"The Meaning of a Life in the Wilderness": Wordsworth, Hawthorne, Miller

Author(s): Matt Lorenz

Source: The Arthur Miller Journal , fall 2012, Vol. 7, No. 1/2 (fall 2012), pp. 63-77
Published by: Penn State University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/42909491

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 "The Meaning of a Life
in the Wilderness":
Wordsworth, Hawthorne, Miller
Matt Lorenz

In situating The Crucible in Salem and its surrounding woodlands,

Arthur Miller, according to some commentators, "connects the
paranoia of his age to Hawthorne's imaginary world in The Scarlet
Letter , as well as to earlier lawless wilderness scenes in such works as
'Roger Mal vin' s Burial' and 'Young Goodman Brown'" (Schultz
177). Given that Salem was Hawthorne's birthplace, that Hawthorne
set a number of his works there, and that Miller chose to condense
"several judges of almost equal authority" in two historical figures,
Judge Hathorne and Deputy Governor Danforth, the first of whom
was Hawthorne's ancestor (Miller 1997a 133), one can hardly doubt
that Miller had Hawthorne in mind as he composed his Salem drama.
However, through brief analyses of wilderness texts by Hawthorne,
Miller, and their predecessor William Wordsworth, this essay seeks to
demonstrate that Miller's conception of wilderness is more complex
and philosophically nuanced than the "metaphor for moral darkness"
that commentators identify in Hawthorne's Salem fiction (Schultz
177). At the same time as Elia Kazan's testimony before HUAC,
Miller drove north to the site of the witch trials, committed to
exploring the impulsive and often self-serving manifestations of
human desperation. In his colonial period tragedy, he delves beneath
facile judgments, associating the wilderness not with the handy, self-
righteous labels of morality, but with the vital urge to contemplate the
wild and bewildering behaviors of characters who elude
comprehension. Miller's wilderness is "dark and threatening" (Miller
1997a 135), but it does not conceal the evils of the witching hour.
While Hawthorne's wilderness is burdened by the author's religious
and allegorical aims, Miller's wilderness evokes the wondering
attentions of a consciousness turned back upon itself.
This wondering consciousness bears some resemblance,
historically, to that of another wilderness text, Wordsworth's "Tintern
Abbey." In a 1979 interview, James J. Martine asked Miller what
sorts of literary works he read in his spare time. After rattling off the

The Arthur Miller Journal Volume 7, Nos. 1 and 2 Fall 2012

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 54 Matt Lorenz

names of a few authors he had read rece

Miller noted, "I read poetry I suppose m
just for pleasure. I have a large number
house, and I just keep going back to
anything from Wordsworth to May Sw
... it wouldn't matter. It depends on m
Miller's comments suggest that for him r
thinking, not a calculated search for styl
he might incorporate into his creativ
Bigsby has observed, the rhetorical cont
was often bolstered by "writing first in
(Bigsby 21). Miller's commitment to this
suggests that while the reading of poetry
source of pleasure, it is unlikely to have
poetry reading habits substantially b
influences. While an American Romantic such as Nathaniel
Hawthorne may well have shaped Miller's thinking as he composed
The Crucible , this essay will suggest a few ways that the themes
imagery, and language of The Crucible resonate with those of
earlier Romantic - the one who first came to mind when Miller spo
of his poetry-reading habits.
ii.

During Miller's early life in Brooklyn, the British Romantics

represented, if not the "nightmare" of history from which Stephen
Dedalus is "trying to awake" (Joyce 34), then at least a mildly
oppressive, foreign authority. "Even at P.S. 24 on 111th Street,"
Miller says in Timebends of his early life in Brooklyn, "we were at
school in order to become ladies and gentlemen; we were not to read
Whitman or Dreiser or Sinclair Lewis but Keats and Shelley and
Wordsworth - writers who wrote English English" (Miller 1995 22).
The nationalistic overtones of this remark are quite clear. While the
young Miller might have relished the opportunity to study the works
of earlier American writers in the classroom and thereby shape his
own uniquely American voice, his schoolteachers demanded that he
learn to speak and write in the King's English. Consequently, if he
wanted to read Whitman's long, sonorous, free-verse lines and
Dreiser's and Sinclair's gritty, realist descriptions of urban squalor
and degradation, he was forced to do so on his own time.
Yet if one resists the impulse to view the Atlantic as a barrier that
artistic influences rarely cross - if one considers, for example,

