Criticism And Mccarthyism In The Crucible By Arthur Miller

Arthur Miller’s The Crucible is a tragic play set in 1692 in Salem, Massachusetts, where Miller uses the Salem Trials as a metaphor for the 1950s McCarthy hearings. In Salem, people value their good names. The Puritan community acts as a theocracy in which there appears to be no right to privacy, and people must conform to a strict moral code. The theme of reputation, lying, and deceit are shown in Abigail, John Proctor, Elizabeth Proctor, Mary Warren, and other characters. In the play’s dialogue, Miller uses Biblical allusions, situational irony, and dramatic irony to develop these themes.

The horrors of history are passed on from generation to generation in hopes that they will never occur again. People look back on these times and are appalled at how horrendous the times were; yet, in the 1950s, history repeated itself. During this time, Joseph McCarthy, a United States senator from Wisconsin, began accusing people of being communists or communist sympathizers, which is parallel to the Salem witch trials in the late 1690s when innocent people were accused of practicing witchcraft. One of the people McCarthy accused was author and playwright Arthur Miller. To express his outrage at McCarthy’s actions, miller wrote The Crucible, intentionally drawing similarities between the McCarthy hearings and the Salem witch trials.

The Crucible, a play written by Arthur Miller, is a chronological narrative including a large cast of characters with a constantly moving setting.* The Crucible is a dramatization of the Salem Witch Trials of 1692 and an allegory of the McCarthyism period. Throughout the play, Miller explores the destruction of freedom by the ignorant and tyrannical society in which his characters live.* By exhibiting how easily a member of the community can become an outcast, Arthur Miller displays social criticism in the Puritan society as well as in today's society in The Crucible.

Arthur Miller’s play, The Crucible, is wonderful example of how mass hysteria can spread throughout a small community. The setting of the play is Salem, Massachusetts in 1692 during the infamous Witch Trials. Miller uses these trials and the way they impacted the Salem community as a parallel to the Red Scare of the 1950s. Both time periods show the effect corrupt authorities can have on the lives of others. The author’s most striking commentary is on the role

The Crucible is a play, which explores the witch- hunting hysteria that happened in Salem 1692. Miller uses this “organized mass-hysteria”[1] to comment on his own similar experience during the 1950s. Through “The Crucible”, Miller is able to draw an analogy between the hysteria of the Salem witch-trails and its modern parallel of the anti communist ‘witch-hunts’ which occurred due to the HUAC-House of un-American Committee, which were lead by Senator Joseph McCarthy; who with the help of the committee were “ruthlessly determined to hunt out communists as the Salem judges had been to hunt out witches”[2]. Miller used “The Crucible” to criticise this unmitigated

‘The Crucible’ is an allegory. An allegory is a story with an obvious meaning but if you look deeper into it, there is another meaning. In this case, the obvious meaning is the Salem witch-hunt and the hidden meaning is McCarthyism. McCarthyism started in the early 1950’s and it was governmental accusations with no evidence. Joseph McCarthy started doing trials on those he thought were communist, but he had no evidence for it. This is the same as the witch trials in The Crucible. Arthur Miller wrote this in response to McCarthyism.

Authors used their literary work to get a point across to the public in the story The Crucible; Arthur Miller used events and characters to show the similarities to McCarthyism which was prevalent in the 1950s. McCarthyism was associated with the period in the United Sates also known as the Second Red Scare. McCarthyism is very similar in the way that Joe McCarthy accused Americans of being communist and in The Crucible people were being accused of being witches. It is known that Arthur Miller wrote this story as a reaction to a tragic time in our history.

