33 pages • 1 hour read
Paul S. BoyerSalem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft
Paul S. BoyerNonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1974A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Business versus Agriculture
Salem Village and Salem Town evolved to represent two conflicting ways of life. The Village was populated primarily by landholders who farmed large tracts. The Town, along with Boston, was the colony’s only port of entry, and it controlled a large import-export trade. As overseas trade expanded, the merchants of the Town grew prosperous from their commercial ventures, but only some residents of Salem Village shared in that prosperity. Farms located at the western edge of the Village couldn’t transport products easily to the Town for purchase and envied the prosperity enjoyed by villagers who could straddle the line.
The ideological differences between the two groups were as great as the geography that separated them. The farmers of the Village supported traditional ways. They wanted to work the land in an unchanging landscape that mirrored the unchanging nature of their society. In contrast, Town residents embraced change and exploited it. They grew rich by adapting to the needs of the marketplace, both in the colony and overseas. Their newfound wealth allowed them to purchase fine houses and other luxuries that the villagers viewed with suspicion and envy.
The tense situation between the agricultural and commercial interests of Salem was aggravated by the fact that the Town didn’t want to allow independence to the Village. The latter provided tax revenue for the Town, but the Town failed to consider the needs of the Village. This tension between these opposing interests might seem to have little to do with an outbreak of witch hysteria, but the addition of Samuel Parris into the mix gave a spiritual dimension to the struggle. Parris conveyed the farmer as virtuous and the merchant as sinful, and their class struggle was played out as a cosmic battle between God and Satan.
Religious Ideals
The Massachusetts Bay Colony was a commercial enterprise launched by European merchants to exploit New World resources, but from its inception, the colony was also intended to offer a refuge for religious dissenters. More than that, it was to become a model human society for God’s chosen people. The religious ideal which the colony represented permeated all aspects of daily life. Salem was no different from Boston in its efforts to combine the spiritual realm with the material. This is part of the reason why a simple squabble over property became so fraught with religious significance.
When Parris characterized the Town merchants as moneygrubbers, he was casting aspersions on their moral character. Like the Puritans who founded the colony, Parris upheld an agrarian ideal as the best way to manifest godliness. His personal emotional baggage relating to commerce was channeled into diatribes against the merchant class that was exploiting the Village. His own failure as a merchant and his envy of the men who succeeded was transformed into moral outrage leveled at those who defied God’s plan for the Puritan community. Parris failed to recognize his own desire for high social rank as the pastor of a flock of country sheep. After his early mercantile failures, he couldn’t hope to achieve that rank any other way. He needed his flock to elevate him, and they needed agriculture to survive.
This combination of religious ideology and marketplace pressures yielded a bizarre kind of spiritual warfare. Parris was briefly able to quell the faction that wished to bind the Village to the Town by resorting to witchcraft accusations. Ordinarily, one might expect economic competitors to try to ruin one another financially. Puritan ideals dictated a different solution by recourse to the supernatural as a means of resolving conflict. It didn’t work.
A Changing World
The friction between commerce and agriculture didn’t merely create financial hardship for the farmers of the west Village. The ascendency of the merchant class created a deep level of anxiety among the community. As stated earlier, the agriculturalists upheld traditional values and resisted change. They were deeply suspicious of anything that might upset the status quo. Because farm life is far removed from the hustle and bustle of a commercial port, it would be easy for the residents of the Village to delude themselves into believing that life would continue at the leisurely pace they had always known. A visit to the Town would have convinced them otherwise.
Through Parris’s influence, the Village’s suspicion and fear of change manifested itself in the hysteria and paranoia of the witch trials. The minister assumed it was possible to uproot evil by killing witches. He never consciously acknowledged that he equated evil with the changes that commerce brought to the local landscape. Parris wished to reify the ideal pastoral life that would place him in the position of shepherd over a passive flock of sheep. However, the world outside the Village was changing—and quickly.
The authors argue that the panic felt by the accusers and their minister during the height of the witch craze was nothing more than an expression of their subliminal awareness that the world would soon engulf their way of life and change it forever. What they perceived as a valiant fight against Satan and his minions was a last-ditch effort to hold the line against commercial expansion. The psychological stance of the villagers was rendered problematic, however, by their appreciation of the benefits that commercial change could bring. Some of the accusers declared that they were tempted to sign the devil’s book in exchange for riches. In making this admission, they were unconsciously manifesting their understanding that change can bring prosperity. It took twenty deaths to convince the Village that hanging witches would not stop the march of progress.
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