Abigail Williams In The Crucible By Arthur Miller

No people living in the Salem Village were ever ready for the horror and conviction they would have to face the winter of 1692. In that year, about one hundred people living in the village we convicted of witchcraft and almost twenty were hung. No villager had assumed the accusers were really the guilty ones, as Abigail Williams is one of these types of people. Arthur Miller writes in The Crucible that Abigail Williams is a very manipulative and bitter person. She tends to be unsure on making decisions. She hurts others around her to get what she wants. For example she wants John for herself and only for herself.

Abigail sees herself in a superior way because she thinks she is worthy of Johns love, and his own wife Elizabeth does not deserve any of it. She says, “Oh, I marvel how such a strong man can be with such a sickly wife” (24 miller). This is one of the main reasons why Abigail starts all of the rumors in Salem. After Abigail’s brief affair with John Proctor, she cannot come to admit the fact that the relationship is over. She says. “I look for the John

Proctor that took me from my sleep and put knowledge in my heart…you loved me John Proctor, and whatever sin it is, you’ll love me yet.”(25).
This hopelessness causes her to feel annoyed with both proctor and his wife, this leads to the accusation of Elizabeth Proctors witchcraft.

Because she gets hurt by john proctor, “She faces these, her own crises, by helping to raise and create a witch hunt”(10). Near the end of the play john tries to get Mary Warren to confess about how everything done in the woods and how Abigail is telling all lies. Abigail is confronted with this and she continues to lie. She then makes the court believe that Mary is sending her soul as a bird and is trying to come after her. Being as devious as she is, she gets all of the girls to follow her lead in the lies. “To escape discovery and punishment, Abigail fearfully takes away the attention from discovery of her own mistakes by pointing her finger at others”(10) and that is Exactly what she does throughout the play to try to get her one and only lover john proctor

back.
Many of the people living in Salem had accused others of witchcraft for numerous reasons. Most did it simply to keep the blame and suspicion off of them. An example of this was when Abigail Williams stabbed herself with a needle and claimed it was voodoo, which was a form of witchcraft. "And he goes to save her, and, stuck two inches in the flesh of her belly, he draw a needle out" (Miller 74). She also claimed that it was Elizabeth Proctor who owned the doll and had performed this act of witchcraft. "And demandin' of her how she came to be so stabbed, she-to Proctor now-testify it were your wife's familiar spirit pushed it in" (Miller 74).