives Tituba courage to fight
against the unwarranted sin. In regards with Tituba’s witchcraft, her performance is
certainly an outlet to demonstrate her innate feminine power, and the Sabbat is the
only stage which provides a space for Tituba’s fantasy, helping her escape from the
reality.
However, with the spread of the rumor, the blood becomes a curse and an
evidence for people to accuse her. Obviously, the blood destroys Tituba herself.
Abigail: She makes me drink blood!
Parris: Blood!
Mrs. Putnam: My baby’s blood?
Tituba: No, no, chicken blood. I give she chicken blood!
Hale: Woman, have you enlisted these children for the Devil?
……….
Abigail: She comes to me every night to go and drink blood!
Tituba: You beg me to conjure! She beg me make charm---51
No matter what women’s roles are in the rituals, the rituals bring them into a world
where they question male domination and understand their own power to overcome
the dominant patriarchal system. The rituals are a kind of performance, a theater, and
an initiation for the girls in The Crucible and for women in real life, and the rituals
are not only to invoke the mutual support but also to raise the consciousness in the
51 Arthur Miller. The Crucible: A Play in Four Acts, p.41.
group.
For the girls in Salem, the Sabbat is not only the utopia of sisterhood but also
the community of womanhood, and there is no hierarchy between the black slave
Tituba and the girls. They depend on each other, in this ritual and in the following
fake accusations, to keep covert the truth of mass hysteria. Equal partnership,
friendship, and ecstasy do exist in their utopia and thus a new subjectivity/
relationship is formed to threaten the patriarchy. “Sabbaths are imbued with the
symbolic significance of commensality: the witches constitute a counter-community
with its own idyllic commensality, a commensality which unites the participants.”52
'You acting womanish,' i.e. like a woman … usually referring to outrageous, audacious, courageous, or willful behavior. Wanting to know more and in greater depth than is considered 'good' for one … [A womanist is also] a woman who loves other women sexually and/or nonsexually. Appreciates and prefers women's culture … and women's strength … committed to survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female. Not a separatist … Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender.
They are no longer the “Objects” who disperse to men’s lives, and they are not
making a symbolic commotion about nothing but they are all “womanists.” The term
“womanist” is first used in Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: