The Crucible (1953) has long occupied a canonical position not only in modern US theatre, but also on global stages. In the 1980s, Arthur Miller visited China, worked with Chinese theatre practitioners, and had many of his works translated into and staged in Chinese. As a young reader of The Crucible, I was confused by the translated title The Witches in Salem because Tituba’s experience is not as central to the Salem Witch Trials and the play itself. The confusion became multifaceted when I watched the National Theatre’s production via NTLive in 2023. The lighting design along with the rain created a claustrophobic atmosphere, not to mention Abigail’s state of frenzy and Tingying Dong’s eerie sound design. I was engaged in the fear of the darkness of Salem’s social mentality, but Tituba’s sudden Bajan accent distracted me: She did not sound as cartoonish in the opening act when she confessed. Sensing the inconsistency in Tituba’s image, I agree on Jane Darcy’s view that this canon is “not a play that easily accommodates fresh interpretations.” There was a lack of backstory for the characters, which also explains why practitioners and researchers have rarely interrogated Miller’s depiction of Tituba, a trigger for white characters’ moral struggles in his historical analogy.
In this Note from the Field, I juxtapose this canon with Black British theatre.1 As a researcher in the field, I am particularly interested in how Black British playwrights convey their ethical stances by envisioning specific audiences. Such ethical claims often involve questioning mainstream narratives. In Winsome Pinnock’s Tituba, a 2016 one–Black woman play, I see an attempt to recenter Tituba’s voice and resist the emotional hegemony constructed by Miller. Pinnock’s triple role as playwright, actor, and director informs her rewriting.2 In a reflective essay for The Yale Review, Pinnock highlights the perils of uncritically perpetuating white-heroic narratives. Meanwhile, affect studies also enrich the political and ethical implications for my comparison in how Miller and Pinnock differently write affects and deploy, suppress, or highlight emotions like fear and anger. By outlining Miller’s politics of fear and Pinnock’s counterstrategy of reimagining Tituba’s emotional/affective subjectivity, this Note proposes Tituba as a subversive example for challenging the canon’s “ethics of affects,” which refers to the concept of creativity when authors use emotions to exert influence, control, or domination over characters, actions, language, plot, etc. I also use the term to explore and evaluate the process and results of using emotions as a universal and strategic means of shaping the elements of theatre from an ethical perspective.
The Hegemony of Fear in Miller’s Historical Analogy
Miller uses witchcraft panic in The Crucible as an allegory for the Red Scare, but the meaning of such emotion remains more ambiguous than McCarthyism because of the difficulty to name the subject and object of scare. The “closed loop of ‘your very fear of being guilty makes you guilty’” (Žižek xvi) may explain the logic of such a comparison, but research has demonstrated that what the McCarthyists feared was not limited to one social dimension. Critical Black studies scholar Charisse Burden-Stelly has recently argued that Red Scare and Black Scare have been mutually reinforced over time because the opposition to racial inequality is interconnected with the struggle against capitalist exploitation and the joint force is seen as a threat by what maintains the capitalist-racist social structure. This makes McCarthyism a model of governance that “combined public authority and societal self-regulation to diffuse throughout society penalty for, and the marginalization, neutralization, and criminalization of, ideas and beliefs that challenged US Capitalist Racist Society” (Burden-Stelly 11). In both constructing John Proctor and Miller himself as fearless heroes and using witchcraft accusations as an innuendo, Miller failed to overcome the Black Scare that parallels the Red Scare. This failure manifests itself in the fear-dominated emotional hegemony he constructs in The Crucible by selectively reproducing and imagining the Salem witch trials. Salem’s mass hysteria over witchcraft replaces Tituba’s emotional subjectivity, while Proctor’s imagined subjectivity replaces her historical subjectivity.
“Fear” is the emotional keyword for Miller’s recollections of McCarthyism and social thoughts in his writings on The Crucible. In a 1996 essay, he used “fear” or “fearful” seven times, not to mention “terrified,” “panic,” and other synonyms. The subject, object, and mode of fear are unquestionable to him. Such emotion thus led him to connect the witch trials to the McCarthy-era experience: “When I walked at night along the empty, wet streets of Salem in the week that I spent there, I could easily work myself into imagining my terror before a gaggle of young girls flying down the road screaming that somebody’s ‘familiar spirit’ was chasing them” (“Why I Wrote”). However, this private association proves that he internalized the politics of fear, which influenced the representation of emotions in his narrative to the point of constructing a white male-centered emotional hegemony. This not only means reproducing the politics of fear as it socially was, but also that Miller both highlights Proctor’s moral choice by letting it underpin the emotional atmosphere of the play and consolidates the white male’s authoritative and heroic image. Meanwhile, Tituba became a narrative tool and was conflated as the legitimate source of the moral panic without regard to historical facts. This resonates with Sara Ahmed’s contention that white fear of the dark is an affective politics that “preserves only through announcing a threat to life itself” (64).
