Arthur Miller is a social dramatist who reflects his outlook on the US government, in many of his plays. The Great Depression had a lasting influence on him, which he portrays in “The American Clock”. Because he was so deeply impacted by the Depression and the government’s role in it, Miller mocks the idealism of the American dream in “Death of a Salesman” and “A View from the Bridge”. Due to his unjust condemnation as a Communist during the McCarthy Era he accuses the faulty court system as culpable. Miller creates John Proctor in, “The Crucible” as a victim during the Salem Witch Trials, to represent himself during the Red Scare. In his plays, Miller’s characters deal with injustices in order to express Miller’s view that American law is artificial. Miller exploits law as a common theme in his plays to express his outlook about its corruption. He portrays injustice done to the ‘common man and the confinement of America in “All My Sons” and “Death of a Salesman”. Miller reflects his political views in his works, by writing about individualism and his experiences. In many of his works, Arthur Miller expresses contempt for the government, which he holds responsible for his childhood poverty, during the Great Depression, and adult persecutions.
The Great Depression had an immense impact on Arthur Miller, which he reflects in “The American Clock”, among other works. After the stock market crash of 1929, the Miller family’s financial comfort drastically changed. Lannone illustrates their extreme change in lifestyle, “The Depression struck the family hard…the garment business of Miller’s father began to decline…the family relocated to a dead-end street in the Gravesend neighborhood of Brooklyn, where their once-prosperous life became ...
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...rays injustice done to the ‘common man and the confinement of America in “All My Sons”. In “All My Sons”, Joe attempts to defend his actions during the war, “Who worked for nothing in that war? It’s dollars and cents, war and peace… half the goddamn country is gotta go if I go” (Miller 150). Here, Miller portrays his view that society is corrupt. This, he explains, is due to big businesses and the government’s negative influence and failure to aid small businesses, like his father’s during the Great Depression, which failed. Joe says, “That’s the way they do George. A little man makes a mistake and they hang him up by the thumbs. The big ones become the ambassadors” (Miller 411). The ‘big ones’ represent big businesses and the government, which is evident in Miller’s intentional use of the word ‘ambassador’ to create a governmental connotation.
Arthur Miller wrote The Crucible as a protest paper to the brutality of the Red Scare .The Red Scare was the inoperable fear of Communism within the United States. This scare was caused as a result of the Cold War in the 1950’s. During the Cold War the US was scared of an attack of the Soviets, and the Soviets were equally as scared of an attack upon them by us. Joseph McCarthy, a Senator from Wisconsin, saw this fear as an opportunity to rise to power. McCarthy had many supporters that were primarily Republicans, Catholics, Conservative Protestants, and Blue-collar workers. McCarthy ruthlessly utilized scare tactics to get people to believe and follow him blindly into his accusations as to innocent citizens supporting Communism and either having them jailed or killed by providing phony evidence. Arthur Miller was not intimidated by this he wrote the Crucible as “an act of desperation” (Miller). This desperation was to counteract the lack of speaking out about personal beliefs during the Red Scare for the fear of breaking the law. In The Crucible, Miller wrote about a character named John Proctor who is very similar to Miller himself. Both the author and the character had to overturn the same personal paralyzing guilt, not speaking out soon enough. Nonetheless, their eventual overcoming of this guilt leads them to becoming the most forthright voice against the madness around them.
Authors often have underlying reasons for giving their stories certain themes or settings. Arthur Miller’s masterpiece, The Crucible, is a work of art inspired by actual events as a response to political and moral issues. Set in Salem, Massachusetts in 1692, The Crucible proves to have its roots in events of the 1950’s and 1960’s, such as the activities of the House Un-American Committee and the “Red Scare.” Though the play provides an accurate account of the Salem witch trials, its real achievement lies in the many important issues of Miller’s time that it dealswith.
There are a lot of ways in which Arthur Miller develops John Proctor's character during the play. Miller uses The Crucible to express his own views on what was happening in America at the time when McCarthyism was at a prominence. He uses John Proctor as he is interested in the person who doesn't allow himself to be caught up in hysteria but thinks for himself and stands up for his values agai...
All in all Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible was written to be a perfect allegory to the McCarthy era. Many of the events, strategies and people on both sides are similar in the play and the McCarthy Era itself. Many similarities can be drawn between the two including the basis upon which of the victims were persecuted, the strategy to lessen their sentences and the driving factor behind both conflicts, fear. The Crucible was written as a silent but obvious rebellion to McCarthy because during the McCarthy Era Miller was accused of being communist as well. The Crucible was a play, an allegory and a rebellion to and about the McCarthy Era.
Through time it can be seen that the world’s history has a nature of repeating its self. Author Miller, was aware of this as he experienced a repitition of history of society’s flawed government. In the text The Crucible, the writer, Author Miller has identified and illustrated the problems society faced during the 1950’s setting by drawing parallels with the setting of the 1962 Salem witch hunt. This setting helps readers to understand the characters of John Proctor and Giles Corey.
