The Crucible AO5: Critical Interpretations

1. A critical introduction to Twentieth-Century American Drama (Volume Three) – C.W.E.

Bigsby

‘Apart from a powerful if ironised nostalgia, it seems to have registered as a sense of a disturbance in the
social and psychological world, a bafflement over social process – as its most obvious is Miller’s The
Crucible’

‘Publicly oppressed, deeply suspicious of the materialism and the increasing anonymity of society’

‘Writers like Miller... tended to dramatise the plight of the individual denied avenues in which to express
that individuality’

‘Existential dramas in which the individual acknowledged responsibilities and claimed rights which
defined a problematic but real identity (The Crucible)

‘For both John Proctor in The Crucible... it is a failure to control the sexual impulse which is a primary
source of guilt.’

2. The crucible of history: Arthur Miller’s John Proctor By William J. McGill, Jr

Miller’s most vigorous critics, have stressed the play’s failure as a political analogy and chided him for
fuzzy-minded liberalism. (e.g. Eric Bentley “The innocence of Arthur Miller” and Robert Warshow, “The
Liberal Conscience in The Crucible”)

David Levin argues that the adultery changes the dynamic of the situation by obscuring the psychological
and sociological conditions which made the witchcraft hysteria possible. (Levin “Salem Witchcraft”)

Eric Bentley remarks that Miller has equipped Proctor with all trappings of political innocence: he
belongs to the right social class, performs manual labour, and has the appropriate dash of scepticism and
pragmatism. (Bentley, “Innocence of Arthur Miller)

Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum have demonstrated that the social causes of events in Salem Village
are considerably more complex than either Miller or most of his critics could imagine. John Proctor was
not simply a farmer but a man of significant wealth derived from diverse sources: inheritance, farming,
rents, tavern keeping, and commercial ventures. (Boyer and Nissenbaum, Salem possessed)

The father was the wealthiest taxpayer, but by 1695 the son ranked only sixteenth on the roster of village
taxpayers. (see above)

The detailed information on which Boyer and Nissenbaum construct their thesis had not been collated at
the time Miller wrote The Crucible. His vision of Salem Village society reflected the historical
understanding of his day, and its defects he shared with others, including most of his critics. (see 15
point)

Proctor’s position here is hardly different from that taken by the real John Hale in his “A Modest Inquiry
into the Nature of Witchcraft”or indeed by any number of other contemporaries, including Cotton Mather.
(Burr, Narratives of Witchcraft)
A playwright has no debt of literalness. Right now I could tell you which details were taken from the
records verbatim and which were invented. I think you can say that this play is as historically authentic
as Richard II (Henry Hewes, “Arthur Miller and How He went to the Devil”)

What he attempts is to provide a historical example to demonstrate that “the sin of public terror is that it
divests man of conscience, of himself.” (Miller, collected plays)

To assert as some critics have, that no analogy is possible because communists exist and witches do not
begs the question. (Popkin “Miller’s The Crucible”)

3. Quotes from Precision and Pseudo Precision in ‘The Crucible’ By Stephen Fender

‘I believe that the very moral awareness of the play and its characters- which are historically correct- was
repulsive to the audience. I think that the Anglo-Saxon audience cannot believe the reality of characters
who live principles....’

‘...the puritans in the play have a consistent moral outlook’

‘Proctor saves himself by recovering his ‘name’’

‘The ethics of society as nearly theocratic as that of the American Puritans owed much to the society’s
doctrine of salvation’

Preston says ‘all men are good and bad’ and ‘there is no middle sort of men in the world’’

Puritan predestination breaks down the whole structure of Aristotelian-Scholastic ethics, sweeping away
any idea of degrees of good and evil. H.W Schneider makes this point in The Puritan Mind

No one can live long in a Holy Commonwealth without becoming sensitive, irritable, losing his sense of
values and ultimately his balance.

All acts of God of the Devil; all issues are matters of religious faith; all conflicts are holy wars...

Yvor Wintersm, The Scarlet Letter: ‘When Hester Prynne committed adultery; she committed an act as
purely representative of complete corruption as the act of Fausus in signing a contract with Satan. This
view of the matter is certainly not Catholic and is little short of appalling.

