Essay about Acts of Injustice in The Crucible by Arthur Miller

In Scottsboro, the two young women at the center of the case, Ruby Bates and Victoria Price, weren't the innocent young women that they were perceived as being. In reality, they were both racist prostitutes who were frequently drunk. There should have been serious doubts to the claims that these girls were making, especially with how severe they were. Similarly, the lead accuser during the Salem Witch Trials was Abigail Williams who, while the trials were taking place, stole money from her uncle, Reverend Parris, and disappeared. The evidence that the accused were witches was based on the testimony of the young girls of the town, mainly Abigail Williams. The testimonies that the young girls gave should have been more highly questioned given their

The court of Salem suppose whether a person goes to church on a regular basis as evidence of witchcraft just because it doesn’t adhere strictly to the expectations of the society which is unreasonable since the accused is charged with the crime of

After community members came to their senses, the trials came to an end after the realization of what was taking place occurred. “New Englanders believed in witchcraft both before and after 1692, yet in no other year was there such a severe persecution of witches” (Matossian 355-357.). After the trials were over, some of the people on the court admitted to mistakes being made about those that had been executed (Hoffer n.pag.). Because of this, evidence is a key part when accusing someone of something so that mistakes will not be made. “The result is an impoverished, … distorted, view of a germinal phase in our people’s history: Salem appears as a brief and dark chapter... “ (Demos 3.).

The governor of Salem, William Phips, was fed up when rumours that his wife was a witch started to float up. “Determined at last to quell the madness, he suspended the special Court of Oyer and Terminer he had earlier established to hear witchcraft cases. He replaced it with a new Superior Court of Judicature—which disallowed spectral evidence. That court condemned only 3 of 56 defendants. Phips pardoned them along with five others awaiting execution.” (Winker, “Interactive: Salem Witch Trials”). Also, before and after the trials, there was a lot of tension between people in Salem. But, their beliefs held them to be nice to each other and to lead a godly life. “The time to heal fell under the gentle hand of the Reverend Joseph Green, who in 1697 succeeded Samuel Parris as minister in Salem Village. Green reshuffled his congregation’s traditional seating plan, placing foes beside one another.” (Winker, “Interactive: Salem Witch Trials”). People of the Puritan community were finally starting to realize the wrongness of their ways. The Puritans were too judgemental and strict. This caused people to break off from

Superstition and a constant mention of God’s antitheses created ignorance of easily explainable phenomenon. This affected the trials because they were solely going off of one side of unproven occurrences. Salem was divided into two distinct factions. Those from the village who were accused and those from the Town who did the accusing. The distinctive differences led to a deep distrust and jealousy. The people from the village were the farmers and compared to the town, much poorer. Life was a hardship for them because they relied on their harvests. As for the town, they had a more direct line to England. They were prosperous and had a diverse economy. In general there was more of a focus on government there as well as the Church. For all puritans,

In the fictional play, "The Crucible" by Arthur Miller, he writes about the time in which the Salem witch trials were taking place. The Play starts with the fear of witchcraft entering the town of Salem. Over time the problem of witchcraft grows fiercely in Salem and many were killed. Throughout the play Miller shows how the characters base a very serious crime on extremely minimal evidence. The entire play is based on the opinion of a group of teen girls without any actual evidence, which lead to many falsely accused people to be condemned to die.

The law did not exploit the “innocent until proven guilty” principle, instead if someone made it to trial, the law assumed guilt (Louis-Jacques 3). So, the court quickly assumed someone guilty, contradicting with the principle of “innocent until proven guilty”, it became “guilty until proven innocent” which caused many innocent people to be jailed or executed. The Rev. Cotton Mather, writing on for several Boston ministers, suggested carefulness in deciding on such evidence but at the same time encouraged the court to undertake "the speedy and forceful prosecution" of anyone guilty of witchcraft. The first woman tried and executed in June was an almost sixty-year o and owner of a tavern, Bridget Bishop. The accusations continued and more and more people jailed and dead, however it soon began to spread outside of Salem into Boston, Cambridge, and Ipswich. The most-lively of the accusers lived in Salem Village, in which this town suffered the greatest from executions, people in Andover sustained the most amount of accusations (Ray

