Close Reading of The Girl who Drank the Moon by Kelly Regan Barnhill Passage One “The Witch—that is, the belief in her—made for a frightened people, a subdued people, a compliant people, who lived their lives in a saddened haze, the clouds of their grief numbing their senses and dampening their minds. It was terribly convenient for the Elders’ unencumbered rule. Unpleasant, too, of course, but that couldn’t be helped (chapter 2).” The Elders use fear of a non-existent witch to control people. This terror combined with the grief of so many needless deaths - deaths of infants nonetheless - is an important theme throughout the book. The inability of the characters to properly deal with fear and grief is what allows the annual kidnapping and …show more content…
At first glance, the conflict appears to be simple: group vs group, with the villains being the selfish, oppressive, and uncaring Elders. Actually, there is also a strong element of individuals vs themselves, or, to be specific, their sorrow and fear. This isn’t fully revealed until later in the story, but Barnhill hints at it here. The villagers are, “frightened,” “subdued,” and “compliant (Barnhill, chapter 45).” By emphasizing such strong emotional defeat so early in the story, Barnhill is foreshadowing an inner conflict within Xan, who, often and without knowing why, thinks to herself, “Sorrow is …show more content…
In extreme cases, such as grief from traumatic events, this can lead to violence or even turn a formerly good person into a villain. Mind-numbing sorrow and the refusal and/or inability to face fear are what led to both the villagers’ cowardice in sacrificing their children and Sister Ignatia’s hardening of her heart. These are what ultimately caused all the suffering in the story. Had Sister Ignatia allowed herself to grieve and be afraid, she could have eventually found healing and come out stronger. Instead, she destroyed her former identity and became the villain of this story. If she’d had courage and faced her emotions, there would have been no lie about a baby-stealing witch for the Elders to take advantage of and, therefore, no kidnapped and abandoned babies and grieving families. If the villagers had had the courage to demand evidence for the existence of an evil witch, if they’d had the courage to do anything besides standing by in the midst of such evil, their children could have been saved from abandonment and presumed death, and they could have been spared such heart wrenching sorrow. Barnhill’s message might seem cliche - most people know, intellectually, that suppressing emotions is a bad idea- nonetheless, in practice, accepting extreme emotions can be extremely difficult. I know from experience that it’s much easier to simply push
Karlsen, Carol. "Witchcraft: Prejudice and Intolerance Targeted Gender During the Witch Hunts: Effects on Early Mode." setonhill.edu. n.p., 1998. Web. 18 February. .
The novel ‘The gathering’ by Isobelle Carmody doesn’t just explore good vs evil like most fantasy novels but also the evil of human nature and how it can be used against us. Cheshunt where this novel is based within is not only a place of harboured evil but a choosing to be evil and the consequences of this for mankind. Within this novel it seems like evil has a way of repeating itself, “These witches were supposed to have stolen people’s pets and sacrificed them to the devil” (p.9). The readers were told about these witches so briefly as a part of the evil history of Cheshunt. Towards the end of the novel the same thing happens to Nathanial “I cuddled his limp, gruesome body to my chest, rocking backwards and forwards.” However it wasn’t the witches at this time but ordinary kids doing evils work, using something Nathanial loved and cared so deeply about and taking it so gruesomely away to make him fall into place in society.
hysteria brought about by the witchcraft scare in The Crucible leads to the upheaval in people’s differentiation between right and wrong, fogging their sense of true justice.
...ion. The Salem tragedy, which occurred in 1692, makes us feel sympathetic towards the innocent people that died. It almost brings tears to our eyes because these people gave in to death in order to maintain humanity on this Earth. Although the deaths of these people were very tragic, it clearly demonstrates that good deed will always over power evil. The people, who reinforced this statement, were people like John Proctor and Rebecca Nurse. These people uprooted the seeds for evil from the ground, to lay the seeds for goodness. Throughout history citizens have branded people as witches, and warlocks. Maybe, a person act's different than us, or they have strange habits, does this make them a witch? In the Massachusetts Bay Colony in January of 1692, you would be branded a witch for these odd doing's. Being accused of witchcraft had serious consequences (spark notes).
... life and goes back to these girls who turned on her in an instant. Others even confess to witchcraft because, once accused, it is the only way to get out of being hanged. The confessions and the hangings actually promote the trials because they assure townsfolk that God?s work is being done. Fear for their own lives and for the lives of their loved ones drives the townspeople to say and do anything.
