Cultural Sociology
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Why Salem Made Sense: Culture, Gender, and the Puritan Persecution of
Witchcraft
Isaac Reed
Cultural Sociology 2007; 1; 209
DOI: 10.1177/1749975507078188
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Cultural Sociology
Copyright © 2007
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Volume 1(2): 209–234
[DOI: 10.1177/1749975507078188]
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Why Salem Made Sense: Culture, Gender,
and the Puritan Persecution of Witchcraft
■
Isaac Reed
University of Colorado, USA
ABSTRACT
Sociological explanations of the Salem witch trials, and of witch-hunts in the West
more generally, have focused on economic transition, political instability, and the functional aspects of witchcraft belief. A more interpretive approach to the explanation
of Salem is proposed: an analysis of the intersection of the gendered symbolization
of witchcraft in colonial Massachusetts and the larger tensions within Puritan culture
at the close of the 17th century. A broad theoretical implication of this interpretive
shift is also proposed: that a cultural-sociological approach to witch-hunting as symbolic action can bring together feminist theorizations of witch-hunting as an exercise
in patriarchal power with the social history of the broad, structural causes of witchhunting in pre-modern Europe and New England.
KEY WORDS
cultural sociology / culture / gender / interpretation / Salem witch trials / witch-hunts
Introduction
n The Crucible, Arthur Miller (2003[1952]) recreated the Salem witch trials
to attack McCarthyism in mid-twentieth century America, and since then they
have become a common metaphor for conspiracy and the political use of fear.
Miller used a historical event to provide perspective on contemporary events, a
venerable interpretive device in literature and the arts. Here, however, I am concerned with the inverse hermeneutic problem, namely, how to comprehend
and explain what happened in Salem Village, Massachusetts in 1692. What
motivated the people who made the trials happen? In other words, what structured
their social action? In working towards a sociological explanation of the trials,
I
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I take as my concern what Max Weber described as ‘action in the sense of
subjectively understandable orientation of behavior’ (Weber, 1978: 13).
In attempting such an interpretation, I wish to resist the transportation of
20th and 21st century subjectivities into 17th century Massachusetts, or the
assumption of a universal set of human interests, economic or political. The
persecution of witchcraft at Salem involved the use of legitimated violence by a
proto-modern state, and occurred in a moment of economic transition. It thus
makes for an excellent case study in social power. But, by investigating and
attempting to comprehend the subjectivities that inhabited this social world, I
want to explore the ways social power is not only located in the opportunities
granted to interested actors in a market structure or in the decision-making
potential of certain social locations and political positions. I will suggest that
power is also present in the ‘texts’ of social life, the typified meanings which
structure moments of faith and revelation, define the split between public
denunciation and private skepticism, and also serve as a ‘model for’ and ‘model
of’ social reality (Geertz, 2000a: 93).
In this regard, the tools of cultural sociology – inspired by Durkheim, structuralism, and post-structuralism in tandem with Weber’s and Geertz’s
hermeneutics – will be particularly useful. What could broadly be called social
discourse analysis – which draws upon structural anthropology (Sahlins, 1976,
1981), the strong program in cultural sociology (Alexander and Smith, 2004)
and post-structuralist studies of language, signification, and the body (Butler,
1989, 1993; Foucault, 1972, 1978) – brings to bear an ability to examine
intended and unintended meanings, connotation as well as denotation, exclusion
as well as profanation. I will argue that the fears and anxieties that drove the
people of Salem to execute nineteen of their own men and women cannot be
reduced to political uncertainty, economic competition, or village jealousy. But
I will also argue that we cannot take the Puritans wholly at their word as to what
was guiding their action. Rather, we must look beyond actors’ own accounts of
their actions towards the meaning-structures that made them possible.
Ultimately, I will argue that Salem made sense to the Congregationalists in
Massachusetts because it was a set of actions in the defense of an emotionally
charged order of morality, metaphysics, and sex. This order was not – or not
only – the standard master narrative of Puritanism, the ‘errand in the wilderness,’ the attempt to build a ‘city upon a hill,’ nor was it the sociologically
tempting ‘collective identity’ of New England. That this narrative and this identity were present for both the leaders and populace of Salem in 1692 is certainly
the case; it was in this theological context that Puritan leaders all over
Massachusetts self-consciously understood both their economic advances and
their political uncertainties. However, if we look deeper into the social meanings at Salem, and decode the underlying assumptions of the Puritan worldview,
we see that the collective project of Puritanism was, in the case of witchcraft,
implicated in a much more specific set of meanings: a conception of masculinity
tied to the Puritan image of God’s absent efficacy, and a conception of femininity
tied to the Puritan image of the Devil’s constant, present temptations of body
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and soul. What Salem put at stake was not only the self-conscious collective
identity of the Puritans as God’s chosen people, but also the nature and place
of men and women, and their relationship to the invisible world of God and the
Devil. It was the understanding of gender inside Puritan culture that enabled
husbands to turn on their wives, ‘good’ women to accuse ‘bad’ ones, and highminded judges to believe them. Such were the structures of the social imagination, in other words, by which male power could, in the Puritan case, imagine
itself into existence, and into legal legitimacy.
The Essex County Witch Crisis: A Brief Historical Summary
I will not, in this article, be concerned with the specific, day-to-day chronology
of the Salem witch trials. Still, it is worth setting out the dramatis personae of
the event. Some of the names I mention here have remained alive in the popular lexicon of the USA, due in part to Miller’s play, but also to the several ‘witch
museums’ that make present-day Salem, Massachusetts a popular tourist attraction. They are divisible into five groups:
1)
2)
3)
4)
5)
The accusers who manifested symptoms of ‘bewitchment’ and who claimed
to be ‘tormented’. This group included, famously, Ann Putnam Jr (age 12),
Ann Putnam Sr (age 30), Abigail Williams (age 11 or 12), and Mary
Warren (a servant in the Proctor household, age 20).
The accused, a subset of which were tried, and nineteen of which were
hanged. This group of adults included Sarah Good, Elizabeth Proctor,
Martha Corey, Rebecca Nurse, John Proctor, Bridget Bishop, Abigail
Hobbs, Giles Corey, and George Burroughs. Burroughs was a former minister of Salem who had left in 1680.
The ‘prosecution’ (so to speak), which is to say the men of power who
pushed the trials forward. This would include Samuel Parris, the village’s
controversial minister, the Putnam men (Thomas Sr, John Sr, Edward) and
Nathaniel Ingersoll. Generally, men went to swear in official complaints on
behalf of the tormented, though women gave testimony which was
recorded.
The judges, most famously Jonathan Corwin, Samuel Sewall, and John
Hathorne, but also former minister William Sloughton and others.
‘Observers’ who actually had varying degrees of involvement. Some townspeople who were no more than bystanders are invaluable to students of
Salem for the journals or letters they left behind. The minister Deodat
Lawson gave sermons at Salem during the scare and also wrote his own
narrative account of the event. Increase Mather and Cotton Mather were
extensively consulted and the historical debate over the extent of their contribution to the trials continues to this day. The governor, Sir William
Phips, appointed the special court to begin the trials, and also brought
them to a halt.
