Mass Hysteria In The Little Girls In The Crucible

Mass hysteria has caused many outbreaks and concerned many people with false threats. Mass hysteria is defined by dictionary.com as, “A condition affecting a group of persons, characterized by excitement or anxiety, irrational behavior or beliefs, or inexplicable symptoms of illness.” In order to understand why mass hysteria in the little girls have caused the effects of rampant false accusations that lead to their unrighteous deaths, we first need to look at why mass hysteria affected the little girl and not the boys, secondly look at how mass hysteria allowed the little girls to be so influential in the trials, and finally look at how the Puritan Society gave the girls an illness that lead to the whole effects of the Trials. The Puritan

According to Robert Bartholomew, a medical sociologist, stated, “Canadian psychiatrist Francois Sirois believes the answer lies not in society’s treatment of females, but their biology. He analyzed 45 school outbreaks from around the world, and found that girls near puberty are most frequently affected. Sirois observes that outbreaks in Western schools affect girls at about the same rate as those in other parts of the world, despite the social conditions being fairly uniform for both sexes.” This is somewhat true. The fact that the the little girls’ biology is a factor is this, is true. Looking at the statistic, this helps us understand why the little girls were the ones to get hit by mass hysteria. Now, the cause is not just their biology alone. It stems further than what Sirois claims- the girl’s treatment in society. According to John Goldsmith, curator of the Cromwell Museum in Huntington, England, told the BBC in 2010, witch trials may have helped restore people’s sense of control. "People who were different in any way, through age, or physical disability, or mental disability, were picked out by those who wanted to believe there was some specific reason why things had gone wrong," Goldsmith said. The little girls use their rage and frighten-selves to use. This is seen on pages 45 to 46 in The Crucible where Abigail and Betty start listing off the names of so called “witches”. The list of names they start giving off is a way for them to put them in some sort of power- the power of condemnation. The girls needed to get some kind of way to move up the ladder. They used witchcraft as their ultimate way of doing just that. The judges and villagers all trusted the little girls solely on the sense that they need to control the situation, which the girls did create, of the