The Crucible Research Paper

908 Words2 Pages

Nineteen forty-seven. The House Un-American Activities Committee has instituted a “Hollywood blacklist,” condemning many of those in the business of motion picture as Red, or communist, making it impossible for them to land jobs or roles. Rewind two-hundred fifty-five years to the Salem witch trials, a similar series of events motivated by religion instead of politics. In The Crucible: A Play in Four Acts, Arthur Miller uses the group of young girls led by Abigail Williams to draw a comparison between those trials and the convictions of the Second Red Scare, and to evince how a single person can ruin a society through the effects of mass hysteria. Throughout the play, Abigail Williams lies and tricks the town, all the while accusing more and …show more content…

Disastrous is the thought that possesses a society (Blaney). This applies both to the Second Red Hunt and the trials in The Crucible, the thought being communists in the government and witches living among the Puritan settlers respectively. Quite bluntly, The Crucible was written purely as allegory of the time of McCarthyism in the twentieth century (Miller, “Why I Wrote The Crucible”). During the trials, the courts of the region adopted a new acceptable form of evidence, spectres. This meant that one could just claim that they were attacked by a spirit sent out by someone, and that could be taken as definitive proof that the accused was a witch (Miller, “Why I Wrote The Crucible). These instances are similar to the times of the Second Red Scare, where mere suspicion of being remotely Red or even “too-far-left” was enough to earn the name “pinko”, thus decimating any reputation one could have had. In the final lines of the play, John Proctor calls out the validity of the trials and refuses to sign a confession to witchcraft, nailing the last nails on his coffin (Miller, The Crucible 143). Proctor’s actions in his final moments go against the trend of that time and of the Red Hunt because speaking out against either the trials or the hearings meant being accused as a sympathizer; a quiet devil is better than a dead angel, even if only because the devil remains alive

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