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CRUCIBLE
By Arthur Miller (1915 – 2005)
Introduction / Biography of Arthur Miller
Introduction

Known and respected for his intimate and realistic portrayal of the working
class, Arthur Miller remains one of the most prolific playwrights of his time. At
the peak of his career immediately following World War II, American theater
was transformed by his profound ability to capture the heart of the common
man and make his audiences empathize with his plight as he attempts to find
his way in an often harsh and unsympathetic world.

Early Years and Education

Arthur Miller was born in 1915 in New York, into a middle-class Jewish
immigrant family. His father was a clothing manufacturer and store owner
who experienced significant loss after the Stock Market Crash of 1929. Miller
attended Abraham Lincoln High School in Brooklyn, and was a gifted athlete
and an average student. After being rejected the first time, Miller was finally
accepted into the University of Michigan in 1934, where his studies focused on
drama and journalism. He graduated in 1938 with a Bachelor‘s degree in
English. Two years later, he published his first play, the relatively unsuccessful
‗The Man Who Had All the Luck‘ and married his college girlfriend Mary
Slattery, with whom he later had two children, Robert and Jane.

His Works

Arthur Miller‘s first prominent play was All My Sons(1947), a tragedy about a
factory owner who knowingly sold faulty aircraft parts during World War II.
All My Sons won the Drama Critics Circle Award and two Tony Awards. His
1949 play Death of a Salesman was also an enormous critical success, winning
the Drama Critics Circle Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and several Tony Awards,
including Best Play, Best Author, and Best Director. To this day, Death of a
Salesman remains one of his most famous and respected works.

In 1950, Miller‘s troubles began. After directing a production of Henrik Ibsen‘s

An Enemy of the People, Miller began getting negative attention for his very
public political and social commentary. In 1953 The Crucible opened on
Broadway, depicting a deliberate parallel between the Salem Witch Trials and
the Communist Red Scare that America was experiencing at the time. This
production brought more suspicion onto Miller at a very unstable time in
American history, and in June of 1956, he was called to testify in front of the
House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), for which he was found
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in contempt of court for his refusal to cooperate and identify names of

Communist sympathizers. This ruling was later overturned by the United
States Court of Appeals, but damage to his reputation had taken place
nonetheless.

That same year, he divorced his wife and married actress and American icon
Marilyn Monroe; however, his marriage to Monroe did not last long—they
divorced in 1961. His plays After the Fall (1964) and Finishing the Picture
(2004) are said to loosely depict their turbulent and unhappy marriage. After
divorcing Monroe, Miller married Inge Morath, with whom he had a son,
Daniel, in 1962, and a daughter, Rebecca, in 1963. There have been
unconfirmed reports that Miller‘s son Daniel was diagnosed with Down
Syndrome shortly after he was born and that Miller institutionalized Daniel
and never saw or spoke to him again, even in his poignant autobiography
Timebends (1987).

Miller‘s other plays include: Incident at Vichy (1965), The Price (1968), The
Creation of the World and Other Business (1972), The American Clock (1980),
The Ride Down Mount Morgan (1991), Broken Glass (1994), and Resurrection
Blues (2002). He also wrote a novel, Focus (1945), a book of short stories in
1967, several screenplays and television movies, and Echoes Down the
Corridor (2000), a collection of essays. In addition, he collaborated with Inge
(who was a photographer) on several books. He received the Tony Award for
Lifetime Achievement in 1999 and the National Book Foundation‘s medal for
his contribution to American literature in 2001. Arthur Miller died of heart
failure in February of 2005 at his Connecticut home. He was 89 years old.

The Crucible
Plot Summary

In telling the story of a New England so gripped by hysteria they killed many of
their own residents, The Crucible explores the tension between the repressive
forces of a social order and individual freedom. The antagonist in The
Crucible is broadly the town of Salem, whose residents temporarily lose their
sense of community and vilify one another. But the hysteria of the witch hunts
exposes long-simmering resentments and grievances. Even before the witch
hunt begins, Proctor‘s primary motivation is to restore reason in the town.
Proctor attacks Parris for focusing on everything other than prayer in his
sermons, chastises Putnam for obsessing over his land as a means to
increasing his influence, and teases Giles for generally causing trouble
throughout Salem. Proctor‘s rationality blinds him, however, to the dangers of
his own indiscretions as he struggles to repair his life in the wake of his affair.
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The inciting incident of the play occurs when Abigail confesses to witchcraft
and the accusations rapidly spiral out of control. The town, already on the
brink of fracture, quickly falls apart and neighbor turns on neighbor both as a
way of releasing past anger and also out of fear of being implicated in the witch
hunts.

The rising action accelerates as the trials begin, and Abigail accuses Proctor‘s
wife Elizabeth. Although Abigail told him that Betty isn‘t actually bewitched,
Proctor is hesitant to testify because he fears exposing his affair with Abigail.
Here, the antagonist is Proctor‘s own divided self – the flaw of lust that made
him commit the affair, conflicting against his moral sense that what‘s
happening isn‘t just. Proctor compounds his errors by relying on Mary to
exonerate Elizabeth. When Hale rejects Mary‘s confession as an accusation
against Abigail, Proctor exclaims, ―common vengeance writes the law!‖
Though alluding to Abigail‘s feelings, Proctor hides that her revenge stems
from jealousy of Elizabeth, not simply anger at Elizabeth for firing her. Proctor
decides to go to court as a last resort only after Herrick takes Elizabeth away in
chains. The play‘s climax comes when Proctor finally confesses the affair with
Abigail, at last releasing the guilt of his sins and sacrificing his good name to
save his wife. His sacrifice is in vain as Elizabeth, seeking to protect her
husband‘s reputation, refuses to verify his story, and Mary accuses Proctor of
witchcraft. At this point, most of the town is in such a frenzy, the difference
between fact and fiction has been completely destroyed, and the characters
have lost all sense of reason.

The falling action of the play occurs three months later, when Elizabeth
forgives her husband for adultery, and says she doesn‘t want him to die.
Realizing that concepts like honesty, honor, and truth have lost all meaning in
the town‘s fearful, paranoid, and vengeance-seeking environment, Proctor
agrees to confess, even though he knows ―it is evil.‖ When Danforth insists on
recording and publishing the confession ―for the good instruction of the
village,‖ however, Proctor realizes that the confession not simply a formality
but a political opportunity for the court to validate the witch hunt and justify
the executions. His confession, then, is in direct opposition to his desire to end
the hysteria in Salem. While a verbal confession may have no relationship to
the truth, signing his name on paper will give credence to the falsehoods being
perpetuated by the trial, blackening the names of his friends who have died
denying the charges against them. Proctor considers himself as good as dead if
he has compromised all of his values to escape the gallows: ―How may I live
without my name?‖

The play reaches its resolution when Proctor recants and rips up his
confession. In doing so, he is signing his death warrant, but preserving the
good names of his friends, and exposing the hypocrisy of the witch hunts. In
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ripping up the confession, Proctor reasserts his identity as an individual, while

also taking a step toward restoring his community to sanity. ―I do think I see
some shred of goodness in John Proctor,‖ he says, referring to himself in the
third person. This formulation suggests that he knows that rather than going
down in history for signing a false confession against his neighbors, his name
will be remembered for his refusal to compromise, even at the cost of his life.
But because his tragic flaws have led to the deaths of other innocent
characters, he knows he cannot live. Elizabeth seems to understand the
sacrifice he is making both for the town and for their family, and doesn‘t ask
him to reconsider. The play ends with Proctor and Rebecca Nurse, who has
also refused to confess, being led to the gallows.

A Historical Context – The Red Scare and McCarthy Trials

In 1950, Arthur Miller wrote The Crucible as a parallel between the Salem
Witch Trials and the current events that were spreading throughout the United
States at the time. A similar ―witch hunt‖ was happening in the United States—
and this time, the accused were those who were a part of the Communist Party
or who were Communist sympathizers.

Shortly after the end of World War II, a ―Red Scare‖ took hold of the nation.
Named after the red flag of the USSR (now Russia), the ―Reds‖ were seen as a
threat to the democracy of the United States. Fear, paranoia, and hysteria
gripped the nation, and many innocent people were questioned and then jailed
for expressing any view which was seen as anti-Democratic or anti American.

In June of 1940, Congress passed the Alien Registration Act, which required
anyone who was not a legal resident of the United States to file a statement of
their occupational and personal status, which included a record of their
political beliefs. The House Un American Activities Committee (HUAC), which
was established in 1938, had the job of investigating those who were suspected
of overthrowing or threatening the democracy of the U.S. As the Alien
Registration Act gathered the information, the HUAC began hunting down
those who were believed to be a threat to American beliefs.

The HUAC established that Communist beliefs were being spread via mass
media. At this time, movies were becoming more liberal, and therefore, were
believed to be a threat; many felt that Hollywood was attempting to
propagandize Communist beliefs. In September of 1947, the HUAC
subpoenaed nineteen witnesses (most of whom were actors, directors, and
writers) who had previously refused to comment, claiming their Fifth
Amendment rights. Eleven of the seventeen were called to testify; only one
actually spoke on the stand—the remaining ten refused to speak and were
labeled the ―Hollywood Ten.
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After these infamous ten refused to speak, executives from the movie industry
met to decide how best to handle the bad press. They decided to suspend all
ten without pay. Although the initial intention was to save their box office
reputation, what eventually resulted was as decade-long blacklist. Hundreds of
people who worked in the industry were told to point the finger naming those
who had any affiliation with the Communist party. As a result, over 200 people
lost their jobs and were unable to find anyone who would hire them. The
Communist with-hunt ruined the careers of hundreds, and ruined the
reputation of hundreds more.

In February of 1950, a Republican senator from Wisconsin names Joseph

McCarthy claimed to have a list of over 200 card-carrying members of the
Communist party. By 1951, a new flourish of accusations began and a new
wave were subpoenaed to ―name names‖—to snitch on those who were
Communists or believed to be Communist sympathizers. Later, the terms
McCarthy Trials and McCarthyism were coined, which described the anti-
Communist movement and trials of the 1950s.

Arthur Miller wrote The Crucible in 1953, after witnessing first-hand the
modern witch-hunt that had taken place in the United States. Miller wrote the
controversial play as an allegory, a play which represents something much
deeper. In this case, the story is about the Salem witch trials of the 1690s, but
warns of history repeating these tragic events on the 1950s.

Style of Crucible

The Crucible‘s style mixes historically accurate phrases with more

contemporary-sounding speech, grounding the play in its time period while
reminding audiences the ideas remain relevant today. Characters‘ speech
patterns in the play reflect the language Miller found in legal documents and
court transcripts in the Salem courthouse. Miller even embedded direct
quotations into his dialogue, such as when Giles pleads for ―more weight.‖ One
word may be particularly foreign to readers: ―Goodwife,‖ sometimes shortened
to ―Goody.‖ This word was typical nomenclature for ―wife‖ in the seventeenth
century, and the girls repeat it when accusing various townswomen of
witchcraft. At the same time, characters often speak in plain, contemporary-
sounding English, modernizing archaic words like ‗saith‘ to ‗said.‘ Most other
words are familiar though less common in everyday speech, especially biblical
words like ―abomination,‖ ―damnation,‖ and ―heathen.‖ Parris uses ―heathen‖
to characterize the girls when their dancing is deemed sinful, and Abigail
repeats it as a pejorative term for Native Americans and similar to ―savage.‖
This usage reflects how settlers viewed Native Americans and the frontier,
which the narrator describes as mysterious and terrifying.
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The diction varies between characters based on their education and profession,
so while Parris, Hale, and Danforth speak formally even outside of the
courtroom, the Salemites‘ language is less polished and sometimes contains
grammatical errors. Characters‘ grammar and pronunciation also depend on
social status, much like how accents today affect speech. The Salemites
regularly omit the ―g‖ at the end of words with ―ing‖ endings. Some characters,
especially those with less education, forgo subject-verb agreement, confuse
tenses, and use double negatives. Tituba‘s speech is especially unique as the
play‘s only non-native English speaker, although her speech is probably not
historically accurate to the real-life Tituba. According to records from the
Salem witch trials, Tituba was referred to as Indian, possibly meaning she was
Native American. Another woman, named Candy, was from Barbados, as
Tituba is in the play. Tituba makes specific errors when referring to the other
members of the Parris household, like omitting ―to be‖ verbs and confusing
subject and object pronouns. She bypasses the word ―is‖ when claiming that
the Devil told her, ―Mr. Parris no goodly man, Mr. Parris mean man and no
gentle man!‖ When Mrs. Putnam accuses Tituba of feeding her baby‘s blood to
Abigail, Tituba clarifies that ―I give she chicken blood!‖ instead.

Miller‟s Reaction to Witch Hunt

Miller himself once said:

―I had known about the Salem witchcraft phenomenon since my

American history class at [the University of] Michigan, but it had
remained in my mind as one of those inexplicable mystifications of the
long-dead past when people commonly believed that the spirit could
leave the body…‖

―As though it had been ordained, a copy of Marion Starkey‘s book The
Devil in Massachusetts fell into my hands, and the bizarre story came
back as I had recalled it, but this time in remarkably well-organized
detail.‖

―At first I rejected the idea of a play on the subject. My own rationality
was too strong, I thought, to really allow me to capture this wildly
irrational outbreak. A drama cannot merely describe an emotion, it has
to become that emotion. But gradually, over weeks, a living connection
between myself and Salem, and between Salem and Washington, was
made in my mind—for whatever else they might be, I saw that the
hearings in Washington were profoundly and avowedly ritualistic.
After all, in almost every case the Committee knew in advance what
they wanted the witness to give them: the names of his comrades in the
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[Communist] Party. The FBI had long since infiltrated the Party, and
informers had long ago identified the participants in various meetings.
The main point of the hearings, precisely as in seventeenth-century
Salem, was that the accused make public confession, damn his
confederates as well as his Devil master, and guarantee his sterling
new allegiance by breaking disgusting old vows— whereupon he was
let loose to rejoin the society of extremely decent people. In other words,
the same spiritual nugget lay folded within both procedures—an act of
contrition done not in solemn privacy but out in public air.

―The Salem prosecution was actually on more solid legal ground since
the defendant, if guilty of familiarity with the Unclean One [the Devil],
had broken a law against the practice of witchcraft, a civil as well as a
religious offense; whereas the offender against HUAC could not be
accused of any such violation but only of a spiritual crime, subservience
to a political enemy‘s desires and ideology. He was summoned before
the Committee to be called a bad name, but one that could destroy his
career.‖

―In effect, it came down to a governmental decree of moral guilt that

could easily be made to disappear by ritual speech: intoning names of
fellow sinners and recanting former beliefs. This last was probably the
saddest and truest part of the charade, for by the early 1950s there
were few, and even fewer in the arts, which had not left behind their
illusions about the Soviets.‖

―It was this immaterial element, the surreal spiritual transaction that
now fascinated me, for the rituals of guilt and confession followed all
the forms of a religious inquisition, except, of course, that the offended
parties were not God and his ministers but a congressional committee‖

Introduction to the Crucible by Christopher Bigsby‟s:

―The question is not the reality of witches but the power of authority to define
the nature of the real, and the desire, on the part of individuals and the state,
to identify those whose purging will relieve a sense of anxiety and guilt. What
lay behind the procedures of both witch trial and political hearing was a
familiar American need to assert a recoverable innocence even if the only
guarantee of such innocence lay in the displacement of guilt onto others. To
sustain the integrity of their own names, the accused were invited to offer the
names of others, even though to do so would be to make them complicit in
procedures they despised and hence to damage their sense of themselves. And
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here is a theme that connects virtually all of Miller‘s plays: betrayal, of the self
no less than of others.‖

―…in Miller‘s plays there usually comes a moment when the central character
cries out his own name, determined to invest it with meaning and integrity.
Almost invariably this moment occurs when he is on the point of betraying
himself and others. A climactic scene in The Crucible occurs when John
Proctor, on the point of trading his integrity for his life, finally refuses to pay
the price, which is to offer the names of others to buy his life…Three years
later, Miller himself was called before the Committee. His reply, when asked to
betray others, was a virtual paraphrase of the one offered by Proctor. He
announced, ―I am trying to, and will protect my sense of myself. I could not use
the name of another person and bring trouble on him.‖

―[The Crucible] is Arthur Miller‘s most frequently produced play not, I think,
because it addresses affairs of the state nor even because it offers us the tragic
sight of a man who dies to save his conception of himself and the world, but
because audiences understand all too well that the breaking of charity is no
less a truth of their own lives than it is an account of historical processes…The
Crucible reminds us how fragile is our grasp on those shared values that are
the foundation of any society.‖

―Beyond anything else The Crucible is a study in power and the mechanisms by
which power is sustained, challenged, and lost…In the landscape of The
Crucible, on the one hand stands the church, which provides the defining
language within which all social, political, and moral debate is conducted. On
the other stand those usually deprived of power—the black slave Tituba and
the young children— who suddenly gain access to an authority as absolute as
that which had previously subordinated them… Those socially marginalized
move to the very center of social action…The Crucible is a play about the
seductive nature of power…‖

The Crucible is both an intense psychological drama and a play of epic

proportions…this is a drama about an entire community betrayed by a
Dionysian surrender to the irrational; it is also, however, a play about the
redemption of an individual and, through the individual, of a society. Some
scenes, therefore, people the stage with characters, while others show the
individual confronted by little more than his own conscience. That oscillation
between the public and the private is a part of the rhythmic pattern of the play.

―…the play‘s success now owes little to the political and social context in which
it was written. It stands, instead, as a study of the debilitating power of guilt,
the seductions of power, the flawed nature of the individual and of the society
to which the individual owes allegiance. It stands as a testimony to the ease
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with which we betray those very values essential to our survival, but also the
courage with which some men and women can challenge what seems to be a
ruling orthodoxy.‖

―Like so many of Miller‘s other plays, it is a study of a man who wishes, above
all, to believe that he has invested his life with meaning, but cannot do so if he
betrays himself through betraying others. It is a study of a society that believes
in its unique virtues and seeks to sustain that dream of perfection by denying
all possibility of its imperfection…America is to believe that it is at the same
time both guilty and without flaw.‖

Introduction to „The Crucible‟ by Harold Bloom

Fifty years ago, in his introduction to his Collected Plays, Arthur Miller
meditated upon The Crucible, staged four years before, in 1953. A year after
that first production, Miller was refused a passport, and in 1956–57 he
endured the active persecution of the American witch-hunt for suspected
Communists. The terror created in some of his former friends and associates
by the possibility of being branded as warlocks and witches ―underlies every
word in The Crucible,‖ according to Miller. ―Every word‖ necessarily is
hyperbolical, since The Crucible attempts to be a personal tragedy as well as a
social drama. Miller, Ibsen‘s disciple, nevertheless suffers an anxiety of
influence in The Crucible not so much in regard to Ibsen‘s An Enemy of the
People but in relation to George Bernard Shaw‘s Saint Joan. The frequent
echoes of Saint Joan seem involuntary, and are distracting, and perhaps fatal
to the aesthetic value of The Crucible. For all its moral earnestness, Saint Joan
is enhanced by the Shavian ironic wit, a literary quality totally absent from
Miller, here and elsewhere. Though a well-made play, The Crucible rarely
escapes certain dreariness in performance, and does not gain by rereading.

This is not to deny the humane purpose nor the theatrical effectiveness of The
Crucible, but only to indicate a general limitation, here and elsewhere, in
Miller‘s dramatic art. Eric Bentley has argued shrewdly that ―one never knows
what a Miller play is about: politics or sex.‖ Is The Crucible a personal tragedy,
founded upon Proctor‘s sexual infidelity, or is it a play of social protest and
warning? There is no reason it should not be both, except for Miller‘s inability
to fuse the genres. Here he falls short of his master, Ibsen, who concealed
Shakespearean tragic purposes within frameworks of social issues, yet
invariably unified the two modes. Still, one can be grateful that Miller has not
revised The Crucible on the basis of his afterthoughts, which have emphasized
the absolute evil of the Salem powers, Danforth and Hathorne. These worthies
already are mere facades, opaque to Miller‘s understanding and our own.
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Whatever their religious sensibility may or may not have been, Miller has no
imaginative understanding of it, and we therefore confront them only as
puppets. Had Miller made them even more malevolent, our bafflement would
have been even greater. I am aware that I tend to be an uncompromising
aesthete, and I cannot dissent from the proven theatrical effectiveness of The
Crucible. Its social benignity is also beyond my questioning; American society
continues to benefit by this play. We would have to mature beyond our
national tendency to moral and religious self-righteousness for The Crucible to
dwindle into another period piece, and that maturation is nowhere in sight.

Major Motifs of the Play

Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, or literary devices that can help to
develop and inform the text‘s major themes.

Empowerment

The witch trials empower several characters in the play who are previously
marginalized in Salem society. In general, women occupy the lowest rung of
male-dominated Salem and have few options in life. They work as servants for
townsmen until they are old enough to be married off and have children of
their own. In addition to being thus restricted, Abigail is also slave to John
Proctor‘s sexual whims—he strips away her innocence when he commits
adultery with her, and he arouses her spiteful jealousy when he terminates
their affair. Because the Puritans‘ greatest fear is the defiance of God, Abigail‘s
accusations of witchcraft and devil-worship immediately command the
attention of the court. By aligning herself, in the eyes of others, with God‘s will,
she gains power over society, as do the other girls in her pack, and her word
becomes virtually unassailable, as do theirs. Tituba, whose status is lower than
that of anyone else in the play by virtue of the fact that she is black, manages
similarly to deflect blame from herself by accusing others.

Accusations, Confessions, and Legal Proceedings

The witch trials are central to the action of The Crucible, and dramatic
accusations and confessions fill the play even beyond the confines of the
courtroom. In the first act, even before the hysteria begins, we see Parris
accuse Abigail of dishonoring him, and he then makes a series of accusations
against his parishioners. Giles Corey and Proctor respond in kind, and Putnam
soon joins in, creating a chorus of indictments even before Hale arrives. The
entire witch trial system thrives on accusations, the only way that witches can
be identified, and confessions, which provide the proof of the justice of the
court proceedings. Proctor attempts to break this cycle with a confession of his
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own, when he admits to the affair with Abigail, but this confession is trumped
by the accusation of witchcraft against him, which in turn demands a
confession. Proctor‘s courageous decision, at the close of the play, to die rather
than confess to a sin that he did not commit, finally breaks the cycle. The court
collapses shortly afterward, undone by the refusal of its victims to propagate
lies.

Major Themes of the Play

Theme‘ is a universal idea presented in a literary piece of work. There are
many themes in the masterpiece of Arthur Miller, The Crucible. Themes of
this play not only shows the problem of witchcraft during the late 19th and
early 20th centuries but also exposes the dark sides of human nature. Some of
the major themes have been discussed below.

Reputation

Reputation is one of the major themes in the play, The Crucible. Most of the
characters of the story strive hard to maintain their reputations. The
prominent example is John Proctor, who hides his affair with Abigail. He fears
it will harm his reputation in the society. Even in the court after confessing his
crime, he tries to save his name. Judges of Salem are also biased, as they
uphold a false reputation to honor the church. They believe that they make the
right decisions and hesitate to accept any evidence which could have set
innocents free. It is evident from John Proctor‘s case, as the delay in his
confession makes him a liar in the court.

Reputation is tremendously important in theocratic Salem, where public and

private moralities are one and the same. In an environment where reputation
plays such an important role, the fear of guilt by association becomes
particularly pernicious. Focused on maintaining public reputation, the
townsfolk of Salem must fear that the sins of their friends and associates will
taint their names. Various characters base their actions on the desire to protect
their respective reputations. As the play begins, Parris fears that Abigail‘s
increasingly questionable actions, and the hints of witchcraft surrounding his
daughter‘s coma, will threaten his reputation and force him from the pulpit.
Meanwhile, the protagonist, John Proctor, also seeks to keep his good name
from being tarnished. Early in the play, he has a chance to put a stop to the
girls‘ accusations, but his desire to preserve his reputation keeps him from
testifying against Abigail. At the end of the play, however, Proctor‘s desire to
keep his good name leads him to make the heroic choice not to make a false
confession and to go to his death without signing his name to an untrue
statement. ―I have given you my soul; leave me my name!‖ he cries to Danforth
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in Act IV. By refusing to relinquish his name, he redeems himself for his earlier
failure and dies with integrity.

Hysteria

Hysteria also upholds thematic significance in the play because the society in
Salem is engulfed in the accusations of witchcraft. The rapid growth of hysteria
in Salem destroys the impact of rational thinking. Act 1 of the play starts giving
clues of hysteria when Abigail tries to escape from the harsh judgment blaming
Tituba of witchcraft. The existence of evil plot creates tension in the town, as
the people do not find any fault in punishing the accusers. Hence, they believe
that women were truly guilty of witchcraft and chose to punish them without
an inquiry. Often mass hysteria numbs people‘s mind and makes them
vulnerable.

Another critical theme in The Crucible is the role that hysteria can play in
tearing apart a community. Hysteria supplants logic and enables people to
believe that their neighbors, whom they have always considered upstanding
people, are committing absurd and unbelievable crimes—communing with the
devil, killing babies, and so on. In The Crucible, the townsfolk accept and
become active in the hysterical climate not only out of genuine religious piety
but also because it gives them a chance to express repressed sentiments and to
act on long-held grudges. The most obvious case is Abigail, who uses the
situation to accuse Elizabeth Proctor of witchcraft and have her sent to jail. But
others thrive on the hysteria as well: Reverend Parris strengthens his position
within the village, albeit temporarily, by making scapegoats of people like
Proctor who question his authority. The wealthy, ambitious Thomas Putnam
gains revenge on Francis Nurse by getting Rebecca, Francis‘s virtuous wife,
convicted of the supernatural murders of Ann Putnam‘s babies. In the end,
hysteria can thrive only because people benefit from it. It suspends the rules of
daily life and allows the acting out of every dark desire and hateful urge under
the cover of righteousness.

Power and Authority

The desire to attain power serves as blood for the people of Salem. The pillars
of traditional power, the church, and the court worked in unison. The judges
exercise their absolute power by rejecting Proctor‘s rational explanation and
punishing him and acquitting the girls, who are guilty. Progress in
Abigail‘s character, from an orphan teenager to the witness of a sinister plot,
highlights the theme of power in the play. From a helpless girl, she becomes
crafty and capable of destroying innocent lives through such accusations.
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Justice

Many characters struggle with choices they made before and during the events
of the play, trying to understand if the results of their actions are just or not.
Elizabeth Proctor has a difficult time forgiving John for his affair with Abby,
but by the end of the play, Elizabeth has come to feel that she is at least partly
to blame for her husband‘s adultery. Elizabeth accepts her imprisonment and
John‘s decision to die as justice being served. Reverend Hale also changes his
understanding of justice: at the beginning of the play, he believes himself
adept at finding and combating witchcraft. By the end, he is encouraging
residents of Salem to falsely confess to save themselves. While he would have
once found false confessions a perversion of justice, he now sees false
confession as a necessary act of self-preservation. Elizabeth doesn‘t agree with
Hale, and their differing definitions of what justice is end the play on an
ambiguous note.

Guilt

The theme of guilt is related to the progress in John Proctor‘s character in the
play. He is ashamed of the infidelity committed in the past and wants to bury it
deep in the heart as if it never existed. He fails to relegate his guilt to the
background. In reaction to this, he turns against Elizabeth, accusing her of
being judgmental. In reality, his sin is responsible for his mental confusion.
Hale also becomes the victim of his guilt, as he once believed people engaged
in witchcraft are sinners. However, as the play progresses, he considers them
innocent and tries to save them. Thus, the theme of guilt plays an important
role in shaping and reshaping the characters in the play.

Portrayal of Women

The women‘s portrayal in the play is not of a typical Victorian era. They are not
portrayed as servants to men, mothers or wives. Miller presents them keeping
in mind the attitude of the society toward women in 1950s when writing The
Crucible. The most prominent character, Abigail, portrayed as a promiscuous
young woman, represents a few women during that period. She is selfish and
becomes extremely revengeful when John leaves her. On the contrary, there
were many women like Rebecca, a nurse, who chooses to sacrifice herself over
a false statement. Again, a few women held false standards of feminity like
Elizabeth, John Proctor‘s wife, in the society of that time.

Deception

Deception and lies present another important theme that runs throughout the
play. It does not include myths related to black magic or witchcraft. It includes
lies that people tell to save their false reputations in society. The girls of the
 14

town tell lies in the court thinking they can continue this by deceiving others.
Putnam deceives the innocents to take control of their lands. Proctor deceives
Elizabeth and himself by keeping the secret of his adultery in his heart to
secure his false reputation. Therefore, deception and lies in Salem serve as a
tool to achieve what is desirable.

Goodness

Goodness also serves as a major theme of The Crucible despite the deception.
People in Salem intend to look genuine in the eyes of society. Proctor
suppresses his guilt and does not reveal the truth before the girls just because
he wants to be a good person. Abigail, when tries to confess about witchcraft
following Tituba‘s example, lies to prove herself good. Elizabeth is also
portrayed as a good character, but toward the end, the acceptance of an affair
reveals the truth about her nature. Therefore, the concept of goodness plays a
vital role in the play.

In The Crucible, the idea of goodness is a major theme. Almost every character
is concerned with the concept of goodness, because their religion teaches them
that the most important thing in life is how they will be judged by God after
they die. They want to be found good, because being good will make them right
with God. Their neighbors‘ opinion guides them, too. The characters want to
be seen as good by the whole village. From the opening of the play, when the
Rev. Parris is far more concerned with what his parishioners will think of him
than his daughter‘s illness, this theme is clear. Parris bullies his niece and slave
to get them to reveal what they‘ve done to tarnish his reputation. When Abigail
follows Tituba‘s example by falsely confessing to witchcraft, she does so
because she sees an opportunity to convince the residents of Salem that she is
a good person. Other characters, such as Mary Warren, confess, because being
seen as good is more important to them than telling the truth.

Several characters‘ concern over goodness goes beyond how they are seen and
requires that they actually examine what it means to be good. We see the
struggle in the Rev. Hale, Elizabeth Proctor, and John Proctor,. Hale enters the
play convinced he‘s a good man who can spot a witch easily. By the end of the
play, he has examined his conscience and realized that if he wants to be at
peace with himself, he has to encourage the prisoners to falsely confess.
Elizabeth is also convinced of herself as a good woman, but by the end of the
play, she has reconsidered her treatment of her husband after he confessed to
an affair, and realizes that she was unforgiving. John struggles the most with
goodness: it takes signing a false confession, then ripping it up, for him to
recognize that the only way he can be good is by being honest and true to
himself.
 15

Judgment

Another major theme in the play is judgment. It is seen through the characters
of Danforth and Hale. Danforth, a deputy Governor, sits for judgment against
the accusers of witchcraft. Although he knows that most of the prisoners like
Martha Corey, Elizabeth, and Rebecca Nurse are not witches, he believes his
decisions are absolute and refuses to change his mind even after having proof
of their innocence. Hale, on the other hand, does not care about the rules. In
fact, he intends to save people. These incidents happen when people consider
themselves the custodians of justice and fair play.

Another major theme in The Crucible is that of judgment, especially seen in

the characters of Danforth and Rev. Hale. In the third act of the play, Deputy
Governor Danforth sits in judgment over the accused and imprisoned
residents of Salem. Danforth‘s judgments, which he is always firm and resolute
about, are clearly wrong: Elizabeth, Martha Corey, Rebecca Nurse, and many
others are not witches at all. Danforth is unable to change his mind, even when
all evidence and logic points him towards concluding he is incorrect. Danforth
mistakenly believes that a reliable judge never reconsiders his stance. Hale, on
the other hand, Hale learns the foolishness of sitting in judgment over his
fellow humans. By the end of the play, he no longer cares about the official
judgments of the court of the land, only about saving peoples‘ lives. Danforth
has not learned the danger of judging others, while Hale has.

Jealousy

Another important theme seen through the character of Abigail is jealousy.

She plots the whole blame to rekindle the affair with John Proctor. While
Proctor does not want to continue the life of sin and leaves it behind as the
forgotten tale, she exacts revenge from Salem and despises Elizabeth Proctor.
She also threatens the girls that if they are going to disclose her secret of
witchcraft, she will murder them on a dark night. Hence, jealousy gives birth
to hatred and consequential evil deeds against others.

Intolerance

During the play, various characters face false judgment and intolerance. The
play shows prejudice of the characters for others such as in the court and at the
time when someone is accused of witchcraft. Second, The Crucible also
presents a theocratic society where the Church and state are one, and no one
can go against this system. The beginning of the play foreshadows intolerance
in Salem when some outcast women are accused of witchcraft. Everyone turns
against them without any proof. The situation becomes complex when reputed
persons of the town are caught for the same guilt. Ironically, they also receive
the same treatment as outcasts.
 16

The Crucible is set in a theocratic society, in which the church and the state are
one, and the religion is a strict, austere form of Protestantism known as
Puritanism. Because of the theocratic nature of the society, moral laws and
state laws are one and the same: sin and the status of an individual‘s soul are
matters of public concern. There is no room for deviation from social norms,
since any individual whose private life doesn‘t conform to the established
moral laws represents a threat not only to the public good but also to the rule
of God and true religion. In Salem, everything and everyone belongs to either
God or the devil; dissent is not merely unlawful, it is associated with satanic
activity. This dichotomy functions as the underlying logic behind the witch
trials. As Danforth says in Act III, ―a person is either with this court or he must
be counted against it.‖ The witch trials are the ultimate expression of
intolerance (and hanging witches is the ultimate means of restoring the
community‘s purity); the trials brand all social deviants with the taint of devil-
worship and thus necessitate their elimination from the community.

Social Status

The world of Salem in the 1600‘s contained many class divisions. Men were
considered much more important than women. White people were considered
of more valuable than people of color. And wealthy people had more status
than the poor. The Crucible reflects these divisions, and the way the privilege
certain characters over others. The first character to confess to witchcraft is
Tituba, the only person of the color in the play. She knows that her status is too
low to withstand the accusations of being a witch and the only way she‘ll
survive is to confess. The girls are quick to accuse the poorest and weakest
members of their society (like Goody Good and Goody Osburn), correctly
sensing that no one will bother to protect those women. When Elizabeth learns
that Abigail has accused her, she immediately tells John that Abigail is taking a
big risk in accusing her, since Elizabeth is a farmer‘s wife and has some status
in the town. Her quick realization shows that Abigail is risking it all to go after
John.

In The Crucible, concerns over property and ownership affect many of the
decisions characters make. John Proctor reveals to Reverend Hale that he
doesn‘t go to church because he doesn‘t like Reverend Parris‘s obsession with
money. Tituba falsely confesses to witchcraft because she knows, as a slave,
she is the legal property of Parris, who can beat her if she doesn‘t confess. Mr.
Putnam, who has a long history of false accusations, encourages his daughter
to falsely accuse their neighbors of witchcraft so he can claim their property
after the neighbors are jailed or executed. Giles Corey dies rather than falsely
confess so that his children can inherit his land. In the new world of America,
owning property was one of the few ways people could feel secure. The
relentless ambition to own more and more land created an environment that
 17

encouraged falsehoods and deception among neighbors. The extreme lengths

characters go to protect what they own leads to the witch trials.

Consequences

John‘s affair with Abby has ended by the time the events of the play begin, but
the consequences of that affair have just begun. Because Abby doesn‘t believe
that John no longer is interested in her, she seizes upon accusations of
witchcraft as a way to get rid of Elizabeth. Because John allowed Abby to
believe that he loved her, she thinks she can take Elizabeth‘s place as his wife.
She‘s wrong, but doesn‘t realize her error until both John and Elizabeth have
been accused of witchcraft. Another example of the unexpected consequences
of one‘s actions can be seen in Tituba‘s false confession. She says she
performed witchcraft in hopes of ending her master‘s beating, but soon the
girls of Salem realize that they can punish many of their neighbors by accusing
them. The girls fail to anticipate the consequences of their lies. Giles Corey also
brings about unintended consequences when he tells Reverend Hale that his
wife sometimes hides books she was reading from him. The result of this
revelation is that Corey‘s wife is imprisoned and Giles himself is accused of,
and killed, for witchcraft.

Plot Analysis
In telling the story of a New England so gripped by hysteria they killed many of
their own residents, The Crucible explores the tension between the repressive
forces of a social order and individual freedom. The antagonist in The
Crucible is broadly the town of Salem, whose residents temporarily lose their
sense of community and vilify one another. But the hysteria of the witch hunts
exposes long-simmering resentments and grievances. Even before the witch
hunt begins, Proctor‘s primary motivation is to restore reason in the town.
Proctor attacks Parris for focusing on everything other than prayer in his
sermons, chastises Putnam for obsessing over his land as a means to
increasing his influence, and teases Giles for generally causing trouble
throughout Salem. Proctor‘s rationality blinds him, however, to the dangers of
his own indiscretions as he struggles to repair his life in the wake of his affair.
The inciting incident of the play occurs when Abigail confesses to witchcraft
and the accusations rapidly spiral out of control. The town, already on the
brink of fracture, quickly falls apart and neighbor turns on neighbor both as a
way of releasing past anger and also out of fear of being implicated in the witch
hunts.

The rising action accelerates as the trials begin, and Abigail accuses Proctor‘s
wife Elizabeth. Although Abigail told him that Betty isn‘t actually bewitched,
 18

Proctor is hesitant to testify because he fears exposing his affair with Abigail.
Here, the antagonist is Proctor‘s own divided self – the flaw of lust that made
him commit the affair, conflicting against his moral sense that what‘s
happening isn‘t just. Proctor compounds his errors by relying on Mary to
exonerate Elizabeth. When Hale rejects Mary‘s confession as an accusation
against Abigail, Proctor exclaims, ―common vengeance writes the law!‖
Though alluding to Abigail‘s feelings, Proctor hides that her revenge stems
from jealousy of Elizabeth, not simply anger at Elizabeth for firing her. Proctor
decides to go to court as a last resort only after Herrick takes Elizabeth away in
chains. The play‘s climax comes when Proctor finally confesses the affair with
Abigail, at last releasing the guilt of his sins and sacrificing his good name to
save his wife. His sacrifice is in vain as Elizabeth, seeking to protect her
husband‘s reputation, refuses to verify his story, and Mary accuses Proctor of
witchcraft. At this point, most of the town is in such a frenzy, the difference
between fact and fiction has been completely destroyed, and the characters
have lost all sense of reason.

The falling action of the play occurs three months later, when Elizabeth
forgives her husband for adultery, and says she doesn‘t want him to die.
Realizing that concepts like honesty, honor, and truth have lost all meaning in
the town‘s fearful, paranoid, and vengeance-seeking environment, Proctor
agrees to confess, even though he knows ―it is evil.‖ When Danforth insists on
recording and publishing the confession ―for the good instruction of the
village,‖ however, Proctor realizes that the confession not simply a formality
but a political opportunity for the court to validate the witch hunt and justify
the executions. His confession, then, is in direct opposition to his desire to end
the hysteria in Salem. While a verbal confession may have no relationship to
the truth, signing his name on paper will give credence to the falsehoods being
perpetuated by the trial, blackening the names of his friends who have died
denying the charges against them. Proctor considers himself as good as dead if
he has compromised all of his values to escape the gallows: ―How may I live
without my name?‖

The play reaches its resolution when Proctor recants and rips up his
confession. In doing so, he is signing his death warrant, but preserving the
good names of his friends, and exposing the hypocrisy of the witch hunts. In
ripping up the confession, Proctor reasserts his identity as an individual, while
also taking a step toward restoring his community to sanity. ―I do think I see
some shred of goodness in John Proctor,‖ he says, referring to himself in the
third person. This formulation suggests that he knows that rather than going
down in history for signing a false confession against his neighbors, his name
will be remembered for his refusal to compromise, even at the cost of his life.
But because his tragic flaws have led to the deaths of other innocent
 19

characters, he knows he cannot live. Elizabeth seems to understand the

sacrifice he is making both for the town and for their family, and doesn‘t ask
him to reconsider. The play ends with Proctor and Rebecca Nurse, who has
also refused to confess, being led to the gallows.

Character Studies
Q. Character Analysis of John Proctor

John Proctor is a character from the Crucible, a play by Arthur Miller,

Throughout the play he changes from being a troubled, self-exiled, sinner to
becoming a person of high moral standards. The characters in this play are
simple, common people that live in the town of Salem in the year 1692. There
is a rumor of witchcraft floating about in the town that has led to accusations
about many of the townsfolk. The accused are charged and convicted of a
crime that is impossible to prove (witchcraft). The reasons the villains select
the people they do for condemnation are both simple and clear
because all of the accusers have ulterior motives, such as revenge, greed, and
covering up their own behavior. The three major points I will be talking about
in my essay about are as follows: 1 His entrance into the play where he is
talking alone to Abigail and trying to convince himself that he is not an
adulterer and that they did not have an affair. 2 when John is reciting the Ten
Commandments. 3 where John tells Elizabeth that he are going to confess.

In the beginning of the play John Proctor is introduced as a farmer in his mid-
thirties that is not a partisan of the town, and shows a very strong sense of self-
preservation. The first real conversation he has with another character is with
Abigail Williams, where Abigail is trying to make John tell her that he loves
her, and that he will come again for her. John tells Abby that their affair is over
with and Abby begins to plead for John‘s love and he says
“Abby I may think softly of you from time to time. But I‟ll cut off my
hand before I‟ll ever reach for you again. Wipe it out of mind. We never
touched, Abby.”

John knows that he really did have an affair with Abby, but the fact that he
denied it shows how in the beginning of the story, he was a man only
concerned with only his own self-preservation. Despite his adulterous behavior
John Procter is a man that often serves as the only voice of reason during the
play.

In act two, in the scene where Reverend Hale asked John to recite the Ten
Commandments and John recited all except for adultery. This scene shows
that John isn‘t just pretending he didn‘t commit a sin, but that in his mind the
 20

sin of adultery doesn‘t exist by itself, it had to be triggered by Elizabeth telling

John that he forgot, adultery as one of the commandments. It is from this
point on that John Proctor seems more willing to accept the consequences of
his behavior.
“I will fall like an ocean on that court! Fear nothing Elizabeth.”

