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The crucible reflecting the character of a society
The crucible reflecting the character of a society
Personal reflection on the crucible
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¨When societies come under stress these kinds of things happen. People start looking around for essentially human sacrifices. They start looking around for somebody they can blame.” Margaret Atwood proposes this in an interview with Bill Moyers. The kinds of things she is speaking of is exactly what we observe in The Crucible by Arthur Miller which tells the story of the Salem witchcraft trials where many were punished and killed. In Arthur Miller’s ¨Why I Wrote The Crucible¨ we witness innocent people being blacklisted for conspiring with communists. All of these defend what Margaret Atwood declared in her interview. When a society comes under stress, we always find someone to blame. ¨Half-Hanged Mary¨, a poem by Margaret Atwood, tells the sinister account of Mary Webster, an ancestor of Margaret’s and had been accused of witchcraft in the 1680’s in Massachusetts. The poem is written chronologically by time …show more content…
and starts at seven in the evening where she describes her situation. Mary was an independent woman, making her easy to blame for witchcraft. She says she “once took blood in return for food.” Meaning she was a healer of some sort, and find out later she was a midwife. She wore tattered clothes and probably wasn’t particularly influential in her community. She is hanged an hour later and the women whose lives she had saved came to see her, at first she is angry with them, but then there’s a shift, and she understands why the women cannot help her. We see her become angry with God and how she struggles to stay alive. She survives through the night and proclaims that she will have two deaths. The next morning when the townspeople come to get her body, she is still alive and since she can’t be executed twice for the same crime she will have a fresh start. She exclaims “Before, I was not a witch. But now I am one.” By hanging her for a crime she didn’t commit Mary turned against the village and became bitter. Mary was not a wicked person, she saved lives and should not have been punished for a crime that couldn’t be proven, but the town would do anything to solve the problem and find someone to blame. The Crucible by playwright Arthur Miller takes place in Salem, Massachusetts in 1692 and we are introduced to the teenage girl Abigail Williams, niece of Samuel Parris the new town minister. Abigail and a group of her friends are caught dancing in the woods and instead of facing their punishment they begin accusing other people in the town of witchcraft. Mass hysteria breaks loose and soon almost everyone in the town has been accused or found guilty. Severe trials are held and the ones being accused often faced unanswerable questions and spectral evidence was used against them. The court and Parris were on a mission to find the person who had caused all this destruction and they wouldn't stop until they thought the town was safe. At the beginning of the trials, Judge Danforth says that they wouldn’t stop until the devil was out of Salem. They wrongfully punished so many people and it could’ve been avoided if they would have had accurate and reliable evidence. Instead, they jumped to conclusions out of fear and used respectable and honest people of the town to be their scapegoat. In Arthur Miller’s essay Why I Wrote The Crucible he tells about The Red Scare and Senator McCarthy’s “power to stir the fears of communism” in American’s lives.
Writers, actors, politicians, and many other people were summoned to court to answer if they were or had been a communist. Miller was one of these many people tried and found in contempt of Congress. He compares what happened in the 1950’s and communism to the Salem trials. When Miller visited Salem for the first time in 1952 he read the transcripts of the trials and saw the case which involved Abigail Williams which inspired his play. When Miller was accused of communism, he admitted to occasionally attending Communist meetings, but he wouldn’t tell the names of people he saw going there as well. This is why he was found guilty at first, and the same thing happened in Salem, when people wouldn’t name names of those who had been in contact with the Devil they were found in contempt of the court and then pronounced guilty. Miller said the 1950’s communist scare formed The Crucible’s
skeleton. Even though the Salem witchcraft trials and the Red Scare happened centuries apart from each other they share similarities because they tell of events where people were wrongfully accused and how their reputations suffered from it. The same thing happens in all societies when they are put under pressure and stress. We always try to find someone to blame because we think that if we eliminate that person than the problem will just go away and things will go back to normal. These sources are from very different time periods, but yet we still get a glimpse of the same thing happening in today’s world.
In the crucible, I believe reputation and respect was interwoven in the term of the play the ‘‘crucible’’. Reputation and Respect can also be a theme or a thematic idea in the play, reputation is very essential in a town where social status is synonymously to ones competence to follow religious rules. Your standing is what enables you to live as one in a community where everyone is bound to rules and inevitable sequential instructions. Many characters for example, john proctor and reverend parris, base their action on the motive to protect their reputation which is only exclusive to them. People like reverend parris saw respect as what made them important or valuable in a town like Salem, this additionally imprinting to his character as a very conventional man.
In the Town of Salem Massachusetts, 1692, a group of adolescents are caught dancing in the forest. Among the adolescents in The Crucible, Abigail Williams and Mary Warren. The girls are horrified that they have been caught dancing, a sinful act, therefore they devise a story to evade punishment: they claim to have been bewitched. The first person who they accuse of witchcraft is a the black maid, Tituba. This results in her jail sentence as well as fearful suspicion throughout the town.
