I think that the notion of good and evil being points of view, I think, is really complicated and troubled in the context of this story. Because we are dealing with the spiritual world, in which there are very clearly defined higher powers and I wonder how that interacts with the novel and like the structure of how these townspeople. Obviously there's so much mayhem and panic by this point. Where I don't really think anyone is really appealing to theology anymore, sound or unsound. But I find it fascinating, going back to Chilton and his sort of perceived, and this primary source, or this all chemical sort of key to life and to knowledge. I think that there's something very deeply sympathetic that, for me, as a reader, I can find when reading him. That this man has kind of been twisted by his own ambition. But how do we start finding, I guess the moral latitude or the moral worth of these characters if we don't have something to put it against? And I think that that's something that the novel struggles with, and something that I really had to think hard about as I was reading it as well. If it's really disappointing for you then that's I think we're finger pointing. >> Right. >> Sort of if it's to really take off. >> Yeah. >> But then, when these two worlds have been kind of meshed together, it becomes a lot less defiant. What actually is good and what actually is evil, everything becomes relative at that point. >> Well, it's a struggle both for Connie living in the postmodern moment and for me writing in the postmodern moment. I mean, there's this tendency on the one hand to want to respect all points of view and give them all credence and accord them all equality, but you're quite right, at some point a given text has to take a position, and I think that its an interesting challenge. If you feel, and I do feel this way, that fiction has a moral responsibility or has moral content, or is responsible for how it represents things. And I do feel that way. And so, in answer to your question, I think that, I think that the kind of moral position of the story is to, you know, accept that you're a flawed person and try and conduct yourself with honor anyway. Which is kind of a weak moral position I think especially when you're putting it within a puritan context because the puritans would not credence that position to the slightest degree. But I think that it raises an interesting question also because I think that there's a debate certainly amongst kind of contemporary, I won't say literary criticism because I don't think that's right. But there's sometimes a struggle for readers to think what do I do with a book that I'm reading if I don't much like the character. Does that mean that I don't like the author. Does that mean that I don't like the book. Does that mean the book isn't worth reading. And I think that there's a lot to be gleaned from having characters that aren't particularly likable. Because, most of us, in certain contexts, aren't particularly likable, depending on whose eyes we're looking through. >> [LAUGH] >> And so I feel like that part of the author's responsibility is to do her best to engage with an authentic sense of a human, and to explore the possibilities for empathy. In my case, I'm particularly interested in empathy across time because that's the intellectual position that I'm coming from. But I think that, I think all authors have that in common, that we're at root we're struggling to create empathy. You know? >> [SOUND] >> What's that word, technically? >> [LAUGH] >> The level of the sentence or the paragraph. When you're actually putting some pros together. >> Uh-huh. >> And you're like, okay. I need people to be more sympathetic. What it. >> Yeah. >> Are there things you actually do. And are they different when you're writing in a more present day context than a more historical context. >> In a funny way, at least with Physic book, I found the historical, admitting that the whole thing is historical. But I mean the more deeper historical. I found those passages easier to write. I found it easier to think outside my own point of view. Perhaps because there was such a distance to cross. Their assumptions were going to be so different that I really had to discard my own memory, my own recollection. It was harder for me to write in 1991, because I had been a version of myself in 1991. I had my own memories, I had my own experience. I had my own very regrettable fashion choices. >> [LAUGH] >> And, so for me, leaving myself aside to write Connie and her point of view in her period was a bigger challenge. Frankly, I don't think I met it as well, to be honest with you. I think that I wrote the historical stuff with more effect and affect, because of its distance, it was easier to let my own self fall away. Other writers don't struggle with that as much. But it's actually one of the reasons that my second novel, which is called The House of Velvet and Glass is entirely historic. It takes place mostly in 1915 in Boston, and to a lesser degree in China in 1868. And part of that was because I found it easier to forget my present, and to just thrust myself in to these different points of view that are from a different time period, and have a different experience of self, of technology, things like that. >> So, do you think Connie is to some degree representative of you, if you couldn't necessarily. >> I don't think that she is although there is an almost universal confusion between me and Connie. I mean I think Connie's Facebook page for instance has a picture of me on it. Although it didn't for a very long time. But, she's a graduate student, she's a brunette, she has an adorable sidekick dog. These are not coincidences, because I was a first time novelist who was writing my way into a role that I knew, and kind of a set of anxieties that I was already engaged with. I think that Physic book, at least for me, is certainly an artifact of a moment in my life. In a way that other fiction that I've written is less an artifact of a personal moment, for me, and more a purely kind of intellectual antiesthetic exercise. That being said, Connie and I have nothing in common, I mean for one thing