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The Crucible By Arthur Miller

Decent Essays
Scapegoating Throughout Society

“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, by Arthur Miller, shows many situations where people have been accused of things they have not done. Tituba, a slave owned by Reverend Parris is one of many to be accused of witchcraft. Abigail felt under pressure for being found dancing naked in the woods, so she uses Tituba and blames her for the entire scenario. “She sends her spirit on me in church; she makes me laugh at prayer!” (page 847) Blaming Tituba, she then controls the girls to follow her words to direct the attention off of themselves and place it on people who are easy to blame. One of the girls, Mary Warren,
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