The crucible - arthur miller

Introduction In 1953, when Arthur Miller\'s play \"The Crucible\" ran on Broadway at the Martin Beck, despite being a box office success and acclaimed by critics and audiences alike, it was always considered second best to his prior \"Death of a Salesman.\" As Brook Atkinson for the New York Times reported the day after the opening, \"[T]he theme does not develop with the simple eloquence of \'Death of a Salesman.\'\"
Although the events of the play are based on the events that took place in Salem, Massachusetts in 1692, Miller was liberal in his fictionalisation of those events. For example, many of the accusations of witchcraft in the play are driven by the affair between farmer, husband, and father John Proctor (Arthur Kennedy), and the Minister\'s teenage niece Abigail Williams (Madeleine Sherwood); however, in real life Williams was probably about eleven at the time of the accusations and Proctor was over sixty, which makes it most unlikely that there was ever any such relationship. Miller himself said, \"The play is not reportage of any kind .... [n]obody can start to write a tragedy and hope to make it reportage .... what I was doing was writing a fictional story about an important theme.\"
The \'important theme\' that Miller was writing was clear to many observers in 1953 at the play\'s opening. It was written in response to Senator McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee\'s crusade against supposed communist sympathizers. Despite the obvious political criticisms contained within the play, most critics felt that \"The Crucible\" was \"a self contained play about a terrible period in American history.\"

Analyses

Set in Salem, Massachusetts in 1692, Arthur Miller\'s The Crucible describes the witch hunt that saw harmless people hanged for crimes they did not commit. The Crucible provides an accurate historical account of the witch hunt, but its real achievement lies in the many important issues it deals with. Miller's concerns with conscience, guilt and justice develop into significant and thought-provoking themes throughout the play. These themes are developed through the characters of Abigail Williams, John Proctor and Deputy Governor Danforth. The Crucible is even more successful when the wider relevance of these issues is considered. This occurs particularly when the themes of the play are examined in relation to the events occurring at the time Miller was writing.
The inhibitions born out of the Puritanical values of the time are perhaps what forced Abigail Williams into such evil behaviour. Abigail and the girls are allowed no freedom to have fun, a point illustrated by their fear that their parents will discover they were dancing in the forest. Later, as the girls successfully accuse more and more people of witchcraft, they begin to seek revenge on the adults in their lives who have oppressed them and who, until now, they were bound to obey unfailingly. Abigail Williams depicts Miller\'s concern with guilt and conscience. When speaking of the Salem witch hunt, Miller talks about \'men handing conscience to other men\'. This handing over of conscience is one of Miller\'s most prominent concerns in the play. When people shed the responsibility of their conscience, they are no longer able to feel guilt, and their sense of right and wrong is left in utter confusion. Miller saw guilt as \'a quality of mind capable of being overthrown\'. This is seen through Abigail who sheds her conscience firstly to get herself out of trouble by accusing Tituba, and eventually to seek revenge on the adults who make her life miserable. The court of Salem accepts Abigail\'s false claims and, in doing so, divests her of her conscience and she is left with no sense of guilt for what she has done.
This handing over of conscience eventually spreads throughout the wider Salem community where people willingly shed their conscience in the developing state of hysteria. In The Crucible, people feel guilty for not being as \'pure\' as they are supposed to be. The trial is an opportunity for these people to shed their guilt and prove publicly and to themselves the extent to which their behaviour accords with the dominant beliefs.
John Proctor's struggle is in understanding the fundamental significance of his conscience. What separates him from the other characters is that he will not hand over his conscience, even for the sake of saving his life. Proctor is aware that he is a \'sinner\'. He feels that his affair with Abigail was wrong, not because this is what contemporary moral fashions denote, but because he himself feels it is wrong. In the final Act, Proctor decides to confess because he knows he is not a \'good\' man and feels that dying for the cause of being \'good\' is therefore a pretence. He says of his confession: \'I think it is honest, I think so; I am no saint\'. However, it is when Proctor is pressed to disclose other witnesses that he realises he cannot confess. By naming others, Proctor would be handing over his conscience. The masterful scene between Proctor and his wife in the final act deals with his struggle to be true to himself. Elizabeth refuses to judge Proctor and influence his decision to live, saying: \'I am not your judge, I cannot be\'. Proctor now realises that the only one to judge him is himself: he has a conscience. By refusing to let others judge him, Proctor keeps his conscience and hangs as an innocent man rather than living as a liar.
At the time Miller wrote The Crucible in the early 1950s, the United States of America was experiencing a modern \'witch hunt\' of its own. Senator Joseph McCarthy, prompted by the tensions of the Cold War, was convinced that the American government was polluted with communists and was determined to hunt them out, just as the Salem judges hunted out witches. McCarthy led the Senate Committee on Internal Security which, also like the Salem judges, forced people to confess, and then name associates. The parallel between the two situations is remarkable: both sought to hunt out \'witches\' going against the dominant values of the time; both created hysteria among the public obscuring the course of justice and forcing people to comply through lies; both involved individuals speaking out against others in order to prove their lack of guilt. Miller masterfully recognised this direct parallel and was able to use the unfamiliar time and place of the Salem witch hunt to comment on his own time. He wrote about McCarthyism indirectly to protect himself at the time, but more importantly, he set The Crucible in Salem in 1692 to prove the wider, on-going relevance of his themes. The play was topical, but not particular. The problem it addresses - not specific but, indeed, timeless - could now be seen in perspective. Certainly, the play remains successful and relevant today.
The witch hunt in Salem in 1692 and McCarthyism in the USA in the 1950s are remarkably similar situations, and the issues dealt with by Miller in documenting one of these describes almost perfectly the issues of the other. Both deal with public concerns and fears developing into hysteria, and in both cases it is the effects of the hysteria which prove far more dangerous than the alleged threats themselves. This is because people lose their sense of justice through the \'handing over\' of conscience and the shedding of guilt. The fact that this pattern repeats itself throughout history indicates the mastery of Miller: he recognises a crucial concern of the individual in society.
Throughout Arthur Miller\'s The Crucible the issues of the \'handing over\' of conscience, the divesting of guilt, and the administration of justice are presented to create a masterful drama. The Crucible deals with issues crucial to all people of all time and is therefore a timeless and momentous play.