Essay Questions

What are some examples of how the novel illustrates the inherent danger that living within insular communities demanding rigid adherence to traditions and values makes such society particularly susceptible to the consequences of fear and suspicion?

Matthew Wood’s interpretation that Kit’s clothing automatically equates with sloth and potentially giving rise to pagan attitudes and John’s acceptance of Puritan belief that reading merely for the sake of entertainment is sinful both have the effect of ascribing moral failure to what are essentially cultural distinctions. When an insulated culture is raised to view the ways of other societies not merely as different, but as being a sign of spiritual collapse, certain things tend to happen. Things like witch hunts and wars, for instance.

The Witch of Blackbird Pond was written in the 1950s, the same decade that produced another work of literature about witches in Puritan settlements, Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. Both authors looked back to the real life witch hunts of the colonial era to make a commentary the McCarthy Era in which they were written, yet the novel does not seem to be held hostage to that connection quite like Miller’s play. Why might that be?

Both the play and the novel examine the curious mob mentality that allowed suspicion of the behavior of others to justify excesses of illegal conduct toward the accused. Miller was clearly writing with the intention of linking suspicion of being a witch to suspicion of being a Communist. The novel, however, seems to prefer a path that allows any sort of behavior defying societal norms and expectations to become fair play for paranoid reactions. The end result seems to be that The Crucible exposes the unfounded paranoia about communist lurking on every street corner trying to destroy America as being every bit as ridiculous as believing in witches. Thus, Miller succeeds to showing how the present connects directly to the past. By contrast, Kit’s behavior and the suspicion toward her seems disconnected directly from the communist paranoia to explore larger avenues of how suspicion arises out of perfectly normal behavior and in the process she is linking the behavior the past to more pervasive behavior of the present. Not everybody was a rabid opponent of communism, but nearly everybody can draw some personal parallel between their modern lives and the Puritan insularity.

When Kit reveals that she actually knows how to swim, this ability is met with a variety of reactions ranging from amazement to hostility because of the common misconception that only witches were supposed to know how to swim. Can you relate what seems like a remarkable and almost unbelievable acceptance of myth to the modern world?

It does seem to verge almost on the bizarre that so many people might actually have never learned to swim simply because an ancient tradition had obscured rational thinking. But how often have you seen someone walk out of the their way to avoid crossing under a ladder? Or think back to any time you might have seen someone toss salt some salt over their shoulder or rap their knuckles against a convenient piece of wood when wishing for good fortune. Because we know witches don’t exist in the same way the Puritans believed them to and because we can see the illogic in not learning to swim because of that belief, such a scene may seem like the stuff of science fiction rather historical fiction. On the other hand, do you know fellow students who have never been inoculate against disease because their parents feared that such shots could contribute to developing autism?