Who Is To Blame For The Crucible

Nicole Howren

Mrs. Cole

English 10 Honors

15 November 2014

The Crucible by Arthur Miller

We often test the limits and try to see how far we can go. As you grow with age you realize how much your limits have been tested, but at least for me I haven’t been tested to the extreme of the death of you or others. The Crucible by Arthur Miller shows how far the falsely accused people of the Salem Witch Trials would go to prove their innocence; in some instances it required lying and damning themselves, similar to the situation created in Milgram's Experiment. The root of this conflict is in the pressure coming from the people whether to sacrifice themselves or others which can all be avoided if all sides were treated fairly and weren’t pushed to see how far they would go.

In the Puritan society there was a strong belief in absolutes. That there was no grey area in a situation, that you are either good or evil. When Tituba is blamed for influencing the girls

to dance around the fire and for being a witch she is seen as this absolute evil. The only way ro stop herself from being killed is by telling Hale she is good and giving names of others who are “witches”. By doing this she is lying saying those people are evil which is against the Ten Commandments which in the time of the Puritans she would viewed as damning herself. So in the struggle of this situation she was pressured by Hale to give names of others for her own life.
This situation and many others throughout the play are tests of limit parallel to the study conducted by Milgram to see how far people would do when it requires hurting another.

This experiment had a student, a teacher, and an experimenter. The teacher would ask the student a question and if the student got it wrong he would be believed to have been shocked with increasing voltage each time. The experiment was to see how far the teacher would go in the amount of voltage in “harming” the student. The experimenter was telling the teacher he had to continue, trying to see how far the teacher would go. In one instance in The Crucible, John Proctor can be seen as the “experimenter”. He is pressuring Mary Warren to tell the truth and tell the court that she never saw any spirits and that she lied. She would be the “teacher” in this act. Her actions could cause harm to Abigail. If Mary tells the truth it is putting risk to Abigail and herself for they were both lying. They could be seen as the “students” in this act. (p.

88)
The cause of this conflict is in the pressure coming from the people whether to sacrifice themselves or others. In another conflict, Procter was continuously pressured by Danforth, Paris, and Hale to confess. This meant sacrificing his relationship with God in order to survive. He also had to sacrifice his reputation in town just to save his life because the other men in town kept pressuring him.
which can all be avoided if all sides were treated fairly and limits weren’t tested.
The idea of believing in witchcraft when only one can see it (abigail) (i know this is in the play can’t remember where)

conclusion