Breslaw argues that Tituba’s confession to practicing witchcraft clearly reveals her savvy and determined efforts to protect herself by actively manipulating Puritan fears. The author emphasizes the inextricably linked worlds of the Caribbean and the North American colonies, illustrating how the Puritan worldview was influenced by its perception of possessed Indians. The first focuses on Tituba's roots in Barbados, the second on her life in the New World. The uniquely multicultural nature of life on a seventeenth-century Barbadan sugar plantation-defined by a mixture of English, American Indian, and African ways and folklore-indelibly shaped the young Tituba's world and the mental images she brought with her to Massachusetts.īreslaw divides Tituba’s story into two parts.
Reconstructing the life of the slave woman at the center of the notorious Salem witch trials, the book follows Tituba from her likely origins in South America to Barbados, forcefully dispelling the commonly-held belief that Tituba was African. In this important book, Elaine Breslaw claims to have rediscovered Tituba, the elusive, mysterious, and often mythologized Indian woman accused of witchcraft in Salem in 1692 and immortalized in Arthur Miller's The Crucible. A landmark contribution to women's history that sheds new light on the Salem witch trials and one of its most crucial participants, Tituba of The Crucible
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