The play The Crucible by Arthur Miller is a play set in the late 1600s as an allegory of the hysteria of McCarthyism in 1950s America. The relationship between John Proctor and his wife, Elizabeth Proctor is crucial to understanding the main concerns of the play such as corruption, forgiveness and reputation through features such as key scenes and key dialogue.
Near the beginning of The Crucible it is revealed that a group of girls and Tituba - a slave from Barbados - were found dancing in the forest and members of the Puritan society believe they are working for the Devil as they ventured into the forest - or the 'Devil's land'. The girls and Tituba lie about how they want to escape the power of the Devil to save themselves and in the process name other innocent people who 'work for him'. This eventually leads to the persecution and murder of many innocent people and other innocent important characters such as Rebecca Nurse and John Proctor, a man who had an affair with the leader of the girls, Abigail Williams.
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Elizabeth still does not trust her husband as Abigail had completely corrupted their relationship. As much as John wants to bury their affair, as shown in the key dialogue directed to Abigail 'wipe it out of mind, we never touched, Abby' whilst Abigail is 'waitin' for you [John] every night' and wants the affair to continue. This shows that Abigail wants to further corrupt John by continuing the
“I visited Salem for the first time on a dismal spring day in 1952….” (Miller 1095) that’s what started it all. Arthur Miller was motivated to write The Crucible due to the trauma done to the liberals during the McCarthyism trials. The question is, was he a little too motivated to write it? Could his thirst for vengeance for those accused fuel him to over-exaggerate what happened in order to prove a point? Arthur Miller overused his artistic license because Joseph McCarthy was accusing important people of being communists, he wasn’t exactly like Danforth, and some of the accused in the McCarthyism trials were actual communists.
Corruption has always existed in our society since the beginning to present time due to conspiracies such as the witch trials and the communism era. The Crucible by Arthur Miller was written during the era of communism to mere the hysteria. The Crucible is about the Salem witch trials in Salem Massachusetts in 1692. It’s a corrupt witch trial in Salem that’s due to false accusations of witchcraft for personal gains. John Proctor is the protagonist in the story The Crucible who goes through the ultimate test by choosing his reputation over integrity. He also had an affair with a young girl named Abigail who is the antagonist and is the main reason the bloodshed is occurring in Salem. Initially, Proctor hesitates to deal with his sin, but as the play progresses, he begins to understand its effects; this ultimately leads him to find goodness in himself as he stands for the truth.
Herbert Block, a cartoon illustrator during McCarthyism, depicts the absurdity of the communist accusations during the 1950s through his drawings of fictitious evidence and the power hungry government. Despite the lack of evidence, the influence of the government’s spurious claims causes unnecessary hysteria and chaos within America. Likewise, these events are prevalent within Arthur Miller’s play, The Crucible. The witch trials symbolize the court hearings during McCarthyism, and an identical absence of feasible evidence and a town overridden by fear lead to fallacious convictions. Block’s political cartoons embody the fraudulent evidence and hysteria over communism during McCarthy’s reign, which relates to the witch trials that Miller describes
"Reasonable doubt" was all that was necessary to accuse and sometimes convict someone of un-American activities in the late 1940's, early 1950's. This period of time was known for McCarthyism--a time of extreme anticommunism, lead by Senator Joseph McCarthy (McCarthyism). The United States pledged to contain the spread of communism globally, as well as locally, and did what it could to keep this promise. Americans began to fear that communism was leaking into the media, government, arts, schools, and other areas. This was called the "Red Scare" (Brinkley). One writer that used this era as a basis for his play, The Crucible, was Arthur Miller. He was able to capture the panic and mere insanity of many Americans in an allegorical way. The "crusade against subversion" played a significant role in the following: the actions and tactics of McCarthy, the reasons why Miller and other artists were targets of McCarthyism, and the relationship of his play The Crucible to the events of the late 1940's to the early 1950's (Brinkley).
“The greater the power, the more dangerous the abuse” (Burke). Lies, power, and selfishness can destroy families, friendships, and towns. When a person has power, they may not use it properly. There have been many instances where this has happened, but two main examples are in the novel The Crucible, and in McCarthyism. The Crucible is connected to McCarthyism by its model of a desire for power, unsubstantiated accusations, and the detrimental effects of these accusations.
The horrors of history are passed on from generation to generation in hopes that they will never occur again. People look back on these times and are appalled at how horrendous the times were; yet, in the 1950s, history repeated itself. During this time, Joseph McCarthy, a United States senator from Wisconsin, began accusing people of being communists or communist sympathizers, which is parallel to the Salem witch trials in the late 1690s when innocent people were accused of practicing witchcraft. One of the people McCarthy accused was author and playwright Arthur Miller. To express his outrage at McCarthy’s actions, miller wrote The Crucible, intentionally drawing similarities between the McCarthy hearings and the Salem witch trials.
In Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, which details the Salem witch trials, Abigail has an affair with John Proctor, and then tries to kill his wife with a charm. This leads to her being thought a witch, but they point fingers at others to keep the spotlight off of them. Eventually many people are hung for witchcraft because Abigail and her friends will not tell the truth of what happened the night they were dancing. During the McCarthy trials, the Cold War was currently going on, and the public was getting anxious about the recent findings that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were found guilty of being communist spies. Joseph McCarthy used this to get power by convicting others of Communism in his trials. McCarthy and the witch trials is a classic example of history repeating itself, when there is no way to prove yourself innocent of an invisible crime.
There have been major events that have shaped American history. The Salem Witch Trials and The Red Scare/McCarthyism are two of them. Arthur Miller took these two separate events in US history and realized they were connected in many ways. He wrote The Crucible, as an allegory of McCarthyism. Through his work, Americans could see the hysteria that the Salem Witch trials conveyed and made associations to what was happening in their world with regards to the Red Scare.
Arthur Miller’s The Crucible is a play that was first performed in 1953 in the United States of America in the midst of the persecution of alleged communists during the era of McCarthyism. Although the play explicitly addresses the Salem which hunt, many find that the play is an analogy to McCarthyism due to the striking similarities in which the people behaved. Miller highlight the different groups of characters in order to reveal overlying ideas of the play such as: Self preservation, power, and hypocrisy.
The Crucible is a famous play written by Arthur Miller. This play centers around the witch trials that took place in Salem, Massachusetts. In Act II, Abigail and her friends accuse several innocent people of witchcraft. Once they leave the court, Reverend Hale goes to John Proctor’s house to inform Elizabeth Proctor that people in the court have mentioned her name. Then officials of the court, Herrick and Cheever, arrive at the Proctor’s house. They claim to have a warrant for Elizabeth’s arrest because the court declares she practices witchcraft. After, Herrick and Cheever take Elizabeth to jail. Injustice in Act II prevails because of the inability to see the truth. Reverend Hale and John Proctor illuminate the theme that closed-mindedness
Another important work Miller wrote, The Crucible, takes place in Salem, Massachusetts, during the 17th century. It is a time when jealousy and suspicion poisoned the thinking of an entire town. Neighbor turned against neighbor when events happened that could not be explained. Accusations turned into a mad hunt for witches who did not exist. One of the main characters of the play is John Proctor, a well-respected man with a good name in the town. As the play develops, John Proctor’s moral dilemma becomes evident: he must decide whether to lie and confess to witchcraft in order to save his life, or to die an honest man, true to his beliefs.
Written in the 1950s, Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible delineates the situation of the McCarthy conflicts in America while the plays’ events revolve around the Salem witchcraft trials of 1692. In the play, two major characters are Reverend Hale, an expert on witches sent to Salem for investigation, and John Proctor, a man known for his leadership and hard work. Proctor and Hale, in addition to both being Puritans, are alike in their actions and motives since they both see the depravity of the court and seek to protect people from it. However, they have major differences in their characters as they have contrasting dedication to Christianity and the values that they live by.
Miller completed "The Crucible" in the 1950's. At that time, America was engulfed in the civil rights movement. Racism was a huge issue and people were fighting for equality and respect. African Americans were among the minorities that were persecuted by society. Miller touched on the subject of racism and related it the present time by his characterization of the woman, Tituba. Historically, Tituba was a native woman; however, in the story she was portrayed as a black woman. Tituba was a servant of Reverend Parris and one of the first to be accused of witchcraft. She was an easy target because she was a minority and did not have a lot. Her different culture made her stick out which caused people to surmise that she was witch. Abigail whined, "I could hear her singing her Barbados songs and tempting me..." Tituba's language was different, which made it seem evil to the sheltered community. Miller included the present day struggles of African Americans by changing the character of Tituba to a black woman. Although she was not persecuted only for being black, the fact that she was a minority made her easy to blame.
The Crucible is a 1953 play by Arthur Miller. Initially, it was known as The Chronicles of Sarah Good. The Crucible was set in the Puritan town of Salem, Massachusetts. It talks of McCarthyism that happened in the late 1600’s whereby the general public and people like Arthur Miller were tried and persecuted. The Crucible exemplifies persecutions during the Salem Witch Trials. The people were convicted and hung without any tangible proof of committing any crime. Persecutions were the order of the day. When a finger was pointed at any individual as a witch, the Deputy Governor Danforth never looked for evidence against them or evidence that incriminated them; he ordered them to be hanged. This can be seen through his words “Hang them high over the town! Who weeps for those, weeps for corruption!” (1273), the people were persecuted aimlessly. The four main characters in the play, John Proctor, Abigail Adams, Reverend Hale and Reverend Parris, are caught in the middle of the witchcraft panic in the religious Salem, Massachusetts in late 1690’s. Persecution is the most important theme in the Crucible, the leaders and citizens of Salem attacks and persecutes one of their own without any tangible evidence against them.
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.