The Heretic's Daughter

“She, with a deliberation bordering on the unseemly, set herself apart from what a woman should be and was as surprising as a flood or a brush fire. She had a will, and a demeanor, as forceful as a church deacon’s.”

Martha has already made herself conspicuous by her outspokenness. Puritan wives were supposed to be meek and humble in the presence of men. The Salem trials were essentially a war against women like Martha. Witches were perceived as powerful women who represented a threat to the existing social order. They might topple men in high places and must be destroyed.

“She had asked him, ‘Are you the parson who serves all of Salmon Falls?’ ‘No, Goody Carrier,’ he answered. ‘I am the parson that rules all of Salmon Falls.’”

The parson makes a distinction in this quote that highlights the Puritan minister’s perception of his role in the community. Whereas Martha sees a minister as the servant of the people, this parson sees himself as the king of his small realm. Again, the novel emphasizes the arrogance of Puritan religious leaders.

“From that time, there was not an hour that passed that I did not compare the fullness of my days with the dryness that was life with my own family. Where mine was reserved to harshness, Margaret’s was lavish with praise and care. Where my parents were silent or sullen, hers were animated with talk and laughter.”

Sarah makes this comment as a nine-year-old who doesn’t yet understand that appearances can be deceiving. She’s especially beguiled by her charming and entertaining Uncle Roger. While her parents exhibit a toughness that helps ensure their children’s survival, Roger does magic tricks, drinks heavily, and dallies with bar servers.

“A Quaker is a heretic because he makes himself answerable to no body of church, only to the voice of his own conscience. Quakers believe God resides within them like an organ of the body and speaks to them.”

Margaret explains the principles of Quakerism to Sarah after the two girls encounter a starving young man in their barn. This description suggests that Quakers emphasize the inner spiritual world of the individual rather than deferring to the external trappings of authority that Puritan ministers display. Small wonder that they, like witches, are viewed as a threat to the Puritan hierarchy.

“Ply the needle in and out of a canvas and with a great length of thread one can make a sail to move a ship across the ocean. In such a way can a sharp gossipy tongue, with the thinnest thread of rumor, stitch together a story to flap in the breeze. Hoist that story upon the pillar of superstitious belief and a whole town can be pulled along with the wind of fear.”

Sarah offers this comment as an adult looking back at the flimsy evidence that led to the witch trials. Small injuries and petty grievances were blown out of proportion until entire lives were wrecked. In this quote, she emphasizes that gossip is never harmless in a paranoid community where everyone mistrusts their neighbor.

“Since my return I had not seen him shed one tear for my grandmother. But it was not my father I resented. It was my mother I blamed for bringing me back, separating me from my cousin.”

Again, Sarah bemoans the dullness of her own family compared to the Toothakers. She judges by appearances. Because her father doesn’t outwardly show his grief at the death of Grandmother Allen, Sarah assumes that he doesn’t feel the loss. Her anger against her mother is that of a petulant child whose parent has just taken away her favorite doll.

“I had heard enough in the meetinghouse to know that Catholics were idolaters and blood drinkers and were as evil as Lucifer himself.”

Sarah’s thoughts here indicate the absurd beliefs the colony’s gullible Puritans received as fact. While ministers would certainly have found an advantage in discrediting their competition, they also believed that they held the moral high ground and adhered to the one pure faith. The people don’t have access to any other source of information on the subject, so their narrow views of other religions are shaped by the beliefs of their bigoted clergy.

“And yet with a shifting of sunlight, I had seen, as though looking into a killing pond, that beyond the restive landscape of the living, the Master stood poised, razor in hand, to cut and scrape away our delicate flesh, leaving only bone and weathered shell.”

The world that Sarah inhabits as a child is precarious: Death can come in an instant from multiple directions. The clergy has shaped this uneasy environment into a parable about God’s potential punishment. Because the people are seen as sinful, God always has a reason to be displeased with them. Such messages from the pulpit would be difficult for an adult to process, much less a child. This is the stuff of nightmares.