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 The Meaning of a Life 55

Emerson's extensive engagement with the British Rom

Hawthorne's notable, if less pronounced, awareness of the
becomes possible to read poems such as Wordsworth's
Abbey" beside Miller's The Crucible with a deepening s
ways that Wordsworth's descriptions of wilderness co
Miller's language and with the attitudes and inner work
characters, whose suspicions and compulsions so mesm
today.
Though Wordsworth's "Lines Written a Few Miles above
Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour,
July 13, 1798" is, on its surface, a tranquil meditative poem, the
speaker is, upon closer inspection, somewhat bewildered by his
surroundings - at once elated and disconcerted. The poem is, like the
speaker, framed by wilderness. Its opening and closing verse
paragraphs each thrice echo the word "wild," an echo which shapes
and shades the speaker's musings.
As the first verse paragraph makes clear, the speaker, like the
characters of The Crucible , situates himself at "[t]he edge of the
wilderness" (Miller 1997a 135) - at the blurry and perhaps ultimately
unplottable point where "plots of cottage-ground" proceed to "lose
themselves" in "[t]he wild green landscape," and where "hedge-rows,
hardly hedge-rows," converge upon a "sportive wood run wild" (lines
11, 13, 15-17; Wordsworth 110). As John R. Stilgoe notes, this point
of convergence was often a vexed one for settlers of the New World.
Just as Wordsworth portrays the encroachment of the "wild" upon
"pastoral farms / Green to the very door," so does Stilgoe observe that
"the transition from streets and houses to dense forest" seemed
calculated to "terrify" Hawthorne characters such as Hester Prynne,
Dimmesdale, and young Goodman Brown, often compelling the
planners of New England towns to ensure that a community "fronted
the ocean or faced in upon itself' (Stilgoe 51). Creative writers such
as Wordsworth, Hawthorne and Miller felt drawn to dramatize this
uneasy reaction to the impinging wild.
Yet for Wordsworth, the porous boundary between wilderness
and civilization represents a site not only of emotional conflict but
also of epiphanic contemplation. The speaker's liminal surroundings
insist, like the faculty of reason itself, upon a compression of thought.
Observing the "steep and lofty cliffs" that hang above him, he feels at
once impressed and mildly oppressed. Just as the cliffs appear to
press down upon the "wild secluded scene," so does the scene press
him to entertain "[t]houghts of more deep seclusion," which

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 gg Matt Lorenz

"connect" him with "[t]he landscape" and

5-8; Wordsworth 1 10). In this way, the
state of "purer mind" that famously allo
things" and to "hear" the "still, sad mus
91-92; Wordworth 111-13).
Such a tranquil mental state cannot p
speaker's "matured" mind allows him
pleasure" and to cultivate profound mus
of the world at large, his visit to the bank
intermingled with recollections of an ear
he was consumed by "the coarser pleasur
their glad animal movements all gon
Wordsworth 1 14, 112). His remembranc
jaunts presage his encounter in the fina
"wild eyes" of a "dear, dear Friend,"
Wordsworth's sister Dorothy. These "w
and force him to physically confront th
speaker had in the previous verse parag
by" (lines 117, 74; Wordsworth 112-1
and reliving his "former pleasure in th
"wild eyes" - lights which flash and
ecstasies" of the speaker's as yet untam
(lines 119-20, 139; Wordsworth 114).
These "wild ecstasies" - ecstasy literal
of standing beside or outside oneself - si
loss of the self but also the permanent l
food/For future years" that a self-c
wilderness can occasion (lines 65-66;
Wordsworth's wilderness initially prov
allowing the speaker to determine his an
an untamed heart and an undiscipline
ultimately provides something more im
discipline the senses so that they may be
but to cultivate and enlighten the mind.
yet it ultimately provides a site for en
chance to attain lasting insights that
ministries of pleasure and fear.
iii.

