The author of The Crucible has his say.
Oct. 15, 1998
New York Times
Salem Revisited
By ARTHUR MILLER
A number of commentators have seen a resemblance between the extravaganza
around President Clinton and the witchcraft hysteria in Salem 300 years ago.
There are some similarities and some important differences.
The tone of iron vituperation and the gut-shuddering hatred are reminiscent of the
fury of the Salem ministers roaring down on the Devil as though they would grind
their heels into his face. Though there were never any witches while there certainly is
a Bill Clinton, the underlying emotions are not all that different -- the evident wish is
to end the evil one's very existence.
In both cases there is a kind of sublime relief in the unearthing of the culprit's hidden
crimes. The Salem church, which effectively controlled the village, had been so
fractious that minister after minister had fled the pulpit or been dismissed. But with
the discovery of Satan in town, the people understood in a flash what the source of
their troubles had been, and a new era of social peace opened before them -- provided
they could root out the diabolically corrupt. Suddenly paranoia ruled and all were
suspect and no one was safe.
What is very different now is the public reaction. Rarely does just about every
newspaper and television commentator agree so thoroughly. Be it The New York
Times, The Washington Post, or the television and print tabloids whose normal
business is reporting news of the gutter, media outlets all became highly moral in a
single stroke, as though an electric charge had passed through iron filings, instantly
pointing them all in the same direction. Not often does one sinner raise so many so
quickly out of their moral slumber.
But what is strange and interesting is how the public, that great stallion that is so
often led to water, this time dipped its head but refused to drink, perhaps scenting the
stale smell of political manipulation.
It may also be that with so many American marriages ending in divorce, and most of
those surely involving a mate in the wrong bed, an unspoken self-identification with
this kind of marital misery has restrained people from losing all sympathy for their
leader, disappointed as they might be in his behavior.
Despite the lashings of almost all the press and the mullahs of the religious right, the
people seem largely to have withheld their righteous anger. This did not happen in
Salem, where the members of the clergy, who were also the leaders of the
community, were strangers to mercy and indeed to common sense, and helped drive
the public into a lethal panic.
There is, I think, a parallel in the sexual element common underlying each
phenomenon. Witch hunts are always spooked by women's horrifying sexuality
awakened by the superstud Devil. In Europe, where tens of thousands perished in the
hunts, broadsides showed the Devil with two phalluses, one above the other. And of
course mankind's original downfall came about when the Filthy One corrupted the
mother of mankind.
In Salem, witch-hunting ministers had the solemn duty to examine women's bodies
for signs of the "Devil's Marks" -- a suggestion of webbing, perhaps, between the
toes, a mole behind an ear or between the legs, or a bite mark somewhere. I thought
of this wonderfully holy exercise when Congress went pawing through Kenneth
Starr's fiercely exact report on the President's intimate meetings with Monica
Lewinsky. I guess nothing changes all that much.
In any case, those who think it trivial that Clinton lied about a mere affair are missing
the point; it is precisely his imperious need of the female that has unnerved a lot of
men, the mullahs especially, just as it has through the ages. This may also help to
account for the support he still gets from women. He may be a bit kinky, but at least
he's not the usual suit for whom the woman is a vase, decorative and unused.
Then there is the color element. Clinton, according to Toni Morrison, the Nobel
Prize-winning novelist, is our first black President, the first to come from the broken
home, the alcoholic mother, the under-the-bridge shadows of our ranking systems.
He is also the most relaxed and unaffected with black people, whose company and
culture he clearly enjoys.
His closeness to blacks may, in fact, have contributed to the peace in the streets we
have been enjoying these past few years. But it may also be part of the reason for his
estrangement from his peers, and it may have helped uncork the sewer of contempt
upon his head, the Starr report.
The Devil in Salem was white, but two of the few black people in the village were his
first suspected consorts, John Indian and Tituba. Both were slaves. Tituba was
tortured into naming women she had seen with the Devil, thus starting the hunt on its
way. The conflation of female sexuality and blackness in a white world is an old
story, and here it had lethal results.
In Clinton's case, there comes an overflowing of rage reminiscent of that earlier
explosion. If he lied under oath he of course broke the law, but it seems impossible
that the Founding Fathers would have required Congress, as a part of his punishment,
to study what parts of a woman's body the President had touched. Except for this
hatred of Clinton, which sometimes seems to mount to a hellish fear of him as
unclean, a supernatural contaminator, it would surely have sufficed for Starr to report
that he had had an affair and falsely denied it under oath.
The Salem paroxysm left the town ravaged, accursed and almost deserted, a place
where no one would buy land or farm or build for 100 years. Salem's citizens had
acted out the mythology of their dark subconscious and had eaten their own -- all in
the name of God and good morals. It was a volcanic explosion of repressed steam
that gave people license to speak openly in court of what formerly would have been
shamefully caged in their hearts -- for example, the woman who testified that her
neighbor flew in through her window one balmy night and lay upon her and had his
way. Suddenly this was godly testimony, and the work of heaven was to kill the
neighbor.
Salem purified itself nearly to death, but in the end some good may have come of it. I
am not historian enough to assert this as fact, but I have often wondered if the witch
hunt may have helped spawn, 100 years later, the Bill of Rights, particularly the Fifth
Amendment, which prohibits forcing a person to testify against himself -- something
that would have stopped the witch hunt in its tracks. It may also have contributed to
the wall of separation between church and state in America, for in Salem theocratic
government had its last hurrah. Or so one may hope.
Arthur Miller is the author of "The Crucible" and many other plays. |
