John Proctor Character Analysis

Everyone is willing to go some distance to preserve their reputation and integrity but how far they go is determined by their strength of character. John Proctor and Reverend Parris represent the polar opposite ways people go about protecting their integrity. Though they went about different ways of preserving their dignity, they both showed an immense conviction to do so. In The Crucible, Arthur Miller uses John Proctor and Reverend Parris to reinforce the substantial effect that risk to a person’s reputation has on their thoughts and actions.

At the end of The Crucible, John Proctor is faced with the choice to confess to false allegations of witchcraft and save his own life or to retain his integrity by refusing to sign the false confession

Parris wishes only to preserve his own reputation among the townspeople so that he can slowly leech them of their money. “Abigail, I have fought here three long years to bend these stiff-necked people to me, and now, just now when some good respect is rising for me in the parish, you compromise my very character” (Miller 888). Reverend Parris has lived in Salem for three years trying to gain the townspeople’s trust and managed to gain enough money to buy real golden candlesticks to be used in a puritan church hall. “But Parris came, and for twenty week he preach nothin’ but golden candlesticks until he had them” (Miller 923). John Proctor criticizes Parris’s frivolous spending on expensive golden candlesticks because the ones made by Franklin Nurse from pewter do the job well and aren’t a waste of the townspeople’s money. Puritan life is also meant to be lived in a simple fashion and golden candlesticks clearly reject such an idea. Parris has been an instigator of the witch hunt since it began because he wanted to protect his own reputation by condemning others. “Tonight, when I open my door to leave my house- a dagger clattered to the ground. You cannot hang this sort. There is danger for me. I dare not step outside at night” (Miller 962). Parris is so afraid for his life that he begged judge Danforth to

People in America at the time were accusing others of being Soviet spies due to the propaganda created by Senator John McCarthy in his attempt to increase his political influence. “Mary Warren! Drawback your spirit out of them! (Miller 950). Danforth jumps to the presumptuous conclusion that Mary is bewitching the girls because they act like supposed “victims” of her specter. Danforth utilizes no rational thought in deciding that Mary has begun tormenting the girls while remaining ignorant that the girls are lying to him to protect themselves. During the Red Scare people would condemn other to accusations of espionage because of John McCarthy’s lies and to avoid being accused themselves. The Salem Witch Trials and the Red Scare draw several characteristic similarities to each other. Both involved senseless and baseless accusations of people due to a paranoia generated by people in high positions of power and authority. Seeing all this on stage, we are free to reflect that something very like these trials had been going on in recent years in the United States” (Warshaw