Social Pressure In The Crucible
We all know peer pressure can make you do things, But Arthur Miller’s The Crucible shows us the extremes of social pressure and how it can make us do things we would never have thought of doing. One of the major themes in The Crucible is that popular belief causes you to act and operate differently than you would normally. Some examples of this is Mary’s behavior, the girls fainting, and Proctors struggle to not confess.
One of the main examples of someone giving in to social pressure is when Mary Warren decides to convict Proctor and say he is working with the devil. Under the pressure of the court Mary breaks and says while pointing at proctor “My name, he want my name. ‘I’ll murder you’ he says, ‘if my wife hangs! We must go and over throw the court,’ he says!” (194). She completely changes her stance and prosecutes Proctor because she is scared of being dissent and wants to conform to everyone else.
John Proctor the star of the show is under the most pressure in my opinion. John proctor is under pressure to confess and sign his testimony, but he unlike most others in the story stands his ground. He refused to sign his name because it would be an insult to himself and to his faith if he admitted to something he didn't do just to spare his life.
Pressure can also make you
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What lesson is this trying to teach? Arthur Miller is trying to teach us that there is going to be immense negative pressure from our peers/society and that we should persevere through that pressure like Proctor did. In The Crucible and in the Salem witch trials many people gave in to the pressure and conformed; few brave people stood their ground and did the right thing. In his time he had the same experiences. People had great pressures put upon them to find the commies and or confess you were a communist. So finally one of his major lessons in this book is that we need to persevere the negative social pressure that we all face in our daily
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