She is an orphan who must support herself but Abigail Williams has a sense of supremacy over people in Salem and it appears as if she knows this especially when she’s talking about Goody Proctor who happens to be John Proctor’s wife. Abigail says “she hates me, uncle, she must, for I would not be her slave” and she goes on to insult Goody Proctor. We can argue that Abigail sees herself as prominent so no one has the right to treat her any less. In reality, the Abigail Williams is about 11 years old but Arthur Miller has increased her age in the play to 17 years. He might have done this so the storyline seems right as some of the occurrences in the play wouldn’t be possible if she were as young as eleven years old. Abigail is portrayed as a spirited person.
In Salem, teenage girls aren’t allowed to “have a life” in the sense that they had to walk around with their eyes low and they also weren’t allowed to do certain things that could be seen as exhilarating. As a result of this, Abigail rebels against her uncle the reverend and the rules and she partakes in the dance and “witch craft” related activities. Being caught, she becomes terrified of what might happen to her because she was clearly aware of the laws but she chose to ignore them and her terror ignites the entire play.
Her fright also led to the selfish Abigail as she seems to be thinking about herself alone while the other people she dragged down were suffering in innocent anguish and evidence is found throughout the play especially as she harshly threatens Betty Parris and Mary Warren not to say anything. “Let either of you breathe a word, or the edge of a word, about the other things, and I will come to you in the black of some terrible night...I can make you wish you had never seen the sun go down”. In other words, Abigail knew that everything taking place was false and she most probably felt guilty but she went along with it all for her selfish desires to get John Proctor to herself. She also names a Good Osborne as a witch and this is a selfish side to her personality as she was avoiding persecution by placing the blame on someone else and she also influenced the other girls to blame other innocent people in Salem at the end of Act one where the girls all chant the names of Goodies they saw “with the Devil”.
This can be linked to her dominance in the community as it is evident that she has an unusual power over the people. She expresses traits of a bully in many parts of Act one for the same reasons she’s selfish. Abigail has managed to create this web of lies and singlehandedly involve everyone in the village because if she feels as though the truth is slowly unveiling itself, she hastily declares another lie as an attempt to protect herself such as when Reverend Parris and Mr Hale, the minister are questioning her and she says “...Tituba, Tituba...” as though she is trying to involve Tituba, the maid in her unjust practices which she succeeded in doing as Mr Hale asks “Did Tituba ask you to drink it?” and Abigail says Tituba tried but she refused. Although Tituba was present in the forest, it was very clear that she didn’t partake in drinking the chicken blood. More discussion goes on and Abigail suddenly proclaims “She made me do it! She made Betty do it!” She told a lie against Tituba hence saving herself as Tituba is now seen as possessing the spirit of witchcraft and is to be hanged as she didn’t want this and she was already defeated through the whipping, she succumbs to the situation Abigail put her in by saying “...I tell him I don’t desire to work for him, sir”. Tituba falsely confessed to witchcraft.
Abigail Williams is the portrayal of evil in this play because all occurrences were her fault and they were built around evil therefore she could be argued as a girl full of iniquity. She tells horrific lie which lead to the death of innocent people. We find out later through Act one that she is only trying to get her hands on John Proctor who happens to be married and Abigail lies against his wife, the Goody Proctor who dismissed her from her job earlier in Act one for sleeping with her husband. This piece of information is revealed when she’s talking to Proctor and he claims they never touched while Abigail states the other then she proceeds to slain his wife and he is quick to shut her up saying “You’ll speak nothin’ of Elizabeth!”.
He also threatens her with a whipping which suggests Abigail is quite discourteous. I believe Proctor’s motivation for saying this was the fact that he loved his wife and he wouldn’t want to upset her any longer as things weren’t thriving in their home already because Elizabeth still doesn’t trust John after she caught him with Abigail. This lack of ease is evident in the beginning of Act two when Proctor arrives home late according to Elizabeth and they were both in an awkward situation at the dinner table and the readers could feel the tension most especially when “she is watching him from the table as he stands there absorbing the night...her back is turned to him. He turns to her and watches her. A sense of their separation arises”. In both the minds of Elizabeth and John, they are worlds apart and this brings us back to the wicked heart of Abigail Williams who I believe seduced John Proctor into making love to her hence the distrust Goody Proctor feels towards her husband.
To conclude, I think it is easy to judge Abigail and say she is an evil person and I don’t disagree but we find out that she is a sad orphan who witnessed her parents die so she could have been traumatised and a way of getting over this trauma was to go against the rules in Salem and then partake in unjust affairs. She fell in love with John Proctor after their encounter and her morals began to fall apart just as much as her life did in the sense that her passion for Proctor was enormous so when she was rejected by him, she lost control of herself and possibly her state of mind so she resolved to doing anything and everything she could to get John Proctor for herself. This suggests that in life, when someone is denied something they adore, they are despondent and then they attempt many things to get that which they are passionate about.