The Moral of Arthur Miller's The Crucible

544 Words2 Pages

The Moral of Arthur Miller's The Crucible

The Crucible is a play about the connections between sinning and

paranoia, hysteria, and religious intolerance. The people of Arthur

Miller's Salem in 1692 would consider the very idea of a private life

unorthodox. The government of Salem, and of Massachusetts as a whole,

is a theocracy, with the legal system based on the Bible. Moral laws

and state laws are the same and someone's personal life must obey

these moral laws, or that person represents a threat to the public

good. This well planned story of struggle in an oppressive society

leaves freedom for many morals for life, death and religion.

The Crucible is based in a theocratic society and it is the complete

intolerance brought fourth by the ideas in the bible that causes so

much frustration and secrecy throughout the play. Religion affects

every aspect of life, but it is a religion doesn't allow these people

to control emotions such as anger, jealousy, or bitterness. This can

relate to the laws of today. Our society it is based upon laws, what

is right and what is not. People have many different perceptions of

this. Some feel so oppressed by these laws that they feel the need to

break them. This is what happened in Salem with the young girls. For

so long they had been forced to live the ways that the Bible taught

them, live the simple life, worship God and repent for their sins. But

Abigail was not like the rest of the girls she had always been a true

sinner and thought the only way to get her true love was to break down

this theocratic society based upon the Bible. It then became a wild

rampage of cold-blooded revenge.

By 1692, Salem had become a fairly established community. Many of the

dangers that united the town in its years before have gone, while

grudges over property, religious offices, and sexual behaviour have

begun to bubble beneath the theocratic surface. These tensions,

combined with the paranoia about supernatural forces, pass through the

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