UC Riverside

This dissertation considers the ways in which tourism associated with the Salem Witch Trials of 1692 have represented the intersections of gender, race, and class since the nineteenth century. Representations of classed masculinity, femininity, whiteness, Blackness, and indigeneity engage the perceived threats to, and the threats of, white patriarchy in the face of shifting racial and gender roles. Interpretations of the trials represented in travel guides, museums, walking tours, and memorabilia reflect the assumptions that predominantly white, middle-class Americans have had towards problems of authority and identity at particular moments in history. The Salem witch trials disrupt ideas of New England exceptionalism and undermined the mainstream public history work of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that asserted white patriarchal dominance and facilitated middle class bourgeois norms and values. Therefore, tracing the evolution of discourses in witchcraft tourism afford a useful opportunity for considering the fractures, ambivalences, and reconciliations present in New Englanders’ constructions of a usable past and identity. Tourist narratives have largely served to legitimize white patriarchal authority in the present, evolving in response to shifting attitudes towards identity and authority and perceived moments of social upheaval such as the Civil Rights Movement. In seeking to valorize bourgeois masculinity, however, travel boosters have often marginalized their treatment of the accused women and interpreted colonial femininity in ways that validated patriarchal gender values or constructed issues of colonialism and misogyny as problems of the past. These narratives also scapegoated an enslaved indigenous woman, Tituba, for instigating the witch trials with superstitions from the Caribbean, thereby shifting blame for the witchcraft panic from Anglo-American culture and intellectualism to an unruly woman of color extrinsic to New England.