‘Half-Hanged Mary’ – the witch who haunts The Kdfhghsdjkfgjkd Handmaid’s Tale sdfghsdfjghjkdf
Her eagerly awaited sequel is on sale at midnight. But first read this macabre family saga of sorcery and murder that inspired Margaret Atwood’s original bestseller
EVEN before the mysterious death of their esteemed Puritan l eader, Philip Smith, Mary Webster’s neighbours had no doubt that she was a witch who had made a pact with the Devil.
They’d seen all the signs – the dying crops, the farm animals that refused to pass by her door, the baby she levitated out of its cot just by looking at it. Some said they’d even seen her fly.
Folklore held that witches could be ‘disturbed’ from their spell-making by violence and so Mary was frequently assaulted by her fellow townsfolk.
But after a Massachusetts court – controlled by dark powers, some suggested – acquitted the English-born Webster of witchcraft, they took the law into their own hands.
They strung her up from a tree – but, even then, they couldn’t vanquish her. She survived and ‘HalfHanged Mary’ lived on for more than a decade.
Her legacy, however, continues to this day because her name appears on the dedication page of Margaret Atwood’s 1985 dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale.
Atwood – who was told as a child that she was a descendant of Mary – is, of course, the literary superstar of the moment.
The third season of the acclaimed TV adaptation, starring Elisabeth Moss, has just concluded, and tomorrow a sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale will be released, the most hotly anticipated book of the year.
The Testaments has already been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and bookshops worldwide will open for fans at midnight tonight, while an interview with the Canadian novelist will be beamed live from London’s National Theatre to 1,300 cinemas across the world.
So what exactly is behind the resurgence of interest in a novel more than 30 years old?
In the US, the Donald Trump presidency, with its assaults on abortion rights and environmental protection, has been a key factor. The international success of the novel and the subsequent TV series has clearly captured the zeitgeist.
The story is set in Gilead, an alternative modern America that has been taken over by a Christian fundamentalist theocracy that subjects women to brutal repression.
Devastating pollution has caused widespread infertility, so fertile young women are f orced to become ‘ handmaids’ to provide Gilead’s rulers with children.
Atwood says she was partly i nfluenced by the rise of the Christian Right in the US during the 1970s and by Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution.
But an older inspiration was Mary Webster, who Atwood’s grandmother ( whose maiden name was Webster) had l ong assured the writer was their ancestor.
MARY’Splight deeply affected Atwood, and in 1995 she wrote a poem entitled Half-Hanged Mary.
‘I was hanged for living alone, for having blue eyes and a sunburned skin, tattered skirts, few buttons, a weedy farm in my own name, and a surefire cure for warts,’ Atwood wrote.
Those who have read The Handmaid’s Tale will recognise how its powerful themes of female subjugation and frenzied religious persecution could have had their roots in Mary’s real-life story.
According to records, she was born Mary Reeve in Salisbury, Wiltshire, in about 1624. Her family emigrated to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in what was called the ‘ Great Puritan Migration’, when hardcore Protestants left England en masse to find religious freedom in the New World.
In 1670, Mary, then in her mid40s, married 53-year- old William Webster. The couple lived in
Hadley, Massachusetts, a tiny and close-knit Puritan community founded by William’s father.
William i nherited l i ttle as a second son and the couple fell on hard times, often relying on the charity of others.
According to a 1905 history of Hadley, ‘Mary’s temper, which was not the most placid, was not improved by poverty, and she used harsh words when offended’. Some called her a ‘termagant’. The account continues: ‘ Despised and sometimes illtreated, she was rendered spiteful to some of her neighbours.’
Puritans believed marriage was rooted in procreation and that women must be subservient to men. As a childless, temperamental and seemingly ungrateful woman, Mary would hardly have endeared herself to her neighbours.
Their literal reading of the Bible also persuaded Puritans that the Devil forever stalked among them, that witches talked to him, and that they were set on harming humanity. Unexplained phenomena and ailments were likely to be blamed on evil forces. Even an anti-social temperament.
Gossip grew that Mary was a witch, a fatal development as, in such a hysterically superstitious community, almost any evidence could be cited as proof of sorcery.
The whereabouts of her husband at this time are unclear – records indicate he didn’t die until 1688 – but what is clear is that there was no one to protect Mary when her persecution became physical.
