Heretic's Style Flashcards
Style
Point of View
The story is recounted from the vantage point of, Sarah Carrier who is 10 years old when the story opens in 1690. She is the older of two daughters and sister to three brothers in the Carrier household. Due to her age, Sarah is particularly close to her mother Martha. She is a surrogate mother to Hannah, her infant sister, and occasional mother proxy to brothers Richard, Andrew and Tom. She is witness to her mother’s quiet dignity and courage when accused of witchcraft in the Salem witch trials and sentenced to death. Sarah internalizes this lesson and seems certain to pass along to her offspring her idea of strong womanhood. The device of using a family member as narrator of what is admittedly a family history, enhanced by some scholarship on the author’s part, is quite effective at drawing the reader into the heart of the narrative. Instead of experiencing the story as something that happens to someone else in a far distant past. the reader is swept into the action as though it were happening today. Since the primary point of view is that of one of the Carrier children, the points of view of her siblings are given almost equal weight in the story’s progression.
Setting
The book is set in colonial Massachusetts in Billerica where the Carrier family lives and farms, in Andover, and Salem in Middlesex County. Culturally, the setting is post-Puritan New England where the colony is experiencing for the first time the kind of crowd hysteria produced by fear-mongering preachers who would periodically throughout American history gain for themselves a kind of earthly power based on the manipulation of people’s fears. In this instance the colony is under the thrall of Increase and Cotton Mather, two fundamentalist preachers who launched the colonial equivalent of the Spanish Inquisition. These preachers, and others, arrogated to themselves the power of divining witchcraft, trying and prosecuting supposed witches. The setting, thus, is one of fear because of the witch hunts and because of diseases such as smallpox that were killing colonists unabated.
The socio-cultural setting of the book is eerily similar to the communist “witch hunts” of the 1950s spurred by the paranoid investigations of the House of Representatives Committee on un-American Activities established and conducted by Sen. Joseph McCarthy. In an identical example of crowd psychology, this committee sought to objectify evil within American society during the time of the Cold War with the Soviet Union. By creating supposed villains who could then be prosecuted and destroyed personally or politically, the paranoid right wing was able to gain some sense of control over its fears of nuclear annihilation at the hands of the Soviets. Similarly, during the time of the colonial witch hunts, some preachers were able to demonstrate to their followers that they were working to cast evil out of their society when colonists felt threatened by Indians, disease, crop failure and British colonialism itself.
The author goes to great pains to paint the setting in lovingly complete detail, for at least the first third of the book. By the time the action and interaction get underway, the reader has had a chance - assisted by plenty of immersion in the colonial world - to get comfortable in the jarringly different 17th Century world of Massachusetts.
Language and Meaning
The language is that of English colonists in the late 17th Century, before the American Revolution, rendered convincingly by the author in both direct conversation and in her narrative of events. Although not peppered with “thees” and “thous” of Quaker or Mennonite colonies, the language nevertheless displays subtleties of expression that suggest a much earlier, more formal time when speech seems unduly indirect and prolix to modern eyes and ears. In addition the speech of Thomas Carrier, patriarch of the family, is flavored with a Gaelic bent reflecting the fact he is a Welshman. Here is one instance where the narrator herself explains a linguistic peculiarity:
“Mother called the scarecrow a murmet. A scarecrow was a thing of bold-faced tactics, out in the full light of day. A murmet, the ‘r’ softly rolling against the tongue, spoke of murmuring stealth, as though it hunted marauding cows in the darkening twilight. It was the name that people who came from the south of England used. Places such as Devon, Basing and Ramsey where the old tongue was spoken” (Chapter 4, p. 108).
A flavor of the contemporary language, as well as the patent absurdity of the witch trials, occurs when 10-year-old Sarah Carrier is brought before the so-called judges after her mother is arrested and imprisoned on charges of witchcraft. John Hathorne, the same man who sentenced her mother to death by hanging, chillingly asks, “How long hast thou been a witch?” Coached by her mother to cooperate with the prosecutors to save her own life, Sarah answers: “Ever since I was six years old.”
Another linguistic anachronism: “Ten of the clock” (Chapter 8, p. 262).
Structure
The structure of the novel is loosely the same as that employed in the great majority of mainstream novels with the format of problem leads to conflict that escalates to crisis and leads to resolution. The primary problem faced by the characters is the ongoing witch hunt but lesser problems include disease, Indians and poor agriculture. The conflict builds in intensity because of the heretical disdain shown by both Thomas and Margaret Carrier toward the witch hunts and their ecclesiastical perpetrators. The crisis arrives when Margaret is arrested and thrown in jail on charges of witchcraft, which profoundly disturbs the entire family because her children - Sarah, Tom, Hannah, Andrew, and Richard - are also thrown into the dank and disease-ridden dungeon. The resolution occurs after Martha Carrier is hanged and the rest of her family are at last released as the Salem witch trials come to an end. Part of the resolution is the profound lesson in female courage and loyalty that Sarah learns from her mother - a lesson that is passed down through generations of Carrier women.
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