Greed And Hatred In The Crucible By Arthur Miller

Every event in history can be attributed to a collective of emotions. In 1692, in Salem, Massachusetts, a group of girls claimed to have seen other villagers working for the devil and began accusing people of practicing witchcraft. This soon created a sense of mass hysteria throughout the town that resulted in the death of twenty people and the imprisonment of over two hundred. We now refer to these events as the Salem witch trials. In the 1950’s, Senator Joseph McCarthy conducted similar trials accusing people in prominent positions of being Communists. McCarthy implemented unfair investigative techniques, similar to those used in the Salem witch trials. Arthur Miller’s play, “The Crucible”, creates a story around the known details of the

Land-lust had been the source of many lawsuits and much bitter rivalry, and having your neighbor imprisoned was a lawful, albeit immoral, way of obtaining their land. Initially, the accused were people of low social status, but eventually we see neighbors turning on neighbors. They were motivated by greed, knowing that if their neighbor with a large acreage went to jail, their land could be taken. In Betty’s room, as there is a heated discussion occurring regarding land disputes, Giles questioned “Wherefore is everybody suing everybody else?” and urged others to “Think on it now, it’s a deep thing, and dark as a pit.” They were all suing each other out of greed before the witch trials. Once the trials began, they accused each other of practising witchcraft out of greed. Giles refers to this as a ‘dark thing’ because sending someone to jail, or possibly to hang, in an act of avarice was, in fact, infernal. Greed caused the situation to escalate. As Hale, Parris, and Putnam were trying to get information about the devil from Tituba, Putnam continually fed her the names of people that he wanted to see jailed by asking her “Sarah Good? Did you ever see Sarah Good with him? Or Osburn?”(Miller, I 1264). She repeated the names after him, accusing them of working with the devil. Abigail and Betty followed suit and began making accusations of people they wanted to see jailed. Greed is what turned the fear into the witch trials. Avarice and fear are what fueled the beginning of the Salem witch trials, without both, the situation would not have become the malicious event that it