Question

In “The Devil and Tom Walker” why did he take a short cut home to such a miserable wife?

Answer 1

One day Tom Walker is taking an ill-conceived shortcut home through the nearby swamp; it is gloomy with pines and hemlocks and owls, full of pits and boggy areas which travelers sometimes plunge into, deceived into thinking them solid ground by the weeds and mosses which partly cover them. Tom navigates the treacherous swamp carefully, scared occasionally by the screaming and quacking of birds.Tom’s shortcut through the swamp symbolizes the shortcuts people take to prosper in this world like the investors introduced later with their get-rich-quick schemes. However, such shortcuts are riddled with pitfalls, to both economic depression and hell.Active ThemesAt length, late in the dusk of the evening, Tom arrives at a piece of firm ground in which slump the overgrown ruins of an old fort used by Indians in their war with the American colonists, a former haven for Indian women and children, the Indians’ last foothold. Here Tom decides to rest as no one else would, so troubled would they be by what they would have heard in stories from the Indian wars, about how “the savages” cast spells here and “made sacrifices to the evil spirit” (later called Old Scratch). Tom, however, is not afraid of such things.Warfare is an even more extreme expression of human greed than usury (money-lending), and it also results, ultimately, in nothing but ruins, as the fort bears witness to. That the Indians worship Old Scratch is perhaps shocking (though also consistent with the racist perception of Native Americans at the time the story was written). At the same time, it’s worth noting that the story portrays American colonists like Deacon Peabody and Tom himself as also worshipping the devil by acting on their greed. When looked at in that way, the colonists are no more moral than the Indians, they are just better at deceiving themselves about their immorality.