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Part 1: Chapter 4
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Surviving vs. Enduring
Slavery and Daily Life
Nature as Knowledge
Desire, Patriarchy and the Difficulty of Feminism
Archival History vs. Memory
Summary
Analysis
On board a ship, Parris pours ice-cold water on Tituba and John and formally marries them. Tituba feels that she is going to be ill. As the ship sets off, Tituba avoids Parris’s gaze, looking instead at her surroundings. She notes that the water of “the sea was a bright blue and the uninterrupted line of the coast, a dark green.”
Whereas Parris tries to make Tituba and John conform to his ideas of propriety by baptizing Tituba into Christianity (pouring the water) and marrying them, Tituba again seeks solace in nature (the sea and the coast). These particularly short sections also provide a clue to form: though I, Tituba is primarily a novel, Condé is also experimenting with more lyrical, stream-of-consciousness forms of writing.
Themes