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A narrative summary of the event runs as follows. In 1692 in Salem
Village (today Danvers, Massachusetts), slightly to the west of Salem Town,
several girls in the household of the minister Samuel Parris became ‘afflicted’
and fell into fits and had visions – or so they claimed. After an initial debate
among adults about the cause of the fits concluded with the resolution that the
girls were under an ‘evil hand’ and thus that the cause was ‘unnatural’, the girls
and their parents became convinced that they were ‘bewitched’ by malicious
others. The girls began to accuse other townspeople of tormenting them in
spectral form – i.e. that ghosts of other townsfolk would appear to them, pinch
them, and in other ways ‘afflict’ their bodies. Soon more became afflicted, and
the accusations – numbering in the hundreds – spread throughout the county
throughout the summer. The crisis eventually spread beyond Salem Village and
the families who had been heavily involved in starting it. In particular, the
afflicted girls were invited to Andover to uncover any witches who might be
among the townsfolk there. They accused 49 people before the justice of the
peace refused to write any more warrants. In June, the governor of
Massachusetts Bay Colony set up a special court of ‘Oyer and Terminer’ (to
‘hear and determine’) to try the witches. Nineteen people were hanged for the
crime of witchcraft (13 women and six men), two more died in jail, and Giles
Corey was pressed to death for remaining mute in the face of questions from
the judges (two dogs were also killed on suspicion of being devils). On 29
October, in the face of increasing skepticism, the governor suspended the
court. Upon reconvening, the court acquitted all remaining suspects (Calef,
reported in Burr, 2002).
Before 1692, the practice of publicly accusing witches and trying them in
court was relatively infrequent in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and the practice of executing them even less common. After 1692, it never happened
again.1 In the 17th century, New Englanders had an adversarial legal system
that made it possible for a witch to defend herself, a two-witness requirement
for capital crimes, and magistrates who generally disallowed ‘spectral evidence’ – testimony by the afflicted of being visited and tormented by the
specter of the accused. Thus while suspicion of witchcraft (and perhaps also its
practice) were part of the fabric of everyday life (Butler, 1979; Demos, 2004;
Hansen, 1969), it was difficult to convince a jury and a judge that a woman or
man should be hanged on such a suspicion. Witch trials were also, it is worth
noting, hard work: they required depositions, pre-trial hearings, and then
extensive deliberation by judges and jury once the trial was under way.
The questions that surround Salem, then, are the following. What enabled
the myriad accusations that flew through the county in 1692? What explains
the willing belief and complicity of magistrates and populace with the hysterical teenage girls who became the focus of the event, perhaps to their own surprise? What made it possible for the accusers’ adult advocates and the judiciary
to proceed to execute nineteen citizens of the colony? Why did they work so
hard to do so? Why did the judges accept ‘spectral evidence’, thus going against
the advice of Increase Mather and judicial and clerical precedent? And why did
this happen in 1692, and not before?
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I cannot claim to address why those girls, in that house, became afflicted, or
other contingencies of this nature – such as the testimony of Abigail Hobbs, who,
at a key moment in the pre-trial hearings, agreed with the court that she was a
witch, and did have familiarity with the Devil, perhaps thus helping the judges
along in their doubt about the veracity of the statements of Sarah Good, who had
vigorously denied the accusations. But I do want to address the specificity of this
moment in American history, in terms of the social conditions that made these
actions possible. I would, however, like to bring a somewhat different perspective
to the study and theorization of these social conditions than that which is usually
applied in the sociological and historical study of witchcraft.
Theorizing Witchcraft and Society
Conceptually, the literature on witchcraft and witch-hunts in the West has
two strands. The first is attention to systematic material and ‘structural’ factors, which means, broadly speaking, the social context of witchcraft understood in terms of overarching theories of economic and political stasis and
change. The second is attention to historical detail about lives, communities,
and nations, that is, the construction of historical narratives. Since the
1970s, and under the influence of social history, these strands have been
brought together, so that ‘witchcraft studies’ has become a complex and
sophisticated interdisciplinary field. One cannot claim that studies of
witchcraft and witch-hunting lack either a ‘nomothetic’ or ‘ideographic’
dimension – most clearly have both. Yet, it is perhaps exactly this categorization of approaches that needs to be amended or slightly rethought, in so
far as the nomothetic, structural aspects of the explanation of witch-hunts
lack a symbolic dimension. From a sociological perspective, the comparative
study of witch-hunting in general, and explanations of Salem in particular,
use schemas of causal explanation from which the idea of culture as a structure in its own right is missing. This is related, I believe, to the ongoing struggle to put gender on the agenda in the study of witchcraft, as I will endeavour
to make clear shortly. After reviewing the literature from a sociological perspective, I discuss how the perspective of cultural sociology can contribute to
the ‘gendering’ of witchcraft in scholarly discourse and to the explanation of
the Salem witch trials
It is possible to discern in the literature on witchcraft and witch-hunting in
continental Europe, England, and New England, three sociological theories that
provide the backbone of explanation and debate:
1)
2)
3)
witch-hunting was caused by the advancement of capitalism;
witch-hunting was the project of a Christian elite (Church or state-making)
attempting to bring village life under increased control;
witchcraft and its persecution were socially functional.
Each of these theories has a Salem-specific version.
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The view that witch-hunts were a response to economic restructuring follows
the logic that the individualism and competition of a market economy upset the
norms of charity and understandings of the social collective that characterized
towns and villages in pre-modern continental Europe, Elizabethan England, or
Puritan New England (Thomas, 1971: 490–98). This thesis is actually a good
deal less abstract than it sounds. For as Keith Thomas and Alan Macfarlane
showed for England, and Richard Weisman showed for Massachusetts, accusations of witchcraft that centered on maleficium – the use of magic to do direct
harm to others in the form of injury, sickness, or loss of possessions – followed a
clear social pattern that included the refusal of aid, financial or otherwise, by the
accuser (Macfarlane, 1970; Thomas, 1971; Weisman, 1984).2
The Salem-specific version of this thesis, which forms the core of Boyer and
Nissenbaum’s Salem Possessed (1974), is in a way even simpler: it posits economic competition, and varying economic trajectories, as the social source of
the witch-hunt. In that now classic work of social history, they showed that the
east side of Salem Village was inhabited by a set of increasingly successful families, led by the Porters, with diversified holdings and connections to Salem
Town – and its ports and taverns. On the west side were the Putnams, whose
possessions were in land, and who were thus suffering, in their third generation,
from the Puritan inheritance system, which divided land equally among sons.
Plots were now small, and there was nowhere to go that was close by – Salem
was hemmed in by Andover and other villages. Records show that in Salem
Village’s longstanding bickering over who should be their minister (and how
much he should be paid), these groups were always on opposite sides of town
meetings, petitions, and pretty much every other Salem Village proto-institution. Ultimately then, for Boyer and Nissenbaum, the trials were a pathological
side effect of inevitable economic competition and change.
The main competitor to the ‘advancement of capitalism’ explanation is the
thesis that witch-hunting was the project of a theological and judiciary elite concerned with the augmentation (or at least conservation) of church power (Cohn,
2001). Christina Larner’s (1981) study of witch-hunting in Scotland explicitly
connects this project to the assertion of state legitimacy and control, while BenYehuda’s (1980, 1983, 1985) work about the European continent points to a
Church on the defensive in the face of new urban social configurations and market economics, and a set of elite inquisitors looking to move beyond Jews as a
traditional scapegoat. These accounts have the advantage of offering a more precise explanation for the timing of the hunts and for the elaborate ‘ideologies’ of
witchcraft developed by theological elites and communicated in intellectual networks throughout continental Europe, England and Scotland, and the North
American colonies. The rise of witchcraft ideology, the story goes, coincided
with the advent of the Dominican Order, and continued in places where the
Inquisition needed justification (Ben-Yehuda, 1980: 6 and 10–13).
