Authority and Witchery: Cotton Mather's Ornaments and Mary English's Acrostic

WILLIAM J. SCHEICK Authority and Witchery: Cotton Mather's Ornaments and Mary English's Acrostic MONG the many revisions that have occurred in studies of . colonial America, three in particular influence this investigation. There was, we now recognize, much more trouble with the establishment of authority in the New World settlements than we once thought. Relatedly, we appreciate better today that Puritan culture was far more diverse and hétérodoxie—far less formed—than we previously believed. And we now understand that, within both of these dynamic contexts, women's voices were more evident and distinctive than we had once noticed. These voices, wittingly or unwittingly, spoke over the franchise of authority and thereby often revealed other stories within the main story of emergent orthodoxy, including the Puritan version. One story they tell concerns the discomfort some women experienced when expressing a sense of identity and voice, a discomfort that registered beneath the surface of their writings and sometimes destabilized their efforts as writers. This problem can be gauged not only by effects in their own work; clues to their difficulties also surface as "another story" in writings by male authors who, in one way or another, touch upon the subject of female authority. My essay tries to piece together a version of this "other story" by assembling clues from a book on women in general by Cotton Mather and a poem on one woman in particular by Mary English. The lives ofboth Mather and English intersected during the Salem witch trials, but ofprimary interest here is how his book and her poem are both deformed by the unstable Assuring conArizona Quarterly Volume 51, Number 1, Spring 1995 Copyright © 1995 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004-1 610 William J. Scheick flicts endemic to their mutual attempt to negotiate an authorized identity for women. To uncover this story, I will focus on sites of logonomic conflict. Logonomic conflict refers to peculiar, sometimes subversive, narrative effects that demarcate certain tensions extant within culturally regulated ideological complexes. Ideological complexes are "contradictory versions of the world, coercively imposed by one social group on another on behalf of its own distinctive interests or subversively offered by another social group in attempts at resistance in its own interests." These ideological complexes operate within logonomic systems, which are visible "rules prescribing the conditions for [the] production and reception of meanings." Logonomic systems express attempts by dominant groups to control, and to legitimate their control over, subordinated groups. But the ways whereby these systems contain opposition or exceptions to general rules inadvertently acknowledge the friction and contradictions at the core of all ideological complexes (Hodge 3-12). Sites of logonomic conflict provide various narrative signs of the ideological contradiction and friction typical of cultural systems. Logonomic conflict, my argument suggests, can be glimpsed in the unintentional, barely perceptible fissures in colonial women's uneasy attempts to negotiate between orthodox and personal authority. Most often, these authors and their contemporaries seem unaware of any such dissonance within the textual management of the visible prescriptive rules of theit cultural logonomic systems. Nevertheless, unconscious resistant impulses lurk beneath the surface of the various narrative strategies authorized by the prevailing systems of their cultural milieu. The seismic activity of these impulses is underground, with only subtle, hardly detectable disruptive effects on the surface of a work. Authority is the matrix of this logonomic conflict. As Foucault and New-Historicist studies have indicated, humanity engages authority by way of an unresolved dialogism between resistance to and replication of the status quo (Foucault 151). The perception of authority is always "a process of interpretive power," so that "the sentiments of authority lie in the eye of the beholder," who experiences both "fear and regret" in trying to penetrate the "secret the authotity [figure] possesses" (Sennett Authority and Witchery 20, 154). Colonial American men, accordingly, were not exempt from this struggle despite the fact that they were more favorably aligned than were women with the power structure of their time—i.e., with the logonomic systems of s> t "rules prescribing the conditions for [the] production and reception of meanings." Similarities notwithstanding, it is reasonable to assume, on the basis of what...