Violence towards suspected witches was condoned on the grounds that beating or physically restraining witches stopped them casting their spells.
So when farmers and herdsmen taking horses and cattle past Mary’s house to graze on the town’s meadow claimed she bewitched their animals so that they refused to pass her door, the answer was to set about her with their whips – whereupon the animals were said instantly to have recovered their wits.
A man whose cartload of hay was suddenly overturned outside her house was about to attack Mary when, he claimed, the hay was mysteriously returned to the cart. Mary was also accused of going to a neighbour’s house where, just by looking at it, she levitated a baby out of its cradle to the floor and back again three times ‘when no hands touched it’.
On another occasion, a hen fell down a chimney and was scalded in a bubbling pot of water. Neighbours became suspicious when they saw Mary with scald marks, suggesting she might have some supernatural link with the bird.
Whenever crops failed, there would i nevitably be someone who could recall having seen Mary nearby.
In March 1683, when she was almost 60, Mary was hauled before a c ounty c ourt in nearby Northampton ‘ under strong suspicion of having familiarity with the Devil, or using witchcraft’.
SOMEONEeven claimed she ‘could ride through the air on broomsticks or without them ’, although if there were specific instances of her doing it, none has survived for posterity.
Witchcraft was punishable by death, and the case was referred to the Court of Assizes at Boston.
At her trial in September, a jury heard ‘many testimonies brought in against her’ and how Mary ‘not having the fear of God before her eyes, and being instigated by the Devil, hath entered into covenant and had familiarity with him in
the form of a warraneage [a wild black cat]’.
Witches were thought to suckle the Devil’s imps in return for help with spells. Mary was accused of doing this and, it was further alleged, local women in Hadley had examined her body and found so-called ‘witch marks’ on her skin to prove it.
When Mary was acquitted (as alleged witches often were), her accusers were furious. They got another chance to see her off the f ol l owing J a nuary when a respected Hadley dignitary, Philip Smith, inexplicably fell ill.
Smith – a 50-year-old judge and church deacon – had previously claimed that Mary had become so angry with him when he offered financial help that he feared she meant him harm.
Conveniently, he then fell ill and became delirious, babbling that she had cursed him.
He started having f i ts and crying out about ‘ sharp pins’ pricking him, mentioning Mary and unidentified others, saying: ‘Do you not see them? There they stand.’
Witnesses reported strange occurrences around his sick-bed, including the strong smell of musk ( associated with witches), unaccountably emptied medicine pots and odd scratching sounds.
‘Diverse people felt something often stir in the bed, at a considerable distance from the man,’
reported Cotton Mather, a Harvard- educated Puritan minister and elder who sniffed witchcraft everywhere and i nvestigated the case. ‘It seemed as big as a cat, but they could never grasp it.’
After Smith died, his body covered i n unaccountable bruises and wounds, Mather concluded that Mary had murdered Smith with ‘hideous witchcraft’.
(Eight years later, he whipped up even greater hysteria in the notorious Salem witch trials — which inspired Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible — in which 20 people were put to death.)
Even before Smith died, Mary’s persecutors had taken action. Convinced they could help him by hurting her, a group of Hadley’s young men — called ‘brisk lads’ in one account — visited her three or four times to ‘give disturbance to her’ and disrupt her spells.
On their f i nal visit, they dragged her out of the door and hanged her from a tree.
She dangled there all night in what must have been excruciating agony until her persecutors cut her down the following morning and discovered that she was still alive. They rolled her through the deep snow on the ground and left her buried in it.
But even that failed to finish her off. As Margaret Atwood has pointed out: ‘I expect that if everyone thought she had occult powers before the hanging, t hey were even more convinced of it afterwards.’
It appears townsfolk subsequently kept their distance from ‘Half-Hanged Mary’. She died 11 years later, leaving a small estate that included a bed, a Bible, a psalm book and three sermon books. She is buried in the t o wn’s graveyard.
Atwood describes Mary Webster as ‘my favourite ancestor’, adding that ‘if there’s one thing I hope I’ve inherited from her, it’s her neck’.
The novelist says she dedicated The Handmaid’s Tale to Mary (along with a Harvard academic who taught her about Puritanism) because she was a wrongly accused woman who is ‘slightly a symbol of hope because they didn’t actually manage to kill her’.
She says she still wonders how Mary made it through the night hanging from a tree, and what was going through her mind as she dangled there.