In a short story such as Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown"

(1835), the moral and intellectual benefits of wilderness are far more

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 The Meaning of a Life 67

dubious. Though Hawthorne's wilderness tests Goodm

strength, the story's logic indicates that Goodman would
better off if he had withstood his temptations, contented
home "in the arms of Faith," and refused to enter the wild
shady "errand" that neither he nor the narrator ever
(Hawthorne 2005c 57, 51). Moreover, Wordsworth's sugges
wilderness provides the opportunity for intellectual cultiv
enlightenment is overshadowed by the moral agenda of Ha
nascent Anti-Transcendentalism.1 Hawthorne's wilderne
site of openness, contemplation and circumspection but a sy
rather stark and unambiguous conflict between good
Prefiguring the character struggles of Joseph Conrad
Darkness , Goodman is propelled toward "the heart o
wilderness" by "the instinct that guides mortal m
(Hawthorne 2005c 59) - the same instinct that the sp
Emerson's "Self-Reliance" says does not "seem to me"
"from below" but that is, for those resolved to "live w
within," nonetheless worth following even if society wou
it as immoral (Emerson 36).
Interestingly, as his references to "the heathen wildern
"the unconverted wilderness" imply (Hawthorne 2005
Hawthorne's wilderness owes as much or more to pagan tr
to Christian tradition. As John R. Stilgoe observes:

The peasant attitude [about the wilderness] owed somet

the Bible but far more to the Old Religion, to the subst
belief that underlay the veneer of Christianity well into
modern era [...] The biblical wilderness was indeed bewi
a place where man strayed from the holy path and
temptation and blasphemy. But it was sometimes a
punitive preparation for salvation, an area free fr
temptations of cities and almost the favored ground of
was the scene of His covenant with Israel, of the visions
and Ezekiel, of John the Baptist's witness, and of
triumph over the Devil. (Stilgoe 7)

In the Christian gospels, the wilderness and the desert

place of retreat, of solace and even of triumph. While the
of young Goodman Brown lead readers to conclude t
wilderness religious faith is fragile and undependable, the
settings of the Bible reveal this faith to be hearty and stead

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 g g Matt Lorenz

eleven gospel references to "wilderness" i

seven refer to the location of John the B
fulfillment of Esaias's prophecy that the Messiah would be
announced with "The voice of one crying in the wilderness" (Matt 3:1
and 3:3, Mark 1:3 and 1:4, Luke 3:2, 3:4 and 7:24), and four refer to
the location of Jesus' s forty days and nights of fasting and of Jesus' s
temptation by the devil (Matt 4:1, Mark 1:12 and 1:13, and Luke
8:29). In both cases, the wilderness represents a place where a strong
faith triumphs over evil, for certainly the ministries of John the
Baptist and of Jesus of Nazareth must ultimately be judged as
successful. By contrast, in "Young Goodman Brown," the
compassionate and compelling urgings of an innocent Faith are not
enough to deter Goodman from his errant "errand" in the wilderness,
nor is his dependence upon her goodness enough to protect his own
faith and support him as he strives to "stand firm against the devil"
(Hawthorne 2005c 51, 58). If in ultimately urging his "Faith" to
"Look up to Heaven, and resist the Wicked One," Goodman has
avoided succumbing to his tempters in word and deed, he has
nonetheless lost his faith in himself and others at the story's
conclusion and allowed his tempters to lay claim to his spirit
(Hawthorne 2005c 63). In this way, Hawthorne's story indicates that
a Christian faith cannot survive in the pagan wilderness.
Moreover, though Hawthorne's wilderness is bewildering, it does
not incite the kind of bewilderment that occasions intellectual inquiry.
At their hazy etymological origins, the image of wilderness, the
physical activity of wandering, and the activity of wondering appear
to be deeply linked - an association that Keats partially invokes in
Book III of Hyperion with his image of "Many a fallen old Divinity /
Wandering in vain about bewildered shores" (Keats 493). In his Old
Manse notebooks, Hawthorne makes a similar verbal association,
describing the human heart as a cavern in which, initially, "You are
bewildered, and wander long without hope" (Hawthorne 1966 536).
Yet Hawthorne's references to bewilderment in The Scarlet Letter
(1850), "The Minister's Black Veil" (1836) and "Young Goodman
Brown" refer to a strictly moral confusion, which is often mingled
with guilt, suspicion, fear or disgust.
Hawthorne's most pithy and powerful reference to bewilderment
appears in the Scarlet Letter narrator's criticism of Dimmesdale.
After the clergyman has daftly told himself that no one will ever think
he has "performed" any "ill," the narrator wisely observes that, "No
man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself, and

