Reviewed by: The Salem Belle: A Tale of 1692 by Ebenezer Wheelwright Dawn Coleman ebenezer wheelwright. The Salem Belle: A Tale of 1692. Ed. Richard Kopley. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016. Pp. x + 210. America remembers 1692 as a grim year. The story is infamous: girls twitching, writhing, and shrieking, soon followed by trials at which they named witches and reported seeing their familiars and being tortured by them, soon followed by hangings. The hysteria crested in summer and early fall. Accusers pointed fingers at those they begrudged, judges solemnly heard testimonies that invoked spectral evidence, and ministers—most notably, Cotton Mather—urged on the collective effort to defeat Satan. Salemites with misgivings hesitated to speak out lest they, too, be accused of covenanting with the Prince of Darkness. Before Governor Williams Phips ended the admission of spectral evidence in late October, nineteen people were hanged, one was pressed to death, and five more had died in custody. These events form a misty backdrop to this 1842 novel. Originally published anonymously, it is now attributable, thanks to editor Richard Kopley's sleuthing, to Ebenezer Wheelwright, a Boston-based West Indies merchant who petitioned for bankruptcy to the tune of more than thirty-three thousand dollars the year he published The Salem Belle. In the foreground is Mary Graham, the eponymous belle, whom a rejected suitor outrageously accuses of witchcraft to avenge his wounded ego, an all-too-plausible motive that [End Page 116] points up the risk women have always run in saying "no." Mary's efforts to mitigate the sufferings of other accused citizens and her scorn for the charges against her only deepen public suspicion. She is sentenced to hang, but true to Romantic convention, the faultless heroine escapes her unjust sentence. The night before her scheduled execution, her fiancé Walter Strale rescues her from imprisonment by masquerading as Satan and frightening the superstitious watchmen—contempt for superstition is the book's hallmark—with a costume that involves hooved feet and glowing eyes in a jailbreak-through-disguise device that echoes James Fenimore Cooper's Last of the Mohicans (1826) and Catharine Sedgwick's Hope Leslie (1827). Notwithstanding this salable melodramatic plot, Wheelwright seems to have turned to authorship for reasons beyond filling his empty coffers. He avows admiration for the Puritan forefathers—"a nobler race was never seen on the globe"—yet presents his story primarily as a warning: "Follies equally great with those of the witchcraft delusion may yet infest a land as enlightened and civilized as ours" (27). Much of the narration evinces fascination with the non-rational as a force in public life: the collective paranoia operates as "an unseen yet terrible influence, before whose mysteries Reason was overthrown, and Religion herself was staggered" (106). Such meditations, while speaking to any period baffled by open animosities and state-sanctioned untruths, echo other critiques of the Salem witch hunt from the 1830s and 1840s. In The Specter of Salem: Remembering the Witch Trials in Nineteenth-Century America, Gretchen Adams details how these decades appropriated the Salem witch hunts as a cautionary tale about fanaticism, and Kopley proposes Robert Mackay's Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions (1841), which has a few pages on Salem, as a possible source for Wheelwright, especially in its fixation on "the power of the irrational" (198n2). As a representative of an important strand of antebellum American cultural memory, Wheelwright's engaging novel is well worth reading. Kopley's introduction frames The Salem Belle less as a work to be appreciated for its historical value than as a vital source for The Scarlet Letter (1850). His introduction convincingly highlights three scenes in Wheelwright's novel that seem to have shaped passages in Hawthorne's, an argument that revisits Chapter 3 of his book The Threads of the Scarlet Letter: A Study of Hawthorne's Transformative Art (Newark, Del.: University of Delaware Press, 2003). In the first borrowing, Hawthorne modeled the final private meeting in the forest between Hester and Dimmesdale on a similarly melancholy moment in The Salem Belle when Mary and her brother James walk in the forest and James urges Mary to flee the colony. Secondly, Hawthorne...