Did Abigail Williams Use Mass Hysteria In The Crucible

The song “Rollercoaster” by the Bleachers is a good song that can be easily relatable with the character Abigail Williams from The Crucible. Abigail and the song share many characteristics that help them relate. Abigail gets a lot of people killed, she is exciting, and she is like a teenager who ran away.

In the story/play mass hysteria plays an important role in Salem in the late 1600s. For instance Abigail Williams one of the girls in the crucible that uses mass hysteria to exploit the people of Salem around her. Mass hysteria means a group of people who over exaggerate something and becomes a fear. According to a quote from Abigail Williams says ”She is blackening my name in the village! She is telling lies about me! She is a cold sniveling woman! And you bend to her! Let her turn you like a-” which means she only accuses people because she wants

The Crucible is a play is referred to the Samel Witch trials that takes place in Massachusetts in 1962. Abigail Williams is the leader of a group of girls who are a part of the Samel witch trials. Abigail is Betty Parris cousin and the niece of Reverend Parris. She never went down without a fight. Abigail is selfish and only cares about her own goals. Throughout the whole pay she shows her greedy, dishonesty, manipulative character.

Fear, panic, and obsession can drive a person to commit terrible acts. In Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, many people are accused of witchcraft by a group of girls claiming to be afflicted by the “witches” in their town of Salem, Massachusetts in 1692. Because there was no way to prove that someone was really a witch, those who did not confess were sentenced to hang for their crimes, which ranged from conjuring up the dead to sending their spirit out on others. Terror soon spread throughout the village and people began to point fingers at each other. Although many townspeople contributed in getting the situation out of hand, one person was responsible for starting the whole ordeal: seventeen-year-old Abigail Williams, ringleader of the troubled girls. Her reason for crying witchcraft and spreading panic was due to her obsession with a man named John Proctor.

The Salem witch trials took place between February 1692 and May of 1693. It happened because people thought the devil was lose in Salem so they accused many people of witchery. Every person that confessed or accused was hung because the judges thought that they had access to the devil and could put a curse on anyone they wanted to. In The Crucible, Abigail Williams and her friends are accusing people around the town of witchery and having contact with the devil. A total of 14 people was hung, and many more are still to be hung. There are three ways that Abigail Williams could have changed in the Crucible by Arthur Miller.

Arthur Miller’s book The Crucible was not only a look at how paranoia warped the minds of people in fear, but was also used to compare to the time in which our country succumbed to The Red Scare. During this time, many authors and hollywood stars were outcasted for being accused of being a communist, similar to how Abigail Williams accuses people of being a witch in The Crucible. Like Joseph McCarthy, Abigail used the paranoia of Salem to condemn the lives of the innocent, and protect herself. She employed others to join her in her cleansing of Salem, under the promises of protection from her accusations. Lastly she acted swiftly, spitefully, and out of greed for her own ambition.

In the play, The Crucible by Arthur Miller, lying accusers such as Abigail Williams are believed, innocent people such as Goody Nurse are hung, and the Salem townspeople cheer as they watch the “devil’s women” put to death. During the Salem witchcraft trials in the seventeenth century, many of Salem’s people ignore their vindictive crimes and even their religion. The accusations placed by Abigail shows the grudge she has for Elizabeth. If not for Abigail, actions in Salem wouldn’t have been the same.

In the play “The Crucible” Abigail williams was the only character to blame for all the deaths and trials. She manipulated the kids in Salem. And she pretended to be attacked multiple “demons’’ or “spirits”. All of her actions caused the death of others in the town.

The Crucible is a dramatic story based on the witch hysteria that occurred during the Salem Witch Trials in 1692.(Miller 1124) The villainous, troubled Abigail Williams is one of the major characters in this novel. Abigail becomes very powerful throughout the story and defends herself from her own actions by blaming and ruining the lives of many in Salem. In The Crucible, Abigail shows her true motives of being the antagonist in the story, shows her real character and personality traits, and can personally connect with the writer of this essay.

With the absurd amount of corruption and chaos that was present in Salem during the 1690’s, it’s hard to put the blame for the witch trials on any one person. In Arthur Miller’s, The Crucible, the reader is given a dramatized insight on the events surrounding the dark times that had befallen the province of Massachusetts Bay. The play begins by presenting that aftermath of a ‘ritual’ that had taken place in the woods in which Betty, the daughter of Reverend Parris is seemingly in a coma that everyone believes was brought forth by witchery. When the blame for Betty’s condition is turned towards Tituba (Parris’ slave), Abigail, Mary Warren, and the other girls who were seen by Reverend Parris dancing in the woods, Abigail claims to have only

Not only was Abigail Williams the catalyst of the Salem Witchcraft Trials, but she was immoral and revenge-seeking. The Crucible, a historical play written by Arthur Miller demonstrates our antagonist, Abigail, making bad things happen to good people. Her destructive behavior causes her to lie at the expense of another person’s life. Nobody in Salem was safe, regardless of their social status or their relationship with Abigail. She acted recklessly without any hesitation. Abigail wrongfully accused many innocent people which lead to their death, through her lack of morals and deception, feeding her desire for revenge.

In, “The Crucible,” the way hysteria began to rise was after the event of the young girls of the community of Salem are caught dancing in the moonlight believing that it will help kill Proctors wife. When they got caught, Abigail, one of the young girls, refuse to confess and started to accuse innocent people of sending the Devil on them. She acted on her guilt, lying and making over exaggerated assumptions. Abigail said,

The Red Scare was a time when people feared communism. Investigators were hired to find spies from the Soviet Union. Due to the power of fear and mass hysteria, many people were accused of being spies who actually had nothing to do with the Soviet Union or communism. Arthur Miller discusses in an essay why he wrote The Crucible when he did. The mass hysteria from the Red Scare was very similar to that of the Salem Witch Trials, “In those years, our thought processes were becoming so magical, so paranoid, that to imagine writing a play about this environment was like trying to pick one's teeth with a ball of wool: I lacked the tools to illuminate miasma. Yet I kept being drawn back to it” (Miller 3). In saying how the thought processes of the

In the play, The Crucible, by Arthur Miller a girl named Abigail wrecks havoc on the town of Salem. After girls start having seizures from “dancing in the forest” Reverend Parris decides evil is among them in the form of witchcraft. Due to the fact that the girls confess to Parris’s slave being a witch and the fact that the girls won’t wake up Parris decides to call in for help. Little did the town suspect that they were about to be at the whim of 17 year old Abigail Williams. Miller was compelled to write this play to inform people of the horrific acts that took part in the Salem Witch Trials such as the people using personal vengeances for conviction, lying to save oneself, and dying for religious release.

One of the most intriguing and problematic characters in The Crucible who causes hysteria in the town is Abigail Williams. After being caught dancing in the woods with her friends, she begins to cause disaster within the town of Salem. Days after being caught, she pours her soul out to God and admits her sin to