This thesis has a Salem-specific version as well. It forms the core of
Weisman’s extended argument in Witchcraft, Magic, and Religion in 17thCentury Massachusetts (1984). He argues that, before 1692, the (relatively) low
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incidence of witchcraft convictions and executions is best explained by seeing
witchcraft accusations as village-bound movements for popular justice that
were resisted by a circumspect judicial elite and made difficult by an adversarial legal system. (As opposed to the situation in continental Europe, where the
legal format of the Inquisition was used, and torture was allowed, torture was
not allowed in England or the North American Colonies, and executions were
by hanging, not burning.) According to Weisman, Salem was a case where the
magistrates went on an ‘official initiative’, and engaged in a project of ‘communal regeneration’ made necessary by the legitimacy deficit of a colonial government which, between 1684 and 1692, had had its original charter revoked,
an Anglican governor installed and overthrown, and a new charter enacted
which threw into doubt the theological legitimacy of the secular order by
including Quakers and Anglicans. For Weisman, this accounts for the breaking
of clerical precedent in allowing spectral evidence, the carrying of the accusations and the trials beyond the town of Salem, and the role of the new governor in bringing the trials to a halt.
The language of Weisman’s explanation, though, already points to the
functionalist explanation of witchcraft, pioneered by Evans-Pritchard in his
investigation of the witchcraft in the Azande tribe in Africa (1976), picked up
by numerous historians and sociologists who have seen witchcraft as a solution
to social strain, and used extensively by Kai Erikson in Wayward Puritans: A
Study in the Sociology of Deviance (1966). In this understanding, the persecution of witchcraft serves to confirm community identity, maintain social boundaries, and reaffirm social order. Ben-Yehuda thus writes that in Europe, ‘the
15th century was a time of great enterprise, bold thought, innovation, as well
as one of deep confusion and anomie … a feeling that society had lost its norms
and boundaries and that the uncontrollable forces of change were destroying all
order and moral tradition … The witch craze was a negative reaction in the
sense that its purpose was to counteract and prevent change and to reestablish
traditional religious authority’ (Ben-Yehuda, 1980: 13–14).
In Erikson’s account of Salem, the solidarity of the colony as a whole was
being preserved by the identification and exclusion of deviants, via violence. In
the face of the loss of both the experience of the wilderness and the sense of mission, and an increasing recognition of the role of human work (as opposed to
the Lord’s providence) in securing New England’s success, the Puritans faced a
crisis of collective identity (Erikson, 1966). And though Weisman’s accounts of
the reasons why the trials were ‘needed’ focuses on the details of theological
and political authority, his ultimate conclusion is much the same as Erikson’s,
arguing that the magistrates at Salem ‘transformed an ostensibly legal event into
a ceremony of collective expiation’ (Weisman, 1984: 135).3
In witchcraft studies today, Thomas’s (1971) and Macfarlane’s (1970) applications of functionalist social anthropology remain both the basis for the social
study of witchcraft and a much maligned aspect of that study. A plethora of new
studies of European witchcraft (English, Scottish, and continental European) have
developed a more complex, multi-faceted account of this history, and paid more
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attention to the content of witchcraft accusations (Barry et al., 1996; Briggs,
1996; Geis and Bunn, 1997; Purkiss, 1996; Sharpe, 1996; Willis, 1995; Winship,
1996). Yet the functionalist heritage remains. Most arguments about the maintenance of witchcraft ideology, such as Ian Bostridge’s recent (1997) Witchcraft
and its Transformations c. 1650–c. 1750, retain some element of the idea that
witchcraft is ‘socially useful.’ In Bostridge’s case, the decline of ‘witchcraft theory’
is pegged not to the advent of a scientific worldview, but rather to the decreasing
utility of witchcraft accusations and ideology to ruling elites in the party system
following the Glorious Revolution. From a theoretical perspective, I would say
that the functionalist or strict Durkheimian account of witchcraft combines a key
truth with a key falsehood, and that this accounts for its ambiguous role in the
literature. On the one hand, writers such as Erikson recognize that emotion and
identity, not just ‘interests’, must be considered in the study of any social phenomenon, and in particular those involving collective violence. On the other,
Erikson entertained the more tendentious idea, most strongly expressed in the
theories of René Girard (2005), that social collectivities ‘need’ to sacrifice parts
of themselves, and that in so doing they can retain social equilibrium. This latter
idea is sometimes transformed into the more concrete and more palatable idea
that certain interested groups ‘need’ witch-hunts.
But discussions of the ‘social utility’ of witch-hunting bring us to the most
immediate problem with all of these sociological schemas of explanation. All
three arguments – capitalism and market forces, state and/or Church elites,
social functionality for the collectivity – fail to account for the central social fact
of witchcraft: gender. In New England in general, 78 percent of accused witches
were women, men accused of witchcraft tended to have family or sexual relations with accused witches, and accused witches tended to be women out of
place – the poor and homeless, the childless, or, alternately, women who had
inherited property for lack of brothers (Karlsen, 1998). Concerning Salem in
particular, husbands betrayed their wives on several key occasions, and what
bothered the Putnams more than anything was the marriage of Joseph, already
the distrusted son of Thomas Putnam Sr’s second wife, to Elizabeth Porter
(Boyer and Nissenbaum, 1974: 133–54). Furthermore, though six male witches
were executed, four of them had wives who were accused, one was a former
minister suspected of being a ‘conjurer’ who led female witches in a Black
Sabbat and had killed his former wives, and one was directly accused by the
family of his wife, who testified that he beat her. A connection between women
and violence is present in all cases tried at Salem.
More generally, in the last 30 years, masses of previously un-mined data
concerning gender and witchcraft have begun to be explored (e.g. Balfe,
1978; Barstow, 1994; Garrett, 1977; Heinemann, 2000; Hester, 1992;
Honegger, 1979; Karlsen, 1998; Moia, 1979; Norton, 1984; Thickstun, 1988;
Westerkamp, 1993). In a seminal essay, Elspeth Whitney made the key argument that the assumption of a universal misogyny to ‘explain’ the gendered
element of witchcraft actually removes gender from serious consideration in
the historiography of witch-hunting (Whitney, 1995). This is particularly
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surprising, given the extent to which the social history of witchcraft is now
so often written ‘from below’. She writes:
Gender is clearly central in some way to the witch-hunts … Yet the questions ‘why
were witches women’ or its converse, ‘why were women witches’ have received
short shrift …While virtually every other aspect of the hunts has been debated, the
central element that witches were believed to be women, has remained, for most
scholars, unproblematic. Explicitly or implicitly it is assumed that a sort of timeless,
‘natural’ misogyny present in Western culture can adequately explain why the collective image of the witch was that of an ill-tempered, older woman. Conversely, it
is argued that misogyny has been such a permanent characteristic of Western culture that it cannot be considered the cause of so specific an event as the witch-hunts.
