The Sins of Hawthorne's Fathers

"Hawthorne’s Puritans: From Fact to Fiction" by Deborah L. Madsen, in Journal of American Studies (Dec. 1999), Cambridge Univ. Press, 40 W. 20th St., N.Y. 10011–4211.

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–64) was merciless in his fictional portrayals of merciless Puritans, those upholders of dour orthodoxy, hot in pursuit of witches and heretics. But Madsen, an English professor at South Bank University, London, argues that Hawthorne did the Puritans, and one colonial family in particular, an injustice.

Hawthorne’s own 17th-century ancestors, as he frankly admitted, had been among the reallife Puritan zealots. One was a long-time magistrate of Salem, William Hathorne. (Nathaniel added the w to his surname when he began to write.) William Hathorne, says Madsen, was "a notorious persecutor of Quakers," operating "a system of spies or informers who reported to him individuals who neglected their church and civil duties." Hathorne’s son John was the " ‘ hanging judge’ " of the Salem witchcraft trials in 1692.

After The House of the Seven Gables appeared in 1851, telling of the cursed Pyncheon family, Hawthorne acknowledged—in response to complaints from members of a Pynchon family (who spelled their name without the e)—that the Pyncheon name had been inspired by the name of their ancestor, Judge William Pynchon (1590–1661), one of the 26 patentees of the Massachusetts Bay Company and the founder of Springfield, Massachusetts.

How odd then, suggests Madsen, that novelist Hawthorne paid no heed to the fact that Judge Pynchon was cut from very different cloth than his own ancestors—"something of a thorn in the side of colonial authorities." When he presided over an early witchcraft case in Springfield, the judge seems to have "simply performed his duty," she says. In 1650, he was found guilty of heresy in connection with a book he had written about Christ and redemption, and arranged to return with his wife to England.

If Hawthorne knew about the real colonial Pynchons and their like, why did he ignore the varieties of Puritanism and portray it instead as a monolith (with heretics being only exceptional individuals)? Because, Madsen of his fathers by showing that they were incasays, he was able in that way "to excuse the sins pable of acting otherwise."