The Crucible Theocratic Justice

Arthur Miller’s 1954 play, The Crucible, toys with the emotions and morality struggles of the 1690 Salem Witch Trails involving the repercussions of government corruption and the desire for personal liberty and integrity. Miller’s artistry as a playwright, positions the audience to believe that women are largely suppressed by men in the community which ultimately leads to an uprising of power from the “powerlessness” members of the community. The Crucible challenges preconceived audience perceptions that change can only be accomplished with power, by presenting an opportunity for the powerlessness gender of Salem to congregate and upturn the pillars of society that Salem thought were most strong such as theocratic justice.

Miller successfully

Comprised of a theocratic justice system, The Crucible highlights Salem’s prodigious tendency to believe ‘that they held in their steady hands the candle that would light the world’, ‘for they were united from top to bottom by a commonly held ideology whose perpetuation was the reason and justification for all their sufferings’. However, ironically it was this common ideology that lead to the corrupt legal system which eliminated the goodness and integrity of the common man. Justifying even the smallest of circumstances with phrases from the Bible, the Puritans of Salem turned to holy book hoping for an explanation for the girls’ odd and “extremely” sexual behaviour in the forest. ‘Thou shall not suffer a witch to live’ arose when Mr Hale an ‘eager-eyed intellectual’ with a knowledgable outlook in witchcraft—the ‘most precise science’—journeyed to Salem to observe the strange conduct of the girls. Nevertheless, as bravely put in Wendy Schissel’s Feminist Reading of The Crucible, the girls were ‘caught in scandalous behaviour in a society that provides no outlet for exuberance, much less sexual exploration’ it might be worth considering ‘whether eating disorders today, or other related dysfunctions, could be similar last-ditch for girls facing dilemmas to which they see no healthy solutions.’

Someone once said ‘those who have true power share it, while those who hunger power abuse it.’ In The Crucible the girls reflected the half of the community that had been suppressed by men and retrained by religion. In their journey to escape the shackles of their restricted future, the girls abused the power they gained from manipulation and exploitation, to present one of the darkest times in the history of man. Stripping the reputation, personal liberty and integrity of many innocents of Salem, it was power that subsequently dismantled the the pillars of society that Salem thought were most strong such as theocratic justice; to reveal an ugly truth of human existence, that powerlessness can be as potent a catalyst for change as excessive power, but it is abuse of power that will always prevail over