Now John has a purpose for direct involvement in the trials, it is the fact that
Elizabeth has now been accused of witchcraft. Since John knows she is
innocent his statement above shows his will to make sure his wife‘s image or
life isn‘t destroyed by the false accusations of Abigail.
“A man will not cast away his good name. You surely know that.”

This quote shows how in the middle of the story John fells that his name is the
only true thing a man has. This quote comes from the courthouse scene where
John tells the judge that the girls danced naked in the woods. After Abigail‘s
dramatic reaction, John tells the court that he had an affair with Abby, and
that she is a whore not to be trusted. At this point John asks that the court see
it is only Abigail‘s vengeance that Elizabeth is guilty of. In the final act John
Proctor decides to confess to the crime.
“I have been thinking I would confess to them, Elizabeth. What say you?
If I give them that? It is at this point that John realizes that his name is
no longer as important as he once thought. “…let them that never lied
keep their souls. It is pretense for me, a vanity that will not blind God
nor Keep my children out of the wind…”

But the good name of honest people like Rebecca Nurse still has a profound
importance, and John feels that importance. Now John has a burning desire to
live and is ready to confess, but just as he signs the confession he snatches it
up and rips it in half, because he doesn‘t want his name to be scorned in the
village. It appears as though John Proctor has come full circle and now refuses
to hand the confession over to Danforth.
“Because it is my name! Because I cannot have another in my life!
Because I lie and sign myself to lies! Because I am not worth the dust on
the feet of them that hang! How may I live without my name? I have
given you my soul; leave me my name!”

He realizes that the only thing in this world that he can hang on to is his name,
his honor, and the truth. John Proctor‘s story is the heart of the play. He
represents both the cowardice and courage that Miller sees in everyone in the
play, and in the world, caught in dangers beyond their control. His initial
reaction is to protect himself only. With time he believes that he needs to
protect others, not only himself. But in the end he comes to realize that all he
can do and must do is to protect the truth, even at the cost of his own life. By
 21

doing so he finally saves his own ‗name‘, his truth, and his life, in a different
way. This is what Miller is trying to tell us, that there are some things more
important than life itself.

In a sense, The Crucible has the structure of a classical tragedy, with John
Proctor as the play‘s tragic hero. Honest, upright, and blunt-spoken, Proctor is
a good man, but one with a secret, fatal flaw. His lust for Abigail Williams led
to their affair (which occurs before the play begins), and created Abigail‘s
jealousy of his wife, Elizabeth, which sets the entire witch hysteria in motion.
Once the trials begin, Proctor realizes that he can stop Abigail‘s rampage
through Salem but only if he confesses to his adultery. Such an admission
would ruin his good name, and Proctor is, above all, a proud man who places
great emphasis on his reputation. He eventually makes an attempt, through
Mary Warren‘s testimony, to name Abigail as a fraud without revealing the
crucial information. When this attempt fails, he finally bursts out with a
confession, calling Abigail a ―whore‖ and proclaiming his guilt publicly. Only
then does he realize that it is too late, that matters have gone too far, and that
not even the truth can break the powerful frenzy that he has allowed Abigail to
whip up. Proctor‘s confession succeeds only in leading to his arrest and
conviction as a witch, and though he lambastes the court and its proceedings,
he is also aware of his terrible role in allowing this fervor to grow unchecked.

Proctor redeems himself and provides a final denunciation of the witch trials
in his final act. Offered the opportunity to make a public confession of his guilt
and live, he almost succumbs, even signing a written confession. His immense
pride and fear of public opinion compelled him to withhold his adultery from
the court, but by the end of the play he is more concerned with his personal
integrity than his public reputation. He still wants to save his name, but for
personal and religious, rather than public, reasons. Proctor‘s refusal to provide
a false confession is a true religious and personal stand. Such a confession
would dishonor his fellow prisoners, who are brave enough to die as testimony
to the truth. Perhaps more relevantly, a false admission would also dishonor
him, staining not just his public reputation, but also his soul. By refusing to
give up his personal integrity Proctor implicitly proclaims his conviction that
such integrity will bring him to heaven. He goes to the gallows redeemed for
his earlier sins. As Elizabeth says to end the play, responding to Hale‘s plea
that she convince Proctor to publicly confess: ―He have his goodness now. God
forbid I take it from him!‖

Q. Character Sketch of Abigail Williams

Of the major characters, Abigail is the least complex. She is clearly the villain
of the play, more so than Parris or Danforth: she tells lies, manipulates her
friends and the entire town, and eventually sends nineteen innocent people to
 22

their deaths. Throughout the hysteria, Abigail‘s motivations never seem more
complex than simple jealousy and a desire to have revenge on Elizabeth
Proctor. The language of the play is almost biblical, and Abigail seems like a
biblical character—a Jezebel figure, driven only by sexual desire and a lust for
power. Nevertheless, it is worth pointing out a few background details that,
though they don‘t mitigate Abigail‘s guilt, make her actions more
understandable.

Abigail is an orphan and an unmarried girl; she thus occupies a low rung on
the Puritan Salem social ladder (the only people below her are the slaves, like
Tituba, and social outcasts). For young girls in Salem, the minister and the
other male adults are God‘s earthly representatives, their authority derived
from on high. The trials, then, in which the girls are allowed to act as though
they have a direct connection to God, empower the previously powerless
Abigail. Once shunned and scorned by the respectable townsfolk who had
heard rumors of her affair with John Proctor, Abigail now finds that she has
clout, and she takes full advantage of it. A mere accusation from one of
Abigail‘s troop is enough to incarcerate and convict even the most well-
respected inhabitant of Salem. Whereas others once reproached her for her
adultery, she now has the opportunity to accuse them of the worst sin of all:
devil-worship.

Critic Analysis of Abigail Williams

Abigail is vengeful, selfish, manipulative, and a magnificent liar. This young

lady seems to be uniquely gifted at spreading death and destruction wherever
she goes. She has an eerie sense of how to manipulate others and gain control
over them. All these things add up to make her an awesome antagonist.

In Act I, her skills at manipulation are on full display. When she's on the brink
of getting busted for dabbling in witchcraft, she skillfully manages to pin the
whole thing on Tituba and several of Salem's other second-class citizens. (This
is extra-horrible when you think about the fact that Abigail is the one who
persuaded Tituba to go out and cast the spells.) Ever since Abigail's brief affair
with John Proctor, she's been out to get his wife, Elizabeth. Our crafty villain
convinced Tituba to put a curse on Elizabeth, hoping to get rid of her and take
her place at John's side:

ABIGAIL, pulling her away from the window: I told him everything; he knows
now, he knows everything we—

BETTY: You drank blood, Abby! You didn't tell him that!

ABIGAIL: Betty, you never say that again! You will never—
 23

BETTY: You did, you did! You drank a charm to kill John Proctor's wife! You
drank a charm to kill Goody Proctor!

ABIGAIL, smashes her across the face: Shut it! Now shut it! [...] Now look
you. All of you. We danced. And Tituba conjured Ruth Putnam's dead sisters.
And that is all. And mark this. Let either of you breathe a word, or the edge of
a word, about the other things, and I will come to you in the black of some
terrible night and I will bring a pointy reckoning that will shudder you. And
you know I can do it [...] I have seen some reddish work done at night, and I
can make you wish you had never seen the sun go down! (I.113-132)

It's ironic that the Abigail, who encouraged the witchcraft in the first place, is
the one who goes around accusing everybody else. As ringleader, she excites
the other girls into a frenzy of emotion, which allows them to condemn as
witches the people they know and love. She riles up the entire village‘s hatred
of witches, just like her 20th-century counterpart Sen. Joseph McCarthy riled
up Americans‘ hatred of communists. Abigail's main skill seems to be finding
people's flaws, their weaknesses, and their prejudices... and then mercilessly
manipulating them to her advantage.

Abigail's ruthless cunning is shown again in Act II when she frames Elizabeth
Proctor for witchcraft. Later on in Act III she seems to lose her last shred of
humanity by damning John Proctor... even though she says she loves him.
When John attempts to expose Abigail, she skillfully manages to turn the
whole thing around on him, packing him off to the slammer. Abigail rides her
power trip out to the end, eventually leaving town with all of her uncle's
money.

Redeemable. The character of Abigail is often accused of being one-

dimensional, and there's more than a grain of truth in that accusation (unlike,
say, Abigail's accusations). She doesn't express one shred of remorse the entire
time, making her seem almost inhumanly diabolical. However, even though
Abigail's actions are ruthless, they are in some ways understandable.

For one, Miller slips in an interesting detail about Abigail's childhood that
gives us a clue about where her mercilessness might stem from. When she was
younger, Abigail watched both of her parents be murdered. She tells the other
girls:

"I saw Indians smash my dear parents' head on the pillow next to
mine." (I.119)

Whoa. Whoa there. That is some intense, messed-up stuff. It's no surprise that
a person exposed to such brutality at a young age might eventually act brutally
herself. Abigail's ruthless, manipulative tactics might also be a result of her low
 24

social position. She does have it pretty bad. She's an orphan. She's an
unmarried teenager. And worst of all (in the patriarchal Puritan society), she's
female. The only person lower than her is probably the black slave, Tituba. On
top of all that, Elizabeth Proctor has been going around dropping hints that
Abigail is sleazy, lowering Abby's social status even more. With all this in
mind, it's understandable that Abigail might seize any chance to gain power.

Historical Abigail. Abigail Williams was a real person, and she did
spearhead the group of girls who saw spirits and pointed out the witches in
Salem. The historical person was a bit different than the fictional character,
though. Arthur Miller explained that one discovery he made while digging into
the actual history of the Salem Witch Trials set his imagination on fire: Abigail
Williams, the mover and shaker of the witch-finding craze, had been the
Proctors‘s house servant for a short time. Though Abigail called Elizabeth a
witch, ―with uncharacteristic fastidiousness she was refusing to include John
Proctor, Elizabeth‘s husband, in her accusations despite the urgings of the
prosecutors‖.

While there's no actual evidence that the real John Proctor and the real Abigail
Williams had an affair, Miller could find no good reason why Abigail
distinguished so vehemently between the guilt of a husband and wife. So
Arthur Miller took creative license with her character to make the connection
between sexuality and politics more dramatic.

In reality though, Abigail Williams was only eleven years old at the time of the
witch trials... which makes Abigail more sympathetic and John Proctor
potentially way creepier. Or it proves that Abigail is a demon-child and John
Proctor is way more innocent. What do you think?

Q. Character Sketch of Reverend Hale

John Hale, the intellectual, naïve witch-hunter, enters the play in Act I when
Parris summons him to examine his daughter, Betty. In an extended
commentary on Hale in Act I, Miller describes him as ―a tight-skinned, eager-
eyed intellectual. This is a beloved errand for him; on being called here to
ascertain witchcraft he has felt the pride of the specialist whose unique
knowledge has at last been publicly called for.‖ Hale enters in a flurry of
activity, carrying large books and projecting an air of great knowledge. In the
early going, he is the force behind the witch trials, probing for confessions and
encouraging people to testify. Over the course of the play, however, he
experiences a transformation, one more remarkable than that of any other
character. Listening to John Proctor and Mary Warren, he becomes convinced
that they, not Abigail, are telling the truth. In the climactic scene in the court
in Act III, he throws his lot in with those opposing the witch trials. In tragic
 25

fashion, his about-face comes too late—the trials are no longer in his hands but
rather in those of Danforth and the theocracy, which has no interest in seeing
its proceedings exposed as a sham.

The failure of his attempts to turn the tide renders the once-confident Hale a
broken man. As his belief in witchcraft falters, so does his faith in the law. In
Act IV, it is he who counsels the accused witches to lie, to confess their
supposed sins in order to save their own lives. In his change of heart and
subsequent despair, Hale gains the audience‘s sympathy but not its respect,
since he lacks the moral fiber of Rebecca Nurse or, as it turns out, John
Proctor. Although Hale recognizes the evil of the witch trials, his response is
not defiance but surrender. He insists that survival is the highest good, even if
it means accommodating oneself to injustice—something that the truly heroic
characters can never accept.

A Personal Journey That Would Make Ulysses Jealous

Hale starts out with a Van Helsing esque vendetta (against witches, not
vampires) and ends up a broken, cynical man.

With the notable exception of John Proctor, Hale gets our vote for most
complex character in The Crucible. He starts off with really good intentions—
even if he has a bit of a chip on his shoulder. In Act I, Miller writes of Hale:
"His goal is light, goodness, and its preservation." This guy has trained and
trained to be the best witch-hunter ever, and he's psyched to finally get a
chance to show off his stuff. Though he's probably a little full of himself, his
ultimate goal is to valiantly fight the Devil. What could be wrong with that?

Well, a whole lot.

In Act II, we see that Hale's former confidence is slowly eroding. This is
demonstrated by the fact that he shows up at the Proctors's house of his own
accord. He's there without the court's knowledge, trying to get an idea of who
the Proctors are for himself. This independent action is a big hint that he's
probably beginning to doubt the validity of his own conclusions. When John
Proctor gets convicted in Act III due to Abigail's transparent machinations,
Hale's confidence is shattered. He quits the court and storms out in anger.

The transition from overconfidence to total disillusionment is already a big

journey, but then Miller takes his character a step further in Act IV. After
taking off for some soul-searching, Hale turns up hoping to save some lives.
He councils convicted witches to confess so that they won't be hanged. Hale is
knowingly counseling people to lie. He's lost all faith in the law, and there's a
good chance his faith in God is a bit shaky as well.
 26

Hale's last effort to wash some of the blood off his hands fails. He's not able to
convince anyone to confess. When John Proctor marches off to his martyr's
death, Hale pleads with Elizabeth to change her husband's mind, screaming,

"What profit him to bleed? Shall the dust praise him? Shall the worms
declare his truth?" (IV.207)

Words like these show that Hale has become a completely different man than
the one we met at the beginning of the play. The tortured reverend is a great
example of the kind of rich, morally ambiguous character for which Miller is
famous.

Q. Character Sketch of Elizabeth Proctor

Readers first encounter Elizabeth through the words of Abigail, who describes
Elizabeth as a ―bitter woman, a lying, cold, sniveling woman.‖ When Elizabeth
enters the action of the play in the second act, we immediately see that Abigail
is the liar: Elizabeth is anything but bitter and sniveling. She is solicitous of
her husband, John, as well as deeply caring and sensitive, if still hurting from
what has happened to her. John had an affair with Abigail when she was a
servant in the Proctors‘ household. Elizabeth was ill after giving birth to a child
when the affair happened. Now, Elizabeth and John are trying very hard to
repair their broken marriage. But Elizabeth is human: she doesn‘t trust John
yet. She senses that he wants to do all he can to make up for his mistake, but
she isn‘t ready to fully love him without reservation again. Her pride won‘t let
her.

The revelation that John has talked to Abigail alone changes Elizabeth. Her
fear and anger about John‘s affair come out. She is colder to him, because as
much as she loves him, his weakness towards Abigail is a major flaw in his
character, which Elizabeth sees clearly even though John does not. She tries to
explain to him why he must tell the town authorities that Abigail confessed to
him that she and the girls were lying, but he‘s flustered and upset. Before they
can discuss their problem much further, the Rev. Hale arrives to try to discern
whether the Proctors are a good Christian couple. Elizabeth impresses him;
she really does practice the Christian principles of charity, kindness, and self-
control that she professes to have. She also accepts being taken off to jail
stoically. When John comes to the court to try to free Elizabeth, she faces her
most difficult choice in the play. Readers feel the tension that this character
goes through, as she lies in an attempt save John.

Elizabeth as Goody Proctor

Elizabeth is good. She's moral. She's upright. She's composed. And she's also
colder than Salem, Massachusetts, in early February.
 27

In a neat literary twist, Elizabeth's positive qualities are also her negative
ones. She is a virtuous woman who is steadfast and true—but these traits also
make her a bit of a cold fish. When we first meet her, she's especially cold...and
thinks she smells something fishy. She's got good reason to be suspicious and
kind of distant, though: her husband has recently had an affair with their
housekeeper, Abigail Williams:

ELIZABETH: You were alone with her?

PROCTOR, stubbornly: For a moment alone, aye.
ELIZABETH: Why, then, it is not as you told me.
PROCTOR, his anger rising: For a moment, I say. The others come in
soon after.
ELIZABETH, quietly—she has suddenly lost all faith in him: Do as you
wish, then. [...]
PROCTOR: Woman. (She turns to him.) I'll not have your suspicion any
more.
ELIZABETH, a little loftily: I have no—
PROCTOR: I'll not have it!
ELIZABETH: Then let you not earn it. (II.65-74)
Elizabeth's reaction to the affair also reveals a bit of a vindictive streak. When
she discovered her husband's sin, she gave Abby the boot and then proceeded
to drop a few hints around town that the girl was a floozy. (Um, isn't John a
little responsible, too?)

For the most part, though, Elizabeth is a stand-up woman. Throughout the
play, she seems to be struggling to forgive her husband and let go of her anger.
And, of course, her hatred of Abigail is understandable. Elizabeth's dislike of
Abigail gets justified later on in the play when Abigail tries
to murder Elizabeth by framing her for witchcraft.

Elizabeth's PSA: Don't Lie, Kids. Not Even Once.

Overall, Elizabeth is a blameless victim. The only sin we see her commit is
when she lies in court, saying that John and Abigail's affair never happened.
This is supposedly the only time she's ever lied in her life. Unfortunately, this
is really bad timing. Though she lies in an attempt to protect her husband, it
actually ends up damning him.

After she‘s spent a few months alone in prison, Elizabeth comes to her own
realization: she was a cold wife, and it was because she didn‘t love herself that
she was unable to receive her husband‘s love. She comes to believe that it is her
coldness that led to John's affair with Abigail:
 28

ELIZABETH, upon a heaving sob that always threatens: John, it come

to naught that I should forgive you, if you'll not forgive yourself. (Now
he turns away a little, in great agony.) It is not my soul, John, it is
yours. [...] Only be sure of this, for I know it now: Whatever you will do,
it is a good man does it. (He turns his doubting, searching gaze upon
her.) I have read my heart this three month, John. [...] I have sins of my
own to count. It needs a cold wife to prompt lechery. [...] John, I
counted myself so plain, so poorly made, no honest love could come to
me! Suspicion kissed you when I did; I never knew how I should say my
love. It were a cold house I kept! (IV.205-210)

This realization helps Elizabeth forgive her husband, and relinquishing her
anger seems to bring her a measure of personal peace. Elizabeth's noblest act
comes in the end when she helps the tortured John Proctor forgive himself just
before his death.

Q. Character Sketch of Tituba

Tituba, the Reverend Parris‘s slave, is a woman from Barbados who practices
what the Puritans view as ―black magic.‖ Of course, she mainly does this
because the conniving Abigail manipulates her into doing it. Tituba admits her
supposed sin, but we never really find out what happens to her. The ambiguity
of her fate actually emphasizes that whether or not these women are in fact
witches is totally beside the point.

And we have to say that, although there is nothing in the play that directly
comments on it, racism undoubtedly plays a huge part in her fate. The fact that
she was convicted at all for her practices is actually inherently prejudiced.
Before being brought to Massachusetts, Tituba never saw singing, dancing,
and spell-casting as evil. Such practices were spiritual and descended from her
African roots. This is shown in Act IV, when we see poor Tituba say to her
jailer:

"Devil, him be pleasure-man in Barbados, him be singin and dancing

[…] It's you folks—you riles him up 'round here […] He freeze his soul in
Massachusetts, but in Barbados he just as sweet." (IV.15)

It's ironic that the Puritans, who came to America to escape religious
persecution, would practice such deliberate, cruel, and ignorant persecution
themselves.

Q. Character Sketch of Judge Danforth

Governor Danforth represents rigidity and an over-adherence to the law in The

Crucible. Danforth is clearly an intelligent man, highly respected and
successful. He arrives in Salem to oversee the trials of the accused witches with
 29

a serene sense of his own ability to judge fairly. The chaos of the trial doesn‘t
affect his own belief that he is the best judge. At the end of the play, Salem is
falling apart, Abigail has run away, having stolen Parris‘s life savings, and
many other lives have been ruined yet Danforth still cannot agree that the
trials were a sham. He remains firm in his conviction that the condemned
should not be executed. When John refuses to let him post his confession in
town, Danforth sends him away to be hanged, ―high over the town.‖ Danforth
believes in sticking by a principle in spite of all evidence that his belief is
wrong.

Despite his intelligence and prestige, Danforth is the most deluded a character
in the play. While modern audiences many find the idea of witches laughable,
Danforth reflects his time, an era when many people believed in witches and
witchcraft, (although it should be noted that Miller makes it clear that at least
a few of the residents of Salem are skeptical of witches). But even in Salem, in
1692, some people did not fall for the girls‘ ―pretense‖ as easily as Danforth
does. Once he believes the girls, lead by Abigail, really are possessed, Danforth
is trapped by his own ego, unable to see that they‘re lying despite mounting
evidence. He just can‘t go back and admit that he was fooled. Danforth
represents the evil of blind certainty in the play: he refuses to accept the truth
because to do so would humiliate him. He‘d rather see people die.

Q. Character Sketch of Mary Warren

Mary is the Proctors‘ servant after Abigail was let go. She‘s a weak person,
prone to hysterics and drawn to drama. She moves back and forth between the
pack of lying girls and the Proctors, drawn by the girls but knowing the
Proctors are innocent. She knows that the girls are lying and that there is no
witchcraft in Salem. She realizes that Abigail intends to use the ruse of
accusing Elizabeth of being a witch to get Elizabeth executed so Abigail can
marry John, and she knows that Elizabeth has never done anything wrong. For
much of the third act, Mary tries to help, despite her intense and justified fear
of Abigail and the girls. Yet she is not strong enough to stand up for what is
right, and eventually gives in to the girls, going so far as accusing John of being
a witch, too.

Q. Character Sketch of Giles Corey

Giles is a noble character in the play. He represents strength of will to the

other characters, who end up looking up to him or feeling cowed by him,
depending on how they have acted themselves. Early on the play, Giles sees the
possibility of witchcraft in town as intriguing, and he asks Rev. Hale why his
wife seems to be able to stop him from reading just by being in the room. But
by the middle of the play, when his wife has been arrested for witchcraft, Giles
 30

realizes his mistake and joins John in approaching the court to tell Danforth
he‘s wrong. Giles is also smart enough to realize that Putnam is using the
accusations of witchcraft as cover to try to take back property they‘ve fought
over for many years. He refuses to confess to witchcraft, even when he is
tortured. In a town where many people lie to save their own skins, and accuse
their neighbors rather than speak up for what is right, Giles stands apart as a
truly noble and brave man.

Q. Who is the protagonist of the Crucible?

Protagonist

John Proctor is the protagonist of the play. Once he enters the play, the real
plot begins. Up to that point, the play‘s exposition has introduced the town,
some of the people in the town and the situation that will drive the plot: the
accusations of witchcraft. Without John, the play would be a historical
retelling of a terrible time in American history. His arrival makes the stakes of
the play more specific, because John has a real dilemma: he wants to free his
wife and his friends (and, eventually, himself) from false accusations of
witchcraft, but he is asked to give up his dignity, honor and good name to do
so. While the audience sympathizes with John, we also recognize that he‘s a
flawed protagonist. His flaw of lust led him to commit the adultery that makes
him vulnerable to Abigail‘s manipulations.

John represents the central struggle of the play: whether to confess and falsely
accuse his neighbors, or to stand up for what he knows is right but face death
in doing so. Because John is uniquely aware that the girls, lead by Abigail, are
lying, and because he knows what Abigail is trying to achieve, his conflict is
especially profound. Most other people in Salem must have at least wondered
if there was some truth to the accusations of witchcraft, but John knows for
sure that the girls are faking everything. His decision not to falsely confess
resolves his conflict and ends the play. He changes from a man still naïve
enough to gently flirt with Abigail at the beginning of the play to a man strong
enough to give his own life to protect his name.

Q. Who is the Antagonist of the Crucible?

Antagonist

Abigail is the antagonist of the play. She stands opposed to John Proctor, even
though she claims to love him and want to be with him. Her refusal to believe
that their affair is over, and her desire for revenge on John and his wife,
Elizabeth, drive the action of the play. Abigail accuses Elizabeth of witchcraft
and makes up lies that send both Proctors to jail, and John to his death.
Abigail always acts selfishly and to save her own skin. At the same time,
 31

Abigail serves as a ―crucible‖ for the other characters, especially John. Her
actions cause him to choose between his honor and his life, and renounce his
past mistakes. Abigail also causes Elizabeth to reconsider whether she‘s been a
good wife to John. While Abigail doesn‘t change much over the course of the
play, she inspires great change in others. None of the events of the plot of the
play would have happened if Abigail had simply confessed to dancing in the
woods with Tituba. Instead, her lies end up killing dozens of people, including
the man she claims she loves.

Symbols used in Crucible

Symbols are objects, characters, figures, or colors used to represent abstract
ideas or concepts.

There is little symbolism within The Crucible, but, in its entirety, the play can
be seen as symbolic of the paranoia about communism that pervaded America
in the 1950s. Several parallels exist between the House Un-American Activities
Committee‘s rooting out of suspected communists during this time and the
seventeenth-century witch-hunt that Miller depicts in The Crucible, including
the narrow-mindedness, excessive zeal, and disregard for the individuals that
characterize the government‟s effort to stamp out a perceived social ill.
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.

Symbolism, Imagery, Allegory in Crucible

The Play Itself

This play doesn't mess around much with itty-bitty bits of symbolism...
because it doesn't need to. The whole play itself is one big angry, righteous
allegory for the intolerance of McCarthyism. The Crucible does for
McCartheism what Richard III and Game of Thrones do for the War of the
Roses.

So let's get down to business. For a decade spanning the late 1940's to the late
1950's, the American government was intensely suspicious of the possible
 32

influence of Communism on citizens and institutions. The FBI accused

thousands of people of ―un-American activities‖ (read: being a Commie) and
monitored a ton more—and the people who were monitored often ended up
with careers and personal that were toast. And the head honcho of this
Communist-hunting was a dude named Senator Joseph McCarthy.

No one wanted to hire a maybe-Communist, or hang out with a maybe-

Communist. Basically, the people accused of being a Communist had to eat
lunch all by them. With no paycheck. You may have heard the slogan "Better
Dead Than Red"? Yeah—McCarthyism set about to convince people that being
Communist was a fate worse than death.

Here's the real kicker: more often than not, there was little to no evidence to
support the accusations. Nevertheless, the FBI and various government groups
involved in monitoring or accusing individuals (such as The House Un-
American Activities Committee) enjoyed widespread support from the
American population.

Sound familiar? Ooh, you betcha. There are more parallels between
Communism-hunting and witch-hunting than there are bonnets in 17th
Century Salem. But we'll outline a few of the biggies:

Paranoia

The stage—a literal stage in the case of The Crucible and a figurative stage in
the case of McCarthyism—is set awash in paranoia. There's an immense threat.
There's a huge amount of fear. People are quaking in their boots and looking
over their shoulders.

With McCarthyism, this fear had a lot to do with the Soviet Union. During
WWII, America and the USSR were buddy-bud-buds (or allies, if you want to
get technical about it), but all that changed after the war ended and a new
war—the Cold War—started. Suddenly, the Soviets were a Big Bad, with the
power to annihilate the United States with the push of a button. (Ka-boom.)

So people started viewing American Communists—a teensy minority—as a

threat. What if they were in cahoots with the USSR?

In The Crucible, Puritan society also sees itself as threatened. Not only are
there Native Americans beyond the borders of places like Salem, but those
Native Americans ain't too happy about Europeans moving in on their turf:

The parochial snobbery of these people was partly responsible for their
failure to convert the Indians. Probably they also preferred to take land
from heathens rather than from fellow Christians. At any rate, very few
Indians were converted, and the Salem folk believed that the virgin
 33

forest was the Devil‘s last preserve, his home base and the citadel of his
final stand. To the best of their knowledge the American forest was the
last place on earth that was not paying homage to God.

And, as a bonus threat, there's also the presence of non-Puritans in

Massachusetts, whose ways are seen as impure and un-Godly.

So people in The Crucible, fearing the "wicked" outside world, start looking in
Salem in order to see if there are any un-Godly men and women that might
bring the threat of sin to their very doorstep.

In both The Crucible and America during the McCarthy era, people were
operating under the "a few bad apples spoils the barrel" philosophy... and
taking that philosophy to the ultimate extreme.

Flying Accusations

Go ahead and count all the accusations that fly in The Crucible. Wait—on
second thought, don't. Counting the accusations in Miller's play is like
counting the commas.

And for every "Ahhh! She's a witch!" we hear in The Crucible, be aware that
there were approximately ten "Ahhh! He's a Communist‖ being flung around
during McCarthyism. The famous question of McCarthyism—"Are you now or
were you ever a member of the Communist Party?" sound a whole lot like the
question posed again and again in The Crucible:

DANFORTH: Mr. Proctor. When the Devil came to you did you see
Rebecca Nurse in his company? [...] Come, man, take courage – did you
ever see her with the Devil?

PROCTOR, almost inaudibly: No. [...]

DANFORTH: Did you ever see her sister, Mary Easty, with the Devil?

PROCTOR: No, I did not.

DANFORTH, his eyes narrow on Proctor: Did you ever see Martha
Corey with the Devil?

PROCTOR: I did not.

DANFORTH, realizing, slowly putting the sheet down: Did you ever see
anyone with the Devil? PROCTOR: I did not.

DANFORTH: Proctor, you mistake me. I am not empowered to trade

your life for a lie. You have most certainly seen some person with the
Devil. Proctor is silent. Mr. Proctor, a score of people have already
testified they saw this woman with the Devil. ( IV.243-250)
 34

Lives Demolished

Much in the way you could save your hide if you told Danforth that you saw so-
and-so "with the Devil," you could save your career if you told the House Un-
American Activities Committee (HUAC) the names of members of the
Communist party. And if you didn't... well, it sucked to be you.

Compare the plight of John Proctor to that of the Hollywood Ten. Sure, it's
weird to compare one dude in the frozen nightmare scape of Salem to ten
industry folks in sunny California.

In October 1947, HUAC began a public investigation into Hollywood

Communism. Some studio heads and other film industry professionals
cooperated with the committee's investigation, furnishing names of suspected
leftists in the industry. (Walt Disney named names, as did Ronald Reagan.)
But ten witnesses named before the committee—who were in fact current or
former members of the Communist Party—refused to cooperate with HUAC.
These guys—so-called Hollywood Ten—were eventually convicted of contempt
of Congress. They were also basically kicked out of Hollywood.

And it wasn't just these ten people, either. The list swelled from ten to
over three hundred people, including Orson Welles, Charlie Chaplin and
Arthur Miller. Many of these people were totally and completely out of work.
Their livelihood evaporated and their good names were totally tarnished.

PROCTOR, with a cry of his whole soul: Because it is my name! Because

I cannot have another in my life! Because I lie and sign myself to lies!
Because I am not worth the dust on the feet of them that hang! How
may I live without my name? I have given you my soul; leave me my
name!
(IV.293)

Arthur Miller—not long on subtlety, but huge on impact and political

commentary

Q. A Reading of Arthur Miller‟s The Crucible in The Light of Jean

Baudrillard‟s Discourse on Simulation

Foreword
The condition of the girls‘ bewitchment in The Crucible is not a mere pretense
or psychotic dissimulation by a bunch of wicked minded, lecherous young
girls as seen by many of Miller‘s scholars. The girls are neither liars nor
pretenders but rather perfect simulators. This assumption implies that these
girls, regardless of their intentions and personal agendas, have seen, felt and
 35

experienced, what they claim to have encountered and consequently

produced the right symptoms of bewitchment. Significantly, the simulators
are minors and young girls who are demonized by a society controlled by
stringent moral codes. It becomes quite normal for those girls to produce new
realities of their own to displace, or colonize the current realities established
by the puritan society of Salem.

Critical commentary on The Crucible falls within several interrelated thematic

categories. The first among these categories is the frequent critical emphasis
on the association between McCarthyism and the Salem witch-hunt where
some critics questioned the validity of the analogy and attacked Miller's liberal
dismissal of anticommunism. Another related category examines the nature
and authenticity of the Puritan world Miller portrays in the play. Herbert Blau,
David Levin and Gary Arnold maintained that the Puritanism of the drama
reflected Miller's alteration of its tenets to suit his liberal perspective.2 Other
critics not only have questioned the authenticity of the play, but also attacked
it as lacking in quality. Walter Kerr, Joseph Shipley and Robert Warshow have
condemned The Crucible for its artificial and perfunctory plot, inexpressive
characters, and obvious themes. 3 Other critics such as Alice Griffin, and
Albert Hunt empathized with Proctor and his human ordeal and highlighted
his heroism.4 Several more critics have focused their attention on contrasting
Proctor‘s heroism with Abigail‘s and the other girls‘ wickedness that led to
mass hysteria in the community.5 Other critics have linked the hysteria
spawned by the unconstrained irrationality to the language Miller uses to
define character and to signify the perversion of the social, moral, political,
and legal dimensions of Salem. As a result, those critics have commended the
play on the merit of its language and the speech of its characters.6

As the catastrophes that befell the people in Salem were initially triggered by
the young girls‘ hysterical cries of bewitchment, a number of Miller‘s scholars
viewed Abigail and her cohorts as malicious and vindictive girls driven by their
cruelty and personal interests.7 One of the reasons, I believe, behind the
animosity of the critics towards the girls in The Crucible is the influence of the
negative view the original Salem girls have received.8 Abigail is seen as
basically motivated by her desire to supplant Elizabeth in Proctor‘s bed.
Elizabeth Frayn maintains that the encounter between Proctor and Abigail in
which he threatens to expose her if she does not free his wife shows Abigail‘s
―perverted motives accusing indiscriminately as she has been accused of
looseness. At times she psychotically believes in her own inventions of
witchcraft‖.

Frayn, like many other critics, stops short of diagnosing the girls‘ condition of
bewitchment as a case of simulation that colonizes and displaces the real and
the conventional truth.9 Simulation is the other of representation.
 36

Representation recognizes the distinction between the real and its copy. It
works on the basis that there is a distinction between signifier and signified. In
classical terms there is an absolute distinction between the word ‗witch‘ and
what that word represents. Similarly, common sense tells us that there is a
clear and necessary distinction between an image of a witch and a real witch.
Simulation, by contrast, short-circuits such distinctions. Saturated by images
of witches acquired from African and Indian popular culture narrated to them
by Tituba and other slaves,10 for the girls the real becomes unthinkable
without the copy. In other words, simulation involves the disturbing idea that
the copy is not a copy of something real, but only of another copy. The witches
of the mind, which are copies of the witches of the folk tales, become far more
real than anyone can hope to produce, they turn in the mind of the girls into
real people such as Elizabeth and Proctor among others in The Crucible.

Accordingly, I want to argue that the accusers‘ condition of bewitchment is not

a mere pretence or psychotic dissimulation by a bunch of wicked minded,
lecherous young girls. The girls are not liars and pretenders but rather perfect
simulators. This assumption implies that these girls, regardless of their
intentions and personal agendas have seen, felt and experienced, what they
claim to have encountered and consequently acted and behaved as bewitched
and viewed their victims as real witches. The physical signs they have exhibited
in the courtroom are signs of what Baudrillard terms the ‗hyperreal‘.

As a matter of fact, the play is pregnant with references that attribute the girls‘
tendency towards generating images without origins to their situatedness,
ethnicity, social and cultural background. Significantly, the bewitched are
minors and young girls who are demonized by a society controlled by stringent
moral codes: Betty Parris is the little daughter of the town‘s clergyman, whose
Christianity is nothing more than a continual preaching about the horrors of
hell; Tituba is an oppressed black slave homesick for Barbados;11 Abigail,
Parris‘s niece, is a young girl sexually and emotionally abused and
abandoned by her married ex-employer; Mary Warren is a poor servant in the
house of a bully and an adulterer. It is in fact quite normal for those girls to
simulate new realities of their own to displace or colonize the current realities
established by the puritan society of Salem.

Foulkes rightly maintains that Miller from the onset of the play presents ―a
society which possessed a tenuous and uneasy relationship to realities of
various kinds‖. This precarious relationship with realities where signs have no
fixed signifieds is the very core of simulation in The Crucible.

At the beginning of the play, Abigail, Tituba, Mary Warren and the other girls
deny that there is any witchcraft attached to their dance in the forest. Of
course, we know that Abigail is lying when she denies witchcraft being part of
 37

their festive activity in the woods because she and the other girls in fact
attempt trafficking with the devil á la Barbados style under the influence of
Tituba: Abigail drinks blood in her attempt to have Elizabeth Proctor killed.
However, Abigail‘s initial denial can be seen as evidence on Baudrillard‘s
assumption that in simulation reality is impossible. For Baudrillard
―simulation collapses the poles of the true and the false into one another
where the imaginary conceals that reality no more exists outside than inside
the limits of the artificial parameter‖. Since there is no reality to embark on,
then the real and the unreal acquire the same status and the process of
simulation is inaugurated. Initially it emerges that Abigail‘s fabrication of a
different reality is motivated, among other things, by her concern about her
name, which is a major sign, a virtual entity that stands above and beyond the
temporality of whipping and lashing. When Parris confronts her with the
gossip circulating in town about her present state of unemployment, Abigail
indignantly defends the virtual sign that represents her physical reality by
collapsing the true and the false in a rhetoric that acquires a reality of its own:

Abigail: My name is good in the village! I will not have it said my name
is soiled! (I, 21)

As the girls find themselves cast in a position where they have no other choice
but to confess to witchcraft under their initial witnessing of Tituba‘s torture,
they perfect their roles and internalize them with great spontaneity to the
extent that they become so real. It is no coincidence that Miller accentuates
Abigail‘s tenuous hold on reality in one of her dialogues with Proctor. She tells
Proctor: ―I cannot sleep for dreamin‘; I cannot dream but wake and walk about
the house as though I‘d find you comin‘ through some door‖ (I, 29). Abigail‘s
tendency, from the very beginning of the play, to believe in and sustain non-
conventional forms of reality paves the way for her simulations. Her attempts
at enlisting the help of spirits to keep Proctor‘s love for her, and later her own
confession to seeing Proctor in her dreams as if real say a lot about her
dialogue with conventional reality. As a result, I find it very simplistic to
dismiss the girls as liars and pretenders. In fact, they are sheer simulators
because simulation, in Baudrillard‘s words, ―no longer needs to be rational, it
no longer measures itself against either an ideal or negative instance. It is no
longer anything but operational‖ (2).

Though the theocracy in Salem is partly responsible for the creation of the new
reality12, it is Abigail and the other girls who prove beyond doubt that a
fictitious reality becomes as authentic as a conventional one. In fact, I highly
doubt, that after the initial cries of Tituba followed by Abigail‘s and the other
girls‘ confessions that the girls perceive of themselves as liars or pretenders.
The amazing thing about simulation is that it obliterates the lines between fact
and fiction. This collusion of fact and fiction or reality and virtual reality is
 38

seen in the sudden awakening of Betty Parris and Ann Putnam, and in their
spontaneous participation in the chorus of confessions, though they were not
under any threat by Abigail or others. As a matter of fact, Abigail does not
perceive of herself as liar and pretender; and most likely she believes in every
single word she utters while uttering it. In her dialogues with Parris, Proctor,
and the judges one discerns her genuineness. Her heart-felt idiom is not a
mere pretence that leaves the principle of reality intact. It conveys another
truth that she lives and experiences. In her defense of her name against the
insinuations that it is soiled, Abigail, correctly and insightfully, describes
Elizabeth Proctor as ―a bitter woman, a lying, cold, sniveling woman‖ (I, 21). In
fact, Abigail‘s description of Elizabeth as ―lying‖ makes sense only towards the
end of the play when Elizabeth‘s lie, ironically acquitting Abigail and Proctor of
fornication, leads to Proctor‘s death and confirms beyond doubt the opinion of
the judges about the accusers‘ sincerity. This gist from the playwright about
the true nature of Abigail‘s utterances shows that there is to Abigail more than
meets the eyes of most of her critics, and confirms beyond doubt how the
simulacrum cancels the conventional boundaries between the real and the
imaginary or the truth and the false. Although the virtual reality created by
Abigail comes for a short while under fire by Proctor and Mary Warren during
the latter‘s attempt at recanting, Abigail and the other girls succeed in
neutralizing Mary and turn the situation to their advantage when the judges
refuse to take Mary‘s claim of faking bewitchment as truthful

Parris: But you did turn cold, did you not? I myself picked you up many
times, and your skin were icy. Mr. Danforth, you Danforth: I saw that
many times.
Proctor: She only pretended to faint, Your Excellency. They‘re all
marvelous pretenders.
Hathorne: Then can she pretend to faint now? (III, 95)

Mary‘s drastic failure to produce signs of bewitchment upon the request of the
judges proves to the court that she is a liar at her moment of conventional
truth. Why is this? Baudrillard clearly tells us that the logic of simulation has
nothing to do with the logic of facts and the order of reason. Baudrillard
believes that ―the impossibility of rediscovering an absolute level of the real is
of the same order as the impossibility of staging illusion. Illusion is no longer
possible, because the real is no longer possible‖ (19). The reader and the
audience who approach the play with a conventional sense of reality in mind
denounce Mary for her cowardice and may condemn her for not pretending to
show signs of bewitchment, the way she and the other girls supposedly did
before. In fact, Mary‘s failure to pretend bewitchment validates the idea that
simulation operates at a totally different scale where illusion becomes
 39

impossible. Mary Warren and the other girls are simply generating models of a
real without origin or reality.

