Mass hysteria has caused many outbreaks and concerned many people with false threats. Mass hysteria is defined by dictionary.com as, “A condition affecting a group of persons, characterized by excitement or anxiety, irrational behavior or beliefs, or inexplicable symptoms of illness.” In order to understand why mass hysteria in the little girls have caused the effects of rampant false accusations that lead to their unrighteous deaths, we first need to look at why mass hysteria affected the little girl and not the boys, secondly look at how mass hysteria allowed the little girls to be so influential in the trials, and finally look at how the Puritan Society gave the girls an illness that lead to the whole effects of the Trials. The Puritan …show more content…
According to Robert Bartholomew, a medical sociologist, stated, “Canadian psychiatrist Francois Sirois believes the answer lies not in society’s treatment of females, but their biology. He analyzed 45 school outbreaks from around the world, and found that girls near puberty are most frequently affected. Sirois observes that outbreaks in Western schools affect girls at about the same rate as those in other parts of the world, despite the social conditions being fairly uniform for both sexes.” This is somewhat true. The fact that the the little girls’ biology is a factor is this, is true. Looking at the statistic, this helps us understand why the little girls were the ones to get hit by mass hysteria. Now, the cause is not just their biology alone. It stems further than what Sirois claims- the girl’s treatment in society. According to John Goldsmith, curator of the Cromwell Museum in Huntington, England, told the BBC in 2010, witch trials may have helped restore people’s sense of control. "People who were different in any way, through age, or physical disability, or mental disability, were picked out by those who wanted to believe there was some specific reason why things had gone wrong," Goldsmith said. The little girls use their rage and frighten-selves to use. This is seen on pages 45 to 46 in The Crucible where Abigail and Betty start listing off the names of so called “witches”. The list of names they start giving off is a way for them to put them in some sort of power- the power of condemnation. The girls needed to get some kind of way to move up the ladder. They used witchcraft as their ultimate way of doing just that. The judges and villagers all trusted the little girls solely on the sense that they need to control the situation, which the girls did create, of the
In “The Crucible”, the author, Arthur Miller, conveys what he believes Senator Joe McCarthy is doing during the Red Scare. The Salem Witch Trials were true events, while this play uses these trials and adds a fictional twist to show a point. Witchcraft was punishable by death during this time. Once names started flying in town it was like a chain reaction, people were accusing others of witchcraft because they were not fond of them or they had something they wanted. Some definitions state mass hysteria as contagious, the characters in this play deemed it true. In this play, innocent people were hung because some of the girls in town cried witch.
Salem 1692, two girls ,Betty Parris, age nine, and her eleven year old cousin Abigail Williams, had a dream. They wanted to be the best actors in the village. They worked very hard to do that and they got twenty people killed. Betty and Abigail were Puritans and they are not supposed to lie or they would end up with the devil in the afterlife, but it seemed like they didn’t care. That’s why we ask, why were people blaming the innocent for being witches in Salem, 1692? The Salem Witch Trials were caused by two poor, young girls who acted possessed. There were also other people who took the risk of lying and accused other people. Most of the accusers were under the age of twenty and woman. The little girls caused the Salem Witch Trials hysteria by pretending to be possessed. Most of the accusers were poor and lived in the western part of the town.
In Cold War, Cool Medium: Television, McCarthyism and American Culture, Thomas Doherty profiles the 1950's Red Scare, also known as McCarthyism, and its vast effect on American culture during that time. Doherty arms his audience with the revealing history behind the rise and fall of Senator Joe McCarthy, as well as the roots of the anti-communist attitude during the Cold War era that led to the rise of McCarthyism. He discusses the effects of McCarthyism on the entertainment world of the 1950's; the blacklisting of actors, actresses, and producers; many important trials, such as the Army-McCarthy Hearings; and, finally, the end of McCarthyism. An interesting section of the book titled I Love Lucy: The Redhead and the Blacklist demonstrates that in a time
The Salem Witch Trials were a series of prosecutions of men and women who were accused to practice witchcraft or have associations with the devil. The first Salem witch trial began with two girls in 1692, Elizabeth Parris and Abigail Williams who started to have “fits”, in which they would throw tantrums and have convulsions. The random outburst of the girls threw the town of Salem into a mass of hysteria. Although historians have not found a definite reason or cause for the witch trials, they have taken different approaches to explain the hysteria that took over Salem. Some historians approach a psychological theory by proposing the girls suffered from diseases that made them act out. Other historians refer to factors such as religion, economics, and weather to explain the beginnings of an unforgettable time in Salem, Massachusetts. For over 300 years, historians have tried to reveal the truth about the beginnings of the Salem Witch Trials, but in order to do so historians must look at both the way of life in Salem in the seventeenth century and use knowledge that is available now to explain the phenomenon.
