How Did Abigail Williams Obtain Power In The Crucible

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 is in love with John Proctor. In the past, John had secretly gone to Salem and slept with Abigail even though he had a wife. Abigail hated John’s wife, Elizabeth. So when she was at the conjuring, she wished Elizabeth dead so she could be with John. John began to feel guilty for what he had done, though, and told Abigail that he will no longer be seeing her.

All references to witchcraft are connected with fear, suspicion and the collapse of normal social values. In the fervor of the witch trials, Abigail is put on a pedestal by the people of Salem and treated as though she has a direct connection with the Divine. Through cold calculation, Abigail carefully selects the people that she accuses in order to establish her credibility. Thus, she first accuses the town’s social deviants, as she knows the court is already predisposed to convict them. Soon a mere accusation from her becomes enough reason to convict even important, influential people.

In 1692 a terrible tragedy occurred, it killed many and lead a town into ruins. This tragedy was the Salem Witch Trials. The witch trials started with two girls, Betty Parris and Abigail Williams, who were thought to have fallen ill. their illness was classified as bewitchment due to their abnormal symptoms such as twitching, choking, and contorting their bodies in abnormal shapes. They soon began to accuse people in the town of witchcraft. Others in the town began to join in on the accusations and the town was terrified.

Those who would admit to being a witch would go to jail, but for those who denied having interaction with the devil would have been trialed and hung, so really, anyway you put it it’s a lose-lose situation. Things like politics, religion, imaginations, and fear of people were just some of the main factors of what aided people into believing that Satan was upon the town of Salem. They believed that the humans were with devil and doing as he said which in turn gave them the power to harm others. One girl named Tituba was trying to save herself by confessing to witchcraft. She didn’t just confess but she also accused many other women about being witches and she said that they all were in the “hands of Satan”.

The most acknowledgeable dispute from the play was between the Putnam’s and the Nurse’s. Rebecca Nurse was blamed for the death of all of Ann Putnam’s children, except for one. The events also caused numerous people to be convicted of witchcraft, some of them being executed. Two of the most notable people convicted in the play were John Procter, condemned for adultery and later hung, and Tituba, who confessed, saving her own life.

When a woman is accused of being a witch and her life is in danger in 1600’s Salem, MA what recourse does she have to protect herself? Women of the time had no authority; they were seen as property of the men they married or were born to. Arthur Miller’s The Crucible takes place during the famous Salem witch trials. It all starts when young Abigail Williams has an affair with John Proctor and practices witchcraft in an attempt to kill John Proctor’s wife, Elizabeth. When Abigail is accused of witchcraft, she confesses and in order to take blame off of herself, she accuses many others as well.

“Rather than try people in the order they were arrested, the court started with the accused with the strongest cases against them” (“The Salem Witch Trials, scholarly articles). This was the concept in how the court charged the cases of each victim. The judges only listened to the girls that lies and just kill everyone that was accused, making the trials unfair. The trials were biased because it all started when a slave, Tituba, was accused of witchcraft. As a slave, she could not defend herself.

Religion was a major factor to why many people were accused of being a witch since the puritans were paranoid about the devil being everywhere. This is especially evident during an examination of Mrs. John Proctor, when Justice says, “You see, the Devil will deceive you. The children could see

Samuel questioned the girls until they eventually told him that his slave Tituba was a witch. The girls also named Sarah Osbourne as well as Sarah Good as the ones tormenting them. On March 1, 1692, Tituba, Sarah Good, and Sarah Osbourne were arrested for practicing witchcraft. Tituba confessed to having made a pact with Satan, causing a psychological dam to brake, releasing a torrent of emotion and hostility on the part of the girls and shortly thereafter on the part of the entire local community.9 The start of the accusations by the girls also initiated the executions. 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.