Arthur Miller wrote The Crucible as a protest paper to the brutality of the Red Scare .The Red Scare was the inoperable fear of Communism within the United States. This scare was caused as a result of the Cold War in the 1950’s. During the Cold War the US was scared of an attack of the Soviets, and the Soviets were equally as scared of an attack upon them by us. Joseph McCarthy, a Senator from Wisconsin, saw this fear as an opportunity to rise to power. McCarthy had many supporters that were primarily Republicans, Catholics, Conservative Protestants, and Blue-collar workers. McCarthy ruthlessly utilized scare tactics to get people to believe and follow him blindly into his accusations as to innocent citizens supporting Communism and either having them jailed or killed by providing phony evidence. Arthur Miller was not intimidated by this he wrote the Crucible as “an act of desperation” (Miller). This desperation was to counteract the lack of speaking out about personal beliefs during the Red Scare for the fear of breaking the law. In The Crucible, Miller wrote about a character named John Proctor who is very similar to Miller himself. Both the author and the character had to overturn the same personal paralyzing guilt, not speaking out soon enough. Nonetheless, their eventual overcoming of this guilt leads them to becoming the most forthright voice against the madness around them.
Arthur Miller, the author of The Crucible, lived during the Red Scare, which was anti-Communist as the Salem witch trials were anti-witches. The whole book is a symbol of two events that happened in history. The Red Scare and McCarthyism both serve as symbols of the Salem witch trials, which makes it an allegory. Although the play is based off of the witch trials during seventeenth century New England, the author meant for it to address his concern for the Red Scare in an indirect way. For example, just like the witch trials accusing people of witchcraft, Americans during the Red Scare accused others of being pro-Communist. The same widespread paranoia occurred as a result.
In The Crucible, the mass hysteria surrounding the witch trials caused paranoia amongst the people of Salem. Miller uses the Salem Witch Trials of 1692 as a symbol and allegory of the fear surrounding the spread of communism during the 1950s in America. The community’s sense of justice was blinded by the mass hysteria and for some, a desire for vengeance and personal gain. The Putnams
During Author Miller’s era of the 1950’s, the ‘cold war’ was happening. Senetor Joeseph McCarthy was completely against communism and began to arrest the communists and people assosiating with them. Those arrested were forced to either name names to identify those who were communists or thought to be, or else they would remain in jail. This was callef McCarthyism For many, being prisioned was a terrible frightening thought so they would name names including any that they could think of that could be innocent. Author Miller was arrested for associating with communists and refused to identify others, and wrote The Crucible, using it as an allegory to identify the problems of society and it’s flaws of the corrupt government.
The play “The Crucible” is an allegory for the McCarthyism hysteria that occurred in the late 1940’s to the late 1950’s. Arthur Miller’s play “the crucible” and the McCarthyism era demonstrates how fear can begin conflict. The term McCarthyism has come to mean “the practice of making accusations of disloyalty”, which is the basis of the Salem witch trials presented in Arthur Miller’s play. The fear that the trials generate leads to the internal and external conflicts that some of the characters are faced with, in the play. The town’s people fear the consequences of admitting their displeasure of the trials and the character of John Proctor faces the same external conflict, but also his own internal conflict. The trials begin due to Abigail and her friends fearing the consequences of their defiance of Salem’s puritan society.
Silence has pervaded every imaginable recess in the old dilapidated courthouse. A hundred silent onlookers hold their breath in baited anticipation. Suddenly, the dull sound that only wood can make as it slams into an desk echoes for what may as well be all eternity. A single man garners the attention of two hundred eyes as he unintentionally clears his throat. However his lips only are able to take form around one bloodcurdling word: guilty. Although of what crime depends on the time period of the aforementioned case, for trials such as these have occurred in American History not once but twice. The first began back in the 1600's in a little town known as Salem Massachusetts, where people were killed for crimes of witchcraft. The second instance, while not quite as known for bestowing rigor mortis still put ruin on the lives of many. Trials in the 1950's fueled by McCarthyism and the idea that communism was invading the United States led to the blacklisting of many people as supposed socialists. Arthur Miller saw the real story of the trials for supposed unamericans during his time and he set about making it known to the public. However, had miller outright stated his views he would have found himself in the same position as those who's stories he tried to tell. Therefore he devised a creative solution; he wrote a story based on events in the Salem witch trials that is nearly perfectly symbolic of the McCarthyism trials. Miller's extensive [use of] irony in the crucible reveals the actual motives behind events carried out during the Salem witch trials, and thereby he exposes the dark truth of what happened during 1950's McCarthyism trials on Unamerican activities.
