also face the reality of being branded as a powerful and dangerous witch while not actually having material or legal power to defend herself or prevent attacks from men. Fearmongering was a source of power for the prosecutors who tried those accused of witchcraft. The accused were often framed as dangerous women: spiritually and sexually impure, too powerful, and too brazen. Women who attempted to defend themselves were seen as emphasizing this point of brazenness. Women who did not confront the accusation were seen as concurring with the accusations.

The witch trials exemplify how women constantly faced an impossible duality. Tituba, as an enslaved woman, would be expected to never resist the sexual advances of her owner; but at the same time, she would be expected to never be anything other than sexually modest and chaste. This experience is similar to that of non-enslaved women of the time; however, the wife of the slave-master often showed great cruelty toward the enslaved woman for being raped by the mistress's husband, because the mistress was unable to lash out at the husband. Tituba would be punished by her master for resisting his sexual advances and punished by her mistress for being raped. The impossible duality is inescapable, and it mirrors the impossible duality that women accused of witchcraft face.

The book I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem by Maryse Boucolon is loosely based on an historical figure, Tituba, a woman possibly of Native American, African, or mixed descent. She was a slave owned by Samuel Parris, probably purchased in Barbados, and accused of witchcraft during the Salem Witch Trials of 1692. After being beaten by her owner, she confessed to practicing witchcraft, but we have no notion of whether this represents an actual practice of some non-Christian ritual tradition, what sort of rituals those may actually have been, or whether the confession was purely fictional, something she simply made up to make the beatings stop. While our historical accounts see the Salem Witch Trials through the eyes of white Christian men, Boucolon uses the character of Tituba to imaginatively reconstruct how that may have been viewed from the perspective of a non-Christian non-white woman. 

You might start your paper with the point that the voices of non-white non-Christian women are suppressed in our existing histories and thus the only way they can be recaptured is through an act of the imagination. Thus even though this work is fictional, in reading it, we have one of our few opportunities to reach back in time and try to empathize with Tituba. Maryse Boucolon, who was born in 1934, in Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe, in the French West Indies, shares the ethnic and cultural heritage of her heroine and in her writing often explores her cultural heritage, especially the clash between colonization and religious oppression and native traditions.

Next, after setting the historical stage, you should explore the intersections of race, class, and gender oppression, particularly the way in which Tituba is born of rape and suffers both rape and beatings as a slave. While sexuality is regarded as a dangerous force for white women in the novel, to be domesticated within the bonds of Christian marriage, when it escapes those bonds, as is the case with Hester, who rebels deliberately, or Tituba who suffers rape, a double standard exists, with women but not their male partners suffering for their transgressions. 

Your conclusion should address the way that gender and class oppression work together with colonialism as forces to oppress Tituba, but her own cultural and religious traditions give her strength. Love, seen as occurring authentically between the marginalized outsiders Benjamin and Tituba becomes a liberatory force in the novel, opposed to the oppressive forces of rape, hegemony, and patriarchy.