Tituba is found as “the only character who originates outside New England, the only character who speaks in a non-standard English dialect, and the only character with a single name . . . she utters the first words in the play, she is the first to confess” (D. Miller 438). And the last point is vital for the plot: For a Proctor-centered narrative, Tituba’s confession eases the identification of the origin of evil, while questioning the reality of witches and witchcraft is not Miller’s major intention. Miller also uses fear to motivate the confession, and Tituba’s initial emotion of “shocked and angry” (Crucible 38) about Abigail’s accusation is quickly overshadowed:
TITUBA:
I don’t compact with no Devil!
PARRIS:
You will confess yourself or I will take you out and whip you to your death, Tituba!
PUTNAM:
This woman must be hanged! She must be taken and hanged!
TITUBA, terrified, falls to her knees:
No, no, don’t hang Tituba! I tell him I don’t desire to work for him, sir.
PARRIS:
The Devil?
HALE:
Then you saw him!
Tituba weeps.
HALE:
Now Tituba, I know that when we bind ourselves to Hell it is very hard to break with it. We are going to help you tear yourself free—TITUBA, frightened by the coming process:
Mister Reverend, I do believe somebody else be witching these children. (39)
Strangely, Parris’s threat to whip Tituba does not provoke an immediate emotional reaction, especially when Miller has a stage direction before Tituba even utters her first line: “[S]he is also very frightened because her slave sense has warned her that, as always, trouble in this house eventually lands on her back” (6). But when it comes to accusing others, what frightens Tituba is the way of being punished, being saved, and naming others. Once she agrees to confess, she is immediately protected by the Puritan community. Moreover, not only does her fear exacerbate that of other characters, but her multilayered fears are assimilated by the collective fear of the white Anglo-Saxon Puritans.
The emotional hegemony deprives Tituba of her independent emotional expression as a Black woman by involving her in social fear as a totality. Admittedly, as Silvia Federici puts it, witch hunts are “a deliberate strategy used by the authorities to instill terror, destroy collective resistance, silence entire communities, and turn their members against each other . . . a means of dehumanization and as such the paradigmatic form of repression, serving to justify enslavement and genocide” (220).
Fear should be faced as a physical and social state; but for Miller, there is a particular reason to create this emotional spectacle. With the accumulating total emotional force, Proctor’s courage and moral self-consciousness in resisting the fear will increase in their value. Miller is aware of the role of Puritan redemptive discourse in the New World of Salem, considering that the final appearance of Tituba’s name is used to underline Proctor’s resistance: “I am no Sarah Good or Tituba, I am John Proctor! You will not use me! It is no part of salvation that you should use me!” (Crucible 129). Proctor’s action is disguised as a for-the-other ethical claim, but this line reveals some unreliability. It sounds that Proctor would rather be punished than confess and implicate the other, but the scope of the other is limited to whomever Proctor/Miller considers as innocent and is yet to come. In order to emphasize the individual “goodness” (131), Proctor/Miller cut themselves from the (Black) women. Miller once stated that “Proctor acts and has to face the consequences of his action. In so going he discovers who he is” (Hewes 21). Tituba’s fear of naming witches, however, is not considered as equal evidence of her consciousness of the consequences of her action. From Proctor/Miller’s perspective, even if Good and Tituba are not witches, they are still symbols of guilt and moral depravity by naming witches and creating fear. Such symbols widen the audience’s emotional distance from them, making it easier to sympathize with Proctor’s tragic revolt and to ignore the end of the “witches.”
Pinnock’s Historicization of Fear and Anger
The difficulty in challenging The Crucible with Tituba in new writing is not that it is a matter of reproducing a typical, historical image of the Black woman, but instead that it is one of imagining Black female emotions and the sociocultural structures around them. Therefore, the emotional hegemony of the canon needs to be revisited to resist the reproduction of Black Scare narratives. With ongoing research that undermines the power of historical analogies and supports the reconstruction of Tituba’s subjectivity, Pinnock historicizes Tituba’s emotions. Her writing focuses not only on the historicity of fear and anger in the temporal logic that links enslavement to racial inequality, but also on the designification and deuniversalization of Black women’s emotions.