Yet leaving the question there in fact does little to explain why women were
attacked in this way at this time. Nor does it help to illuminate the specific nature
of witch beliefs and witch practices, even paradoxically the oft-repeated observation
that some witches were male. (Whitney, 1995: 77–8)
Whitney focuses her attention on the historiography of the European witchhunts, but we can easily see how the same dynamic is operating in the three
sociological frames for explaining witchcraft that criss-cross the literature.
Gender is at best incidental to these sociological explanations, considered perhaps as a facet of the empirical phenomenon, but not as a deep cause. In the
sociology of witchcraft, whether we consider the ‘root cause’ of witch persecution to be capitalism and the disruption of village norms, a project of an elite
attempting to consolidate power, or a useful way to keep social life on track,
‘witchcraft’ becomes an institution and a discourse reached for in a pinch – so
as to make the poor and the socially outcast undeserving, or to eliminate the
unchristian tendencies of pagan villagers, or to smooth over feuds and consolidate and pacify a collective. Who knew murdering women was so useful?
Many efforts have been made to remedy this problem as the scope and
capacity of the study of witchcraft and the European witch-hunts has expanded.
And though studies of witchcraft and gender are now common, the chasm
which Whitney identifies between ‘mainstream’ and ‘feminist’ accounts of
witchcraft remains. I would like to suggest a specifically theoretical route that
might be taken in trying to come to terms with this problem, and which will
offer new insights into Salem in particular. By making the symbolic dimension
of social life not just fodder for ideographic narrative, but rather the subject of
systematic sociological theory, we can bring gender into not only the study of
witchcraft but also its explanation. For witchcraft was, first and foremost, a
fantastical social imaginary of gender relations – a perversion of the authority
relations and behaviors that were expected to hold, an inverted model of and
for reality (Clark 1980, 1997, 2001).
Both the political and economic explanations of Salem cannot help, in the end,
but point to the moral dimension of the conflict. I mentioned above Weisman’s
conclusion that Salem was a process of ‘collective expiation,’ while Boyer and
Nissenbaum admit that the intensity of economic animosity in Salem Village can
only really be understood in terms that are simultaneously economic and moral:
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To understand this intensity, we must recognize the fact – self-evident to the men
and women of Salem Village – that what was going on was not simply a personal
quarrel, an economic dispute, or even a struggle for power, but a mortal conflict
involving the very nature of the community itself. The fundamental issue was not
who was to control the Village, but what its essential character was to be. To the
Puritans of seventeenth-century New England, no social or political issue was without its moral dimension as well. (Boyer and Nissenbaum, 1974: 103)
However, the way in which we analyze this ‘moral dimension’ of Puritan
life is the crucial point, and Erikson’s idea that it was the collective identity of
the Puritan colony that was being defended (against capitalism, against political usurpation, against the loss of charisma) takes the Puritans a little too much
at their word. We should not allow their interpretations of themselves to limit
ours. For in explaining to themselves how they were fighting for the good, the
contemporary advocates of the trials passed over a symbolic order whose internal instability was equally troubling, and in whose name they were willing to
kill: the sexual order.
Toward a Hermeneutics of Witchcraft
In so far as we see demonology and witch-hunting as a pragmatic cultural
answer to a set of extant political or economic problems, we commit the fallacy
of thinking that the Puritans saw their problems in exactly the same way that
we see ours. Instead, I propose to approach witchcraft and its persecutions as
the expression of a meaningful social imaginary, under which both problems
and their solution were conceived. The complex entanglement of beliefs and
institutional arrangements, bizarre practices and devout certainties, unearthly
fears and semi-democratic instincts, suspicion of aristocracy and obedience to
authority that make up the social context of action in Massachusetts in 1692
has to be approached as an autonomous meaningful structure. It has to be interpreted as a cultural system. And if, as Stuart Clark (1980: 99) put it, ‘We no
longer readily understand the language of early modern witchcraft,’ then the
analysis of this structure is first and foremost a hermeneutic problem.
Entering on this path will, furthermore, allow us to connect how gender was
understood to how witchcraft was understood, in Massachusetts in the 17th century (or, if we were to shift our field of study, in England, Scotland, or on the
European continent). In doing so, I hope to add a new dimension to the histories
of witchcraft that focus on the social transformation of the market and/or state.
For social transformation always requires a transformed social consciousness – to
work in the market, individuals have to understand, on some level, the new
game they are playing. To promote a Christian state by stamping out ‘pagan’
beliefs requires an understanding of the meaning of sovereignty. How these
kinds of shifts in social meaning took place, and the role witch-hunting played
in them is what the approach I am here advocating can add to the study of
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witchcraft and social transformation. If we think of symbolics structurally, we
can come to a fuller understanding of the social causes of witch-hunts.
Concerning Salem in particular, with witchcraft as the symptom that
guides our interpretive diagnostics (Geertz, 2000b: 24–8), we can approach the
elusive, conflicted, and contested construct called ‘Puritan culture’, and come to
a better understanding of what motivated the actions and decisions of the
accusers, accused, prosecutors, judges, and onlookers at Salem. What will
become clear is that the trials were not only a murderous set of events, but also
a moment of crisis and desperation for a worldview in tension and on the verge
of collapse. The Puritan metaphysic had many fault lines, but gender was one
around which were gathered not only the denotations of specific discourses
concerning masculinity, femininity, and family, but also the connotations of
religion and magic, good and evil, transcendental and concrete. When, in 1692,
the bodies of screaming women were thrust into the public eye, this already faltering worldview was sent reeling. In acting so harshly and with such a vicious
and circular logic, the judges and the populace were attempting to restore an
order of meaning that was gendered in a particular way. At stake was a conception of the universe that tied together the transcendental, the economic, and
the sexual orders; Salem was a world in which the sins of economic selfadvancement, fornication outside of marriage, and selling one’s soul to the
Devil were held in a rather strict congruence. To understand how exactly this
was so, we must delve into the symbolics of the community and the court.
Towards a Cultural Explanation of Salem:The Instability
of Representation
In New England in the 17th century, witchcraft was tried in ‘secular’ courts as
a capital crime, where evidence of magic was brought to bear, ‘witches teats’
were looked for and found on the bodies of women, and serious testimony
about Black Sabbats was dutifully recorded. But before addressing the meaning
of witchcraft itself, it is perhaps best to begin with a few points concerning the
meanings of social life generally in Puritan Massachusetts, and the basic outlines of the metaphysics of their worldview. This will serve as the background
for the more particular account of the symbolics of gender that surrounded the
persecution of witches.
This general account begins with a simple, if surprising, social fact, namely
that in New England literacy was ‘almost universal’ (Hall, 1990: 32). All education was religious education, and everyone was to one degree or another religious (Hall, 1990: 17–18). This was not only a fact of popular belief, but also
one of institutional power. Magistrates and town leaders actively consulted
with clergy, and embedded their work, decision-making, and judgment about
town affairs in a world of print and of talk that was markedly religious in
character – which is to say, in the case of Massachusetts, Congregationalist.
Printed matter extended from almanacs, scary stories of the invisible world, and
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little pamphlets with romantic advice, through to religious instruction manuals,
and on to the high tracts of philosophy and religion – extensive debates on the
nature of God, the invisible world, the Devil, and their relationship to the visible happenings of nature and the actions of men and women (Hall, 1990:
21–70). All of these tracts, including the highbrow ones, mixed religion with
what Durkheim (1995) would have called magic, and all of them made clear
and repeated reference to what was known as the invisible world. As the cultural historian David Hall (1990: 19) has written:
... it may surprise some readers (as I myself was surprised) to discover how much
‘magic’ circulated in New England – the magic of ‘murder will out,’ prophetic
dreams and visions, pins hammered into buildings, shape-shifting dogs, and much
more besides.
