The Politics of Speech

GOVERNING THE TONGUE The Politics of Speech in Early New England JANE KAMENSKY Oxford University Press • New York Oxford THE TONGUE IS A WITCH 151 From across the Atlantic, where representatives of colony and Crown argued over the fate of Massachusetts's founding charter, came disturbing political news. 3 But while echoes of these distant turmoils unsettled S I X many in Boston, the loudest din was homegrown, a racket caused not (as Mather claimed) by clamorous whores or wordy fools, but by a veritable plague of suspected witches and demoniacs.4 Through the voices of the bewitched and the possessed, God's displeasure with New England had THE TONGUE suddenly become audible, emerging "with an unusual and amazing loud IS A WITCH ness" that, minister Deodat Lawson feared, would "make the ears of those that hear ... to tingle." Lawson and Samuel Parris, his successor in the pulpit of beleaguered Salem Village, witnessed the pandemonium first- The devil had burst forth upon Massachusetts like a "roaring lion," Lawson wrote. Parris added, "when he shall be silenced, the Lord only knows."s However dire, the verbal disorders emanating from Salem that spring have been familiar to New Englanders. The belief that the "un ruly" tongue was formed in the very "image of the divell" was both older and more widely held than the narrow confines of Salem village life might suggest. Nearly a century earlier, English divine William Perkins, a theologian revered by New England's magistrates and clerics, had re minded his followers that "when thou speakest evill, thy tongue is died by the fire of hell and Satan comes from thence with a coale to thy lips." Anglican preacher George Webbe put it more SUCCinctly. "The tongue is a witch," he proclaimed in 1619.6 Not just any tongue, he setting: Boston and its environs, the first stormy months of r692. Webbe might have added, but the female tongue in particular. Just as T The temper of the times: confused, troubled, anxious in the extreme. those trying to make sense of what they heard in Salem knew that the And the level of noise: positively deafening. Cacophonous enough, in often announced himself through disorderly speech, so they also fact, that no less eminent a preacher than Cotton Mather feels com considered women's verbal wrongs especially suspect.? Throughout the pelled, for the first time (though hardly last), to inveigh in print long history of witchcraft in the West, the feminine and the diabolic had against loose words-in particular, against unfettered female speech. In been closely linked. Women comprised upward of 80 percent of those structing the pious matrons of New England on the "character and hap suspected of witchcraft, as well as the vast majority of those thought to piness of a virtuous woman," he recalls for them the psalmist's decree: "[ be directly "possessed" by the deviLS What pulled women into Satan's will take heed unto my ways that I sin not with my Tongue; I will keep my orbit! In large measure, they were snared by their own words. The au Mouth with a Bridle." Mindful of the "usual" charge that women's thors of the Malleus Maleficarum, a fifteenth-century treatise whose au "Tongues are frequently not so Governed by the Fear of God, as they thority was felt in New England as well as in Europe, argued that wom ought to be," he exhorts the "daughter of Zion" to cultivate a "silver en's "slippery tongues" made them the likelier servants of the deviL tongue"--speech rare and pure, free of boastful "dross." Mather urges her, Kramer and Sprenger suggested, therefore, that witch-hunters look no "Be careful that you don't Speak too soon. And be careful that you further than the "wicked woman[,sl . hot words," "evil blandishments don't Speak too much." For" 'tis the Whore, that is Clamorous, and the and violent importunations" for evidence of diabolic goings-on.9 As the Fool, that is Full of words." [ anonymous author of a pamphlet entitled The Anatomy of Woman's First printed in March 1692, Mather's pocket-sized volume on female Tongue explained, "a Woman's Tongue ... is the Devil's Seat." [0 2 conduct must have found an eager audience. No daughter of Zion could Early modem learned culture, then, had much to say about the links have failed to notice that there were clamors aplenty that spring-more between words, witchcraft, and women. But for most people in New En hubbub, perhaps, than had ever before been heard in New England. From gland, being able to hear a witch was a skill honed less through bqok the north and west, where English settlers warred against the French and learning than through hard experience. From the late 1630S, when the their Algonquian allies, came doleful of battle and Indian captivity. "bewitching tongue" of Anne Hutchinson had lured converts with al ISO 15 2 GOVERNING THE TONGUE THE TONGUE IS A WITCH 153 most preternatural ease, settlers there had been subject to a steady flow But how was one to recognize a witch? In New England as in other of diabolically powerful words-so much so, in fact, that one traveler face-to-face societies, people searched for the demonic at the margins of who visited Boston in 1680 said that he had "never been in a place their cultures. Scholars have long argued that colonial witch-hunting where more was said about witchcraft and witches." 