A View From The Bridge by Arthur Miller Essay

has had an affair with Abigail a while ago, but now he wants to forget

"The American Dream is the largely unacknowledged screen in front of which all American writing plays itself out," Arthur Miller has said (Galvin). To many people Arthur Miller is known for his role against communist accusations and using his writing to portray what has happened during McCarthyism. From Miller’s struggles as a child to his first big break as a playwright to his fight against the government, he has still been able to maintain integrity in his writing and captivated many audiences over the years.

The Crucible by Arthur Miller is an interpretation of the Salem witch trials of 1692 in Puritan Massachusetts in which religion, justice, individuality and dignity play a vital role. These factors define the characteristics of many of the most significant characters in the play. Some of them being John Proctor, Rebecca Nurse, Reverend Hale, Danforth and many others. The Salem witch trials were a result of the lack of expression of individuality and the fact that no individual could expect justice from the majority culture as a result of the deterioration of human dignity in the Puritan society of Salem.

The Crucible is a novel based on the Salem Witch Trials in Massachusetts, written by Arthur Miller. The Crucible demonstrates forbidden temptation between John Proctor and Abigail Williams, honor and dishonor in the town of Salem, ruthless revenge, and the strive for high social status. The narrative style of this play is standard 1950s everyday language. The Crucible is set in a theocratic society of Puritanism in 1692.

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Arthur Miller's The Crucible Arthur Miller demonstrates the familiarities of the life he lived in the 1950's and of everyday life we live in through his plays. He communicates through his work to the way people are in society. The extreme witch hysteria deteriorated the rational and emotional stability of its citizens. This exploited the population's weakest qualities, and insecurities.

Throughout a person’s life, he or she is bound to make decisions that they will eventually consider mistakes. In the play The Crucible by Arthur Miller, the protagonist, John Proctor, committed not only a mistake, but also a sin, adultery. Proctor, who is a Christian, is married to a woman named Elizabeth Proctor and has three sons. Before he committed adultery, there was a seventeen-year-old servant working within his house named Abigail Williams. Abigail was the one who Proctor not only committed adultery with, but also lechery because he was in his thirties, while she was only seventeen. His wife would have probably never known about it, but the guilt was eating Proctor alive and so he confessed. He regrets ever committing adultery because consequently his household has become a cold place. Elizabeth cannot fully forgive Proctor for committing the sin, so she turns the environment of the house into gloomy place for Proctor. Throughout the play John Proctor has had to perform certain things, which would make many people within the audience question if Proctor was a man of either conscience, character, or virtue.

Arthur Miller wrote the famous play, The Crucible, in order to compare the Salem witch trials to events of his time and to expose the social injustices that existed in his society due to the controversial Communist scare that was occurring. Though Miller wrote The Crucible for this purpose, its themes are quite appropriate when considering current events, as the audience is met with the ever-prevalent themes of the severity of false accusations, reputation, and integrity. There is no doubt that many current events relate to these themes, what with situations of destroyed reputations at the hands of others, integrity being called into question, and false accusations flying left and right.

In Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, the normal criteria that a central character fits, is not met by the apparent protagonist, John Proctor. Common traits one might expect to find in a traditional hero are humility, patience and caring. John Proctor, while he is the principal, has many qualities that could instead assume him the role of the antagonist and land him in the adversary box. His background and slight character flaws cause him to take on the personalities of both a protagonist and antagonist. Proctor, because he exhibits qualities of both types of characters, is what is known as a tragic hero. Tragic heroes are characters within stories that due to a judgment error, is the cause of his/her own demise. In Proctor’s case, his error was made when he refuses to give up the names of other alleged witches, and refuses to allow the court to hang his confession in the center of town. John Proctor embodies three major signs of tragic heroism. Proctor, even through the rest of the village perceives him as great, knows deep down inside that because of past sins, he will never be able to live up to his reputation. As well, John Proctor is a tragic hero because he had the power to stop his own execution, therefore his downfall was no one 's’ fault but his own. This reluctance to forfeit the names of other “witches” could be seen as a character flaw. The final criteria that Proctor meets for a tragic hero is that the punishment received is way too severe for the “crime” committed.

Unfortunately, mankind has created a paradigm in which women are frequently considered inferior to men. Even the Bible cannot be exempted from this sad idea, as the Genesis story details Adam “birthing” Eve from his rib, a relatively insignificant part of his body. Perhaps this serves as a reason for why the Puritans, a heavily religious group, showed signs of misogyny and gender-superiority. In Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, accusations of witchcraft run rampant in the seemingly holy town of Salem; no person is safe, and no feeling unstirred. Through their numerous allegations, the townspeople expose Proctor’s affairs, Putnam’s and Corey’s feud, and Abigail’s resentment of Elizabeth. Despite the unfavorable qualities and aspects of Salem as whole, women can be often be seen as the source of the town’s troubles. Thus, in The Crucible, Miller tackles sexism by showing the weaknesses of women such as Mary Warren, Abigail Williams, and Elizabeth Proctor, but in doing so revealing that their faults were a product of society at the time.

Arthur Miller’s Focus (1945) is a revolutionary work that highlights racism, especially anti-Semitism, in America. Written during the last year of the Second World War, Focus is a groundbreaking work in every sense of the word inasmuch as it is the first literary work that deals directly with anti-Semitism in the United States. Statistically speaking, there were two main waves of Jewish immigrants to the United States between 1820 and 1920. According to Susan Haberle, “the first group of Jewish people came from Germany, Austria, and Hungary. These immigrant left to seek a better life” (Haberle 6). The second group was the biggest wave; they came between 1880 and 1920: “these immigrants came from Poland, Romania, Russia, and other eastern

To begin with, in this play the author unfolds family conflicts that involve its characters into a series of events that affected their lives and pushed them to unexpected ways.

'A view from the bridge' by Arthur Miller is a tragic intense play about family struggle, lust, passion and deceit. My aim is too look at the relationship of Catherine and Eddie. To understand the relationship, we must understand the atmosphere and culture. To do this we need to know why Miller wrote the play, background history and why this is significant to understanding the relationship between Catherine and Eddie.

A View From the Bridge ' He's like a weird'. This opinion of Rodolfo expressed by Eddie encapsulates the main theme of the 20th century play, 'A View From the Bridge', by Arthur Miller. Rodolfo is subject to Eddie's hostile feelings towards him, emotions like abhorrence, resentment, jealousy and aggression. Eddie's belief in manliness and masochistic behaviour is one explanation why he detests Rodolfo with such vehemence.