Similarities Between The Scarlet Letter And The Crucible

The play The Crucible was written by Arthur Miller and was a very successful play. In this play, girls from the village of Salem, Massachusetts, try to conjure up spirits but were caught by Mr. Parris. This caused fear to be inserted into all of the townspeople and they started condemning people of witchcraft left and right. The main instigator of all this was Abigail Williams. She would lie and accuse people of witchcraft in order to get John Proctor who she liked. In the words of Braedon Page, “The Crucible is not only an illustration of mass hysteria and how quickly people can destroy a society, but also a demonstration of what lengths people will go to in order to get what they want.” In the book, The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne,

Hester Prynne commits adultery and is punished for it. Latter he husband shows up and finds out that she has a kid and seeks revenge on the father. There are several ways in which The Scarlet Letter and The Crucible compare and contrast.
To start, The Scarlet Letter and The Crucible are similar because they are set in the same time periods. These texts are set in the 1600s in colonial America. These texts also include Puritan religious beliefs because those were the people that ran the colony. In the words of Mary Deering in her essay entitled, Puritans in America, “The Puritans believed that God had formed a unique covenant, or agreement, with them. They believed that God expected them to live according to the Scriptures….” The Puritans lived a harsh and disciplined lifestyle. In the prereadings before The Crucible, Arthur Miller describes how his inspiration came from a book, “By Marion Starkly, a narrative of the Salem witch-hunt of 1692.”(pg, 120, line 22) In The Scarlet Letter, Hester gets punished by Puritan law for committing adultery. The book describes her punishment by saying, “Thus the young and pure would be taught to look at her, with the scarlet letter flaming on her breast,—at her, the child of honorable parents,—at her, the mother of a babe, that would hereafter be a woman, —at her, who had once been innocent, —as the figure, the body, the reality of sin.” Both The Scarlet Letter and The Crucible, show religious Puritan beliefs which are a major part to these texts.
On the contrary, The Scarlet Letter and The Crucible differ in how they deal with situations. Mass hysteria plays a major role in the play, The Crucible. Mass hysteria is defined by Juli Yelnick to be an “Imagined or assumed threat that causes physical symptoms among a large number of people.” This is why so many people were condemned of using witchcraft even though there was no evidence whatsoever. An example of this would be when Abigail starts lying by saying, “I saw Sarah Good with the Devil! I saw Goody Osburn with the Devil! I saw Bridget Bishop with the Devil!”(pg 1156, line 41) This is a prime example of how mass hysteria took over and the people went crazy. In the book, The Scarlet Letter, the people take care of the conflict in a more calm and collected way. When Hester was accused of adultery, the people went about her punishment in a much more organized way which proved to be more effective. The book says, “Here... had been the scene of her guilt, and here should be the scene of her earthly punishment; and so, perchance, the torture of her daily shame would at length purge her soul, and work out another purity than that which she had lost.” This shows how they were more organized about Hester’s punishment.
Another similarity between the texts, The Scarlet Letter and The Crucible, would be the conflict with adultery.

In The Crucible, John Proctor commits adultery with Abigail Williams. John does not confess of this until later in the play when his wife is accused of witchcraft. John Proctor confesses to the court by saying, “I have known her, sir. I have know her.”(pg 1206, line 21). In The Scarlet Letter, Hester commits adultery with Reverend Dimmesdale. In this book, the people punish Hester once her pregnancy becomes clear and her husband has been back in Europe. The people punish her by making her wear a scarlet letter A on her chest. The book says, “Throughout them all, giving up her individuality, she would become the general symbol at which the preacher and moralist might point, and in which they might vivify and embody their images of woman's frailty and sinful passion. Thus the young and pure would be taught to look at her, with the scarlet letter flaming on her breast.”As said by Janet Mulroney Clark, “Puritans were known for their strict standards of morality regarding all affairs of life, but especially in the realm of sexuality. Any woman who cheated on her husband would be punished by the community; the punishment would be swift, harsh and sometimes deadly.” In this case, Hester’s punishment was not deadly, but it was

shameful.
There is also the difference of the behaviors of the main characters in the texts, The Scarlet Letter and The Crucible. In The Scarlet Letter, Hester committed adultery and is punished. Now instead of lying and trying to avoid her punishment, she knows what she did was wrong and accepts it. She is described in The Scarlet Letter saying, “ So strong was Hester Prynne, with a woman's strength.” This shows that Hester had the strength to take her punishment. In The Crucible, Abigail has committed a crime by trying to conjure up spirits and tries to get out of her punishment by blaming other people. An example of this would be when she pretends to be attacked by Mary Warren in order to keep herself out of trouble. Abigail said, “Why do you come, yellow bird?”(pg - 1209, line - 10) When saying this, Abigail pretends that Mary shapeshifted into a yellow bird and is trying to attack her. In doing this, she is trying to stay out of trouble by condemning someone else.
A suspected similarity of the two texts, The Scarlet Letter and The Crucible, would be that Hester Prynne and John Proctor’s spouses are mad about them committing adultery. In The Crucible, John Proctor-who is the wife of Elizabeth Proctor-commits adultery with Abigail Williams. Now Abigail was a housekeeper for Elizabeth, but Elizabeth fired her because she suspected that John had been dishonest to her. She explains to the court on why she fired Abigail by saying, “I came to think he [John] fancied her. And so one night I lost my wits, I think, and put her out on the highroad.”(pg 1208, line 16) In The Scarlet Letter, Hester’s husband, Roger Chillingworth, was also not too happy when he figured out that she had committed adultery. Chillingworth seeked revenge on Reverend Dimmesdale for doing this. Chillingworth plans his revenge by saying that he will have, “A more intimate revenge than any mortal had ever wreaked upon an enemy.” He infact did by torturing him in a sense.
One last difference in The Scarlet Letter and The Crucible, would be the characters views on their reputation. Lolly Daskal describes reputation by saying, “Reputation is the basis of leadership, no matter the job.” In The Crucible, the people value their names and their reputation. An example of this would be when John Proctor was accused of witchcraft. John was urged to sign a paper stating that he had committed the crime of witchcraft in order to save his life. He infact did but later ripped up the paper because it would be hung in the church. This would destroy his reputation because everyone would believed that he had done witchcraft. Proctor explains to the court why he will rip up the paper by saying, “Because it is my name! Because I cannot have another in my life!.... How may I live without my name?I have given you my soul; leave me my name!”(pg 1232, line 1) His reputation was very important to him. In The Scarlet Letter, though, Hester does not care about her reputation. She doesn’t care about what society thinks of her, or that they shame her. In the book, it says that Hester’s reputation was, “ever relentless vigor with which society frowned upon her sin.” She knows that what she did was wrong and will deal with the consequences.
Obviously, there are several ways in which The Scarlet Letter and The Crucible compare and contrast. These plays were very similar in some ways, but very different in others. Arthur Miller and Nathaniel Hawthorne must think alike because these texts had much in common. Both these texts were set in the early days of the Massachusetts Colony which plays a major role in how the government was run and how the people acted. The plot line of these texts could have been dramatically different if they were set in another location. Overall, after looking at all the notable differences, these texts have many similarities.