Witches summation

I think I'm going to condense my commentary on “The Examination and Confession of Certaine Wytches,” “The Wonderful Discovery of the Witchcrafts of Margaret and Philip Flower,” “The Wonderfull discoverie of Elizabeth Sawyer, a Witch,” and The Witch of Edmonton to one post, especially since my comments are in regards more to general themes of evil; hopefully my concluding sociological/philosophical thoughts don't sound too much like a high freshman who has just discovered Logic. Moreover, this evil is almost entirely defined by the traditional religious views of Early Modern England. In fact, everything deemed monstrous we’ve studied so far seems to connect back to some concept of religious monstrous – babies, bizarre births, the Jew, the Turk/Muslim/(blanket term for anyone from the East), the African, monstrous women in their baby killing or in their sexuality or in any other terms of domestic violence, same-sex relationships, transvestites and cross-dressing, witches – it all stems back to offending the status quo as set by religion. Sometimes these offenses are on a social level, especially in regards to class (as is the case with cross-dressing [in an attempt to appear of a higher class, especially a woman aiming to act like a man] or in same-sex relations [again, where the concern is that a man of a higher class is having relations most often with his servants, obviously of lower class]), but the class system in question is one established predominantly by the religion of the time, and so an offense of class is ultimately still an offense of religion. However, nowhere are these transgressions more clear than in the persecution of witches, as they represent a direct association with the devil, the ultimate religious monster.

Elizabeth Sawyer is clearly constructed as a witch, but her reactions, especially in The Witch of Edmonton are most interesting. Having been label "witch," she almost seems to revel in the role. History has shown us now that, as a witch, a woman had no recourse. She could confess and blame others, but this did not assure her any sort of real salvation, especially since it would typically end with the condemnation of many other women. And, if a woman were to fight such accusations, she would certainly perish, one way or another. Thus, Sawyer lives up her damnation, much like Katherine lives up her role as "shrew" in The Taming of the Shrew, or as Caliban in The Tempest revels in his role as the bane of humanity and society, talking up large threats of rape, pillaging, and murder. These words are just that, though, fallible, only accurate within context, and just as likely to be prideful posturing on behalf of the speaker as they are truth.

My roommate is sick right now. He came in contact with a friend who went to Mexico. Does he have swine flu? Almost definitely not. However, such a fear is nearly tangible right now in the wake of mass hysteria over what is more or less an imagined threat (at least for us citizens of the developed United States). This doesn't change the fact that we look for causation of problems in ways where we can either easily deal with it, or if not blame it on a larger ideal that we know we can't directly defeat, and to which we must resign ourselves. The Crucible is an incredible example of such mass hysteria, where everything that goes wrong, no matter how trivial, is blamed on witchcraft. Crops die - witchcraft. A horse runs off - witchcraft. A girl is deathly sick - witchcraft. A bundle of wood comes undone off the back of a wagon - witchcraft. Yes, the inconvenience of having to pick up a few logs is blamed on witchcraft, and as a result an innocent girl is hanged. I don't think hysteria has a more appropriate example. Or, in order to either deal with or ignore our real problems, we invent fantastic problems. Abigail Williams is scorned by her former lover, John Proctor. However, Williams won't let this die quietly, and so she ignites an enormous witch hunt to revenge her unrequited love as well as to cover up her attempts to conjure spirits and cast spells, create potions to regain her former lover. Someone in class brought up the interesting allegory of swine flu as witchcraft, created to cover up our very real economic crisis and possibly deflect tension in regards to further firings and business failings.

And, when we're faced with such adversity, we often try to pin logic and reason on the most illogical events. For example, the dog in The Witch of Edmonton is inferred to be perhaps the familiar of witch, as he appears throughout disaster. But what if he is just a dog, wandering along, and the excited tones of human voice attract him? When the World Tradedemonic, Center towers collapsed, people swore to see the face of the devil in the clouds of smoke and ash. Is this reasonable, is this logical, or is this a case of hysteria and of people seeing what they want to see? It is easier to resign oneself to the idea of a spiritual evil opposed to the morally superior United States (or Early Modern England, as it were) than to accept the fact that we were attacked by a terrorist organization, by people that hate us and want to kill us and who may attack again. We are willing to turn a blind eye to the real threat because we have to deal with it if we acknowledge it, and further we have to deal with it on a more immediate level, on the social and emotional level, both individually and as a nation. But, if the enemy is a supernatural evil, we needn't worry, because God is on our side and we are infallible.

