Chief Accusers In The Trials example essay topic

THE CRUCIBLE BY ARTHUR MILLER Arthur Miller's"The Crucible" is a play about the Salem witch trials in 1960. These were classic examples of mass hysteria, resulting in the hanging of a great many respectable men and woman of charges of trafficking with the devil. They were convicted by people at least as respectable as themselves, largely on the evidence of four young girls who had been caught dancing in the moonlight and laid their dissolute behavior to the influence of Satan. Innocent people are accused and convicted of witchcraft on the most absurd testimony, the testimony of those who themselves meddled in witchcraft and are therefore doubly to be distrusted. Descent citizens who sign petitions attesting 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.

Noone is acquitted. The only way out for the accused is to make false confessions and themselves join the accusers. 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 consolidating his shaky position in a parish that was murmuring against his "undemocratic" conduct of the church. The Reverend John Hale, a conscientious 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 a pompous, unimaginative politician of the better sort. As for the victims themselves: John Proctor can be seen a sone of the more "modern" figures in the trials, hardheaded, skeptical, a voice of common sense (he thought the accused girls could be cured of their "spells" by a sound whipping). He was no great churchgoer. It is all too easy to make Proctor into the "common man". Proctor wavers a good deal, fails to understand what is happening, wants only to be left alone with his wife and his farm, considers making a false confession, but in the end goes to his death for reasons tha the 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 or nineteen and invents an adulterous relationship between her and John Proctor in order to motivate her denunciation of John and his wife Elizabeth. The actual conduct of the trials was outrageous, but no more outrageous than the conduct of ordinary criminal trials in England at that time. In any case, its 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 a metaphysical error.

And they choose to die -for all could have saved themselves by "confession" -not foe 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 universe where each man was saved or damned by himself, and what happened to them was personal. Certainly their fate is not lacking in universal significance; it was human fate.