Unfavorable Portrayal of Lawyers & Judges

A negative characterization of the same judge is treated in two works of American literature dealing with the same period of history: the Salem witch trials in Massachusetts in 1692. In The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne and the play The Crucible by Arthur Miller, the historical figure of Judge Hathorne. Hawthorne fictionalizes the character of the judge in the story of the person of Judge Pyncheon, whose direct ancestor Colonel Pyncheon had in an earlier generation of the Pyncheon family in Salem converted the property of one Matthew Maule after agitating for his execution as a wizard. Hawthorne also sets the story in the early part of the nineteenth century, although at the time Hawthorne was writing he was well known as a descendant of the judge who had unjustly sentenced several women and men to hang as witches in 1692 Salem. Colonel Pyncheon's prime motive, as Hawthorne describes it, was greed. His prime weapon was prestige and influence in

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from a distance, talking to Mrs. Forrester: "There was in his attitude that unmistakable something which shows that a man is trying to make himself agreeable to a woman. He was telling her a funny story, probably an improper one, for it brought out her naughtiest laugh, with something nervous and excited in hit, as if her were going too far. At the end of his story Ivy himself broke into his farm-hard guffaw" (Cather 119). Ivy is shown to be cheating Indians out of property, cheating the Forresters out of their investments, and aggravating the personal decline of the woman who has become Niel's personal goddess. Crude, clever but not intelligent, crafty but not masterful, Ivy has power over Mrs. Forrester and over the frontier town. He is draining marshes, bursting with the worst of attitudes that were to become the hallmark of heedless modernism and the despoiling of the environment. Niel offers to intervene on Mrs. Forrester's behalf, but Ivy has power and has to be taken seriously: "Remember," she says, "we have to get along with Ivy Peters, we simply have to! . . . He gets splendid land from the Indians some way, for next to nothing. Don't tell your uncle; I've no doubt it's crooked . . . [He] owns half the town alre
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Approximate Word count = 3677
Approximate Pages = 15 (250 words per page)

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