Mass Hysteria In The Crucible By Arthur Miller

Thesis/Claim: Mass hysteria is defined as an outbreak of abnormal behavior, thoughts, feelings, or symptoms, usually appearing in large groups. Aurthur Miller uses this phenomena in The Crucible, to show how a small community called Salem, became deeply fixated on the crime of witchcraft. This hysteria drove the village to the point where no one was safe from the possibility of being hanged. This play was set in 1692, but now in the present, we have further research into the phenomenon called mass hysteria, with many theories as to why this occurs.

Subtopic 1:
Bagus, Philipp, et al. "COVID-19 and the Political Economy of Mass Hysteria." COVID-19 and the Political Economy of Mass Hysteria, edited by Philipp Bagus, MDPI, 2021.

Philipp claims that the US government used their influence and authority to spread fear and panic, resulting in people staying home in hopes to stay healthy. He presents numerous examples showing how the government “exaggerated the danger of COVID-19, delivering a message of panic to the public” (31). He then adds, “In a US congressional hearing on 11 March 2020, the mortality rate of the coronavirus was exaggerated…This false statement coming out of the Congress…and with its authority greatly contributed to generate anxiety and panic”(31). With that being said, in 1692, how did a small village turn into one of the greatest cases of mass hysteria in history? In The Crucible, Salem is shown as a Puritan Theocracy, meaning that every person in the village saw the Devil as the only evil in the world and the only thing to be scared of when something goes wrong. So, when young women started to act “strange”, the court of Salem used the village's feelings of the Devil, to create mass panic of evil within

He comes up with 3 forces contributing to mass hysteria: affectivity, subjectivity, and vulnerability. Raymond states that mass hysteria is “an outcome of ‘conversion reactions’ where ‘the subject in a tension state … escapes by “converting” the tension to some sort of symptom”(8). He continues saying that conversion reactions lead to “hysterical epidemics in which certain ideas and practices gained acceptance and spread rapidly among a population” (8). We can take Raymond’s ideas and contribute them to the reasons behind the Salem witch trials as shown in The Crucible. Some “symptoms” the young girls were having were delusions, fainting, and cold skin. The news of these “symptoms” led to the epidemic of mass hysteria in Salem. The belief that people were witches rapidly grew in the village to the point where no one was