A Mirror for Witches by Esther Forbes

First published: 1928

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Psychological realism

Time of work: Seventeenth century

Locale: Massachusetts

Principal Characters:

• Jared Bilby, an English sea captain
• Hannah, his wife
• Doll, his adopted daughter
• Mr. Zacharias Zelley, a minister
• Titus Thumb, a man in love with Doll
• Labour and Sorrow Thumb, his twin sisters
• Goody Greene, an old herb woman
• The Bloody Shad, her pirate son and Doll’s demon prince
• Mr. Kleaver, the surgeon

The Story

Mr. Jared Bilby, captain of an English brig, landed his ship in Britanny on a day when the French burned more than two hundred witches and warlocks. Attracted by the holocaust, he saw a tiny girl trying to pass the guards in order to reach her burning mother. Bilby sheltered the child and took her home. He thought she would forget her past, for she lay in a swoon for days; but she remembered only the evil of the years before she met Bilby.

Bilby called the little one his dolly and soon the child was known as Bilby’s Doll. They adored each other, but Bilby’s wife Hannah hated the child as soon as she saw her. Hannah had been barren for years but had recently become pregnant. One searing look from Doll withered Hannah to the marrow, and she believed thereafter that Doll had blasted her unborn child.

Bilby took his family to America. On the ship, they met Mr. Zelley, a minister who became friendly and settled close to them at Cowan Corners, near Salem.

Goody Greene, a kindly woman looked on with disfavor by the townspeople because she associated with Indians in her search for herbs, was called to account by the churchmen because she had let fall in church a poppet she had made for Doll. No one would visit her, but suspicion fell away from her and centered on Doll when Hannah became strangely ill. Hannah told everyone that Doll was a witch who had cast a spell on Bilby so that it pleased him to pamper and fondle her. Mr. Zelley also befriended the girl.

To join their properties, Bilby proposed a marriage between Doll and Titus, the son of Deacon Thumb. Titus, a virtuous young man, was attracted to Doll and willing to wed. One day, the Thumbs’ black bull Ahab was missing. Titus got up early the next morning to catch the animal at a watering hole. The bull, ridden by an Indian, came crashing down to the water. Titus called out and shot at the Indian. In the twinkling of an eye, Doll stood before him, her hands over her heart. Titus knew the bullet had gone through her, but there was no blood on her gown. He wanted to make love to Doll, but he felt only like a protecting big brother until after he had left her, when again he greatly desired her. From then on, he began to pine away.

Bilby wished to speed the marriage. When Titus came courting, Doll frantically locked up the house, but at last, she let him in. When he asked her to marry him, she bit his hand. He flung her away so hard that she hit her head and lay helpless. Titus wept.

Without telling Doll, Bilby had the marriage banns proclaimed the next Sunday. After Mr. Zelley had announced them, Doll screamed at her foster father. Cursed as he was, he took to his bed and died four days later. Doll kept herself hidden during his illness, but on the fourth day, she went looking for Goody Greene. Tracing the herb woman’s footsteps into the woods, Doll became lost. Lying down to sleep, she was startled to hear her father calling her. Then she knew that he was dead and offered herself to the Evil One if he would only release Bilby’s soul. Before and after sleeping, she saw a host of evil signs and knew that she was a witch with evil powers. On her return home, Mr. Zelley assured her that her father had died from natural causes.

No one came to see Hannah and Doll during the winter except Mr. Zelley, who spoke to each separately because the women kept apart. When spring came, Doll noticed that by thought she could make the bull Ahab rush at Titus, and by twisting her fingers compel the deacon to break into fits of coughing. She kept looking for an agent of the Devil to instruct her in arts of evil.

Doll was lonely. The only house in which she was welcome was Goody Greene’s. When she went there, Doll could feel a presence in the room which the woman would not identify. She could even see a bulge against the bed curtains. In the cellar, where she went for herbs, Doll was frightened by a little imp that looked like an Ethiopian.

In May, there was a fire at the Thumbs’. Fascinated but terrified because fires reminded her of her parents’ death, Doll went to watch the blaze. Ahab, penned in the burning barn, came thundering out as the roof fell in. Doll ran up a short ladder to the top of a haystack. There she found her demon prince, dressed like a sailor and carrying the imp she had seen in the cellar. The fiend called his imp the Bloody Shad.

Doll spent the summer nights happily with her demon lover, who taught her to say her prayers backward. He told her that her parents were safe in hell and that she would have a short life, then life everlasting. Before he left her for good, he told her that he would come back to be with her when she lay dying. Shortly afterward, three pirates were caught and executed at Boston harbor. One, called the Bloody Shad, carried a monkey that resembled a tiny imp.

