The Heretic's Daughter

The Heretic’s Daughter takes great pains to set the stage for the mass hysteria that resulted in the Salem witch trials by describing the conditions that prevailed in the community at the time. The Puritan experience was unique in ways that set it apart from other colonies. Unlike Virginia or the Carolinas, which were founded to establish profitable plantations, Massachusetts was founded on ideological principles. The Puritan community in England had been harassed and persecuted. Migrating to North America seemed the only recourse for practitioners of this religious sect.

Puritans had already isolated themselves ideologically from Western European belief systems and now settled in a geographically isolated area. Consequently, the colonists needed to adapt to a harsher climate, different growing conditions for crops, and Indigenous neighbors who resented their territorial incursions. Thus, the colonists were strangers in a strange land. Aside from their religious battle against the devil, they were also obliged to battle disease, starvation, and Indigenous attacks. The author describes the planting and harvest cycles in painstaking detail to convey a sense of the struggle required simply to keep food on the table. A cow that couldn’t produce milk or a lame horse could impact an entire family’s survival. If Thomas Carrier goes hunting and returns home empty-handed, the family goes hungry that night.

In addition, the Carrier family lives in a cold climate that is far less forgiving than the mild winters of the British Isles. Sarah frequently describes traveling through icebound landscapes and expresses her physical discomfort with the frigid climate. Aside from the punishing weather, the novel begins with an assault from a different quarter. A smallpox epidemic is raging in Billerica, so the Carriers flee to nearby Andover. Moving from one town to another in Puritan Massachusetts is a serious matter. The town selectmen can reject a prospective colonist for no reason at all. If a settlement doesn’t take the family in, they must wander through the wilderness and become a likely target of Indigenous attacks.

The novel frequently mentions war parties that swoop down and abduct teenagers after slaughtering their families. The smallpox epidemic ravaging colonial towns was even more deadly among Indigenous tribes that had no immunity to the virus. Consequently, they sought to increase their numbers by stealing young people from the Puritan population and either grooming them as new tribe members or holding them for ransom to supplement their resources. The precarious existence of Puritan colonists created an atmosphere of chronic anxiety and terror that ultimately found some release through the scapegoating of women as witches.