Abigail Williams Trial

In the play Abby tries to do witchcraft to kill John Proctor's wife Elizabeth. She almost gets caught doing it so she accuses many people of bewitching her and got many people hanged. She accuses Elizabeth of bewitching her to kill her. The court will not kill her because she is pregnant but John Procter ends up being hanged because he was accused. In the play Elizabeth the example of good.

Abigail’s lies carry her through the entire trial and allows her to put several people to death because the court believes her. Mary tries at one point to tell the truth but when the group of girls start behaving crazy she panics and goes back on her statement. Due to all of her lies and accusations Abigail has caused the love of her life, Proctor, to be charged. In the end because of Proctor being guilty, Abigail leaves Salem because her quest for his love is over. The girl’s decisions throughout the courtroom drama ended up changing their communities’ future and the people’s lives in

Abigail hates John’s wife, Elizebeth Proctor. So in the woods with al the other young women in the town were joking around and messing around saying random fake chants to the sprits to kill Elizebeth Proctor, so she could be with John. Lust and jealousy is which sparked this

Abigail believed that Proctor actually loved her and she waited every night for him. She was brainwashed to think he would leave his wife for her. The witchcraft accusation came from the beginning of the story when Abigail and the girls were dancing naked in the woods and chanting. She made false accusations that people in the village were worshipping the devil to cover what she had done. Many lives were taken but Abigail had no empathy for anyone who was hanged.

The reason the witch trials began in the first place was because of the lie she told about being in the woods. She didn’t want to tell the truth about what happened in the woods to the adults because she wanted to protect herself. She manipulated the young girls to lie and say they were only dancing, “And mark this. Let either of you breathe a word, or the edge of a word, about the other things, and I will come to you in the black of some terrible night and I will bring a pointy reckoning that will shudder you”(Miller).

In the first Act, Abigail manipulates the girls into helping her lie about the forest “incident” in the beginning of the play. "Now look you, all of you we danced and Tituba conjured Ruth Putnam 's dead sisters, and that is all. Mark this let either of you breathe a word and I will come to you in the black of some terrible night and I will bring a pointy reckoning that will shudder you." (Miller I, 20). In this quote, Abigail becomes aware of what she did in the forest along with the girl and threatens them to keep silence if they want to keep their lives.

“Life, woman, life is God 's most precious gift; no principle, however glorious, may justify the taking of it” (Miller 132). In the months of February 1692 to May of 1693, more than 200 people were falsely accused of witchcraft, 20 of them being brutally executed, including two dogs, creating a craze for witchcraft hysteria in Salem, Massachusetts. In Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, Abigail Williams, a twelve year old girl, is seen as the initiator in Salem’s trials. In the 17th century, women’s rights were faint, as women were seen as the weaker link of the two genders. So when Abigail Williams was asked who afflicted her cousin, Betty, she was quick to point fingers to her uncle’s Barbadian slave, Tituba.

In Witches: The Absolutely True Tale Of Disaster In Salem by Rosalyn Schanzer people in the town of Salem were Condemned for being witches. By the end of it all more than 200 people were accused and 20 were executed. Horridly they accused people from all ages, everyone from teenager to ancient was accused. But why? The Salem Witch Trials were caused by hysteria, popularity, and revenge.

Over 150 men and women were accused and arrested for witchcraft and some were executed.10 The turning point for the Salem Witch Trials was the mass execution that took place on Sept. 22, 1962.11 (pg81-113) The Puritans, the court and even the Reverend were realizing that they made a mistake. After almost a year of terror, the trials were over. Over twenty innocent lives were lost. Those who were not the same as everyone else were given the title of a witch. Instead of being accepted as individuals, they were ousted, persecuted, and some executed.

In the beginning, Mary and her friends danced in the woods, but they are caught by Reverend Parris, and afraid they will get in trouble, two of the girls pretend to be afflicted by a witch. The two seemingly afflicted girls send widespread chaos through the town, and the remaining girls have to figure out what to do to get the attention away from their dance in the woods. Mary is understandably terrified as she is a rule follower and has never broken a rule in her life. Mary knows that “the whole country's talkin witchcraft!” (Miller 1107). Mary desperately wants to tell the truth because she believes their punishment will be less severe if they are truthful.