The Crucible By John Proctor

John Proctor, a prominent individual in both the Salem Witch Trials and The Crucible, was tried and executed for witchcraft in 1692. "When the witchcraft hysteria first began in Salem village in the winter of 1692, Proctor became an outspoken opponent of the trials and stated to many that the afflicted girls, who had been accusing many of the villagers of witchcraft, were frauds and liars" (Brooks). There were many parallels between John Proctor and his character in The Crucible, including his vocal opposition towards the trials and his strong Puritan values that influenced his actions. As an involved member of the Salem community, Proctor was incredibly concerned with his reputation. Proctor 's young slave Mary Warren began experiencing fits after the scandal broke out. "She [Warren] testified that Proctor 's spirit beat her and forced her to touch the Devil 's book" (Brooks). His involvement was interpreted by the community, as him performing witchcraft in attempts to possess the girls.

“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.

In the novel The Crucible by Arthur Miller, the story was based on McCarthyism. This book is based on a real story and real people. John Proctor tore up his confession and goes to his death because he can’t lie about himself and ruin his reputations. He also doesn’t want people to think he is a bad person by confessing a lie just to save his life.

In The Crucible, Abigail Williams, John Proctor, and Elizabeth Proctor are arguably the most important characters. The affair between Abigail and John drives the plot of the play. Abigail begins accusing societal outcasts as witches and gradually works her way up the social ladder until she is able to accuse an upstanding citizen like Elizabeth Proctor of being a witch and having people believe the accusation. She accused Elizabeth of being a witch so that Elizabeth would be hanged. Then, Abigail would have John Proctor all to herself. Abigail, while certainly diabolical and ruthless, is rather misrepresented. Abigail has received nothing but tragedy in her life; short, though it is at this point. Her parents are killed in front of her at a very young age and while there is not anyway you can take that in a sympathetic aspect, seeing as she uses it to convince the girls to do her bidding, it is very clear that this image has stuck with her. The Crucible paints John in the position of a tragic hero and then ineluctably places Abigail in the light of an antagonist with no hope of retribution. Once you commend John for his actions, you must implicate Abigail for hers. Simply stated, Abigail should not just be incriminated based on what information we are provided. Abigail, while still very much faulty in her actions, deserves to be examined at a deeper level to provide you with the full understanding of just why this woman’s scorning was her breaking point.

Fear can cause people to make bad decisions causing the situation to worsen. According to the play The Crucible is about a group of girls who were caught practicing witchcraft who were forced to tell lies about the devil forcing them to participate in villainous actions and then forced to name those involved in the fear of being hanged by the court. Head of the group was a young woman named Abigail Williams, who was infatuated with a married man and determined to get rid of his wife. In the play The Crucible, Arthur Miller personifies Abigail Williams as a manipulative character as seen when she successfully manages to convince the court that Elizabeth and other innocent citizens work with the devil and how she controlled the group of girls into pretending to have encounters with evil spirits of the accused. Arthur Miller wrote the play as an allegory of the McCarthyism in the 1950s. Focusing on the inconsistencies of the Salem witch trials in seventeenth-century in Salem Massachusetts, and the extreme behavior that can result from dark desires.

Fictionalizing the historically famous event of the sixteenth century, Arthur Miller retells The Salem Witch Trials in his dramatized play, The Crucible. Interpreting the horrific witch trials through the play’s characters and actions, Miller is successfully able to scrutinize the hysteria that took place in Salem Massachusetts while synonymously demonstrating the devastating effects of a theocratic government. Although the trials were filled with paranoia and injustice, Miller simply publicized the trials for what they were: a series of hearings and prosecutions. By relaying the accusations and trials that occurred in The Salem Witch Trials, Miller expresses the posing dangers of combining church and state into one supreme power. Given the [ By receiving] power through religious and governmental means, a theocratic government’s ecclesiastical authorities were able to interpret sins and crimes as one [one what?]. Although Salem was supposed to be a very honest and religious Puritan community, multiple sources say otherwise. There was said to be many disputes within Salem, those of which involved animosity over church positions, bitterness over grazing rights, as well as arguments regarding property lines. “Despite the Bible’s charitable injunctions” Miller writes, “long-held hatreds of neighbors could now be openly expressed, and vengeance taken” (Miller 1129). Abusing this power found between the thin lines of religion and government, the residents of Salem blamed witch

Doing the right thing can be hard, but when it comes down to life or death situations, the decision is that much more challenging. In Arthur Lee Miller 's drama The Crucible, he tells the story of John Proctor, the troubled land owner, who changes over time to help his wife and his town. John proctor starts off as a selfish, sinful man, but as the play progresses he fights for what is right and becomes a pure man again.

Reputation can play an important role in our everyday lives. It is how we are defined as people. There is no middle when it comes to reputation, only good or bad. People will act a certain way based on their reputations. Some will go out of their way to the last dying breath to make sure they leave with a good or bad reputation. In one of the recent literature study in class “The Crucible” by Arthur Miller, Miller uses characterization to illustrate reputation throughout the play. “The Crucible” takes place in Salem, Massachusetts. It is based upon the Salem witch trails. In “The Crucible”, we journey through the life of three characters who reputations plays a major role in the play. The three characters are John Proctor, Abigail Williams, and Reverend Parris. When put in a tight situation dealing with life or death, all of these characters choose to keep their reputations rather than save their lives or do the right thing. The preponderance of having a good name is a very prevalent theme in “The Crucible”.

