First off, being aware of how highly critical this novel is, let’s ask the important question of; Is this criticism really valid and sufficient? I strongly believe that this is fundamental to the way we judge the aspects of the novel. We must take into consideration who the target audience is. We, being young, generally liberal Canadians in the current time period, now apply very liberal approaches to society as a whole. For example, if you were a Nazi in Germany during the holocaust, you wouldn’t think “I’m such an awful person, what on earth am I doing?” My point being, it is almost certain that if an American, in the 18th century read this novel, it would probably just seem like a sad story with a happy ending. Perhaps he/she would say “Hackwell seems like a fairly dodgy character”
That being said, this novel facilitates a very easy environment for us to judge these New England families over their racist and sexist lives because of the way we currently live ours today. If we examine an example of something which is currently universally accepted, like the fact that same sex marriages are illegal in 48 states. In this case, there is a minority who is critical of this, Canadians and Californians for example, however thinking about whether it will be the same in 100 years, the majority would probably disagree, and say that it will be legal nation wide.