Past Experiences And Future Actions In Arthur Miller's The Crucible

There are many themes prevalent in The Crucible by Arthur Miller, with all of them manifesting in the actions and decisions of characters at some point in the story. One of the most outstanding themes in the play has to do with the connection between past experiences and future actions. Individuals lashing out at others because they felt they have been wronged, a guilty conscience causing someone to make a drastic decision, or even a person choosing a path due to possible social repercussions are all examples from the play of someone 's past effecting their future. Different characters in the play show that if someone has been wronged or feels like they have been wronged in the past, they will in turn try to hurt others. Both Thomas and

Two examples of this connection from The Crucible are John Proctor and, to a lesser extent, Reverend Hale. Before the play began, John had an affair with his servant, Abigail. Because of the high standards he held himself to, the knowledge that he had not been faithful to his wife left him wracked with constant guilt and caused him "...to regard himself as a kind of fraud" (Miller 79). To make matters worse, his wife, Elizabeth, found out about the affair. In a perfect example of how a guilty conscience can affect a person’s thoughts, Elizabeth 's knowledge of John 's unfaithfulness led John to make every attempt he could to please her over the subsequent months. Unfortunately, his guilty conscience did not subside, and was the ultimate cause of his decision at the end of the play to not "confess" to being a witch (Miller 260-261). As for Reverend Hale, he was the driving force behind the witch trials at the beginning of the play. As the events progressed, however, he began to believe the victims and realized that they were not, in fact, witches. Feeling guilty that innocent citizens were being hanged, he came back to Salem even after the trials were out of his hands to attempt to convince the remaining accused to confess (Miller 241-242). Lying was strictly forbidden in his faith, so Hale would have never asked anyone to falsely confess if he had not felt an extreme sense of guilt for the entire series of