The genuineness and passion with which Mary Warren recounts, to Proctor
and Elizabeth, her earlier experience in court tells a lot about a model of reality
she and the other girls have taken for the truth regardless of the damage they
have caused:

Mary Warren: […] and I feel a misty coldness climbin‘ up my back, and
the skin on my skull begin to creep, and I feel a clamp round my neck
and I cannot breath air; and then- [entranced]- I hear a voice, a
screamin‘ voice, and it were my voice- and all at once I remembered
everything she done to me (II, 57).

As a result of her authentically felt experience of bewitchment, Mary Warren

fails to return to the reality principle and hold to it by the unmasking of
pretence. In court, and under the simulated cries of her peers, she reverts to
the virtual model of reality and accuses John Proctor of being an agent to
Lucifer. Her accusation of Proctor confirms, in Baudrillard‘s words, that
simulation ―no longer needs to be rational, because it no longer measures itself
against either an ideal or negative instance. It is no longer anything but
operational‖ (2). Warren‘s failure to fake signs of bewitchment upon the
request of the court vigorously proclaims the collapse of traditional reality.
It is not surprising, too, that Abigail, the chief simulator turns out in the words
of Parris to be a thief. ―Tonight I discovered my – my strong box is broke
into…thirty-one pounds is gone‖ (IV, 111). Parris believes that Abigail has run
away in fear of her life after the Andover incidents have taken place, where
rioters in the town have over thrown the court. This turn of events symbolically
shows that simulation robs away conventional meanings and their values, and
leaves reality penniless and confused. Abigail‘s sudden disappearance is not a
sign of the sterility of the simulacra, but rather it is a cautious step taken by the
simulacra to protect itself against the onslaught of conventionality. The
theocracy developed in Salem prevents the authorities from accepting the
simulacrum as unreal. On the contrary, they believe in its authentic reality and
thus they become, in Baudrillard‘s terms, ―like the army doctors who dealt
with the simulator as a real patient and dismissed him from the army‖ (19).
They did so not because they believe in a third order or any order of simulacra,
but because they want to preserve their conventional understanding and
perception of the traditional order of reality where signs have fixed meaning.
Hale and Parris defend conventional reality with Don Quixotean zeal:

Proctor: How may such a woman (Rebecca Nurse) murder children?

Hale: Man, remember, until an hour before the devil fell, God thought
him beautiful in heaven (II, 68).
 40

Proctor: Excellency, does it not strike upon you that so many of these
women have lived so long with such upright reputation, andParris: Do
you read the Gospel, Mr. Proctor?
Proctor: I read the Gospel. Parris: I think not, or you should surely
know that Cain were an upright man, and yet he did kill Abel (III, 83).

What Hale and Parris in essence are saying is that the dictates of the girls,
about even the most respectable people in town, can be true because the bible
sets examples of previously righteous people and angels turning evil. This
strict adherence to the Cartesian truth blinds the authorities‘ vision to the
power of simulation. Though at some point in the drama Hale declares that the
girls are pretenders, he fails to unmask them, simply because the girls are not
pretenders, they are simulators; and he, like the rest of the theocracy in Salem
opts to stick to the tenets of conventional reality that sees things in terms of
false and truth. Hale‘s misunderstanding of simulation as lies and pretence
reflect his conventional understanding of the signs. He apparently fails to
grasp that the simulacrum is a reality on its own right: a reality that does not
mask the absence of truth or reality, but rather as a truth of its own with no
connection or relation to a model. Incidentally, Proctor towards the end of the
play intuitively realizes that the simulacrum is a force in action and that this
force is capable of mediating or supplanting conventional reality. When
Danforth asks him in court whether he will confess himself or not, he
militantly responds with ―God is dead!‖(III, 105) Proctor‘s significant response
mourns the death of Cartesian and conventional realities and opens his eyes to
the terrific potential of the hyperreal. From this moment on Proctor begins to
simulate his grand death through sacrificing his physical existence for his
name. In conclusion, the power of simulation and the fecundity of the sign
make their presence all through the play. At the beginning, Reverend John
Hale pompously announces that he can distinguish precisely between
diabolical and merely sinful actions; in the last act the remorseful Hale tries
desperately to persuade innocent convicts to confess falsely in order to avoid
execution. The orthodox court, moreover, will not believe that Abigail
Williams, who has falsely confessed to witchcraft, falsely denied adultery, and
falsely cried out upon ―witches‖ is a ―whore‖; but it is convinced that proctor,
who has told the truth about both his adultery and his innocence of witchcraft,
is a witch. Why is this? Simply, because the authorities in Salem, have taken
the girls‘ signs of bewitchment for real not because the authorities believe in
the power of simulation but because they want to maintain their hold on
conventional reality where signs have fixed meaning. As a result the challenge
of simulation is never admitted by power. Baudrillard tells us that the
―established order can do nothing against simulation because the law is a
simulacrum of the second order, whereas simulation is of the third order,
 41

beyond true and false, beyond equivalences, beyond rational distinctions upon
which the whole of the social and power depend‖ (21). As simulation collapses
the real with the imaginary, the true with the false, it does not provide
equivalents for the real, nor does it reproduce it. And because the real cannot
isolate or identify simulation, we can no longer isolate or define the real itself.
Thus The Crucible ushers in a postmodern era in which the hermeneutics of
depth have been replaced by the play of surfaces, and the simulacrum
has superseded the origin. Accordingly in the play conventional reality and
truth give way to the virtual reality manufactured by the girls where magical
thinking and incantations replace rational argument, thoughtful analysis, and
careful research and investigation.
Notes / References

1 Both Bentley and Warshow chide Miller for his fuzzy-minded liberalism. Eric
Bentley, for instance, assaults Miller's liberal dismissal of anti-communism and asserts that
though ―people are being persecuted on quite chimerical grounds; communism is not
merely a chimera‖. Warshow derogatively indicates that ―Miller has nothing to say about
the Salem trials and makes only the flimsiest pretense that he has. The Crucible was written
to say something about Alger Hiss and Owen Lattimore, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg,
Senator McCarthy, the actors who have lost their jobs on radio and television, in short the
whole complex that is spoken of, with a certain lowering of the voice, as the ‗present
atmosphere‘‖.

2 Levin contends that ―the fault lies in Mr. Miller‘s understanding of the period; its
consequences damage his play as ‗essential‘ history, as moral instruction, and as art‖. Blau
in his critique of Miller‘s treatment of the Salem witch-hunt criticizes Miller for wanting
―the puritan community without puritan premises or puritan institutions‖. Arnold, too,
maintains that the play ―defies serious respect by failing to project itself imaginatively into a
past in which witchcraft did have a dreadful spiritual credibility‖.
3 For instance Kerr maintains that Miller in the Crucible ―seems to be taking a step
backward into mechanical parable, into the sort of play which lives not in the warmth of
humbly observed human souls but in the ideological heat of polemic‖. Shipley, on the other
hand, believes that ―the play is not so much a creation of dramatic art as a concoction of the
author‘s contriving mind‖. And Warshow sees the relationship between Proctor and Abigail
as a ―retreat into easy theatricality that does not explain anything in theatrical terms‖.

4 Alice Griffin, for instance believes that the play achieves its tragic status as a result of
Proctor‘s ―intensified awareness triggered by his ruthless chastisement by fire‖. She adds
that, through ―suffering, Proctor arrives at the realization that he is responsible both to
himself and to his community. In this way his defeat by death is a victory‖. Albert Hunt
observes that The Crucible meets the criteria of a Sophoclean tragedy because of Proctor‘s
triumph over his guilt of adultery with Abbey and his attaining a high level of consciousness
that profits his society. He further confirms that Proctor is so real because he stands at the
heart of all the complex tensions of the Salem community. He is totally involved in the
tragedy socially, intellectually, emotionally and morally. As a result, ―his death becomes,
more than a pointlessly heroic gesture, a rediscovery of his own goodness‖.
 42

5 Iska Alter and Thomas Porter see Abigail as evil incarnate whose ultimate aim is to
sacrifice everyone to her whims and id based desires. In the same vein, more critics such as
Penelope Curtis, Stephen Fender, William McGill and Madline Douglas, have seen in
Abigail an instigator of mass hysteria and have assumed this to be the main theme of the
play. Curtis, for instance, maintains that ―the most interesting feature of The Crucible is that
it is so impressively a play about evil forces that generate mass hysteria, despite the fact that
it seems to be a play discrediting belief in such forces‖ (1956:45). Fender equally believes
that the play is a cogent statement about the destructive tensions of our own world released
through the creation of hysteria and paranoia. He sees Mary Warren‘s failure to recant as a
―dramatic representation of hysteria at its summit‖ (1967:88). McGill argues that ―mass
hysteria created by Abigail and her cohorts devastates all attempts at maintaining a rational
community‖. Douglas further adds that the mass hysteria created by the girls has triggered
moral absolutism in the judges and placed them ―in league with the devil‖.

6 Curtis argues that the speech of Miller‘s characters has the ―saltiness, the physicality, of a
life lived close to the soil and the waste; it is enriched, too, by a literary influence that has
likewise been assimilated into daily life: the Bible partly mediated by a seventeenth-century
sermon convention. From both, it draws a quality of passion‖. Stephen Marino, Edmund
Morgan, A.P. Foulkes and, Fender believe that language in The Crucible has been perverted
and deprived of its moral referents by the girls and other community members as they bear
false witness. Fender insists that the language of the play is devoid of any religious referents
as the Salem community lacks the required religious ethics and values. However, he adds,
―Proctor finally demolishes their phony language and painfully reconstructs a halting, by his
honest way of speaking in which words are once again related to their lexis‖.

7 A positive, remark about Abigail is timidly pronounced by Auslander. Auslander, taking

his queue from Mary Daly (1978) who argues that medieval and renaissance Europe used
the witch hunt to break the spirits of strong women, suggests that Abigail belongs to the
group of strong women who‘s ―assertion of her sexuality in Miller‘s play certainly marks her
as inassimilable into the patriarchal family as it is represented there‖

8 Julian Franklyn suggests that the children engaged in a conscious fraud. ―The girls found
themselves mistresses of a gratifying situation whereby they held the whole adult world of
their environment at their mercy, and they were too glad to wield the power thus conferred
upon them‖ (1971:60). Russell Hope Robbins agrees that the ―vicious girls knew exactly
what they were doing.‖ Their testimony was given in ―a state of utter delinquency, causing
death without rhyme or reason, for sport‖ (1988:435). Ronald Seth condemns the accusers
and abhors the idea that the judges ―could accept the charades of naughty boys and girls
and taking the figments of their childish fantasy worlds as acceptable truths, could send old
women and men to their deaths on the gallows‖. Samuel Eliot Morison blames the girls for
their wickedness and suggests that ―a good spanking administered to the younger girls, and
lovers provided for the older ones‖ might have resolved the conflict in the town.

9 Chadwick Hansen argues that the ―possessed‖ girls were afflicted because of their belief in
the devil and his powers. In explaining the girls‘ odd behavior, Hansen rests his
assumptions on modern medical and psychiatric knowledge and concludes that the fits and
contortions were genuine and that the ―afflicted were suffering from hysteria.‖ He
eventually concludes that the behavior of the victims was ―not fraudulent but pathological.‖
The girls were hysterical in the clinical rather than the popular sense (1969:168-85). Marion
L. Starkey maintains that the accusing girls suffered from hysteria brought on by the
 43

tensions of Calvinism and the absence of legitimate outlets for their ―natural high spirits.‖
She describes one of the young accusers, Mercy Lewis, as a ―young paranoid‖ (1973:127).

11 Tituba‘s identity, ethnicity and color have been the subject of many critical essays and
books. In the original judicial records she is believed to be of West Indies origin. Many
narratives of the period describe her as Indian. However, in later literary texts including
Miller‘s The Crucible Tituba‘s identity changes from Indian to a Negro. Among the
interesting essays that examine this metamorphosis in the identity of Tituba are Chadwick
Hansen‘s (1974) and Veta Smith Tucker‘s (2000).

12 Cotton Mather, a highly esteemed Puritan cleric and the first historian of Salem
witchcraft, maintained that an ―army of devils is horribly broke in upon the place which is
the center…of our English settlements‖ (2003:15). Robert Calef, a Mather‘s contemporary,
maintained that Mather and other fellow clerics had ―encouraged the witch mania as part of
an effort to drive the people of Massachusetts back to the church‖ (1866:83). Vernon L.
Parrington laid the blame on Puritanism as a way of life. He saw Massachusetts as a stifling
environment ―with every unfamiliar idea likely to be seized upon as evidence of the devil‘s
wiles‖

The Crucible:
Historical Background and Critical Overview

Arthur Miller's The Crucible was first performed in January 1953. It was
intended to present the writer's view on the rise of McCarthyism during the
late forties and early fifties of the twentieth century. The play's events were
based on the historical witch hunt trials of Salem, Massachusetts in the late
seventeenth century in which twenty people were found guilty of witchcraft
and hanged, whereas some others, who had also been accused, saved
themselves by confessing to witchcraft and accusing other people.
McCarthyism, after the name of U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy, came to mean
"ruinous accusation without evidence" (Popkin, 1964, p. 139). It had been
likened to a witch hunt, hence Miller wrote a play about a real one. Similarities
between the the Salem court and the McCarthy hearings that examined and
interrogated radicals were clearly found. The play tacitly suggested that
embracing leftist thought in America at that time was equivalent to an
accusation of witchcraft in earlier times stirring panic and suffering in both
cases. Moss (1972) argued that McCarthyism represents for Miller the source
of moral and political collapse through the creation of hysteria and paranoia.

During McCarthy's congressional hearings, as in Salem's court, the proper

process of justice was overlooked and hysteria prevailed through raving
rumors and vengeful lies. Many witnesses found no escape but to deliver
dishonest confessions and were forced to falsely accuse their friends and
acquaintances to save their careers. As in the miserable instance of Salem,
naming others was regarded as an indication of honesty and seriousness.
 44

Those who protested against the hearings were charged of collaborating with
"the red devil" or communist Russia rather than simply the devil as in Salem.
Miller in the introduction of The Crucible alludes to the play's contemporary
reference and invites comparisons between the two widely separated events.
With regard to the victims of the witch hunt of Salem he says: "One can only
pity them all, just as we will be pitied someday" (p. 22).

Miller in his notes to the play indicates that the witch hunt erupted when the
repressions of order of the Salem theocracy were heavier than seemed
necessary by the dangers against which the order was organized. It was a
vicious expression of the terror which set in among all classes when
the balance between the authority of the state and individual freedom began
to turn toward greater individual freedom. The action takes place in 1692, at
a time when people were living in a strictly unified society based on the
puritan principles. Discipline and obedience were the primary rules and
society believed that unity formed the best protection against both hostile
nature and the Indian enemy. Such an unbendingly rigid society implies that
any form of individuality will be considered rebellious or dangerous and
generates doubts and fears among its members, that is why Miller refers to the
strong propensity to mind other people's business. Bonnet (1982) observes
that we have therefore a primarily explosive situation where unity imposed by
a theocratic authority both ensures and jeopardizes the individual safety, thus
the slightest violation in its defenses becomes a channel for all individual and
hitherto unexpressed passions. The ordinary disagreements among its
members such as envy, jealousy, revenge, lust for power and boundary
disputes gradually expanded into a wider, extensive quarrel that soon gets out
of control under the cover of accusations of witchcraft against the victims – the
result being an intensification of the the already inflated authority.

The elements of conflict, however, in such a situation are too large to be

defined within the limits of a play. Thus, Miller offered the main character,
John Proctor, as a nascent liberal who was victimized by the witch hunt
because of his more or less conscious opposition to Puritanism (Walker, 1956).
In addition, Proctor is troubled by an intolerable sense of personal guilt due to
a love affair prior to the play's events with the maid girl, Abigail Williams, who
ultimately accuses his wife of witchcraft. His moral obligation to save his wife
from the charge and his pressing need to restore his self-esteem ultimately
leads him to be accused and condemned as a witch. Bonnet (1982) stresses the
dual structure of the play for it has the content of social hysteria based on the
strife between the puritanical authority and the individuals; at the same time it
takes the form of the interior psychological guilt-ridden conflict within the
hero psyche concluded with his tragic downfall and triumph. It is through
identifying with protagonist's moral dilemma that the audience becomes
 45

directly involved in the social tragedy that overtook Salem in the late
seventeenth century. Steinberg (1972) argues that the play is raised to true
tragic status by means of the higher consciousness that Proctor achieves
through his ordeal by fire. Moreover, Hogan (1972) maintained that it qualifies
as a Greek tragedy because Proctor through overcoming the painful agony and
remorse owing to his past unfaithfulness, he achieves social ethics which
promote and liberate the community. Huftel (1972) focused on portraying the
progress of Proctor's heroism arguing that he rejects conformity and adopts
radical opposition to the the beliefs of an irrational society.

On the other hand, Proctor's heroism has been contrasted with Abby's evil
madness. Alter (1989) asserted that she represents the disorder created by the
release of irrational energy and forces. Porter (1979) explains that she achieves
awesome evil because of her firm resolution to lose everyone to her vicious
purposes and her dangerous ability to pervert the sacred task of bearing
witness. McGill, (1981) contends that Miller has captured one of the basic
realities of Salem events: while characteristic of their times, they also
represented a loss of balance, a breakdown in the conventions which make
communal life possible and human life bearable. Today, the Salem witch hunt
as well as the McCarthy era are far back in time. Nevertheless, The Crucible
still has some political significance for our time since, as Miller maintains, "the
balance has yet to struck between order and freedom" (p. 22). In addition, as
audiences, many of us cannot help but admire the heroic suffering and courage
of the victims.

Q. Pragmatics and the Dramatic Analysis of the Crucible

Pragmatics, the study of "contextual meaning" (Yule, 1996, p. 3), is a type of

study that involves a consideration of how speakers arrange what they want to
say in reference to who they are talking to, where, when and under what
circumstances. Hence, it provides a valuable framework for the analysis of
plays since language can be regarded as the mainspring of the action. As Bryan
Magee (1999) maintains, a play consists primarily of people talking to one
another, walking about the stage, picking up objects, putting them down again,
sitting in chairs, getting out of them. If there is indeed dramatic physical
action, such as a fist-fight or a shoot-out, it takes only a couple of minutes or
perhaps only seconds. Magee adds that we may come out of a play feeling that
it is full of action whereas in another play we may feel that there is "not enough
action." Yet the characters in both cases will have been doing much the same
things: walking around the stage, sitting about, talking to one another. It was
J. L. Austin who early drew people's attention to a class of statements that he
called "performative utterances," such as "I thank you", " I bet," apologize."
 46

These statements cannot be said to be true or false because they do not

describe an action but perform it. His work on the speech acts explains why
some plays are regarded to be full of action, some others are not. Mike Short
(1996) points out that in many respects, the conversation between characters
in dramatic texts is similar to natural real-life conversation, hence lends itself
readily to similar kinds of analysis. This actually means treating the dramatic
text as a series of communicative acts to provide dramatic criticism with a way
of explaining how meanings are arrived at. Mick Short (1989) further suggests
that applying pragmatic and discourse analysis theories to dramatic texts may
help to rescue dramatic criticism from the variability of performance analysis
on the one hand and the inadequacy of traditional textual analysis on the
other. T. A. van Dijk (1976), in his attempt to present the philosophical
preliminaries of an integrated theory of literary studies, stresses the natural
place of a pragmatic account of literature in such a theory. He assumes that
in literary analysis the focus should not only be on the examination of the
literary text, as in most literary studies, but also on the process of literary
communication.

In The Crucible, the witch hunt does not get its original impetus from fact: it is
based merely on the rumor of witchcraft. A whole community is at stake by
means of gossip which soon turns into a hysteria. The power of the accusers
over the victims is essentially "verbal": it first begins with Abigail's accusations
of the women of Salem, then the hysteria spreads all over the town till it gets
out of control. The Crucible then displays the destructive power of language
since the conversational performances of the characters largely determine
their fate and the fate of other characters. Pragmatic theories, particularly the
speech act theory (SAT) as explored in the work of J. L. Austin and Searle help
us to explain systematically how this destructive process works ( Lowe, 1998).
Moreover, the play is deeply rooted in a setting where institutional events and
conventional acts with participants in public roles are enacted publicly via
public procedures: all the victims of the witch hunt are prosecuted before the
the sate court. Consequently, it forms a considerable potential for a literary
pragmatic examination since many of Austin's (1962) original SAT examples
were drawn from this category of conversational acts (Herman, 1995)

Story of Writing Crucible by Miller

Q. Why I Wrote „The Crucible‟: An Artist's Answer to Politics by
Arthur Miller

As I watched The Crucible taking shape as a movie over much of the past year,
the sheer depth of time that it represents for me kept returning to mind. As
 47

those powerful actors blossomed on the screen, and the children and the
horses, the crowds and the wagons, I thought again about how I came to cook
all this up nearly fifty years ago, in an America almost nobody I know seems to
remember clearly. In a way, there is a biting irony in this film's having been
made by a Hollywood studio, something unimaginable in the fifties. But there
they are -- Daniel Day-Lewis (John Proctor) scything his sea-bordered field,
Joan Allen (Elizabeth) lying pregnant in the frigid jail, Winona Ryder (Abigail)
stealing her minister-uncle's money, majestic Paul Scofield (Judge Danforth)
and his righteous empathy with the Devil-possessed children, and all of them
looking as inevitable as rain.

I remember those years -- they formed The Crucible's skeleton -- but I have
lost the dead weight of the fear I had then. Fear doesn't travel well; just as it
can warp judgment, its absence can diminish memory's truth. What terrifies
one generation is likely to bring only a puzzled smile to the next. I remember
how in 1964, only twenty years after the war, Harold Clurman, the director of
Incident at Vichy, showed the cast a film of a Hitler speech, hoping to give
them a sense of the Nazi period in which my play took place. They watched as
Hitler, facing a vast stadium full of adoring people, went up on his toes in
ecstasy, hands clasped under his chin, a sublimely self gratified grin on his
face, his body swivelling rather cutely, and they giggled at his overacting.

Likewise, films of Senator Joseph McCarthy are rather unsettling -- if you

remember the fear he once spread. Buzzing his truculent sidewalk brawler's
snarl through the hairs in his nose, squinting through his cat's eyes and
sneering like a villain, he comes across now as nearly comical, a self-aware
performer keeping a straight face as he does his juicy threat-shtick.

McCarthy's power to stir fears of creeping Communism was not entirely based
on illusion, of course; the paranoid, real or pretended, always secretes its pearl
around a grain of fact. From being our wartime ally, the Soviet Union rapidly
became a expanding empire. In 1949, Mao Zedong took power in China.
Western Europe also seemed ready to become Red -- especially Italy, where
the Communist Party was the largest outside Russia, and was growing.
Capitalism, in the opinion of many, myself included, had nothing more to say,
its final poisoned bloom having been Italian and German Fascism. McCarthy --
brash and ill-mannered but to many authentic and true -- boiled it all down to
what anyone could understand: we had "lost China" and would soon lose
Europe as well, because the State Department -- staffed, of course, under
Democratic Presidents -- was full of treasonous pro-Soviet intellectuals. It was
as simple as that.

If our losing China seemed the equivalent of a flea's losing an elephant, it was
still a phrase -- and a conviction -- that one did not dare to question; to do so
 48

was to risk drawing suspicion on oneself. Indeed, the State Department

proceeded to hound and fire the officers who knew China, its language, and its
opaque culture -- a move that suggested the practitioners of sympathetic magic
who wring the neck of a doll in order to make a distant enemy's head drop off.
There was magic all around; the politics of alien conspiracy soon dominated
political discourse and bid fair to wipe out any other issue. How could one deal
with such enormities in a play?

The Crucible was an act of desperation. Much of my desperation branched out,

I suppose, from a typical Depression -- era trauma -- the blow struck on the
mind by the rise of European Fascism and the brutal anti-Semitism it had
brought to power. But by 1950, when I began to think of writing about the hunt
for Reds in America, I was motivated in some great part by the paralysis that
had set in among many liberals who, despite their discomfort with the
inquisitors' violations of civil rights, were fearful, and with good reason, of
being identified as covert Communists if they should protest too strongly.

In any play, however trivial, there has to be a still point of moral reference
against which to gauge the action. In our lives, in the late nineteen-forties and
early nineteen fifties, no such point existed anymore. The left could not look
straight at the Soviet Union's abrogations of human rights. The anti-
Communist liberals could not acknowledge the violations of those rights by
congressional committees. The far right, meanwhile, was licking up all the
cream. The days of "J'accuse" were gone, for anyone needs to feel right to
declare someone else wrong. Gradually, all the old political and moral reality
had melted like a Dali watch. Nobody but a fanatic, it seemed, could really say
all that he believed.

President Truman was among the first to have to deal with the dilemma, and
his way of resolving itself having to trim his sails before the howling gale on
the right-turned out to be momentous. At first, he was outraged at the
allegation of widespread Communist infiltration of the government and called
the charge of "coddling Communists" a red herring dragged in by the
Republicans to bring down the Democrats. But such was the gathering power
of raw belief in the great Soviet plot that Truman soon felt it necessary to
institute loyalty boards of his own.

The Red hunt, led by the House Committee on Un-American Activities and by
McCarthy, was becoming the dominating fixation of the American psyche. It
reached Hollywood when the studios, after first resisting, agreed to submit
artists' names to the House Committee for "clearing" before employing them.
This unleashed a veritable holy terror among actors, directors, and others,
from Party members to those who had had the merest brush with a front
organization.
 49

The Soviet plot was the hub of a great wheel of causation; the plot justified the
crushing of all nuance, all the shadings that a realistic judgment of reality
requires. Even worse was the feeling that our sensitivity to this onslaught on
our liberties was passing from us -- indeed, from me. In Timebends, my
autobiography, I recalled the time I'd written a screenplay (The Hook) about
union corruption on the Brooklyn waterfront. Harry Cohn, the head of
Columbia Pictures, did something that would once have been considered
unthinkable: he showed my script to the F.B.I. Cohn then asked me to take the
gangsters in my script, who were threatening and murdering their opponents,
and simply change them to Communists. When I declined to commit this
idiocy (Joe Ryan, the head of the longshoremen's union, was soon to go to Sing
Sing for racketeering), I got a wire from Cohn saying, "The minute we try to
make the script pro-American you pull out." By then -- it was 1951 -- I had
come to accept this terribly serious insanity as routine, but there was an
element of the marvelous in it which I longed to put on the stage.

In those years, our thought processes were becoming so magical, so paranoid,

that to imagine writing a play about this environment was like trying to pick
one's teeth with a ball of wool: I lacked the tools to illuminate miasma. Yet I
kept being drawn back to it.

I had read about the witchcraft trials in college, but it was not until I read a
book published in 1867 -- a two-volume, thousand-page study by Charles W.
Upham, who was then the mayor of Salem -- that I knew I had to write about
the period. Upham had not only written a broad and thorough investigation of
what was even then an almost lost chapter of Salem's past but opened up to me
the details of personal relationships among many participants in the tragedy.

I visited Salem for the first time on a dismal spring day in 1952; it was a
sidetracked town then, with abandoned factories and vacant stores. In the
gloomy courthouse there I read the transcripts of the witchcraft trials of 1692,
as taken down in a primitive shorthand by ministers who were spelling each
other. But there was one entry in Upham in which the thousands of pieces I
had come across were jogged into place. It was from a report written by the
Reverend Samuel Parris, who was one of the chief instigators of the witch-
hunt. "During the examination of Elizabeth Procter, Abigail Williams and Ann
Putnam" -- the two were "afflicted" teen-age accusers, and Abigail was Parris's
niece -- "both made offer to strike at said Procter; but when Abigail's hand
came near, it opened, whereas it was made up, into a fist before, and came
down exceeding lightly as it drew near to said Procter, and at length, with open
and extended fingers, touched Procter's hood very lightly. Immediately Abigail
cried out her fingers, her fingers, her fingers burned... "
 50

In this remarkably observed gesture of a troubled young girl, I believed, a play

became possible. Elizabeth Proctor had been the orphaned Abigail's mistress,
and they had lived together in the same small house until Elizabeth fired the
girl. By this time, I was sure, John Proctor had bedded Abigail, who had to be
dismissed most likely to appease Elizabeth. There was bad blood between the
two women now. That Abigail started, in effect, to condemn Elizabeth to death
with her touch, then stopped her hand, then wentthrough with it, was quite
suddenly the human center of all this turmoil.

All this I understood. I had not approached the witchcraft out of nowhere or
from purely social and political considerations. My own marriage of twelve
years was teetering and I knew more than I wished to know about where the
blame lay. That John Proctor the sinner might overturn his paralyzing
personal guilt and become the most forthright voice against the madness
around him was a reassurance to me, and, I suppose, an inspiration: it
demonstrated that a clear moral outcry could still spring even from an
ambiguously unblemished soul. Moving crabwise across the profusion of
evidence, I sensed that I had at last found something of myself in it, and a play
began to accumulate around this man.

But as the dramatic form became visible, one problem remained unyielding: so
many practices of the Salem trials were similar to those employed by the
congressional committees that I could easily be accused of skewing history for
a mere partisan purpose. Inevitably, it was no sooner known that my new play
was about Salem than I had to confront the charge that such an analogy was
specious -- that there never were any witches but there certainly are
Communists. In the seventeenth century, however, the existence of witches
was never questioned by the loftiest minds in Europe and America; and even
lawyers of the highest eminence, like Sir Edward Coke, a veritable hero of
liberty for defending the common law against the king's arbitrary power,
believed that witches had to be prosecuted mercilessly. Of course, there were
no Communists in 1692, but it was literally worth your life to deny witches or
their powers, given the exhortation in the Bible, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch
to live." There had to be witches in the world or the Bible lied. Indeed, the very
structure of evil depended on Lucifer's plotting against God. (And the irony is
that klatches of Luciferians exist all over the country today, there may even be
more of them now than there are Communists.)

As with most humans, panic sleeps in one unlighted corner of my soul. When I
walked at night along the empty, wet streets of Salem in the week that I spent
there, I could easily work myself into imagining my terror before a gaggle of
young girls flying down the road screaming that somebody's "familiar spirit"
was chasing them. This anxietyladen leap backward over nearly three centuries
may have been helped along by a particular Upham footnote. At a certain
 51

point, the high court of the province made the fatal decision to admit, for the
first time, the use of "spectral evidence" as proof of guilt. Spectral evidence, so
aptly named, meant that if I swore that you had sent out your "familiar spirit"
to choke, tickle, poison me or my cattle, or to control thoughts and actions, I
could get you hanged unless you confessed to having had contact with the
Devil. After all, only the Devil could lend such powers of visible transport to
confederates, in his everlasting plot to bring down Christianity.

Naturally, the best proof of the sincerity of your confession was your naming
others whom you had seen in the Devil company -- an invitation to private
vengeance, but made official by the seal of the theocratic state. It was as
though the court had grown tired of thinking and had invited in the instincts:
spectral evidence -- that poisoned cloud of paranoid fantasy -- made a kind of
lunatic sense to them, as it did in plotridden 1952, when so often the question
was not the acts of an accused but the thoughts and intentions in his alienated
mind.

The breathtaking circularity of the process had a kind of poetic tightness. Not
everybody was accused, after all, so there must be some reason why you were.
By denying that there is any reason whatsoever for you to be accused, you are
implying, by virtue of a surprisingly small logical leap, that mere chance picked
you out, which in turn implies that the Devil might not really be at work in the
village or, God forbid, even exist. Therefore, the investigation itself is either
mistaken or a fraud. You would have to be a crypto-Luciferian to say that -- not
a great idea if l you wanted to go back to your farm.

The more I read into the Salem panic, the more it touched off corresponding
ages of common experiences in the fifties: the old friend of a blacklisted person
crossing the street to avoid being seen talking to him; the overnight
conversions of former leftists into born-again patriots; and so on. Apparently,
certain processes are universal. When Gentiles in Hitler's Germany, for
example, saw their Jewish neighbors being trucked off, or rs in Soviet Ukraine
saw the Kulaks sing before their eyes, the common reaction, even among those
unsympathetic to Nazism or Communism, was quite naturally to turn away in
fear of being identified with the condemned. As I learned from non-Jewish
refugees, however there was often a despairing pity mixed with "Well, they
must have done something." Few of us can easily surrender our belief that
society must somehow make sense. The thought that the state has lost its mind
and is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable. And so the evidence
has to be internally denied.

I was also drawn into writing The Crucible by the chance it gave me to use a
new language -- that of seventeenth-century New England. That plain, craggy
English was liberating in a strangely sensuous way, with its swings from an
 52

almost legalistic precision to a wonderful metaphoric richness. "The Lord doth

terrible things amongst us, by lengthening the chain of the roaring lion in an
extraordinary manner, so that the Devil is come down in great wrath," Deodat
Lawson, one of the great witch-hunting preachers, said in a sermon. Lawson
rallied his congregation for what was to be nothing less than a religious war
against the Evil One -- "Arm, arm, arm!" -- and his concealed anti-Christian
accomplices.

But it was not yet my language, and among other strategies to make it mine I
enlisted the help of a former University of Michigan classmate, the Greek-
American scholar and poet Kimon Friar. (He later translated Kazantzakis.) The
problem was not to imitate the archaic speech but to try to create a new echo of
it which would flow freely off American actors' tongues. As in the film, nearly
fifty years later, the actors in the first production grabbed the language and ran
with it as happily as if it were their customary speech.

The Crucible took me about a year to write. With its five sets and a cast of
twenty-one, it never occurred to me that it would take a brave man to produce
it on Broadway, especially given the prevailing climate, but Kermit
Bloomgarden never faltered. Well before the play opened, a strange tension
had begun to build. Only two years earlier, the Death of a Salesman touring
company had played to a thin crowd in Peoria, Illinois, having been boycotted
nearly to death by the American Legion and the Jaycees. Before that, the
Catholic War Veterans had prevailed upon the Army not to allow its theatrical
groups to perform, first, All My Sons, and then any play of mine, in occupied
Europe. The Dramatists Guild refused to protest attacks on a new play by Sean
O'Casey, a self-declared Communist, which forced its producer to cancel his
option. I knew of two suicides by actors depressed by upcoming investigation,
and every day seemed to bring news of people exiling themselves to Europe:
Charlie Chaplin, the director Joseph Losey, Jules Dassin, the harmonica
virtuoso Larry Adler, Donald Ogden Stewart, one of the most sought-after
screenwriters in Hollywood, and Sam Wanamaker, who would lead the
successful campaign to rebuild the Old Globe Theatre on the Thames.

On opening night, January 22, 1953, I knew that the atmosphere would be
pretty hostile. The coldness of the crowd was not a surprise; Broadway
audiences were not famous for loving history lessons, which is what they made
of the play. It seems to me entirely appropriate that on the day the play
opened, a newspaper headline read "ALL REDS GUILTY" -- a story about
American Communists who faced prison for "conspiring to teach and advocate
the duty and necessity of forcible overthrow of government." Meanwhile, the
remoteness of the production was guaranteed by the director, Jed Harris, who
insisted that this was a classic requiring the actors to face front, never each
other. The critics were not swept away. "Arthur Miller is a problem playwright
 53

in both senses of the word," wrote Walter Kerr of the Herald Tribune, who
called the play "a step backward into mechanical parable." The Times was not
much kinder, saying, "There is too much excitement and not enough emotion
in The Crucible." But the play's future would turn out quite differently.

About a year later, a new production, one with younger, less accomplished
actors, working in the Martinique Hotel ballroom, played with the fervor that
the script and the times required, and The Crucible became a hit. The play
stumbled into history, and today, I am told, it is one of the most heavily
demanded trade-fiction paperbacks in this country; the Bantam and Penguin
editions have sold more than six million copies. I don't think there has been a
week in the past forty-odd years when it hasn't been on a stage somewhere in
the world. Nor is the new screen version the first. Jean-Paul Sartre, in his
Marxist phase, wrote a French film adaptation that blamed the tragedy on the
rich landowners conspiring to persecute the poor. (In truth, most of those who
were hanged in Salem were people of substance, and two or three were very
large landowners.)

It is only a slight exaggeration to say that, especially in Latin America, The

Crucible starts getting produced wherever a political coup appears imminent,
or a dictatorial regime has just been over-thrown. From Argentina to Chile to
Greece, Czechoslovakia, China, and a dozen other places, the play seems to
present the same primeval structure of human sacrifice to the furies of
fanaticism and paranoia that goes on repeating itself forever as though
imbedded in the brain of social man.

I am not sure what The Crucible is telling people now, but I know that its
paranoid center is still pumping out the same darkly attractive warning that it
did in the fifties. For some, the play seems to be about the dilemma of relying
on the testimony of small children accusing adults of sexual abuse, something
I'd not have dreamed of forty years ago. For others, it may simply be a
fascination with the outbreak of paranoia that suffuses the play -- the blind
panic that, in our age, often seems to sit at the dim edges of consciousness.
Certainly its political implications are the central issue for many people; the
Salem interrogations turn out to be eerily exact models of those yet to come in
Stalin's Russia, Pinochet's Chile, Mao's China, and other regimes. (Nien
Cheng, the author of "Life and Death in Shang- hai," has told me that she could
hardly believe that a non-Chinese -- someone who had not experienced the
Cultural Revolution – had written the play.) But below its concerns with
justice the play evokes a lethal brew of illicit sexuality, fear of the supernatural,
and political manipulation, a combination not unfamiliar these days. The film,
by reaching the broad American audience as no play ever can, may well
unearth still other connections to those buried public terrors that Salem first
announced on this continent.
 54

One thing more -- something wonderful in the old sense of that word. I recall
the weeks I spent reading testimony by the tome, commentaries, broadsides,
confessions, and accusations. And always the crucial damning event was the
signing of one's name in "the Devil's book." This Faustian agreement to hand
over one's soul to the dreaded Lord of Darkness was the ultimate insult to God.
But what were these new inductees supposed to have done once they'd signed
on? Nobody seems even to have thought to ask. But, of course, actions are as
irrelevant during cultural and religious wars as they are in nightmares. The
thing at issue is buried intentions -- the secret allegiances of the alienated
hearts always the main threat to the theocratic mind, as well as its immemorial
quarry.

Q. The Unexplained Hysteria in Arthur Miller‟s The Crucible

Introduction
Young women accuse people they dislike of being evil witches. Miller
introduces the play with the witch Abigail Williams, whose witchcraft hysteria
is due to her carnal lust for Proctor. Abigail‘s desireto possess Proctor
motivates her, driving her to drink blood and cast a spell on Elizabeth. The evil
present in Abigail can only be understood in terms of human depravity. What
is wrong with Abigail seems to be the mixture of her background and an
outburst of the oppressive society that made her cause the witch-hunt. To
certain extent, Abigail‘s actions were driven by love but the puritans
disapproved her as she crossed the boundary that women were not supposed
to cross. The central thrust of the play revolves round Proctor‘s attitude and
relationship with the two women as well as their socio-moral position in the
context of contemporary Puritan community.

The American attitude towards law and its trial is revealed in The Crucible. It
is a triangle that deals with individual, society and judicial corruption. The
Puritan New England is paralleled to McCarthy‘s America of 1952. The
Crucible is a play about a terrible period of American history of Salem
Witchcraft. The Crucible chronicles a storm that breaks over Salem. If we
consider the developments of Salem Trial of 1692, we come to know that the
young people in Salem performed cunning rituals, which slowly became a
superstitious tradition. Slowly the game had a strange effect on a few girls
between fourteen and nineteen years. In The Crucible, young women accuse
people they dislike of being evil witches. Miller introduces the play with the
witch Abigail Williams, whose witchcraft hysteria is due to her carnal lust for
Proctor.
 55

Argument

The Crucible was written during Senator Joseph McCarthy‘s House Un-
American Activities Committee hearings for which Miller was called to testify
in 1956. The Crucible presents all attributes of a naturalist drama. The Puritan
New England is paralleled to McCarthy‘s America of 1952. The Crucible is a
play about a terrible period of American history of Salem Witchcraft. From
Ibsen‘s An Enemy of the People, Miller adopted The Crucible, which shows his
respect for Ibsen‘s technique. ―This play is not history in the sense in which the
word is used by the academic historian… However, I believe that the readers
will discover here the essential nature of one of the strangest and most awful
chapters in human history‖. The American attitude towards law and its trial is
revealed in The Crucible. It is a triangle that deals with individual, society and
judicial corruption. ―I had known of the Salem witch-hunt for many years
before ―McCarthyism‖ had arrived and it has always remained an inexplicable
darkness to me‖. One of the themes of The Crucible involves the principles of
dying with nobility rather than compromising one‘s moral convictions. John
Proctor was the character Miller chose to convey the theme. ―If The Crucible is
not a contemporary political allegory, neither is it an historical narrative. It is a
dramatic exploration of the condition of corporate hysteria; its validity is no
more dependent upon its complete fidelity to the puritan theocracy than Julius
Caesar and Saint Joan are to their historical antecedents‖.

The Crucible in fact failed as a commercial production but succeeded as a play.

The play is more a sort of a novel than a theatre. The play thus generated a lot
of criticism because of its obvious allusion of the contemporary situation.
Miller became a contentious figure in the political world of American after the
publication of The Crucible. Miller wrote The Crucible to expose the process by
which terror was being knowingly planned and consciously engineered. He
was not referring to any specific instance or individual such as Senator Joseph
McCarthy, considered by many to be the most brutal of the official
interrogators. Instead, he was trying to tell people that ―the great ‗issues‘ which
the hysteria was allegedly about in colonial as well as in contemporary America
were covers for petty ambitions, hardheaded political drivers, and the fantasies
of very small and vengeful minds‖.

The Crucible chronicles a storm that breaks over Salem. If we consider the
developments of Salem Trial of 1692, we come to know that the young people
in Salem performed cunning rituals, which slowly became a superstitious
tradition. Slowly the game had a strange effect on a few girls between fourteen
and nineteen years. The daughter and niece of the local Minister Samuel Paris
were the first who behaved strangely. They showed disrespect to the
authorities. Later, three women were accused of apparitions. They were
arrested and sent to jail in Boston. The three women were Tituba, a slave
 56

woman of South-American Indian origin, Sarah Good, a homeless woman who

begged food and Sarah Osborne, who was a quarrelsome woman. Sarah Good
and Sarah Osborne denied their involvement but Tituba confessed of being a
victim of witch conspiracy.

