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The Crucible - Analysis and Comparison
Witchcraft as a scapegaot in the crucible
Witchcraft as a scapegaot in the crucible
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In the story The Crucible, accusations of witchcraft are flooding the town of Salem. In the opening scene of the story, Abigail Williams and Betty Parris are caught dancing around a fire in the woods, which was an action that was forbidden in the town. Betty then resides into a deep coma, where she is sleeps for multiple days at a time and witchcraft soon becomes the talk of the town. As Betty wakes she begins trying to fly out of her window and she is refusing the Lord’s name. Reverend Hale is then called into the town to try and cure the witchcraft that is quickly beginning to spread through the town. As Reverend Hale arrives in the town, Tituba, Abigail Williams and many other begin to confess of being in cohorts with the devil. As the
story begins to unfold, the relationship between John Proctor and Abigail Williams is revealed. Abigail is very jealous of John Proctor’s wife,Elizabeth, therefore, she begins to accuse Elizabeth and many others of witchcraft. Elizabeth is then arrested, as well as her husband, John. John must make a decision to confess his sin of adultery to the court, which would save his life, or keep quiet and be hanged.
We have all heard the tales and seen the movies of evil witches cooking little kids up for supper. For the people of salem in 1692-1693 this was a reality. In the matter of less than a year more than two hundred people were accused of witchcraft and more than twenty were executed. In these historic events author Arthur Miller wrote a play about the people and events in this play there is a man, Reverend Hale is well versed in the study of witchcraft and has come to try and save the girls that have been gripped by the Devil. Miller has Hale change very much throughout the event of this play. In the beginning he believes that the Devil is at work in Salem, how ever near the climactic ending of this play he realises that this witch talk has gotten completely out of hand
In the first act of The Crucible, the setting revolved around the community. The community was curious as to if witch craft was happening in the forest where Parris caught the girls dancing. Abigail told the truth that they were just dancing but, when Tituba confessed that she was a witch to save her life Salem then went insane. The community had the fear that the devil was coming to overtake Salem, just like the government in the United States thought communism was taking over.
For example, Betty Paris and Ruth Putnam in the movie could not wake, but in Wilson’s historical depiction the only symptoms the afflicted girls had were: slipping into trances, cowering in corners, blurting nonsense, and collapsing into shrieking epileptic fits. Miller’s beginning scene of “The Crucible” where the girls were dancing and conjuring spirits in the woods with Tituba is not something that is known to have actually occurred. In Wilson’s historical depictions, Tituba is accused of being a witch because she made the witch cake, but in the film Abigail accuses her in order to avoid punishment because of what her and the girls were caught by Reverend Parris doing in the woods. Tituba’s confession in the movie was whipped out of her, but according to the historically she was interrogated, not whipped. Miller also changed why Martha Corey was accused in the film it is because her husband, Giles Corey, said she was reading suspicious books, but according to Wilson it was because Abigail said she saw her specter on the beams during sermon. According to Wilson’s historical depiction of the Salem Witch Trials, jailers would torture children to get them to confess their mother was a witch, but Miller did not put that in his
As the daughter of Reverend Samuel Parris, the rumors of her affliction brought much attention to her and her family. The play described Betty as a young girl, nine years of age, who began showing symptoms around the same time as her cousin Abigail Williams. Betty accused many people, and testified against them in multiple court cases. From the evidence that the Witch Trials shows, Betty was most likely pretending to be possessed in order to gain attention, or rebel from the strict lifestyle the Puritans followed. “She could not concentrate at prayer time and barked like a dog when her father would rebuke her. She screamed wildly when she heard the ‘Our Father’ prayer and once hurled a Bible across the room” (Walsh). As a distinct personality in both the Witch Trials and The Crucible, Betty Parris created a lasting affect on the course of history in
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 demonstrates the impact of lying as the girls recognise and manipulate their power in the town. Lead by Abigail, they go further, claiming countless others guilty and dooming them to exile. Miller demonstrates that there power is so great that even when Mary attempts to stand against her friends, she is quickly overwhelmed and once again plays along with their trickery. As the girls’ conspiracy continues, controversy arise over their truthfulness; people choose sides often lying themselves to support their side, further altering the lives of all involved.
