Hawthorne's Puritans: From Fact to Fiction
DEBORAH L. MADSEN Professor of English a1
a1 South Bank University, 103 Borough Road, London SE1 0AA
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AbstractNathaniel Hawthorne's view of his first American ancestors as belonging to a
grim and gloomy race, impatient with human weaknesses and merciless towards
transgressors, reflects a wide-spread popular attitude towards the Massachusetts
Bay colonists. Indeed, Hawthorne's contribution to the construction and
perpetuation of this view is not inconsiderable. Hawthorne frankly confesses to
his own family descent from one of the “hanging judges” of the Salem witchcraft
trials, and he does not spare any instance of persecution, obsession, or cruelty
regarding the community led by his paternal ancestors. But Hawthorne does not
stop at indicting his own family history; in a famous exchange with the president
of Hartford College, Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, shortly after the publication of
The
House
of
the
Seven
Gables (1851) Hawthorne is accused of blackening the
reputation of another of New England's great colonial families. Hawthorne
denied any knowledge of a “real” Pynchon family, let alone one with living (and
litigious) descendants. He apologized for his mistake and offered to write an
explanatory preface (which never appeared) for the second edition. Historical
evidence suggests that Hawthorne, in fact, knew the history of the Pyncheon
family, in particular William Pyncheon and his son John, of Springfield, who
shared political and business connections throughout the mid-seventeenth
century with William Hathorne of Salem. William Hathorne was a notorious
persecutor of Quakers and his son John was the “hanging judge” of the
witchcraft trials; William Pyncheon was a prominent fur-trader and founder of
several towns along the Connecticut River who left the colony abruptly in circa
1651 accused of heresy. Given this history, a more likely model for the grim
Colonel Pyncheon of Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel is rather a composite of John
and William Hathorne than William Pynchon. So why should Nathaniel, who had
already in his fiction revealed his family skeletons, choose to displace his own
family history on to the Pyncheon family, with all the trouble that then ensued?
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