In The Crucible, young women accuse people they dislike of being evil witches.
Miller introduces the play with the witch Abigail Williams, whose witchcraft
hysteria is due to her carnal lust for Proctor. John Proctor, a respected farmer
and husband, has committed adultery with a seventeen year-old girl. Yet,
although he hides this fact from the rest of the community, he still values
truth. He knows that the allegations of witchcraft are vengeful lies. Abigail
seems to be a biblical character driven by the lust for power and sexual desire.
Being an orphan and an unmarried girl, she tries to climb up the puritan social
ladder. She was once a maid in Proctor‘s house, had an affair with him.
Abigail‘s conversation with John reveals her past affair with him.― I look for
John Proctor that took me from my sleep and put knowledge in my heart! I
never knew what pretence Salem was. I never knew the lying lesson I was
taught by all these Christian women and their covenanted men. And now you
bid me tear the light out of my eyes? I will not I cannot! You love me, John
Proctor and whatever sin it is, you love me yet! John, pity me, pity me‖.

It was Elizabeth, who fires her after discovering the affair. Abigail begs John to
come back to her. Her jealousy towards Elizabeth prompts her to do such evil
so that in the process, she would get back John and dispose Elizabeth. Abigail‘s
fierce distrust, hatred and disgust of the entire town are exposed. ―I never
knew what pretence Salem was; I never knew the lying lesson…‖ Abigail thus
hates Salem and makes Salem pay in the course of The Crucible. Abigail
realizes that the Puritanical society will never permit Proctor to leave his wife
for her, and that he does not want to leave his wife anyway. The only way that
Abigail can legitimately obtain Proctor within the bounds of society is for
Elizabeth to die, giving Proctor the opportunity to marry again. Thus, from the
very beginning, Abigail‘s desire to possess Proctor motivates her, driving her to
drink blood and cast a spell on Elizabeth.

John Proctor‘s affair with his beautiful teen-age servant is the source of his
undoing. Sexuality is dangerous, an alienating trap and the male protagonist,
―John Proctor makes his desperate decision, trapped between a wife and a
whore. Elizabeth maintaining a magisterial distance from her husband‘s guilt
and Abigail leading the girls into the woods and then the court to fan the spark
of suspicion into a raging fire of accusation‖ John Proctor‘s adultery with
Abigail is the cause of estrangement between him and his wife Elizabeth. The
barrier between them is never fully removed despite Proctor‘s attempt to
please his wife in various ways. Both Elizabeth and Proctor do not feel free to
communicate with each other. His wife‘s suspicion makes him guilty and
 57

alienated. ―Abigail, the girl who gives the witch hunt its strongest momentum,
is even more damagingly misconceived. More than any other character, Abigail
reflects the sexual element in the hysteria that overtakes Salem. Abigail is the
spurned lover of Proctor, with whom she had an affair while working as a
servant in his house. And there is frustrated lust in her condemnation of her
fellow townspeople that turns self-serving duplicity into self-deluding mania‖.
Abigail develops an intense feeling of lust for Proctor. ―I have a sense for heat,
John, and yours has drawn me to my window, and I have seen you looking up,
burning in your loneliness. Do you tell me you‘ve never looked up at my
window…You are no wintry man. I know you John, I know you (She is
weeping) I cannot sleep for dreamin‘; I cannot dream but I wake and walk
about the house as though I‘d find you comin‘ through some door‖.

William Hawkins called Abigail ―an evil child,‖ Leonard Moss called her ―a
malicious figure‖ and ―unstable,‖ Schleuter and Flanagan Proclaimed her as ―a
whore‖ echoing Proctor‘s ―How do you call Heaven! Whore! Whore!‖, ―This
character can be interpreted in many ways. Some actresses have played her as
a childish brat, while others have portrayed her as a sinister harlot. The actress
who takes on this role should decide, how does Abigail truly feel about John
Proctor? Was her innocence stolen from her? Is she a victim? Or a sociopath?
Does she love him in some twisted way? Or has she been using him all along?‖
At the end of Act III, Abigail fights public condemnation of her as a whore and
stages a new illness of demonic possession. ―Abby knows that her prophetic fit
is self-induced, that the witchcraft she denounces is non-existent; but once the
fit is on her, she can produce a convincing performance and induce the same
kind of hysteria in children. Her real diabolism is her misuse of the sacrosanct
office of witness, to gain her own ends‖. Abigail‘s unacceptable description of
Elizabeth as ―a bitter woman, a lying, cold, sniveling woman‖ is perhaps the
demanding side of John.

Abigail is determined to secure the condemnation and hanging of Elizabeth by

inflaming the superstitious alarm of the Massachusetts judges. In the last act,
Elizabeth pardons Proctor‘s sins of adultery, giving him back the name he lost
in court. Proctor at the end sacrifices his life for Elizabeth. The most important
aspect of the play is the relationship between John and Elizabeth. Suffering
has led to a deeper understanding between husband and wife. Elizabeth ―who
has been a cold and frigid woman, when faced with supreme sacrifice discards
her puritan inheritance and kisses him passionately and freely, finding
freedom in unexpressed emotional fullness‖.

There seems to be a great contrast between Abigail and Elizabeth as

individuals. Both are determined. Abigail feels herself superior to other beings
as a young girl. On the other hand, Elizabeth, despite Abigail‘s accusation of
her witchcraft, has courage throughout the play. Both the women claim John
 58

as their rightful spouse. While Elizabeth says, ―I will be your only wife or no
wife at all‖, Abigail on the other hand says, ―I will make you such a wife when
the world is white again!‖ Nelson views both the women as product of the
―constricting atmosphere of Salem‖- the former a ―Zealous adherent to the
Puritan ideal of duty‖ and later ―a rebellious abuser of this code‖.

Elizabeth is aware that her coldness is responsible for Proctor‘s commitment

of adultery. Elizabeth is highly virtuous outside, but cold inside. Abigail blames
Elizabeth, ―She is blackening my name in the village! She is telling lies about
me! She is a cold, sniveling woman‖. Abigail accuses her until she is finally
charged of witchcraft. ―Oh, the noose, the noose is up…she wants me
dead…She will cry me out until they take me! …She wants me dead‖. Further,
she says, ―She thinks to take my place John‖. When John and Elizabeth are
asked by Hale if they knew the Ten Commandments, Proctor forgets one and
Elizabeth reminds him that adultery is the one he forgot. Thus, John Proctor‘s
affair with Abigail shows than even the most honored man has flaws.

Abigail certainly believes that she will get back her love. Proctor turns to
Abigail, and confesses that he has hardly any love for her. ―Abby, I may think
of you softly from time to time. But I will cut off my hand before I‘ll ever reach
for you again. Wipe it out of mind. We never touched. Abby‖. This shows John
is truly ashamed of his deeds. Elizabeth‘s capacity for compassion grows in the
course of the play. Far from being contemptuous, she persuades Proctor to
forgive her for being cold and to forgive himself for whatever sin he
committed.

After months in jail, Elizabeth Proctor was called into the courtroom to answer
a series of questions that could determine the fate of her husband, herself, and
Abigail Williams. Elizabeth Proctor was asked to accuse her husband of
lechery. The hesitation in Elizabeth's response to this question was not a
surprise. She was fighting a battle inside of herself that only she knew the
depth of. It was up to her to make a decision that she knew would change her
life and the lives of others. To the question of lechery put before her, Elizabeth
Proctor chose to answer "no.‖ Elizabeth answered "no" for a number of
reasons. The biggest was the respect she had for her husband. She wanted
John to reveal his sin on his own. She felt it was not her responsibility to reveal
the wrong in his life. Elizabeth also believed that she was part of the reason
John chose to have an affair with Abigail. Before John was to sign his
confession, Elizabeth asked him to forgive her for being a cold wife. Elizabeth
truly believed she was the reason behind John's affair with Abigail. This proves
that Elizabeth really did love John although there were times when it wasn't
evident in her words and actions. She respected and trusted him to such an
extent that she allowed him to decide when he would let the community know
of his sin. ―John Proctor himself at first accepts moral guilt for his adultery,
 59

then angrily challenges the court at his wife's arrest, insincerely confesses to
save himself, and finally tears up his confession to retain his ―goodness.‖ Miller
invests the play with the theatrical energy of the reversals of melodrama
without succumbing to the form's simplistic morality. This is a classic play
which does not demand ingenious directorial intervention to command
contemporary interest‖.

Although the events of the play are based on the events that took place in
Salem, Massachusetts, Miller was liberal in his fictionalization of those events.
Abigail in real life was eleven at the time of accusation and Proctor was over
sixty, which makes it most unlikely that there was ever any such relationship.
Elizabeth was Proctor‘s third wife and stepmother to their children. Miller
omitted this historical fact. Miller also raises the age of Abigail from 11 to 17
and lowers the age of Mary Warren from 20 to 17. Tituba‘s husband is not
mentioned in the play. In the real trials, 19 women were hung as well as John
Proctor. The Crucible ends with Proctor and Rebecca Nurse being led to the
gallows. Thus, we may call The Crucible a ―self-contained play.‖

Abigail only after being rejected by John turns her love and lust into hate and
revenge. John feels no obligation towards Abigail. The evil present in Abigail
can only be understood in terms of human depravity. Miller describes Abigail
in the play as ―Abigail Williams, seventeen…a strikingly beautiful girl, an
orphan with an endless capacity of dissembling‖ (230). Abigail is shown as
totally wicked and disgusting. It is she who seduces Proctor and accuses his
wife of witchcraft. She tells Proctor ―Put knowledge in my heart‖ but John
continues to protect her love to Abigail. Her depravity leads her to become a
prostitute of Salem. Miller, in order to show the main issue of the play, gives
close attention to Proctor, totally losing his sight on Abigail, as a participant in
a human relationship. What is wrong with Abigail seems to be the mixture of
her background and an outburst of the oppressive society that made her cause
the witch-hunt. Miller makes us believe that Abigail is insane, as Proctor does,
when she shows her self-inflicted injuries. ―I‘m holes all over from the damned
needles and pins‖ (230). While Miller may have intended the madness to be a
metaphor for the inherent evil, sociologists suggest that ―madness replaced
witchcraft as a pathology to be treated not by burning or hanging but by
physicians‖.

It is evident throughout the play that displays of affection are not very
common in the Proctor household. It is common that it is not until something
drastic happens that those who love each other find out how much they really
mean to each other. This is what happened in the Proctor's situation. John and
Elizabeth did not realize what they meant to each other until they were thrown
into jail and John was on the verge of losing his life. John and Elizabeth
Proctor realize their love for each other at the end of the play. Although they
 60

both realize they will not be able to share it, they are overjoyed with this new
discovery. Elizabeth realizes that John loves her and John realizes that
Elizabeth loves him and that he does indeed have her forgiveness. This gives
him the push he needs to make the right decision.

Conclusion
Elizabeth and Abigail are two extreme characters for which the Puritan society
has no place. Both the characters are opposite to each other. While Elizabeth
represents the virtuous puritan woman, Abigail represents the evil and the
corruption of the society. These two females have drastic roles in the play:
good versus evil. Ironically, the witches seem to be the good people, while the
accusers are bad. To certain extent, Abigail‘s actions were driven by love but
the puritans disapproved her as she crossed the boundary that women were
not supposed to cross. Miller had John choose Elizabeth, instead of Abigail, to
make John an admirable puritan role model because Elizabeth symbolizes
goodness in society quite contrasted to Abigail who represents the corruption
of women. In The Crucible, the two women play crucial roles, for the central
thrust of the play revolves round Proctor‘s attitude and relationship with the
two women as well as their socio-moral position in the context of
contemporary Puritan community.

Q. Discuss about the Issues of Identity Crisis and Self-Sacrifice in

Arthur Miller‟s The Crucible and Incident at Vichy

The Nature of Sacrifice

In religion or spirituality as well as in the philosophical doctrines of many

civilizations, dying sacrificially on behalf of others is given the highest form of
goodness. One can trace this esteemed form of goodness in the text of Luke 6:
32-35:

―If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you … But love
your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return.‖

Although the ―return‖ may not be in the form of any earthly object of desire,
rather it is something more - something spiritual: ―Your reward will be great,
and you will be children of the Most High.‖ In some recent ethical thoughts as
well as in the writings of such thinkers as Jan Patočka, Emmanuel Lévinas,
and Jacques Derrida, this understanding of the highest good has been given a
philosophically systematic expression that the highest ethical gesture is a
sacrificial self-offering without any expectation in return.

The idea of sacrifice in Jan Patočka (1907–1977), considered as one of the most
important contributors to Czech philosophical phenomenology and an
 61

influential central European philosopher of the 20th century, may appear to be

of Christian origin. In the ―meditation‖ (1970) he parallels the sacrifice of
Jesus Christ to the death of Socrates in the context of the ―third movement of
human existence.‖ Both sacrificed their lives in order to make something
apparent, to show that humanity is fully human only if it overcomes its
bondage to life, insofar as it is capable of living above the level of mere
sustenance. (Chvatík 10) Both Socrates and Christ could have avoided brutal
death, but they willingly endured it and their sacrifice was associated with the
idea of immortality. Such is precisely the meaning of the ―third movement‖: to
break through the level of sheer survival and open it up to the dimension
which, though no being, is nonetheless the condition of the world of existing
things.

Emmanuel Lévinas (1906–1995), a French philosopher of Lithuanian Jewish

ancestry, maintains: ‗Responsibility for another is not an accident that
happens to a subject, but precedes essence in it, has not awaited freedom, in
which a commitment to another would have been made. I have not done
anything and I have always been under accusation— persecuted. The ipseity
[or the self]… is a hostage. The word I means here I am, answering for
everything and for everyone‘ (Lévinas 114). The ‗I‘ is now completely
overthrown from its nominative or originative status and is no longer a
beneficiary of action: ‗Strictly speaking the other is the end, I am hostage,‘
(Lévinas 128), which is to say that the Ego or the ‗I‘ is a subjection to the other.
The ‗I‘ now subsists only in self-abnegation and sacrifice for the other, which
Levinas calls ‗substitution.‘

Derrida maintains that the ideal ethical act is the gratuitous sacrifice of one‘s
life for others. He, in this respect, interprets deconstruction from an ethical
point of view and considers the ―other‖ as ―others,‖ represented by the
marginalized individuals and groups, who are excluded by the existing forces
of social and political authority, who use the old metaphysics to legitimate
their oppression. Derrida goes for the deconstruction of ethics and he has
adopted ―Gift‖ as the main medium for his deconstruction-reconstruction of
ethics.

Brian Johnstone offers a simplified schema of European philosophical

tradition vis-à-vis the concept of self-sacrifice: ―Husserl seeks to bridge the gap
between subject and object with the ―intentionality‖ of consciousness;
Heidegger seeks to do the same with ―being‖ which shows itself in the
comportment of the subject to the world; Levinas seeks to overcome the
separation of the subject from the other, by invoking the subject‘s ethical
responsibility for the other. In the course of these reflections, he introduced
the notion of Gift; Derrida and Marion develop further the ontological and
ethical implications of Gift.‖ (Johnstone 7-8)
 62

Q. Role of Sacrifice in Arthur Miller‟s Plays

In the plays of Arthur Miller sacrifice plays a crucial role in determining

relationship and exploring identity crisis of his protagonists. Miller explores
the impact of sacrifices made for one‘s family versus humanity as a whole
which involves the idea that all sacrifices are actually not conscious decisions
and the acts of ‗sacrifice‘ in some of his plays could be explained simply by an
‗escape‘- escape from the pressure around. Again in some of his plays the act of
sacrifice is motivated by a conscious decision of exonerating the sense of guilt
of a larger community and an individual‘s effort to clean the system by
undergoing through an ordeal of penance.

All My Sons (1947) is a play about the individual‘s responsibility for his own
actions and also about the obligations he has to his society. The play is about a
man who chooses his personal commercial benefit above value, self above the
interest of the nation, and interest of his own family above responsibility to
society. It is also, however, about loss, loss of a sense of common humanity.
But Joe Keller believes that he has done nothing wrong because he put his
family first. And when the truth comes out, he still tries to justify his action by
arguing that nothing is more important than his family, than saving the
business to give to Chris, his son: "For you, a business for you!" (Miller,
Collected Plays 146). But Chris believes in a greater responsibility to society
and his response is volatile: 'For me! Where do you live, where have you come
from? For me! I was dying every day and you were killing my boys and you did
it for me? What the hell do you think I was thinking of, the goddam business?
Is that as far as your mind can see, the business?' (Miller, Collected Plays 146).
The final act of killing himself by Joe is in a way an understanding of his
failure to negotiate his identity as an individual and a social being. Again the
self-sacrifice of his elder son Larry, who himself was a warplane pilot and
comes to know about his father‘s crime, may be termed as an attempt to do
penance for the sin committed by his father, although the latter initially tries
to evade it.

Death of a Salesman (1949) is a story of a man who sacrifices himself to a false

promise and a self-created notion of golden future. Willy Loman has engrossed
the values of his society and wanted to live in that make-believe world. Bigsby
in Critical Study (2005), states: ―Willy Loman is a man who wishes his reality
to come into line with his hopes, a man desperate to leave his mark on the
world through his own endeavors and through those of his children. Though
he seems to seek death, what he fears above all is that he will go before he has
justified himself in his own eyes and there are few, from New York to Beijing,
who do not understand the urgency of that need (Bigsby 101). Willy, being too
 63

much obsessed with success, even moves too far to live vicariously through his
sons. In the end, he decided to give everything up for his two sons and
sacrificed himself so that his sons could be successful. Willy decides to kill
himself in order to give the life insurance money to Biff and Happy. This type
of sacrifice, although not so uncommon from parents, is a conscious decision
and is motivated by an earnest sense of love and a desire to fulfil his dream
through his sons.

Eddie Carbone in A View from the Bridge (1955) also shows in his character
the potential for self-destruction and which in fact has destroyed him. And
apart from this improper love, Eddie is a good man; and this love has its origin
in the quite proper love of father for child, and Eddie's sense of duty to his
family and community. Although acts of self-sacrifice in one form or other is
present in some other plays of Miller, but arguably his two most representative
plays in these context are The Crucible and Incident at Vichy which are
discussed in details.

Proctor in The Crucible (1953) is racked by guilt at his infidelity who, through
the crucible of experience, comes to discover his identity. In a way Proctor
represents Miller‘s definition of the tragic hero: ―I think the tragic feeling is
evoked in us when we are in the presence of a character who is ready to lay
down his life, if need be, to secure one thing—his sense of personal dignity‖
(Miller, Tragedy 4). As Terry Otten points out ―Predictably some postmodern
theorists have assaulted Miller‘s conception of ‗heroism‘ that simply does not
mesh with the cynicism attached to much current theory‖ (Otten 68). But
Proctor‘s main conflict is not just with the evil around him, rather it is within
himself where he realises the capacity for both evil and good reside. This guilt
is the driving force in Proctor that brings him to his defining moment of
accepting his predicament.

The initial title of the play was The Chronicles of Sarah Good which later on
Miller renamed as The Crucible. The word ―crucible‖ is contextually defined as
a metal container in which metals or other substances are subjected to high
temperatures. In this play what we find is that each character is metaphorically
a metal subjected to the heat of the surrounding situation and the characters
that could morally stand out in the face of this conflict, symbolically refuse to
melt.

The Crucible is a play that transcends time as although it presents the

catastrophe of the Salem witch-hunts that took place in the Province of
Massachusetts Bay during 1692 and 1693 as an analogy to the McCarthy
hearing of 1953 when the U.S. government blacklisted accused communists,
this calamity is a regular happenings in contemporary societies, insofar as it
portrays the viciousness of certain individuals against others, may it be in the
 64

form of community backlash or ethnic cleansing. Apparently the play is a

dramatization of the incident in the life of John Proctor who, notwithstanding
his feelings of guilt over an adulterous affair with Abigail Williams, rises above
the tragic flaw in his character and becomes a man of integrity and self-
sacrifice in the final act of the play. But more than that the play portrays the
doldrums of two societies that panicked, one in 1692 and one in 1953, by
tracking down innocent victims without any reasonable ground, to feed the
fires of hatred and intolerance during a specific era. The post-war situation in
America in the 1950‘s which has witnessed challenges on all fronts: economic,
political, military and social was similar to that of the witch hysteria of Salem,
when people, in expectation to end their misfortunes, cling to their Puritan
ideals. Both McCarthy era and witch hysteria of Salem threatened the rights of
the people and Arthur Miller has addressed both these problems in this play.

―In modern terminology 'witch-hunt' has acquired usage referring to the act of
seeking and persecuting any perceived enemy, particularly when the search is
conducted using extreme measures and with little regard to actual guilt or
innocence. It is used whether or not it is sanctioned by the government, or
merely occurs within the "court of public opinion".‖

There are various reasons for the existence of the climate of fear in Salem in
the 17th century. The Puritans were becoming worried about their religion
since, in 1686 after the restoration of monarchy in England, Charles II revoked
their charter and sent an Anglican governor to the Massachusetts colony that
was hostile to Congregationalism. The result is that the people were unable to
govern themselves and faced the challenge of ownership to their farms. The
problem was further complicated by the breaking out of smallpox epidemic in
1691-92, followed by conducting of raids on small farms. In addition, the
economic disparity between the two parts – Salem Town and Salem Village
was expanding by the 1660s and each had established a separate church by
1672. The Townspeople were gradually becoming more modern and more
prosperous than the Villagers. Moreover fortunes of major villagers were
reduced due to questions over contesting of wills in courts and division over
land boundaries. It was in such an atmosphere of unrest that a small incident
escalated to hysteria of persecution that left twenty-three people hanged, one
pressed to death, and three to die in prison.

Similarly, after World War II when Cold War was gradually dominating the
foreign and internal policies of America, the federal government under the
President Truman was apprehensive of the danger posed by Russian
Communism. Truman stated in policies that no one who held beliefs contrary
to the current form of government should be allowed in teaching profession
and other literary activities and that vigilance over Communists would be such
that almost any action against them would be allowed. The threat of
 65

Communism was considered almost a national crisis as the extermination of

democracy by the Russians was imminent. Against this background, the House
un-American Activities Committee was set up under the leadership of Senator
Joseph McCarthy which began an investigation into the lives of citizens who
had advocated the doctrine of Communism. This intensive interrogation by
way of using tactics of distortion led to a witch-hunt resulted in black-listing,
termination of services and in some cases, isolation of its citizens from the
country for more than thirty years. Miller himself was questioned by the House
un-American Activities Committee in 1956 and convicted of "contempt of
Congress" for refusing to identify others present at meetings he had attended.

The Crucible dramatises the events of a small village falling prey to a collective
fear about witchcraft. Reverend Hale, a specialist in demonology, is
summoned to search for the devil and a court of justice is set up to do away
with the evil by hanging witches. As stated by Jean-Marie Bonnet, the play
―constantly shifts between two related poles: the individuals must be purged
separately so that the community as a whole may be preserved. We then may
wonder whether the play is about an individual's discovery of his true self or
about a whole community getting out of hand.‖ (Bonnet 32) Northrop Frye has
mentioned that the play has the 'content' of 'social hysteria' but the 'form' of a
'purgatorial or triumphant tragedy' (Frye 37). Regarding the context of the
play we get two entirely contradictory statements of Arthur Miller. In the
Introduction to his Collected Plays he writes: ―The central impulse for writing
at all was not the social but the interior psychological question, which was the
question of the guilt residing in Salem which the hysteria merely unleashed,
but did not create.‖ (Miller, Introduction 156) Again, a few years later, in his
interview with Richard I. Evans he said that ―... the predominant emphasis in
writing the play was on the conflict between people rather than the conflict
within somebody.‖ (Evans 15)

Miller was in search of an allegory through which he wanted to expose the

ruthless conduct of the House un-American Activities Committee and the
Salem witch hunt hysteria provided him with the raw material for his reaction
to the contemporary terror unleashed in the American society. The action of
the play reaches its climax when the protagonist, John Proctor, is caught in a
dilemma of moral choice: in order to save his wife who has been accused of
witchcraft either he has to confess his adultery as well as accuse his friends as
witches or he has to accept his death. Proctor initially accepted the charge of
adultery in order to free his wife; but when he was asked to name others he
prefers to die rather than destroy the reputation of people who were innocent.
It draws parallel to McCarthy era when reputed people were asked to appear
before the committee and name their fellow beings as communists.
 66

The Crucible is a dramatization of examining one‘s conscience as well as

search for inner values, morals and identity in the lives of both John Proctor
and Reverend Hale. Reverend Hale, although is considered as an expert on
demonology and witch-craft, undergoes a process of examining his beliefs and
own sense of identity which ultimately leads him to question the very basis of
his faith. Initially being guided by the sense of authority and position,
Reverend Hale fails to see the real issues behind the ordeal of witch hunt in
Salem. His main objective and stimulus behind his choice to come to Salem is
his curiosity regarding the dark aspect of life and experiment the nature of the
"invisible world" of spirits and the devil for medical practices. Initially,
because of his position in the church and society, Hale is left with little space to
self reflect and to see the things from an angle different from that of the church
and the authority. He feels a sense of pride and worthiness of a specialist upon
arriving to Salem that his knowledge in the field is publicly acknowledged. He
is not motivated by greed or personal material gain as his intention is good to
discover and clean any sign of evil in Salem. So he does not contradict the
position of the church believing that it is also motivated by the same spirit. But
his presence adds to complication of the situation and as Hale unintentionally
contributes to the condemning of innocent towns folk he starts to suffer the
guilt that leads him into a quest for justice and a sense of identity.

Hale, out of his frustration and sense of guilt, starts questioning and relocating
his beliefs and moral ideals. He voices his doubt regarding the authority of the
court: ―We cannot blink it more. There is a prodigious fear of this court in the
country --‖ (Miller, Collected Plays 418). He comes to realize that the court
itself is used to carry out injustice to people: ―Excellency, it is a natural lie to
tell; I beg you, stop now before another is condemned! I may shut my
conscience to it no more - private vengeance is working through this
testimony!‖ (Miller, Collected Plays 431). It is not only the questioning of the
nature of (in)justice in Salem court; but more profoundly, by doing so, he
challenges and questions the very fundamental of his belief and thus he is
bound to reconstruct it in search for a sense of identity. His real journey for the
search of identity begins when he tries to seek the truth within himself which
prompts him to alienate himself from this system: ―I denounce these
proceedings, I quit this court!‖ (Miller, Collected Plays 435), and this
denouncing of the court symbolizes his attempt to abandon all his past false
beliefs and move towards a new perspective of the meaning of life.

In contrast to Reverend Hale, John Proctor is always consciously aware of his

own identity and this consciousness brings a sense of integrity as a human
being in him that has helped him to set high standards of nobility, honesty and
integrity which he maintains till his death. These qualities have distinguished
him from others and render him his own sense of complete happiness. He puts
 67

a great emphasis on the value of one‘s name: ―We vote by name in this society,
not by acreage‖ (Miller, Collected Plays 367) and is conscious about the fact
that one‘s name represents the identity about self and the family: ―A man will
not cast away his good name‖, he says. (Miller, Collected Plays 428) He
considers that his greatest possession in his life is the respectability in his
name: ―Because it is my name! Because I cannot have another in my life! . . .
How may I live without my name? I have given you my soul; leave me my
name!‖ he urges Danforth (Miller, Collected Plays 453)

In spite of having so many good human attributes, Proctor‘s conscience is

plagued by guilt because of his adulterous affair with Abigail which creates a
conflict in his personality and identity. He claims to consider his affair with
Abigail a thing of the past: ―I have forgot Abigail‖ and wants to remain faithful
towards his wife Elizabeth. It is his sheer sense of love and responsibility for
Elizabeth that prompts him to compromise with the authority, even going
against his own conscience, so that she may be freed at the cost of his name.
With the conviction of Elizabeth, Proctor feels that he has become a part of the
affairs and problems in Salem. Although initially Proctor claims: ―I have no
business in Salem‖ (Miller, Collected Plays 386) he never has the idea that he
will be involved with the affairs of Salem against his choice, primarily to save
his wife from prosecution. However, the irony of the situation is that his
presence in the court weakens his position. In a desperate bid to free the name
of his wife from the prosecution, he confesses his act of adultery with Abigail
but that enables him the courage to confront his guilt-ridden conscience. Now
he becomes scornful to himself and feels that he has betrayed his wife: ―I wish
you had some evil in you so that you might know me‖. This has also enabled
him to negotiate his guilt and re-established his position as a human being. He
recognizes the true nature of both Abigail and his wife and it provides him the
courage to recognize his self and realizes that he must stand up to the morals
he has set upon himself; and with this strength and determination he resolves
to face the situation and confronts his imminent death. John Proctor has
already made up his mind, as he would rather die than to corrupt his and his
family‘s name.

Thus, his act of self-sacrifice can be analyzed from the context of Jan Patočka‘s
view of the ―third movement of human existence.‖ Like Socrates and Christ,
John Proctor also could have avoided his death if he had confessed his
involvement in witchery, but like them he also willingly endured it and his act
of self-sacrifice is intended to exterminate the real evil inherent in Salem
society.

In the police station the arrested person found others waiting on line for their
turn to be interrogated. At the instruction of the policeman the people on line
went one by one inside the room and only a few of them came out and walked
 68

free into the street and most of them simply disappeared. The rumour was that
it was a Gestapo operation and the detainees were required to produce
immaculate proof of their identity. That fellow was a Jew and as he got closer
and closer for his turn, he got assured of his imminent death. At last there was
only one man standing behind him and that man was asked to go inside ahead
of him. After some time that man came out and instead of walking past him
with his pass to freedom he stopped in front of him and handed over the pass
and whispered him to go, never to be seen again.

Miller says about the writing of Incident at Vichy and the above incident:

―In the ten years after hearing it, the story kept changing its meaning
for me. It never occurred to me that it could be a play until this spring
when Incident at Vichy suddenly burst open complete in almost all its
details. Before that it had been simply a fact, a feature of existence
which sometimes brought exhilaration with it, sometimes a vacant
wonder, and sometimes even resentment. In any case, I realize that it
was a counter-point to many happenings around me in this past
decade.‖ (Miller, Echoes 70)

The image of that ―faceless, unknown man‖ who sacrificed his pass to freedom
to the Jew haunts Miller again and again as he says: ―Whenever I felt the
seemingly implacable tide of human drift and the withering of will in myself
and in others, this faceless person came to mind.‖ (Miller, Echoes 70) Miller
through this play tries to demonstrate the prevailing racial or ethnic violence
across the globe and is against the view of limiting the play within a specific
frame. He asserts:

―. . . I must say that I think most people seeing this play are quite aware
it is not ―about Nazism‖ or a wartime horror tale; they do understand
that the underlying issue concerns us now and that it has to do with our
individual relationships with injustice and violence.‖ (Miller, Echoes 70)

Miller‘s Incident at Vichy also takes place in 1942, in France and till then there
was no sign of any Jewish resistance to the Nazi regime in Germany though
there were reporting of the existence of the concentration camps where
thousands of Jews had been killed already. In the German-controlled Republic
of Vichy, citizens, regardless of their racial status, could stay by producing
papers which were not so difficult to get. The play Incident at Vichy is about a
group of detainees in Vichy waiting for the interrogation by German officers
during World War II. At the simplistic level it deals with the issues of human
nature, guilt and responsibility as well as the atrocities perpetrated by the
Nazis against Jews. In the first half of this one act play, the discussion among
the detainees bring out their struggle to ascertain their predicament. All the
 69

detainees except for a gypsy, Von Berg, and possibly Bayard are Jews, and they
are unsure about the purpose of their detention:

MARCHAND: It‘s perfectly obvious they‘re making a routine identity

check. LEBEAU: Oh.

MARCHAND: With so many strangers pouring into Vichy this past

year there‘re probably a lot of spies and God knows what. It‘s just a
document check, that‘s all. LEBEAU: turns to Bayard, hopefully: You
think so?

BAYARD: shrugs; obviously he feels there is something more to it: I

don‘t know.

MARCHAND: Why? There are thousands of people running around

with false papers, we all know that. You can‘t permit such things in
wartime.
The others glance uneasily at Marchand, whose sense of security is
thereby confined to him alone. (Miller, Plays: Two 247)

As the discussion proceeds further, Bayard warns the detainees about trains
going to Nazi concentration camps in Germany and Poland and reports of
mass killings. He, being a man of strong socialistic leanings, bids the detainees
to develop political consciousness and make an intellectual stand against the
pressure of detention. "It is faith in the future; and the future is Socialist.‖ He
continues: ―But they can‘t torture the future; it‘s out of their hands. ... they
can't win. Impossible." (Miller, Plays: Two 265-66)

Leduc, a psychoanalyst and a French veteran of the 1940 fighting against

Germany, unsuccessfully tries to unite the prisoners to attempt an escape. Von
Berg tries to understand the reason of the holocaust as well as the fundamental
issues of human existence: ―Many times I used to ask my friends- if you love
your country why it is necessary to hate other countries? To be a good German
why must you despise everything that is not German?‖ (Miller, Plays: Two
269) One of the notable incidents in the second half of the play is the
discussion between Leduc and the Major of German Army, as the former tries
to persuade the Major to let them go free. It also reveals the character of the
Major as well as the larger issues concerning the workings of the authoritarian
rule. Although the Major resents his assignment thinking it beneath the
dignity of a regular Army officer, he is left with no other alternative but to
carry out the order, feeling himself entrapped by the system. He feels that
whether or not he helps the detainees to escape is irrelevant: ―There are no
persons anymore, don‘t you see that? There will never be persons again.‖
(Miller, Plays: Two 280) It shows the predicament of individual as well as the
 70

future of civilization in an authoritarian society where human beings are

reduced to nonentity.

There is a major difference between the two versions of the play. In the 1964
version, there is no real attempt by the prisoners to escape and at the end, Von
Berg gives away his pass to freedom to Leduc and thus involving in the act of
self-sacrifice. In the 1966 version there is an escape attempt in the middle of
the play which is foiled by the sudden appearance of the Major.

In the play Miller creates a gallery of portraits representing people from

different professions and strata - a prince, a painter, a businessman, an
electrician, an actor, a waiter, a psychiatrist, a young boy who is terrified, and
an old Jew. All of them have been brought into the police station for
interrogation by the German officers to ascertain their Jewishness. They sit on
benches outside the office and arguing and questioning about their future.
Each of them has a tale to share how they have been brought here and though
their stories and their fears one of the darkest aspects of human history is
revealed. They come to realize that in the eyes of the Nazis, Jewishness is
indeed the ―crime‖ for which they‘ve been rounded up.

Q. "I Quit This Court": Is Justice Denied in Arthur Miller's The

Crucible?

Introduction

"I denounce these proceedings, I quit this court."' Thus, at the end of Act
Three, the Reverend John Hale punctuates the painful climax of The Crucible,
Arthur Miller's memorable play about the Salem witch trials. And who in the
audience would fault Hale's condemnation? Denied fair judgment, protagonist
John Proctor has fallen the court's latest victim in a witch hunt that has
already claimed Proctor's wife, his friends, and his neighbors. Proctor and the
others, none of them witches, will hang with Salem's approval and at its behest
on the basis of "spectral evidence" produced by frightened children and a
vengeful young woman.2 The accusers, in turn, have been spurred to their
ruinous false charges by a rapacious, petty, and vindictive citizenry. The
morally guilty-Judge Danforth, Abigail Williams, Reverend Parris and the rest-
seem to have triumphed. Proctor, his wife Elizabeth, Rebecca Nurse, and
seventeen others, all legally guiltless in the eyes of the audience, will perish.
Hale is correct to recoil, and surely the audience is correct to empathize with
such a response to brutal inequity.

The unhappy judgment visited upon Proctor and his fellow victims has
prompted several critics to view the play as an icy commentary on a flagrantly
 71

unjust legal system. Leonard Moss, focusing on the play's trial scene,
characterizes the proceedings as "an unjust trial of a just man." Benjamin
Nelson, contrasting The Crucible's trial scene with that appearing in Bernard
Shaw's St. Joan, notes that Miller's exposition of Salem justice fully eradicates
any line that may be drawn between reason and lunacy. Others point to the
"twisted logic"' of the legal proceedings the play depicts and to its portrayal of
an "irrational" exercise of authority.

But such reactions clearly miss the mark if we are to read The Crucible as a
tragedy. Proctor is far more the victim of his own inaction and pride than he is
of a "trial without sense." To regard him as a victim of legal injustice renders
him a pathetic, as opposed to a tragic, figure. And the proceedings and legal
method that Miller present teach us very little about formal injustice. This
Article proposes a novel reading of The Crucible as a commentary on the law. I
suggest that to read Miller's play as an indictment of the legal process is to
read it wrongly. My thesis is that the legal decisions depicted in The Crucible,
however monumentally unfair and unwelcomed, are not necessarily unjust.
Rather, from the standpoint of legal positivism, one can regard them as almost
compelled. They result from the legitimacy Miller's Salemites attach to their
system of law and from the straightforward deductive application of accepted
norms to adduced facts,"° even facts of the spectral variety. My goal is to
demonstrate that the best lessons one learns from The Crucible have little to
do with bad law or law badly applied. Instead, as in all great tragedies, the best
lessons flow from viewing a heroic figure confronting, and then conquering,
the feebly understood self.

Part-I

A Synopsis of the play's plot

The Crucible recounts the tragic and almost inexplicable events that befell
the town of Salem, Massachusetts from the spring through the fall of 1692.
Miller attempts an explanation in his introductory comments to Act One:

The Salem tragedy . . . developed from a paradox. It is a paradox in

whose grip we still live, and there is no prospect yet that we will
discover its resolution. Simply, it was this: for good purposes, even high
purposes, the people of Salem developed a theocracy, a combine of state
and religious power whose function was to keep the community
together, and to prevent any kind of disunity that might open it to
destruction by material or ideological enemies."

But as Miller further notes, the conditions which once may have warranted
such a repressive social and political mechanism were no longer in place by
1692." Individuals tentatively struggled for self-assertion and factions arose.
 72

Authority, once revered and cherished in all quarters, now became doubted in
some. Fear and guilt naturally accompanied such doubt. As Act One develops,
we see fear and guilt about to give way to mass hysteria and to cries of
witchcraft.

The story line of Act One is brief to tell. We are inside the house of the
Reverend Samuel Parris, three years now Salem's minister. A catatonic illness
afflicting two teenage girls has the town abuzz with rumors of demonic
possession. One of the girls, Betty Parris, is the minister's daughter. The other
is Ruth Putnam, daughter of Thomas Putnam, a wealthy landholder. Parris
had found the two dancing with other girls in the woods the night before. He
had also seen them participating in what may have been a seance. He seems to
agree with his niece Abigail, a leading participant as it turns out, that the girls'
illness is somehow related to their shock over being discovered. At first, Parris
will hear no talk of witchcraft. Still, he has summoned Reverend John Hale, an
expert in such matters, from a nearby town to investigate. Hale quickly learns
of the girls' activities, and then, in the presence of Parris, Putnam, and others,
he begins his interrogation of the ringleaders. Betty Parris lies unconscious off
to the side. Hale turns to Abigail first. Under intense questioning, she
confesses to drinking blood at the nighttime gathering. But Abigail claims that
Tituba, Parris's slave from Barbados, is the chief culprit. To avoid imminent
hanging, Tituba in turn blames the devil. When pressured to name individuals
she may have seen with the devil, she names two disreputable townsfolk.
Abigail now takes her cue from Tituba. She admits to cavorting with the devil
and names yet another Salemite as an accomplice. Finally, Betty Parris revives
from her stupor and names others. At the Act's conclusion, nine citizens of
Salem are accused.

Act One, which Miller calls "an overture," deserves close study. In addition to
setting the plot into motion, it introduces several of the play's major characters
and previews its central conflicts. The seance, we discover, had been largely
instigated by Ann Putnam, Ruth's mother. She sought through Tituba to
discover why seven of her children died just after birth. She remarks to a
shaken Parris, "I sent my child-she should learn from Tituba who murdered
her sisters."'" When the pious Rebecca Nurse rebukes her for entertaining such
an expedient, she angrily asks Hale, "Is it a natural work to lose seven children
before they live a day?" She nearly rejoices when the girls name Goody Osburn
as one of the devil's disciples: "I knew it! Goody Osburn were midwife to me
three times. . . . My babies always shriveled in her hands!" The prospect of
righteous revenge is unmistakable. Any guilt she may have felt over the loss of
her children is transformed into blame.

Thomas Putnam joins his wife in entertaining impure motives for pursuing the
witch hunt. Thomas is an overbearing and officious man. Whatever
 73

discomfort he experiences over this affair-after all, his daughter is possessed-is

masked by self-righteousness. He commands Parris to initiate an investigation
of witchcraft and will have Tituba hang for trafficking with the devil. In an
aside, Miller describes him as resentful and vindictive.'" He notes as well that
Putnam was part of a faction engaged in a land war against Francis and
Rebecca Nurse.' Toward the middle of the act, we view him quarrelling with
Giles Corey, an elderly neighbor, over a piece of pasture. Clearly, Putnam
would be happier were the Nurses and Corey to find themselves among the
accused.

Parris fears for his office. He initially resists the cries of witchcraft over
concern that his daughter's affliction will darken his name and cause his
congregation to turn against him. In fact, the congregation is tired of Parris.
The people are loath to accede to his demands for free title of the parsonage,
an increase in his supply of firewood, and golden candlesticks. In an early
confrontation with Proctor having to do with the house, Parris exclaims: "I
want a mark of confidence is all! ...You people seem not to comprehend
that a minister is the Lord's man in the parish; a minister is not to be so lightly
crossed and contradicted."" Proctor plainly irritates Parris. A practical minded
farmer, Proctor disdains talk of pursuing witches, a cause which by now Parris
has wholeheartedly embraced. Thus, Parris would be well rid of Proctor and
other troublemakers among his flock.