“She told me that hoarding anger is like hoarding grain in a lidded rain barrel. The dark and the dank will cause the seeds to sprout but the lack of light and air will soon force the grain to spoil.”

Martha uses a simile while trying to get Sarah to voice her resentment against her mother. While the advice is sound, Sarah doesn’t take it. Martha fails to understand how resentment operates in her own interactions with her neighbors. She has challenged their bad behavior and kindled a spark of resentment in those whom she justly criticizes. The seeds that sprout as a result will send her to the gallows.

“That which is scarred and pitted in nature can mean sustenance and life, whereas a smooth and pretty skin can mean destruction and death. People, too, are not often what they seem, even those whom you love. You must look closely, Sarah.”

While teaching Sarah about edible mushrooms, Martha cautions her daughter not to let an attractive surface fool her in people either. Unfortunately, Sarah isn’t yet willing to be persuaded away from her affection for the Toothakers. Before the novel ends, she’ll come to understand the truth of her mother’s words.

“The eggs were dropped into the glass, the water was stirred, and the spin within that fragile vessel would form a vortex into which the good and the evil alike would be sucked down and drowned. And from that time, I would often think of hell as a very cold place.”

The elderly Sarah offers this comment just as the Salem witch hysteria begins. It all starts innocently in the dead of winter when some bored Salem girls create a Venus glass to predict their futures. Sarah draws a parallel between the season’s coldness and the figurative hell into which she’s dropped along with her family. The perennial coldness of the judges and the community knows no season.

“These days are very harsh, Martha. There are still smallpox and Indian raids not two days’ ride from here. People are very much afraid, and fear makes fools of us all.”

When Martha hears the first rumors about her powers as a witch, she scoffs at the folly of the people in Andover. Her neighbor Robert rightly points out that everyone lives in a perpetual state of fear because of the precarious conditions in the colony. That insecurity makes them inclined to lash out against what frightens them. Since they can’t fight smallpox or Indigenous people who strike by night, they instead persecute witches.

“Martha, they will not listen to reason. How can they, when all they have built here is to keep themselves propped up on the backs of others? You do yourself credit to believe in your own strength and courage. But they will not hear you. They cannot.”

Martha and Thomas are having a conversation about her impending arrest. She’s confident that the Salem judges will apply the law fairly. Martha has been a lifelong resident of the colony, but Thomas has not. He saw similar tyranny in England and recognizes it in the arrogant clergy who rule Massachusetts. Their pride and reputations are at stake even more than the witches they judge. They can’t admit that they’re wrong.

“‘If they come for you, you must tell them anything they want to hear to save yourself. And you must tell Richard and Andrew and Tom to do the same.’ ‘But why can you not do the same…’ My voice had started to rise plaintively but she shook me and choked it off. ‘Because someone must speak for the truth of things.’”

Martha has already concluded that she’ll be convicted and executed because she refuses to confess to the charge of witchcraft or implicate anyone else. However, she wants to save her children’s lives. Maternal instinct isn’t the only reason that she gives Sarah the advice to save herself. Martha knows that someone must preserve the family’s story and survive to speak the truth when the world is finally ready to hear it.

“It’s how the English run their courts. They sacrifice innocents, thinking to keep evil at bay, and call it a kind of justice.”

Thomas is explaining the legal system to Sarah. Because he has lived much of his life outside the colony, he has had a chance to observe the wider world and how its systems operate. This quote implies that the law uses scapegoating as a convenient way to discourage future crimes. Such tactics have nothing to do with justice.

“Who among us would give up what we cannot see for what we can hold in our hands? I believe many of us would peel ourselves away from our immortal selves as easily as the skin from a boiled plum if it meant we could remain on the earth for a while, our bellies full and our beds warm and safe at night.”