Although some people say that Salem condoned genocide due to the hallucinogenic fungus on bread, the community was really more focused on the law of their religion, not how they denied people of their natural rights. In Salem, these Puritans had immigrated from New England so they could have more say over what happens in their presence. Although for quite some time the Church of England still controlled these Puritans. This control by the church made them obey their laws which included being denied their natural rights. This indicates why America wanted to separate from the Church of England. The past between Europe and the Puritans is similar to the“Witches” in Salem case. Salem denied these people the right to do practically anything which caused a small rebellion of sorts, such as the girls moving themselves up to the ‘law of the land’. Most accused weren’t guilty of witchcraft, but of using their natural rights. 8

The Salem Witch Trials brought havoc among the citizens of Salem, Massachusetts starting in 1692. Many of the people within the town continued to have strong loyalties to their new Puritan religion and their old king back home. The church of England had moved away from the Catholic religion with the help of King Henry VIII and the Puritans were a new group of people who accepted the split from Catholicism but still believed that the church of England had a lot of aspects that remained with the Catholic religion. Despite this, loyalty to the king remained strong because the Puritans were not looking to break off from the Church of England instead they wanted to reform the religion and make it their own. These loyalties stretched to such an extent that any sin committed was also considered an act of treason and thus punished. The Salem community was constantly searching for evil within their town to prove their righteousness to God which lead to high rates of fear and paranoia in their daily lives. The strict Puritan religion soon became the root cause of the monstrous imagination that started to form within the community of Salem. Many people still feared the presence of Catholic ideas within their communities and in response were willing to go to any extent to irradiate these views. Some historians also account the beginning of the trials to divisions within the two towns of Salem that lead to tensions and turmoil between the townsmen. But without the increased belief in their new religion, women around town wouldn’t have been persecuted. The strict belief in the Puritan religion and culture was the root cause of fear and paranoia that led to the mass execution of many women and townspeople during the Salem Witch Trials.

The Crucible was based in 1692 in and around the town of Salem, Massachusetts, USA. The Salem witch-hunt was view as one of the strangest and most horrendous chapters in the human history. People that were prosecuted were all innocent and their deaths were all due to false accusation of people’s ridiculous belief in superstition and their paranoia. The Puritans in those times were very strict in personal habits and morality; swearing, drunkenness and gambling would be punished. The people of Salem believed in the devil and thought that witchcraft should be hunted out.

Deputy Governor Danforth is a selfish, arrogant, and corrupt man who only cares about his own goods. His flawed personalities and hypocritical attitudes make him blind and irrational throughout the entire witchcraft, which directly causes the calamity of the town. Danforth feels embarrassing and doesn’t know what to do when Proctor brings Mary Warren’s deposition that shows his previous judgments are wrong. He is baffled and find a reason to defend himself, “ there lurks nowhere in your heart, nor hidden in your spirit, any desire to undermine this court? Are you in all respects a Gospel Christian? Not come to Church?”(94). Instead of taking a closer look at the details and the evidence of the case, he chooses to question Proctor’s credibility, and he believes people who confound his theory are challenging his authority and he will never let that happen. Furthermore, Danforth is somewhat terrified and worried

The Crucible, written by Arthur Miller, is a tragic story of injustice suffered by an innocent community who are subjected to the hypocritical, prideful judges of their trial. These Judges use their power to eliminate evidence of their mistakes and return their community to puritanical ways. The leaders of Salem are not concerned with seeking the truth and justice, but with maintaining their authority and reputations; this objective leads them to consistently rejecting truth, against all logic and evidence of their senses.

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.

In “The Crucible,” Salem was a town with strong religious values. However, their religion may have overshadowed their sense of morality. Every individual in the community cared very passionately about their reputations because they wanted to appear good to God. They were even willing to sacrifice the wellbeing of others for their own gain. Blaming others for crimes they didn’t commit became a common way of releasing sins, because people didn’t want to face the punishment that came from being a sinner in a theocracy. However, if they were willing to hurt others, then the people in Salem valued their own religious reputations so much that they had lost their sense of morality.

This source will help me answer my question because it is mentioned that Salem was a puritan society and that they believed in evil supernatural spirts. This also shows that die to the religious indoctrination it was easy for people to believe in things that they would not normally believe in. This source shows what the puritans believed in and what they feared during this time and to what impact it affected their decisions. It gives a