Essays on Salem Village

A great writer Nathaniel Hawthorne is a person who uses different themes and characters in his writings. He is a romantic writer who uses different literary devices, such as metaphor, irony, symbols in order to make his works more understandable and reaching to the reader. He himself as a person has a very interesting family history. His father died and he was forced to live with his relatives, mother and sister. Every writer’s storyline influences their writings and Nathaniel Hawthorne was not an exception to the rule. Hawthorne’s family history shaped the theme of his writing including ...

Analysis of an American Trial: The Salem Witch Trials of 1692

Today, the Salem village located in Massachusetts in the United States of America is notorious to the world for being the village, where unjustified witch prosecutions and trials took place. The Salem has fallen into such disrepute because of the sad historical events occurred there in 1692. Many women, including little girls aged 4 and 11, were accused of witchcraft without any valid evidentiary material. All of them were considered to be the Devil’s servants, who possessed supernatural powers for the purposes of harming people and pleasing the Devil by doing so. Such women were imprisoned, hanged on ...

In the essay “Devil In Salem Village” from Portrait of America, Edmund S. Morgan describes the terror that had spread through Salem, Massachusetts, when the locals were convinced that many of the women living in the city were in fact witches. In this essay Morgan outlines the factors that ultimately led to the Salem Witch Trials of 1692. Morgan starts with how the Massachusetts Bay colony was founded by the Puritans in 1630 as a model Christian community. However, by 1680, the Puritan movement was perilously in danger of losing its following. Many of the youngsters had become “increasingly preoccupied ...

Article Summary: Levy, Leo B., "The Problem of Faith in `Young Goodman Brown'”, Journal of English and Germanic Philology. 75(3) July 1975: 375-87. In "The Problem of Faith in `Young Goodman Brown'” (Journal of English and Germanic Philology, July, 1975), Leo Levy finds that the story is ambiguous about whether the protagonist is dreaming, mentally disturbed or undergoing a crisis of faith (Faith) because all three elements are present in the story. Although the most important event in the story is the witch’s Sabbath in the forest, Hawthorne never makes it clear if this was a real or ...

Introduction

The Salem Witch trials were a series of hearings in the Counties and these hearings were carried out with the aim of prosecuting people who were accused of engaging in witchcraft. Although they were known as the Salem trials, they were carried across different provinces in the counties of Essex, Suffolk and Middlesex. Most people believed in witches and there were probably practicing witches in Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1692. Witches have existed in Salem and Andover since 1692 until today. There were 58 cases of witchcraft in the England colonies from 1645 to 1662 (Buckland, 2002). The trials led ...