All throughout the play,The Crucible , Arthur Miller uses various themes to get his message across. A motif that made an enormous impact in the Puritan community would be demonization. Demonization could be described as marking an entity as evil, due to having the polar opposite beliefs as one's own. In Miller’s play demonization caused instability in the community by creating chaos, fear, and false accusations. It allowed people to create scapegoats, and it revealed repressed social conflicts in both the Salem witch trials and in the era of Mccarthyism. Demonization plays an important role on how characters in the play live, and associate with one another. Miller in the play describes the lives of the people living in the Massachusetts Bay Colony during the witch trials, that occurred during the late 1600s. Much of these characters are a representation of what was happening during Miller’s lifetime.

In this paper, I will be talking about The Crucible, a story written by Arthur Miller in 1952 about the Salem Witch Trials in 1692, and the Red Scare, a time in the 1950’s when Americans were scared that Communists were a threat to them. I will also talk about how Arthur Miller uses “The Crucible” to help the reader understand that similarities such as fear and nationalism occur in historical witch hunts such as the Red Scare still exist, and society persecutes those who do not fit into society because it fears those who are different.

The message in which Miller writes teaches teenagers about what life was like in the centuries before their time, and what some of the themes in those times were; which are also parallel to what happened during Miller’s lifetime, in the era of McCarthyism, as it does in today’s social and political problems. All three of these eras have intolerance, hysteria, reputation, and empowerment woven throughout them. This is one of the reasons they are connected to each other.

As America entered the post-war era after World War II, there was still an ongoing sense of paranoia throughout the country. In the mid-nineteen hundreds, McCarthyism, initiated by Joseph McCarthy’s accusation of 205 Communists and the use of unjust methods to hunt Communists, arose. As this era emerged, Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible, which highlighted and dramaticized the scandal of the 1692 Salem witch trials, gained popularity and opened on Broadway. Though the two events in American history, McCarthyism and the witch trials, lie almost 300 years apart, Miller’s The Crucible serves as an allegory to the closely mirrors the events of McCarthyism, specifically in the request of the names of those accused, the absence of reliable

The Red Scare. As the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the U.S Intensified in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s, hysteria over the threat of communism in the U.S became known as “The Red Scare”. Communist’s were often referred to as “Red’s” because they pledged allegiance to the red Soviet Union flag. The “Red Scare” led to a range of actions that had a big effect on the U.S Government and society. These actions included, Federal employee’s being analysed to determine whether they were loyal to the U.S Government or not. This is exactly like Arthur Miller's “The Crucible”.

Human beings are born with many emotions. From happy, excited, sad, and more to list, these feelings are what contribute to our behaviors and ways of thinking. A happy person will feel energized and tend to work more productively; a person full of anger can sometimes act without thinking and regret later on. Another specific example is The Crucible by Arthur Miller, where fear takes over the minds of people. When witchcraft is believed to be practicing among the villagers, the fear for life and the bottomless greed for wealth have stirred up the trust between the people, causing them to call out names, whom they believe to be witches, with false confessions. The Crucible is an excellent allegory that portrays McCarthyism, mob mentality, and courage.

One of the many works written and driven by Puritan influence, The Crucible by Arthur Miller has continued to influence life and thinkings. Its story tracing the 1692 Salem Witch Trials has been widely read, received and understood, along with influencing the reader and their ideals. The play has manifested into more than words on a page and has become of the greatest influences, even sixty years after its publication. Though its story has not changed and is merely a retelling of the original itself, its themes have greatly impacted its universal and enduring state.

The play, “The Crucible” is written by Arthur Miller in 1953. During this time of American history, a war had just ended and there was a deeply rooted fear of communists infiltrating American soil; Americans had begun to turn on each other out of fear that people around them were against American ideals. Arthur Miller expressed his concern for the time by writing “The Crucible,” which is written about a witch hunt that occurred in Salem, Massachusetts in 1692. Arthur Miller used the themes of an earlier American event to remind people of his time that their actions were indeed following a historical pattern of fear. The play, “The Crucible” takes place in America in a time of deeply rooted religion, fear of the unknown, and early civilization. The juxtaposition of this play, it’s characters, and the time in which the play was written, teaches a very difficult, yet important, lesson about fear and it’s position in a society of people.