Introduction:
Arthur Miller has created John Proctor the protagonist of The Crucible to be a 30 year old farmer in Salem, Massachusetts, powerful of body, even-tempered and not easily led. John speaks his mind when he recognizes injustice. He is highly respected, even feared, by some in Salem. His name is synonymous with honour and integrity. He takes pleasure in exposing hypocrisy and is respected for it. However John is a sinner, a sinner not only against the moral fashion of the time but against his own vision of decent conduct, he has come to regard himself as a kind of fraud. After admitting to lechery, John is accused of witchcraft, on this charge he is condemned.
Monologue:
The walls close in around me. I cannot not escape the endless, darkened walls of this cell. I sit in the corner, I see the sharp corners at each edge of the room. The dismal paint on each of the walls carries a burden of memories where men and women drawing closer and closer to their death had been scraping at the walls. Looking up from the corner of the cell, I see the light coming down from the window, it is the only hope and light that is left in this retched room in which they have confined me.
These past months the nights have been long and cold, the days lonely and sad. But the choice is this, confess or hang. It is my word they want, and they will come for me soon. Every day I hear another person being taken from this place, these people are innocent and they be dying like animals, how
The Crucible, a novel/play by Arthur Miller displays the chaos of the witch trials within the small town of Salem, Mass. Of the many characters of the novel, John Proctor and Mary Warren are both characters that serve an importance to the novel. The two characters both interact in the stories in different ways. Even though both characters can be seen as minor characters because of their inferior power in the novel, Proctor and Mary Warren serve as important characters to the story line. One reason being the fact that they both bring about problems with and/or against antagonist Abigail Williams such as Mary Warren, who likes the feeling of have authority but gets into unwanted conflict often, and Proctor, who is an very aggressive person
Page 1 of 3Hai Nguyen John Proctor and the McCarthyism “The Crucible” by Arthur Miller illustrates the reflection of the anti-communist hysteria in the United States known as McCarthyism. Miller uses the character John Proctor as a force in demonstrating the way lives were destroyed by McCarthyism. Throughout the story, while Proctor is respected in the community, he has conflict secretly with many people as well as himself. John Proctor is a perfect character because the readers are able to view him as a victim in the society where McCarthyism took place. He is also an adulterer, husband of Elizabeth, and knows what is happening in and outside of the Salem society. Proctor was having a conflict with his wife, Elizabeth Proctor. Elizabeth did not trust John because he had an affair with Abigail Williams. Elizabeth was supposed to trust John, but she refused to because he said he was alone with Abigail for a moment. John cannot say or argue against Elizabeth because of his guilt:” Because it speaks deceit, and I am honest! But I will plead no more! I see how your spirit twists around the single error of my life, and I will never tear it free!” Elizabeth tried to make John feel guilt, so John wanted to make sure she understood her cold nature may have prompted his cheating. He also has conflict with Abigail Williams which is his mistress. John Proctor was so angry because Abigail accused his wife to witchcraft. She sent Mary Warren with a puppet that has needle inside its
With all that is going on in the world today, what is more important to you freedom or Safety? In The Crucible, Abigale choose her own safety over hers of her friends and family, and in Fahrenheit 451, Guy choose his freedom over the safety of him and his wife and, in Berlin you either live on West Berlin were you were free or you lived on the other side of the wall where you had no freedom but you were safe. So which side of the wall do you want to live on?
Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible show the hysteria that took place in Salem in 1692. Even though this play is fiction, Miller based the plot of his play on a real historical event which was McCarthyism in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s. There’re many connection in The Crucible to be considered as an allegory due to similarities themes and how the characters are being portrayed. Miller does an excellent job of portraying numerals characters used fear for benefit and they showed selfishness and malfeasance. This is also similar to how Joseph McCarthy’s oppressive by using intense fear of the spread of the economic system called communism.
The Crucible by Arthur Miller takes place in Salem, Massachusetts in 1692. It all started when Reverend Parris discovers a group of girls dancing in the woods. After he found the girls in the wood, his daughter Betty fall ill. Since Betty wouldn’t wake up, people become paranoid and started believing that witchcraft was real. Fake accusations were made and innocent people kept dying. In The Crucible there are many people to blame for all for everything that occurred, characters such a Abigail Williams, Reverend Hale, and Reverend Parris. Abigail Williams is to blame because she accused everyone else just to protect herself. Reverend Hale is also blame because he was the one who got people to think that witchcraft was real. Lastly Reverend Parris is to blame because he was just worried about himself and his reputation in Salem.
Most people would not like to be known as a coward. Mary Warren was not aiming for that title, but that is what she ended up with. She gave herself this negative reputation. The Crucible, by Arthur Miller, is a play about the undergoing of the Salem Witchcraft Trials in 1692. A group of Salems girls, are caught dancing in the woods. To take allegation off of themselves, they accuse other innocent townspeople of practicing witchcraft. Multiple victims are murdered or imprisoned. Mary Warren, one of the accusers, plays a big role in this play. Mary Warren’s character changes from cowardly, to brave, and back to cowardly, throughout the story which shows how she evolved throughout The Crucible.
As the various characters in The Crucible by Arthur Miller interact, the dominant theme of the consequences of women’s nonconformity begins to slide out from behind the curtains of the play. Such a theme reveals the gripping fear that inundated the Puritans during the seventeenth century. This fear led to the famous witch-hunts that primarily terrorized women who deviated from the Puritan vision of absolute obedience and orthodoxy. Arthur Miller presents his interpretation of the suffering by subtly introducing women who strayed from convention and paid the consequences. Throughout The Crucible, Arthur Miller delineates the historically austere Puritans’ perception and punition of women who differ from expectations, all while unraveling, through the characterization of Tituba, the harsh truth of how women were vided as lesser than men and feared if deviating.
