Content area
Full text
Puritans regarded the soul as feminine and characterized it as insatiable, as consonant with the supposedly unappeasable nature of women. If historians have noticed the New England Puritans' feminized representation of the soul, they have failed to comment or to accord the matter much significance. Yet such representation is crucial to understanding how the soul could unite with Christ upon regeneration or, alternatively, with the devil through sin.(1)
The body, for its part, also entangled women. Puritans believed that Satan attacked the soul by assaulting the body, and that because women's bodies were weaker, the devil could each women's souls more easily, breaching these "weaker vessels" with greater frequency. Not only was the body the means toward possessing the soul, it was the very expression of the devil's attack. Among witches, the body clearly manifested the soul's acceptance of the diabolical covenant.
Women were in a double bind during witchcraft episodes. Their souls, strictly speaking, were no more evil than those of men, but the representation of the vulnerable, unsatisfied, and yearning female soul, passively waiting for Christ but always ready to succumb to the devil, inadvertently implicated corporeal women themselves.(2) The representation of the soul in terms of worldly gender arrangements, and the understanding of women in terms of the characteristics of the feminine soul, in a circular fashion led Puritans to imagine that women were more likely than men to submit to Satan. A woman's feminine soul, jeopardized in a woman's feminine body, was frail, submissive, and passive-qualities that most New Englanders thought would allow her to become either a wife to Christ or a drudge to Satan.
Witches, unlike commonplace sinners, took a further damning step. Their feminine souls made an explicit and aggressive choice to conjoin with the devil. By defining a witch as a person whose (feminine) soul covenanted with Satan by signing a devil's pact rather than quiescently waiting for Christ, Puritans effectively demonized the notion of active female choice. A woman risked being damned either way: If her soul waited longingly for salvation in Christ, such female yearning could conjure up images of unsatisfied women vulnerable to Satan; if, on the contrary, that soul acted assertively rather than in passive obedience, by definition it chose the devil overtly....