The elderly Sarah is commenting on the ease with which some of the accused are willing to implicate their friends and family. She recognizes that material comfort and freedom from physical pain are strong motivators. Those who confessed were liars. In Puritan terms, they sinned and jeopardized their souls by bearing false witness, but that mattered far less in the moment than escaping execution.

“She was too singular, too outspoken, too defiant against her judges, in defense of her innocence, and it was for this, more than for proof of witchcraft, that she was being punished. Which made it all the more remarkable that my father was not.”

Puritan leaders demanded conformity from members of the community. Anyone who stood out for any reason was regarded with suspicion. Martha makes herself a target simply by being strong-minded and opinionated. Furthermore, she’s the only woman who refuses to confess to witchcraft, which greatly angers her judges. In this quote, Sarah notes that her father possesses the same singularity, but no one dares to arrest him. In part, this is a result of his fearsome reputation, and in part, it’s because the Salem witch trials were essentially a war on women.

“I looked across the faces of the men before me and saw in their eyes interest and enmity, curiosity and fearfulness, but to a person I saw nothing that could be called in good faith compassion or pity or even reserved judgment.”

Sarah has been brought before the judges for questioning. Judges and juries are supposed to be impartial. As this quote indicates, the men of Salem had already made up their minds that all the accused were guilty. All they required was confirmation of their suspicions. Executing witches allowed them to briefly lull their private fears to sleep. They felt the illusion of controlling a situation that was far beyond their abilities to master.

“In common to all of these wives and mothers and sisters who had worked and prayed and midwifed in good faith with their neighbors was the searching, confused gaze that they should be accused and imprisoned and seemingly forgotten by those same neighbors.”

Sarah is now gazing at the faces of the women who have been imprisoned along with her. They all know their innocence and realize that they were jailed by people they trusted. In the paranoid atmosphere of Salem, a person’s best option for avoiding suspicion is to point a finger at someone else.

“‘You must know that this is not the world, and there are many who believe that this’—and he gestured about the cell—‘all of this, is a shame to humanity.’”

Sarah is talking to a kindly doctor who periodically cares for the prisoners. He tries to give her some hope by pointing out that Salem isn’t the world. That is the crux of the problem. The colony’s Puritan leaders are trying to create a theocratic utopia uncontaminated by the impure world outside. Geographic isolation is vital to the success of their plan. However, its insularity also prevents common sense from penetrating the barrier of religious fanaticism.

“It is easier to kill a tyrant with a sword than disassemble whole counties in the grip of superstitious dread. He could not save her, Sarah, without putting you and your brothers at terrible risk.”

The doctor is trying to explain to Sarah why her father didn’t rescue her mother. Even though Thomas had an earlier conversation with his daughter to try to make her understand her mother’s wishes in the matter, she still wants an easy solution to the family’s problem. In this quote, the doctor points out that Thomas would have to kill everyone in Salem and beyond to free his wife. The entire community is infected with fear.

“There were no entreaties or pleas of mercy from the women. There were no moans of distress or even tears. They sat or lay mute, letting their bodies be the book of revelation.”

Increase Mather has just come to inspect the Salem jail and is horrified by what he finds there. He doesn’t need to question any of the women because their emaciated, diseased physical condition is proof of the inhumanity of the Salem judges. Fortunately, Mather has enough political influence to put an end to their suffering. Significantly, he doesn’t criticize the efforts of his son, Cotton Mather, who tried to convict them all.

“I thought of my mother’s courage as she faced her judges. With every step I thought of her cleaving to the truth even as she fell the short distance of the rope. With every step I thought of her pride, her strength, her love. And with every step I thought, I am my mother’s daughter.”

This quote reveals a significant change in Sarah’s attitude toward Martha. In the early chapters, Sarah is a petulant child who sees her mother as harsh. She doesn’t recognize until much later that her mother’s flinty resolve is heroic. Martha is the only woman strong enough to stand up to her judges and defy their authority, knowing that this stance will cost her life. Sarah is now proud to be the daughter of such a woman.