“And they feel if only they can demolish that person, then everything’s going to be okay.” -Margaret Atwood the author of “Half-Hanged Mary”. In The Crucible by Arthur Miller, ¨Why I Wrote The Crucible¨an essay by Arthur Miller, and ¨Half-Hanged Mary¨ a poem by Margaret Atwood, it shows that a society under stress will always scapegoat a person or a group of people. Defending this statement, people from each of these sources have felt betrayed by being blamed and persecuted for actions they have not done. In The Crucible, Abigail and her friends choose to scapegoat people in their society to push the attention away from them. In “Why I Wrote The Crucible”, Arthur shares with us about the communists and how it was a scapegoating society. In “Half-Hanged Mary”, Mary is blamed for witchcraft and hung for having land and being an independent woman.
The Crucible was a play written by Arthur Miller during the era of McCarthyism. This time period and person experiences helped influence the outcomes and aspects of the play written to mimic the Salem Witch Trials. Many characters were accused and even tried for witchcraft, while the audience is clear of whom the guilty party is the entire play. Elizabeth Proctor, the wife to John Proctor the wrongly one wrongly accused and executed, had many conflicts in this play as many others did. Elizabeth Proctor was met with conflicts of wrong accusations, adultery, death threats, and eventually, losing her husband. Elizabeth Proctor endured an incredible amount of pain and conflict throughout the play, The Crucible. She was met with many conflicts that involved many the people she loved, or once trusted. Elizabeth Proctor ended one of the only characters that would feel the pain of the trials forever.
It is necessary to have trust, loyalty, forgiveness, and honesty when living in a healthy community. But when people within the community begin to show betrayal, revenge, deceit, and suspicion, then the balance of the community is disrupted. In the Puritan community, they focused on doing God’s work by taking care of their neighbors and made sure to not be distracted by matters unrelated to God. Their extremely religious and simplistic lives isolated them from any disruption in the community. However, motivations of others led to the accusations of those in the community, which resulted in chaos. This occurred in the event known as the Salem Witch Trials, where twenty were executed and hundreds of others were accused. Arthur Miller, in his play, The Crucible, demonstrates how the thirst for revenge fuels the devastation of a community through the characters of Thomas Putnam, Ann Putnam, and Abigail Williams.
What does it mean to be a victim of society? A victim of society can more or less be defined as someone who is harmed by their surrounding environment. But being a victim of society is not nearly as it seems as people may easily play the victim in order to manipulate others, and that scenario holds true in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. In this play, a crisis regarding the question of witchcraft is introduced in the village of Salem, a town ruled by a theocracy of Puritan beliefs. The dilemma first emerges when Betty, the daughter of Reverend Parris, the minister of Salem, is not responding after having danced in the forest with Abigail Williams, Parris’s niece, and many people around the village begin to believe it as an act of witchcraft.
Long ago in the quiet town of Salem Massachusetts, witchcraft was of major concern. Throughout the chaos, keeping your name free from the attention of the village was what the townspeople wanted to do The varying degree of pride throughout the village was overpowering. If you could save yourself by throwing the blame on someone else.
Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, reveals how general members of society will do anything to attain or maintain a position of power and status amongst the bourgeoisie while a few will go through great lengths to remain true to their faith; ultimately revealing that the act of trying to achieve a higher position in life, at the cost of others, is a choice. Throughout the story you see characters change their views, opinions, and actions on certain items just to remain in the position that they have achieved. They also do these things to get to a higher position in society. Keeping your position and working for a new one means absolutely everything to this society. They will do anything to get what they want, they do not care what they do or if they hurt anyone. If they want something they will do everything in their power to get there.
Throughout this past semester, we have covered a lot of plays and their films that correspond within those plays. While I have learned a lot along the way I have found that there are certain plays that stuck out. Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, and The Importance of Being Earnest were among some of these plays from this semester. However, one of my personal favorites is The Crucible. I was able to uncover many themes from this play such as secret sin, lies and deceit, and religion.
The theme of persecution in The Crucible by Arthur Miller is the convictions of numerous members of a village in Salem, Massachusetts in 1692. During this time God was very prominent and they had a strong desire to convert everyone to Puritanism and if one did not believe in God or practice religion, that one had chosen to bind oneself to the Devil. “The people of Salem developed a theocracy, a combine of state and religious power whose function was to keep the community together and to prevent any kind of disunity that might open it to destruction by material or ideological enemies” (Miller, 1953, p. 7). The play opens in the house of Reverend Parris’ in the bedroom of his daughter, Betty Parris. She had become ill and her father was unable to wake her. Betty was in the forest with her cousin, Abigail Williams and her fathers’ slave who was called Tituba. He had discovered them dancing by a fire, while Tituba sang and danced in her foreign tongue from Barbados; which is where Reverend Parris had spent some years as a merchant before entering into ministry and where he had met Tituba and decided to bring her with him. It is because of what he saw, combined with the fact that the doctor could not find anything in his medical book related to the symptoms that Betty was experiencing, that it was her condition was deemed “unnatural”. The Crucible was set in 1692 and in those times, an unnatural cause was thought to be associated with the practice of witchcraft. Reverend