“Whatever hysteria exists is inflamed by mystery, suspicion, and secrecy. Hard and exact facts will cool it.” – Elia Kazan. In the crucible, Arthur Miller describes the witch trials and the hysteria that was caused by it. The fear of the devil overwhelms reason and makes the town of Salem even more afraid. In the story, Marry Warren falls under hysteria and through her, Arthur Miller explains that fear causes people to leave behind all their logic and reason.
Hysteria is characterized as an uncontrollable outburst of emotion or fear, often characterized by irrationality. Wherever hysteria takes place, it seems to condone distortion of the truth, unfathomable actions, and illogical accusations causing communities to rip apart. Hysteria supplants logic and enables people to believe that their neighbors, whom they grown to trust, do things that one would normally find anomalous. People who died in the haste of fear and uncertainty were often unnecessary because fear clouds the judgment and perception of a person.
In Arthur Miller 's famous play The Crucible, innocent people are falsely accused of witchcraft and are killed as a result. Even the thought of witchcraft in Salem, Massachusetts in the late 1600s would put the whole village into mass hysteria. Mass hysteria refers to collective delusions of threats to society that spread rapidly through rumors and fear. This is the main cause of why so many people were arrested and killed for witchcraft. One way people could save themselves was by falsely confessing to have performed witchcraft. Many people did not do this though. This is because the townspeople were held to very strict moral values and must uphold their good name in society. They did not want a bad reputation. In The Crucible, by Arthur
The Crucible: Hysteria and Injustice Thesis Statement: The purpose is to educate and display to the reader the hysteria and injustice that can come from a group of people that thinks it's doing the "right" thing for society in relation to The Crucible by Arthur Miller. I. Introduction: The play is based on the real life witch hunts that occurred in the late 1600's in Salem, Massachusetts. It shows the people's fear of what they felt was the Devil's work and shows how a small group of powerful people wrongly accused and killed many people out of this fear and ignorance.
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.’
1692, mass hysteria and paranoia fogs over a small town in Massachusetts. A tale of greed, scapegoating and fear of the unknown leads to devastation and death. Arthur Miller’s The Crucible makes the effects of scapegoating, hysteria, paranoia, and greed evident through the actions of Tituba, Parris, the girls and other townspeople. Miller uses the hysteria as a way to validate the ignorance and gullibility of Salems townspeople.
In Salem Possessed, Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum theorize that opposed to the traditional approach of saying trauma or disease caused the mass hysteria in Salem, it was the way in which the strange behavior of the girls was interpreted as witchcraft by the adults in the community that caused such chaos. In fact, when the first occurrence of affliction happened, nearly a month had passed before the girls made any accusations. During this time, it would’ve been so easy to blame the girls themselves for witchcraft. So why instead were the girls treated as innocent victims in all of this? Simply put, the witchcraft accusations were guided by adults and it was only once the girls were influenced to do so did they started to point fingers.
The play, ‘The Crucible’, illustrates how people react to mass hysteria created by a person or group of people, as people did during the McCarthy hearings of the 1950s and the Salem witch hunts of 1962. Many Americans were wrongly accused of being Communist sympathizers. The activities of the House of Un-American Activities Committee began to be linked with the witchcraft trials that had taken place in the town of Salem. This provided Miller with the catalyst to write ‘The Crucible’. Without the knowledge of the McCarthy hearings and the Salem witch hunts, ‘The Crucible’ may be seen as a melodrama and the events in the play, sensationalised. It is not a melodrama because it is not overly dramatic; the McCarthy hearings and the witch hunts inject realism in the play. The play deals with historical events and with characters that have a historical context.
The theme of reputation and quest for people is also portrayed clearly in The Crucible. In the old days, children were considered unimportant. They weren't allowed to speak until given permission to, and they didn't make important decisions at all. However, during the witch court trials, Abigail and other girls had the power to say who was innocent and who was guilty. Probably, for the first time in their lives, they had power over Salem and they wanted to maintain it. Moreover, the authorities of Salem were afraid of losing authorities and power. For example, the judges, Governor Danforth and Ezekiel Cheever didn't want to admit that they were being fooled by a bunch of girls so they insisted that witchcraft existed in the town of Salem.
In Arthur Miller’s story The Crucible (1953), he asserts that deadly rumors and false beliefs lead to innocent deaths. These deaths total up to 19 souls hanged away from Salem, MA due to “witchcraft”. All the witchcraft talk began when Reverend Parris, Salem’s minister, caught his very own slave, Tituba, dancing in the forest along with many other girls one evening. These girls are known to be Abigail Williams, Mary Warren, Susana Walcott, Betty Parris, and plenty other wild girls of Salem. These young women seem to praise Tituba during the dance which lead them to act in an insane and unwomanly manner. They run around like psychos, yell from the top of their lungs, get undressed, and place
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...