{"id":9408,"date":"2018-04-28T11:33:58","date_gmt":"2018-04-28T17:33:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=9408"},"modified":"2018-05-09T19:29:08","modified_gmt":"2018-05-10T01:29:08","slug":"9408","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=9408","title":{"rendered":"Hawthorne’s Witches and a Secret History of Salem"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

She might be Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Muse.<\/p><\/div>\n

A century and a half after the Salem witch trials, they still lived in the mind of a young Salem writer, Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804\u20131864). From his fiancee’s window, if he had a good arm, he could have thrown an ink bottle at the headstone of his ancestor John Hathorne<\/a>, a leading judge in the trials, in the adjacent Charter Street cemetery.<\/p>\n

Visit the official Hawthorne in Salem<\/em> website.<\/a><\/p>\n

Some contemporary literary critics characterize his writing as “dark romanticism<\/a>,” along with Edgar Allan Poe’s<\/a>. Others place some of his work in the Gothic-fiction genre<\/a>, comparing him to Matthew “Monk” Lewis<\/a>, one of the creators of Gothic horror.<\/p>\n

Is this not one of the most Goth sentences ever written? “Years, many years, rolled on; the world seemed new again, so much older was it grown since the night when those pale girls had clasped their hands across the bosom of the corpse.”<\/p>\n

Poe\u00a0(1809\u20131849), Hawthorne’s contemporary, did not much care for the story in which it appears, “The White Old Maid,” a\u00a0 (sort of) ghost story published in 1835.<\/p>\n

In an 1847 critical essay, he praised Hawthorne’s writing (“purest style . .. . the most touching pathos, the more radiant imagination”) even when it was not always popular but suggested that he needed to “escape from the mysticism of his Goodman Browns and Old White Maids into the hearty, genial . . . Indian-summer sunshine.”((Edgar Allan Poe, “Tale Writing\u2014Nathaniel Hawthorne,” in\u00a0The Complete Short Stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne\u00a0<\/em>(New York: Doubleday, 1959), 9\u201310. Originally published in\u00a0Godey’s Magazine and Lady’s Book<\/em><\/a>, November 1847.))<\/p>\n

Hawthorne was both impressed and horrified by his Puritan<\/a>\u00a0ancestors<\/strong>. He admired their courage and enterprise as settlers, but was repelled by their dogmatism, suppression of individuality, and most of all by their mass execution of accused witches in 1692 (as well as sporadic earlier trials).<\/p>\n

Henry James<\/a> (1843\u20131916) wrote that Hawthorne had a “feeling for the latent romance of New England” and praised his handling of “the ingrained sense of sin, of evil, and of responsibility” in a world marked by pressing moral anxiety [and] the restless individual conscience.” Hawthorne sought out and delineated “the laws secretly broken, the impulsive secretly felt, the hidden passions, the double lives, the dark corners, the closed rooms, the skeletons in the cupboard and at the feast,” creating “a mystery and a glamour where there were otherwise none very ready to [his] hand.”((Henry James, “Nathaniel Hawthorne,” in The Complete Short Stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne\u00a0<\/em>(New York: Doubleday, 1959), 2.))<\/p>\n

In other words, he is fascinated by the psychic and psychological history of New England, and how events like the witch trials create a kind of inter-generational curse or psychic poisoning \u2014 this is part of the back story in his novel The House of the Seven Gables,<\/em>\u00a0of which one critic wrote,<\/p>\n

But as the Pynchon story [the Pynchons are the house’s owners in the novel\u2014CSC] is an historical chronicle stretched over two centuries, the treatment of witchcraft changes with the changing times. Hawthorne shows scrupulous fidelity to both historic fact and oral tradition in recording the transformation from the Puritan to the contemporary version of folk belief. Just as the Puritan faith was relaxed and liberalized in the Unitarian and Transcendental periods, so too folk faith in witchcraft transformed itself to accord with the new spirit of the age.<\/em>((Daniel G. Hoffman, \u201cParadise Regained at Maule\u2019s Well,\u201d in The House of the Seven Gables<\/em> by Nathaniel Hawthorne, edited by Seymour L. Gross, Norton Critical Edition (New York: W. W. Norton, 1967), 476.))<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

You can almost think of his writing as a “secret history” of Salem and the surrounding towns.<\/strong><\/p>\n

His witchy-est story, “Young Goodman Brown<\/a>” (1835), takes place in a witchcraft-haunted fictional New England much like the setting of the 2015 film The VVitch.<\/em><\/a>, although it is, with heavy-handed allegory, a story about a Christian man’s loss of faith. Sarah Cloyce, an actual Salem village woman who was accused of witchcraft but never tried (played by Vanessa Redgrave in\u00a0the 1985 production Three Sovereigns for Sarah<\/em><\/a>), becomes in Hawthorne’s story a priestess of Satanism, even though Brown knows her as the one who taught him his Christian catechism, for he discovers that most of the “best people” are secret devil-worshipers. (Shades of Michelle Remembers<\/em><\/a>!)<\/p>\n

