The Crucible By Arthur Miller

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

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.

In the play The Crucible by Arthur Miller, one of the many themes that stands out to most people is the importance of a having a good name and reputation. Miller uses certain characters outcomes in the play to prove that reputation was actually not the biggest concern. He consistently shows that reputation means nothing when it came to being accused during the Salem Witch Trials because many innocent people were killed. People began to use these accusations for their own benefit and that’s when it became chaotic. These random accusations of witchcraft could immediately cause someone’s admirable reputation to disappear. He provides evidence in the play through most characters that we would consider to have a good reputation such as: Rebecca Nurse, Elizabeth Proctor, and John Proctor.

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.

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.

“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.

Reverend Hale develops from a strong intelligent individual with no compassion, to kind & sympathetic as the story matures for example when he is begging women in prison to confess to save their lives.

The world is so full of stupendous works of literature, which are subjected to a plethora of different personal interpretations. It is inconceivable to imagine that each novel has only one prominent underlying message or theme. Arthur Miller, the American dramatist and playwright, out of The University of Michigan, was able to transform one of the most notable accounts of mass hysteria and loss of rational thought, and mold it into an elaborate and complex drama. Miller’s, The Crucible tells the story of the Salem witch trials that occurred in Salem, Massachusetts in the late seventeenth century. Literary lenses are used to assist readers in admiring and evaluating literary works, in an overabundance of ways. When analyzing The Crucible through the historical, psychological, and archetypal lenses, the reader can see the prominent niche that each lens plays within the story, significantly impacting the reader’s point of view on not only the story itself, but as well as the broader connection to society as a whole.

One of the numerous things that a man can never outrun is his reputation. Several authors throughout the history of literature have used this characteristic of citizens as major conflicts in stories and plays. One such author is Arthur Miller, playwright for the famous 1950’s play, The Crucible. In Miller’s The Crucible, reputation plays an influential role in the outcome of the play. A major portion of the population is led to plead guilty in order to save their reputation, have their reputation ruined by pleading innocent, or ruin their reputations so as to protect others. Several of these characters are Sarah Good, Rebecca Nurse, and John Proctor.

Drama is around us every day, everywhere people go no matter what is happening it is there. That is what The Crucible is about; Teenagers starting drama and spreading false rumors. Abigail is responsible for the witch hunts in Salem because of her immaturity, obsession with John Proctor, and for being a liar. This story takes place in small town Salem where you worked and went to church, until some teenagers of the town said some false things about the most innocent people of the town.

Further, as with the alleged witches of Salem, suspected Communists were encouraged to confess their crimes and to “name names,” identifying others sympathetic to their radical cause. Some have criticized Miller for oversimplifying matters, in that while there were (as far as we know) no actual witches in Salem, there were certainly Communists in 1950s America. However, one can argue that Miller’s concern in The Crucible is not with whether the accused actually are witches, but rather with the unwillingness of the court officials to believe that they are not. In light of McCarthyist excesses, which wronged many innocents, this parallel was felt strongly in Miller’s own time

In Arthur Miller’s writing he clearly says his profound political and moral convictions. In 1953 Arthur Miller drew upon the Salem witchcraft trials in 1692 to attack the anti-communist “witch hunts” of the 1950’s. Because the Puritans deeply feared the power of Satan, the villagers of Salem became involved in the hysterical climate not only out of religious reasons but also because it gives them a chance to act on their own personal grudges. When Reverend Parris’s daughter and Abagail Williams started having fits over convulsion, screaming, and hallucination, the theocracy sets up a court to identify the witches in the village. The witch trials are the ultimate expression of intolerance because hanging witches is a way for the

The performance of Arthur Millers drama, The Crucible, put on by the WolfPack Players is one that has taken a fair bit of polishing to go from an average high school show, to a great show; the director, Patrica Scarborough, can certainly attest to such a bold claim. While we were held back by petty issues such as lines, we were, as a company, able to pull it together, just in time for opening. I can honestly say, in my heart, that this show could have gone better. In no way am I marking this a shameful show, nay, in my opinion, the show is quite good. I, for one, love the cast that had been assigned to perform this drama. But the basic act of line memorization had bogged us down, and I primarily attribute that to the language of Arthur Miller's piece; The Crucible is indeed a heavy show, the Director had announced to us that many times before. Even for myself, The Crucible is a dense, heavy story. From my transition from the auditions to the performance, I can say that personal growth had happened, not continuously, but in small spurts. At the audition, I had felt like this wasn't really my show. That feeling I had made me nervous and uncomfortable about auditioning, but I had decided to keep at it; I put on a straight face and acted happy to be there, auditioning, even though I was unsure about the show. I had learned, later on, that even if insecurity strikes during an audition, that its always better to act like its not there at all. Keeping a straight face, as opposed to

The Crucible is a 1953 play by the famous play writer and author, Arthur Miller. It is a partially fictional story of the Salem Witch Trials which took place during 1692 and 1693 in Salem, Massachusetts. Miller wrote the play as an allegory of McCarthyism; when the United States government blacklisted accused communists. The Crucible contains quite a few important characters who play in the tragic events that occurred those many years ago- the characters who had the greatest impact and character transformations would be the tragic hero; John Proctor, the blameless victim; Elizabeth Proctor, and the villainous; Abigail Williams.

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.