Fed by vengeance, greed, and pride, then, conflicts emerge that will pit
neighbor against neighbor and minister against congregation. The remaining
conflict depicted in Act One involves Proctor and Abigail Williams. This
conflict is fueled by lust. At the beginning of the act, Abigail tries to convince
her uncle that the revelry was no more than sport. She says the same to
Proctor when Proctor makes his appearance somewhat later on. But just after
she leaves her uncle and is alone with Betty and some of the other girls, a
darker intention is revealed. A temporarily revived Betty Parris cries out: "You
drank a charm to kill John Proctor's wife! You drank a charm to kill Goody
Proctor!" We learn that Abigail had once been in the service of Elizabeth
Proctor but was turned out after Proctor confessed to his wife that he and
Abigail had committed adultery. Abigail harbors a rabid hatred for Elizabeth
and a lingering desire for Proctor. Earlier, trying to explain to Parris why she
is no longer in Elizabeth's service, she says, "It's a bitter woman, a lying, cold,
sniveling woman, and I will not work for such a woman!"' She repeats these
exact sentiments when she and Proctor have a chance to be alone before Hale's
arrival. In this scene, she tries to rekindle Proctor's ardor but fails. Proctor has
been faithful to Elizabeth during the seven months since Abigail's dismissal;
however, he retains a sense of sin. He tells Abigail, " ...I will cut off my hand
before I ever reach for you again." By the act's conclusion, Abigail's voice is
 74

heard loudest among the accusers. No one doubts that she would relish the
chance to dance upon Elizabeth's grave.

Act Two shifts the scene to Proctor's farmhouse. Eight days have elapsed, and
the girls' mischief has wrought serious harm. Deputy Governor Danforth has
set up a court in Salem. He promises hanging to any accused who refuses to
confess. Abigail Williams is now chief accuser, a saint among those townsfolk
lucky enough to be counted among the righteous. A firestorm gathers whose
heat soon enough will engulf the Proctors. But for now the atmosphere in
Proctor's house is cold.

By way of anticipating the movement of Act Three, Act Two is motivated

almost entirely by accusation and interrogation. We first witness Proctorand
Elizabeth engaged in strained conversation. Elizabeth clings to a brooding,
quiet hurt over her husband's infidelity. Proctor has told her of Abigail's
revelation of the fraud, and she wonders aloud why he has not made this news
public. Proctor further lets slip that he and Abigail were briefly alone when
they talked. Elizabeth wonders over this revelation as well. She meets with
innuendo each of Proctor's protestations of innocence. Finally, Proctor
explodes: "Spare me! You forget nothin' and forgive nothin'. Learn charity,
woman. I have gone tiptoe in this house all seven month since she is gone. . . .I
cannot speak but I am doubted, every moment judged for lies, as though I
come into a court when I come into this house!"

They are interrupted by the entrance of their house servant, Mary Warren.
Earlier in the act, Elizabeth tells Proctor, to her husband's astonishment and
disgust, that Mary sits among the accusers. Mary returns from an exhausting
day at court and is greeted by a fusillade of questions. The Proctors learn that
the firestorm has reached their doorstep. Thirty-nine people by now have been
called out as witches and arrested. Judge Danforth is said to invest complete
confidence in the girls' accounts of being attacked in court by the spirits of the
accused. Elizabeth's worst fear is confirmed when she learns that her own
name has been "somewhat mentioned" in the proceedings. "Oh, the noose,
the noose is up!" she exclaims. She knows that Abigail means to take her
place. Proctor knows this as well.

A final interrogation taking place in Act Two is conducted by Reverend Hale.

His is a private mission to test the "Christian character" of the Proctors.
Troubled, he has just come from questioning Rebecca Nurse. Rebecca is
revered throughout Salem for her piety, but the girls mention her nevertheless.
Hale has learned that Proctor seldom attends church services and wants to
know why. Proctor voices his resentment of Reverend Parris's cupidity. "I see
no light of God in that man," he says. Hale is not satisfied. He asks Proctor to
recite the Commandments. Proctor manages to recall nine but forgets the rule
 75

forbidding adultery. Elizabeth then induces her husband to reveal Abigail's

confession of fraud. This news staggers Hale. He asks if Proctor will testify to
the fraud in court. Proctor reluctantly agrees.

Hale's interrogation is the prelude to the climax of Act Two. Giles Corey and
Francis Nurse appear. Both of their wives have been arrested, Rebecca for the
"marvelous and supernatural murder" of Ann Putnam's babies." Finally,
Marshall Herrick comes to arrest Elizabeth, now formally accused by Abigail
of witchcraft. Hale assures Proctor that all will go well if Elizabeth is innocent.
Proctor will have none of it:

If she is innocent! Why do you never wonder if Parris be innocent, or

Abigail? Is the accuser always holy now? Were they born this morning
as clean as God's fingers? I'll tell you what's walking Salem-vengeance
is walking Salem. We are what we always were in Salem, but now the
little crazy children are jangling the keys of the kingdom, and common
vengeance writes the law! .. .I'll not give my wife to vengeance!"

The act ends on a note of desperation tinged somewhat with hope. Proctor, in
anguish, begs Hale to concede the fraud. Groping for an explanation, Hale
reminds Proctor and the two other husbands that some of the accused will
hang. Surely, he pleads, there must be a cause proportionate. "Think on your
village," he commands, "and what may have drawn from heaven such
thundering wrath upon you all." 32 All but Proctor and Mary Warren then exit.
Proctor turns to Mary who earlier had tacitly admitted to the girls' deceit. With
force he commands her to admit it in open court. Mary acquiesces. The
audience is now left to ponder whether the two of them can expose the real
witchery in Salem.

Acts One and Two share an appealing dramatic dynamic. Each opens with a
subtle tension that builds momentum as the action progresses to reach
feverish proportions by the act's end. Act Three, the trial scene, operates
similarly. In addition, Act Three propels the play to its climax.

The setting is Judge Danforth's court in Salem. Proctor, accompanied by Mary,

has come to save his wife and friends. By now the witch hunt has
spread far beyond Salem. We learn early on in the act that Danforth has jailed
more than four hundred persons throughout the colony. Seventy-two souls are
condemned to hang. Miller describes Danforth as a grave man, not without
humor, who maintains a steely conviction in the justness of his cause. His
credulity is sorely tested when Mary testifies that the spirits of the accused
never afflicted her or the other girls. He tells Proctor, who has also charged
the girls with fraud, the following:
 76

I tell you straight, Mister-I have seen marvels in this court. I have seen
people choked before my eyes by spirits; I have seen them stuck by pins
and slashed by daggers. I have until this moment not the slightest
reason to suspect that the children may be deceiving me. Do you
understand my meaning?

Danforth then attempts to cajole Proctor into dropping the charge. Elizabeth,
it so happens, is pregnant and may safely bring the child to term before any
further action can be brought against her. But Proctor declines. His friends'
lives are at stake as well. He brings forth a testament bearing the names of
ninety-one citizens who declare their good opinion of his wife, Rebecca Nurse,
and Martha Corey. Danforth orders these people arrested for questioning.
Giles Corey then accuses Thomas Putnam of conspiring to steal land. Fearing
the court's reprisal, he refuses to name witnesses. Proctor presses his charge.
Hale, whose earlier zeal has dampened, requests that Proctor have the
guidance of legal counsel. Danforth refuses, arguing that since witchcraft is by
its nature an "invisible crime," its existence may be proven merely by testing
the credibility of the accusers." This test he will perform by himself.

Danforth proceeds to question Mary Warren. Throughout the action Mary has
at best behaved timidly. In a faltering voice, she admits she lied in her
accusations of witchcraft. Abigail and some of the other girls now enter. Mary
feebly insists that the girls pretended. Abigail accuses Mary of lying. Danforth
commands Mary to faint, recalling that some of the girls would faint while
testifying. She cannot. Danforth cautions both Abigail and Mary against lying.
On cue, the girls lapse into a fit of hysteria. They are possessed, this time by
Mary. Howling confusion grips the stage. Proctor ushers in momentary
silence. Shedding his own pretense, he cries out Abigail as a whore. To see
justice done, he will sacrifice his good name. He tells the court the particulars
of his liaison with Abigail, including his wife's knowledge of it. Danforth will
get to the bottom of this "swamp." He calls in Elizabeth Proctor. The honesty
of a woman whose honesty is well known will decide this case. In the act's
darkest and most ironic moment, Elizabeth denies her knowledge of her
husband's adultery with Abigail. She would lie to protect Proctor's name, a
name already publicly dishonored. Pandemonium again controls. The girls
now see Mary as a large bird eager to tear their faces. Mary buckles and runs to
the girls' corner. Pointing to Proctor, she cries out, "You're the Devil's man!"
Danforth demands a confession. Proctor finally yields to crazed frustration and
defeat. He turns to face Danforth and issues the following warning:

A fire, a fire is burning! I hear the boot of Lucifer, I see his filthy face!
And it is my face, and yours, Danforth! For them that quail to bring
men out of ignorance, as I have quailed, and as you quail now when
 77

you know in all your black hearts that this be fraud-God damns our
kind especially, and we will burn, we will burn together!

Proctor is led off to jail, along with Giles Corey who has been arrested for
contempt. Hale, sickened, quits the court.

Act Four opens with a view of the interior of the Salem jail. It is the fall of
1692, on the day set for Proctor's execution. The firestorm of Salem has left a
bitter and blighted landscape. It has reached so many people that orphans and
cattle wander from place to place, and crops lie rotting in the furrows.
Ironically, other signs speak of promise. Abigail has run off to Boston after
emptying her uncle's strongbox. The people of nearby Andover have sought to
overthrow the court. Fearing the people's reprisal, Parris is not eager to
proceed against respectable folk such as Proctor and Rebecca Nurse. Hale, now
turncoat, pleads with prisoners to confess in order to save their lives. Only
Danforth, the "rule-bearer" remains unconditionally wedded to the court's
cause.

Benjamin Nelson properly observes that Act Four belongs to Proctor,"

for it charts the course of his spiritual redemption. At stake once again is
Proctor's good name. He may still escape hanging, but only if he signs a
prepared confession and allows it to be given public display. Proctor's will is
set against Danforth's. Danforth will adamantly proceed according to the rules.
Hale early on urges him to pardon those who will not confess. Parris, urging
the same, fears a riot. Danforth's unpitying refusal is fueled with high
earnestness:

Now hear me, and beguile yourselves no more. I will not receive a
single plea for pardon or postponement. Them that will not confess will
hang. Twelve are already executed; the names of these seven are given
out, and the village expects to see them die this morning. Postponement
now speaks a floundering on my part; reprieve or pardon must cast
doubt upon the guilt of them that died till now. While I speak God's law,
I will not crack its voice with whimpering .... I should hang ten
thousand that dared to rise against the law, and an ocean of salt tears
could not melt the resolution of the statutes. ... "

Hale prevails upon Elizabeth to coax a confession from her husband. She will
promise nothing but yearns to see him. Danforth assents.

We next revisit Proctor, who has become a tortured and near broken man. His
failure to speak out sooner against the town's ignorance, even at the cost of his
name, fills him with self-loathing. So does his adultery. He marvels at the
courage of Rebecca Nurse who, by Elizabeth's account, calmly awaits the
noose. Giles Corey's decision to be pressed to death, rather than to plead,
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invites his awe." He feels he is not fit company for people of such courage and
reveals to Elizabeth his strong temptation to confess: "I cannot mount the
gibbet like a saint. It is a fraud. I am not that man. My honesty is broke,
Elizabeth; I am no good man. Nothing's spoiled by giving them this lie that
were not rotten long before."43 He would have Elizabeth's guidance, but she
will offer him none. "I cannot judge you,"" she tells him. Instead of judgment
or guidance, she gives him an outpouring of love that flows from her own
confession that she was a poor wife.

Danforth awaits Proctor's decision. Proctor agrees to confess, but he

immediately wavers when told that the confession will be made public and
that it must implicate Rebecca and his other friends. Rebecca, now present,
silently rebukes him for considering the lie. Danforth as well insists on the
truth. "[Y]ou mistake me," he tells Proctor. "I am not empowered to trade your
life for a lie."4" He presses on. Proctor signs the confession but then refuses to
turn over the document to Danforth. Upon Danforth's repeated urgings for an
explanation, he tells him why such a confession cannot be seen:

Because it is my name! Because I cannot have another in my life!

Because I lie and sign myself to lies! Because I am not worth the dust
on the feet of those that hang! How may I live without my name? I have
given you my soul; leave me my name!

An exasperated Danforth now refuses to accept the false confession.

Proctor has shed his guilt with his honest confession. Hale tells him his
words will hang him, but Proctor no longer guards his corporeal life. Proctor
perceives some goodness in himself, and gathering from that perception is the
strength to resist all the Danforths this world can summon against him. He
will die with his friends. In the last scene of the play, Hale frantically beseeches
Elizabeth to plead with him. Elizabeth refuses, saying, "He have his goodness
now. God forbid I take it from him!"

In a postscript, Miller remarks that soon after the Salem witch trials the
power of the theocracy in Massachusetts began to weaken. By 1712, it had
vanished.

Part- II

A description of a construct of legal reasoning for understanding

the legal decision making depicted in the play.

"The people of Salem developed a theocracy....

 79

As previously noted, Act Four boils down to a battle of wills between Proctor
and Danforth. Emerging from this contest is what John H. Ferres describes as
one of the play's most baleful ironies. He explains:

[B]oth Proctor and Danforth believe they are fighting against the same
evils of irrationality and ambiguity in the administration of justice and
against their anarchic influences. . . . Danforth must in conscience
regard attacks upon the court as attacks upon God-which is to say the
theocracy. Proctor is convinced the theocracy is an offense against God
because it would deny the humanity of His creatures.

A greater irony informs the play's powerful message. The theocracy, for all of
its outward morality, cannot morally test the likes of John Proctor. He must
be his own judge, and in recognizing that reality, and acting upon it, he finds
his goodness/humanity. Danforth, the theocracy's minion, is denied goodness
because he dare not look into his own soul for the causes of Salem's problems.
The law's prisoner, he must always be perceived as the loser on the play's
thematic level.

But let us turn from the play's theme and look more closely at this rule bearer
as a dramatic character whose function it is to procure a species of justice.
Danforth appears to be an enemy of right reason, but he does not come off as a
caricature in a show piece directed against an inherently wayward legal
system. He is as human as Proctor, and necessarily so. Were he injustice
personified, Proctor's epiphany and sacrifice would have symbolic meaning
only. And, as Henry Popkin reminds us, The Crucible is no mere play of
ideas."' Nor, as human, does Danforth strike us as necessarily evil. Unlike
Parris or Abigail, he has had no hand in consciously promoting the fraud. It is
likely that he seriously believes in the girls' accounts and seriously believes
that he has correctly observed the law.

Furthermore, Danforth's dilemma is credible, and the theocracy's rule of law

can in many respects be viewed as a workable system. Although a modern
audience is uncomfortable accepting the concept of witchcraft, it accepts such
a concept given the play's historical context. Moreover, shift the matter to a
more topical social concern, such as child molestation, and we have a readily
available contemporary context. Our present legal system deals on a daily basis
with such "invisible" crimes-crimes known only to the accuser and to the
accused. And despite our system's presumption of innocence, it does happen
that the accuser sometimes emerges in such instances as the holy party. Salem
justice, while imperfect, makes a believable effort to sort out the guilty from
the guiltless in such instances. We trust, for example, that if Mary Warren can
just cling to her courage, the fraud will be justly discovered. And outcries of
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injustice do not greet Danforth's decision to let the entire matter rest with
Elizabeth, a woman who, as Proctor proclaims before the court, "cannot lie."

How, then, does Salem justice acquire a semblance of credibility in the face of
the misery it breeds? The answer, which I hope to develop in the following
pages, is this.

The Salem system of justice, like our own, possesses both external and internal
logic. Externally, it looks to legal norms whose validity is shared by the
community as appropriate for governing conflicts as they arise. Internally, just
as in most legal systems, justice is driven by deductive logic. The norm, or let
us say major premise, most relevant to resolving a conflict is applied to the
facts to reach a particular result. To be justified, the result need only be validly
derived. It need not be fair; nor need it be good from a moral standpoint. John
Proctor and his companions are morally innocent in the eyes of the audience,
for history and Miller would plainly have it so. But just as no legal system
could ever guarantee a morally just result in the cases that come before it, so
no legal system could guarantee such justice in Proctor's case. Proctor, in
short, is legally guilty. Insisting to the contrary, in the words of John Finnis, is
insisting that "ought" be deduced from what "is" in a situation wherein "ought"
is not contained in the major premise.

The model of justice alluded to above lies as the cornerstone of legal

positivism-that branch of legal philosophy that does not require that legal
systems, rules, or outcomes be moral in order to be valid. A more detailed
examination of the model's elements is now in order. I have indicated that a
legal system acquires an external logic if its participating members share a
belief in the system's validity. Neil MacCormick terms this belief the system's
"validity thesis." He explains that

―A central tenet of positivistic legal theory [is] . . . that every legal

system comprises, or at least includes, a set of rules identifiable by
reference to common criteria of recognition; and that what constitutes
these criteria as criteria of recognition for a legal system is shared
acceptance by the judges of that system that their duty is to apply rules
identified by reference to them.‖

All rules of law within a system, then, are valid rules so long as they are
commonly recognized as such within the community. MacCormick interjects
an equally important tenet. Courts and judges derive their legitimacy from the
community: "[Courts] are institutions established . . . by a wider community
from which they derive their legitimacy and authority.... To have 'judges' at all
. . . we must therefore postulate the existence of some group of people who
ascribe to some individual or individuals of their number the function of
 81

determining controversies."6" It follows that judges presiding within a legal

system are expected to decide cases on the basis of the rules operating in that
system. Once a judge decides a case, the order will be followed, if need be by
force.

But every case requires that certain compelling conditions be met in order to
render valid the judge's decision. It, too, must have a logical base.
MacCormick, building on a theory best elucidated by John Dewey, suggests
that central to a decision's validation is establishing the boundaries of a
workable legal syllogism. According to Dewey, "[the logic] which has ...
exercised greatest influence on legal decisions, is that of the syllogism."
Arriving at the correct syllogism involves first the critical task of identifying
the rule of law most relevant to deciding the instant case. "But in undertaking
this task, the judge cannot adopt a rule which contradicts another binding
and valid rule in the system." The rule, once correctly identified, can be
expressed in the form if p, then q. It becomes the syllogism's major premise.
The judge can now justify the syllogism's conclusion by the application of
simple deduction: if the factual setting of the case, or minor premise, is proven
to be an instance of p, then the result q must follow.

Establishing that the facts of a case represent an instance of p, of course, can

pose a formidable challenge. Contending parties are expected to present a set
of facts to form a minor premise favoring one side only. Proving thus becomes
a matter of adducing credible evidence. Evidence, explains MacCormick, "is
something which enables us (a) to hold as true propositions about the present;
and (b) to infer from these, propositions about the past." He adds that the test
for verifying evidence is the test of coherence, weighing how the facts hang
together to form a believable story. The test "involves interpreting the directly
visible, audible, performances of witnesses . . . within a web of general beliefs,
assumptions, and theories."

The deductive process alone, however, cannot fully validate a legal outcome. A
reasoned explanation is also warranted. To Dewey, the purpose of this sort of
justification is to "set forth grounds for the decision reached so that it will not
appear as an arbitrary dictum, and so that it will indicate a rule for dealing
with similar cases in the future."7' Justification is almost always presented by
way of one or more of the four Aristotelian modes of argument. Judges
particularly favor consequentialist justification, but rationales based on
circumstance, similitude, and definitions are common as well.

One must note this final observation on legal decision making from the
positivist perspective. Just as nature abhors a vacuum, so do positivists abhor
decisions based solely on equity. Deciding a case on the basis of its special
merits, and without reference to rules already in place, promotes anarchy in
 82

the law, not justice. A case either fits within the ambit of the rules or it is an
exception. The law can always accommodate an exception, but it is loath to
allow individual cases to dictate their own rules.' MacCormick observes, "The
notion of formal justice requires that the justification of decisions in individual
cases be always on the basis of universal propositions to which the judge is
prepared to adhere as a basis for determining other like cases and deciding
them in the like manner to the present one." Hence, to decide a case solely on
the basis of equity would interfere with consistent and predictable application
of the law.

Validity thesis, rule selection, adduction of credible evidence, and syllogistic

reasoning accompanied by thoughtful justification are the elements of
positivistic judicial decision making. Let us now return to Salem to test their
application in The Crucible.

A. The Validity Thesis: "I Speak God's Law.....”

Does Miller depict a legitimate legal system in The Crucible? A positivist

would insist that this is very much the case. In keeping with their historical
counterparts, Miller's characters embrace the Bible as the basis of their validity
thesis, and by extension, the Puritan theocracy. Creed ran "high and severe" in
the early days of the Massachusetts colony,' and so it does in The Crucible.
The play presents us with a God-driven autocracy created, as Miller tells us,
out of necessity. Huddled in the wilderness, the first colonists were besieged by
unforgiving winters, fierce natives, and impure alien ideologies. They
permitted religion and government to commingle as protective agents whose
guardianship they bought with piety, austerity, simplicity, and conformity. By
1692, these traits still typified most of the people of Salem. But as the play
instructs us, darker forces had begun to gather. The people had little choice
but to turn to the Bible for explanation and succor. This required turning to
the theocracy as well.

It matters little for the purposes of this discussion that the theocracy becomes
an object of scorn in Miller's play. Proctor's code of self-forgiveness must
have its foil, and the theocracy's inflexible law serves nicely in this regard. Nor
does it matter that Miller depicts a legal system that is, at best, primitive, for
law in historical Salem was roughhewn and hard-handed. Marion Starkey tells
us that the colonists had little grasp of legal developments in England. Further,
they had no real need for sophistication:

This chosen people, this community which submitted itself to the direct
rule of God, looked less to England for its precepts than to God's ancient
and holy word. So far as was practicable the Puritans were living by a
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legal system that ante-dated Magna Carta by at least two millennia,

the Decalogue and the tribal laws codified in the Pentateuch.

What matters for our discussion is that The Crucible faithfully represents the
system that Starkey describes. Let us return to Mac Cormick for a moment to
review the requirements of the validity thesis. First, the system's legitimacy is
determined on the basis of whether the system admits legal criteria of shared
recognition within the community. Secondly, courts and judges derive their
legitimacy from the community." The Salem of Miller's depiction readily meets
both requirements. Legally, the criteria of shared common reference are
contained in the word of God. In Act Three, Danforth reminds the girls that he
presides over a "court of law ...law, based upon the Bible, and the Bible, writ by
Almighty God." He delivers this remark with reverence and severity; none of
his listeners yields to a shred of doubt that God's word is the proper root of the
community's law. Later, in Act Four, Danforth identifies himself to Hale as the
speaker of "God's law."87 And significantly, we know from Miller's description
of the early colony that Danforth has not usurped such a role. The people
bestowed it upon him. Referring to the government established by the first
colonists, Miller writes, "It was ... an autocracy by consent, for [the people]
were united from top to bottom by a commonly held ideology whose
perpetuation was the reason and justification for all their sufferings."88 Miller
makes it clear that by 1692 many people feared, even loathed, their theocracy.
But it remained, at least temporarily, as the agreed upon agent of God's will. So
we can see that the legal system Miller offers us possesses legitimacy. Its
framework is thus a valid one for seriously evaluating the legal decision
making that takes place in the play.

B. Rule Selection: "Thou Shalt Not Permit a Witch to Live

In the logic of the law, rules may be regarded as major premises, or general
propositions, that allow us to draw potentially truthful decisions about a set of
particulars. But neither in the legal context, nor in any other imaginable
context, do we begin our thinking with major premises. 9 We begin, as Dewey
argues, by observing facts. In the law, this means observing the facts of some
confusing and complicated case, one "admitting of alternative modes of
treatment andsolution." The task is to discover those general principles which
best accommodate the facts. This process, as we quickly learn in The Crucible,
is not foolproof.

The problem of discovery the play presents involves interpreting the girls'
troubling behavior-behavior first manifested by Betty Parris and Ruth Putnam
at the play's beginning, and later by Abigail and her cohorts at the end of Act
One and throughout the trial scene. The experts conclude that the girls present
a compelling case of witchcraft. We know, but only through dramatic irony,
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that this finding is wrong. Nevertheless, it possesses legal validity from a

positivist point of view.

For the validity thesis attaches to rules just as it attaches to legal systems.
Synthesizing the ideas of H. L. A. Hart and Joseph Raz, MacCormick
summarizes the positivist position as follows: "every genuine 'positivist' holds
that all rules which are rules of law are so because they belong to a particular
legal system, and that they belong to the system because they satisfy formal
criteria of recognition operative within that system as an effective working
social order." On the basis of this statement, one can say that if the system is
valid, then so too are its rules. Where problems of rule selection arise, Mac
Cormick turns to a concept he calls "second order justification." Competing
rules are tested to determine which makes most sense in both the world and in
the context of the system.9s Because legal norms are either directed at or set
patterns of behavior and do not seek to describe the world, making "sense"
does not mean accurately reflecting facts about the world. Rather, it means
selecting a rule that best interprets human conduct as it is understood in a
particular society.

The society of historical Salem ardently believed in witchcraft. Starkey tells us

that a Puritan's belief in witchcraft was as necessary as a belief in God: "To
doubt the devil was a blasphemy on a par with doubting God Himself. ...",
Hence, the belief in witchcraft rose to a level of dogma, since "to deny acts of
malefic witchcraft was to deny the devil."98 Miller's Salemites closely resemble
history's on this point. Indeed, when Hale first arrives upon the scene, the
other characters seem almost eager to believe that witchcraft beguiles Betty
Parris. He offers this ironic warning: "Now let me instruct you .... The Devil is
precise; the marks of his presence are definite as stone, and I must tell you all
that I shall not proceed unless you are prepared to believe me if I should find
no bruise of hell upon her."

This caveat invites speculation over other possible causes, thus allowing
second order justification to come into play. One possibility, a physical
ailment, has already been dismissed before Hale's arrival. Dr. Griggs, a local
physician, has come and gone, and can find no natural cause for Betty's
condition. Also, before Hale's appearance, Rebecca Nurse, in her wisdom,
points to another possibility:

―I think she'll wake in time. Pray calm yourselves. I have eleven

children,and I am twenty-six times a grandma, and I have seen them
all through their silly seasons, and when it come on them they will run
the Devil bowlegged keeping up with their mischief. I think she'll wake
when she tires of it. A child's spirit is like a child, you can never catch it
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by running after it; you must stand still, and, for love, it will soon itself
come back."

A child's sport invites guilt, and then paralyzing fear. Rebecca, of course,
points to the truthful cause of Betty's malady. But the truth is not an option in
this case. The stiff theocracy regarded children as nothing other than small
adults. They were expected "to walk straight, eyes slightly lowered, arms at the
side, and mouths shut until bidden to speak."' Insight into a child's
psychological dilemma is accessible only to the likes of Rebecca Nurse and to
modernists, and not to those such as Hale and Danforth. Ironically, Hale's
subsequent attempts to get at the truth permit the truth to become less and
less credible as the hysteria gathers momentum. He unwittingly invites a false
response from Tituba and then from Abigail, and soon the stage is set for the
pandemonium of Act Three.

The major premise is thus solidly established. This is a case of witchcraft.

Further, since this is witchcraft, a corollary premise emerges from an ancient
biblical commandment: "Thou shalt not permit a witch to live."

C. The Matter of Evidence: "The Devil is Precise; the Marks of his

Presence are Definite as Stone...."

What marvelous irony Miller conveys with these words! At no time are
readers or viewers of The Crucible willing to suspend disbelief that the devil
possesses the girls. We, along with Proctor and later Hale, simply know too
much. The diabolical forces at work in Salem are surely definite, but they are
also sadly mundane. Pride, lust, greed, envy, guilt, and fear-such are Salem's
enemies, as they are our own. Clothed in righteousness, sin and weakness
accompany Lucifer up and down the village streets. Danforth feels the sickness
of Salem and would ferret out its source. But, as was noted above, he lacks the
courage or the wisdom to look for answers deep enough inside the human soul,
especially his own. Instead, a lawyer, he turns to the Bible and to tradition and
folklore,' all the substance of Salem law on point. He will find his answers in,
among other sources, demonology.

Starkey notes that the magistrates came to Salem armed with several methods
for detecting the devil's presence.' These agreed upon principles
accommodated both physical and testimonial evidence. The discovery, for
example, of a "teat" or some other unexplained "excrescence" on the body of
the accused sufficed for a finding of guilt.' Mischief following squabbles
between neighbors could raise suspicions which, in turn, could lead to an
unfavorable judgment against an accused. In their thirst for spite, neighbors
were quick to recall how sundry farm tools suddenly became lost after such
battles or how some farm animal inexplicably died. Most damaging was a
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victim's testimony, varyingly the product of hallucinations, dreams, or fancy,

that the accused was seen going about the devil's work and in some way
harming the victim. The magistrates regarded this "spectral evidence" as proof
that demons assumed the shape of the accused.' A guilty verdict automatically
followed, since the Puritans held to the concept that "the devil could not
assume the shape of an innocent person in doing mischief to mankind."'
Furthermore, no defense could be mustered against the charge."' For example,
if an accuser said, "Goodman Brown came into my room last night," not even
air tight evidence that Goodman Brown was elsewhere at the time could
disprove the allegation. The shape could wander about as it pleased.
Miller amply illustrates the unfairness of such proof. Martha Corey is hauled
off on account of a gaffe. Giles finds it somewhat odd that his wife reads books
at night and informs the townsfolk of his opinion."' A neighbor who seems
unable to keep his pigs alive then charges Martha with bewitching the pigs by
means of her books." 2 Rebecca Nurse becomes the killer of babies." Elizabeth
Proctor afflicts Abigail by allegedly sticking pins into "poppets." And
thus it continues, Hale ever eager to follow "wherever the accusing finger
points,""' until Proctor himself is charged. Modern audiences can perceive
little justice in a scenario that seems to determine guilt almost solely on the
basis of accusations. The play thus appears to tempt us to mock Salem justice.
But mockery would be useless, since it is an irritating, frustrating, and often
agonizing fact that legal logic does not require the truth. How could it, when
none of us is ever entirely certain about the truth surrounding motives and
events? And how could it, especially in an adversarial system such as our own
where the truth is up for grabs? Legal logic, as positivists point out, requires
merely valid major premises, or rules, and valid minor premises, or
propositions of fact. Says MacCormick, "courts ...make 'findings of fact' . . .
and ... these, whether actually correct or not ... count for legal purposes as
being true.." The proposition of fact brings the legal argument to near
completion. Any resulting decision is justified, providing it is based on
reference to that argument. "

As it so happens, Danforth embraces an argument capable of revealing both

moral and legal truths. He appears willing to piece together a believable story
based on the testimony of competing parties. He will allow Elizabeth to assist
him in undertaking the test of coherence." If Elizabeth, by her testimony, can
buttress Proctor's charge of harlotry against Abigail, then perhaps the fraud
will cease. But in hopes of doing her husband good, Elizabeth lies. The truth
proves inaccessible even to her. At this point, any fraud perpetrated by the
girls seems secondary or nearly irrelevant. When given an honest chance, the
people of Salem are incapable of saving themselves.
 87

Miller offers us broad ironies about matters of human truth, ones not merely
confined to the courts of law. As far as the major characters are concerned,
nothing is "definite as stone." 9 Elizabeth's desperate lie presents a case in
point. So do the lies the girls tell-lies originally wrought by fear but clung to as
proof of sainthood as the play develops. And what, ultimately, does one make
of the likes of Hale, the cleric who would have Proctor and the others lie at the
risk of losing their souls? Truths, however, do emerge, and they collide at the
play's end. One truth, the moral truth, belongs to Proctor. It becomes his
fountain of goodness and salvation. Proud and self-deceiving throughout most
of the play, Proctor grows to accept the truth about himself. He has been
fatally weak and reckless. He will willingly mount the gibbet rather than live
another lie. His gesture is redeeming in another sense, Miller reminds us,
because the theocracy will eventually fail. Danforth owns the other truth. It is
the truth of the minor premise contained in the legal syllogism. It need be
neither accurate nor moral. It need merely cohere with the tested evidence. It
is on the one hand ironic that Danforth, like Proctor, will partake of no lies,
since the law of Salem so easily accommodates them. On the other hand,
Danforth's insistence on legal truth is both appropriate and necessary. And
Proctor's refusal to confess to witchcraft is all the truth that Danforth requires.
He can now comfortably decide the case and justify his decision.

D. Deduction and Explanation: "An Ocean of Salt Tears Could not

Melt the Resolution of the Statutes."

Let us briefly review the elements of judicial decision making discussed up to

this point. First, valid judgments are attainable in any system characterized by
a society's belief in rules identified by reference to common criteria of
recognition.' A corollary to this proposition requires that courts and judges
derive their legitimacy from the community.'" Second, in the subject society,
any rule selected to resolve a controversy is valid so long as it is best suited to
interpret human behavior as it is understood within that society.' 3 Finally,
problems of proof are resolved by selecting and presenting evidence that
satisfies the test of coherence.

The Crucible, as we have seen, captures each of these elements with

remarkable fidelity. The fate of the accused now rests in part with straight
forward deduction. The deductive formula is simply understood. The major
premise posits the rule that witchcraft is a crime in Salem, and it is a crime
punishable by hanging. The minor premise is supplied by the adduced
proposition of fact that John Proctor and his friends are witches. Formal
justice and deductive logic now demand the inevitable legal decision that
Proctor and the others must, therefore, hang.' But, as Dewey explains, such a
decision would be incomplete, or less than valid, if left unexplained. Danforth
offers a valid explanation when he rejects Hale's entreaties for a pardon. The
 88

judge turns to a common strategy, the consequentialist argument." He

reminds Hale that twelve other people have already been hanged. To pardon
the others now would bring into doubt the guilt of those twelve, as well as
speak of "floundering" on Danforth's part. To avoid such a consequence, then,
he will have consistency-he will hang ten thousand should they rise against the
law.

Certainly, one is tempted to condemn Danforth's consistency for bearing all

the earmarks of the hobgoblin variety. We know that Proctor and the rest are
innocent; pardon, then, seems to be the only just course. Benjamin Nelson
perceives in Danforth's decision the motives of a sadist. ‗To John Ferres, it is
merely self-serving.' But clearly, a pardon would make no sense whatsoever. If
one were to believe in Danforth's sincerity as a jurist, then from his perspective
grounds for a reversal simply do not exist. Hale would have a pardon on
grounds of innocence, but no new evidence has come to Danforth's attention
which in the slightest manner casts doubt on the condemned prisoners' guilt.
Nor would a reversal be appropriate were we to interpret Hale's request as an
appeal for clemency. To avoid, in Proctor's case, the specter of a widowed wife
and orphaned children,3 2 a pardon would certainly speak of charity. But to
decide the case on the basis of such special merits would be to decide it solely
on grounds of equity. Equity of this sort only breeds arbitrary and capricious
results, since a decision favoring Proctor would not be made with reference to
the law.'33 Finally, it is worth recalling that Danforth's decision is a response
in part to fears voiced by Parris that segments of the community might riot.14
By discounting such fears, Danforth flatly refuses to hand over the rule of law
to a mob. Even the most charitable of those among us can see some sense in
this motive.

The law, then, must be consistent. Where consistency is lacking, the law
cannot proceed rationally. As MacCormick explains, "laws must be conceived
of as having rational objectives concerned with securing social goods or
averting social evils in a manner consistent with justice between individuals;
and the pursuit of these values should exhibit ...rational consistency."' 35
Danforth, self-righteous and unyielding though he may be, seeks through the
consistent application of the law to avoid any further evils the devil may wish
to visit on Salem. Viewed through the play's prism of dramatic irony, his
explanation for his behavior is altogether unsatisfactory. But when viewed
through the lens of legal logic, his explanation leaves little room for
alternatives. His decision and explanation speak of believable justice.

III. Conclusion

Justice is not denied in The Crucible. I have relied on an obviously formalistic

approach to reach this finding. For purposes of clarification, I must add now,
 89

to use Hart's words that my conclusion applies to "justice in the administration

of the law, not justice of the law." This latter form of justice, which I regard as
an abstraction, I take to mean a form of morally grounded justice. It is justice
that cries out for the right or good result. It is its absence in the legal system
that Miller depicts which prompts critics to label the Salem proceedings as
unjust or irrational. Such observations miss the mark because they ignore the
formal legal context developed within the play. More importantly, they ignore
the play's tragic aspect. On the topic of law and morality, Miller offers only a
single, and mundane, observation: never should a society, as did Salem, permit
such discord to arise between the administration of justice and the cardinal
principle that the innocent shall be set free. Otherwise, Miller makes no
serious argument that law and morality be joined. This is perfectly in keeping
with the play's tragic dimension. Requiring that law be joined with morality,
leads to an insistence that the law be capable of rendering correct moral
judgments. But to Miller such a capacity is properly vested in the individual.
Elizabeth reminds us that no one can judge John Proctor but himself. 'Only
Proctor knows the real issues surrounding his descent, and only he can
discover the path that leads to his redemption.‘ "Justice of the law," then, must
be internal, and we see it residing in Proctor. The court, even when correctly
disposing its formal justice, is far outmatched by Proctor. Such is The
Crucible's most enduring lesson, a lesson fully appreciated with a positivistic
interpretation of this play.

Q. Discuss about the “The Idea of Tragedy in Arthur Miller‟s The

Crucible”.

Abstract

Arthur Miller is acknowledged as a heavyweight in portraying ordinary life‘s

tragedy in twentieth-century America. He believes that tragedy is no longer
confined to the kingly man placed aloofness from others; he denies rigid
definitions of traditional Greek tragedy and enriches them to keep abreast of
the times in modern society. We can see how Miller expresses his idea of
modern tragedy behind the shield of Greek tragedy and how it gives a new
lease on the life of antiquated classical tragedy in modern society.

1. Introduction

At the outset of the twentieth century, man is seen as a victim of his

surroundings and society is thought to have become a shaping force in men‘s
lives. The classical tragic mode is archaic and it no longer suits for ordinary life
in modern society. Increasingly, scores of dramatists become preoccupied with
social and political issues. Under such circumstances, Arthur Miller attempts
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to remold the classical concept of tragedy and formulates an acceptable

modern definition of tragedy. Even if he denies some major principles found in
standardized Greek tragedy, one cannot ignore that Greek tragedy has an
indelible impact on Miller‘s works. The Crucible display characteristics of both
Greek Tragedy and Miller‘s idea of modern tragedy. Here we shall attempt to
draw on certain theories of Greek Tragedy and Miller‘s conception of modern
tragedy which are the foundations for the subsequent analysis. Then it
respectively analyzes how distinctive characteristics of Greek Tragedy feature
Crucible including; the functions and the role of chorus which consists of an
implicit narrator in The Crucible, the tragic hero, the tragic flaw and catharsis,
attempting to perceive Miller‘s underlying ideas of modern tragedy.

2. Greek Tragedy and Arthur Miller‟s Modern Tragedy

Greek tragedy has its beginnings in choral performances, in which a group of

men sing hymns and dance in praise of god Dionysus throughout the play. The
function of the tragic chorus, both as a real and ideal entity, is to comment on
the dramatic actions and draw universal ethical conclusions from the play. The
tragic chorus is called time and time again to participate affectively in the
actions by voicing the feelings which the play evokes, to summarize
information that facilitates the audience‘s understanding of the play, to
comment on the actions by revealing moral implications and social
significance (Bushnell, 2005, p. 215-233). At the same time, the chorus
members provide time for scene changes and give the protagonists a break;
they offer important background information and allow for the tragic plot to
unfold. As the importance of the characters increases, the tragic chorus
become fewer in number and tends to have less importance in the plot.
Modern realist tragedies no longer feature a choric role as Greek Tragedy does
in Oedipus Rex.

Another important element in Greek Tragedy that has played a dominant role
is the role of tragic hero. The standardized tragic hero is a noble and honorable
man with a tragic flaw which eventually leads to his destruction. He must be
greatly superior; he must possess a great reputation and good fortune. The
tragic hero should be defined by a hierarchical order and his demise is the
result of his fatal flaw, his own fault which others cannot be blamed for.
Aristotle stresses that the hero‘s downfall from such height should have a
public significance. His tragic downfall brings about strong emotions of fear
and pity among the audience. The catharsis is an emotional relief through
which the audience can achieve a state of moral and spiritual renewal and
obtain a sense of liberation from stress and anxiety after they undergo
emotions of fear and pity. Aristotle believes that the function of tragedy is to
arouse this catharsis—a purging of emotions and a release of tension. Golden
also points out that what is accompanied by tragedy is not merely pity and
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fear, but the representation of pitiful and fearful situations, a clarification of

such incidents (Golden, 1962, p. 51-60). These particular fearful and pitiful
events so skillfully arranged and presented by the playwright lead the audience
to the cathartic effect and perceive a universal condition of human existence.

As a practical playwright, Miller blends social, political, moral and personal

questions presented directly and indirectly through the characters in most
pieces of his works, revealing social injustice and its effect on the lives of his
characters in modern society. His concept of tragedy is deeply grounded in his
concerns with social problems. In his essay Tragedy and the Common Man,
he presents his conception of tragedy. Tragedy, he writes, is the consequence
of a man‘s total compulsion to evaluate himself justly. Tragedy derives from
the underlying fear of being displaced and being torn away from our chosen
image of who we are (Roudane, 2015, p. 8). Miller focuses on the internal
conflict between the individual and society. For the most part in his essay, he
sees the tragedy inherent in the situation as a consequence of the failure of the
individual‘s struggle against the society he lives in. Man should not be
conceived of as a private entity and his social relations as something attached
to him, but rather he must be seen as constantly in the process of becoming
part of the society which also simultaneously shapes him.