11 The talk had played a vital role in maintaining social boundaries of many kinds, in started more than forty years before, when Jane Hawkins, one of Hutch cluding those separating deviant from normal behavior, premodern from inson's followers, was accused of having "converse[dl with the Devill," an capitalist mentaliu~s, and male prerogative from female encroachment.17 allegiance she revealed through the oddities of her own speech. 12 What has been less well understood is that through witch-hunting, New Hawkins escaped the noose in 1638, but a decade later, Charlestown's Englanders also policed the outer limits of language itself. Who could say Margaret Jones would not be so lucky. Rendered suspect, in part, by the what to whom, and what were the consequences of words gone wrong? consequences of "some angry words passing between her and her Such questions about the relationship between language and power were Neighbours," Jones bore out the accusations against her by the "very often on the minds of early New Englanders, and the words of accused intemperate" way she spoke at her trial: "lying notoriously, and railing witches threw them into particularly sharp relief. For when witches upon the jury and witnesses." 13 If New England's witches had distinctly spoke, the slender boundary between saying and doing-always perme unquiet voices, the victims of witching words could be louder still, the able in the early modern world-seemed to vanish entirely. Witches' occasion (as Increase Mather wrote) of great "noise in the Countrey." 14 speech was a type of action. Perhaps it was with this in mind that Cotton Possessed or bewitched girls were said to make "Railing and Slander" a Mather referred to himself and his fellow ministers as "Ear-witnesses" to "very Frequent Theam" of their discourse. Like Boston's Martha Godwin, witchcraft and possession. IS The phrase is an evocative one, resonating whose symptoms first appeared after a suspected witch gave the girl "bad throughout the records of witch-hunting in the American colonies. Like Language," the bewitched often evinced their diabolic torments by trad Mather, people in seventeenth-century New England believed they could ing a feminine style of "obliging and vertuous Conversation" for one hear the devil's presence in a neighbor's speech before their other senses peppered with "multiplyed Impertinencies." "Shee'd Hector me ... and confirmed the diagnosis. threaten me," Cotton Mather wrote, recalling with horror the way the What, then, did a witch sound like? The answer was multifold, hing uneducated girl had verbally lampooned his published work. IS ing not least upon who the listener was. Witchcraft was an ambiguous or Bewitching, lying, railing, slandering, hectoring, threatening: how far "multivalent" term in premodern culture, holding different (and overlap removed was the witch's way of speaking from the judicious, infrequent, ping, and competing) meanings for people from different segments of and sober conversation of the silver-tongued woman! Where Puritan ma society. Ordinary men and women heard the witch as somebody whose trons spoke softly with tongues of silver, witches, their victims, and the occult powers could be blamed for the myriad sufferings of daily life. demonically possessed ranted with tongues of fire. Indeed, the witch was Protestant clerics and magistrates, in contrast, denounced her as an en not merely a lapsed version of the Puritan matron but her inverse. In a emy of religion who "hast entertained familiarity with Satan." 19 Labeling world understood to be "composed of contraries" (God and Satan, order these rival versions of witchcraft belief clerical and lay, elite and popular, and misrule, head and heart, male and female), the witch defined the or Puritan and traditional, scholars have long sought to measure the gulf virtuous woman in the negative. But she also did more. Not content separating the common person's dread of malefic "magic" from the theo simply to hold a dark mirror to feminine quietude, the witch's words logian's fear of a diabolic "antireligion."2o Common to all these interpre turned the right order of family, neighborhood, and state upside down. tations is the suggestion that the witch sounded (subtly or greatly) differ Such an overturning was not difficult to accomplish.

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