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DUBIOUS AMERICAN IDEAL:
GENDER AND HISTORICAL KNOWLEDGE IN THE CRUCIBLE [Excerpts] The recent movie production of The Crucible offers a welcome opportunity to reexamine gender and historical knowledge in Arthur Miller's play, and so to ponder relations of literature, memory, and power. The Crucible has a notoriously complex relation to American history. It takes its setting from a founding episode in the emerging moral life of the new American community—the Salem witch trials. It also relates, by way of allegory, a critical moment in our subsequent political history—the McCarthy "witch hunts." Employing the drama framed by Salem to make a comment about McCarthyism, it offers to illuminate an enduring challenge for American moral life. In so doing it contributes to a widely (if uncritically) shared understanding about what happened at Salem, and what that episode means for America's ongoing moral and political life. Regrettably, The Crucible significantly distorts the events at Salem. By misremembering that moment in the way it does, The Crucible continues a masculinist myth about American ideals, elements of which were already at work in Puritan society. -- -- -- In what follows I want first to address the broad question of the historical accuracy of The Crucible; second to offer modest background materials for understanding women's experiences of witch hunting; third to suggest a rereading of The Crucible in light of women's historical experience; and fourth to reflect on the ways literature helps construct a knowledge of history inscribed with power. -- -- --
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| Gender: Speech and Silence | New England witch
beliefs also represented intensifications, even interruptions of their
predecessors' beliefs. Writing about the politics of speaking in early
New England, Jane Kamensky shows that Puritan beliefs elevated the importance
of language.16 The Puritan "errand" drew energy from convictions
about the importance of religious speech: according to their theology,
God addressed himself by a preached word to individual sinners, without
need for elaborate ritual. The solemn position of the preacher, righteous
speech in general, and the personal accountability of the hearer were all
critical. In the new world, Puritans still honored the word, but because
they had to balance the ideal of religious liberty with the requirements
for civil order in a fragile new society they placed a new premium on measure
and civility in speech. "Respectful speech," according to Kamensky, "represented
nothing less than the hierarchy of human relations turned into sound" (p.
18). Any violation of discursive decorum—unrestrained argument, for example—threatened
the civil order, and by implication hinted at revolt against God. Violations
that also undermined hierarchies of authority were especially censured;
for a child to speak out publicly against a parent, for example, was a
capital offense.
Kamensky further shows that expectations for proper speech were governed by a precise gender duality. Implicit and explicit instruction divided domains of male and female speech according to manner, content, and location. Codes of good manners, supported by civic practices and religious theories, profoundly restricted women's speech. Kamensky cites, among other homilies on female discourse, Cotton Mather's Ornaments for the Daughters of Zion, published in Boston in the year of the Salem trials. Mather enjoins women "Be careful that you don't Speak too soon. . . . And be careful that you don't Speak too much . . . 'tis the Whore, that is Clamorous, and the Fool, that is Full of words" (p. 150). The organization of Puritan society required men to be temperate and measured in their speaking, but it also required them to assert the authority proper to their social positions as husbands, fathers, civil officials, or religious officials. Women were similarly cautioned to adopt practices of discourse that conformed to their social positions as wives and mothers. Men's self-assertion in speech complemented women's self-effacement; men's solemn claim to responsibility complemented women's renunciation of responsibility; men's participation in public affairs complemented women's withdrawal from public affairs. Kamensky identifies the trial of Anne Hutchinson as a defining moment
for the Puritans' understanding of speech, gender, and power. Hutchinson,
with other "antinomians," challenged Puritan notions of religious authority,
and ultimately was brought up on charges of heresy. Where Puritan preachers
claimed exclusive authority to preach God's saving word, Hutchinson asserted
God's power to address individuals personally, inwardly, and without mediation
by a preached word. By the content of her beliefs, by the persuasive power
of her personality, and by the mere fact of her public speaking, Hutchinson
subverted what Puritans took to be a divinely sanctioned social hierarchy
of masculine authority in religious and civil affairs. Discoursing freely
with religious followers of both sexes, she circumvented the authority
of the male head of household over the religious education of the family,
a transgression that seemed to threaten the exclusive bonds of marriage
and the husband's authority over his wife.17 Her efficacious
discourse was seen to undo her husband's manhood, thus further eroding
the proper order of the healthy religious household. When the judges in
her trial found themselves unable to match wits with her, they fell back
on their underlying commitment to the hierarchy of gender. Governor Winthrop
bluntly informed her that "we do not mean to discourse with those of your
sex" (Kamensky, 80). Interpreting the trial, the judges employed rhetoric
that assimilated Hutchinson to Eve and to the serpent. Mather warned that
she seduced women, and through them their husbands also, "like a serpent
'sliding in the dark'" (p. 77). Hutchinson's language was described as
a "seed" sown in "us," thus constructing her as a masculinized woman capable
of inseminating with her word—a diabolical gender-monster. Hutchinson crystallized
Puritan fear about the threat of the feminine to social and theological
order. While her trial ostensibly addressed her false doctrine, it served
to reassert ordered relations between masculine and feminine spheres.
NOTES
16. Kamensky, Jane. Governing the Tongue: The Politics of Speech
in Early New England. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.
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