Giving Voice to the Voiceless: Beyond Arthur Miller’s The Crucible with Maryse Conde’s I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem

This is a 120-minute intermediate level lecture.

Arthur Miller once said, “I had no doubt that Tituba…had been practicing witchcraft with the girls…”, yet she appears only in domestic and prison scenes in The Crucible. By denying Tituba an actual court appearance in the play despite her historically proven three-day testimony, Miller effectively silenced the woman who may have used the very rhetoric of the Puritan belief system to spin a story of survival. My lecture argues that Miller’s work reduced Tituba to a mere plot device—a catalyst for the naming of names—in order to center the play on his tragic hero, John Proctor. Due to Miller’s stature and widespread cultural awareness of The Crucible, his characterization of Tituba has therefore become the dominant narrative.

However, a brilliant counter-narrative exists in Maryse Conde’s I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem. Conde’s imaginative rendition of the woman Tituba might have been illustrates…