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 The Meaning of a Life 59

another to the multitude, without finally getting bew

which may be the true" (Hawthorne 2005b 312). Here a
in Hawthorne's work, bewilderment represents not th
confusion that gives way to a wondering contemplation of
philosophical problems but the immoral, self-deceiving confusion of
one whose rationalizations have allowed him to lose hold of "the
true," which for Hawthorne is the Christian path to moral
righteousness. While Dimmesdale's profession of bewilderment later
in chapter twenty, occurring just after Mistress Hibbins has told him
that she thinks he has journeyed into the wilderness to seek the evil
"potentate," represents the guilt-ridden confusion of a man who
refuses to concede that he might be a sinner, Hester's bewildered
reaction to Roger Chillingworth's words in chapter four betrays the
repulsion that she feels toward her husband's appalling malevolence
(Hawthorne 2005b 317, 185). In "The Minster's Black Veil," Mr.
Hooper's congregants respond to their newly veiled minister with
bewildered looks that little conceal their suspicion and disgust -
reactions that the minister cannot help but view as justified even in
the last days of his life when he examines his own "bewildered soul"
(Hawthorne's 2005a 69, 78). This equation of bewilderment with a
kind of moral perdition also appears in "Young Goodman Brown,"
when Goodman cries out for his wife Faith "as if bewildered wretches
were seeking her, all though the wilderness," and it persists toward
the end of the story when he emerges from the forest and enters "the
street of Salem village, staring around him like a bewildered man"
(Hawthorne's 2005c 59, 64). Goodman fears that "bewildered
wretches" who have fallen from the righteous path maliciously seek
his wife (and symbolically, his own faith), and when he emerges from
the forest he must count himself among the wretches. In these works,
Hawthorne portrays bewilderment as either the natural reaction of the
righteous to what is potentially sinful, or as the unenviable state of
faithlessness itself.
iv.

While Hawthorne's moral agenda prevents him from

representing the constructive, intellectual benefits of wilderness and
bewilderment in his allegorical fictions, The Crucible presents Miller
as a writer who is far more sensitive to the shared philosophical
origins of wilderness, wandering, and wondering. As the American
philosopher Henry Bugbee suggests in his major work, The Inward
Morning (1958), there is an integral link between wilderness and the

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 70 Mátt Lorenz

wonder that emerges out of wandering a

time reality has begun to sink into us i
can begin to realize that our minds a
(Bugbee 39). In this way, our minds enf
"homelessness" that we are powerles
Bugbee' s formulation, wondering is an
wandering that we can escape only throu
in the world, we can. . .

... busy ourselves with an attempt t

homelessness], to represent to ourselv
situation as unconditional and some pr
fit it. Or we can open ourselves to the
wilderness and be patient of being over
that which can make us at home in th
40).

When Bugbee speaks of "the meaning of a life in the wilderness," he

presents wilderness as a metaphorical embodiment of all the
confusions that demand intellectual confrontation on a daily basis,
even in environs that appear most familiar. "Our true home is
wilderness," he declares, "even the world of every day" (Bugbee 76).
Bugbee composed The Inward Morning as a journal of daily
meditations during the seasons of summer and fall in 1952 and '53,
beginning it four months after Kazan's HUAC testimony and
concluding it the year that The Crucible opened. Bugbee also
attended the Theodore D. Spencer Lecture that Miller gave on
contemporary drama at Harvard in 1953 (Bugbee 195), and his
reflections on wonder in the wilderness help to highlight the
philosophical import of The Crucible.
Miller's conscious cultivation of the language of wilderness and
bewilderment comes into stark relief if one compares his use of this
language in The Crucible to a classic play that preceded it. In Death
of a Salesman (1949), Miller's characters twice use the word 'wild,'
and the word 'bewildered' appears once in the stage directions. Ben
says he gave Willy "a bunch of wild flowers," and he reminds Willy
that their father was "a very great and a very wild-hearted man"
(Miller 1997b 52, 53). Stanley, the restaurant waiter, is seen " shaking
his head in bewildered admiration " at how easily and quickly Happy
has succeeding in making a date for Biff and himself with two young
women (Miller 1997b 99). In The Crucible , by contrast, the word

