Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Copyright © 2007
BSA Publications Ltd®
Volume 1(2): 209–234
[DOI: 10.1177/1749975507078188]
SAGE Publications
Los Angeles, London,
New Delhi and Singapore
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 func-
tional 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 sym-
bolic 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 witch-
hunting 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
209
210 Cultural Sociology Volume 1 ■ Number 2 ■ July 2007
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 high-
minded judges to believe them. Such were the structures of the social imagina-
tion, in other words, by which male power could, in the Puritan case, imagine
itself into existence, and into legal legitimacy.
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 popu-
lar 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 attrac-
tion. They are divisible into five groups:
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.
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 col-
lective 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 cul-
ture 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)
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 with-
out its moral dimension as well. (Boyer and Nissenbaum, 1974: 103)
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 out-
lines 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 edu-
cation was religious education, and everyone was to one degree or another reli-
gious (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
220 Cultural Sociology Volume 1 ■ Number 2 ■ July 2007
Thus the first fundamental structure of meaning in Puritan New England was coex-
istence 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 vis-
ible 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 indi-
vidual 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
Why Salem Made Sense Reed 221
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, dur-
ing 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 dis-
honest to imagine that this culture split neatly along the lines of class or sta-
tus. 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 distribu-
tions 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 apoc-
alyptic, 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 repudi-
ating 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 cen-
tral cognitive and moral frame of the clerical elite. William Stoughton’s New-
Englands 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 print-
ers 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 num-
bering many of the Rising Generation for the Sword; as if the Lord should say, I will
222 Cultural Sociology Volume 1 ■ Number 2 ■ July 2007
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 con-
crete 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 transcenden-
tal 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 sus-
tained, 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 writ-
ers 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 reper-
tory of these writers was limited only by their powers of imagination and the con-
straints 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:
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 con-
cludes 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 suspi-
cions 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 patri-
archal 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 pos-
sessions (see, for example, Deodat Lawson’s recounting in Burr 2002:
145–62).
And in this part of the meaning system we find a notorious representa-
tional 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 some-
times 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:
224 Cultural Sociology Volume 1 ■ Number 2 ■ July 2007
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 tri-
als 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 sin-
ful 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 indi-
vidual subject, she makes much more sense from a cultural perspective’
(Kibbey, 1982: 126).
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, how-
ever, 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’ invisi-
ble. 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
Why Salem Made Sense Reed 225
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.
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 partic-
ularly the complex relationship between morality, divine authority, and supernat-
ural 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 prac-
tices 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 hus-
bands’ ‘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 super-
natural forces with a particular and personal interest in the human world. The
attribution of personal and collective significance to storms, accidents, and ‘nat-
ural wonders’ – not to mention the sickness and/or untimely death of domesti-
cated animals or humans – was as much a practice of the elites as the populace.
Why Salem Made Sense Reed 227
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 inter-
nal 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 with-
out 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 develop-
ment of an internal relationship with God. The unbalanced nature of this sys-
tem 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 vic-
tims 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 congrega-
tion 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 partic-
ular, patriarchs. In fact, anything important or unusual that happened to any-
one 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 his-
tory 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, appar-
ently, 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
228 Cultural Sociology Volume 1 ■ Number 2 ■ July 2007
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 accep-
tance 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 bod-
ily 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 tri-
als 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 com-
pleted 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 ‘cri-
sis’ 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
Why Salem Made Sense Reed 229
like red threads through this drapery. In particular, I see one fault line that
appears whenever the Puritans dealt with witchcraft: a morally loaded meta-
physics 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 congrega-
tion 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 immedi-
ately 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 specif-
ically 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