Just as it was a sin drift on to the side of the devil in the time of the crucible, it was the same to drift on to the side of communism in the 1950's, when Arthur Miller wrote this play. In the 1950's Senator Joe Macarthy set up a campaign to rid the United States of all communist supporters. These communist trials would be broadcast on national television. It would involve the accused to admit their guilt even though they were completely innocent, and give the names of 10 other would-be communists or face exile, torture, invasion of family privacy etc. Arthur Miller uses the events of the Salem witch-hunts to represent and show what the communist trials of the 1950's were. They were both based on false premises and paranoia, and as more people got involved, more people suffered, this can be summarised by calling it the 'Snowball effect.
It is common knowledge that Author Miller wrote The Crucible as a reaction to a tragic time in our countries history. The McCarthy hearings, as they came to be known, which dominated our country from 1950 to 1954, where hearings in which many, suspected of being related to communism, where interviewed and forced to give up names of others, or they where imprisoned, and their names were black listed. There are several parallels between the McCarthy Era, and the time of the Salem which trials. One similarity one will see is what I call the scare factor. Another parallel between the two groups is the "everybody is doing it" mentality. One also sees a parallel in the lives that were ruined in both eras because of the accusations and punishments.
In the 1950s, Arthur Miller was accused of being a sympathizer to communism, and was one of the three hundred and twenty artists blacklisted by Congress (Arthur Miller: McCarthyism). Arthur Miller was angered by the accusations without evidence to back them up, and hit a boiling point after famed director Elia Kazan went in front of House Un-American Activities Committee and named some of his peers as communist sympathizers (Arthur Miller: McCarthyism). After a meeting with Kazan to discuss why he did what he did, a tumultuous relationship between the direction and playwright began, and Miller began research on the Salem witch trials (Fisher 255). Miller used the “Salem witch trials as the basis for an allegorical portrayal of the HUAC hearings” in his play, The Crucible (Teachout, “Concurring with Arthur Miller” 72). McCarthyism, much like the witchcraft fever of Salem, Massachusetts, unfairly judged people of their crimes, in this case, communism,, less based on evidence than personal prejudices.
...ad to avoid making close relationships to known communists. On the other hand instead of death as a punishment for crime, America blacklisted (prevented from getting jobs) or imprisoned those who refused to appear in trials or those who were determined communists. Behind it all was Senator Joe McCarthy, thus the name McCarthyism. McCarthy capitalized these concerns, becoming the standing figure for the anti-communist movement, aiming to hunt down the people he assumed to be infiltrators. In addition to his accusations, he also targeted writers and entertainers, whom he thought sympathized with the communists. Arthur Miller was one of the many questioned writers. His play, ‘The Crucible’, was a metaphor for McCarthyism, which therefore caught attention of both the public and the government, who questioned him on whether he has had any connection with communists.
Although The Crucible, by Arthur Miller, is set in the small town of Salem, Massachusetts during the seventeenth-century, its intention is to provide insight to the events occurring during Miller’s own time. In 1947, Alger Hiss, a State Department official, was accused of espionage, increasing the fears of the communist party among the public. Additionally, in 1949, the Soviet Union exploded its first atomic bomb and China recently became a communist nation. Furthermore, Joseph Stalin controlled half of Europe, and the threat of an atomic war was ever-present. In 1950, three years before the play was first produced, Senator Joseph McCarthy launched a mass epidemic of hysteria throughout the country by publicly accusing 205 Department of State
Mary Warren doesn’t want to be hanged as a witch and her fear is even more solidified when they start accusing people and getting them to confess as witches. The first instance of this is with Tituba, the women out in the woods with the girls making the pot of stuff to conjure the spirits. She gets accused of hurting some of the girls with witchcraft and she replies with, “I don’t compact with no Devil!’ Parris: You will confess yourself or I will take you out and whip you to your death, Tituba! … Tituba, terrified, falls to her knees: No, no, don’t hang Tituba! I tell him I don’t desire to work for him, sir. (Miller, 42). This is the first trial in The Crucible and it sets up how the rest of the trials are run. The trials are run unfairly. They have no solid evidence but they still convict the people. Dennis Welland comments on the way the trials are run
...t Sarah Good. She was one the fist women who was charged with witchcraft. She always mumbled and talked under her breath. Due to the paranoia in town, people developed gossip about Sarah Good, which resulted in wild accusations and execution. These gossips also replace the blame from one person to the other, the Putnams claim that their children died of evil spirits as Mrs. Putnam claims that she has “laid seven babies unbaptized in the earth” (Act I, 14), however, this is an easy escape. Instead of taking the responsibility and blame for her children’s deaths, she accuses witchery to compensate for her loss.