The Roman Catholic doctrine of salvation was and is a rational system, depending on man’s free will to
do good and evil- actively and consciously. Sins are either venial or mortal

‘...the sinner can neutralize his transgressions by greater or smaller acts of penance, depending on the
degree of sin committed’

‘one cannot help noticing the curios confusion of values by which drunkenness and refusing to hear the
word of God become major sins and murder is not mentioned’

4. Crucible quotes Davis Thacker

‘The play exists on an intellectual level and an emotional one at the same time. It is politically and
socially comprehensive while being powerful.’
‘It is crucial that you avoid any tendency to romanticise [Danforth]’

Arthur Miller

‘The witch –hunt was a perverse manifestation of the panic which is set in among all classes when
balance began to turn towards greater individual freedom’

John Arden

‘John Proctors courage become Millers courage in face of rabid ant- communists’

‘One possible approach to the play is to see it as a rebellion of youth against age [...] simply because the
girls don’t have anybody in their age group.’

‘Of course in any power struggle within any society or community, what you name to be real, or relevant,
or significant, if you’re in authority, is what becomes significant and relevant.’

‘In a sense it is a play about power, about people who find themselves forced into playing roles which
they had not asked for and which they play either heroically or corruptly.’

‘ [ Danforth conducts himself badly but he did not ask for a set of circumstances quite so epic, for a
situation so critical for the society.’

Tom Wilkinson

‘I think John Proctor has a sense of morality which sees his betrayal of his wife as being amongst the
lesser crimes.’

5. The crucible: Henry Popkin

...Had been examining and interrogating radicals, former radicals and possible former radicals, requiring
witnesses to tell about others and not only about themselves.

The Crucible was a bold as well as a timely play, written at a time when the congressional investigators
had the power to do considerable damage.

As in the unhappy occurrences of the 1950’s, naming others was taken to be a guarantee of sincerity and
of a laudable desire

There is such a thing as communism; there is no such thing as witchcraft

That delusion is too special – not to say too lunatic – to be a very likely, interesting, or useful state of
mind for a serious character

They were heroic in maintaining their innocence at a time when false confession was likely to save their
lives

It was possible for many, like miller himself, to have some association with Communism and
Communists.

Still others among the accused had no connection with the communist party; for the purposes of our
comparison, they are exactly like the innocent victims of the Salem trials.
The Crucible is imperfect; we might still justifiably object that the impact of a sudden and undeserved
punishment upon entirely innocent people is a difficult subject for drama

Miller has constructed a new sort of guilt for his hero, John Proctor

In trying to save her, he is himself charged with witchcraft. So, he does suffer for his guilt – but for a
different guilt, for adultery, not for witchcraft

In the children’s malice, we have also noted a particular form of malice that is to breed results to come-
Abigail’s jealousy

He has pursued the wrong study; instead of demonology, he should have applied himself to economics

The Proctors’ joint interrogation of Mary Warren, and finally, the real goal of the scene- Hale’s
examination of the Proctors

He causes Proctor to miss the seventh commandment and evidently takes that failure as a sign of the
man’s general impiety when it is really a sort of Freudian slip, an unwilling confession of his infidelity

From the beginning, Salem has been presented as a community in which mutual evaluation is a generally
popular activity

Living in this environment and sharing values

To use the word ‘depraved’ is to remind ourselves that this state of affairs is well suited to the Puritan
theology, which held that divine election was the one balm for innate human depravity

Proctor dies, then, for his good name

Proctor is not merely innocent; he is an innocent, and his guilt as an adulterer us irrelevant, except insofar
as it supplies Abigail with her motive for slandering his wife.

We are obviously expected to apply a modern ‘psychological’ judgement to him and say that he was
driven to adultery by a cold wife and by irresistible attraction of the conscienceless girl who seduced him

To the automatic trustworthiness of accusers he has added the advantage of confession (always
efficacious for former communists)

Rebelliousness has led to them to dance in the moonlight and to join in Tituba’s incantations

Over against the bad individual, the vengeful adults, and the lying children, Miller sets the basically
sound community

The Crucible is not only to give the impression of an antique time, although that is part of it; the purpose
is to alienate us, to make us unfamiliar in this setting, to permit distance to lend its enchantment to this
bare, simplistic confrontation of good and evil

The Crucible is a play of action and suspense

6. English Journal Judith A. Cerjak

‘Miller finds that the “sin of public terror is that it divests man of conscience, of himself”’
‘When asked to incriminate other writers who attended a set of Marxist meetings, Miller said, …I am not
protecting the Communists or the Communist Party. I am trying to and I will protect my sense of self. I
could not use the name of another person and bring trouble on him’
‘Danforth refuses to admit his own error. He says, “While I speak God’s law, I will not crack its voice
with whimpering.’
‘Miller sees as “the question of whether conscience is in fact an organic part of the human being, and
what happens when it is handed over…”’
‘[Miller] warns us to hold onto our individuality and not to let our guilt or the guilt of someone else force
us to lose our consciences.’
“what is dark is not unknown…the relationship between those who side with justice and their implication
in the evils they oppose” (Our Guilt)
Miller fears a man’s loss of self- a self which is lost in conscience’s conflict between justice and evil.

