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The Crucible by Arthur Miller Essay

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The Crucible The Crucible is a novel based on the Salem Witch Trials in Massachusetts, written by Arthur Miller. The Crucible demonstrates forbidden temptation between John Proctor and Abigail Williams, honor and dishonor in the town of Salem, ruthless revenge, and the strive for high social status. The narrative style of this play is standard 1950s everyday language. The Crucible is set in a theocratic society of Puritanism in 1692. Miller uses imagery and figurative language when Abigail Williams attempts to get John Proctor to admit his lust for her even though he is trying to repair his marriage with Elizabeth Proctor. “I have a sense for heat, John, and yours has drawn me to my window, and I have seen you looking up, burning …show more content…

Examples of cause and effect in this play include Abigail Williams faking a vision of Mary Warren’s spirit of a yellow bird coming down to attack her. When Williams’ does this in court, she convinces the court of the ‘legitimacy’ in witchcraft. Giles Corey declines to pleading innocent or guilty to being a witch. He does this to protect his land from being seized from his children. In doing so, Corey is sentenced to large stones pressed to his chest until he confesses. Corey mocks his torture and replies, “More weight.” Corey does not confess, saving his land, and consequently dies from the weight of the immense stones. Miller wrote the play during the 1950s in times of the anti-communist Americans battle with Senator Joseph McCarthy. Miller himself refused to plead guilty or innocent to being a communist. Led by McCarthy, committees conducted controversial investigations to trap communist sympathizers in the United States. This relates to the Salem Witch Trials in which like the townspeople were forced to confess to witchcraft, communists were also forced to confess

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