Now we stand only slightly farther apart in time, say 150\u2013180 years, from Hawthorne’s writing. At a time when the Salem witch trials were seen as an embarrassment and the actual execution site forgotten<\/a>, Hawthorne did keep the “witch city” meme alive.<\/p>\n

But who else passed it along after Hawthorne’s death? There are two obvious candidates, and others not so obvious. I will be returning to the most obvious soon.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A century and a half after the Salem witch trials, they still lived in the mind of a young Salem writer, Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804\u20131864). From his fiancee’s window, if he had a good arm, he could have thrown an ink bottle at the headstone of his ancestor John Hathorne, a leading judge in the trials, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[216,329,325,29],"class_list":["post-9408","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-literature","tag-nathaniel-hawthorne","tag-salem","tag-witchcraft"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s6xQTg-9408","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":9439,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=9439","url_meta":{"origin":9408,"position":0},"title":"Salem, Arkham, and H. P. Lovecraft","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"May 1, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"What Bourbon Street is to New Orleans' French Quarter, Essex Street is to Salem, Mass. When it's party time (October), this is where the party happens. Otherwise, it is the chief tourist-commercial street, whether you want the Peabody Essex Museum, Christian Day's witch shop,\u00a0or The Witch House, which was actually\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"Massachusetts\"","block_context":{"text":"Massachusetts","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=massachusetts"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/05\/essex-st-west-vertical.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":9245,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=9245","url_meta":{"origin":9408,"position":1},"title":"Our Salem Film Festival","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"April 8, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"Prompted by J. W. Ocker's A Season with the Witch: The Magic and Mayhem of Halloween in Salem, Massachusetts, M. and I held a little Salem film festival. (We skipped The Lords of Salem.) In order of creation, we watched these three movies:\u00a0 Three Sovereigns for Sarah (1985), Hocus Pocus\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"American religion\"","block_context":{"text":"American religion","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=american-religion"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":9473,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=9473","url_meta":{"origin":9408,"position":2},"title":"Aye, My Hearties, the Six of Coins!","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"May 6, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"Pickering Wharf today. At left is the reconstructed Salem privateer schooner Fame. The original Fame\u00a0 operated during the War of 1812 against British shipping, while the newer version offers summer day cruises in Salem Sound. The history of Salem, Mass., is more about the sea than the witches \u2014 at\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"history\"","block_context":{"text":"history","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=history"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/05\/pickering-wharf-cropped-sm.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/05\/pickering-wharf-cropped-sm.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/05\/pickering-wharf-cropped-sm.jpg?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/05\/pickering-wharf-cropped-sm.jpg?resize=700%2C400&ssl=1 2x"},"classes":[]},{"id":9206,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=9206","url_meta":{"origin":9408,"position":3},"title":"Witches, Sea Captains, and Art \u2014\u00a0We Go Back to Salem","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"April 4, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"Last November, during the American Academy of Religion annual meeting in Boston, I made a quick trip to Salem, Mass., with some fellow Pagan studies scholars. It was only one afternoon\u2014long enough to visit some of the witchy shops, a magickal temple, the Charter Street\u00a0cemetery, and a few other sites.\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"American religion\"","block_context":{"text":"American religion","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=american-religion"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/04\/black-magic-rum-ocker-sm.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":12111,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=12111","url_meta":{"origin":9408,"position":4},"title":"Happy Ostara, and It’s Going to Snow","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"March 20, 2021","format":false,"excerpt":"Happy Ostara to those of you who experience something called \"spring.\" I will be taking advantage of the last of three warm days \u2014 which have melted most of the snow that was on the ground \u2014 to split some firewood in advance of the snow expected Sunday night, Monday,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"equinox\"","block_context":{"text":"equinox","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=equinox"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/03\/Ostara-blossoms.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/03\/Ostara-blossoms.jpg?resize=350%2C200 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/03\/Ostara-blossoms.jpg?resize=525%2C300 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/03\/Ostara-blossoms.jpg?resize=700%2C400 2x"},"classes":[]},{"id":11842,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=11842","url_meta":{"origin":9408,"position":5},"title":"Salem Museum Gives In, Exhibits 1692 Witch-Trial Materials","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"October 26, 2020","format":false,"excerpt":"In 2017, Donna Seger, a history professor at Salem State University (Massachusetts) wrote an open letter to the leadership of the Peabody Essex Museum, a big, rich institution in downtown Salem that along with being a major art museum, controls (and usually hides) the town's historical archives. Her letter stated,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"Massachusetts\"","block_context":{"text":"Massachusetts","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=massachusetts"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/10\/sewall-256x300.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9408","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9408"}],"version-history":[{"count":19,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9408\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9511,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9408\/revisions\/9511"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9408"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9408"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9408"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}