Thus the first fundamental structure of meaning in Puritan New England was coexistence and coupling of the invisible and visible worlds (see Hansen, 1969: 7–8).
Both involved complex teleologies, moralities, and cognitive frames, and both were
highly gendered. The invisible world was sometimes an idealized model for the visible one, sometimes a gross and distorted mirror of its problems. But it was most
of all a set of explanatory tools by which individual Puritans – elite and non-elite –
comprehended fate and accident, hard work and reward, and sin and repentance.
This (to us) bizarre epistemology of memorable providences and evil imps, God’s
grace and malicious consorts of the Devil, was used to explain both individual lives
and the direction and destiny of the collective, variously understood.
By 1692 this invisible world – in which everyone believed – was in crisis.
The tensions surrounding it are perhaps best described under the rubric of
Weber’s sociology of religion. Puritan religion, despite its reputation as austere,
ritual-less, and conducive to rational economics, had not, in 1692, been entirely
transcendentalized, and thus the world was not disenchanted. And yet, what
might be called the Atlantic Enlightenment – or at least the scientific revolution
– was very much on hand, at least for the elites educated at Harvard. This
included writings of the English empiricist philosophers. Thus the Mathers,
their colleagues, and their eventual debating partners concerning the trials (such
as Robert Calef) were reading Newton and Boyle (Jeske, 1986; Solberg, 1987).
But they were putting this to odd use, or what we would think of as odd use.
To them, for example, the new empiricism presented a reason to accept the
existence of specters, devils, and imps, since it testified to the accuracy of individual perception (Weisman, 1984: 31–2, 55–7 and 150; see also Merton,
1970). The debates about empiricism were ultimately folded into the ongoing
discourse of interpretation surrounding the scriptures, and in this the Puritans
were ultimately deductive thinkers, who debated the way evidence should be
interpreted in terms of the truth of the Word. And thus the standing position of
the clergy when it came to trying witchcraft was that spectral evidence should
not be accepted, not because specters might not exist (everyone knew that they
did), but because the Devil might have not only the capability of, but also an
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interest in making innocent persons appear guilty (Weisman, 1984: 33–4 and
104). Being collectively on guard against such trickery was an essential aspect
of the Puritan ‘errand in the wilderness’ (Miller, 1984).
Not everyone in Massachusetts was reading Boyle. But it is worth noting,
in this regard, that the populace – not educated at Harvard but quite capable
of reading and discussing the Bible – was aware of, and participated in, the
tension over where specters came from, and why. Several of the accused, during the trials, argued quite coherently that the Devil might take their shape
without their permission, and indeed that, as the father of all lies, he would
do just that to get poor hardworking folks like themselves into trouble. The
historiography of early New England has shown that it is hermeneutically dishonest to imagine that this culture split neatly along the lines of class or status. This is partly for religious reasons – namely, Puritan conceptions of
individualism in relationship to God – but also for economic ones. New
England was founded by ‘folks of a middling sort’ that rarely had more than
one or two servants, and thus was distinctly different in the social distributions of patterns of meaning than a colony like Virginia, which was based on
a plantation system of immensely rich owners using the labor of masses of
indentured servants (Taylor, 2001: 158–87). Indeed, the Puritan household
was strikingly middle class, and the social distance between the villagers and
their ministers was relatively small, perhaps another reason their fierce
sermons were so effective.
Starting in about 1670 these sermons had turned more pessimistic and apocalyptic, and Samuel Parris, as well as Cotton Mather, were experts in this regard
(Bercovitch, 1978: 73–92). Increase Mather opened his diary of January 1681
with the entry ‘This year begins awfully’, and spent the rest of the decade repudiating the newest generation of New Englanders (Foster, 1991: 231). Certainly, the
claim that the world was in decline, and that God’s children were straying from
Him, was a rhetorical trope possessed by Puritan ministers before 1670. However,
that year marked a turning point, as the discourse of ‘declension’ became the central cognitive and moral frame of the clerical elite. William Stoughton’s NewEnglands True Interest; Not to Lie (preached in 1668, published in 1670),
‘worked up the various pieces of the jeremiad into a single unified literary form’
(Foster, 1991: 214). Ironically, this launched Stoughton’s political career, leading
eventually to his role as chief judge of the Salem witchcraft court in 1692 (Foster,
1991: 215–16). Increase Mather was even more effective in this regard because of
his access to the Dorchester pulpit and his ‘unprecedented influence with the printers and booksellers of Boston and Cambridge in the decades when the production
of the colonial presses was finally about to move into high gear’ (Foster, 1991:
217–18). In 1674 he brought a concreteness to his grim predictions, which were
then borne out to much fanfare:
Early in 1674, in The Day of Trouble is Near, he announced on no particular evidence
that ‘it is a very solemn providence, that the Lord should seem at this day to be numbering many of the Rising Generation for the Sword; as if the Lord should say, I will
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being a Sword to avenge the quarrel of the neglected Covenant.’ … King Philip’s War4
the next year accidentally turned him into an instant prophet, a mantle he was quick
to claim, but otherwise the awful conflict with the Indians of 1675–6 was a distinct
disappointment, over too quickly and not universally convincing as a judgment on an
unreformed people. (Foster, 1991: 219–20)
Mather and his followers wanted, and sensed, the arrival of judgment in concrete form. When the colony’s charter was revoked in 1684, it was interpreted
in these terms; New England had failed to show England that the new life they
were carving out of the wilderness was the righteous one.
More generally, then, we can say that the tensions in Puritan discourse and
in Puritan life – between ‘spirituality’ and ‘worldliness’, between transcendental and concrete understandings of the divine, between declension and the desire
for renewal – were augmented in the latter decades of the 17th century. The
Halfway Covenant, a compromise reached in 1662 that allowed the children of
partial members of the church to receive baptism, had marked the beginning of
escalated internal conflict among the Congregationalists, not its end (Miller,
1953). And, beyond Increase Mather’s popularity, the sense of conflict and
impending judgment filled the popular press. David Hall comments tellingly
that:
The contradictions that engulfed [the Puritan imagination of ‘wonder’] were sustained, not resolved, by the printers and booksellers who manufactured newssheets,
chapbooks, and broadside ballads that conveyed the lore of wonders to so many
people. Their allies were writers who specialized in tales of preternatural events.
Well versed in all the themes that made the wonder story so appealing, these writers produced tales of judgment that rivaled any jeremiad. They took on the guise of
prophet and offered up a heady mixture of apocalyptism and astrology. The repertory of these writers was limited only by their powers of imagination and the constraints of the literary form at hand. (Hall, 1990: 111)
It is in this unstable context (for more, see Butler, 1979) that the specifics
of witchcraft must be understood, and it is the gendered aspects of this symbol
system that would prove to be particularly inflammable. Witchcraft in New
England participated in – and formed a connection point of – three symbolic
formations:
1)
2)
3)
a set of understandings concerning the nature of women;
a series of related binaries that mapped the world around the opposition
male:female; and
a (gendered) epistemology of supernatural causality concerning the effective relationship between the invisible and the visible world.