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 The Meaning of a Life 7 1

'wilderness' appears in Miller's overture and in a comment from

(Miller 1997a 135, 241); the word 'wild' appears eleven times,
times in the dialogue itself (Miller 1997a 150, 158, 176, 191
230, 249); and the words 'bewilder,' 'bewilders' and 'bewildered'
appear six times, four times in the dialogue (Miller 1997a 154, 178,
190, 194, 195, 214). While one might argue that this proliferation of
wilderness language is nothing to wonder at since the play is set in
the wilderness, this dismissal overlooks Miller's apparent efforts to
highlight not only the wilderness or wild but also the bewildering
reactions of characters to the wild and to humans who behave wildly.
Quite calculatedly, Miller draws our attention to the link between
wilderness and the interrelated aesthetic experiences of confusion,
bewilderment, astonishment and wonder. Instead of confining
bewilderment to a state of moral repulsion or perdition as Hawthorne
does, Miller, like Wordsworth, presents his readers with characters
who are truly grappling (in Bugbee's broader sense of the term) with
the meaning of a life in the wilderness.
For some characters in The Crucible , the wilderness is precisely
what Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown" makes it out to be: a
woodsy realm in which people go astray, performing devilish deeds
either because they have entered the forest with wicked intentions or
because the forest has bewildered their moral compass. The
prejudices of Reverend Parris exemplify this conception of
wilderness, and Parris serves as a foil for other characters who
respond to bewilderment with less self-deception and greater
intellectual engagement. Just as Goodman encounters the devil in the
wilderness soon after voicing his fear that "There may be a devilish
Indian behind every tree" (Hawthorne 2005c 52), so does Miller
observe in his overture that the wilderness was "dark and threatening"
to settlers in part because "out of it Indian tribes marauded from time
to time," noting that "Reverend Parris had parishioners who had lost
relatives to these heathen" (Miller 1997a 135). This reference to
Parris and his parishioners finds quick confirmation in the play's
opening scene, when Parris waffles between pressuring Abigail to
deny witchcraft and pressuring her to confirm it. Immediately after
instructing Susanna to tell the doctor and the other townspeople that
no evil "unnatural causes" are to blame for his daughter Betty's
illness, Parris confronts Abigail with a flood of questions and
accusations about the profane activities of her and the other girls,
refusing to accept her denials. According to Parris, the wilderness is
a place where people are found "dancing like heathen," "trafficking]

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 72 Matt Lorenz

spirits," and engaging in "obscene pract

(Miller 1997a 139-40). That Parris was suspicious about the
wilderness before encountering the young women he found there is
clear from Abigail's statement that "when [he] leaped out of the bush
so suddenly, Betty was frightened and then she fainted" (Miller 1997a
139). With these words, the audience imagines Parris waiting in the
brush, rushing out in panic, at once fearing and hoping that he will
find evidence of untoward activities. In his erotically charged
recollections, Parris hesitantly ventures to say, "And I thought I
saw - someone naked running through the trees!" However, no
sooner has Abigail denied his claim than Parris yells, "I saw it!" His
suspicions of what he might have seen in thé wilderness are replaced
by a certain conviction about what he has seen - a conviction
foreordained by his prejudices.
Yet from these opening scenes, Miller is also laying the
groundwork for a different kind of wilderness - the kind that incites
wild behavior, bewilderment and wonder. In her first meeting with
John Proctor in the play, Abigail Williams recalls the day when
John's wife Elizabeth told Abigail that the Proctors would no longer
require her services as a housekeeper. "I saw your face when she put
me out," Abigail says, "and you loved me then and you do now." To
this Proctor replies, "Abby, that's a wild thing to say," and his
familiar way of speaking to her seems almost like a confirmation of
her claim. Abigail cuts him off and says, "A wild thing may say wild
things. But not so wild, I think" (Miller 1997a 150). With this rush
of wilderness language, Miller prepares his audience for the wild and
bewildering effects of the play's setting, yet the rhetoric of sin,
blasphemy and witchcraft is conspicuously absent from this
exchange. Unlike Parris and the Putnams, whose every utterance in
the preceding dialogue has alluded to Christianity and heathenism,
the sacred and the profane, Proctor does not call Abby sinful or evil;
he calls her words "wild" in the original sense, meaning that they are
careless, untamed and uncontrolled. Moreover, in recollecting the
way Proctor had "clutched [her] back behind [his] house and sweated
like a stallion," Abigail creates an image of Proctor as one who is
similarly wild and untamed, even as she disdains his recent efforts to
tame himself and suppress his desire for her in the name of his
marriage to Elizabeth. Proctor's restraint is palpable, giving credence
to Abigail's account of the affair. While Hawthorne equates
bewilderment with the wayward who have fallen from the Christian

