The Wonders Of The Invisible World

Throughout history, minority groups such as women and blacks have often been treated as “monstrous” outcasts. In The Wonders of the Invisible World, Cotton Mather’s account of the Salem witch trials, women are depicted as witches. In Coleman’s In the Beginning there was White Zombie, we see that first-hand accounts of Haitian culture written by a white man created the image of the zombie. When studying these accounts, we notice that when depicting minorities as monsters, the oppressor seems to feel a need to cite "reliable" sources and enhance the credibility of his ideas and experiences. This essay will argue that these credibility-enhancing mechanisms are used to spread panic and fear of minority groups, and hence support the creation of …show more content…
In The Wonders of the Invisible World, Mather presents himself as an unbiased informer, stating that he has never had “any personal prejudice at the persons thus brought upon the stage”. He refers to himself as a “historian”, a reputable authority on the events of the past, and denies being an advocate for the trials. He also mentions that he received all his information from official court records, which are supposed to be objective and unbiased. Seabrook also used official documents as sources to support his claims. He cites Article 249 of the Haitian Penal Code in The Magic Island, saying that it confirms his “attempted rational explanation … of how the zombie may actually exist without being supernatural”. He goes on to say that his argument is “accepted by ethnologists as probably correct”. Just like Mather uses the widely acknowledged reputability of a group of scholars (historians) to support his claims, Seabrook does the same with ethnologists. In Horror Noire, Coleman mentions that the American explorer also cited The Museum Journal (1917) of the University of Pennsylvania to lend credibility to his work. The overuse of credibility-enhancing mechanisms can be partially explained by the fact that these writers were arguing for ideas that were highly dubious, as there weren’t any solid findings to support the concepts of witchcraft and zombieism. Hence, they …show more content…
The bite of the zombie represents the tainting of whiteness and its purity by blackness. In Horror Noire, Coleman quotes John Dayan’s Haiti, History, and the Gods when he concludes that “white’s gradual taking on of the traits of Blacks was seen not as imitation but infection”. Here, we see that while blacks were expected to assimilate into white culture, the reciprocal was far from true: when whites adopted elements of black culture, they were said to have “caught a disease, as if they were too weak-willed or amoral to resist the contagious attraction of loose living, scanty dress, and languorous talk”. Similarly, members of the colonial New England society feared being possessed by the devil that inhabited the bodies of witches. The idea that Mather and other Puritans spread was that anyone, even the purest of beings, could become a victim of the indwelling spirit without even realizing. In The Wonders of The Invisible World, Mather says: “if the devils now can strike the minds of men with any poisons of so fine a composition and operation, that scores of innocent people shall unite in confessions of a crime which we see actually committed, it is a thing prodigious, beyond the wonders of the former ages, and it threatens no less than a sort of dissolution upon the world”. Those who were bewitched had to be persecuted and forced to confess their sins. If they