On the Bodies and Souls of Women
The high drama of the battle of good and evil was not only a collective narrative imagined by ministers and lay people, it was also a personal struggle that
played itself out through the bodies and souls of individual Puritans. And the
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understanding of the body, intention, and action – and the meaning of sin and
repentance – was different for men and women (Reis, 1999). In particular,
women were more vulnerable to both bewitchment and being saved – more
likely to sign over their ‘essence’ to either God or the Devil. Elizabeth Reis concludes from reading women’s confessions that women were much more likely
to become convinced that they had sold their souls and made a grave mistake,
almost without knowing it. They were also, as Carol Karlsen shows, held in
deep suspicion as descendents of Eve, liable to fall from grace and attempt to
gain both economic advantage and sexual gratification – though these suspicions were not the central, public attestation of Puritan religion so much as a
set of unspoken assumptions among men, connotations of sermons rather than
denotations, and the imagery common to talk in the tavern (Karlsen, 1998:
173–81).
Today, the metaphor of the witch in fantasy TV shows and horror movies
provides a seat for ongoing prejudice about women’s natures and intentions.
But then, witchcraft was a direct and real extension of women’s supposed
tendency towards greed and sexual depravity. For the Puritans, witchcraft
was not a fictional way of thematizing misogyny, it was a real aspect of the
world, the worst of women’s inherent tendencies carried to an extreme and
expressed via unholy intervention into the invisible world. If the individual
woman’s relation to God was a model of and for the relation of a woman to
her father and her husband, imagining and defining the specifics of the patriarchal relation for New Englanders, the witch’s relation to the Devil was the
perverted inversion of this relation. Monogamy became polygamy as the Devil
or one of his ministers led a coven of witches, ‘natural’ sex acts were replaced
by ‘unnatural’ ones, the Bible was replaced by the Devil’s red book, and a
woman’s appropriate humility gave way to her greedy desire for material possessions (see, for example, Deodat Lawson’s recounting in Burr 2002:
145–62).
And in this part of the meaning system we find a notorious representational instability, with rather nefarious consequences. In terms of both body
and soul, women accusers, or women inspectors (brought in to examine the
bodies of accused witches), were always at risk of becoming accused. They
could become the accused for the same reasons, culturally speaking, that sometimes they became themselves convinced of their own guilt. One of the classic
Catch-22s of witch trials throughout the century was the inspection of
women’s bodies – and in particular their breasts, genitals, and underarms – for
witches teats. For propriety’s sake, women ‘had’ to be entrusted with the
examination. And those assigned to this task could easily be accused of being
in league with the witches. Richard Weisman addresses this point in a two-part
argument. First, he points out that the women so entrusted, ‘almost entirely
matrons and midwives’, would not have had formal medical education, and
therefore could not challenge the validity of the test on medical grounds, or
make fine-grained distinctions between ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’ marks on
women’s bodies that would be convincing to the court. Furthermore:
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there were more profound reasons for silence than mere lack of technical expertise …
Even more unfavorable for the female critic was that the positions of examiner and
suspect were so easily reversible … The folk healer or midwife who protested too
strongly against an affirmative finding might soon discover herself transposed from
the investigator in a search to the subject of a search. (Weisman, 1984: 102–3)
A category mistake was also possible with women’s souls. Puritan culture made
a distinction between ‘possession’ and ‘obsession’ by the Devil (Harley, 1996).
In the former, the soul and the body were taken over and controlled by evil, in
the later, only the body was. Lurking behind the accusations of the girls and
their adult advocates that, via bewitchment, they were being tormented bodily
or ‘obsessed’ indirectly by the Devil (through his intermediaries, the accused
witches), was the possibility that the accusing girls were themselves possessed
by the Devil – and thus guilty of internal sins of the soul of the highest order.
The discursive work done by the accusers to keep this possibility at bay cannot
be underestimated, and it explains why those who suggested offhand that the
girls were possessed, or in error, or committing fraud, were so quickly attacked
as themselves witches.
The larger point is that the strategies of individuals in the midst of the trials were dictated by these (to us) bizarre categorizations, dichotomies, and
threats of recategorization. If there was an incentive structure at the trials, it
was one set by the religious understanding of women’s souls and bodies as sinful in a particularly Puritan manner. The ultimate evidence for this at Salem is
the case of Mary Warren. Warren, a servant in the Proctor house, initially
appeared in court as an afflicted accuser. However, on April 19, she stood trial
as accused of witchcraft. Why? Because she had dared to assert that some of the
girls’ afflictions might be fraudulent. Confronted now as a potential witch, she
reacted to the reading of her deposition that the girls were fraudulent by falling
into a fit, presumably induced by witchcraft! Then, having admitted to signing
the Devil’s book, she returned to her role as an accuser. As Ann Kibbey has
written perceptively, ‘although Warren seems nearly unintelligible as an individual subject, she makes much more sense from a cultural perspective’
(Kibbey, 1982: 126).
The Gendered Dichotomies of Puritan Metaphysics
The association of women with the bodily and with weakness of ‘soul’ is not, of
course, specific to Puritan culture. The manner in which this took place, however, is particularly telling for our case, because it points to the other axis around
which the elaborate symbolics of witchcraft were aligned. I mentioned above the
extant tension in Puritan culture, pulled to the point of breaking by the end of
the 17th century, between the transcendental invisible and the ‘concrete’ invisible. The witches’ engagement with the invisible was, in witchcraft accusations,
always explicitly bodily – suckling familiars and pricking poppets with pins.
Indeed the entire history of bewitchments and torments shows an amazing
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propensity of women towards hysterics that were (supposedly) induced by actual
bodily harm inflicted by spectres, and not just by fear (see, for example, Burr,
2002; Godbeer, 2005; Karlsen, 1998). That the bodies of men were considered
stronger made them also less involved and less noticed, stoic in the face of the
world invisible. It is useful to think of the judges themselves in this way. In the
pre-trial hearings, Corwin and Hathorne were convinced that the afflicted were
being tortured before their very eyes, yet never feared for their own skin in the
face of these terrible witches. They were certain of their immunity, guaranteed
in the strength of their body and their elected souls whose relation to the sacred
was transcendent and internal. Compare this to the witches who, according to
the accusations, were suckling yellow birds, having orgies in the woods, and taking spectral form so as to pinch the women across town.
Yet it is not that men did not have bodies, or even bodies in danger. The
workings of the binaries of Puritan culture were more subtle than that, and for
that reason, all the more effective. The bodies of men were not at stake domestically, in both senses of that term. The bodies of men were in danger, not in Salem
and Boston, but rather on the front in Maine, and at sea, in the French-Indian
war. Though the military threat from the Indians to the core of the
Massachusetts Bay was not real, the fear of attack was a social reality – as Mary
Beth Norton (2003) has shown in a book describing how traumatized the
accusers were by the stories of survivors and letters from the front. And thus
another dichotomy that emerges in the meanings that surround Salem is the
threat from without (the War) and the threat from within (witches). This is most
clear in Samuel Parris’ sermons, in which the theological logic was the following:
the Devil wants to destroy New England, he has thus sent the savages to attack
from the wilderness, and has put agents among us as well – he has tempted the
souls of some of our own – including church members (Parris, in Boyer and
Nissenbaum, 1993: 129–36). It is then the responsibility of the collectivity to rid
itself of these evil agents, not only for its own immediate good, but also because
if it does not, then God will not favor the Puritans in the war. To fail internally
was to fall out of favour with God, and thus to invite external destruction. This
complex logic is important, because it indicates how high the stakes were in this
particular hunt for witches, and how what we, as investigators, would clearly
identify as real versus unreal threats to the colony were, in the Puritan system of
understanding, melded together by a series of religious meanings.