Hysteria took over the town and caused them to believe that their neighbors were practicing witchcraft. If there was a wind storm and a fence was knocked down, people believed that their neighbors used witchcraft to do it. Everyone from ordinary people to the governor’s wife was accused of witchcraft. Even a pregnant woman and the most perfect puritan woman were accused. No one in the small town was safe.
Kent, Deborah. Witchcraft Trials: Fear, Betrayal, and Death in Salem. Library ed. Berkeley Heights, NJ: Enslow, 2009. Print.
The term witchcraft is defines as the practice of magic intended to influence nature. It is believed that only people associated with the devil can perform such acts. The Salem Witch Trials was much more than just America’s history, it’s also part of the history of women. The story of witchcraft is first and foremost the story of women. Especially in its western life, Karlsen (1989) noted that “witchcraft challenges us with ideas about women, with fears about women, with the place of women in society and with women themselves”. Witchcraft also confronts us too with violence against women. Even through some men were executed as witches during the witch hunts, the numbers were far less then women. Witches were generally thought to be women and most of those who were accused and executed for being witches were women. Why were women there so many women accused of witchcraft compared to men? Were woman accused of witchcraft because men thought it was a way to control these women? It all happened in 1692, in an era where women were expected to behave a certain way, and women were punished if they threatened what was considered the right way of life. The emphasis of this paper is the explanation of Salem proceedings in view of the role and the position of women in Colonial America.
In today’s times, witches are the green complexed, big nosed ladies who ride around on broomsticks at Halloween. Back in the 1600’s, witches looked like average people, but they worked alongside the devil. Salem, Massachusetts, was a religious town of Puritans. They were strong believers in God, and had believed that witches were the devils workers. Everything was usual in Salem in 1692, until, 9-year-old Elizabeth Parris and 11-year-old Abigale Williams had sudden outbursts of screaming, contortions and convulsions, the doctor came and diagnosed witchcraft (Blumberg, Jess) And from this time on, the people of Salem believed there were witches all around them.
When writing a story that is meant to scare the reader, authors use a variety of different literary elements to intensify fear. This is apparent in the stories “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “beware: do not read this poem,” and “House Taken Over”. It is shown through transformation in the character, setting, and sometimes even the story or poem itself, adding to the scariness that the reader feels when reading it. While there are some examples of transformation not being scary or not playing a role in stories meant to scare us, transformation plays a crucial role in making the reader of these stories scared.
The story is set in seventeenth-century Salem, a time and place where sin and evil were greatly analyzed and feared. The townspeople, in their Puritan beliefs, were obsessed with the nature of sin and with finding ways to be rid of it altogether through purification of the soul. At times, people were thought to be possessed by the devil and to practice witchcraft. As punishment for these crimes, some were subjected to torturous acts or even horrible deaths. Thus, Hawthorne’s choice of setting is instrumental in the development of theme.
Fear brings forth a certain atmosphere which compels us to act upon it. The era in which the book was published allows us to see how common these fears were. Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House is an excellent portrayal of how fear controls the human mind by using the characters as examples. In the book Eleanor, Theodora, Luke, and Dr. Montague have all been influenced by fear in the story, whether it be the fear of love, the unknown, family, rejection, expression, or loneliness. These different types of fear plagued their minds causing their actions to reflect upon them. Jackson explores the theme of fear in The Haunting of Hill House by creating a cast of characters that in turn are manipulated by the inner workings of their minds and the
Hester, Marianne. “Patriarchal Reconstruction and Witch Hunting.” Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe: Studies in Culture and Belief (1996): 288-306.
“The Devil in the Shape of a Woman” was an excellent book that focuses on the unjusts that have been done to women in the name of witchcraft in Salem, and many other areas as well. It goes over statistical data surrounding gender, property inherence, and the perceptions of women in colonial New England. Unlike the other studies of colonial witchcraft, this book examines it as a whole, other then the usual Salem outbreaks in the late 17th century.
The witch is both vulnerable and a powerful figure. The resulting tension between power and powerlessness as a response to laws created by those in power, rather institutionalised power: men, can be seen as expressed through such binary metaphors as that of physical strength and beauty versus weakness and ugliness, kn...