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 The Meaning of a Life 73

path to moral righteousness, Miller equates it with somethin

basic: living in a state of nature.
As two who have embraced the state of nature that a life in the
wilderness occasions, Proctor and Abigail also reveal themselves in
this opening exchange as two enlightened people who confront and
wonder at intellectual problems. Weeping, Abigail says, "I look for
John Proctor that took me from my sleep and put knowledge in my
heart! I never knew what pretense Salem was, I never knew the lying
lessons I was taught by all these Christian women and their
covenanted men! And now you bid me tear the light out of my
eyes?" (Miller 1997a 151). Abigail credits Proctor with waking her
from her intellectual slumber and enlightening her about the
hypocrisy of Salemites who cloak their selfish, property-driven
agendas in religious piety. Yet Proctor also betrays his pupil in this
scene by demanding that she delude herself and deny the evidence of
her senses. "Abby, I may think of you softly from time to time,"
Proctor says. "But I will cut off my hand before I'll ever reach for
you again. Wipe it out of mind. We never touched, Abby." Informing
Abigail not only that they will never but also that they have never
been together romantically (even as the word "again" confirms that
they have), Proctor reneges on all the lessons about the town's
hypocrisy and self-delusion that he has taught her. In his effort to
brainwash her and perhaps also himself, he becomes just like all the
other deluded Salemites, and one might interpret the false witness that
she bears during the remainder of the play as a retaliation not so much
for his denial of their future together as for his denial of their past.
She begs him to concede that he loved her then and loves her yet, and
in refusing to concede the truth of either, he tacitly condones the lies
she will later tell. If he will be a hypocrite, so will she.
A similar pattern of inquiry stirred by wilderness occurs in the
opening scenes of act 2, when Proctor and Elizabeth discuss his
earlier interactions with Abigail. Just as Abigail's "wild" declaration
that Proctor loved her in the past and present compels the two to
argue about the nature of their relationship (Miller 1997b 150-51), so
does Elizabeth's declaration that "[t]he town's gone wild" compel
Proctor to wonder at the townspeople's belief of Abigail and to
wonder how he might prove she is a fraud (Miller 1997b 176-77). In
this scene, the audience observes the pressures that Elizabeth has
placed upon Proctor in the wake of his infidelities. Offstage he
claimed to have seen Abigail in the presence of a crowd of people,
and as soon as he lets slip that there are no other witnesses of the

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 74 Matt Lorenz

conversation he had with Abigail, the s

Elizabeth has " suddenly lost all faith
This sends the stormy Proctor into a ra
has "gone tiptoe in this house all seven
gone" (Miller 1997a 177-78). While Proc
with an intellectual problem, saying
prove what she [Abigail] told me" w
present, Elizabeth suggests that Proctor
for not speaking up, asking whether
anyone but Abigail who he "must go
They are probably both correct, an
intellectually engaged they are with th
them. In the succeeding lines, Elizabeth
that she has always thought him "a
somewhat bewildered" (Miller 1997a
Proctor observes that the wild compels h
pious Elizabeth observes that it also leads
Later in act 2, when Reverend Hale examines Proctor and
Elizabeth, Proctor's skepticism takes further hold of him. Again he is
shocked and bewildered, confessing "I never knew until tonight that
the world is gone daft with this [witchcraft] nonsense," and when
Hale implies that Proctor's resistance to appearing in court might be a
sign of guilt, Proctor says, "I falter nothing, but I may wonder if my
story will be credited in such a court. I do wonder on it, when such a
steady-minded minister as you will suspicion such a woman that
never lied, and cannot, and the world knows she cannot!" (Miller
1997a 190). Just as Bugbee suggests that wilderness stirs us to
wander and wonder, so does the bewildering behavior of Miller's
Salemites stir Proctor to wonder why they behave as they do and
whether they would convict a man who is telling the truth. In the
same scene, Proctor confesses that he has "wondered if there be
witches in the world," and though he seems to capitulate to Hale's
insinuation that this is the wrong opinion for a devout Christian to
hold, Elizabeth declares that she "cannot believe," leading Proctor to
chastise her for "bewildering]" Hale (Miller 1997a 190). While Hale
insists that nothing but a literal interpretation of the gospel can be
accepted as Christian, Proctor and Elizabeth both maintain that they
are Christian even as they interrogate and wonder at the impulses of a
town determined to see witches everywhere. Elizabeth sagely
demands that Hale, "Question Abigail Williams about the Gospel, not
myself!" (Miller 1997a 190), indicating that Salem's authorities

