I've lived my whole life near enough Salem, Massachusetts for an easy weekender, but I've never done so. I mean, it's roughly the same time as my usual monthly trek to see my long-distance paramour, just the opposite direction, and yet, I've never gone. It might be that I'm worried the mystique will wear off; or, just as likely, that the mystique will increase to the point where I'm another silly tourist, dropping dollars left and left on callous reminders of a deeply misogynistic rampage-turned-horror movie twaddle.
The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane, by Katherine Howe, is an immensely effective way of checking yourself before you wreck yourself when getting into the mythos of Salem.
I'll quote the author biography on the back flap for some insight into what this book is really about:
"Katherine Howe is completing a PhD in American and New England Studies, and is a descendant of Elizabeth Proctor, who survived the Salem with trials, and Elizabeth Howe, who did not." This story is about the gulf between those two women, between survival and surviving, between the cold academic analyses of that historical madness and the real warm-blooded women who lived it.
Harvard graduate student Connie Goodwin is stuck between the same academic studies as her author and her obligation to clear out her matrilineal home, an old crickety house in Marblehead, Massachusetts. Her mother is a hippie, Connie, following in the WASP tradition. What Connie finds is that her journey to educate herself and her journey to understand herself are one in the same, as her thesis work and her personal task both bring her to the discovery of Deliverance Dane, a previously-unknown accused woman in the Salem Witch Trials. And the only real witch among them.
Personal highlight: the incredibly poignant flashback to the execution of these women that drives home exactly what happened to so many more unnamed and unknown women across the years. Reader, I cried, as the emotional truth of the narrative came to a head at the same moment the historical truth joined it.
And, really, that is the crux of what I loved most about this book. The lines of women, throughout the centuries, have been as tangled and as disparate as of any human group, but the idea that I can touch my foremothers through shared interests--performing, cooking, music, each generation with their own interpretations, but the base love the same--that what we share might be more than a genetic code, but the same heartaches and the same rages and the same ambitions...that is, and always has been, compelling. It's a more intimate version of why I've always loved archaeology. Touching the past in all its electric and yet mundane glory.
Also, the cliche of names having meaning is a cliche for a reason. The accepted analysis is that, during this era, people named their children for the values and virtues they hoped their parenting, and God's Will, would yield. Combine this with the writer's instinct to have their character's names be a tell, and you have one of the most amazing realizations of women living up to their given names that I've ever seen.
Choice quotes:
"She sometimes forgot that to be a good historian one must also have an ear for gossip."
"Her mother laughed softly. 'You know,' she said, 'it's hubris to assume that we always ought to be able to explain everything.'"
"Faith is what distinguishes the alchemical mind from the purely scientific one."
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