His idea of tragedy aforementioned to some extent subverts the Aristotelian

tragedy in that Aristotelian tragedy derives from a fatal tragic flaw which leads
to a hero‘s crisis and downfall while Miller‘s tragedy comes from the external
forces operated on the man, his failure of confrontation towards the society he
lives in. The importance of the tragic flaw is diminished in Miller‘s viewpoint.
Insofar as he regards external factors as the source of tragedy, he argues
common man is apt for tragedy as kings are. Miller argues for the impossibility
of tragedy if tragedy must be about the socially elevated nobles in the social
hierarchy, because the modern age is an age without rigid hierarchy which is
eliminated by democracy. He argues for the possibility of a common tragic
hero by observing the fact that modern psychiatry deals with such conceptions
as the Oedipus complex which can be applied to anyone no matter whether he
is a king or a common man (Roudane, 2015, p. 9). He makes it clear that the
common man experiences the same mental processes as the high-born heroes
of the past, facilitating the secularization of tragedy. Tragedy, furthermore, is
not exclusively about individuals, but more precisely about humanity and it
reveals the truth about human societies. Miller explores themes of a personal
search for forgiveness and salvation. The individual‘s tragedy lies deep down
not only in his psychology as well as the tragic flaw, but in his milieu which is
influenced by the socio-economic system. Man‘s own personality, psychology
and social and moral forces act upon each other and bring about the
individual‘s end.
 92

In his essay The Nature of Tragedy, Miller stresses the distinction between
pathos and tragedy. Pathos merely arouses feelings of sympathy, sadness, and
possibly identification. Tragedy, however, brings the audience fear besides
sadness, sympathy and identification; it also brings knowledge and
enlightenment (Roudane, 2015, p. 12). For Miller, knowledge is ethical
knowledge, the right way of living in the world. His idea of tragedy related to
ethical knowledge here can be viewed as an equivalent to the catharsis in
Greek Tragedy which stresses the audience‘s moral enlightenment after the
undergoing of fear and pity. Miller further points out that tragedy is
inseparable from a certain hope regarding to humans. The glimpse of hope
inherent in tragedy can function to raise sadness out of the pathetic towards
the tragic, which adds a hint of optimism in modern tragedy.

3. The Idea of Tragedy in „The Crucible‟

Miller begins to adapt the device of chorus from the classical Greek Tragedy
when creating The Crucible, and in his next play A View from the Bridge he
also uses the choric role to unfold the tragedy. He employs an implicit
omniscient narrator, a parallel of Greek chorus, to address the audience to tell
the story. Not being part of the action, the implicit narrator provides detailed
information on the characters and comments on the social background of the
play. He traces the history of the characters to show that the long-held hatred
of neighbors who turn on each other has its historical origins. The constant
bickering over land boundaries can cause the citizen‘s grievance and
resentfulness which eventually leads one to take revenge on the other. The
neighbors‘ pent-up dissatisfaction towards one another provides excuses for
their later invented accusation of witchcraft in the dramatic text. Some people
are accused of witchcraft by others who merely feel envy and hostility towards
them, revealing the guise of morality in Salem. Except for the disclosing of the
steeped-in tradition of vengeance in his detailed monologue, he also
introduces the history of Salem in which people‘s way of life is extremely strict
and somber. In Salem, the inhabitants oppose individuality for they see it as a
threat to their existing social order. The community is intolerant of individual
thinkers who question or refuse to accept what they are told to believe
(Ackerman, 2013, p. 115). The dominant ideology is held by the religious
authority that runs the government and manipulates the citizens. Judge
Hawthorne and Reverend Parris, therefore, have chance to abuse their power,
and characters like Abigail could manipulate it to her selfish advantage. These
background issues of land ownership, personal vengeance and power struggles
give ample evidence to the tumult of Salem where it is overtaken by
accusations of witchcraft. The concern with social problems, social injustice
and its effect on the lives of the characters is evident in Miller‘s plays. The
choric narrator uses the lengthy background information to foreshadow
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Proctor and others‘ tragedies, and accounts for the inevitability of their
tragedies in morally degenerate Salem. Miller applies a choric role to weave in
and out of the characters‘ dialogue and at the same time comments on the
milieu of the play, which illustrates the historical parallel between the witch
hunt in Salem in 1692 and McCarthyism in the United States of 1950s and
reflects that tragedies are socially determined.

The Crucible has the outline structure of Greek Tragedy with Proctor as a
standardized tragic hero. Procter is an upright, reasonable and honest man,
but he has an affair with Abigail, which is a fatal flaw that leads him to death.
Their affair plays a significant role—an incident that touches off the
widespread fear of witchcraft throughout the play. Elizabeth, Proctor‘s wife,
dismisses Abigail after she spots their affair, resulting in Abigail‘s vengeance—
the indictment of witchcraft—on her. Abigail‘s revenge on Elizabeth never
seems more than a way of removing Elizabeth and marrying Proctor. Not only
does Abigail accuse Elizabeth of witchcraft, but she also sets the witchcraft
hysteria in motion in Salem. She starts to accuse the community‘s outcasts and
gradually moves up to the respected members of the community, which causes
community-wide fear of being indicted of witchcraft. Proctor initially tries to
hide their affair, but later he realizes that nothing can prevent Abigail‘s
instigation but his confession to their affair. He eventually admits their affair
and his guilt publicly, coming to save his threatened wife and defend
something more than his wife. His tragic flaw results in his downfall, but his
role of a tragic hero shows a larger view of Miller‘s conception of modern
tragedy. Asked to concede a lie of participating in the witchcraft, he refuses to
sign the document admitting the false confession. When Judge Danforth
demands an explanation, Proctor cries out ―because how may I live without
my name? I have given you my soul; leave me my name!‖ (Miller, 2015, p.
328). He refuses to provide a false confession under the threat of his
impending death. Miller stresses that tragedy is evoked when the tragic hero is
ready to lay down his life to secure his personal dignity because he is
embroiled in the social mire. Faced with the trumped-up charge, Proctor
would rather go to the gallows than give false testimony. He saves his sense of
himself, his dignity as a man; he seeks the meaning of his own life when
threatened by the invented charge.

His tragedy is also intensified by the fault of the society according to Miller‘s
idea of modern tragedy. Judge Hawthorne and Deputy Governor Danforth
believe that they are emissaries of God and everything they do must be right.
Having realized that they might be deceived by Abigail and other girls, they
never reassess their actions because they think the citizens in the community
would target at them if they knew the judges had made impaired judgement.
Parris also knows this but he makes scapegoats of people including Proctor
 94

and Rebecca in order to strengthen his position as the Reverend of Salem.

They connive at hateful revenge under the shield of righteousness. The church
abuses their immense power, resulting in the innocents‘ tragedies. Thus the
importance of the tragic flaw as a disadvantage in Proctor‘s character
diminishes, and the tragedy stems from the corrupted stifling social
environment. As Miller deeply believed, individual tragedies do have their
social roots. Man‘s tragedy is viewed as constantly in the process of being
shaped and inevitably influenced by the environment which he lives in.
Miller‘s focus on social problems not only expresses the characters‘ tragedies,
but reflects the moral truth concerning society. Miller‘s concept of modern
tragedy does have ethic values; there exists no tragedy without messages of
moral values. The death of the innocents as scapegoats in the historical
corrupted society shows a larger impending tragedy in American society,
McCarthyism.

In classical Greek Tragedy, the downfall of the tragic hero arouses strong
emotions of pity and fear. The audience sympathizes with his misfortune and
feels pity for his inevitable fate. At the conclusion of The Crucible when
Proctor sacrifices his life to retain his sense of integrity with the intoning of the
final prayer, the audience feels something more than pity and fear. Miller
writes, ―There lies within the dramatic form the ultimate possibility of raising
the truth-consciousness of mankind to a level of such intensity as to transform
those who observe it‖ (Miller, 1956, p. 36). He strongly believes that the
tragedy can lead the audience to ponder something bigger such as ethic and
moral problems closely interrelated with humans; he also believes in the
capability of the audience to achieve spiritual enlightenment from tragedy.
Proctor struggles to reconstruct a new self through which he is able to become
worthy of respect from others and retrieve his name again. Not only does
Proctor‘s death evoke great sympathy, but it impresses the audience with
enlightenment and knowledge—the high consciousness of defending one‘s
dignity when he is mired in dilemma. It provides the audience an insight into
the importance of regaining one‘s integrity in the world. Miller also points out
that there exists a glimpse of hope regarding humans in tragedies. This hint of
hope inherent in tragedy is enough to raise sadness out of the pathetic towards
the tragic. The audience can observe the optimism when Proctor stands up to
defy the religious authority in order to preserve his integrity as a man. No
matter how corrupted and unscrupulous the social environment has become,
there are always upright people shining through in it.

5. Conclusion

It is generally assumed that a tragic playwright cannot thrive in the theatre of

the populace and that tragedy is the archaic dramatic form which cannot be
developed anymore in modern society. But Miller‘s successful creation of
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modern tragedies definitely proves it wrong. Miller insists on his modern

conception of the nature of tragedy, but he never rejects classical tragedy
wholesale (Bushnell, 2005, p. 202). Standing close to Greek Tragedy, both The
Crucible and A View from the Bridge involve these characteristics of the
classical tragedy including the choric role, the tragic hero, the fatal flaw and
catharsis which promotes the understanding of the actual conflicted
psychological process of tragic heroes in modern tragedies. Even though they
could be viewed as contemporary equivalents to classical tragedies, they bear
undeniable marks of modern tragedy. In his idea of modern tragedy, Miller
gives his common man a tragic stature and offers him an opportunity to trade
his life for greater significance when he is mired in guilt and helplessness.
Miller goes beyond the social concerns with moral issues forced on tragic
characters and further reveals the complex minds of tragic heroes struggling
with guilt, dignity and hope. As this paper points out, under the screen of the
form of Greek tragedy in these two plays, Miller intensifies the tragic quality,
endows modern tragedies with significance, and gives a new lease on the life of
tragedy in modern society.

Q. Write a detailed note on Legal Trauma in Twentieth-Century

American Drama: Arthur Miller‟s The Crucible.
(Brahimi NASSIMA Department of English Language and Literature University of Constantine, Algeria)

Abstract
Basing on the interdisciplinary approaches of law and literature studies and
trauma theory, in particular Felman‘s repetitive legal trauma, we advocate that
The Crucible demonstrates a past and a modern «legal trauma» in which the
judicial hearings and trials of the post-World War II remarkably rehearse the
Salem witchcraft trials. We engage with the play‘s significant analogy to
Communist witch-hunts to show how the justice system, in both periods,
proceeds in engendering legal traumas. To prove this claim, we explore the
legal narrative and the shared procedures, dramatically leading to accusation
and/or execution. We discuss the judiciary‘s articulation of law and justice,
guilt and innocence within traumatic atmosphere, stressing the point that
trauma yields nothing but another trauma, doomed to be repetitive when
similar conditions arise. Also, we highlight the role of the play as a universal
mode of testimony to Salem‘s legal spectre and to any similar hysterical
practices.

1. Introduction

Because the 20th century has been shaped by many traumatic events, it is
considered to be an age of traumas and of historical trials (Felman 2002: 1).
 96

After the WWII, the United States found itself in a new war, that is, the Cold
War. This latter created a national paranoia against the Communist ideology,
triggering the emergence of McCarthian witch- hunts, or the Red Scare. And
one battle to face this threat was through the courtrooms or the hearing rooms,
as O‘Connor notes (2013:64). Consequently, many people were targets to these
judicial practices, seen by many critics as kind of persecution.
It was under these new realities that Miller‘s masterpiece The Crucible came
out in 1953. The play dramatizes the Salem witchcraft trials of the late 17th
century to be an outcry of America‘s mid-twentieth century anti-Communist
hysteria.

Generally, scholars have been divided into two categories when discussing the
themes of law and justice in the play. The first part sees that the trials
symbolize an unjust, or a «bad law» (Porter 1979:75-92) for the execution of
20 innocent people for the crime of witchery. The second part considers the
trials as impartial for the judiciary acted according to the norms of the time, as
the law professor Samuelson argues (1995:620-642). However, none of these
studies has tackled Miller‘s representation of legal trauma.
To prove our statement, we have opted for an interdisciplinary approach that
combines law and literature studies (it means reading the play through literary
as well as legal lens) in dialogue with contemporary trauma studies in
particular Felman‘s theory of repetitive legal trauma.

The latter states that: because of what the law cannot and does not see
that a judicial case becomes a legal trauma in its own right and is
therefore bound to repeat itself though a traumatic legal
repetition....Legal memory is constituted, in effect, not just by the
«chain of law» and by the conscious repetition of precedents but also by
a forgotten chain of cultural wounds and by compulsive or unconscious
legal repetitions of traumatic, wounding legal cases (2002:57).

In other words, the theory articulates that the law has its own trauma when it
becomes unable to deal with, or to read appropriately, the much questioned
case; thereby, the law finds itself in a crisis or a trauma, becoming doomed to
repeat its previous misdealing when similar conditions arise.

Trauma is defined by the Journal Juridical :

Trauma has many connotations including wound and suffering.

Felman proposes that trauma theory has a strong relation to legal
studies, «[s]ince the consequences of every criminal offense (as well as
the legal remedy) is literally a trauma (death, loss of property, loss of
freedom, fear, shock, physical and emotional destruction)» (Juridical
2002: 171-72)
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2. The Salem court: a re-staging of Legal trauma

The Salem trials generally epitomize an earliest American collective memory of

fear, oppression and legal injustice. The Crucible narrates the story- which is
almost identical to the real events of a hysteria that swept Puritan New
England in 1692- of a group of young girls who in order to predict their future
husbands and fulfill some enclosed wishes, delve into some nightfall folks in
the forest. When caught and being unable to explain their actions to their
oppressive community, the girls resort to strange behaviours, leading to the
potential manifestation of the devil, then, to accusation of witchcraft and trial,
and finally to the execution of twenty Salemites.

Through the play‘s narrative, Miller heavily stresses how the issue of witchery
empowers the girls, rising them to the status of «officials in the court», as
Mary Warren the servant of the John Proctor- the play‘s tragic hero-strongly
claims to be (Miller 2003:50). And this represents a total contrast to the
norms of the time in which the girls are «anything but thankful for being
permitted to walk straight, eyes slightly lowered, arms at the sides, and
mouths shut until bidden to speak» (2003:3). But now the girls have a loud
voice and holding a privileged position, derived from the legal system itself.

Speaking about the Holocaust trials, Felman asserts that the power of the
court has given a stage to «the tradition of the oppressed»-concept proposed
by Walter Benjamin which refers to people facing severe traumas or
persecution (2002:13). Constructing on Felman‘s statement, we propose that
the Salem court has helped the oppressed teenage girls, or ‗the expressionless‘,
to have a loud, yet deadly voice. This kind of new power is considered one of
the most important ironies in the play, since the young women have become
accusers as well as witnesses, and much more preeminent figures in the court;
that is, having a strong word in the legal system, as Bigsby notes (2005:150). It
is precisely at this verge that Salem legal trauma emerges.

For an exemplary scene that captures this claim is when John Proctor comes to
the court to handle Mary‘s testimony, testifying that she and the other girls
have been just pretending. However, the Salem judge, Danforth, clearly
admonishes that «the entire contention of the state in these trials is that the
voice of heaven is speaking through the children» (Miller 2003: 82).Therefore,
and considerably, it is the voice of the girls that triumphs on Salem and its
justice system. As such, the court is performing a legal trauma towards the
accused, for refusing to even see at least the possibility of the accusers‘ fraud
and fear.

Besides, and though in his endeavor to resolve the contradicted testimonies,

what the Salem judge Danforth resumes to do is to pave the way to the teenage
 98

girls to repeat the same questioned hysteria by allowing them to perform a

fabricated bewitchment show in the court. Miller‘s describes the judges‘ act as
follows:

Now, children, this is a court of law. The law, based upon the Bible....children,
the law and Bible damn all bearers of false witness… Now then. It does not
escape me that this deposition may be devised to blind us; it may well be that
Mary Warren has been conquered by Satan, who sends her here to distract our
sacred purpose. If so, her neck will break for it. But if she speak true, I bid you
now drop your guile and confess your pretense, for a quick confession will go
easier with you. (Crucible 2003:95) Commenting on this excerpt, Porter
observes that even the «rhetoric of this charge» seems to encompass «doubts
about the advisability of retraction», there is no promise of applying justice in
favor of the poor accused since the general straining in Salem rows against
them (1979:75-92). That is, the law fails in establishing justice because the
hysteria has already excavated into people‘s lives and minds; accordingly what
the judiciary does achieve is the validation of this hysteria and of its yielding
power. And this is exactly what the girls come to understand as they
transplant, once again, the witchcraft hysteria to the law arena when
threatened by Mary‘s new testimony, collectively reacting and presuming to be
haunted by Mary‘s spirits. Most importantly, the court finishes by considering
this bewitchment show as irrefutable evidence.

As such, we can say that a «pattern emerges in which the [Salem] trial, while it
tries to put an end to trauma, inadvertently performs an acting out of it.
Unknowingly, the trial thus repeats the trauma, reenacts its structures»
(Felman 2002:50). That is, while «law strives to contain the trauma», as
Rottenberg explains, it «fails to remain safely outside it» (2004:1099-1103). It
means that the Salem law stands blind to the girl‘s pretense as well as fear,
falling prey to a legal trauma for ascending hysteric voices at the expense of
innocent voices. Thus and in contrast to the girls‘ heard voice, Miller too sheds
light on another image that which of how the voice of the accused has been
silenced by the same court. And we are going to show this legal trauma
through two main legal procedures. The first way is through the court‘s
conduct of depriving the accused to have legal councils because according to
Salem judge the crime of witchery is an ipso facto (Miller 2003: 93), needing
no proof except, of course, of the girls‘. However, according to law professor
Ronner, this kind of climate constitutes an «anti-therapeutic arena» that
deeply undermines the rule of law and the judicial system in the
whole (2007:241-298). The second way is by presuming the guiltiness of the
accused instead of their innocence, «Is the accuser holly by now», as Miller
exclaims through his protagonist‘s mouth (2003:73). A distinguished reading
of Salem‘s law is that of Porter who describes it as deficient. He argues that
 99

this deficiency stems from the court‘s focusing only on the letter of the law and
excluding the humane view (1979:75-92). And in our context, we claim that
another failure of Salem court to contain the witchcraft hysteria lies on the
absence of the humane view that which is the presumption of innocence.

Moreover, what happens in Salem court is that through underscoring the letter
of the law, the Salem judge goes on further to the extent of advocating guilt by
association. He opines: «Hang them high over the town. Wherever weeps for
these, weeps for corruption» (Miller 2003:90). To Danforth, the law is similar
to a reaper machine which harvests everything whether good or corrupt, for
the simple act of showing emotions is considered as guilt by association.
Danforth has also the power of his signature to yield more and more verdicts
of death regardless of others‘ views or reactions. In other words, he is
indomitable in enforcing the letter of the law. In so doing, for him the law is, in
a Derridean reading, « always an authorized force, a force that justifies itself or
is justified in applying, even if this justification may be judged from elsewhere
to be unjust or unjustifiable» (Derrida 1992:5). Noticeably, Salem‘s court
proceedings of enforcing the letter of the law seem to be grounded so deeply in
American cultural and legal history.

3. The communist Hysteria: a repetitive Legal trauma

We shall investigate Salem‘s modern repetitive legal trauma through two

examples that marked the period of the Cold War and its Communist hysteria.
The first will be through the hearings of the House of Un-American Activities
Committee (HUAC); and the second will be through the Rosenberg case.
Before that, we have to mention that the aim of this study is not to make a pure
comparative study between past and modern legal traumas, but in a way that
explore the similar general patterns.

One infamous person who orchestrated and presided over post war
Communist hysteria was Joseph McCarthy whose hysteric voice echoes in
some way that of the Salem‘s girls. As the young girls, in The Crucible, endorse
a prestigious position for having knowledge about persons who made contract
with the devil, as McCarthy did, claiming to have a list of Communists in the
federal department, and through the committee room he exercised his witch –
hunt. He was also depicted by many commentators as unknown person or «a
little man» who ade use of the nation‘s hysteria «to build a political
constituency» (Neal 2005:79).

Miller says that the committee‘s hearings and the Salem trials epitomize the
same rituals except the fact that Americans of the 1950‘s weren‘t hanged
(2003: xvi). Interestingly, Murphy depicts the HUAC hearings as trials
«without any system of defense, a jury, or even evidence against the accused»
 100

(1999:4). She goes on further to add that the mere interrogation before the
committee implied incrimination and sealed destiny (1999:9-10), alluding by
that to the embrace of the presumption of guilt. Moreover, people were not
only accused of being Communists but to be Communists‘ sympathizers, an
ostensibly similar practice to Salem‘ court endorsement of guilt by association.

Accordingly, we can say that both the Salem and the HUAC procedures are
«vehicle of trauma; a vehicle of aggravation of traumatic consequences rather
than a means of their containment and of their legal resolution» (Felman
2002:60). In other words, the legal procedures have failed to give reasonable
treatment to the hysterical cases. And more than that, like in Salem, the
Communist paranoia put many lives into jeopardy.

One of the most resounding historical trials of the Cold War era in which the
lives of two Americans were subjects to great scrutiny was the espionage case
of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. They were arrested in 1951 and electrocuted in
1953 for communicating and delivering atomic information to the Soviets.
However, the question we pose here is what is the relation between the
Rosenberg and the executed Puritans?

The theater professor Polster says that there is an apparent similarity between
the convicted in both cases. He says that the socio-political atmosphere of the
fifties forms the ‗historical‘ setting to Miler‘s play and to the audience‘s views.
He also contends that the Rosenbegs‘ accusation of espionage for the
infiltration of atomic secret to the enemy, hence, putting the U.S. into great
danger, equals the accusation of the Salemites «for spreading the dark secrets
of the invisible world» and destroying the Puritans‘ community (qtd. In
Castellito 2011:128-129). Besides, the historian Detweiler affirms that both the
Rosenbergs and the Salemites were convicted with ‗uncertainty‘ (1996:23).

Significantly, Felman suggests that historical trials are prone «to repetition or
to legal duplication» (2002:62). Within this vein, the Rosenberg case may be
read as an adjacent judicial case to Salem trials and an echoing/repetitive
event, that is, a ‗legal duplication‘ to them. Felman further explains:

[G]reat trials make history… in being not merely about a trauma but in
constituting traumas in their own right; as such, they too are open to
traumatic repetition; they too are often structured by historical
dualities, in which a trial (or a major courtroom drama) unexpectedly
reveals itself to be post traumatic legal reenactment, or the deliberate
historical reopening of a previous case or a different, finished, previous
trial» (2002:62).

As The Crucible‘s courthouse prosecutes the defendants on the basis of high

anxiety and contradicted testimonies as did the court in the Rosenberg‘s affair.
 101

The government had long urged an anti-Communist rhetoric; and the judicial
criminal system, too, operated in the same vein by superimposing a specific
narrative, powerfully leading to the couple‘s execution.

To better illustrate the case as a repetitive legal tama to Salem, we refer to

arguments stated by the law professor Ferguson. He addresses the issue of the
prosecution‘s narrative in the Rosenberg‘s trials and its impact on the case. He
says that because «the prosecution‘s account held a narrative desire for the
long moment of the trial», the Rosenberg‘s execution, then, had become
inevitable (2007:238). Fergusson also states that the prosecution used «untrue
master narrative» which «dominated the country as well as the court»
(2007:245). Likewise, we have seen how the Salem judiciary has dramatically
opted for the girl‘s untrue testimony.

In her discussion of the presence of legal trauma in the Rosenberg case, Li

argues that the trial transcript reveals «a certain willful blindness» in the state
narrative (n.d.4). Li also clarifies that the legal trauma in the couples‘ case
dwells in the «possibility that an injustice-an act of political persecution- may
have been facilitated by the very process of the law itself» (n.d.7). Similarly, in
Salem, «the law itself becomes the instrument of perversion» (Porter 1979:75-
92).

Interestingly, the Rosenberg‘s legal trauma is also seen through the court‘s
inflammatory narrative. The presiding judge Irving Kaufman concluded during
the couples‘ sentencing, that their crime was «worse than murder», for
«immeasurably increasing the chances of atomic war…may have condemned
to death tens of millions of innocent people all over the world» (qtd. in
O‘Connor 2013:67-68). O‘Connor contends that this general inflammatory
statement is far from reality, for the fact that the Soviets, according to
government officials, had developed the atomic bomb without information
delivered from the U.S. (2013:68). So, by enforcing a certain over-exaggerated
legal rhetoric or narrative, the justice system certainly worked linearly with
reifying the nation‘s paranoia. And what led to this kind of narrative is the
unconscious implementation of a past legal memory.

We have already mentioned how Salem courthouse has ascended the accuser‘s
voice, conversely hushing the voice of the accused. Remarkably, Li states that
the Rosenberg‘s voices have been «overridden or overwhelmed by those of the
judge and legal counsel», therefore the defendants‘ voice has been silenced
(n.d.8). Consequently, though the court managed to bury the defendants‘
voices- as is the case in Salem- it has left a non-closed case that refuses to be
buried in the American cultural memory.
 102

Essentially, after many years of the Rosenbergs‘ death and with the emergence
of new evidences concerning the case, considerable views have appeared
whether proclaiming the prospect of the couples‘ innocence, or questioning the
credibility of the procedural investigations and trials. Among these voices is
that of Dershowitz who says that the Rosenberg‘s death continues to be a
«serious blemish on the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Justice
Department and—worst of all—the judiciary» (1995:3). Basing on information
delivered to him by Roy Cohen, who was a prosecutor in the Rosenbergs case,
Dershowitz contends that it is more likely that Julius was guilty, that the
couple was ‗framed‘ by wrong evidence, and that Ethel was betrayed by her
lawyer. He further illustrates:

He [Roy Cohen] told me that the FBI knew for certainty that Julius
Rosenberg was guilty because they had access to secret intercepts of
Soviet intelligence messages, but that the prosecutors could not use this
evidence because the FBI didn‘t want the Soviet to know that their code
had been broken. Without this evidence, the prosecution had a weak
case, because the various witnesses had given conflicting and changing
accounts, especially as to whether Ethel had typed up notes given to
Julius (1995:3).

Taking into account this statement and regardless of the extent of the
Rosenberg‘s culpability, what matters is that the law has been manipulated by
the different partners in the justice system. In other words, the law has been
articulated to accomplish special scheme or certain predetermined political
agendas. As such, the law has surrendered to the power of hysteria and of
politics, deviating deeply from the notion of justice and due process.

Thus, the answer to the question of whether the judiciary in the Rosenberg
case succeeded in containing the Communist scare may be clearly stated
through the words of Detweiler who concludes that «If the Rosenbergs were a
cancerous growth demanding excision, the process left a wound that still
festers» (1996:17). He also mentions how the case has never come to terms
saying that in «literary and historical terms, the plot has as yet no conclusion;
in psychological terms, the nation has not achieved closure» (1996:17).
Actually, this very sense of non-closure connects with one proposal of trauma
studies that of a traumatic event usually «registers a belated impact»… which
«becomes precisely haunting… to the precise extent that it remains un- owned
and unavailable to knowledge and to consciousness» (Felman 2002:174).That
is to say, the Rosenbergs‘ trauma has not yet fully closed that which is in need
to reappear many times into the surface. The appearance of the new evidences,
new interpretations, and new literature on the affair is in fact an attempt to
represent a legal trauma which resists to be locked. Hence, the role of an
 103

artistic work like The Crucible is to reconstruct the nation‘s wounding legal
cases, standing by that as an open act of testimony.

4. The Crucible: a universal mode of testimony

Felman perceives that «literature and art as precocious mode of witnessing»

(Felman and Laub 1992: xx). Also she pinpoints that the mere act of retelling a
story is a kind of ‗testimony‘ to trauma or crisis (1992:4-7). Within this
context, we claim that The Crucible significantly stands as a precocious mode
of testimony not only to Salem but to any contemporary legal traumas or
crises. Speaking about The Crucible‘s impact, Miller says:

And for people wherever the play is performed on any of the five
continents, there is always a certain amazement that the same terror
that had happened to them or that was threatening them, had
happened before to others. It is all very strange. On the other hand, the
Devil is known to lure people into forgetting precisely what it is vital for
them to remember—how else could his endless reappearance always
comes with such marvelous surprise? (Guardian 2000)

The questions we may pose, here, is what makes this ‗endless reappearance‘ of
such terror or devil so marvelously surprising? And what do the play and its
dramatic performance and script provide to its audiences/ readers? Actually,
The Crucible enables Miller, not only to reopen the case to his American
audience, yet to satisfy a universal thrust to the theme of justice and ascending
the sense of solidarity and common experience among humans. Accordingly,
The Crucible can also be perceived as a universal mode of testimony to laws‘
traumas, for it throws light on the likelihood of repetition or reappearance of
the legal trauma at any time or place.

Adams argues that one crucial implication of Salem «as a rhetorical weapon»
at any age or disagreement can be obviously seen when a convenient
Puritanical quotation is used (2008:157-158). She further explains that the
raising of, through succeeding centuries, ‗the specter of Salem witchcraft‘,
serves as a warning among the Americans that there are ‗limits both to liberty
and to power‘(2008:158).Within this context, Zivin- commenting on George
Bush‘s proclamation that «you are either with us or against us in the fight
against terror»- comments on how the Salem judge‘s words still
«unexpectedly, hauntingly mattered to a twenty-first century public…[re-
erupting] like a specter» (2014:58).

Not only has Miller‘s play tried to testify and to allude to the eruption of the
spectre of legal trauma to the modern audiences, but his drama also achieves
another role that of bringing up the legal trauma closer. In this vein, Felman
affirms that «Law is a discipline of limits and of consciousness.... Law
 104

distances the [trauma]. Art brings it closer» (2002:107). Drama can better
speak a legal trauma, reenact it structure and juxtapose past events with the
present conditions, making it more tangible and this due to the inherent
affinity existing with trial; for the fact in a drama, as in a real trial, the
audience can experience the element of authenticity. Hence, The Crucible may
strongly revive the shared painful, may be forgotten wounds.

Law as a discipline aims to put an end to a case by promulgating a final

judgment and closing the law‘s gate. But, in recreating the trial in dramatic
work, the case is reopening from which new windows are waving and stirring
the readers/ audiences to face the law, question its process and, then, to
promulgate their own verdicts or to reach, as Budick notes, ‗a moral verdict‘ on
events, whether they are contemporary or historical (2008:21-40). That is, the
play, as an artistic work, permits its viewers to experience insights, whether
they are legal or moral, about themselves as well as about others; in so doing,
they also become a kind of participants, or witnesses, to justice system‘s
trauma.

5. Conclusion

Miller‘s play aims to disclose both Salem and its contemporaneous hysterical
trials and judicial hearings, showing what kind of results may unfold when the
law functions, first, blindly by allowing the very trauma intended to be treated
to be unconsciously repeated in the legal arena; second, for acting violently
and advancing a deliberate inflammatory rhetoric. So, under these conditions,
decisions of guiltiness may easily come out at the expense of innocence and
due process.

Significantly, what the Salem, the HUAC and the Rosenberg courts couldn‘t
and refuse to see is that trauma has been more powerful than law‘s apparatus
and the imperatives of justice. Consequently, historical trials are so
problematic because, as is the case in Salem, the legal trauma has been rooted
unconsciously in both the cultural memory and as well as in the legal one,
becoming doomed to be repetitive when similar conditions arise such is the
case of the Rosenbergs. That is to say, «paranoia breeds paranoia», as Miller
cogently observes (Guardian 2000).

The role of The Crucible, hence, is to testify on past and existing judicial
blindness, violence, paralysis and miscarriage through its dramatic re-enacting
of the closed hysterical trials. The play, unlike the law, does ‗justice to trauma‘,
as Felman proposes (2002:8), for an artistic work has the power to permit its
viewers to have their own words or judgments on judicial issues, regardless of
time or space. As such, Miller‘s play stands as a universal mode of testimony to
legal injustices.
 105

Q. Relationship of Individual to Society in 'The Crucible' by

Miller' or Describe the theme of „Individual and Society‟ in „The
Crucible‟.

No person can completely steer clear of the trials and tribulations of his or her
society. He who does may be vulnerable to serious allegations. If a man is to
work well in his surroundings, he must partake in all aspects of his society or
he is leaving himself open to unfavorable charges. In Arthur Miller‘s, The
Crucible, John Proctor‘s lack of involvement in the Salem witch trials
ultimately leads to his execution. John Proctor tries to avoid any involvement
in the Salem witch trials. His reason for this attempt is motivated by his past
fault of committing adultery with Abigail Williams. The guilt connected with
his lechery makes Proctor hesitant to speak openly because he would condemn
himself as an adulterer. Basically, then, in the first act he attempts to isolate
himself from the primary proceedings, saying to Reverend Hale:

―I‘ve heard you to be a sensible man, Mr. Hale. I hope you‘ll leave some
of it in Salem‖

Proctor tries to wash his hands of the entire affair, than to instead deal with his
own personal problems. His wife Elizabeth constantly badgers him about his
adulterous affair and he retorts with

―Let you look sometimes for the goodness in me, and judge me not‖.

Rather than interfering in the witch trials he is still trying to defend himself in
the dangerous love triangle. In Act I, Proctor attempts to retire to the private
world of his farm and remain completely oblivious to the events arising in
Salem. This refusal to become involved is brought to an end when his servant,
Mary Warren, announces that she is an official of the court and that Elizabeth
Proctor has been ―somewhat mentioned‖ by the woman who with whom he
had copulated. Proctor still wishes to dismiss the hearings, but his wife uses
his guilt about infidelity to extract a covenant that he will expose Abigail as
being an impostor. Proctor is being coerced by his wife to become involved, it
is not his free and open decision. Indirect characterization can be surmised in
the aforesaid situation that Elizabeth is very influential upon Proctor‘s
character. Harold Bloom avers that this demonstrates that

―Proctor‘s sense of guilt is central to any understanding of him as a

dramatic character‖.

Before Proctor is forced to take the next step, Reverend Hale arrives and then,
Herrick with a warrant for Elizabeth‘s arrest. In anger over his wife‘s
conviction and arrest, Proctor accuses Hale of being a ―Pontius Pilate‖ and
later tells him that he is a coward by saying:
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―though you be ordained in God‘s own tears, you are a coward now!‖

The significant self-laceration which John Proctor undergoes while struggling

to make his choice is finally convincing because it is perfectly in character,
Harold Bloom says: ―Miller uses Proctor as a vehicle for the play‘s major moral
questions‖. Proctor is weak, like most men, but he has the potential for
greatness likewise common to all men. When John Proctor shouted: ‗‘I am no
saint‖. He asserted his human frailty and vulnerability. As the tragic hero of
Miller‘s drama, Proctor faces his downfall due to his lack of commitment to
humanity. Proctor feels guilty about his relationship with Abigail when he is
visited by Hale and asked about his commitment to the church and his
knowledge of the Ten Commandments. Proctor inadvertently forgets one
commandment: ―Thou shalt not commit adultery‖. Proctor accounts for his
lack of attendance at church in Act 1 by proclaiming that he will not listen to
the ―hell}re and bloody damnation‖, preached by Parris. In Act 2 he states:

―I like it not that Mr Parris should lay his hand upon my baby, I see no
light of God in that man‖

An act the towns people and the court view as a revolt against the supremacy
of God. This quote also highlights Proctors‘ otherwise principled approval to
his life, he is not prepared to do something just because it is expected by the
rest of the community. Proctor‘s relationship with other characters highlight
aspects of his personality. In Act 2 Giles Corey and Francis Nurse come to him
for help following the arrest of Rebecca Nurse and Martha Corey. It is
apparent from this that he is respected by them. Proctor‘s character is also
highlighted through how he is seen by his wife. Elizabeth is cooking for him
and it is clear that she is wanting to please him. This shows that Proctor is
obviously making an effort to please and be loving towards Elizabeth, but she
is finding it hard to forgive him for his behaviour.

―Spare me! You forget nothin‘ and forgive nothin‘. Learn charity
woman. I have gone tiptoe in this house all seven month since she is
gone. I have not moved from there to there without think to please you,
and still an ever-lasting funeral marches round your heart‖.

It is important to Proctor how he is seen by other people in the community and

for this reason he is reluctant to go to Salem‘s court early on, as he would have
to admit to the affair with Abigail. He eventually acts correctly, in order to
show his love for Elizabeth who risks condemnation from the court on
evidence from Abigail. The outraged court officials summon Elizabeth Proctor
to find out the truth about Proctor and Abigail. When asked about her
husband, Elizabeth's soul is twisted, for reporting the truth could destroy her
husband‘s reputation, but lying means breaking the solemn oath to God. As
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she is selfless, Elizabeth choose to lie and save her husband, but perhaps
condemn herself to hell for such a sin. This scene indicates dramatic irony, for
Proctor knows that which Elizabeth is not aware of, and this is that he has
already ―confessed it‖. In Act 3, Proctor remains loyal to his friends whose
wives have been accused. He is tempted to withdraw his charges against
Abigail when he is told his wife is pregnant and in no immediate danger of
being hung, but he goes ahead to support his friends. Despite Proctor‘s lack of
integrity in his relationship with Abigail, Proctor is initially tempted to save his
own life by confessing, but he eventually decides to die rather than lose his
good name, Proctor‘s recognition is his discovery that he contains goodness.

―for now I do think I see some shred of goodness in me‖.

Elizabeth supports him through her confidence that he is a ―good‖ man. ―he
have his goodness now. God forbid I take it from him‖. John Proctor is not a
perfect man, but his beliefs and values are in the right place. Proctor listens to
his soul, a lesson the whole world should learn to follow. John Proctor is a
―good‖ man.

Q. Discuss Arthur Miller‟s The Crucible as postmodern parody.

i.e., Salem as the Parody of McCarthyism

The Crucible in the Present: the Preposterousness of McCarthyism

Parodying Salem

The Crucible deals with an historical episode and it is because of it being

written in the 1950s, i.e. Miller‘s present, that an anachronistic effect is
unavoidably generated. It may be a form of anachronism, however, that
doubles the parody. The production of the play in the early 1950s is in itself
not enough to call it postmodern. Yet, its intense self-reflexivity, and its
obvious intention to intervene in the playwright‘s present political
environment compel me to read The Crucible as a postmodern work. Its self-
reflexivity is evident from the interspersed narrative commentary in the text
which reminds the reader that he/she is reading a text, language, and a drama
and not viewing a world without mediation. However, the point is that the
drama itself facilitates a mapping of two worlds and the question is how we
can understand this mapping. The latter is evident when Miller explains the
genesis of The Crucible in an interview with Olga Carlisle and Rose Styron. In
it he says that in the 1950s, when Senator Joseph McCarthy waved the card in
the air by saying ‗I have in my hand the names of so-and-so‘, it felt eerily
similar to the standard tactic of seventeenth century prosecutors. In Salem,
they would announce: ‗we possess the names of all those people who are guilty.
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But the time has not come yet to release them‘. This was a way of inflicting
guilt upon the whole village. Many responded genuinely and many out of fear.
McCarthy re-enacted this show at the national level in the 1950s by
demonizing the Communists.

The mapping of two worlds is distinct from the potential of postmodern fiction
to represent history in order to open it up to the present. Linda Hutcheon
explains this relation of historiography to the present in postmodern fiction as
follows: ‗Postmodern fiction suggests that to re-write or to re-present the past
in fiction and in history is, in both cases, to open it up to the present, to
prevent it from being conclusive and teleological‘. Hutcheon elaborates on this
in her essay ‗Historiographic Metafiction‘:

In the postmodern novel the conventions of both fiction and

historiography are simultaneously used and abused, installed and
subverted, asserted and denied. And the double (literary/historical)
nature of this intertextual parody is one of the major means by which
this paradoxical (and defining) nature of postmodernism is textually
inscribed.

The difference with White and Ankersmit is crucial. It concerns not so much
opposing two approaches as the simultaneous realization of possibilities.
Socalled postmodern metafiction is a type of fiction that self-consciously
addresses the devices of fiction without, however, turning everything into mere
fiction. In drawing attention to itself as a work of art, the work both
emphasizes artifice and exposes the truth inhering it. In Patricia Waugh‘s view,
metafiction is a fictional writing that draws attention to itself as an artifact, not
to ignore but to raise questions about the relationship between reality and
fiction. In selfcritically assessing its methods of construction, meta fictional
writings examine the fundamental structures of narrative fiction and explore
alongside the possibility of the truth of a world outside the literary texts.

In The Crucible, the dynamic at play is similar when Miller introduces

John Proctor through a narrative comment on his dramatic character in
relation to historical realities outside the play:

But as we shall see, the steady manner he displays does not spring from
an untroubled soul. He is a sinner, a sinner not only against the moral
fashion of the time, but against his own vision of decent conduct. These
people had no ritual for the washing away of sins. It is another trait
that we inherited from them, and it has helped to discipline us as well
as to breed hypocrisy among us.

The passage is a good example of historiographic metafiction as John Proctor‘s

dramatic character is narrated with reference to his socio-historical time and
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also with reference to the sustained cultural practices that ‗we‘, i.e. Miller‘s
contemporaries in the fifties, had inherited. The Crucible has therefore a vast
postmodern potential as its subject is an historical event whereas, through
dramatic performance and theatricality, Miller has established a double
relationship between fact and fiction, working through both past and present
to unearth new meanings for both. Yet what is the nature of this process of
working through? For this the notion of parody in historiographic metafiction
is of relevance.