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 The Meaning of a Life 75

should be questioning the sources of these rumors and not me

people whom the rumors slander. In contrast to Hawthor
treats bewilderment as a witnessing of or a succumbing
perdition, the Proctors respond to bewildering phenom
suggesting that these phenomena should invite not hasty jud
but greater scrutiny.
Unfortunately for the Proctors and for Hale, philoso
questioning itself becomes cause for condemnation in Miller's
While Hale allows Christian orthodoxy to guide his judgment
the arrest of Elizabeth Proctor, he afterwards begins to chal
authorities who are willing to forfeit the lives of so many acco
what they deem orthodox. To Hale's suspicions, Danforth
with condescension, saying that if Hale has the audacity to do
justice" or "my probity" then he has himself become "bewild
insinuating, like the congregants of Hawthorne's black-
minister, that Hale himself is now worthy of suspicion (Mill
214). Ironically, Danforth employs the language of logic, sayi
"witchcraft is ipso facto , on its face and by its nature, an in
crime," yet this observation leads him to conclude that as on
witch and the victim" can witness invisible witchcraft and as witches
will naturally wish to protect themselves, the word of "the victim" is
tantamount (Miller 1997b 214). Consequently, he institutes a
perverted form of justice according to which the accused witch must
either confess and forfeit property and reputation, or refuse to confess
and be executed. Either way, guilt is inevitable. Proctor's efforts to
delude Abigail at the beginning of the play have come full circle; for
she has deluded them all.
Before Wordsworth, Hawthorne, and Miller would take up the
theme of wilderness, Thomas Paine spoke in his Rights of Man
(1791-92) not only of "the woods and wildernesses of America" but
also of the "pathless wilderness of rhapsodies" that Edmund Burke's
prose presented and of the "wilderness of turnpike gates" that people
more often confront in the modern world (Paine 19, 36, 38). Arthur
Miller had a similarly expansive sense of wilderness. Toward the end
of The Crucible , Hale tells Elizabeth that he has "gone this three
month like our Lord into the wilderness," poignantly suggesting that
Salem is not a clearing in wilderness but wilderness itself (Miller
1997a 241). For Hale as for Miller, the sources of bewilderment
extend far beyond the forests of the world. While Hawthorne aptly
' dramatizes the pervasive fear of wilderness that burdened early
settlers of the New World and created a compelling metaphor for

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 76 Matt Lorenz

moral darkness, Miller does this and som

audience that wilderness is even more elemental than Hawthorne's
treatment of it would suggest. While he does indicate that the
wilderness is a space where human beings can go morally astray,
Miller also, like Wordsworth, shows that it is a space where human
beings can contemplate and question - a space where they can
wonder and make themselves at home, as all must who take seriously
the meaning of a life in the wilderness.

Notes

1 I say 'nascent' because Hawthorne published "Young Goodman

Brown" in 1835 and because scholars typically mark the 1836
publication of Emerson's Nature as the commencement of the
Transcendentalist movement. However, as early as September 1830,
Emerson was delivering the core intellectual kernels of essays such as
"Self-Reliance" and "The Poet" as sermons from his pulpit in Boston
(Richardson 99), and even Hawthorne's early short stories might have
been written, if not in direct response to Emerson's willingness to
follow evil "impulses" and become "the devil's child" (Emerson 36),
then perhaps with an awareness of the radical and arguably amoral
ideas that were then circulating among the intelligentsia of New
England. Hawthorne's documented interactions with Emerson would
not occur until several years later. In late September of 1841,
Emerson and Margaret Fuller visited Brook Farm, the
Transcendentalism-inspired community where Hawthorne had been a
laborer and was presently a boarder (Meitzer 65). Moving into the
Old Manse in the small town of Concord, Massachusetts with his
wife after their wedding in July 1842, Hawthorne found that his
neighbor Henry David Thoreau had planted a vegetable garden as a
gift to the married couple, and Emerson was also a fellow neighbor
(Meitzer 66-69). Hawthorne booked Emerson, Thoreau and Alcott
for speaking engagements at the Concord Lyceum (Meitzer 87), and
Emerson was a pallbearer at Hawthorne's 1864 funeral in Concord
(York & Spaulding 225).

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