I need to talk about sexuality and women in the book I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem by Maryse Boucolon for a paper and I don't know where to...

The book I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salemby Maryse Boucolon is loosely based on an historical figure, Tituba, a woman possibly of Native American, African, or mixed descent. She was a slave owned by Samuel Parris, probably purchased in Barbados, and accused of witchcraft during the Salem Witch Trials of 1692. After being beaten by her owner, she confessed to practicing witchcraft, but we have no notion of whether this represents an actual practice of...

The book I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem by Maryse Boucolon is loosely based on an historical figure, Tituba, a woman possibly of Native American, African, or mixed descent. She was a slave owned by Samuel Parris, probably purchased in Barbados, and accused of witchcraft during the Salem Witch Trials of 1692. After being beaten by her owner, she confessed to practicing witchcraft, but we have no notion of whether this represents an actual practice of some non-Christian ritual tradition, what sort of rituals those may actually have been, or whether the confession was purely fictional, something she simply made up to make the beatings stop. While our historical accounts see the Salem Witch Trials through the eyes of white Christian men, Boucolon uses the character of Tituba to imaginatively reconstruct how that may have been viewed from the perspective of a non-Christian non-white woman. 

You might start your paper with the point that the voices of non-white non-Christian women are suppressed in our existing histories and thus the only way they can be recaptured is through an act of the imagination. Thus even though this work is fictional, in reading it, we have one of our few opportunities to reach back in time and try to empathize with Tituba. Maryse Boucolon, who was born in 1934, in Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe, in the French West Indies, shares the ethnic and cultural heritage of her heroine and in her writing often explores her cultural heritage, especially the clash between colonization and religious oppression and native traditions.

Next, after setting the historical stage, you should explore the intersections of race, class, and gender oppression, particularly the way in which Tituba is born of rape and suffers both rape and beatings as a slave. While sexuality is regarded as a dangerous force for white women in the novel, to be domesticated within the bonds of Christian marriage, when it escapes those bonds, as is the case with Hester, who rebels deliberately, or Tituba who suffers rape, a double standard exists, with women but not their male partners suffering for their transgressions. 

Your conclusion should address the way that gender and class oppression work together with colonialism as forces to oppress Tituba, but her own cultural and religious traditions give her strength. Love, seen as occurring authentically between the marginalized outsiders Benjamin and Tituba becomes a liberatory force in the novel, opposed to the oppressive forces of rape, hegemony, and patriarchy.