Fear drives action. The main reason people continue to progress and change are due to the fear of the unknown. Humans have and will continue to fear the unknown since the beginning of the world. In the town of Salem circa 1692, fear ran a rampage and cased dozens of innocent people to be accused of witchcraft and hanged. In Arthur Miller’s play, The Crucible, this mass hysteria led to the death of many innocent citizens. When fear takes over and becomes widespread, it leads to mass hysteria. Miller wrote this play to tell people not to get caught up in the mass hysteria of the trials because it can turn into an unimaginable horror. Fear causes people to do things out of character. People should be aware of how easily they can be swept up into these mass hysterias and what bad things happen when we do. Sometimes, people tend to make poor judgments when they are afraid of something. Miller wants everyone to know that people can and will use mass hysteria as a tool, or even a weapon for personal advantage.
In the play, Thomas Putnam takes advantage of the fear of others for personal gain. He is a wealthy person who believes that accusing others of witchcraft can make him wealthier. The accused
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Abigail Williams, the girl that started this trial, used the fear of others to get revenge against John Proctor’s wife, Elizabeth. Abigail used to serve Proctor. They had an affair. Elizabeth found out and fired Abigail. Abigail wanted to get rid of Elizabeth. In Act 1, Abigail says “...let either of you breathe a word, or the edge of a word about the things, and I will come to you in the black of some terrible night and I will bring a point reckoning that will shudder you…” (20) This quote shows how evil and psychotic Abigail really is. To get Proctor back, she gets his wife convicted of witchcraft. But, after all she went through; she did not get Proctor because he was hanged. She managed to use the fear of others as
Mrs. Proctor says she fired Abigail because she suspected that Proctor had been seduced by the 17 year old to commit adultery that he later admitted to. As a result, Abigail became jealous and set out for revenge, after all the earlier woods action and Mary Warren brief support she had Mrs. Proctor arrested for witchcraft claiming that she crafted a poppet of her and used it to physically hurt her. On the stand, Abigail says she never intended to hurt John Proctor even though he ended up getting him killed. We later find out during the defendants questioning of Mr. Proctor that Abigail had no ill will against Mrs. Proctor until the trial. The two had not spoken to each other again until the trial and in his own words says, “Abigail confessed the truth to him, and wanted to run away with him”.
First off, Abigail Williams is motivated by her love for John Proctor. She will go as far as killing Elizabeth Proctor or accusing her for witchcraft to take her place as John's wife. “She is blackening my name in the village! She is telling lies about me! She is a cold and sniveling women…”(1037)
In the play The Crucible, Arthur Miller utilizes the motif of mass hysteria. In the play townspeople panic about the accusation of people they know of being witches. In today's world we are surrounded by technology which allows news to travel fast. Recently, when a deadly disease called Ebola was found people began to panic and they were scared of being infected. The accusation of witches in the town and the Ebola found caused the same reaction in people.
She accused Tituba and watched her get whipped and did not speak up. Abigail started to accuse people and in all reality she just wanted John proctor to herself. She did anything to make her devious plan come to life. She also tells the other girls that they will never speak the truth, or she will come into their houses and kill them.
The Crucible, written by Arthur Miller, is one of the leading titles in American literature when it comes to the understanding of human motivation. This literature demonstrates what enables the human mind to push itself forward into doing what is set in their mind. As the setting takes place in the 1690s in Salem, a small town in the new colony of Massachusetts Bay, people were living in a Theocracy and were accusing each other of witchcraft and working with the devil. As a result of these accusations, people were getting executed under the court of Salem, which leads to the theme: fear can drive one to the action of the abnormal. This theme reoccurs in The Crucible, and also in literatures outside The Crucible.
Abigail’s disastrous plan was to have Elizabeth killed so she could be with John Proctor. The wickedness of Abigail shows no remorse or regret, because she is willing to do anything to achieve her desire of being with John Proctor. Abigail is now in court being accused by John Proctor by using Mary Warren to tell the complete truth on how Abigail and the girls are pretending to be the devil’s eyes, but Abigail lies and pretends that Mary is
Among the obviously innocent is John Proctor’s wife, Elizabeth. Abigail gains integrity for her “duty [of] pointing out the Devil’s people”, and therefore uses this to accuse Mrs. Proctor. Abigail’s ultimate goal is to get rid of Elizabeth in order to be with Proctor.
Have you ever had those nosy neighbors that start rumours about you or the people that live around you? Having those people around you can lead to discomfort and drama. People were accused of being communists in the 1960’s. Arthur Miller was exposed to it. The mcCarthy hearings inspired Arthur Miller to write The Crucible.
Only in rare cases is something so impactful on a story caused by solely one person. Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, luckily, is not one of those cases. There would be much less of a story if it was that simple. The blame of the hysteria that is revolving around Salem is upon many shoulders. The three people that are most intertwined with this are Abigail Williams, John Proctor, and Mary Warren.
People who do things like this in there village are labeled witches and killed. So Abigail is pretty scared from the beginning, and starts the finger pointing to defend herself starting this witch trial. She is in love with a man in her village named John Proctor, realizing she will never have him due to his love for his
Miller conveys his point that allowing selfishness and fear to consume society can be devastating and harmful to life through his use of the witch trials and the mass hysteria that occurs during
Abigail wanted to get her vengeance on Elizabeth Proctor for firing her as a maid. John Proctor screamed in rage at Judge Danforth, “She thinks to dance with me on my wife’s grave!... But it is a whore’s vengeance, and you must see it…”(3.863-8). Abigail wanted to kill or blame Elizabeth for witchcraft to get her vengeance. She may have wanted vengeance, but that did not happen as much as scapegoating like when Abigail scapegoated Tituba.
The Crucible by Arthur Miller is a dramatic play that expresses a very important message and that is how far people would go to save themselves from the hands of death. There are many characters in the Crucible who are guilty of taking innocent lives, but there are three major characters who, without a doubt, are the most at blame. The play takes place in the city of Salem, a city filled with people that would do anything to keep their reputation clean. Throughout the play, Miller is introducing multiple characters that experience changes in their decisions and negatively influence more people eventually leading up to the witch trials. The main point that the story revolves around is that people would rather lie and blame someone else instead of confessing and accepting the punishment.
The Crucible written by Arthur Miller. The Crucible is a story based off of a lot of main characters and scenes. The story itself is based off the salem witch trials hence the story is in the town of salem. The three categories of this story was mass hysteria where people believe things and all join in. Group think is how people together make decisions based on ideas in the group.
In the play, The Crucible, written by Arthur Miller, many unprecedented events occur in the period of The Salem Witch Trials, one of the most unprecedented being the countless accusations of villagers being accused of witchcraft. However, the fact of the matter is that not many individuals really thought about what drove society to do the unthinkable, or the influence that could have caused many other individuals to take decisive actions to no prevail. In a couple of ways, society unknowingly used the means of peer pressure and life threats to ultimately cause an individual to take decisive action. One way society unintentionally influenced the action of many individuals was through the excessive use of peer pressure. For instance,