7. The South central Bulletin Antony R.Collins

‘John Proctor is a truly good man, and unlike Willy Loman, a capable and respected member of his
community. Even this, Miller seems to argue, is not sufficient to insecure him from ruin.
‘As Calarco says: “When judicial truth becomes a personal lie, the link between social and profane justice
collapses …The judge becomes a witch…Justice destroys man and unleashes the furies.”’
‘John Proctor must restore moral order to the universe through personal transcendence and sacrifice.’
‘Whether God would endorse such a judgment is for each to decide, but the fact must be noted that such
stubborn determination to follow a specific course of action has provided grist for the dramatic mills
sense the time of Oedipus and Antigone’.
‘Miller demonstrates that even the potentiality for evil compromises all human goodness. Man is doomed
for not being saint and angel”.
‘The dilemma of After the Fall is not so very different from that of The Crucible. How does one reconcile
the instinct for life with moral absolutes?’
 ‘John Proctor makes the rational judgment that there may be some good in him just moments
before his death and realizes that this fact transcends the events of his dying.’
‘[Proctor] believes, as must any rational believer, that God’s justice will eventually triumph over the
momentary distortion of human law.’

8. Arthur Miller - A Critical Study by Christopher Bigsby

‘What is at stake in The Crucible is the survival of Salem, which is to say the survival of a sense of
community.’ P.148

‘One dictionary definition of a crucible is that it is a place of extreme heat, ‘a severe test’. John Proctor
and those others summoned before a court in Salem discovered the meaning of that.’ P.149

‘…it offers un the tragic sight of a man who dies to save his conception of himself and the world…’
P.149

‘If he seeks to overthrow the court it is, apparently, for one reason only: to save his wife. But behind that
there is another motive: to save not himself but his sense of himself.’ P.153

‘He does not die for the landless, for social justice, but for his sense of himself,’ P.154
‘…Miller certainly believed, individual decisions de have social consequences. That is the connection
between the private world, in which a man decides whether to sign his signature to a lie, and the public
world, in which conformity is demanded in the name of an ideal.’ P.154

‘In The Crucible, he explained, he wished to explore the tension between a man’s actions and his concept
of himself, and the question of whether conscience is an organic part of the human sensibility. He wished
to examine the consequences of the handling over of that conscience to others.’ P.155

‘…knowing, finally, the deceptions being practised, Danforth nonetheless decides to proceed. This, as he
suggests, is the obverse of Proctor’s final decision that he cannot sign his name to a lie.’ P.155

‘It stands, instead, as a study of the debilitating nature of guilt, the seductions of power, the flawed nature
of the individual and of the society to which the individual owes allegiance.’ P.159

‘It is the study of a society which believed in its unique virtues and seeks to sustain that dream of
perfection by denying all possibility of its imperfection.’ P.160

‘John Proctor’s flaw is his failure, until the last moment, to distinguish guilt from responsibility.
America’s flaw is to believe that it is at the same time both guilty and without flaw.’ P.160

‘God and the Devil, capitalism and communism, constituted the ideological site for a conflict in essence
about power.’ P.160

‘…the dilemma at its heart, its concern with betrayal, self-interest, power, a coercive language, personal
and public responsibility, abusive authority, injustice, corrosive myths, remains of central significance, as
does its awareness of the individual’s struggle to locate and define him or herself in the face of forces that
seem to leave so little space for moral being.’ P.165

9. Salem Witchcraft in recent fictions and drama – DAVID LEVIN

‘the essential nature of one of the strangest and most awful episodes in human history’

‘human pride makes devils of the opponents of orthodoxy and destroys individual freedom’

Comparison – ‘In the Salem of 1692 there were indictments and juries, in The Crucible there are none’

‘Mr Miller consistently develops historically documented selfish motives and logical errors to grotesque
extremes’

‘Every accuser is motivated by envy or vengeance’