Discussion Topic
Mrs. Putnam's reasons for contacting Tituba in The Crucible
Summary:
In The Crucible, Mrs. Putnam contacts Tituba because she believes Tituba can communicate with the dead. Desperate to understand the deaths of her seven infants, Mrs. Putnam hopes Tituba can help her discover who or what is responsible for their deaths through supernatural means.
In Act 1 of The Crucible, why did Mrs. Putnam contact Tituba?
There is a mystical quality about Tituba for a variety of reasons. She is from Barbados, and the people of Salem believe that the slave island culture is rooted in a lot of spiritual mysticism. Parris has a good quote that shows audiences that her Christian spirituality is somewhat suspect.
I saw Tituba waving her arms over the fire when I came on you. Why was she doing that? And I heard a screeching and gibberish coming from her mouth. She were swaying like a dumb beast over that fire!
Mrs. Putnam believes that Tituba is the only person in the town that can give her the information that she seeks. Mrs. Putman tells audiences that seven of her children have died. Ruth is now sick, and it looks like she might die too. Mrs. Putnam genuinely believes that her children have been murdered, and she wants to find out...
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who the murderer is. She believes that only her dead children can identify the culprit, so Mrs. Putnam contacts Tituba and asks her to contact her dead children using the Barbados mystical faith.
Mrs. Putnam: And so I thought to send her to your Tituba—
Parris: To Tituba! What may Tituba—?
Mrs. Putnam: Tituba knows how to speak to the dead, Mr. Parris.
Parris: Goody Ann, it is a formidable sin to conjure up the dead!
Mrs. Putnam: I take it on my soul, but who else may surely tell us what person murdered my babies?
This part of the play comes in Act I just after the Reverend Hale has arrived in Salem to offer his expertise to sort out what has been happening. When Mrs. Putnam accuses Tituba of being able to conjure, she needs to offer some form of proof to back up her claim. When she does so, it is proof that she herself has contacted Tituba to ask her to perform a spell so that she can know who killed her seven babies who all died. Note what she confesses to:
I sent my child--she should learn from Tituba who murdered her sisters.
Rebecca Nurse responds in horror to this, as what Mrs. Putnam did was to send her daughter to commune with the dead spirits of her sisters, who all died in childbirth. Mrs. Putnam therefore contacted Tituba before in order to try and learn why her daughters all died.
Why does Mrs. Putnam contact Tituba in The Crucible?
Mrs. Putnam contacted Reverend Parris's Barbadian slave, Tituba, prior to the start of the play because she believes that "Tituba knows how to speak to the dead [...]," as she says early in Act 1. This is important to Mrs. Putnam because she has lost seven of her eight babies to death within a day of their births, and she is anxious to make some contact with them and figure out what or who it was that killed them. Moreover, she claims to have seen her one surviving daughter "[shrivel] like a sucking mouth were pullin' on her life too" this year. Desperate not to lose her only child and to find out why her others died, Mrs. Putnam has come to the conclusion that witchcraft must be playing a role because there is simply no other reason that makes sense to her. Therefore, she admits to sending her daughter, Ruth, to Tituba so that they could conjure the spirits of her dead babies and find out the identity of the witch that murdered them.