What emerges, then, is a schema for the interpretation of the embodiment
of evil. The savages afar are the Indians (and their allies the Catholic French).
In the fantasies of the accusers, specters of these ‘dark men’ often accompany
the specters of witches. But inside the community, the threat is from the ‘vile’
and ‘scandalous’ women (Mather, in Burr, 2002: 100, 104) that in this case
may have penetrated even the church membership. Or as Samuel Parris put it
in his sermon of March 27, 1692, ‘there are devils in the church. Not only sinners but notorious sinners; sinners more like to the devil than others.’ (Boyer
and Nissenbaum, 1993: 130). And as Deodat Lawson warned, ‘it is a matter of
terror, amazement, and astonishment, to all such wretched souls … as have
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given up their names and souls to the Devil; who by covenant, explicit or
implicit, have bound themselves to be his slaves and drudges, consenting to be
instruments in whose shapes he may torment and afflict their fellow creatures’
(Boyer and Nissenbaum, 1993: 126). Terror indeed, for those found to be in
this relation to the Devil would be punished in the visible world as well.
Male Authority and Gendered Causality
But if Lawson was sure that the witches were ‘entertaining Satan’, the exact source
of the witches’ powers, and what exactly they could be found guilty of doing, was
something that had to be established in court. And here, the controversial nature
of witchcraft again exacerbated the tensions in the Puritan worldview, and particularly the complex relationship between morality, divine authority, and supernatural causality. In other words, as a specifically gendered connection between the
invisible and visible worlds, in the context of the crisis of the invisible world,
witchcraft caused cosmic problems that required violent solutions.
Above, I discussed the relation, in the Puritan imagination, between the
female and the bodily, and especially the domestic body. It should not surprise
us, in this regard, that not only was black magic most often projected onto
women in accusations of witchcraft, but that both white and black magic were
in most cases better known and more frequently actually used by women
(Karlsen, 1998: 142–9). They formed a set of quite practical beliefs and practices pointed directly at the immense task that faced colonial women, which
included care of children and the household, making clothes, aid in childbirth,
and of course all of the farm work that was not deemed fit for strong men. And
in the 17th century, this must have been an immense and difficult task that did
not always go well. It is perhaps no surprise that women, entrusted as their husbands’ ‘helpmeets’ upon marriage, and expected to carry out the care of the
members of the family in a way that still characterizes American middle-class
culture, were familiar with a set of knowledges that included strange ointments
and magical incantations to bring relief to sick children, and perhaps a curse or
two for the neighbor who overcharged you for the curds you needed. In the
context of extensive belief and engagement with the invisible world, it would be
unusual if magic – white and black – was not practiced.
But this was only the general context of practical knowledge for witchcraft
and magic in the Puritan world; more important to explaining the trials was the
rich symbolics under which the supposed ability of witches to accomplish
wicked deeds – to affect the visible world – was comprehended. For the Puritans,
the natural world was, if not fully animated or enchanted, still significant in the
sense that its events were signs to be read as possibly brought about by supernatural forces with a particular and personal interest in the human world. The
attribution of personal and collective significance to storms, accidents, and ‘natural wonders’ – not to mention the sickness and/or untimely death of domesticated animals or humans – was as much a practice of the elites as the populace.
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Anne Kibbey (1982) has noticed that some of the very same accidents and
misfortunes that were attributed on occasion to witches’ maleficium were at
other times attributed to the divinity. But the logic here was different; it was not
a matter of a man’s practical expertise – that is, a concrete ability to meddle in
natural events, a sort of techne or skill with the invisible world – when God
wreaked havoc on his life. It was, rather, a sign of the sinful nature of his internal soul. And, given that good fortune was interpreted with the same logic –
‘luck’ came to pious men, who had established a clean soul – we might even say,
as these men were on the brink of modernity, that they had a pure self.
In this context, the supposed ability of witches to interfere in nature without reference to transcendental divinity, but through mere ‘cunning’, must have
been disturbing indeed. Even if the judges showed almost no fear that their
cows would die or their daughters would be tormented, the capacity of such
women to affect the lives of the colonials in this fashion revealed exactly the
problem with the world as it existed for the Puritans in 1692. And it rendered
the whole cosmic schema problematic, because it suggested that one could
interfere ‘unnaturally’ in nature and in the lives of others without the development of an internal relationship with God. The unbalanced nature of this system in the face of a suspected witch – good fortune coming from a clean soul,
bad fortune coming from black magic – was particularly hard on witchcraft victims and their families, because ministers demanded that they respond to direct
attacks upon the afflicted with prayer, and not with counter-magic. For Deodat
Lawson, a military metaphor was close at hand, when on March 24, 1692, he
specifically discouraged the burning of hair and the boiling of urine to hurt a
witch, and recommended prayer and trust in God, urging the Salem congregation that to ‘ARM! ARM! ARM!’ against Satan meant to ‘PRAY! PRAY!
PRAY!’ (Lawson, in Boyer and Nissenbaum, 1993: 127–8).
The gendered implication should be made clear here as well: the causal
capacity to affect one’s fate through God was reserved for men, and in particular, patriarchs. In fact, anything important or unusual that happened to anyone or anything in the household (cows, children, wife … ) was, if thought to
be supernaturally caused, attributed to the moral quality of the father:
Men … interpreted their personal histories in the same way they understood the history of the Puritan community as a whole. Unusual events disrupting their personal
lives were similarly interpreted as signs of the Puritan deity’s disposition towards
them as individuals … in a Puritan man’s life the death of his wife or child became
one more index of the state of his soul. (Kibbey, 1982: 140)
Unless, of course, it was the woman across town, the malefic witch. She, apparently, did not have to bother with God to do her deeds.
Thus the cognitive and moral problem was that, in this understanding,
malefic witches required no relation to an authoritative transcendental force to
accomplish their dirty deeds. But to this problem, the mythology of the Devil
and his female ‘instruments’ offered a solution that could work for a religious
mindset on the brink of giving up a belief in magic and ‘cunning folk’, yet still
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deeply invested in the existence and ultimate importance of the invisible world.
As Lawson and Parris never ceased to affirm, the witches were in fact taking
orders from the Devil, or even a male minister of the Devil (specifically, former
Salem minister George Burroughs, see Norton, 2003: 123–32).
This then brings us to the great controversy of the trials, namely, the acceptance of spectral evidence – testimony by the afflicted of being tormented by
apparitions that only they could see. Generally, in trials in Massachusetts before
1692, the main evidence brought against witches was evidence of maleficium,
which is to say, the meddling by the witch in unnatural causation and thus the
bringing about of misfortune (dead cows, thumbs hit with hammers, sickness,
etc.) (Weisman, 1984: 13). But at Salem, the question was mostly one of
bewitchment/torment – the traveling of the witches in spectral form to visit bodily pain upon these girls, and a corresponding ability spontaneously to torment
them in the courtroom itself (from across the room). Maleficium required little
or no direct relation to the Devil, while bewitchment, many clergymen insisted,
required the accused to sign the Devil’s book.
