Examples Of Scapegoating In The Crucible

In Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, the audience introduced to a chaotic 1692 Salem, Massachusetts. Throughout the play we see a series of unreasonable events including the hanging of 19 people due to false accusations of witchcraft. These witch trials killed many people and jailed hundreds for no reason at all. There is many people to blame for the Salem Witch Trials but, Abigail Williams is most culpable.

People believe that actions happen for many different reasons and tend to blame others before themselves. Some believe that the devil is doing the work in the body of someone else, and some believe that the devil does not, and some even believe in witchcraft. In Arthur Miller’s play, The Crucible, nineteen innocent people are hung for accusations of performing witchcraft in Salem, Massachusetts. A group of young girls go out into the woods which is forbidden in Salem. They are sent into a frenzy when the town’s reverend, Parris, spots them dancing in the woods. The girls are led by Abigail Williams, a young teenage girl who lives with her uncle, reverend Parris. Abigail is not the most truthful girl, which ends up causing 19 innocent people their lives. Previous to these events, Abigail was a servant in the Proctor household, but was sent off after Elizabeth Proctor found out about the affair between Abigail and her husband, John Proctor. In Abigail’s case the more lies she told, the more lives she ended.

“I bear I will be born this is a crime I will not acknowledge leaves and wind hold onto me I will not give in”(Atwood 3). In the selections The Crucible by Arthur Miller and Half- Hanged Mary by Margaret Atwood scapegoating is found in both. A society under stress can affect a person or a group of people more likely by the cause of scapegoating then it can others.

The Salem Witch Trials: a time where the innocent were guilty and the guilty got away with murder. This horrendous event can be further explained through Arthur Miller’s play, The Crucible. Miller has won many awards in his time for writing many dramas that are very popular amongst the people and The Crucible just so happens to be one of them. It tells a story about a harsh time that many people faced when they were losing loved ones who were found guilty since they didn’t confess to a crime that they never committed. While reading the play, a person will find a theme of power. One specific character, Mary Warren, helps show this theme because as soon as she gains power, her character changes drastically. Throughout The Crucible, Mary Warren is portrayed as a very dynamic character since she begins as being very wimpy, then she gains confidence and becomes brave, and then she goes right back to being timid and controlled by Abigail.

Imagine being accused of something you never did just because someone had something against you. That is exactly what the characters in “The Crucible” were going through. The author, Arthur Miller, used the play as an allegory. He wanted to compare the Salem witch trials to the McCarthyism. McCarthyism, created by Joseph P. McCarthy, was popular during the cold war and it falsely accused people of being a communist with no evidence to support the accusation. It became popular because of the spread of communism in China and Europe. In the United States, anyone could accuse someone of being a communist and could ruin their lives. That is exactly what Miller was trying to portray in “The Crucible.” If someone accused another person of witchcraft their whole lives could be turned upside down. They could even possibly be hanged. Throughout the story there are an abundance of arguments. Most of the arguments come from Act III in the courthouse. The arguments are all different, but they all end up being the same in the sense that people are being falsely accused. The arguments that are like that include Giles accusing Putnam, Proctor accusing Abigail, and Parris accusing Proctor.

“I have given you my soul; leave me my name!”, John Proctor said in Arthur Miller’s book, The Crucible. Proctor was one of the main characters in this play and throughout this play he experienced some horrific tragedies. It all leads down to the themes of The Crucible. There was guilt, sacrifice, and hysteria all throughout the play, that all of the characters went through.

The book“The Crucible”by Arthur Miller, describes the ultimate twist of the Salem Witch Trials, and origins, which happened between the colonial years of 1692-1693 in Massachusetts. The novel is filled with characters which are bad and good, they all have certain “issues”. The person who started the crazy in Salem is Abigail, she is Reverend Parris’s niece. The logical fallacies in the book played a big role in making bad decisions, this is the reason why the obnoxious accusations of witchcraft and prosecutions lasted so long. The most dangerous logical fallacy that happened  in the Crucible is the Bandwagon occurrence because people have no choice but to pick a side and makes people believe in that certain truth or story even though it may be wrong.

During World War II, Hitler used his power to persuade the government to make him the chancellor, which gave him more control over Germany. This lets him manipulate the people so they would think that same way as he did. The people believed this because they did not understand what Hitler was going to do with the Jews, during this time they used the Jews as a scapegoat to blame for their problems. Many situations have a scapegoat that people need to blame to help them deal with their problems. In The Crucible written by Arthur Miller the town used witches as their scapegoat. In the New York Times article Extended Forecast: Bloodshed the people in Tanzania used witchcraft as their scapegoat. Finally in the Quartz Magazine article Fear of the Government Makes Americans More Likely to Reach for a Gun the government is creating scapegoats out of the certain people and events. Some people need to find a scapegoat to blame for example, in The Crucible, the New York Times article Extended Forecast: Bloodshed, and the Quartz Magazine article Fear of the Government makes Americans more likely to Reach for a Gun the people had to find a scapegoat for the problems that they faced.