Without her demon, Doll was lonely again. She spent much time in the Thumbs’ pasture talking to Ahab, who was friendly with her but savage with anyone else. At last, Titus’ mother persuaded him to pen the beast. One day, Doll met Titus’ small twin sisters and gave them pumpkin seed poppets. Without telling their mother about them, the children ate the seeds and became deathly sick. Mrs. Thumb was sure Doll had withered the children’s vitals when she learned that Doll had given them the poppets. The children screamed that Doll was visiting them and pinching them, but no one could see her. Strange things blamed on Doll happened to people in nearby towns. Convinced that Doll was a witch, Deacon Thumb and Mr. Kleaver, the surgeon, had her jailed.

At her trial, the judges were at first convinced that Hannah’s hatred for Doll had produced all the complaints against the girl. The twins, brought into the court, went into convulsions at the sight of her. When she touched them, the devil went out of them into her, and they quieted. Then Doll, in reciting the Lord’s prayer, said the last half backward. When Doll spoke of her lover, Goody Greene claimed that he had been her pirate son, but the old woman was thrown out of court. The judges seemed so sympathetic that Doll told them why she thought she was a witch. She insisted, however, that she had never harmed the twins.

Held for a jury trial, Doll was put in irons. Mr. Zelley, going to comfort her, was confused by a third presence he could feel in the cell. Doll told him that her demon had come back to be with her. When she was found dead one dismal morning, her face was peaceful.

Critical Evaluation:

Esther Forbes was primarily interested in New England, where she lived and where her ancestors have lived since Massachusetts was settled. She was peculiarly equipped to write A MIRROR FOR WITCHES, since witches are common to the folklore and history of her region, and it is said that one of her ancestors died in jail after being charged with witchcraft. While the nineteenth century Hawthorne used this kind of material symbolically, and others have used it romantically or sentimentally, Forbes has written originally and brilliantly in making A MIRROR FOR WITCHES a psychologically realistic novel. Under the same title, a successful modern ballet has been based on this tale of demonism and witchcraft in early Puritan times.

Primarily a novel about psychology, it reflects Doll Bilby as a tormented, lonely, undersized woman who is hated by her barren stepmother. Hannah Bilby is jealous of the attention lavished on Doll by her husband, Jared. Doll is feared by the people of her Massachusetts village because of her stepmother’s malicious gossip and because of the eccentric behavior that her stepmother’s hatred has brought out in her. Doll is not a witch, however, and Bloody Shad is not her “demon prince.” He is simply a pirate who has escaped jail and fled to Doll’s part of the country. He passes himself off to her as a demon since he had heard of her reputation and was playing up to it. She is eager to believe him as a way of soothing her loneliness.

The whole course of action in the novel is much like that involving Doll and Bloody Shad. Doll was driven mad by the tales told about her, for after her stepfather’s death, she herself came to believe those tales. She was lonely and without comfort. Forsaken by the godly people of Puritan New England, she in turn forsook God and sought comfort from the devil whose servant she had long been told she was. She begins to walk abroad at night in search of her new god, Satan, and the world looks to be a better place to her after she has become mad. She was at peace with herself after she accepted the townspeople’s view of her and began to accommodate herself to that view.

At one point, she dreams that she rises up out of her body and flies about her bedroom. She flies out the window and goes walking in spirit over the meadows. She knew when she awoke that this was not a dream because she was wearing her slippers; they were wet with dew and covered with grass stains. She, of course, had been walking in her sleep. Forbes knows this, and the reader knows this, but Forbes chooses to portray Doll’s dream as actual fact involving astral projection and witchcraft. It is upon such a point that the novel flounders, and what could have been an engrossing tale about magic and the discernment of neurotic behavior turns out to be fundamentally disappointing.

Forbes writes this novel in a quasi-Puritan style. It is as if it were an example of a moral tale, written by a true believer, describing the harmful effects of trafficking with the forces of evil. Such writings do exist, but they should not be imitated by those who cannot do it brilliantly. The fact that Forbes does imitate it is one mistake, and it makes the novel seem like a poorly planned piece of work. This error is compounded by her presentation of the story in the guise of the omniscient narrator. The resulting combination of these two errors is a novel that often does not seem to know where it is going or how to get there. A MIRROR FOR WITCHES sometimes shows very well the psychological underpinnings of actions that the community of the novel chooses to see as magical, supernatural, or maleficent. More often, however, the novel is confusing, and the reader remains unsure of the psychological underpinning Forbes is trying to show.

The theory that previous ages may have recognized the truths of what was later called psychoanalysis but hid these truths under a cloak of magic and mystery, is a fascinating one. It is unfortunate that Forbes was not more skillful in her treatment of this theme.