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Abigail Williams The Crucible

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It seems that throughout the life of literature, authors paint women and men to look and behave in certain ways; often they portray these characters with extremely positive or negative traits. Arthur Miller’s The Crucible shows this element throughout its entirety. The Crucible is the inspiration from the 1692 Salem Witch Trials, where the women were seen as exceptionally strong and feared members of society, and men were seen as weak. This novel illustrates what an incredible power that the women could obtain all in the name of fear and lies. The person who had the most gravity in this play had to have been Abigail Williams. She plays a very intense, dominant character all starting with the opening act, then remains this way until the curtain …show more content…

She even faces off against Danforth (the man with nominally the most power in the play as Deputy Governor of Massachusetts) and gets him to back down from questioning her. This type of bullying and harassment happens till the very end when she ultimately indirectly causes John Proctor’s death. Williams holds the power to ruin or end someone's life in mere moments, and this is what makes her such a strong, yet fearful character. This type of strength is extremely negative in the reader’s eyes as, however, I suppose that this is the only type of political strength that the women and girls could obtain in that time period. William’s power brings me to the second group that directly held all of the power. This would be the girls that Williams controls. They were indeed only followers of Williams, yet they held the same amount of power in society. Harvard professor David D Hall answered in an interview that “Witchcraft is primarily a legal process, with a strong social base… in very small communities, you would insult each other, and you insult them by calling them a witch”(Kinchlow). Perhaps under these stressful conditions, social norms did not matter as long as they were cracking down on witches. Only under said conditions could a woman obtain political

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