The Crucible By Arthur Miller

Fear is a distressing emotion aroused by impending danger, evil or pain, whether the threat is real or imagined.1 It causes feelings of dread and apprehension. Fear can lead to hysteria- a condition where community wide fear overwhelms logic and ends up justifying its own existence. In Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, fear and hysteria are the foundation and antecedent behind the bedlam and conflicting events that take place in the community of Salem. It is the key factor that results in the degeneration of the community. It is fear and hysteria that incited the Salem Witch

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?

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.

TV shows and Movies with a focus on cliques, either in high school or in the work force, are popular in our society today. For instance the movie Mean Girls is about a teenage girl moving to a new school and being recruited into a high school clique. In this clique, the members exhibit the behaviors of people experiencing the psychological phenomenon, Groupthink. Groupthink is the practice of thinking or making decisions as a group in a way that discourages creativity or individual responsibility. There are eight symptoms of Groupthink- Invulnerability, Rationale, Morality, Stereotypes, Pressure, Self-Censorship, Unanimity, and Mindguards. Groupthink has also taken place in our history a a country. The play, The Crucible by Arthur Miller is about a the real-life Salem Witch Trials that happened in 1692 - 1693, in Salem, Massachusetts. Some symptoms of Groupthink found in the Crucible are Rationale, Pressure, and Self-Censorship.

“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.

Abigail influenced all the girls to lie and convict innocent people and this all for one person, John Proctor. Abigail obviously had a huge crush on John Proctor and it was probably because of his previous affair with Abigail. There was only one problem John no longer had feeling for her and he was in love with his wife Elizabeth. John really didn’t pay much attention to Abigail anymore which basically started this whole thing. Abigail thought that by dancing around a fire like a hooligan would cast a spell and make him fall in love and that definitely didn't work. John still didn’t pay attention to her and she knew she had to try and take Elizabeth out. She ended up stabbing herself because the poppet had a needle in it and that’s how elizabeth was sent to court. Obviously none of this worked out because John and Elizabeth still loved each other and Abigail ended up running away. So Abigail was a very dark force in the town of

Throughout history, mass hysterias have occurred as the result of psychological stress and the irrational fear of the unknown. In fact, the Salem Witch trial was the result of the irrational fear from the town that the devil was present in their everyday lives. In the play The Crucible, Arthur Miller presents the consequences of the fear of witchcraft spreading through the community of Salem. Laura Dimon furthers Gladwell’s argument in “What Witchcraft is Facebook” by arguing that hysterias occur because of preexisting tensions and psychological stress. Thus, as long as the fear of the unknown is present in a society, oppression and psychological abuse will endure, resulting in individuals to feeling vulnerable and succumbing to the pressures of their disordered and dysfunctional environment.

Thomas Putnam is a perfect example of taking advantage of fear for personal enrichment. Putnam was a wealthy land owner who sought to add to his wealth by accusing others of witchcraft and buying their land. The convicted are usually forced to sell their land at second-rate prices. Putnam’s agenda is exposed when Giles Corey, a prosperous farmer, testifies on behalf of his wife to the court. According to Giles, Putnam

The Crucible, mass hysteria leads to the wrongful accusation and hanging of dozens of Salem citizens for witchcraft. It also happened in 1962 when 62 textile workers came down with a disease that was blamed on the bite of a Junebug. When fear becomes widespread and delusional as it has in Salem, it is not fear anymore; it is mass hysteria, a condition affecting a group of persons, characterized by excitement or anxiety, irrational behavior or beliefs, or inexplicable symptoms of illness. The human behavior of mass hysteria is evident in both Arthur Miller’s The Crucible and in the modern event The June Bug Epidemic.

In the English dictionary, there are three definitions of the word crucible. One is a metal container in which metals are mixed and melted. Another is a severe test. But the third definition, and the one that I think fits the best for this book, is a place or situation in which different elements interact to create something new. In my mind, this fits because all of the characters had their little grudges and dirty secrets. But when all those seemingly little things interact, they formed something new and a lot bigger: a witch hunt. This strange transformation that happened, occurred because of people exacting revenge. Revenge is a theme in the crucible because Abigail Williams, Mr Proctor, and Ann Putnam acted out of revenge.

The Crucible, a play by Arthur Miller, depicts the hysteria that came to Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692. Miller attempts to combine the idea of witchcraft illustrating a similar modern day example, called McCarthyism. In the mid twentieth century, Senator John McCarthy, an advocator of the Red Scare, used similar tactics to hunt communists and send them into exile. These communists then used the same defense mechanisms as citizens in Salem, to clear their names and put the liability on someone else. In the play, a young orphan, named Abigail Williams, felt inclined to attack others in order to dismiss the accusations made against her, and she did so successfully. In order to clear her name, Williams framed many people and victimized herself. As a result of her cruel tactics, Abigail is characterized as a selfish, merciless, and destructive villain. Abigail Williams is the antagonist of the play because she manipulates the other young girls, the court judges, and the life of John Proctor through malicious lies.

In the play The Crucible by Arthur Miller, the citizens of Salem are accusing each other of witchcraft. The whole crisis begins as an effect of John Proctor 's affair with his servant Abigail Williams. After the affair, Abigail, who is jealous of Elizabeth Proctor, wants to get Elizabeth out of the way so that she can be with John. John Proctor realizes that it is up to him to stop the hysteria and save innocent people. Yet John Proctor waits to confess. John Proctor 's moral lapses propel his search for redemption, a decision that ultimately cost a man of integrity his life.

ublished in 1952, during a period of cold war tensions, which culminated in the ideological "witch trials" of the McCarthyism era in America; the allegorical play, The Crucible, by Arthur Miller, is set in Salem Massachusetts, in 1692, during the Salem Witch Trials. The author has intentionally used allegory to draw parallels between the two events and invite the reader to think critically about the persecution that occurred during both time periods. One of the themes that the author has used to position the reader to recognise the immorality and idiocy of both historical events is the representation of personal integrity. Integrity is the quality of being honest and having strong moral principles. This is achieved through strongly contrasted characterisation through characters such as Abigail Williams and Rebecca Nurse , as well as the use of textual features such as irony,symbolism, and dialogue. In the play characters can be assorted into three distinct groups: those who have completely relinquished personal integrity in favour of personal interests, Those who have good intentions, but struggle to display integrity at times and those who continuously display integrity, even when faced with harsh punishment. In "The Crucible" Miller has utilized a multitude of textual features to create characters whose personal integrity ranges from being nonexistent to exemplary. The positive characterisation of Rebecca Nurse and the conflicted but developing characterisation of John

Imagine being persecuted for something you had no control over. Ever since 1692 in the city of Salem, Massachusetts where the idea of “witch-hunts” originated, several groups across the world have been persecuted because of their race, religion, ethnicity, or other unsupported reasons. In Arthur Miller’s play, The Crucible, the witch-hunts that took place during Puritan times are specifically targeted and serve as the focus point throughout the course of the story. Aside from the main plot points of the play, Miller also comments on a period in the 1950s during the Cold War when people who were thought to have been communists were persecuted against and deemed guilty without substantial evidence. These so-called “witch-hunts” stemmed from periods of fear and racism, and people were victimized with no way to prove themselves. Based on the outcome of multiple historical events throughout the course of history, “witch-hunts” are not justified or needed to achieve justice or establish order in society. One prime example of a historical “witch-hunt” is the Negro Holocaust, a period in the late 1800s and early 1900s where African Americans were lynched by white people based on their skin color.