When Hutcheon emphasized the importance of parody in postmodern

historiography, it was certainly not a pejorative literary device meant to
ridicule and imitate history. As Hutcheon explains:

What I mean by ‗parody‘ here is not the ridiculing imitation of the

standard theories and definitions that are rooted in eighteenth century
theories of wit. The collective weight of parodic practice suggests a
redefinition of parody as repetition with critical distance that allows
ironic signaling of difference at the very heart of similarity. In
historiographic metafiction, in film, in painting, in music, and in
architecture, this parody paradoxically enacts both change and cultural
continuity.

So, in historiographic metafiction, the parody of history is performed through

critical representation of the past with a view to finding difference and
continuity in perspectives with respect to the present. Hutcheon sees in this an
urge for a public discourse that articulates the ‗presentness of the past‘ through
a social placing of art in cultural discourse, thus linking art with what Edward
Said calls the ‗world‘.

In The Crucible, for instance, the ‗Black slave from Barbados,‘ Tituba, can be
seen as a specific example of parody of double oppression of race and gender
patterns in American history. Miller introduces her character to critically
revive the ghosts of race relationships from America‘s past in a new space of
modern American multiculturalism.140 When, for example, Tituba‘s speaks to
Reverend Parris in Act 1 of the play, she says:

He say Mr. Parris must be kill! Mr. Parris no goodly man, Mr. Parris
mean man and no gentleman, and he bid me rise out of my bed and cut
your throat! (They gasp.) But I tell him ‗No! I don‘t hate that man. I
don‘t want kill that man.‘ But he say, ‗You work for me, Tituba, and I
make you free! I give you pretty dress to wear, and put you way high
up in the air, and you gone fly back to Barbados!‘ And I say, ‗You lie,
Devil, you lie!‘ And then he come one stormy night to me, and he say,
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‗Look! I have white people belong to me.‘ And I look - and there was
Goody Good.

There is an obvious Caribbean tinge to Tituba‘s style of speech. Marion Starkey

calls it ‗slurred southern speech‘.142 In the play, she is presented as a black
slave woman who is an expert in traditional folk healing methods and black
magic. Her identity and background have certainly played a part in her being
accused in first instance of practising Voodoo. In this quote, in citing the
Devil‘s enticing temptations, Tituba subconsciously vents her desire for
freedom and emancipation from slavery, which refers to the historic tragedy of
the Africans and the Indians in the Caribbean and the Americas. There is
tangible evidence that Miller introduces her character as a parody, in
Hutcheon‘s sense, of a past that still lurks in America‘s present (be it our
contemporary present or the 1950s, but more so in the fifties) in the form of
problematic race relations between blacks and whites.

Hutcheon defines the function of parody in her study of Robert Coover‘s The
Public Burning from 1977.143 It concerns a fictionalized account of the
Rosenberg case, told from Richard Nixon‘s viewpoint. The novel combines
metafictional techniques with a critique of American history and ideology and
had a pronounced impact on Hutcheon‘s views on postmodernism. Hutcheon
writes in this respect:

Postmodernism deliberately confuses the notion that history‘s problem

is verification, while fiction‘s is veracity (Berthoff 1970, 272). Both
forms of narrative are signifying systems in our culture, both are what
Doctorow once called modes of ‗mediating the world for the purpose of
introducing meaning‘ (1983, 24). And it is the constructed, imposed
nature of that meaning (and the seeming necessity for us to make
meaning) that historiographic metafiction like Coover‘s The Public
Burning reveals.

The important point here is that when both fiction and historiography are
signifying systems in cultural space, and postmodern metafiction is meant to
mediate the world aesthetically and politically, this is all meant not just to
grasp or find meaning but to make meaning, as Doctorow would also suggest.
The past is given meaning by verifying it through the veracity of the fictional
discourse. Likewise, The Crucible works on the basis of this confusion of
verification with veracity, i.e. historical facts in relation to the truth in their
representation. Or, to put this yet differently, the veracity of the play as a truth
practice calls for verification, with regard to both the past and the present, in
line with Hutcheon‘s approach: ‗It is part of the postmodern stand to confront
the paradoxes of fictive/historical representation, the particular/the general,
and the present/the past‘.
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The general picture is that postmodern historical novels, like Coover‘s The
Public Burning, use metafictional techniques to juxtapose historical facts with
fiction, thus not only reminding the readers of historical fiction‘s limitations as
a textual version of history but also of the disturbance created by mixing
historical facts through fiction. Yet this disturbance is not just a simple matter
of disturbance. In The Crucible the normative historical narratives of Salem
and the persistent ideology of good and evil in American cultural discourse is
problematized and somehow challenged through metafictional drama
techniques. The truth is nowhere to be found, it has to emerge through
this process. Thus the text creates room for radical political engagement in the
sense formulated by French philosopher Alain Badiou:‗it is our encounter with
the emerging truth that can ultimately force us towards an ethical
confrontation or choice: the recognition of truth of an event ‗compels us to
decide a new way of being‘.

Postmodernism‘s revisiting of the past, in this respect, is not nostalgic; it is a

critical revisiting of the past based upon a parodying dialogue of both art and
society with the past. In postmodernism, this critical reflection deals with
aesthetic and social formations of the past in its relation to the present. To be
sure there are those who do see in postmodernism a nostalgic tendency, such
as Christian Gutleben in Nostalgic Postmodernism.148 And even in The
Crucible, as we will see in chapter 5, there might be a perverse nostalgia in the
desire to revisit the dark past with its clear-cut forces of good and evil. Such
nostalgia, however, was not at issue in the fifties. At that time, The Crucible
was able to twist the narrativization of Salem, with the aim of finding new
possibilities of meaning in the present. It did work, distinctly, as a parody:

Historiographic metafiction works to situate itself within historical

discourse without surrendering its autonomy as fiction. And it is a kind
of seriously ironic parody that effects both aims: the intertexts of
history and fiction take on parallel (though not equal) status in the
parodic reworking of the textual past of both the ‗world‘ and literature.

The key term here is ‗reworking‘. The pivotal issue is that the past is not
finished. In the case of The Crucible, there is moreover another, related,
problem. Not only is the past not finished, but nor is the making of history in
the present. Hutcheon explains that:

Historiography and fiction, as we saw earlier, constitute their objects of

attention; in other words they decide which events will become facts.
The postmodern problematization points to our unavoidable difficulties
with the concreteness of events (in the archive, we can find only their
textual traces to make into facts) and their accessibility. (Do we have a
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full trace or a partial one? What has been absented, discarded as non-
fact material?).

The first and last sentence are of particular relevance to Miller‘s play. Its main
concern, again, is not to investigate the Salem case per se, but to provoke
investigation into the manipulative making of events by McCarthy and his ilk,
and the consciously used partiality of traces. If I read The Crucible as a
postmodern play, it is firstly as a parody in the sense that the Salem period is
used as a parody of McCarthyism. Secondly, it is also a parody of
historiographical metafiction itself. It seems to focus chiefly on the past but it
is actually interested in the present, in which ‗full traces and partial ones‘ are
used politically as a matter of public manipulation. For Hutcheon a parody of
the past is used to work on historiographical sources in literary texts, whose
selfreflexivity or metafictional nature reveal the possibility of alternative
versions of truth that are textually inscribed in historical records. The parody
works like this and yet differently in The Crucible. Its parody of the past is both
aimed at finding different forms of truth in the past and calling for the truth in
the present.

The parody of the past in postmodern works of art is not nostalgic or

commemorative, nor is it based on lamentation of the past; rather it is always
critical and seeks new meanings from the past whilst having its feet
entrenched in history and fiction at the same time, which in terms of parody
boils down to ‗installing and ironizing‘ simultaneously. Miller‘s The Crucible
proves the point. The play both claims to install an historical reality whilst
ironizing it. Miller‘s main goal is not to just represent the Salem events
correctly but to present them in such a way that they appear as a parody of
themselves and of McCarthyism. In strategic terms, he appropriates the Salem
events to criticize the contemporary McCarthy events, which are parodied in
the play. There is thus a double parody in play. Considered in this way, The
Crucible is a theatrical piece that confronts the established narrative of the
1950s US political environment by dramatizing an historical episode, or by
redoing this episode in the context of the play‘s contemporaneous present.

In this context, Walter Benjamin‘s reading of Brecht‘s epic theatre is relevant,

in particular when Benjamin mentions that the use of gesture and citability
distinguish epic theatre from classical drama. Regarding this gesture and
citability, Samuel Weber explains:

Epic theater, it could be said, turns the traditional claims of drama

inside out. This is why gesture as such is only the ‗raw material‘ of
theater, and why Benjamin citing Brecht, singles out the citability of
gesture as the defining principle and resource of his theater. For
‗gesture‘ does not merely interrupt some thing external to it: the
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expressive intentionality of an action, the teleology of a narrative, or

the causal necessity or probability of a sequence of events. It does all of
this, but it also does something more: insofar as it is citable, it
interrupts itself, and indeed, only ‗is‘ in its possibility of becoming other,
of being transported elsewhere.

The gesture in epic theatre possesses a dialectical dimension in that it

interrupts a specific movement towards meaning, comprehension and closure
and brings out effects to render these apparent. The point in relation to this
quote is, again, that The Crucible does not intend to be a classic dramatic piece
that tells a closed, yet gripping story that may fascinate us. The relation
between Salem and McCarthyism is, indeed, one of citability. In this case, it is
not so much the actors working by means of gesturing, but the play itself, as a
whole, that functions as gesture. The play itself is ‗the raw material‘ of theatre
that interrupts the gripping and dramatic events of the present in which it is
brought. As such it is citable as well, as we will see in chapter 5 and in the
conclusion.

Sarah Bryant-Bertail states that ‗epic theatre rejects the old dichotomy
between, on one side, human consciousness as the interior time of the spirit of
history; and, on the other side, the world, including the human body, as the
exterior space and matter of nature‘.153 Miller‘s The Crucible uses theatrical
gesture much like Brecht‘s epic theatre because it refuses such a dichotomy,
for it would restrict literature and art to the position of reflecting on history‘s
internal sense and meaning. Instead The Crucible is very much concerned with
the world of acting bodies, both political bodies and individual ones. The piece
retains this strength to confront the grand narrative of its age by interrupting it
and intervening critically. As Sarah Bryant-Bertail says: ‗theater can still be
used as a forum to stage and critique the crises of our own era, to help us see
the images we have constructed of our own historical existence, constructions
that have real-life consequences‘. The argument in this section is that this does
not hold for theatre per se, but for specific forms of theatre, of which The
Crucible is one example. In relation to history, the play does not only work by
means of parodic gesture and citability, however. Its parodic potential is even
more complicated, or doubly doubled, as when Salem becomes the parody of
McCarthyism.

Q. The Healer and the Witch: Sexuality and Power in Arthur

Miller‟s THE CRUCIBLE

Although Arthur Miller‘s The Crucible (1953) rose to fame due to its allegorical
critique of the anti-Communist hysteria surrounding McCarthyism, this drama
 114

is just as important for what it suggests concerning the power of women‘s

bodies: specifically, that the persecution of witches in Salem, Massachusetts, in
1692 was directly linked to the persecution of female sexuality. Accusations
were based on ancient Greek conceptions of ―hysteria‖ and the medieval belief
that as the inheritors of Eve‘s ―original sin‖ women were inherently sensual,
sinister, carnal, and prone to evil—especially those women who transgressed
socially constructed gender boundaries. Women who wielded any sort of
power, such as healers who possessed knowledge about sexuality and its
implications (pregnancy, childbirth, and infant mortality), were particularly
susceptible to accusations of devil worshipping and witchcraft.

Beginning with the ancients and continuing into the twentieth century, natural
philosophers and physicians connected female sexuality to physiology,
anatomy, and behavior—a concept that Freud would summarize as ―biology is
destiny.‖ The Hippocratic Corpus, a grouping of approximately sixty ancient
Greek medical texts attributed to Hippocrates (c. 460 BC–370 BC), who is
known as the father of Western medicine, is often cited as the origin of this
triangulation. According to the corpus, the female disease known as ―hysteria‖
(derived from the Greek word hystera, meaning womb) was the manifestation
of a bodily imbalance of fluids which prompted the womb to wander
throughout the body in search of relief. This resulted in insanity when the
womb reached the brain, or illnesses of the respiratory or circulatory systems,
all of which collectively came to be known as ―hysteria.‖ The corpus stated that
the cure for this condition was marriage for single women and increased
sexual activity for married women, which would draw the womb back into its
proper position (King 3–5). This treatment not only stressed heternormative
gender roles and behaviors, such as marriage and motherhood, but also
medicalized female sexuality by connecting it to physiology and social control.

Feminist critics of the play, such as Wendy Schissel and Iska Alter, and authors
Ann Petry and Maryse Conde—both of whom retell the drama ´ through
Tituba‘s point of view—have maintained that at the core of The Crucible are a
number of gendered power struggles. The physical manifestation of these
predominantly sexual and racial power struggles is the ―hysterical‖ behavior
found in the drama. The women accused of witchcraft (i.e., hysterical
behavior) are, not surprisingly, those who do not conform to socially
constructed gender roles, such as Sarah Good, who engages in extramarital
sex, or those who hold social power, such as Tituba, the ―exotic‖ slave from
Barbados whose account Miller gleaned from the historical record of the
original Salem witchcraft trials. As conveyed in The Crucible, Tituba was a lay
healer who was knowledgeable about sexuality, the human body, as well as
Afro-Caribbean spiritual practices. It was a common belief that women who
were ―trained in the art of midwifery‖ (i.e., female healers) possessed
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knowledge beyond the boundaries circumscribed by society because of their

familiarity with herbs, potions, rituals, and the ―mysteries of life.‖ This
threatened patriarchal institutions, such as the church, which sought to
persecute and eliminate nonconformist women by linking unorthodox
sexuality to wickedness and hysteria using the sin of Eve. This doctrine was
―the primary ammunition used to subjugate women to the authority of the
Church, the state, and therefore men‖ (Achterberg 66). Midwives‘ authority
concerning sexuality also became associated with evil supernatural forces,
especially the rituals of witchcraft, which were already laden with sexual
metaphors, including the midnight sabbat involving black magic and orgies
between Satan and his followers (Achterberg 86–88).

Thus the persecution of witches was in effect the persecution of female

sexuality and social power, for it was predominantly women who were accused
of witchcraft. The assumption was that ―women were more likely to be witches
because they were sensual and hopelessly, insatiably

carnal,‖ like Eve (Achterberg 86). Consequently, female sexuality, as

channeled through individuals such as Tituba and Abigail Williams, is
portrayed as the evil and sinister force behind the witchcraft in The Crucible.
The midnight forest ritual that occurs in act 1 of the play is highly sexualized
and resembles the witches‘ sabbat: Abigail drinks enchanted blood to kill
Elizabeth Proctor, the wife of her former lover John Proctor, while Tituba, the
Afro-Caribbean healer and spiritual medium, uses her knowledge of
indigenous potions and folk spells to conjure the spirits of Ann Putnam‘s
deceased children. The most overt example of female sexuality during the
ritual is their ―naked running through the trees‖ (Miller 20)—a ―vile‖ act which
allegedly occurs in a religious Puritan community where both dancing and
nudity are perceived as signs of moral corruption, evil, and ―hysteria.‖

As Achterberg notes, ―[T]he moral and ethical crux of the witchcraft

persecutions was that witch hunting was woman hunting, or at least the
hunting of women who did not fulfill the male view of how women [should]
conduct themselves‖ (82). Women who did not fit the gender, sexual, and in
this case racial norms of society were more likely to be misogynistically
targeted as witches. The opinionated Rebecca Nurse, the black slave Tituba,
the drunk Goody Osburn, Bridget Bishop (who lived with a man for three years
before marrying him), and the unorthodox Sarah Good are all accused of
witchcraft. Good, in particular, is especially problematic in Salem because her
unmarried, pregnant state and homelessness challenge the mechanisms
through which power is distributed and sustained in the patriarchal town,
serving as proof that there were flaws in John Winthrop‘s Puritan vision of the
Massachusetts Bay settlement as a ―city upon a hill.‖ The fact that Good is
nearly sixty, a beggar who sleeps in ditches, and a pipe smoker also constructs
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her as an outsider, contributing to her persecution as a witch. The ―hysteric‖

outbursts during the court trial further exemplify the conflation of sexuality
and difference with the transgression of gender roles and social attempts to
discipline ―disobedient‖ women through witchcraft accusations and
persecutions. Aware of this potent connection, the young accusers cunningly,
and subversively, employ all the ―traditional‖ characteristics of the ―hysterical‖
woman—crying, fainting, screaming, hallucinations, and turning cold—to
suggest the ―witches‖‘ power to infect and poison ―normal‖ girls through their
dangerous, contagious sexuality, as well as the need to punish such
nonconformist women.

Despite her participation in the midnight ritual, her ―irregular‖ sexual

activities as John‘s mistress, and her outbursts during the trial, Abigail is able
to elude allegations herself through her cool and resourceful scheming, feeding
into the medieval assumption that women (like Eve) are inherently dishonest
and can use their sexuality to manipulate men. Taking advantage of the mass
confusion to advance her own agenda, she accuses Elizabeth of witchcraft so
she can take her place as Mrs. Proctor (Elizabeth is eventually spared because
she is pregnant) and attempts to lure John back into an extramarital affair.
John, on the other hand, is characterized as the innocent victim of Abigail‘s
evil sexuality. As John and Abigail discuss the midnight ritual and the
accusation of naked dancing, Abigail ―dares to come closer, feverishly looking
into his eyes.‖ The married John responds, ―Ah, you are wicked yet!,‖ thus
successfully connecting Abigail to Eve, the evil temptress, and wickedness to
sexuality beyond the socially prescribed boundaries of marriage (Miller 28).
The sexual tension between Abigail and John climaxes when physical
awareness and passion are juxtaposed:
“I have a sense for heat, John, and yours has drawn me to my window,
and I have seen you looking up, burning in your loneliness”.

Abigail‘s statements clearly confront Puritan doctrine by suggesting that

the purpose of sex is not procreation within the institution of marriage but
rather personal enjoyment beyond it. Once she is denied physical gratification
by John, Abigail‘s seductive powers seem to increase, causing him to perform
―evil and shocking‖ acts of his own, as if he has been bewitched: he attempts to
resist, subvert, and sabotage the witchcraft investigations by opposing Parris
and Putnam and destroying Herrick‘s warrant. Moreover, he fails to recite all
Ten Commandments by symbolically forgetting ―Thou shalt not commit
adultery‖ (Miller 64). However, in the final analysis of the play, it is the
―ethical,‖ male Proctor who emerges as the hero: despite his previous marital
infidelities or ―sins,‖ he honorably rejects Abigail and is led to the gallows for
refusing to confess to, and incriminate others of, witchcraft. On the other
hand, Abigail, the licentious and carnal female, becomes a Boston prostitute,
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thus fulfilling her role as Eve, the wicked temptress, and exemplifying a
dangerously sexual outcome of ―hysteric‖ behavior.

Q. Explain the 17th Century Beliefs in Superstition as depicted in

Crucible.

Is Crucible a Political Allegory? Explain.

Understanding Satire and Political Allegory

To understand how Miller uses The Crucible as a political platform, one must
first become familiar with the nature of satire and its relation to politics. As a
literary genre, satire often focuses on the politics of society to reveal
inconsistencies and/or unfair treatment; humor is also used to create a
caricature of historic figures and to emphasize the satirist‘s agenda. Gilbert
Highet states, ―the typical weapons of satire [are] irony, paradox, antithesis,
parody, colloquialism . . . violence, vividness, exaggeration‖ (18); each appears
throughout The Crucible in various ways; for instance, Miller addresses
colloquialism through the creation of dialogue that mimics Puritan speech
patterns. He also positions the authoritative figures, the accusers, and the
victims in contradicting and paradoxical situations. He engages with irony and
exaggeration through sarcasm and his portrayal of the Puritan courtroom,
which reveals that the judges accept false testimonies, and ultimately mocks
the HUAC‘s interrogation strategies.

Miller employs these tactics to express his public dislike of HUAC officials and
his refusal to allow the hindrance of his work. According to Aamir Aziz,
―Arthur Miller was subpoenaed by the HUAC on 21 June 1956, three years
after the Broadway premiere of The Crucible . . . The charges against him were:
‗Signing CRC statements against anti-Communist legislation and against
HUAC itself‖ (170). The charges were later dropped. Thus, Miller manipulates
language used by authoritative figures around him and language recorded in
the historical archives from 1692 to emphasize how easily the border between
the logical and the illogical can be blurred; this margin renders society
susceptible to social hysteria, resistant to logic, and creates the basis and need
for a satire.

In his research on modernism and satire, Jonathan Greenberg explains the

multifaceted role of a satirist. He states, ―on the one hand, the satirist speaks
for a community, exaggerating and ridiculing his target in order to urge
reform; on the other, he is a renegade who enjoys the subversion of traditional
values, delights in his own aesthetic powers, even savors the cruelty he inflicts‖
As Miller watches 1950s Hollywood descend into chaos from the media and
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Senator McCarthy‘s perpetuation of paranoid messages regarding

Communism, he sees many individuals and even friends disclosing
information about others to remove the attention from themselves. Miller later
remarks that ―films of Senator Joseph McCarthy are rather unsettling -- if you
remember the fear he once spread. Buzzing his truculent sidewalk brawler's
snarl through the hairs in his nose, squinting through his cat's eyes and
sneering like a villain, he comes across now as nearly comical, a self-aware
performer keeping a straight face as he does his juicy threat-shtick‖ (―Why I
Wrote the Crucible‖ n.p.). Miller‘s dislike of the political climate inspires him
to become the voice for artists like himself and to write a play that encourages
society to question their leaders when certain political decisions appear to lack
common sense.

According to Joshua E. Polster, Miller considered himself a Marxist, which

implies he sees society as destined to experience strife with those in power;
―Marxism, therefore, provided a theoretical context and means for Miller,
along with the American Public and leftist movements in particular, to
disclose, critique, and attempt to overthrow the capitalist system‖ The notion
of individuals plotting to destroy leadership positions appears in several
instances throughout The Crucible; for example, Proctor is frequently accused
of planning to attack the court simply because he dares to advocate for the
people he swears are innocent. This concept establishes a connection between
the play‘s allegorical function of depicting Salem‘s politics and modeling
characters based on actual people, and satire in the sense that Miller uses the
Puritans to mock HUAC officials. Miller does this to draw attention to HUAC
and simultaneously revive the violence of the Salem Witch Trials in a way that
establishes a new understanding of the play, which is the idea that the
behavior of society‘s trusted leaders creates more hysteria than the entity that
people are told to fear.

A Religion Rooted in Fear of the Devil:

Fear plays an important role in understanding 1692 Salem society. The

Crucible begins with several young girls in the village experiencing
unexplained fits of rage, seizures, and hallucinations of the Devil. Feeling
unequipped to address the suspicious behavior, Reverend Parris seeks
guidance from an expert who specializes in the Devil‘s mysteries, Reverend
Hale. In Act 1 as he examines Betty Parris, the first victim, Hale claims, ―we
cannot look to superstition in this. The Devil is precise; the marks of his
presence are definite as stone‖ (Miller 35). The image of Reverend Hale
surrounded by books in which he proposes to find the solution for the alleged
Devil‘s presence in Salem is satiric because it never occurs to Hale that the
girls may be pretending simply to avoid being punished for dancing in the
woods with Reverend Parris‘ slave, Tituba. Instead, Hale insists he possesses
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the knowledge necessary to single-handedly destroy the Devil, which is

impossible and reveals a great deal of overzealous pride. Additionally, in a note
introducing Reverend Hale, Miller mentions audiences have failed to find the
humor of this line in every performance; he supposes that ―we are not quite
certain even now whether diabolism is holy and not to be scoffed at. And it is
no accident that we should be bemused‖ Here, Miller acknowledges the
complexity of writing a political allegory that also creates a satiric
caricaturization of boastful elites. Audiences‘ receptions are also interesting to
note because part of satire‘s function is to make people feel unsettled, and one
way to achieve that is to establish religion as a controversial subject and the
source of many people‘s inherent fears.

The Puritans‘ greatest fear is the Devil. According to Emory Elliot, Puritan
theology is founded on the ancient binary premise of good versus evil; any gray
area is intolerable. They treat religious worship as an intimate gathering
amongst trusted individuals; therefore, making their churches exclusive
implies everyone in the congregation is well-known and has a quality
reputation, so it is easier for people to distinguish outsiders as untrustworthy;
this distinction generates a heightened degree of suspicion and hysteria. The
reason the Devil conjures so much fear in the Puritan era is because as
Increase Mather preaches, the Devil himself was once an angel and delights in
his ability to entice good people with sin; therefore, it makes perfect sense for
him to appear on earth within the bodies of the most pure and compassionate
neighbors because no one would ever suspect such people of committing sin.
Thus, once accusations fly throughout the village, the people experience an
even greater dilemma because they must come to terms with their opinions of
others and struggle to find who they can truly trust.

According to Marion Lena Starkey, the trouble in Salem results from ―semantic
accident‖ as the Puritans misinterpret the phrase: ―thou shalt not permit a
witch to live.‖ The Bible does not discuss witchcraft explicitly; it only states the
word. Prior to the King James version, the very term was nearly nonexistent. It
never seems to occur to the Puritans that they do not have a clear image of
what a witch looks like; they simply equate witchcraft and the Devil, and vow
to rid the village of the evil entity. Of course, without a clear definition to
ameliorate their fears, they become susceptible to social hysteria rather than
successful in their crusade. Additionally, Christopher Trigg claims the Puritans
were overtly concerned with books and signatures, despite their penchant for
misrepresentations; therefore, Miller as a political renegade uses this penchant
to his advantage since the fear that individuals were disclosing others‘ names
and signing documents that rallied against Congress was a popular trope in the
McCarthy era. This reveals that regardless of the knowledge Reverend Hale
has in his books, he and the other officials lack common sense; their fear
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generates hysteria and subsequently creates a vulnerability to accepting

Spectral Evidence, which is the Puritans‘ belief that the Devil can manipulate
his spirit to torture others in multiple places at once.

More dangerous than Spectral Evidence is the notion that words and actions
are interchangeable. Jane Kamensky states, ―in seventeenth-century parlance,
the word ―conversation‖ referred both to verbal exchange in particular and to
human conduct in general...for them, speech was conduct and conduct was
speech‖. Prior to 1830, conversation is interpreted via its noun form meaning
―one‘s behavior or an intimate gathering amongst people;‖ not intimate in the
sexual sense, but a trusting group of social members. Over the years, society
grows more familiar with conversation in its verb form meaning, ―to converse,
talk, engage in conversation.‖ Thus, Kamensky implies the Puritans‘
interchangeability between words and actions is significant because it shows
their belief that if one says something in confidence, then it must automatically
be true; this is a dangerous concept that 1950‘s American society is familiar
with because there is no such confidence allowed once the HUAC begins their
examinations. Thus, Miller positions Salem as a society that is too trusting; he
shows how the Puritans lack the common sense that is necessary to foresee the
consequences of their hasty actions. Miller exposes these behaviors to
establish a correlation between the dangers in Salem and the dangers he sees
around him in Hollywood. Additionally, Kamensky goes on to say:

Early New Englanders were not simply people of words but, more
pointedly, people of the Word. The reformed Protestant emphasis on
Scripture, sermons, and free-form prayer held out new possibilities for
speech to ministers and also to layfolk, who were urged to address God
directly.

Puritans were more often judged by their language, which is not as tangible as
physical actions; therefore; their words are easily manipulated and used
against them, especially once society begins pointing fingers at everyone.

Jefferey Andrew Weinstock argues there are two sides to the situation when
considering Spectral Evidence: the physical person who can be seen, and the
person‘s emotional or mental persona which cannot be seen. Thus, when
people in the village begin claiming witchcraft and seeing apparitions of the
Devil, it establishes a difficult relationship between the accuser and the
accused, the victim and the witch, because it becomes nearly impossible in the
minds of the Puritans to distinguish who is telling the truth. This inability to
separate the physical from the mystical, and the truth from the lies makes
them vulnerable to belief in the Devil‘s power.
 121

A major theme in The Crucible that allows Miller to comment against the
hypocritical teachings of Puritanism and Christianity is honesty versus
dishonesty. In Act 2, John Proctor and his wife, Elizabeth discuss the recent
chaos as numerous people are added to the court‘s list. Eventually, their
discussion lapses into yet another argument about Proctor‘s affair with their
former housemaid, Abigail Williams, which takes place prior to the plot.
Proctor says, ―I should have roared you down when first you told me your
suspicion. But I wilted, and, like a Christian, I confessed. Confessed!‖
The irony that Proctor wishes he had lied about his affair rather than having
been honest with Elizabeth indicates a satiric function in the play; it suggests
corrupt behavior on the part of Christians who are forced to confess their sins
regardless of true remorse. This concept mirrors the same logic used in the
Salem Trials and the HUAC examinations because people are either forced to
confess to what the judges want them to say, or they are forced to stand at the
gallows, which acts as a metaphor for those involved in the HUAC
interrogations who experience the death of their careers if they are found
guilty.

Religious morals versus damnation is another crucial theme that allows Miller
to further convey his skepticism of Christian duty. As Reverend Hale arrives at
the Proctor house to question the accused Elizabeth, he says to Proctor, ―I have
a rumor that troubles me. It‘s said you hold no belief that there may even be
witches in the world. Is that true, sir?‖. Proctor is the first character in the
play to criticize society‘s absurd behavior; however, he recognizes that his
response may cause powerful destruction. Believing in witches means
admitting that Abigail and the rest of the girls are not pretending, that the
world has indeed been poisoned by a force, spectral or political, that is beyond
society‘s control. Hale then says he must ask the Proctors ―some questions as

to the Christian character of this house‖ (Miller 61). The questions are
designed to search for incriminating evidence such as poppets,2 one of which
is later found and used to make Elizabeth‘s arrest. Reverend Hale first
questions Proctor about his meagre church attendance, to which Proctor
reveals he recognizes a certain degree of corruption in Reverend Parris‘s
behavior. He states:

―Since we built the church there were pewter candlesticks upon the
altar; Francis Nurse made them, y‘know, and a sweeter hand never
touched the metal. But Parris came, and for twenty week he preach
nothin‘ but golden candlesticks until he had them. I labor the earth from
dawn of day to blink of night, and I tell you true, when I look to heaven
and see my money glaring at his elbows - it hurt my prayer, sir‖
 122

The pewter candlesticks represent the plain values of the Puritans, while the
gold candlesticks are an expensive, ostentatious, and materialistic symbol that
often conjures negative associations of Christianity. Proctor‘s statement of the
candlesticks being handmade and his working the fields to pay for them speaks
to his character as the ideal Puritan man; he represents the people who do
honest work but are taken advantage of by their leaders. By depicting the
contrast between the two metals, Miller exposes selfish behavior and vices that
contradict Reverend Parris‘ role as a religious official. In this instance, The
Crucible becomes a political allegory about the dangers of rigid belief systems
because the juxtaposition of labor and morality reveals a troubling disconnect;
the implication that Christianity is a religion founded upon greed is especially
controversial.

Since the Puritans adhere so strictly to their religion, acts of piety such as
reciting The Ten Commandments also counts as evidence of a person‘s good
nature; this is an example of the church‘s flawed mentality because the
reverends fail to realize that such public displays do not consist of any tangible
evidence or fact with which to make a solid case. As Proctor recites The
Commandments for Reverend Hale‘s examination, he omits adultery, which is
ironic because he is guilty of the offense. Elizabeth attempts to assist him, but
this does not go unnoticed by Hale who says, ―Theology, sir, is a fortress; no
crack in a fortress may be accounted small‖ (Miller 64). Ironically, Reverend
Hale does not realize how many cracks are in his own thought process and that
of the church‘s which he works to support. Hale implies the church can do no
wrong, that every decision made is founded on a deep understanding of God
and his divine message; he fails to realize the degree to which greed, as
demonstrated via the ornate candlesticks, and personal vendetta have
corrupted officials like Reverend Parris. Thus, Highet states, ―the satirical
writer believes that most people are purblind, insensitive, perhaps
anesthetized by custom and dullness and resignation. He wishes to make them
see the truth‖. Miller seems to embody this mindset, especially regarding the
Puritans, whom he felt ―had no ritual for the washing away of sins. It is
another trait we inherited from them, and it has helped to breed hypocrisy
among us‖. By showing how their intense adherence to the Covenant forces
Salem to become blind to the true danger, which is not the Devil, but society‘s
trusted leaders.

According to Kamensky, Miller‘s focus on the Puritan‘s devotion to religious

language reveals that the way the Puritans incriminate others is similar to the
way language creates chaos during The Red Scare. She states:

If understanding the meaning of speech teaches us something essential

about early New England, it should also teach us something about
ourselves...we are engaged in wars over words: struggles to
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understand the relationships between language and experience, and

between speech and power. Can words harm, and even kill?

In Act 4, Miller returns to satirizing boastful elites and shows words can
indeed create destruction as Reverend Hale finally realizes his so-called
knowledge has failed him. Hale explains, ―I came into this village like a
bridegroom to his beloved, bearing gifts of high religion; the very crowns of
holy law I brought, and what I touched with my bright confidence, it died‖
(Miller 122). Again, Reverend Hale arriving allegedly omnipotent and planning
to solve Salem‘s fears of the Devil with books and other accounts that describe
demonic possession is ironic because the Devil is not present in Salem, nor are
witches. Believing so strongly in what the Bible supposedly says about
witchcraft, as Starkey notes, is what creates the hysteria. Thus, Miller writes
The Crucible as a political allegory to show that not every problem can be
solved with prayer.
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ANALYSIS
The Crucible (1953)
Arthur Miller
(1915-2005)

Q. Different Views from renowned authors about Crucible.

―I was half inside the car when Molly [Kazan] came out and asked,
unforgettably, if I realized that the United States Electrical Workers union
was entirely in the hands of Communists….and told me that I no longer
understood the country…. ‗You‘re not going to equate witches with this!‘…
Molly‘s instant reaction against the Salem analogy would be, as I already
sensed, the strongest objection to such a play. ‗There are Communists,‘ it
would be repeatedly said, ‗but there never were any witches.‘…What was
manifestly parallel was the guilt, two centuries apart, of holding illicit,
suppressed feelings of alienation and hostility toward standard, daylight
society as defined by its most orthodox proponents….the liberal, with his
customary adaptations of Marxist theory and attitudes, was effectively
paralyzed.‖ [1952] Arthur Miller Timebends: A Life (Grove 1987) 334, 339

―In The Crucible, which opened…last night, he seems to me to be taking a step

backward into mechanical parable, into the sort of play which lives not in the
warmth of humbly observed human souls but in the ideological heat of
polemic. Make no mistake about it: there is fire in what Mr. Miller has to say,
and there is a good bit of sting in his manner of saying it. He has, for
convenience‘s sake, set his troubling narrative in the Salem of 1692. For
reasons of their own, a quartet of exhibitionistic young women are hurling
accusations of witchcraft at eminently respectable members of a well-meaning,
but not entirely clear-headed society. On the basis of hearsay—‗guilt by
association with the devil‘ might be the phrase for it—a whole community of
innocents are brought to trial and condemned to be hanged. As Mr. Miller
pursues his very clear contemporary parallel, there are all sorts of relevant
thrusts: the folk who do the final damage are not the lunatic fringe but the
gullible pillars of society; the courts bog down into travesty in order to comply
with the popular mood; slander becomes the weapon of opportunists (‗Is the
accuser always holy now?‘); freedom is possible at the price of naming one‘s
associates in crime; even the upright man is eventually tormented into going
along with the mob to secure his own way of life, his own family. Much of
this—not all—is an accurate reading of our own turbulent age, and there are
many times at the Martin Beck [theater] when one‘s intellectual sympathies go
out to Mr. Miller and to his apt symbols anguishing on the stage. But it is the
intellect which goes out, not the heart. For Salem, and the people who live,
 125

love, fear and die in it, are really only conveniences to Mr. Miller, props to his
theme. He does not make them interesting in and for themselves, and you
wind up analyzing them, checking their dilemmas against the latest headlines,
rather than losing yourself in any rounded, deeply rewarding personalities.
You stand back and think; you don‘t really share very much.‖
Walter F. Kerr New York Herald Tribune (23 January 1953) 12

―Arthur Miller has written another powerful play. The Crucible, it is called, and
it opened at the Martin Beck last evening in an equally powerful performance.
Riffling back the pages of American history, he has written the drama of the
witch trials and hangings in Salem in 1692. Neither Mr. Miller nor his
audiences are unaware of certain similarities between the perversions of
justice then and today. But Mr. Miller is not pleading a cause in dramatic form.
For The Crucible, despite its current implications, is a self-contained play
about a terrible period in American history. Silly accusations of witchcraft by
some mischievous girls in Puritan dress gradually take possession of Salem.
Before the play is over, good people of pious nature and responsible temper
are condemning other people to the gallows. Having a sure instinct for
dramatic form, Mr. Miller goes bluntly to essential situations. John Proctor
and his wife, farm people, are the central characters of the play. At first the
idea that Goodie Proctor is a witch is only an absurd rumor. But The Crucible
carries the Proctors through the whole ordeal—first vague suspicion, then the
arrest, the implacable, highly wrought trial in the church vestry, the final
opportunity for John Proctor to save his neck by confessing to something he
knows is a lie, and finally the baleful roll of the drums at the foot of the
gallows. Although The Crucible is a powerful drama, it stands second to Death
of a Salesman as a work of art. Mr. Miller has had more trouble with this one,
perhaps because he is too conscious of its implications. The literary style is
cruder. The early motivation is muffled in the uproar of the opening scene, and
the theme does not develop with the simple eloquence of Death of a Salesman.
It may be that Mr. Miller has tried to pack too much inside his drama, and that
he has permitted himself to be concerned more with the technique of the witch
hunt than with its humanity. For all its power generated on the surface, The
Crucible is most moving in the simple, quiet scenes between John Proctor and
his wife. By the standards of Death of a Salesman, there is too much
excitement and not enough emotion in The Crucible…. After the experience of
Death of a Salesman we probably expect Mr. Miller to write a masterpiece
every time. The Crucible is not of that stature and it lacks that universality. On
a lower level of dramatic history with considerable pertinence for today, it is a
powerful play and a genuine contribution to the season.‖ Brooks Atkinson The
New York Times (23 January 1953) 15
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―The issue of civil liberty is too serious to be confused by its defenders as well
as its enemies. Freedom is under menacing fire at home as well as abroad. But
Arthur Miller, in his new play The Crucible, seems to us to have provided more
confusion than defense. Some may argue—as many of the drama critics did—
that this is just a play about Salem, Mass., in the time of the 1692 witch hunt.
Having seen it ourselves, we dissent. It is inconceivable that Miller is unaware
that the year is 1953 and that a play about Salem‘s witch hunt was inevitably
bound to stir contemporary echoes…. Actually most of the reviewers
recognized the contemporary analogy, but few of them examined its validity
until the magazine critics got around to the play somewhat later…. Whatever
his original intention, Miller has pushed the people of Salem around in a
loaded allegory which may shed some light on their time but ultimately
succeeds in muddying our own. The frenzied cruelty of Salem stemmed from
superstition and fantasy: Lives were ruined and lost in the wild attempt to
prove that witches were the root of all suffering. In Miller‘s script the labored
implication is that modern political hysteria is similarly founded on totally
irrational fear of nonexistent demons. It would be nice if life were that simple.
Unhappily, the despotic threat that confronts modern society is real; the
people who loved freedom in Czechoslovakia, China and other places now
ruled by tyranny can testify to that. The threat is as real as it was when Nazism
was overrunning the world. International Communism is a disciplined, fanatic
movement whose secret battalions have seized whole nations and enslaved
millions of people. There are spies and saboteurs; there are accused agents
who are guilty… The irony is that Miller‘s most fiery lines seem designed to
caricature America‘s jitters rather than Prague‘s terror…. The Communists
took over Czechoslovakia in February 1948, replacing the coalition
government that had ruled since the end of World War II. A systematic
repression began, ending with the Prague trials of November 1952, at which
eleven men, after public confession, were condemned to death. [My] reference
here is to those trials, which were widely accepted as a mockery of justice….
In a matter of months the people of Salem banished the spectre of the witch
and regained their own senses. But the problem of our age is how to resist the
real and continuing peril of totalitarianism without destroying our freedoms in
the process. It is how to combat authentic dangers without yielding to panic
and hysteria. That is infinitely more complicated a problem that the cure of
Salem‘s dementia…. There is an equal contempt for truth in a defense of free
speech which pretends that the Soviet challenge is an elaborate hallucination
of Western man, as fanciful as the madness that bedeviled Salem.‖ New York
Post (1 February 1953) 9

―The strong John Proctor, who has before him as an example the steadfastness
of his beloved wife, is nevertheless made to weaken, to ‗confess‘ to a lie—in
order to give more theatrical effect to his final resolve to proclaim, and to die
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for, the truth…. Proctor will lie privately, but he refuses to sign so that his lie
can be made public. The one really neat turn of character comes during the
questioning of Proctor‘s wife. After Proctor has assured the judge that his wife
never lies, she falters and does lie to save her husband‘s reputation—not
knowing that this very action brings on his ruin. She testifies that her husband
is not a lecher and that Abigail—chief denouncer of the ‗witches‘—was
dismissed from her service only for incompetence—this after John has sworn
that Abigail was his eager whore. A neat twist, dramatically effective,
psychologically sound. On the other hand, when basic soundness and
immediate effectiveness conflict, Miller plumps for the box-office. The opening
of the last act, for instance, presents two women who are being put out of their
cell to make it a reception room for the deputy governor. No reason is given
why the deputy governor could not have an office, if not a cell, of his own. It
that last act opening is intended to provide a sort of emotionalrest, like the
Shakespearean comic interlude, it is as clumsy as the opening of the first act is
confused…. The climactic growth of tension…is excellently managed.
But…the calculating craftsman, not the deeply moved creator, is at work. Take
even such a detail as calling the first act a ‗Prologue.‘ There is nothing at all in
it to justify separating it by that kind of label from the rest of the play. It would
be as logical to call the last act an ‗Epilogue.‘ But the three-act play is the
fashion of our time; a play in four acts might seem Ibsenian, dated. So The
Crucible as a ‗Prologue and Three Acts.‘ It conforms. This is trivial, no doubt,
but it is a further indication that the play is not so much a creation of dramatic
art as a concoction of the author‘s contriving mind.‖ Joseph T. Shipley
―Arthur Miller‘s New Melodrama Is Not What It Seems to Be‖ The New Leader
XXXVI (9 February 1953) 25-26