As an interesting tangent, I was reminded in the discussion of Tom the dog of a quote from The Usual Suspects: "Who is Keyser Soze? He is supposed to be Turkish. [Ironic, this is a monster in the context of our class] Some say his father was German. [Also somewhat ironic, as I'll discuss Nazi Germany below] Nobody believed he was real. Nobody ever saw him or knew anybody that ever worked directly for him, but to hear Kobayashi tell it, anybody could have worked for Soze. You never knew. That was his power. The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist. And like that, poof. He's gone." Perhaps my rationalizing, such as that of Tom as just a dog, and my explanations, like that of mass hysteria, are simply ingenious conventions this great and global evil has created to fully dupe our civilized, apathetic/atheistic, modern society. Perhaps the Early Modern English Church had it right, but the Romantic period and the quest of knowledge and learning and science and industry and growth have blinded us, perhaps the Devil is real and his old tactics of witchcraft and monstrous births, of attacking us through "false" religions (oh, wait, don't many of us still hold this belief in regards to Islam?) and instead has gone into hibernation. Because if we're so quick and sure to assign evil against God to the Devil, and the Devil disappears, so does evil to God. And if there isn't conflict against God, if there aren't these evils for the Church to warn us against, all of a sudden its role is greatly diminished, it has less power and authority, we don't "need" it anymore. But I digress...

All this gives me some interesting insight into the psychology behind evil. Cuddy, the simpleton, isn't swayed by the "evil" of Tom the dog. Rather, he attributes his ability to talk to that of the dogs of Aesop's fables. To put it simply, Cuddy doesn't give the dog power (albeit perhaps because he is too stupid to fear the dog), and so the dog has no power over him. How true this is of nearly all fear and evil, especially that which we tend to perceive as immediate. Zombies, ghosts, that which go bump in the night - whether you believe in such matter or not, its power over you is only that which you give it in the form of fear. And because the rest of the town fears Tom, Tom has power over them as a devil-dog. To misquote a cliche, Evil is in the eye of the beholder.

To that end, what is evil? What is right and wrong? Does truly, inherently evil exist? If so, what dictates it as such? Certainly there are individual evils - these are highly subjective and open to anyone's interpretation. At a higher level there are societal evils. In Early Modern England these are nearly all dictated by religion, and so often they are classified as monstrous or explained away through monstrous phenomenon. This tactic is interesting. In the case of the Turkish monster, for example, "evil" is defined as Islamic, but the Turk likely had a reversed definition, viewing Early Modern England Christians as "evil." While evil to an entire society, this is still a very subjective evil. Or monstrous babies, representative of God's wrath. What we now know to be genetic anomalies of nature, a function of the probability in gene mutation, was viewed as God's response to sinning parents, sinning individuals, sinning England. There isn't anything truly monstrous about these babies and they are not the product of evil, but they are constructed as such by their society. Tied to these subjective definitions of evil is always some sort of personification. Tom the dog, the Devil coming to seduce women into sexual and spiritual debauchery, the looming, unspoken threat of a more powerful Ottoman empire, or the seedy underworld where the Jew inhabits, biding his time and striking as a guerrilla against "good" Christians. And, as I've mentioned, these socially dictated evils of Early Modern England are defined by the reigning religion, and so any sort of monster is ultimately a religious one.