The reconstruction of Tituba’s fear begins with an imaginative interpretation of the object of her fear. In The Crucible, Miller confirms Tituba’s essential slave-ness to solidify the audience’s association with enslavement, a way to rationalize Tituba’s confession out of fear. But in Pinnock’s writing, what triggers Tituba’s fear is the confinement of freedom by the religious power represented by Reverend Parris: “With Parris at the meeting house the parsonage is at rest, so his wife Elizabeth takes herself early to bed, while Betty and I are alone and free” (Tituba 59). This freedom refers to both actions and emotions.
Considering Abigail’s and Betty’s ages, Pinnock does not emphasize the Puritan culture and the criminalization of women’s bodies and souls during the trial process (like nudity and adultery) as Miller does. Rather, she looks at the proof for accusing Tituba. The examination transcripts show that Tituba never danced to invoke spirits, nor did she organize voodoo rituals; she broke eggs and used the shape of the yolks for fortune-telling, with no mystical beliefs behind it.3 With this fact, Pinnock portrays Parris’s severe restrictions on pastimes and entertainment to show the destruction of childhood innocence by the narrow Puritan asceticism. Tituba recalls to the audience that “Reverend would forbid it, but it is an innocent game, and they have been so good. . . . She (Betty) is only nine, but dreams of a husband to rescue her from the Reverend who is the most demanding of fathers” (Tituba 60–61). This means that domestic fear points initially to a known power before turning to the unknown disease asserted as witchcraft. By linking Miller’s hegemony to that of Parris, a split is made between Proctor’s heroic image and Miller’s. Parris, with a precarious social position, could only draw on his paternal and clerical authority to assert himself at home by severely restricting the emotional pursuits of his family and servants. Thus, Pinnock’s in-depth, layered dissection of fear not only makes Tituba a fluid emotional being but also demonstrates the presence of the issue of emotional power in the history of the witch trials.
Just as Tituba’s fear is reinterpreted by revealing the historical logic and cultural roots behind the emotion, Pinnock uses the same strategy to understand and reframe Tituba’s anger. Pinnock skillfully relates the anger to Tituba’s diasporic experience, avoiding the stereotype as an “angry black woman,” one of three stereotypes of Black women proposed by Melissa V. Harris-Perry. According to Harris-Perry’s critique, the reproduction of this image in contemporary media and artistic works, rather than treating “black women’s anger as a legitimate response to unequal circumstances” (95), symbolizes anger in the public sphere and “negates the substance of her anger. She is just angry about ‘something’” (87). Unlike the fury Tituba fleetingly displays at Abigail’s accusations in The Crucible, the historical traces of Tituba’s anger are revealed in Pinnock’s work, making this conceptual emotion vividly concrete and layered by adding its objects.
After being punished by Parris, Tituba recalls her mother’s voice that confirms her name, before she warns, “you destroyed my mother and now I will destroy yours” (Tituba 69–70). In depicting a vulnerable but fluid form of memory, Pinnock releases Tituba’s manifold anger at the continuing legacy of enslavement: the diaspora, the destruction to her family, her being misnamed, and her being accused of witchcraft and lynched because of racial reductionism and cultural hegemony. Pinnock has also made clear the intent of this monologue: “Keeping her name a secret is a symbolic way for her to hold on to her culture and sense of self, a means of resisting enslavement” (“Reclaiming Tituba” 116). It is also worth noting not only that the anger is used in resistance to the extreme conditions of oppression, but that Tituba first turns it into a means of recovery and healing. Although Betty and Abigail lived in the shadow of Parris’s power as well, the complexity of Tituba’s anger also suggests that the two girls do not share the same range of her emotions. The monologue distinguishes Tituba’s emotional knowledge and labor from the white emotional norms, thus confirming her value as an emotional subject and supporting her active subjectivity.
Despite The Crucible’s intentional marginalization of Tituba in its historical analogy, Tituba’s subjectivity at the level of emotional performance is paradoxically confirmed in the collective Puritan unconscious, which is anti-pagan and deems wrath a sin. It should be noted that Miller directs Tituba’s anger at Parris during her confession:
TITUBA, suddenly bursting out:
Oh, how many times he bid me kill you, Mr. Parris!
PARRIS:
Kill me!
