Analysis Of I Tituba Black Witch Of Salem, The Crucible & Young Goodman Brown

8 Pages 1955 Words

rested at all in what her real life could have been… I really invented Tituba” (Dukats 51). Author Ann Armstrong Scarboro adds, “Condé does not merely retell Tituba’s story; she recreates it to new purposes” (Dukats 51). As conceived by Condé, Tituba steadfastly resisted any attempts to categorize her as a witch, because, as she remarked, “I was born to heal, not to frighten” (Condé 12). She commits many controversial acts in her role as faith healer, such as the slaughtering of animals, but she views this only as a means to a desirable end. Lisa Bernstein noted in her literary criticism, “Tituba reinterprets her own psychic powers as positive, life-affirming qualities, indicting societies which vilify the witch figure and implicating contemporary Western models of thought in her critique” (77). She is portrayed as a sexual ‘animal,’ but A. Joseph Arnold points out, “The interest Tituba exhibits in sex is not gratuitous or simply titillating, but is rather the ultimate disturbance of patriarchal order” (711). When she is accused of practicing witchcraft in the Parris household, Tituba refuses to go quietly into the judgmental New England night. She promptly organizes a slave rebellion to combat what she perceives as the hypocrisy of a Calvinist society that prefers to see evil as something carried by outsiders than to recognize it as existing within their own, tightly knit, God-fearing group. When Tituba ascends to the ...