she's a terrific student. I was writing a novel. I was supposed to be working on my dissertation. >> [LAUGH] >> So there's that. And I think that Connie's relationship with herself and her anxieties are quite different from mine. Her relationship with her mother, is not based on my relationship with my mother at all. And so there is a, certainly there is some blurring that happens, I think inevitably, especially for beginning novelists. It's been said that debut novels are always just a little bit too autobiographical I think [LAUGH]. And I'm definitely guilty of that crime. But I do think that Connie and I don't actually have much in common. In fact, occasionally readers are like, I don't really like Connie. She's kind of stubborn and irritating. And she's slow in putting her research together, and stuff like that. And I don't always like Connie, either, actually. I mean, she doesn't always do what I wanted her to do. She's not as noble or marvelous as one might wish her to be. And so I don't know if that answers your question but it, the answer to that question is maybe it's kind of complicated. >> Yeah. >> For your perspective though at the beginning of our discussion you had said that you approached this novel from a more historical perspective than from the fiction perspective and I think that authors who do approach history from the fiction perspective do tend to include a lot of autobiographical elements, and you being from an historical perspective, I think I enjoy history too. And we're taught to keep our distance, to not taint what historical facts we're looking at with our biases in our life. And I think I see that in your book because you're right. I don't see similarities well based on what you've told us between you and Connie, and I think that even contributes to the historical aspect of this novel, the fact that you do distance yourself. And I think that it's a nice change from other types of historical fiction. >> Thank you. Although it's funny that you say that, it's true that certainly in academic writing the expectation is of total objectivity and pure non-personal engagement with the facts. And yet the deeper you get, at least in witchcraft historiography, the more tenuous that becomes. I mean, if you look at for instance, before Carol Karlsen's book, which was 1985, Devil in the Shape of a Woman, before that, the fact that most witches were women was kind of not that important. Some of the most major scholarship and why? Because it was in the 1980s that women's history started moving from the margin and into the center of academic scholarship. One of the biggest kind of overarching theories of why the afflicted girls acted so crazy, that the Ergotism Hypothesis that was advanced by a woman named Linnda Caporael in 1974, it still gets recycled in popular culture a lot. In fact, at book events people ask me all the time, weren't they just eating moldy bread that was making them hallucinate? Well, that hypothesis was advanced, as I said, in 1974, where there was a desire for [LAUGH] you know, there was question about and engagement with hallucinatory drugs. >> [LAUGH] >> Both in a popular context and in an academic context. I'm not being that facetious. I'm saying that that interpretation is a product of a particular historical moment. To think that academics and scholarship is going to be independent of intellectual trend is completely false, I would think. And so I think that, especially for the history of, a discredited idea, I mean this the other thing I find so compelling about the history of witchcraft, we don't believe witches are real anymore, so what are we doing a history of if we're doing a history of a discredited idea. It becomes this kind of blank space onto which contemporary ideas can often be projected. And I'm kind of getting off topic of physics books specifically. But it's something that I think is very interesting. I think it can reveal greater truths about the personal investment we have in the practice of history that I think is often obscured. >> Was going off of the discredit idea like witchcraft not being a really real object, is there a reason why you chose alchemy for children to be interested in because alchemy is also a pretty discredited idea [LAUGH] it would be awesome to turn stuff into gold, I love it, but it's not really a real thing. So is that why you kinda juxtapose the two ideas or- >> The juxtaposition of witchcraft and alchemy kind of continues the conversation about the gendering both of history and also of knowledge. If you look at the way that alchemy was, itself, when it was still kind of a going concern, and it was a going concern into the 18th century. When alchemy was a going concern, it was in the university. It was the purview of intellectual men. It was considered a practice for the educated. And a pursuit of a rarefied kind of knowledge worker, in a funny way. Whereas witchcraft, even if we define it even as in opposition to Christianity, even if we're using the ecclesiastic definition, or even if we're using the folk definition, is gendered very differently, and particularly with the folk definition. It is a non institutional knowledge. It is a, artisanal isn't the right word, but it is a small, personal knowledge. It is very much in opposition to the elite. It is a non-elite practice. And so there's a gender critique at the center of it. But there's also to some degree a class critique. In a funny way, it is a branch of occult thought that was sanctioned, whereas witchcraft was not. >> Just a quick clarifier. Going back to the earlier question of witchcraft being real or not. I think, I want to kinda hear from you what your distinction between those two different things are. Because on the one hand you have witchcraft in the book we actually get to see. >> Mm-hm. [INAUDIBLE] we see the magic happen. >> Yeah. >> And actually get to witness that sort of play and then there's also like the practice of it. And so how for you as the writer were those two things sort of distinct in your mind because at the efficacy of these spells are immaterial if there are people that actually believe that these things work. Who are actively