The purpose of this research is to examine the unfavorable portrayal of judges and lawyers in American literature. The plan of the research will be to cite selected works of American fiction and drama with a view toward showing negative characterizations of persons in the legal profession, in physical appearance, habits, attitudes, and the like. Based upon the presentation of this evidence, the research will address reasons that literature appears to present lawyers and judges in such an unfavorable manner.
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 incumbent upon his status as a public figure. His prime method was cunning and deceit, a subtext hidden behind the facade of legal claims. Hawthorne describes Pyncheon as one who was "characterized by an iron energy of purpose" and someone who benefited from the fact that, in Salem, "personal influence had far more weight than now" (3:126). When Maule was accused of witchcraft, moreover, Pyncheon lent the moral weight of his social and political position to convic...