The Crucible is one of the most bizarre accounts of a historical event to date. The naïveté of the townspeople leads them down a road of madness and confusion, led by a shameless Puritan girl. Abigail Williams was a ruthless girl who showed no mercy upon accusing her victims of witchcraft. Knowing the entire town of Salem would believe her and the other girls, she would not hesitate at charging anyone she wished with the crime of the Devil’s work. However, a challenge arose to Abigail when she decided to accuse Elizabeth Proctor, and eventually her husband John, of witchcraft. The Proctor marriage was not just any simple marriage; it had its times of cold shoulders, heartfelt truth, and undying love.
The Crucible, a play by Arthur Miller, is set in Salem, Massachusetts. The hysteria begins with suspicion that a group of teenage girls found dancing in the forest are guilty of witchcraft. The reverend of Salem then calls on Reverend Hale, who hails from Beverly, to come ascertain the truth. Threatened with severe punishment girls tell lies that Satan had possessed them and falsely accuse others of working with the Devil. One of the girls has an infatuation with John Proctor, a married man, and her determination to get rid of his innocent wife, Elizabeth fuels the hysteria. Reverend Hale is a unique character because he is both a catalyst and a preventer of this hysteria. His main character flaw, like many a people, is failure to defend his beliefs. In order to characterize Hale as a naïve outsider, Miller shows Hale as misled because he defends the justness of the court and later as guilt-ridden because he realizes the court is false.
The witch hunt in the crucible is initiated when Abigail and her friends fear the consequences of their ‘dancing’ in the forest. This connects to McCarthyism as the HUAC is represented by the judges and the ‘accuses’ (the girls) are representatives of Elia Kazan and others like him. The theocratic society of Salem is what the girls fear as the forest is seen as the devils resting place and the puritan nature of the town forbid dancing as it was seen as ‘vain enjoyment’ which as Miller himself states at the beginning of the novel to not be allowed. The character of Mary Warren begs the girls to just admit they were dancing as “…you’ll only be whipped for dancin’…”, but as Abigail is questioned and Parris mentions the kettle and how he believed “…there to be some movement- in the soup…”, the devil becomes prominent in the conversation. This is due to Abigail fearing that she will be blamed for devil worshipp...
Arthur Miller’s dramatic play The Crucible, takes place during 1692 in Salem, Massachusetts. The setting is important because it takes place during the time of the Salem Witch Trials. The play begins with the town’s girls, led by Abigail Williams, gathering in the forest and starting to dance around a fire, chanting. Reverend Parris catches them dancing, sending the girls into a panic and causing two of the girls to go into a coma-like state. The townspeople spread rumors that there are witches lurking throughout the the town that have put the girls under their spells. This causes Reverend Parris to send for Reverend Hale, an expert in witchcraft and the devil's work, who hopes to rid the town of all witchcraft. John Proctor, a local farmer, asks Abigail to stop accusing innocent people and start telling the truth about what happened in the forest. Elizabeth Proctor, John Proctor's wife, excused Abigail from their house because she found out about an affair between Abigail and John. She lies to the court when she is asked about John’s affair to save him from any punishment. In doing so, they were both sent to jail for witchcraft because they knew she had lied. Abigail and the girls continued to lie about people in the town being witches, causing many innocent people to be killed, including John Proctor. Miller shows the dangers of scapegoating when lies that are regarded as the truth, and can kill innocent characters.
She pledges a good name, however only later an affair between Abigail and John Proctor, a farmer in salem, is revealed. Later, the worried citizens bring in Reverend Hale, a minister from Beverly, to investigate the situation. Quickly, he determines witchcraft could be the cause for the condition of Betty, leaving Abigail worried of punishment, and further blackening of her name, to point fingers. In The Crucible, Abigail is responsible for the witch hysteria due to her selfish actions resulting in many innocent citizens in Salem, Massachusetts to be condemned as witches.