“ There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.” - Elie Wiesel. This quote communes the struggles of the citizens of Salem, Massachusetts who were unjustly condemned of witchcraft during 1692 . They were vulnerable while they were convicted but a few people managed to speak out against this injustice -John Proctor, Martha Corey, Giles Corey and Rebecca Nurse - eventually giving up their lives for this cause. The Crucible, a play by Arthur Miller, tells of a forbidden affair between married man John Proctor and his servant Abigail Williams. Their liaison is eventually discovered by John’s wife, Elizabeth, leading John to call off the affair. In an endeavor to get vengeance, Abigail and other local girls attempt to place a curse on Elizabeth in an occult rite in the forest one night. When their ritual was discovered, allegations of witchcraft spread around town. When Elizabeth is convicted of being a witch, it ultimately leads John to cease the paranoia and hysteria plaguing Salem. Abigail Williams applied scare tactics in order to manipulate fear in the citizens of Salem.

When something goes wrong it’s not just easy to point the blame at someone other than yourself in fact it’s common. Most people don’t want to take responsibility for their actions especially when they hurt others they . In the play The Crucible by Arthur Miller, it would seem that the easiest solution is just to blame Abigail for the outcome of the play. However, the blame actually should be on all the people who participated in the Salem witch trials. Many people in the play directly and indirectly fueled the trials, not just Abigail alone.

When we are younger we used to get our brother or sister and pick on another sibling. When mom or dad comes to yell at the person who started it we tend to pin it on someone else or you are the person who gets left with all the punishment. At one point in our lives we were blamed for something we didn't do or we were the person that pushed it onto someone else. Arthur Miller expresses a lot of scapegoating or being the scapegoat in The Crucible.

Sometimes people get blamed for wrongdoings that they did not participate in. This was shown in Salem, Massachusetts, during the salem witch trials in the play The Crucible. The play was based in 1692, when a community of Puritans started accusing each other of of being witches and wizards. Innocent people that did not practice witchcraft were getting hanged and accused of being witches. Scapegoats have also been used in modern day with McCarthyism, which was a campaign against communist. Many people were blacklisted and lost their jobs even though many of these people did not belong to the communist party. This took place in 1950-1954 carried out by Senator Joseph McCarthy. Using scapegoats blames innocent people for wrongdoings, and accuses people of wrong doings.

Morgan Sharp Ms. Weldon English 3 14 September 2016, Period A Grudges were a huge factor not just in the play but also in the real-life Salem witch trials. Back then they didn’t have much evidence to support such statements and since Puritan towns were not only pure but also cautious, they couldn’t risk having a witch in the town. People were extremely dependent on other people's word therefore if someone was more trusted than others in a town, then they would believe the more trusted person rather than the accused. This made it simple for people with grudges to take advantage of the system and accuse whomever they want if that’s what they chose.

"The best way to avoid becoming a scapegoat is to find one" (Warren Eyster). Scapegoating, the act of blaming others because of your differences, is a common thing people do. Usually, the victims of scapegoating are the weaker members of society, because they make easy targets. Examples of scapegoating throughout history include; Catholics coming to America in the 1800s, where rumors arose that they were there to steal America's freedom, Adolf Hitler's genocide on the Jewish religion and people through means of concentration camps, and in present times, Christianity and Islam. Only certain members of society are able to be scapegoated. If a Muslim commits an act of terrorism, the whole religion is blamed and deemed bad. If a Christian commits an act of terrorism, the individual is the only person blamed. Never has Christianity been under near as much hate as any other religion. In The Crucible, the people of the town scapegoat each other to keep eyes off of themselves. In real life, Christians scapegoat people of the Islamic faith as terrorists that’s sole purpose is to behead and kill Christians. Xenophobia, the fear of people that are foreign, is very common in present times like how people in America to this day are terrified of people from

They also believed that confessions of their sins saved them from themselves, a similarity with characters from The Crucible where blame placed on someone else constantly, to take guilt from ones self, Abigail began accusing others by saying: "I saw Sarah Good with the Devil! I saw Goody Osborn with the Devil! I saw Bridget Bishop with the Devil!"(2) Accusations needing to be on anybody but her, Abigail disregards others and accuses them. The Salem Witch Trials, encouraged people to make accusations against their friends and neighbours to gain their own freedom, in scenes as the ones listed previously Miller emphasises and dramatises this idea. Another example of a Puritan theocracy is the punishment of an alternative opinion, as John Proctor yelled in The Crucible, “I say-I say God is dead!”(3) He caused uproar within the community and inevitably the end of his own life. The town felt that because John Proctor believed in something against that of the Court’s which was God’s then he must be working for the Devil and must be killed. The referencing in the play to the periods of time where similar issues of right-wing, conformed views were present was not only linked to The Puritan society but also with McCarthyism, present in the 1950’s.