Books: Poppets

A MIRROR FOR WITCHES — Esther Forbes—Houghton Mifflin ($2.50). Child of witches burned in Brittany, Bilby’s Doll is haunted in Salem by the stench of their burning flesh, remembers their Black Masses, and says the Lord’s Prayer backward. Thereupon the impish child is accused of withering the fruit of her foster-mother’s womb, and of casting a fatal ailment upon her beloved foster-father. When God ignores her challenge that He restore this good man’s life, she believes herself indeed a witch, and sets herself weirdly to learning the trade. Straws and hairs and fingernails are stuff for fantastic poppets; Ahab, the neighbor Thumb’s bull is fit to make a virile familiar. In answer to her prayers that the Prince of Darkness send her a tutor in the black arts, there appears nightly a demon disguised in the swarthy skin and gold hooped earrings of a pirate.

At her trial for witchcraft (Increase Mather and many another divine officiating), an old medicine woman swears this pirate who so cleverly duped Doll with his talk of Hell, was none other than her earthly son. Doll of course denies his earthliness, swears it is carnal knowledge of a fiend she has, and convicts herself of her witchcraft.

Neurotics are the favorite topic of dreary modern fiction. Bilby’s Doll is a neurotic whose hallucinations are logically built upon the terrific shock of her childhood. But the lore of her witchcraft, and the superstitions of her New England neighbors, lift her out of the psychiatric laboratory into the worthy realm of fiction. Author Forbes formalizes her fantastics with a prose borrowed in part from the 17th century when witches were common subject of puritanical debate.