Cotton Mather’s “Dora”: The Case History of Mercy Short

“The frequency of hysteria is not less remarkable than the multiformity of the shapes which it puts on.”

—Robert Sydenham (1624–98)

Mercy Short, a 15-year-old, orphaned servant girl, is one of the most puzzling and intriguing figures to emerge from the witchcraft crisis in seventeenth-century New England. “Cursed” on an errand to a Boston prison by an accused witch, she quickly fell into fits described by Cotton Mather as “just such, or perhaps much worse, . . . as those which held the Bewitched people then Tormented by Invisible Furies in the County of Essex” (Brand 260). Her afflictions were episodic, lasting for a period of about nine months, during which time Mather began to minister to her with “a little company of his praying Neighbors” (260). During one of her “remissions,” she attended Sunday services at Mather’s North Church, where she once again “fell under the Arrest of her Invisible Troublers,” which tormented her so violently, Mather writes, that it was all a group of men could do to carry her to a neighboring house (261). There she remained for “diverse weeks” under Mather’s care and counsel, his impressions of her condition culminating in A Brand Pluck’d out of the Burning, a “possession narrative” in the tradition of the captivity narrative Increase Mather (presumably) had shaped a decade earlier for Mary Rowlandson (1682). Thus, we have for Mercy Short a particular kind of text we do not have for the girls in Essex County,¹ a provocative early “case history,” which we might read as Cotton Mather’s “Dora.”²

Like many of the afflicted girls in Salem, Mercy Short was a “youthful refuge[e] from the frontier wars” (Norton 298) in nearby Maine and New Hampshire, traumatized, orphaned, and displaced, both physically and socioeconomically, by French and Indian attacks.³ Of all the girls with ties to the frontier, however, Mercy Short was the only one who had herself been taken captive—a central fact almost entirely ignored by critics. During the 1690 raid on Salmon Falls,⁴ her father, Clement Short, her mother, and three siblings were killed before her eyes while she and five or six siblings were taken captive and then marched through the snows into Canada. Whatever may have happened to her during the eight months before she was redeemed in Quebec by Sir William Phips and returned to Boston with his fleet, I think we are safe in assuming that her experience, what Cotton Mather himself called “The worst Captivity in the World” (Decennium 206), marked her differently than the other young refugees.

Moreover, living some distance from Salem in Boston, Mercy Short was not part of the core group of afflicted girls and accused witches. Although her first fit occurred in the early summer of 1692, Mather managed to effect a “cure” that lasted for “diverse months,” until two months after the final hangings at Salem. Only then did she succumb fully. And Mercy was not essentially an accuser, railing primarily at her Invisible Tormentors without pointing the finger at townspeople and neighbors. Indeed, Mather worked hard to suppress the occasional name that flew from her mouth:

As for the Spectres that Visited and Afflicted Mercy Short, there were among them such as wore the shape of several, who are doubtless Innocent as to the Crime of Witchcraft; it would bee a great Iniquity in Mee, to judge them otherwise; and the World, I hope, shall neither by My means, nor by Hers, ever know, who they were.

(Brand 274)

The fact that she suffered at a geographical, temporal, and, I would suggest, psychological remove from the “witchcraft crisis” is significant, for it isolates her case, leading us to consider the possibility that what was happening to Mercy Short was more than a product of her proximity to Salem. In fact, when language failed her, the events in Salem may have provided her a convenient cloth onto which she could embroider the story of her captivity.

“Another Sort of Plague”

Mather himself, immersed politically and religiously in the maelstrom swirling in...