John Proctor is widely known as a tragic hero from the famous play The Crucible. He displays this “heroic” character through his actions and words and thoughts. For example, he sacrifices his name for the town, refrains from continuing his affair, and tries to fix his marriage. While he is not perfect, he fits the description of a hero of sorts, despite his failed attempts to save others. Probably the greatest example of Proctor’s heroism, despite its failure, is when he admits to his affair with Abigail Williams.

Arthur Milller’s The Crucible and Katherine Howe’s Conversion follow teenage girls and how their individual actions and actions as a group affect colonial Salem Village and present day Danvers, Massachusetts. In Salem Village an outbreak of witch accusation by a group of young women tears apart the entire community and has everyone question what the truth is. Religion and honesty are large factors in peoples’ views on the situation taking place in Salem. In modern day Danvers an outbreak of a mystery disease, conversion disorder, similarly has the people of the town questioning what the truth is. This disorder is exclusively affecting the students of the all girls catholic high school, St. Joan’s. These girls exploit their disorder by talking to media and going on television. Both stories seem to reflect similar plot lines of rebellion, scandal, and sex. Both follow the lives of teenage girls who face similar problems. The time of adolescence in a woman’s life is an extremely influential period when one either stands out as a dominant leader, or falls in line as a follower. Though The Crucible and Conversion are based over three hundred years apart, both focus on similar motifs regarding female adolescence including rebellious lust, and the desire for attention and one’s individual identity.

One may call self-preservation a natural, basic instinct. This will to survive is strong, but how far would you be willing to go to stay alive? In The Crucible, by Arthur Miller, a series of events unfold in the 1600s when a group of girls accuse others of conspiring with the devil. These accusations spread and the mass hysteria caused neighbors and friends to turn on each other. When unexplainable things happened, they attributed it to other performing witchcraft. The religious town of Salem took action against the accusations by making a court. This court prosecuted anyone suspected of being a witch or being affiliated with one. With little to no evidence, many innocent people were arrested and even killed in Salem. A recurring theme prevalent throughout The Crucible is self-preservation.

The definition of crucible is a difficult test or challenge. Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible introduces the strictly Puritan town of Salem, Massachusetts in 1692, quickly overrun with rumors of witchcraft after one scandalous night. Abigail Williams, a young girl and niece of a Reverend, gets caught out one night dancing and conjuring souls. In a reckless attempt to clear her name, Abigail, with the assistance of her friends, falsely accuses fellow townspeople of witchcraft and thus, chaos ensues. In a town such as this, accusing someone of witchcraft gives you a “shield”, a benefit these manipulative girls take full advantage of. In a desperate attempt to bring justice to those who suffer the accusing finger of Abigail, three of Miller’s most complex characters, Mary Warren, Reverend Hale, and John Proctor, each face their own crucibles in the midst of the witch trials that test their moral strength as individuals and uncover their true selves.

Thomas J. Watson once said, “If you stand up and be counted, from time to time you may get yourself knocked down. But remember this: A man flattened by an opponent can get up again. A man flattened by conformity stays down for good.” Due to the fear fueling in the atmosphere during the Salem witch trials, a numerous amount of citizens allow themselves to be trampled on by conformity. Consequently, nineteen innocent citizens were hanged, and one brutally crushed to death. Arthur Miller’s The Crucible stages the theme of social conformity through the characters Reverend Parris, Abigail Williams, and John Proctor as they venture on a journey throughout the Salem Witch Trials displaying that joining society’s assembly of deceivers may preserve their lives, though not their integrity.

Arthur Miller 's, The Crucible, presented a theme of mass hysteria. The author states that when there is mass hysteria, many are suffering from it but some are also gaining from it. What started with a few girls playing around became a huge problem in Salem that changed its entire society. Starting off as a fear, which was caused by these girls due to their accusation of innocent citizens of witchcraft, it turned into mass hysteria as more and more people started believing them. It lead to wrongful accusations and hanging of many innocent Salem citizens. Fear could be used for many things; it can be used for personal gains; it can be used to increase your political power;

According to Aristotle, a tragic hero is a literary character of magnitude that “makes a judgment error that inevitably leads to his or her destruction”. Unlike the Greek philosopher’s description, Arthur Miller, the author of the essay “Tragedy and the Common Man”, considers a tragic hero to be a character of ordinary status that “is ready to lay down their life to secure his or her personal dignity”. Miller illustrates this belief in his Puritanical play The Crucible, featuring the honest and wholesome protagonist, John Proctor as the tragic hero. Proctor, a farmer who despises hypocrites, finds himself in a string of conflict when he commits adultery with his former house servant and becomes what he hates most, resulting in his death. Proctor’s role as a true classical tragic hero is demonstrated by his relentless fight to expose Abigail and the “witch trials” as lies, and save his wife and secure “good name”.