TITUBA, in a fury:
He says Mr. Parris must be kill! Mr. Parris no goodly man, Mr. Parris means 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.” (Crucible 41)
While this dialogue justifies the presence of anger in the play, from the perspective of the Reverend and the audience, Tituba’s anger is reasonable with an assumption that the devil is speaking via her, not that Tituba is taking advantage of the devil. Further, the moment can be understood as Tituba’s mimetic performance of emotion, i.e., as a reenactment of the devil occupying her body and mind, rather than as a resistant performance to challenge the unjust structures. It follows that restoring the historical presence of conceptual affect only is still insufficient to restore Tituba’s emotional subjectivity, as the context provided by the historical archive still obscures her interaction with Salem society. While unearthing the significance of conceptual emotions, Pinnock’s literary imagination shapes Tituba’s resistance by complementing empirical affects combined with her emotional performance.
Resistant Performances of the Affective Subject
Pinnock has taken Tituba away from the image of the “origin of fear” and used her to revise the historical genealogy of the “angry black woman,” thus creating a centrifugal force to remove the witch-hunt narrative from the white male-centered McCarthyism narrative. Affects, on the other hand, hold a different advantage in constructing Tituba’s personal narrative and shaping her social interactions, because affects can transcend the structured and systematized mechanisms of the scientific regulation of emotions and thus have their “political vigor” (Hogan 38). Whereas Miller’s imagined fear and fury for Tituba can be directly extracted by the performers and the audience, Pinnock’s imagined affects for Tituba are nonconceptualized and nonintuitive; they form a fluid energy within her monologue. As those affects are not subject to the cognitive mechanisms and linguistic and social norms that regulate and obscure them, they help to complete Tituba’s subjectivity.
Pinnock establishes Tituba’s emotional performance as her ability formed on the basis of social structures and highlights the resisting power of such ability through the rich depiction of affects. Although affects are not recognized scientifically, they can be identified to the receivers. Pinnock’s positive attitude toward the mobilizing, interactive, and strategic nature of affects can first be seen when Parris discovers Tituba fortune-telling with eggs, but Tituba’s response to his dogmatic reprimand, and her affect’s effect on the children, surprises Parris:
And now, with the Reverend glaring at us, his face so purple he could be that black beast himself. I have a sudden desire to laugh. A tremor in the pit of my stomach rises up through my belly and chest, passes my throat, and into my mouth. Betty trembles beside me and I know that she wants to laugh too. The trembling sparks across the circle of girls. It has taken fire. Abigail sneezes. The Reverend turns around sharp to look at her, not knowing, as we do, that the sneeze is a cover for a giggling girl. This makes Mercy burst out laughing. The Reverends head spins like an owls. We are all laughing. It is a bonfire of laughter.
Laughter defies the “fear” script that Parris envisions, evolving from an individual’s covert, inner emotion to a collective, overt resistant performance. Like fear, laughter is a “socially contagious affect. These affects can alter a social climate, functioning like waves rather than like properties of discrete individuals” (Willett and Willett 88). But what laughter has power over differs from that of fear: While assuaging the children’s guilt and fear, laughter challenges Parris’s parental authority and dissolves the Puritan order. It also breaks with the emotional dichotomy of diasporic pain/homeland joy common in playwriting, stimulating Tituba’s potentially radical affective subjectivity and offering new interpretations of her motives for confession and naming. After all, a nonbeliever would not have been fearful of Puritan punishment and redemption; as a spectator of Puritan ethics, Tituba might have possessed sufficient knowledge and motivation to challenge the religious power.
Tituba’s affective experience of laughter can be traced back to an imagined satire of the Pearsehouses, her former enslavers in Barbados. This experience presents the interactive nature of performance of affects. When such performance works to undermine the images of authority and reestablish discourses of power relations, not only do the performers gain autonomy and authenticity, but the target audience’s reactions also expose how social power intensifies emotional alienation. Mrs. Pearsehouse is recalled as a lover of African slaves’ singing who “says it shows how happy they are” (Tituba 64). In a craze to vie with other’s chattel, she also flaunts Tituba’s Englishness to her visitors. Her pretentious performance attempts to glorify herself, but also to publicly defend and reinforce the power structure between the enslavers and the enslaved. However, Tituba satirizes and defies her audience by performing obedience and gratitude:
I am grateful, Mrs Pearsehouse. Yes, I thank God for the sailors who lured us onto their ship with the promise of trading our shells for furs and magic powders. . . . I am grateful that the children I bear are sold for profit as pets to the offspring of other planters. I do not cry when they are taken from me. Though slaves are human in form, they do not feel, they do not cry for their lost children at night. Just as we do not tire when you work us to death, we do not beat ourselves about in a rage of grief so that the physical hurt obliterates the pain in our hearts. Thank you, Mrs Pearsehouse, for making me a happy slave.
