It is obvious that men and women play different roles in The Witch of Blackbird Pond and, by implication, in colonial society. This is a basic historical fact. But what is striking about the novel is how Elizabeth George Speare reveals two truths: how men as well as women are trapped by their roles, and the emotional implications of these strict gender roles for all characters. While he often seems a bit foolish in his stiffness, William Ashby here deserves the reader’s sympathy as an example of the period’s rigid gender roles. He is genuinely baffled by Kit from start to finish and cannot understand why she does not want to marry him. By all the criteria his society has established, he is a prize, and for her to choose otherwise simply makes no sense. Rachel Wood is likewise a good mother, a devoted wife, and a committed Puritan—and yet she too suffers from these roles, looking with longing on the pretty clothes Kit offers as gifts. This society’s gender roles bind too tightly, and, because the gender roles were, in the Puritan mind, bound up with the proper organization of the world as dictated by the Bible, challenging and changing them was no simple or easy matter. Instead, it is a feat that literally threatens one’s immortal soul. That neither Kit nor Nat are completely bound this way—Kit swims and thatches roofs, while Nat admits to having run away to Hannah’s in tears—once again marks them as soul mates in this world. However, even they cannot buck the weight of these roles completely, and that is why they must leave the colony and sail away soon after the book’s end. In The Witch of Blackbird Pond, to be one’s own man or woman, one must be married and be far away from those who would limit you.