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In The Crucible, there was a lot of senseless behavior. The purpose of The Crucible is to educate the reader on the insanity that can form in a group of people who think they are judging fairly upon a group of people. Judge Hawthorne believes what he is told by certain people is the truth even if little evidence is to be shown. The young girls with Abigail convince Hawthorne of others being witches so that Abigail can get what she wants, John Proctor, also so that Abigail does not blackmail the girls.
The Crucible by Arthur Miller investigates the effects of hysteria, superstitions and repression on the Salem Community in the late 1600 s. Author Miller, 1915 - was born in New York City and graduated from Abraham High School in Brooklyn, New York. Miller later went on to graduate school at the University of Michigan, 1938, where he received a prize for his play write. After college Miller joined the United States Army and fought in World War II.
Miller also went through the great depression. Arthur Millers first play was written in 1944, he titled it The Man who had All the Luck. The Crucible is a dramatization of the 17 th-century Salem witch trials and a parable about the United States in the McCarthy era. It was written in 1953 and Miller received a Tony Award for this play write. Millers The Theater Essays (1971) is a collection of writings about the craft of play writes and the nature of modern tragedy.
In his time he has written many others plays, he has also written a novel and a screenplay. His play writes are Death of a Sales Man, (Pulitzer Prize), is a tragic story of a salesman betrayed by his own hollow values and those of American society. In A View From the Bridge (1955; Pulitzer Prize) Miller studies a Sicilian-American longshoreman whose unacknowledged lust for his niece destroys him and his family. All My Sons (1947), Incident at Vichy (1965), The Price (1968), The Creation of the World and Other Business (1972), The Ride down Mount Morgan (1991), and Broken Glass (1994).
His screenplay, The Misfits (1961); television dramas, Playing for Time (1980) and Clara (1991); His novel, Focus (1945); and a study of the Soviet Union, In Russia (1969), Arthur Millers last book written was his autobiography Time bends: A Life. (Kennedy Center) Arthur Millers The Crucible is a play about the Salem witch trials in 1692. these were classic examples of mass hysteria, resulting in the hanging of a great many respectable men and woman of charges of dealing with the devil. They were convicted by people at least as respectable as themselves, largely on the evidence of many young girls lead by Abigail Williams, who had been caught dancing in the moonlight and laid their rakish behavior to the influence of Satan. Many innocent people were accused and convicted of witchcraft on the most absurd testimony, the testimony of Abigail and the other girls blaming whom they wanted to, so that they were not seen as witches. Descent citizens who signed petitions vouching to the good character of the accused friends and neighbors are thrown into prison as suspects.
Anyone who tries to introduce into court the voice of reason is likely to be held in contempt. No one is acquitted. The only way out for the accused is to make false confessions and themselves join the accusers, or to confess themselves as being witches. The character and the motives of all characters in this drama are simple and clear. The girls who raised the accusation of witchcraft were merely trying to cover up their own misbehavior. The Reverend Samuel Parris found in the investigation of witchcraft a convenient means of centralizing his shaky position in a parish that was murmuring against his republican conduct of the church.
The Reverend John Hale, an honorable and troubled minister who gives the premises, must have represented something like the best that Puritan New England had to offer. Deputy Governor Danforth, presented as a virtual embodiment of early New England, never becomes more than an arrogant, unimaginative politician of the better sort. As for the victims themselves: John Proctor can be seen as one of the more modern figures in the trials, thickheaded, skeptical, a voice of common sense. He believed that the girls would stop the nonsense if they were whipped. He was no great churchgoer. It is all too easy to make Proctor into the common man.
Proctor is a good man but fails to understand what is happening. He wants only to be left alone with his wife and his farm, and considers making a false confession. Yet in the end goes to his death for reasons that he finds a little hard to define but that are clearly good reasons mainly, it seems, he does not want to implicate others. Abigail Williams was one of the chief accusers in the trials. Miller makes her a young woman of eighteen and invents an adulterous relationship between her and John Proctor in order to motivate her condemnation of John and his wife Elizabeth.
The actual conduct of the trials was unchristian, but no more unholy than the conduct of ordinary criminal trials in England at that time. In any case, it is a little absurd to make the whole matter rest on the question of fair trial: how can there be a fair trial for a crime which not only has not been committed, but is impossible? The Salem witches suffered something that may be worse than persecution: they were hanged because of an insubstantial error. And they choose to die. They all could have saved themselves by confession. They died not for a cause, not for civil rights, not even to defeat the error that hanged them, but for their own credit on earth and in Heaven: they would not say that they were witches when they were not.
They lived in a place where each man was saved or damned by him, and what happened to them was personal. Certainly their fate is not lacking in universal significance; it was human fate.
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Research essay sample on Salem Witch Trials Group Of People