(65–66)
Tituba’s fluent delivery should have satisfied Mrs. Pearsehouse’s desires and even prove her Englishness with a masterful satire; and such rebellious performances can hardly lead to immediate punishment, because “they would have to admit that I had a mind capable of doing so” (Tituba 66). But a later punishment proves that Mrs. Pearsehouse is capable enough of understanding the emotions/affects of her slaves, although she finds power in ignoring, distorting, or assimilating their emotions/affects. By returning the emotional performer-audience relationship to sociocultural structures, Pinnock avoids a trauma paradigm in captivity narratives, and Tituba’s agency is affirmed in her creativity in performance.
Finally, Pinnock supplements Tituba’s strategic emotional performance by directly quoting Tituba’s statements from the examination transcripts,4 and by adding imagined affects to them. Tituba takes advantage of the cognitive violence of the Salem Puritan community against Blacks and witches, transforming her sinfulness into an authority of knowledge, thus creating an outsider status of the inquisitor and audience:
Why do you hurt these children?
I do not hurt them.
Who is it then?
“The Devil for ought I know.”
Hale’s eyes widen in surprise.
Did you never see the Devil?
He is an expert in the extracting of confessions. I take advantage of his conceit.
“The Devil came to me and bid me serve him.”
Hale thinks he is onto something. He is not to know that I am holding the reins in one hand and a whip in the other. With each movement I send him in the desired direction.
Who have you seen?
“Two women sometimes hurt the children.”
Who were they?
Now, Tituba, now. You have the whip in your hand. You are the auctioneer. Pick a name, any name. Just as you were ripped random from your mother’s arms and from the life that you knew, now you will tear their lives apart. I look around the court. Silence. They are waiting for me to speak. I name the names.
“Goody Osborne and Sarah Good.”
Tituba no longer resorts to emotional performances in order to gain discursive dominance. This does not mean that her words are emotionless; nor that she has all the right and rational choices. The imagined affects added to the testimony reclaim the complexity of making ethical choices under multiple social forces. These affects do not serve justice in the utilitarian sense of maximizing happiness and well-being; instead, they promote individual and collective historical tragedies. Such writing of affects, therefore, does not conform to the liberal humanists’ conception of the positive effects of affects on judgment. However, the exploitative creative environment that Pinnock continues to face can explain this complex social justice perspective behind her writing. In the 2023 production, the performer kept changing her costumes, some scenes in black and other scenes in white, implying that Tituba was innocent only in some ways, while the elusiveness remains. Therefore, bringing Tituba back to the center of emotional/affective writing not only restores a historical identity but also suggests new ways of understanding the structure of emotions/affects in light of her impacts.
In summarizing my reading of Tituba, I stress that the play offers a dynamic alternative by exposing the ways fear can flatten enslaved women’s lives and feelings. The play also exemplifies how playwrights can engage with audiences to challenge canonical narratives. Questioning to whom a story belongs and who benefits from a story points toward an ethical imperative, to reexamine power dynamics in and outside the canonical texts, and to champion new voices that restore the subjectivity of historically suppressed.
Notes
1. Special thanks to Professor Lynette Goddard for their help in discussing this Note, especially for alerting me to consider the theorization of ethics of affect(s) and its relation to activism in theatre; and to Professor Juan Du, who advised me to consider the poetic effects the emotions have in both plays.
2. In the reflective essay “Reclaiming Tituba: What The Crucible Left Out,” Pinnock recalls the theatre education she received during the second wave of feminism, her experience of playing Mary Warren in her school rehearsal, and her exploration with performers who played Tituba of the problems of taking on the role. She was the director of the 2016 performance, commissioned and produced by Sphinx Theatre and staged at Hampstead Theatre, before the play’s revival at the 2023 Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
3. See “Understanding the Records of the Salem Witch Trials,” The Salem Witch Museum, May 2023, salemwitchmuseum.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Salem-Witch-Trials-Primary-Sources-1.pdf.
4. The Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive and Transcription Project at the University of Virginia contains 168 sets of court records, including 9 records in Tituba’s file. Here, Pinnock quotes Tituba’s examination on March 1, 1692. See “SWP No. 125: Tituba,” Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive and Transcription Project, salem.lib.virginia.edu/n125.html.
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