But what about universal evils? What about things that would always be considered wrong? Even here there is a loophole. Genocide is wrong - always. This is a statement that I believe finds universal appeal. But even here, this evil is justified within the context of a very specific society: Hitler and the Nazi party felt as if they were making a better world through genetic cleansing. And in the dog eat dog world of West Africa today, one can easily justify robbery and murder because it is necessary, because "if I don't do it, someone else will," and even more convincingly "if I don't do it, someone else will...to me." To take a sort of Buddhist approach, the extermination of insects from our homes is something we would generally find acceptable, but it is, in a literal sense, genocide. Do lesser developed central nervous systems negate the value of life? Do these same rules apply to a developed CNS made less so, as in brain damage, in individuals born with Down Syndrome, in comas? Or are we again speaking of a subjective, societally based evil, where the society is humanity as a whole?

So I'll end my blog (except for my research blogging) with this: Early Modern England is a prime example of a society that defines its evils in universal terms, assuming that said society's values are universal. Again, this is the power religion played during the period in defining right and wrong for the society as a whole, and indeed because these values are based in spiritual world of religion, versus the geographical/political/society world of England as part of Europe as part of the world, it was entirely feasible - and in fact could not have made sense any other way - that this moral system was inherently, infallibly true. But, barring the chance that this is the Devil's greatest trick, our modern society tells us that as liberally-minded, anthropologically-correct individuals of a global society, right and wrong are subjective. But perhaps this is another example of social definitions of right and wrong, and our society just so happens to define it as subjective. Perhaps right and wrong can't exist, not out of principle nor the lack of a unified definition, but because society will always interpret right and wrong in whatever way it sees fit; or perhaps, ultimately, universal right and wrong is merely too vague, too abstract. Here I am reminded of quantum mechanics' "many-worlds interpretation": In a nutshell, there are infinite universes, and so anything that could possibly happen will, statistically speaking, play out in one, or any, of these universes. That's a whole other can of worms, though, and I'll spare you from my attempts to explain and expound on something I don't understand. Maybe we simply aren't enlightened enough to fully comprehend such a divergent subject as the nature of evil.

Or maybe this is all silly rambling, maybe I'm wrong on all accounts. Maybe they're all right. All that's left here is the illustrative power of literature to encompass any subject, simultaneously answering as many questions as it raises. And such are the Monsters and Curiosities of Renaissance Literature. Thanks for reading.

Same sex relations

The Trial of Lord Audley and Edward II both present the Renaissance view of homosexuality, and I found it very interesting how progressive it is, in a sense. Rather than a binary decision (a view that seemed popular until the 80s/90s when gay rights activism really became mainstream), the early modern period seemed to view it as a spectrum, much as is the popular theory today. Granted, the act of sodomy is still demonized, and the fervor with which it was prosecuted leaves no doubt the intolerance for homosexuality, but it was fascinating nonetheless how there was a sort of "don't ask, don't tell," closeted (pun intended) acceptance of homosexuality. In the Trial documents specifically, I thought that the rape was downplayed not in order to make it seem like less of a crime, but only to heighten the atroscity of sodomy. Also highlighted was the fact that Lord Audley had relations with men of a lower social order and how his actions were "against the peace." The heirarchy of religion so permeates Renaissance soceity that sodomy, a private affair, causes harm to the public, because it was believed to disrupt the laws of nature, and more importantly, of God. However, Lord Audley's actions also disrupted the social heirarchy of the time, and so his actions were offensive on so many fronts.

On the other hand, it seems as if Edward III's time spent with the mother and other significant women is somehow suggestive, as if Edward II's preference for male favorites was something genetic that would be passed down to his son; or, as if a boy that spends too much time in the company of women has a greater risk of having homosexual relationships.

The justification for male relations through Classical literature is also interesting. It seems common knowledge that the Greeks in particular viewed women as deformed men and that the only true realization of human relationship came about between two men, and these beliefs still exist, at least in part, in the Renaissance.

Perhaps my favorite part of Edward II is how Marlowe using hunting as an allegory for gay sex, and how the hunter becomes the hunted. This inversion of roles exists in both scenarios, as one male must necessarily take on the gender role of female during sex. In this sense, the hunter (read: male sexual agressor) must become submissive. Gaveston likening his relationship with Edward II to a hunt is thus very appropriate.