In accepting spectral evidence of bewitchment and torment, the judges were
going against precedent but making a move congruent with the cultural logic of
the time. In this logic, the efficacy of the invisible world on the visible had to be
assured by a transcendent male authority figure – for upstanding patriarchs,
God, for nefarious witches, the Devil. From this perspective, we can see the trials as a crisis of the metaphysics of male authority. And the social meaning of
the two male witches hanged who were not married to female witches is also
made clear – they were hanged because they also enacted this inverted, Devilish
form of male authority. George Burroughs, former minister of Salem, was
accused of killing his previous wives and leading the witches – and said to have
claimed to be not only a witch but also a ‘conjurer’. John Willard was tried and
hanged because his wife’s family accused him of beating her. These two completed the terrible solution to the cosmic problem at hand, by robbing the
female witches of any agency in the invisible world outside of the command of
men. Every woman had to sign one book or another.
Conclusion
Since Perry Miller’s 1953 treatise The New England Mind, discussions of a ‘crisis’ or ‘decline’ in Puritan culture and society have formed a constant thread of
discussion in the historiography of colonial New England (Foster, 1991;
Knight, 1994; Middlekauff, 1999; Vaughan, 1997). Miller, however, famously
dismissed the Salem witch trials, claiming that ‘the intellectual history of New
England up to 1720 can be written as if no such thing ever happened. It does
not figure,’ he insisted, ‘in the institutional or ideological development’ of New
England (Miller, 1953: 191). Here, I have argued to the contrary that that the
trials thematized in a sharp way a crisis of representation in Puritan culture,
conceived of as a complex set of interwoven symbols and stories, cosmic
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connections and practical knowledges, moral certainties and cognitive dissonances.
This meaning-system was full of tension, at times pathological in its prescriptions for social behavior, and, in 1692, on the verge of collapse.
The trials, furthermore, articulated this crisis in a particular realm: the representation of gender and the sexual order. Witchcraft, as a meaning-system,
spoke to the nature of the feminine, the battle between good and evil in the bodies and souls of men and women, and the causal connection between the invisible and visible worlds. It sat at the crux of the increasing tension between
religion and magic, and between the practical operation of the world and the
state of an individual’s soul. And more than anything, it brought out the gendered nature of a precarious Puritan worldview. At stake at Salem was the
nature and legitimacy of male authority.
It is this, I think, which accounts for the willingness of the judges, and the
community at large, to proceed with the trials, and (ironically) to believe the
incredible testimony of the girls at the centre of it all. As Cotton Mather wrote
near the beginning of the outbreak, ‘To determine a matter so much in the dark
as to know the guilty employers of the devils in this work of darkness, this is a
work, this is a labor’ (Mather, letter of May 31, 1692 to John Richards, in
Silverman, 1971: 37). It was a labor indeed, but a necessary one, for the meddling of troublesome women in the affairs of the invisible world was something
that Puritan culture, at the brink of the 18th century, could no longer tolerate.
It is relatively commonplace, in sociology today, to admit that the structural
forces of institutions, economies, and political interests are ‘mediated through’
the meanings used by actors. One can even go further and argue, as Ann Swidler
does so cogently, that ‘people elaborate culture where institutions are incomplete’
(Swidler, 2001: 157). And we can imagine, given what we know about transitions
in the Atlantic economy and the political instability of the colonial government
of Massachusetts, an explanation of Salem in terms of these structural forces
which has, as an addendum, an account of the meaning of witchcraft as a ‘channel’ for the anxieties and jealousies of the Salem villagers. In this account, however, the source of these anxieties and jealousies would remain the ‘real’ problems
of the advent of capitalism and the crisis of political authority.
I have no doubt that the Congregationalists at Salem were skillful actors –
as I imagine Swidler and Anthony Giddens would insist – using discursive
repertoires to parry each other in interaction and to make specific, interested
accounts of what was going on in the village meetinghouse as compelling as
possible to others. I do doubt, however, whether they differentiated, as we do,
between the ‘real’ problems of war, economics, and politics, and the ‘imaginary’
ones of religion and culture. And so I have tried to take a somewhat different
perspective. I have tried to suggest that Puritan culture might have created problems as well as offered solutions, and that the skillful actors immersed in it
might not only use culture to respond to reality, but rather drape their cultural
construction of the world so thickly over social reality that our primary task in
explaining their actions should not be the differentiation of ‘culture’ from
‘structure’, but rather the interpretation of the major social problems that ran
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like red threads through this drapery. In particular, I see one fault line that
appears whenever the Puritans dealt with witchcraft: a morally loaded metaphysics of gender and authority. This, more than economics and politics, was
what the accusers, accused, judges, and onlookers were working out – skillfully
and horribly – when they hanged nineteen of their own.
Ultimately, I wish to challenge the sense that we have, as sociologists, that
social structure is something external and thus real and forceful, and culture is
something more evanescent, which only ‘matters’ at certain times and places. I
suspect that this distinction is the result of countless sociological appropriations
of the philosophical distinction between subject and object, which is so central to
our own modern Western culture that it is not easily overcome. Nonetheless, we
should try, because in interpreting the actions of someone like Samuel Parris –
who was utterly convinced that the Devil’s female servants among his congregation were as dangerous as the French soldiers on the front – we have to realize
that the problem was not a lack of reality but too much of it.
Notes
1 There were two indictments – but not executions – for witchcraft in 1697, the
only official articulation of witchcraft in New England after Salem (Demos,
2004: 386). As Demos writes, ‘The official record of witchcraft in New
England belongs entirely to the 17th century. The greatest and most destructive
of the trial proceedings was also virtually the last’ (Demos, 2004: 387). While
the private belief in and perhaps practice of witchcraft continued into the 18th
century, its public affirmation and legal instantiation stopped almost immediately following the trials.
2 The full pattern that occurred is: Person B requests financial or other forms of
aid from Person A. Person A refuses. (Person B expresses ill will, perhaps
through a muttered curse) or (Person A assumes Person B harbors ill will). An
unfortunate ‘accident’ occurs. Person A accuses person B of witchcraft.
3 For another account of different sociological theories of witchcraft, and specifically of the European witch hunts, see Smith (1992).
4 King Philip’s War, named after the English name for the Indian leader
Metacom, was fought in 1675 and 1676. Many New England towns were
attacked, including Andover, Massachusetts, which became involved in the
witch crisis of 1692. For the relationship between the trauma of the war and
American identity, see Lepore (1999). For an argument that the war was not a
clash of civilizations or ways of life, but rather the devolution into conflict of
two societies that had been ‘covalent’ (see Drake 1999).
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Isaac Reed
Isaac Reed is an assistant professor of Sociology at the University of Colorado, Boulder
who works in culture, historical sociology and social theory. His current research
concerns the theoretical logic of interpretive sociology, and aims to provide a new
epistemic framework for qualitative work in the social sciences, exemplified through a
case study of the Salem Witch Trials. He is the co-editor of Culture, Society and
Democracy: The Interpretive Approach.
Address: Department of Sociology, University of Colorado, Boulder, Boulder, CO,
80309, USA.
E-mail: isaac.reed@colorado.edu
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