Sullen Fires Across the Atlantic:
Essays in Transatlantic Romanticism

Notes

¹ For a summary of conjectured sources, see Newman, 333-336. While most of the sources Newman summarizes are literary, he also points to oral tradition: "The witch folklore transmitted through oral tradition is difficult to document, yet during the course of growing up in the environs of Salem, Hawthorne had to have been exposed to some of the local folk beliefs" (333).
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² Writes the folklorist Mary Ellen Brown: "Burns’ focus in his early work on local topics, his frequent use of traditional material, his acceptance of the fluidity of texts, his stress on audience and the oral socialization of his own works, and his articulated views on the function of composition—all suggest Burns’ strong and largely intuitive ties to the traditional and particularly oral matrix of late eighteenth-century Ayrshire" (6).
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³ "The pacification of the Highlands involved deliberate attempts to eradicate traditional forms of culture in order to root out remaining sources of indigenous identity and national pride" (Trumpener 29).
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⁴ See Davis 72-73.
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⁵ See, for example, Manning: "Scotland underwent—debated, theorized, experienced, resisted, imagined—union before the American colonies; the literature that emerged from this experience inevitably proved potent when the colonists began to formulate their own responses to a crisis in their relationship with England" (Fragments 4).
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⁶ See also Larry J. Reynolds’ account of the effect that European history had on Hawthorne’s attitude toward revolutionary "mobs."
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⁷ "A nation’s formal literature needs to be based on the creative accomplishments of its folk, regardless of how crude that body of materials may seem to the sophisticated classes of society . . . . the sense of nationality is derived from the unsophisticated folk poetry of the people" (Herder, qtd. in Bluestein 5).
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⁸ See Bland, 79-99.
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⁹ See Bayer.
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¹⁰ "Beneath the decline of sacred communities, languages and lineages, a fundamental change was taking place in modes of apprehending the world, which, more than anything else, made it possible to ‘think’ the nation" (Andersen 22).
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¹¹ See Anthony Marx.
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¹² In a letter to Francis Grose (401 summer 1790) Burns recounts three of "the many Witch Stories I have heard relating to Aloway Kirk" (22).
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¹³ Smith cites Walker Connor’s view that "nations, like ethnic groups, are phenomena of mass psychology and ultimately of felt kinship" (72).
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¹⁴ See Dundes: "Projection is one of a number of psychological defense mechanisms which provides an unconscious screen or arena for display of the causes of anxiety and it is for this reason that folkloristic projections are so indispensable" (45).
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¹⁵ In "Shadows of Doubt: Specter Evidence in Hawthorne's 'Young Goodman Brown,'" Levin shows how Brown, and perhaps the reader, falls for the same kind of "ocular deceptions" used to convict witches during the Salem trials.
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¹⁶ Smith argues that nations can be traced to "popular participation in large-scale cults and rituals, in the performance of ethical and religious obligations which bind a community of presumed ancestry into a community of faith and worship, in the sense of community evoked by symbols and myths of ethnic origins and election, and in shared memories of ancestors and heroic deeds" (Smith 111).
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¹⁷ Manning calls the Devil’s oration in "Young Goodman Brown" "a demonic inversion of Dimmesdale’s Election Day sermon in The Scarlet Letter" (Puritan-Provincial 101).
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¹⁸ Writes Larner: "A witch was, by definition, an abnormal person. The execution of a witch was a demonstration of group solidarity. It removed the provocative deviant and redefined the boundaries of normality to secure the safety of the virtuous community . . . . Witchcraft was more than crime for the practitioner was an enemy and witch process was directed against the eradication of public enemies" (206).
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¹⁹ Writes Marianne Hester: "The accusation of women was not merely a reflection of an age-old stereotype, not merely the by-produce of a patriarchal society; the witch-hunts were a part of, and one example of, the ongoing mechanisms for social control of women within a general context of social change and the reconstruction of a patriarchal society" (276).
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