Arthur Miller expresses the concept of oppression being present in every society through the characters of The Crucible. "It is still impossible for man to organize his social life without repressions." As discussed, personal motives, disputes and misuses of power, as well as distorted religious beliefs are the roots of the maltreatment in Salem. Miller’s statement and message is valid and applicable in every society, and for every
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.
The Crucible written by Arthur Miller is a historical play about the Salem Witch Trials. The play contains a historical allegory to the Salem Witch Trials and a political allegory to Mccarthyism. John Proctor is one of the main characters in and is considered the tragic hero of the play. Throughout Miller’s play, John Proctor is seen as the protagonist of the play because he is not afraid to stand up for what he believes in, even if no one else agrees with him. John Proctor’s intention to hang instead of admitting that he was consorting with the devil was an act of honor because he didn’t want to lie for the sake of saving his own life, but also wanting to prove that Puritan society has changed because of the Salem Witch Trials.
Over two hundred years of history rests between the Salem witch trials and the publication of The Crucible, but innumerable resemblances rests between the times. From the wrongful deaths during the witch trials to the punishments throughout the reign of McCarthyism, all occurred without much validation other than someone’s word over someone else’s. Also, Miller possibly set his play hundreds of years ago to give a voice to the accused citizens of Salem who lost theirs in a similar way to those haunted by the accusations against them during the Red
...cter 54). Large suspicions arose about the McCarthyism theme idea and were not classified by Miller until many years later (Decter 54). The play was criticized originally because it was comparing things that were not serious accusations but communism was very serious at that time in history (Kaufmann 30). Luckily for Americans, The Crucible may have raised some good points, because not long after the play became famous, President Dwight D. Eisenhower put an end to the anti-communist efforts of Joseph McCarthy and others (Decter 54). All in all Arthur Miller wrote a great play showing people how dangerous the power of false accusations. The Crucible easily reflects 20th century American plays and the time period by using the Salem witch trials to open the eyes of Americans to the Red Scare and McCarthyism and prove how history never fails to repeat itself.
The observer can see this through the explicit cinematography of the movie and depiction of the Great Depression made by the director. However, the director left out a key aspect of the events of the depression, the stock market crash. Perhaps, this catastrophic event was irrelevant to the plot and message of the movie, but it is important to the actual Great Depression of the United States. Furthermore, the nation of 2010 is well on its way to repeating history. There are frightening similarities between that dreadful time of the 1930’s and the present that should not be overlooked, or the United States might condemn itself back into that horrific state it has so long tried to avoid.
Miller’s life paralleled The Crucible in many ways. The characters in the play had many traits that resembled his. He and the people of Salem were censored by the frenzy of the times they were living in. The hysteria and the mob mentality exacerbated the anticommunists’ and the witch-hunters’ philosophies. The Red Scare affected Miller in the same way the witch hunts affected the people of Salem. As long as there are people with authority in the world, there will be challengers of authority. Censorship will always be used to make others conform. A majority of the public is and always will be easily influenced by hysteria and the mob mentality. Miller used his own experiences to write The Crucible, a play that describes universal behavior and the human condition.
Arthur Miller wrote plays as a way of showing people the real picture of what life was really like during the Great Depression and after World War II. Before the Great Depression many Americans were living in a significant time period, the Roaring Twenties. People had radios, automobiles, and movies with sounds. Then it all suddenly came to an end with the Stock Market Crash, leading to the Great Depression. During the Great Depression, Americans faced poverty, and had no income because jobs weren’t available. Throughout his life Miller influenced many people with his plays, and his contributions to this day because people want to read and understand what was truly happening in past history. For example, “The Crucible” is a play about the Salem Witch Trials, giving a good understanding of the basics that went on in this time period. Another example of Miller’s influential work is “The Death of a Sales Man”, which is his way of showing what life was like when people were struggling financially during the Stock Market Crash. Overall, Arthur Miller is one of the leading American playwrights of the twentieth century.
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.
Writers, actors, politicians, and many other people were summoned to court to answer if they were or had been a communist. Miller was one of these many people tried and found in contempt of Congress. He compares what happened in the 1950’s and communism to the Salem trials. When Miller visited Salem for the first time in 1952 he read the transcripts of the trials and saw the case which involved Abigail Williams which inspired his play. When Miller was accused of communism, he admitted to occasionally attending Communist meetings, but he wouldn’t tell the names of people he saw going there as well. This is why he was found guilty at first, and the same thing happened in Salem, when people wouldn’t name names of those who had been in contact with the Devil they were found in contempt of the court and then pronounced guilty. Miller said the 1950’s communist scare formed The Crucible’s