Abigail’s struggles come from many of her personal desires that are forbidden in her society, causing her to lie. However, this also creates further social problems, such as the initiation of the witch trials. After Betty is stuck in a coma, Reverend Parris questions Abigail about the night in the woods, because he is suspicious and she denies that it had anything to do with witchcraft. Abigail replies to Parris saying, “ We never conjured spirits” (24). Abigail lies to Parris, denies the statement that witchcraft ever occurred, and says that all they did was danced. Witchcraft and dancing both are sins in the society, and she knows that her reputation is at stake and finds the need to lie to look innocent. Parris wants to be sure and calls Reverend Hale to look further into the issue. Once Reverend Hale comes into town, he questions Abigail about the night, and she once again denies everything he asks her. Abigail is being questioned by Hale, and once Tituba enters she screams, “ She made me do it! She made Betty do it! She makes me drink blood!” (45). Abigail denies every...
"However, the Salem Witchcraft Trials use of human frailty in court helped courts move forward in eliminating its use. Courts now need factual or circumstantial evidence to convict a person of any crime and the accused is promised a fair trial. Nowadays, the accused is given an unbiased judge and jury making it a fair trial (Linder). A fair trial was something colonialists thought they were giving. Human frailty to a colonialist from the 1640s would have been overwhelming and unbelievable. Colonialists believed that the common procedure of witchcraft was justifiable and never abused. The evidence from the Salem trials found nowadays shows that not only were the procedures often abused and accusations baseless, but that the way in which they treated the accused was inhumane."The Crucible is a fictional retelling of events in American history surrounding the Salem witch trials of the seventeenth century, yet is as much a product of the time in which Arthur Miller wrote it, the early 1950s, as it is description of Puritan society. The Salem witch trials took place from June through September of 1692, during which time nineteen men and women were hanged at Gallows Hill near Salem, while another man, Giles Corey, was pressed to death for refusing to submit to a trial on witchcraft charges. Hundreds of other persons faced accusations of witchcraft and dozens more languished in jail without trials. As the play describes, the witchcraft trials began because of the illness of Betty Parris, the daughter of the Salem minister, Reverend Samuel Parris, a former merchant in Barbados. Before Betty Parris fell ill, Cotton Mather had published
Salem’s failing theocracy is a result of hysteria. Betty’s behaviour is one of the many examples of hysteria in The Crucible. Hysteria is an uncontrollable emotion. In this case the exaggerated uncontrollable emotion is fear. The girls were caught dancing in the woods therefore out of fear of being whipped or hanged the girls turn hysteria and deception as an escape goat. Betty does not believe that she can really fly, but hysteria has totally taken over her logic thus she behaves as such. This is one of the reasons why Abigail tries to wake her up because as far as she’s concerned it is all an act. Hysteria plays a major role in The Crucible and it is apparent throughout the play. This is the same hysteria that the girls use to convince the court that the named people are communing with the devil. The do not only turn to hysteria and deception to only protect them, but to protect their family reputation. Betty’s father is the reverend of the town therefore it is very crucial that the family’s reputation remains pristine and not associated with witchcraft. The rest of the community does not partake in this hysteria solely o...
One could easily believe that Betty Parris is the one who is most for the witchcraft hysteria in Salem. Reverend Parris said, “ Out of my- Oh.my God! God help me! Betty. Child. Dear child. Will you wake, will you open up your eye! Betty, little one”(1092). At the beginning of the play Betty is laying down on her bed and her father is believing that she is in a coma like state. In reality she is just faking being sick. Many of the villagers of Salem have heard about what happened and have come to visit. While she is being visited Betty continues to play along and makes the villagers believe that witchcraft was practiced and that it is also affected their lives. Reverend Parris said, “ Will you look at my daughter, sir? She has tried to leap
Also that Reverend Parris’s daughter had been impacted by witches, that put her in a coma, he knew that she was apart of disruption of Salem. He feared because of his family’s involvement in the witchcraft, his reputation as a minister of the church was questionable. He was embarrassed of his family, because a minister of the church, a person that has looked highly to and was considered the closest things to God, was somehow involved with “evil”. “And what shall I say to them? That my daughter and my niece I discovered dancing like heathen in the forest?” (Miller 142), said Reverend Parris. Because of Abigail’s action in The Crucible, Reverend Parris fears that him and his family will be looked down upon which will but the status of his reputation on the