Abigail insistently tells her uncle, the Reverend Parris, that all she and the other girls did in the forest was dance. She says, "Uncle, we did dance, let you tell [the town] I confessed it—and I'll be whipped if I must be. But they're speakin' of witchcraft. Betty's not witched." Abigail knows what horrible trouble she and the other girls will be in if anyone finds out what they were really doing. This is why she threatens the others with a "pointy reckoning" in the middle of the night if they say a word. When Betty wakes up, she reveals that Abigail actually "drank a charm to kill John Proctor's wife." Further, Mrs. Putnam reveals to Reverend Parris that she sent her daughter, Ruth, to Parris's Barbadian slave, Tituba, to conjure the spirits of Mrs. Putnam's other dead children in order to find out who is responsible for their deaths. Despite the fact that "it is a formidable sin to conjure up the dead," as Parris says, Mrs. Putnam feels it is the only way she can find out who "murdered [her] babies." In addition, rumors are running rampant through the town regarding what the girls were doing, and people now assume that Parris's daughter, Betty, has been bewitched. Mrs. Putnam has heard Betty can fly, and she wants to know how high. She says that "Mr. Collins saw her goin' over Ingersoll's barn, and come down light as a bird [...]." Ultimately, there are quite a few different stories going around about what the girls were doing, and none of them seems to contain the full and total truth.
No comments:
Post a Comment