Benjamin Franklin's Purpose To Ridicule Puritan Beliefs

With specific time and setting that establish authenticity; this hoax, written allegedly by Benjamin Franklin, has the purpose to ridicule Puritan Beliefs. Throughout this hoax, the narrator is deeply uninvolved; he ironically describes puritan folks with comic exaggeration. Benjamin Franklin portrayed puritans as an entertainment spectacle and ridiculed their beliefs such as witchcraft. Franklin states, “ 300 People were gathered together to see an Experiment or two tried on some Persons accused of Witchcraft”. To apprehend the joke it is crucial to point out the connotations of the word “experiment”. Experiments are unproven procedures that are still being tested and have no definite result yet. This term was Benjamin Franklin’ first of
Because you can almost picture it and hear it, this term is slightly onomatopoeic. During this first trial the search of pins arose. They thought pins had a particular weight and were startled when they saw the accused were able to outweigh the Bible. Another noticeable attempt was the use of the term “Lumps of Mortality” in “After the same Manner, the others were served, and their Lumps of Mortality severally [separately] were too heavy for Moses and all the Prophets and Apostles.” With this, Benjamin mocks them, for trying to learn or test something by just measuring their weights. The use of lumps reminds us of the previous word plump, both referring to massiveness. He as well cleverly contrasted “Lumps of Mortality” and “Moses and all the Prophets and Apostles”. During the second trial, he states “The Accuser Man being thin and spare [bony], with some Difficulty began to sink at last; but the rest every one of them swam [floated] very light upon the Water.” Franklin scorns how mistakenly they were by believing that the accuser sank due to his thin physique, while truly the cause came from the accuser’s air in his