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

8 Pages 1955 Words

Ever since the beginning of time, the classic conflict of humankind has been the moral struggle between good and evil. Evil can take many forms, but it is always rooted in Satan or the antichrist. The natural assumption has historically been that since God created man/woman in His own image, he/she is inherently good. Therefore, whenever a man or woman takes a detour from the moral straight and narrow, there has to be some type of external cause responsible for the dramatic shifting of course. The logical conclusion to draw was that a spell must have been cast upon the unfortunate person’s soul. In other words, the evil acts were not instinctive; but rather, ‘the Devil made them do it.’
Maryse Condé’s 1992 novel, I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem; Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1835 short story, “Young Goodman Brown,” and a 1996 film based on Arthur Miller’s 1953 play, The Crucible, feature the theme of good vs. evil, and consider its repercussions on the respective protagonists and antagonists. In none of these works do the characters ride off into the sunset and live happily ever after. This seems to suggest that once their moral foundations had been cracked, the damage was irreparable.
In I, Tituba, the Black Witch of Salem, the protagonist is the misunderstood Tituba, a real-life woman who had been transported to Salem from the West Indies at the height of the seventeenth-century slave trade. She is a strong-willed woman who brought much of her African culture with her in the form of healing concoctions (misconstrued as spells) that she uses to assist her master, Reverend Samuel Parris, his wife Elizabeth, daughter Elizabeth (“Betsey”) and niece, Abigail Williams. The novel’s first-person narrative allows author Maryse Condé considerable creative license to mold Tituba into the kind of person she wanted her to be to deliver the message she deemed relevant. Condé candidly acknowledged, “I was not inte...