doing reciting spells or you know try to practice method, whether or not it actually happened and how does that sort of factor into a western, like a 17th century context because in our 21st century America we may not believe, witches, as we understand it like a Harry Potter universe, >> Right. >> are real, but that doesn't negate the fact that there are people, say in non-western culture that are witches, who do practice witchcraft, and that is a very real thing culturally for them. So how does that sort of play in between the practice and the effect. >> Well I think that there are two ways of talking about the so-called reality of it and one of them is the question of practice, i.e. Did people actually conduct ritual in the hope of having a magical outcome? And then the other is in the form of persecution. Because I hasten to add that everyone who was accused at Salem, none of them did anything wrong. They weren't accused because they did anything. They were accused because of structural situations and also because of personality, because of kind of who they were. That being said I mean as you rightly point out today not only do we have an alternative religion that is built around the practice of ritual, and the kind of group articulation of belief. But by the flip side of that, in certain other cultures, it is still possible to be accused as a witch, and in certain countries in Africa. And, in fact, in Saudi Arabia recently someone was put to death as a witch in Saudi Arabia. I'm an Americanist and so I'm only really qualified to talk about the American context. That being said, I think one of the things that was interesting to me in talking or thinking about the issues in physic book was the fact that we kind of disavow too much, I think. We think that we live in a post-enlightenment world that is completely governed by science and we do. And so, why is it that I still wear my grandmother's wedding ring for good luck? Why do I do that? I would say it's because it is an heirloom and that's why I put special stock in this little object of metal and chips of stone. That's the word that I'm gonna use. The word is heirloom, it's a nice safe word. But the truth of the matter is, it is a kind of magical thinking that I'm indulging in, and my putting on of the ring is itself a kind of ritual, that there is this sense I'm in effect treating the object in a talismanic way, and I think within our culture we don't necessarily have names for these persistent forms of belief. But one of the things that's been very interesting to me in my life as a writer, and especially a writer who is interested intellectually interested in questions of belief and in questions of occult knowledge. I was joking with my husband the other day I should get occult expert written on my business card. >> [LAUGH] >> Because it's actually kind of crazy how much I've read about the subject. But what's been interesting to me is how many people will occasionally pull me aside and say and sort of confess to me their secret ritual, their secret practice, that isn't formed either by the folk or just by kind of practice, or habit, in which a certain kind of magical thought is taking place. And so, I was interested in. I'm sort of circumventing your question a little bit, to get back to the historical part of your question, there is not a ton of evidence for the cunning folk kind of work that I've described but there's some. In fact there's a few witch bottles. There is a witch bottle in the story. Those are real and, in fact, there are a few witch bottles that have turned up in archaeological digs in Britain. In fact, there are a couple that you can, you can [INAUDIBLE]. If you search for one for them online, or actually might be one or two of them on my Pinterest board for physical that you can look at. There's one that's been x-rayed. It's still sealed. It still has liquid inside. Which is probably urine of a very long deceased person and it's still full of rusted nails. I mean this is, so you know these objects, the material culture of, at least of early modern English and North American folk belief to some degree turns up here and there, not a ton of it, but it does turn up and, in fact, one of the things that provoked my initial thinking about this story was the fact that in Marblehead today if you wander around town you'll find horse shoes all over the place. There was a, nailed on doors horse shoes for good luck. In fact, in our house, in the little apartment I mentioned to you guys at the beginning of class. There's this very narrow door from the room we use as our bedroom which is in the back lean to part of the house, there's a, a narrow door to a rear stair, so these houses used to grow, here's me being material culture person. Early modern North American houses grew kind of organically, so when you talk about Hawthorn's House of the Seven Gables, a gable is a pointed roof part of a house and Hawthorne's house, which is based on the Turner Ingersoll mansion, which is still standing in Salem, the reason it had seven of them is because it grew over time. So you'd add a wing here and you'd add a wing there and it would pop out this way and you'd have all these pointy different roofs intersecting in weird ways. So the house where we living had a room here, a room here, loft, loft. Then they would have added a lean to in the back to expand out into the back then you'd add an extra loft as people got older. And so we, our bedroom was in the lean to part in back. And over the door, to the rear stair, was a little horseshoe charm. Like not a real horseshoe, totally a charm, yay big, over the door, caked in paint. And I asked our landlords how long it had been there. They had no idea. They did not know how, who put it there, they didn't know why it was there, they hadn't ever noticed it. And so, there are these remnants here and there of folk belief and sometimes we're so accustomed to seeing them we don't see them anymore. [LAUGH] [INAUDIBLE] answered your question. >> And on that very occult note, we should bring our discussion to a close, and thank our visiting writer, Katherine Howe, for joining us. >> Thank you, guys. >> [APPLAUSE]
