her of Lies. And so, if a good Christian sins, it must be because, in some way, "the Devil made him do it."The point here is that Hale and the others lead Tituba into her confession by giving her nowhere else to turn. And once she starts, the emotion of releasing pent-up guilt and anger is so powerful that it sucks Abigail and then Betty into its vortex. Witchcraft has been revealed.NOTE: But is the witchcraft real? Or are the girls and Tituba "pretending," as Mary Warren will later say? Modern psychology explains what happened in Salem in 1692 as a case of "mass hysteria." Hysteria often occurs when a person can't or won't express powerful emotions--rage, say, or fear--which then find an outlet in bizarre forms of behavior: outbursts of laughter or fits of weeping for no apparent reason, paralysis of the limbs for which no physical cause can be found, sometimes dancing or trying to fly. And hysteria can be contagious, especially in communities with strongly shared values and strict codes of conduct. To those who "catch it," the affliction is completely real, they simply cannot control themselves.But is hysteria the case here? Let's look at two striking moments in this climactic scene to see if we can get a clue. The first happens during Tituba's "confession." Hale and Parris are pressing her for the names of the people she's seen with the Devil. Instead of giving these names right away, she bursts out, "in a fury:"He say Mr. Parris must be kill!... Mr. Parris mean man and no gentle man, and he bid me rise out of my bed and cut your throat!This is a violent non sequitur and, as such things often do, it tells us a lot of what Tituba really feels about her master.There are three possible explanations for this outburst: 1) Tituba is being sly--she hates her master and sees this as a chance to get back at him; 2) Tituba has fantasized killing Parris, especially when he mistreated her, but she can't admit this to herself and blames it on the...