―[Miller] has labored hard at his statue and it has not come to life. There is a
terrible inertness about the play. The individual characters, like the individual
lines, lack fluidity and grace. There is an O‘Neill-like striving after a poetry and
an eloquence which the author does not achieve. ‗From Aeschylus to Arthur
Miller,‘ say the textbooks. The world has made this author important before he
has made himself great; perhaps the reversal of the natural order of things
weighs heavily upon him. It would be all too easy, script in hand, to point to
weak spots. The inadequacy of particular lines, and characters, is of less
interest, however, than the mentality from which they come. It is the mentality
of the unreconstructed liberal…. The analogy between ‗red-baiting‘ and witch
hunting can seem complete only to communists, for only to them is the
menace of communism as fictitious as the menace of witches. The non
communist will look for certain reservations and provisos. In The Crucible,
there are none. To accuse Miller of communism would of course be to fall into
the trap of oversimplification which he himself has set…. His view of life is
dictated by assumptions which liberals have to unlearn… In Hebrew
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mythology, innocence was lost at the very beginning of things; in liberal,

especially American liberal, folklore, it has not been lost yet; Arthur Miller is
the playwright of American liberal folklore…. Such indeed is the viewpoint of
the dramatist of indignation, like Miss [Lillian] Hellman or Mr. Miller. And it
follows that their plays are melodramas—a conflict between the wholly guilty
and the wholly innocent…. The Crucible is a melodrama because, though the
hero has weaknesses, he has no faults. His innocence is unreal because it is
total. His author has equipped him with what we might call Superinnocence,
for the crime he is accused of not only hasn‘t been committed by him, it isn‘t
even a possibility: it is a fiction of traffic with the devil…. Innocence is, for a
mere human being, and especially for an artist, insufficient baggage…. The
Crucible is about guilt yet nowhere in it is there any sense of guilt because the
author and director have joined forces to dissociate themselves and their hero
from evil. This is the theatre of two Dr. Jekylls.‖ Eric Bentley ―The Innocence
of Arthur Miller‖ New Republic CXXVIII (16 February 1953) 22-23

―After an engagement of six months and the acquisition of a prize or two,

Arthur Miller‘s The Crucible has come out in a new edition at the Martin Beck
Theatre. Although the new edition is motivated by the necessity for economy
during the hot months, the changes have improved Mr. Miller‘s drama. The
Crucible has acquired a certain human warmth that it lacked amid the shrill
excitements of the original version. The hearts of the characters are now closer
to the surface than their nerves. The changes include a brief new scene
between Abigail Williams and John Proctor that completely motivates their
clash in the following scene laid in the courtroom…. And Mr. Miller had
personally redirected a good deal of the performance—giving it more variety
and humanity than it had when it was new…. Del Hughes is excellent as the
liberal-minded Rev. John Hale, who is honestly seeking after the truth despite
his personal complacence…. Even in its new edition The Crucible does not
seem to this theatergoer like Mr. Miller‘s most eloquent drama. The prologue
tries to pack too much information into a distracted first act. The last scene is a
vacillating one; it gives the impression of changing points of view impulsively.
Although Mr. Miller does not dwell specifically on the analogies between the
Salem witch trials of 1692 and the hysterical bushbeating search of subversives
[Communists stealing atomic secrets and distributing propaganda] today, the
analogies lurk in the background, and they are too inexact to be wholly
persuasive. The overtones of a thesis play are the mediocre parts of The
Crucible.‖ The New York Times (2 July 1953) 20

―The Crucible does not, I confess, seem to me a work of such potential tragic
force as the playwright‘s earlier Death of a Salesman; it is the product of
theatrical dexterity and a young man‘s moral passion rather than of a fruitful
and reverberating imagination. But it has, in a theatre of the small success and
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the tidy achievement, power, the passionate line—an urgent boldness which
does not shrink from the implications of a large and formidable design…. His
characteristic theme is integrity, and its obverse, compromise…. In The
Crucible…he has stated his theme again with a wholly admirable concision and
force.‖ Richard Hayes Commonweal (20 February 1953) 498

―If The Crucible is a drama of 1953, as well as of 1692, it does not follow that it
is a simple parable. On the contrary it is self-contained rather than contained
by time of place. It is the terrible and tragic situation that provides the real
setting…. The situation is convincing to the last irrational detail. The conflict
emerges in subtly differentiated forms and shadings…. Beginning slowly, with
a prologue somewhat diffuse and confusing, the play gathers momentum and
power with each act. The final scene, just before the hanging, is immensely
moving, summarizing the theme of the play with an eloquence that carries the
audience…out of the theatre in a mood of resolve rather than despair.‖
Freda Kirchwey Nation (7 February 1953) 131-32

―The Crucible, although it set few records on Broadway, has been steadily
popular elsewhere… It attracted such large audiences over a period of several
months last year that the San Francisco company turned professional and
continued for some time to produce the same play as its first professional
offering. In France, too, the play has been popular…. The Crucible dramatizes
brilliantly the dilemma of an innocent man who must confess falsely if he
wants to live and who finally gains the courage to insist on his innocence—and
hang. To increase the impact of this final choice, Mr. Miller has filled his play
with ironies. John Proctor, the fated hero, has been guilty of adultery but is too
proud to confess or entirely to repent. In order to save his wife from execution
by showing that her leading accuser is ‗a whore,‘ he has at last brought himself
to confess his adultery before the Deputy Governor of Massachusetts Bay; but
his wife, who ‗has never told a lie‘ and who has punished him severely for his
infidelity, now lies to protect his name. Denying that he had been unfaithful,
she convinces the court that he has lied to save her life. In the end, Proctor,
reconciled with his wife and determined to live, can have his freedom if he will
confess to witchcraft, a crime he has not committed. This battery of ironies is
directed against the basic objective of the play: absolute morality. In the
twentieth century as well as the seventeenth, Mr. Miller insists in his preface,
this construction of human pride makes devils of the opponents of orthodoxy
and destroys individual freedom. Using the Salem episode to show that is also
blinds people to truth, he has his characters turn the truth upside down. At the
beginning of the play, the Reverend John Hale announces fatuously that he
can distinguish precisely between diabolical and merely sinful actions; in the
last act the remorseful Hale is trying desperately to persuade innocent convicts
to confess falsely in order to avoid execution. The orthodox court, moreover,
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will not believe that Abigail Williams, who has falsely confessed to witchcraft,
falsely denied adultery, and falsely cried out upon ‗witches,‘ is ‗a whore; but it
is convinced that Proctor, who has told the truth about both his adultery and
is innocence of witchcraft, is a witch…. The helplessness of an innocent
defendant, the court‘s insistence on leaping to dubious conclusions, the
jeopardy of any ordinary person who presumes to question the court‘s
methods, the heroism of a defendant who cleaves to the truth at the cost of his
life, the ease with which vengeful motives can be served by a government‘s
attempt to fight the Devil, and the disastrous aid which a self-serving
confession gives injustice by encouraging the court‘s belief in the genuineness
of the conspiracy—all this makes the play almost oppressively instructive,
especially when one is watching rather than reading it…. But Mr. Miller‘s
pedagogical intention leads him into historical and, I believe, aesthetic error.
Representative of the historical distortion is his decision to have the Deputy
Governor declare the court in session in a waiting room in order to force a
petitioner to implicate an innocent man or be held in contempt of court.
Obviously suggested by the techniques of Senator McCarthy, this action is
unfair to the Puritan Judge. And it is only the lease of a number of such libels.
In the Salem of 1692 there were indictments and juries; in The Crucible there
are none. Mr. Miller‘s audience sees in detail the small mind and grandiose
vanity of Samuel Parris, the selfish motives of the afflicted girls, the greed of
Thomas Putnam; but it does not learn that a doubtful judge left the court after
the first verdict, that there was a recess of nearly three weeks during which the
government anxiously sought procedural advice from the colony‘s leading
ministers, or that the ministers…hit squarely on the very logical fallacies in the
court‘s procedure which The Crucible so clearly reveals. In 1692 there was a
three-month delay between the first accusations and the first trial. Each
defendant was examined first, later indicted, and then tried. In The Crucible
the first ‗witch‘ is condemned to death just eight days after the first
accusations, when only fourteen people are in jail. Whatever its eventual
justice, a government which adheres to trial by jury and delays three months
while 150 people are in jail is quite different from a government which allows
four judges to condemn a woman to death within a week of her accusation.
Since Mr. Miller calls his play an attack on black-or-white thinking, it is
unfortunate that the play itself aligns a group of heroes against a group of
villains. In his ‗Notes on Historical Accuracy,‘ Mr. Miller remarks scrupulously
that he has changed the age of Abigail Williams from eleven to seventeen in
order to make her eligible for adultery. But this apparently minor change alters
the entire historical situation. For Mr. Miller‘s Abigail is a vicious wench who
not only exploits her chance to supplant Elizabeth Proctor when the time
comes, nor only maintains a tyrannical discipline among the afflicted girls, but
also sets the entire cycle of accusations in motion for selfish reasons. Although
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Mr. Miller‘s preface to the book suggests other psychological and historical
reasons for the ‗delusion‘ and even admits that there were some witches in
Salem Village, his portrayal of Parris, Abigail, and the Putnams tells his theatre
audience that a vain minister, a vicious girl, and an arrogant landgrabber
deliberately encouraged judicial murder and that a declining ‗theocracy‘
supported the scheme in order to remain in power. One might fairly infer from
the play itself that if Abigail had never lain with Proctor nobody would have
been executed…. Mr. Miller consistently develops historically documented
selfish motives and logical errors to grotesque extremes. Every character who
confesses in The Crucible does so only to save his skin. Every accuser is
motivated by envy or vengeance, or is prompted by some other selfishly
motivated person. And the sole example of ordinary trial procedure is an
examination in which the judges condemn a woman because they regard her
inability to recite her commandments as ‗hard proof‘ of her guilt…. The witch
hunters of The Crucible are so foolish, their logic so extremely burlesqued,
their motives so baldly temporal, that one may easily underestimate the
terrible implications of their mistakes. Stupid or vicious men‘s errors can be
appalling; but the lesson would be even more appalling if one realized that
intelligent men, who tried to be fair and saw the dangers in some of their
methods, reached the same conclusions and enforced the same penalties. The
central fault is Mr. Miller‘s failure to present an intelligent minister who
recognizes at once the obvious questions which troubled real Puritan ministers
from the time the court was appointed. Cocksure in the first act and morally
befuddled in the last, Mr. Miller‘s John Hale is in both these attitudes a sorry
representative of the Puritan ministry. ‗Spectre evidence,‘ the major issue of
1692, is neither mentioned nor debated in The Crucible. Preferring to use Hale
as a caricature of orthodoxy in his first act, Mr. Miller does not answer the
question which a dramatist might devote his skills to answering: What made a
minister who saw the dangers, who wanted to protect the innocent and convict
the guilty, side with the court? Even though the dramatist must oversimplify
history, the fact that dramatic exposition may be tedious does not excuse The
Crucible‘s inadequacies; Mr. Miller finds plenty of time for exposition in the
first act and in the later speeches of Hale and the Deputy Governor. The fault
lies in Mr. Miller‘s understanding of he period; its consequences damage his
play as ‗essential‘ history, as moral instruction, and as art.‖ David Levin ―Salem
Witchcraft in Recent Fiction and Drama‖ The New England Quarterly XXVIII
(December 1955) 537-42

―It is not to be concluded that Proctor‘s concession to the mad conformity of

the time parallels Miller‘s testimony [in 1956 to the U.S. House Committee],
for Proctor had never in fact seen the Devil, whereas Miller had in fact seen
Communists…. If the position taken by Miller were in all cases right, then it
would seem wise to supplement the Fifth Amendment with one holding that
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no man could be required to incriminate another. If this were done, the whole
machinery of law enforcement would collapse; it would be simply impossible
to determine the facts about a crime.‖ Richard H. Rovere “Arthur Miller‟s
Conscience” New Republic CXXXVI (17 June 1957) 13-15

―The Crucible tells the story of the Salem witch hunt. When the play opens, a
group of young girls, including the Minister Parris‘s own daughter, have been
conjuring spirits in the forest. Two of them are in a hypnotic trance. A religious
expert in witchcraft is called in and soon the girls, in a state of revivalist
enthusiasm, are calling out the names of people they have seen with the Devil.
A court is set up. At first only the riff-raff are named, but gradually the circle
widens as social feuds become entangled with personal emotions, and
presently Elizabeth Proctor, a cold, harsh Puritan, is framed by one of the girls
(Abigail), whom she has dismissed from her service after finding her in
adultery with her husband, John Proctor. Proctor, supported by a tough old
individualist, Giles Corey, takes it on himself to oppose the court. He
persuades one of the girls, Mary Warren, to confess that it is all a fraud, and by
admitting his adultery with Abigail, tries to discredit her as a witness. But
Elizabeth, called in to confirm his testimony, lies for the only time in her life,
and Mary is once again contaminated by hysteria. After this, Proctor himself is
condemned. The last act deals with the struggle of his conscience. To escape
the gallows, he as only to confess that he is in league with the Devil. Is not life,
he reasons, like Brecht‘s Galileo, worth a compromise? ‗Let Rebecca go like a
saint; for me it is a fraud!‘ But, finally, he tears up his confession. ‗You have
made your magic now, for now I do think I see some shred of goodness in
John Proctor. Not enough to weave a banner with, but white enough to keep
it from such dogs.‘

A summary can do no justice to the richness and complexity of the play.

Sartre‘s film version, which turned it into a projection of the class struggle,
kept some of the power, but lost the depth of the original…. John Proctor
stands four-square in his own time and place. This is not to say that his story is
historically accurate. It is one of the fallacies of our pseudo-realism that
historical accuracy is the same as reality…. But Proctor is real because he
stands at the heart of all the complex tensions of the Salem community. He is
totally involved as a human being: socially, as a farmer in a farming
community who, against his will, is caught up in the town‘s factions;
intellectually, because his mind rejects the insanity of the witch hunt;
emotionally, because he is linked with that insanity through his adultery with
Abigail; morally, because this adultery is not just a sin against the community,
but a sin against his own conscience, so that his death becomes more than a
pointlessly heroic gesture, a rediscovery of his own goodness….
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The most immediately powerful scene in the play is the one in which Mary
Warren tries to expose the fraud. Again, everything that happens is realistic,
but it is a realism which takes into account the fact that delusions too are real
to those who hold them, and can change a given reality. As Mary testifies, the
other girls fix their eyes on the ceiling. Mary has become a bird trying to
possess them. Presently, she does possess them. Everything she says is
repeated, horrifyingly, in chorus by the girls, until Mary‘s own mind is broken
down, and she herself is screaming at the ceiling.‖
Albert Hunt “Realism and Intelligence: Some Notes on Arthur Miller” Encore
VII (May-June 1960) 12-17, 41

―The pattern is varied slightly in The Crucible. The Man Who Learns here is
the Reverend Hale, but unlike the earlier two plays, it is not he who suffers the
death in the third act. But Hale takes the play over so completely from the
victim, Proctor (who after all only Knows and is static), that the latter‘s
martyrdom seems almost a sentimental afterthought. ‗I denounce these
proceedings,‘ Hale says at the curtain of the second last scene, but the tide of
majority stupidity has already engulfed them. He is too late too, and this is his
tragedy.‖ William Wiegand “Arthur Miller and the Man Who Knows” The
Western Review XXI (Winter 1957) 85-102

―Whether we are to accept his Salem as historical or as an analogy for the

United States in the early fifties, Miller needs to create a mood of mass
hysteria in which guilt and confession become public virtues. For this reason,
Proctor is not so intensively on stage as the protagonists of the earlier plays
are; the playwright has to work up a setting for him, has to give his attention to
the accusers, the court, the town. It would be simple enough to dissect Miller‘s
use of Salem and to show, as so many critics have, that the Massachusetts
witch hunts are not analogous to the postwar Communist hunts…. It is John
Proctor who shows most clearly Miller‘s attitude. His hero might have been
another Willy Loman, another Joe Keller, an acceptor not a defier of society,
and his play would have had just as much— perhaps more—propaganda
value…. Ironically, not even Elizabeth‘s ‗He have his goodness now‘ can make
Proctor‘s dignity convincing. The simplicity of the real situation is impossible
on stage. Miller‘s need to push Proctor to his heroic end causes him to bring to
The Crucible too many of the trappings of the standard romantic play; the plot
turns on that moment in court when Elizabeth, who has never lied before, lies
out of love of her husband and condemns him by that act. This is a sentimental
mechanism almost as outrageous as the hidden-letter trick. Although Proctor
is never completely successful as a character, Miller makes an effort to
convince us that he is more than the blunt, not so bright good man he appears
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to be.. We are to assume that Proctor is a solid man, but an independent one,
not a man to fit lightly into anyone else‘s mold. When we meet him, however,
he is suffering under a burden of guilt—intensified by his belief that Elizabeth
is continually judging him.

Miller makes it clear that in sleeping with Abigail Williams, Proctor has
become ‗a sinner not only against the moral fashion of the time, but against his
own vision of decent conduct.‘ In Act III, when he admits in open court that he
is a lecher, he says, ‗A man will not cast away his good name.‘ When he is
finally faced with the choice of death or confession (that he consorted with the
Devil), his guilt as an adulterer becomes confused with his innocence as a
witch; one sin against society comes to look like another, or so he rationalizes.
In the last act, however, Elizabeth in effect absolves him of the sin of adultery,
gives him back the name he lost in court, and clears the way for him to reject
the false confession and to give his life: ‗How may I live without my name?‘…
There are distressing structural faults in The Crucible, violations of the
realistic surface of the play, such as the unlikely scene in Act I in which Proctor
and Abigail are left alone in the sick girl‘s bedroom. Nor was it such a good
idea for Miller to attempt, in that play, to suggest the language of the period;
the lines are…awkward and…stagily false.‖ Gerald Weales “Arthur Miller: Man
and His Image” American Drama Since World War II (Harcourt 1962) 3-17

―At the time we produced The Crucible, Miller was already the most powerful
rational voice in the American theatre. While it lacked the terrifying
impartiality of greater drama, The Crucible had nevertheless the vehemence of
good social protest. And in our program notes we stressed the McCarthy
parallel, speaking of guilt by association and Ordeal by Slander…. While the
power of mass psychosis is one of the strongest elements in the play, there is a
melodrama in the fervency that always made me uncomfortable…. It is the
mind which rebels finally against its formulas while the emotions may be
overwhelmed by its force…. A master of conventional dramaturgy, with all the
skills of building and pacing, he drives past the turbid aspect of social hypnosis
to the predetermined heroism of Proctor…. This absence of doubt reduced the
import of The Crucible for those who thought about it, while increasing the
impact for those who didn‘t. Several critics have pointed out that the analogy
between witches and Communists is a weak one, for while we believe in
retrospect there were no witches, we know in fact there were some
Communists [hundreds, supported by thousands of liberals], and a few of
them were dangerous….

The Crucible was not really the ‗tough‘ play that Miller claimed; I mean
dramatically tough, tough in soul, driving below its partisanship to a judgment
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of anti-social action from which, as in Dostoyevsky, none of us could feel

exempt. I wouldn‘t have asked the questions if Miller didn‘t prompt them with
his reflections on Social Drama and the tragic form. Miller wants the Puritan
community without Puritan premises or Puritan intuitions (which is one
reason why, when he appropriates the language, his own suffers in
comparison). His liberalism is the kind that, really believing we have outlived
the past, thinks it is there to be used. The past doesn‘t lie around like that. And
one of these days the American theatre is really going to have to come to terms
with American history. Axiom for liberals: no play is deeper than its witches.‖
Herbert Blau “Counterforce I: The Social Drama” The Impossible Theater
(Macmillan 1964) 188-92

―In dramatizing the Salem witch hunts at the end of the 17th century, Miller
explores the roots of intolerance and mass hysteria. A few girls, fettered by a
rigid Puritan moral code, seek an outlet in secret dances at night in the woods.
Discovered, they manage to elude punishment by declaring themselves victims
of the Devil and by ecstatically accusing several harmless women of witchcraft.
The whole community is caught in a frenzy. Envy, greed, and superstition rule.
The Devil‘s supposed human assistants are blamed for every mishap, be it the
miscarriage of a woman or the death of a pig. Deputy-Governor Danforth, a
monster of dogmatism, meticulously executes the verdict of mob madness. The
central plot concerns John Proctor, a forthright farmer, his wife Elizabeth, and
Abigail, the ringleader of the girls. Abigail had once seduced Proctor and now
tries to eliminate Elizabeth by declaring her a witch. Attempting to clear his
wife, Proctor implicates himself. He refuses to save his neck with a false
confession and is led to the gallows. Though the characters sometimes seem to
lack human substance, they are effectively profiled and clash in gripping
dramatic scenes. In his concern for historical accuracy and a universal
comment, Miller does not emphasize contemporary parallels.‖ Theodore J.
Shank, ed. A Digest of 500 Plays: Plot Outlines and Production Notes
(Crowell-Collier 1963

―If we are to judge solely from his next play, The Crucible, we would have to
say that Art did think of himself as a sinner; the central character in it
expresses contrition for a single act of infidelity. I had to guess that Art was
publicly apologizing to his wife for what he‘d done. I believed it was the duty of
the government to investigate the Communist movement in our country. I
couldn‘t behave as if my old ‗comrades‘ didn‘t exist and didn‘t have an active
political program. There was no way I could go along with their crap that the
CP was nothing but another political party, like the Republicans and the
Democrats.
 136

Molly [his wife] was criticizing the parallel Art had seen in the story of the
Massachusetts witch trials and becoming indignant. ‗What‘s going on here and
now is not to be compared with the witch trials of that time,‘ she said to me
and, first chance she got, to Miller. ‗Those witches did not exist. Communists
do. Here, and everywhere in the world. It‘s a false parallel. Witch hunt! The
phrase would indicate that there are no Communists in the government, none
in the big trade unions, none in the press, none in the arts, none sending
money from Hollywood to Twelfth Street [Communist Party headquarters]. In
a way Miller admired my wife, but not so much as he resented her…. Molly
knew what she was talking about; she‘d been in the trenches. She‘d been
assistant editor of New Theatre magazine when it had published Waiting for
Lefty… I thought Molly was right in her dispute with Miller…. I thought Art‘s
bright idea questionable and his claim later that his play should not be read for
‗contemporary significance‘ seemed dishonest to me…. [Congressmen] pointed
to Hollywood as ‗the Communists‘ greatest financial angels‘.‖ Elia Kazan
Elia Kazan: A Life (Knopf 1988) 367, 449-51 CommunistPerspective

―The Crucible is a mirror Miller uses to reflect the anti-communist hysteria

inspired by Senator Joseph McCarthy‘s ‗witch hunts‘ in the United States.
Within the text itself, Miller contemplates the parallels, writing ‗Political
opposition [Communist totalitarianism] is given an inhumane overlay, which
then justifies the abrogation of all normally applied customs of civilized
behavior. [Communists worldwide are estimated to have murdered over 110
million people!] A political policy [preventing the overthrow of the democratic
U.S. government by Communists loyal to the Soviet Union] is equated with
moral right, and opposition to it with diabolical malevolence.‖ back cover The
Crucible by Arthur Miller (Penguin 2003) Michael Hollister (2015)

Q. Describe „The Crucible‟ as an exponent of „The Use and Abuse

of Power: Carryout a Critical Discourse Analysis of Arthur
Miller's “The Crucible”

1. Introduction

The emergence of the term ‗Critical Discourse Analysis‘ is attributed to the

works of Norman Fairclough Wooffitt (2005: 137) The critical discourse
analysis is associated with researchers such as Norman Fairclough, Ruth
Wodak and Teun A. Van Dijk who comprehend critical discourse analysis as it
is concerned with analyzing how social and political inequalities are
manifested in and reproduced through discourse. Critical discourse analysis is
an area of interdisciplinary research and analysis which began to develop as a
 137

distinct academic area around the 1980s and now includes a number of
different approaches. These approaches have something in common which is a
concern to ensure more satisfactory attention in critical social research to
‗discourse‘ as a facet of social life, and to its relation to other facets of social
life, than they have received in the past. Critical analysts of ‗discourse‘
approach language as one facet of social life which is closely interconnected
with other facets of social life, and is therefore a significant aspect of all the
major issues in social scientific research—economic systems, social relations,
power and ideology, institutions, social change, social identity and so on
(Fairclough, 2006: 8). This definition is still in use and most quoted by many
scholars. Fairclough (1995) defines critical discourse analysis as:

By 'critical' discourse analysis I mean discourse analysis which aims to

systematically explore often opaque relationships of causality and
determination between (a) discursive practices, events and texts, and
(b) wider social and cultural structures, relations and processes; to
investigate how such practices, events and texts arise out of and are
ideologically shaped by relations of power and struggles over power;
and to explore how the opacity of these relationships between discourse
and society is itself a factor securing power and hegemony. (pp. 132-33)

2. Van Dijk's Approach to Critical Discourse Analysis and Power

Van Dijk (2008b: vii) points out that critical discourse analysis is
fundamentally interested in the social conditions of discourse and specifically
in questions of power and power abuse. Since power is not shown just in some
of the aspects of powerful speech, he calls for the need to study the whole
complex context in order to know how power is related to text and talk, and
more generally how discourse reproduces social structure. Critical discourse
analysis does not primarily focus on discourse and its properties, but on social
issues and problems, such as racism and sexism or other forms of domination
and power abuse, and then examines whether and how text and talk are
involved in its reproduction. The analysis should involve how power abuse is
enacted, reproduced or legitimized by the text and talk of dominant groups or
institutions and that, Van Dijk (1996a: 64),critical discourse analysis is only
effective when it generates reproduction of power and inequality. Relevant to
the present study of Crucible are:

1- Power is a property of relations between social groups, institutions or

organizations.
2- Social power is defined in terms of the control exercised by one group or
organization (or its members) over the actions and/or the minds of (the
 138

members of) another group, thus limiting the freedom of action of the
others, or influencing their knowledge, attitudes or ideologies.
3- Power of a specific group or institution may be distributed, and may be
restricted to a specific social domain or scope, such as that of politics,
the media, law and order, education or corporate business, thus
resulting in different centres of power and elite groups that control such
centres.
4- At an elementary but fundamental level of analysis, social power
relationships are characteristically manifested in interaction. Thus we
say that group A (or its members) has power over group B (or its
members) when the real or potential actions of A exercise social control
over B. Since the notion of action itself involves the notion of (cognitive)
control by agents, the social control over B by the actions of A induces a
limitation of the self-control of B. In other words, the exercise of power
by A results in the limitation of B's social freedom of action.
5- Except in the case of bodily force, power of A over B's actual or possible
actions presupposes that A must have control over the cognitive
conditions of actions of B, such as desires, wishes, plans, and
beliefs. For whatever reasons, B may accept or agree to do as A wishes,or
to follow the law, rules, or consensus to act in agreement with (the
interests of) A.
6- A's power needs a basis, that is, resources that socially enable the
exercise of power. Power is a form of social control if its basis consists of
socially relevant resources. Generally, power is intentionally or
unwittingly exercised by A in order to maintain or enlarge this power
basis of A, or to prevent B from acquiring it. In other words, the exercise
of power by A is usually in A's interest.
7- Direct control of action is achieved through discourses that have
directive pragmatic function (elocutionary force), such as commands,
threats, promises, laws, regulations, instructions, and more indirectly by
recommendations and advice. Speakers often have an institutional role,
and their discourses are often backed by institutional power. Compliance
in this case is often obtained by legal or other institutional sanctions.
8- Crucial in the exercise or the maintenance of power is the fact that for A
to exert mental control over B, B must know about A's wishes, wants,
preferences, or intentions. Apart from direct communication, for
instance in speech acts such as commands, request, or threats, this
knowledge may be inferred from cultural beliefs, norms, or values;
through a shared (or contested) consensus within an ideological
framework; or from the observation and interpretation of A's social
actions.
 139

The discussion above stresses power abuse not only involves the abuse of force
and may result not merely in limiting the freedom of action of a specific group,
but also and more significantly may affect the minds of people. That is,
through special access to, and control over the means of public discourse and
communication, dominant groups or institutions may affect the structures of
text and talk in such a way that the knowledge, attitudes, norms, values and
ideologies of recipients are more or less indirectly affected in the interest of the
dominant group.

3. Applying Van Dijk's Approach

Arthur Miller‗s ―The Crucible‖ is based on the historical account of the Salem
witch trials. Particularly, the story revolves around the discovery of several
young girls and a slave dancing in the woods conjuring or attempting to
conjure spirits.

The four white girls, Abigail, Betty, Mercy and Mary, and the black maid
Tituba, have been caught dancing naked in the woods at night by
Abigail‗s uncle, the Reverend Parris. The reader or member of the audience
knows that the girls were not just dancing: a conversation among Abigail,
Mercy and Mary reveals that previously Abigail had asked Parris‗s black female
slave, Tituba, to give her a ‗charm‘ to kill Elizabeth Proctor, the wife of John
Proctor, Abigail‗s ex-lover.

As a self-defense, Abigail diverts the attention from herself and the other girls
by claiming that Tituba made them take part in witchcraft, suggesting that
they are the innocent victims of Tituba‗s power, and thereby deflecting blame
from herself onto the slave. The accusation is thus transferred from Abigail to
Tituba, whose fear and bewilderment, and her relatively powerless status in
the village, cause her to produce incompetent conversational contributions
which lead to her imprisonment.

In order to judge whether Tituba confesses or is forced to confess to witchcraft,

it is necessary to examine some examples from the text. The extract below
begins when Abigail deflects the accusation from herself onto Tituba, and ends
with Tituba‗s confession.

[MRS PUTNAM enters with TITUBA, and instantly ABIGAIL points at

TITUBA.] (1) ABIGAIL: She made me do it! She made Betty do it!
(2) TITUBA: [shocked and angry] Abby!

(3) ABIGAIL: She makes me drink blood!

(4) PARRIS: Blood!!
(5) MRS PUTNAM: My baby‗s blood?
(6) TITUBA: No, no, chicken blood. I give she chicken blood!
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(7) HALE: Woman, have you enlisted these children for the Devil?
(8) TITUBA: No, no sir, I don‗t truck with no Devil!
(9) HALE: Why can she not wake? Are you silencing this child?
(10) TITUBA: I love me Betty!
(11) HALE: You have sent your spirit out upon this child, have you
not? Are you gathering souls for the Devil?
(12) ABIGAIL: She sends her spirit on me in church; she makes me
laugh at prayer!
(13) PARRIS: She has often laughed at prayer!
(14) ABIGAIL: She comes to me every night to go and drink blood!
(15) TITUBA: You beg me to conjure! She beg me make charm—
(16) ABIGAIL: Don‗t lie! [To HALE:] She comes to me while I sleep;
she‗s always making me dream corruptions!
(17) TITUBA: Why you say that, Abby?
(18) ABIGAIL: Sometimes I wake and find myself standing in the open
door way and not a stitch on my body! I always hear her laughing in my
sleep. I hear her singing her Barbados songs and tempting me with—
(19) TITUBA: Mister Reverend, I never—
(20) HALE: [resolved now] Tituba, I want you to wake this child.
(21) TITUBA: I have no power on this child, sir.
(22) HALE: You most certainly do, and you will free her from it now!
When did you compact with the Devil?
(23) TITUBA: I don‗t compact with no Devil!
(24) PARRIS: You will confess yourself or I will take you out and
whip you to your death, Tituba!
(25) PUTNAM: This woman must be hanged! She must be taken and
hanged!
(26) TITUBA: [terrified, falls to her knees] No, no, don‗t hang Tituba!
I tell him I don‗t desire to work for him, sir.
(27) PARRIS: The Devil?

(28) HALE: Then you saw him! [TITUBA weeps.] Now Tituba, I know
that when we bind ourselves to Hell it is very hard to break with it. We
are going to help you tear yourself free—
(29) TITUBA: [frightened by the coming process] Mister Reverend, I
do believe somebody else be witchin‗ these children.
(30) HALE: Who?
(31) TITUBA: I don‗t know, sir, but the Devil got him numerous
witches.
(32) HALE: Does he! [It is a clue.] Tituba, look into my eyes. Come,
look into me. [She raises her eyes to his fearfully.] You would be a
good Christian woman, would you not, Tituba?
(33) TITUBA: Aye, sir, a good Christian woman.
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(34) HALE: And you love these little children?

(35) TITUBA: Oh, yes, sir, I don‗t desire to hurt little children.
(36) HALE: And you love God, Tituba?
(37) TITUBA: I love God with all my bein‗.
(38) HALE: Now in God‗s holy name—
(39) TITUBA: Bless him. Bless Him. [She is rocking on her knees,
sobbing in terror.]
(40) HALE: And to His glory—
(41) TITUBA: Eternal glory. Bless Him—bless God…
(42) HALE: Open yourself, Tituba—open yourself and let God‗s holy
light shine on you.
(43) TITUBA: Oh, bless the Lord.
(44) HALE: When the Devil comes to you does he ever come—with
another person? [She stares up into his face.]Perhaps another person in
the village? Someone you know.
(45) PARRIS: Who came with him?
(46) PUTNAM: Sarah Good? Did you ever see Sarah Good with him?
Or Osburn?
(47) PARRIS: Was it man or woman came with him?
(48) TITUBA: Man or woman. Was—was woman.
(49) PARRIS: What woman? A woman, you said. What woman?
(50) TITUBA: It was black dark, and I—

(51) PARRIS: You could see him, why could you not see her?
(52) TITUBA: Well, they was always talking; they was always runnin‗
round and carryin‗ on—
(53) PARRIS: You mean out of Salem? Salem witches?
(54) TITUBA: I believe so, yes, sir. [Now HALE takes her hand. She is
surprised.]
(55) HALE: Tituba. You must have no fear to tell us who they are, do
you understand? We will protect you. The Devil can never overcome a
minister. You know that, do you not?
(56) TITUBA: [kisses HALE‗s hand] Aye, sir, oh, I do.
(57) HALE: You have confessed yourself to witchcraft, and that speaks
a wish to come to Heaven‗s side. And we will bless you, Tituba.
(58) TITUBA: [deeply relieved] Oh, God bless you, Mr. Hale.
(Miller 1986:45–8)

With the end of this conversation, Reverend Hale concludes that Tituba is
guilty of practicing witchcraft "You have confessed yourself to
witchcraft" (turn 57). But if we trace the whole conversation from the
beginning, we will see that Tituba did not directly confess her involvement in
the action. According to van Dijk‗s framework adopted in this study, social
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power is defined in terms of the control exercised by one group or organization

(or its members) over the actions and/or the minds of (the members of)
another group, thus limiting the freedom of action of the others, or influencing
their knowledge, attitudes or ideologies. In the excerpt outlined above, the
exercise of power by Hale and Parris over Tituba is apparent. The analysis
shows that Hale and Parris are more powerful if compared to Tituba; they are
white, male and Hale is a reverend of the church and Parris is Tituba‗s master.
Hale questions Tituba in (turn7) "Woman, have you enlisted these
children for the Devil?", (turn 9) "Why can she not wake? Are you
silencing this child?",(turn 11) "Are you gathering souls for the
Devil?" and (turn 22) "When did you compact with the Devil?".

Although all these questions are met with denial by Tituba, Hale concludes
that Tituba is guilty of witchcraft. This depicts how religious people in Salem
affirm the existence of evil to cripple any person who disagrees with them
religiously. Such people adopt a moral high ground so that anyone, who is in
disagreement with them, is judged immoral and damned without hearing
his/her defense. Hale employs his religious power to prevent any kind of
disunity that might threaten the community by material or ideological
enemies. In this respect, Hale really wants everyone to understand that he is in
charge and that he knows what he is doing. So to speak, Hale is trying to have
control over the whole situation and have everyone respect him and think he is
correct. That is why Hale is pressing Tituba to confess that she works for the
devil.

In the light of van Dijk‗s framework, direct control of action is achieved

through discourses that have directive pragmatic function (elocutionary force),
such as commands, threats, promises, laws, regulations, instructions, and
more indirectly by recommendations and advice. Hale tells "Tituba, I want
you to wake this child" (turn20) and "you will free her from it
now!"(turn 22). This indicates that he presumes that Tituba is able to wake
Betty. Actually Tituba does not have any kind of power to wake Betty because
she is not truly bewitched but is only pretending to be sleeping. As indicated
earlier, Hale has an institutional role in the city and his discourse is thus
backed by institutional power (religious power). However, Tituba‗s sustained
endeavors to deny her guilt, "No, no sir, I don‟t truck with no Devil!"
(turn 8),"I have no power on this child, sir" (turn 21), "I don‟t
compact with no Devil!" (turn 23), appear to be irrelevant to Hale who is
determined to interpret her utterances as a confession. On the other hand,
Parris's following directive "You will confess yourself or I will take you
out and whip you to your death, Tituba!" (turn 24) is an explicit threat
which leads to a series of vague utterances from Tituba that may imply her
guilt but do not constitute a confession. Parties, Tituba, on the one hand, and
 143

Hale and Parris, on the other, have dissimilar and mismatched conversational
goals. They want Tituba to confess to an accusation which she wants to deny.
However, the more powerful status of her white male accusers renders Tituba‗s
attempted denials useless. Tituba's status as a slave shows that she is
powerless to deny her fault. The menace of being hanged for rejecting to
confess is evidence of the duress to which Tituba is subjected and is sufficient
to explain why she admits her involvement in witchcraft. In this case she
prefers imprisonment to being hanged.

The exercise of power by Hale and Parris results in the limitation of Tituba‗s
social freedom of action. Thus, the social control over Tituba by the actions of
Hale and Parris induces a limitation of the self-control of Tituba. Tituba‗s
powerless status in the village makes her unable to refute her guilt since she is
considered as if she had already confessed. This idea is strengthened by her
use of non-standard English. This helps her interrogators to interpret her
utterances in the way they prefer. For instance, as Tituba says "I tell him I
don‟t desire to work for him, sir" (turn 26), Parris presumes that Tituba
is confessing her involvement with the devil, while actually Tituba means
something else, and Hale remarks "Then you saw him" (turn 28). This
supposition is not confirmed by Tituba whose next utterance "I do believe
somebody else be witchin‟ these children" (turn 29) is seen as
confirming her guilt rather than supporting her denial.

The power of Hale and Parris over Tituba‗s actual or possible actions
presupposes that they have control over the cognitive conditions of actions of
Tituba such as desires, wishes, and beliefs. For whatever reasons, Tituba may
accept or agree to do as her accusers wish, or to follow the rules, directions, or
consensus to act in agreement with them. Hale not only threatens Tituba, but
also advices and promises her salvation and protection if she complies: "We
are going to help you tear yourself free—" (turn 28), "Open yourself
and let God‟s holy light shine on you" (turn 42), "We will protect
you. The Devil can never overcome a minister" (turn 55). Here, Hale
and Parris are intending to persuade Tituba to confess. A common way to
exercise
power is by getting the person to want something that he would not have
wanted, for instance by presenting a limited range of options as the only ones
available so that he is not aware of alternatives. The alternatives, damnation
and abandonment to evil, are assumed to be more frightening than the
imprisonment which results from confession. Crucial in the exercise or the
maintenance of power is the fact that for Hale and Parris to exert mental
control over Tituba, Tituba must know about their wishes, wants, preferences,
or intentions. This knowledge may be inferred from cultural beliefs, norms, or
values; through a shared (or contested) consensus within an ideological
 144

framework; or from the observation and interpretation of Hale and Parris's

social actions. In order to save her own life, she takes cues from her
interrogators and tells them what they want to hear and thereby avoids
execution. When they ask Tituba: "When the Devil comes to you does he
ever come—with another person? Perhaps another person in the
village? Someone you know." (turn 44), "Who came with him" (turn
45), "Sarah Good? Did you ever see Sarah Good with him? Or
Osburn?" (turn 46), "Was it man or woman came with him?" (turn
47), Tituba replies "Man or woman. Was—was woman." (turn 48).

4. Conclusions

Teun A.van Dijk‗s approach of power provides a useful framework for the
analysis of Arthur Miller‗s ―The Crucible‖ due to the differences in power
between the interactants under study. The analysis , undoubtedly, uncovers
how power is used and abused by those people who wield power.

The whole conversation in the selected extract of this study goes alongside
with the interests of Hale and Parris. They want to restore social equilibrium in
Salem and establish their status as they represent the elite groups in the city.
For good purposes or even beneficial purposes, the powerful groups of Salem
develop a theocracy, a combine of state and religious power whose function is
to keep the community together, and to prevent any kind of disunity that
might open it to destruction by material or ideological enemies. Hale and
Parris are unwilling to put their position of power in jeopardy.

Racial difference and Tituba‗s powerless status in the community make her the
target for the disruptions. The idea that women, and not men, are accused in
Salem demonstrates that male privilege offers some protection from
persecution. Gender, race, and class, make them vulnerable to social
mistreatment.

The analysis also proves that Tituba‗s confession to witchcraft is void since her
confession is done under pressure by her accusers. Unsurprisingly, Tituba
confesses to witchcraft when the accusers threaten her with physical violence.
She is a black female slave, an individual without any power. She does not have
the least chance to defend herself against Abigail‗s accusations. Tituba‗s
admitting of her involvement in witchcraft is a direct result of the Salem belief
system and her lack of status in the community. The asymmetrical power
relationships which exist in Salem are responsible for the misinterpretation of
what she says by her accusers, and render Tituba unable to deny the charge.