How successful is The Crucible as an allegory?

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How successful is The Crucible as an allegory?

      I will be analyzing  how ‘The Crucible is an allegory’ for what happened with Joe McCarthy, an American Senator in the 1950’s  and how he accused many high standing members of Congress of having links with communism, communism was a major threat as communists had just taken over China and the red scare was very much alive, This caused mass hysteria in America and throughout the Western world, This caused mass hysteria causing people to believe that there could be an overthrow of the US government, and Senator Joe McCarthy saw this and took advantage of this for his own personal gain, He made a list of all the men and woman from high ranking government positions and high positions in entertainment and accused many of them of having communist links, These men and woman were accused and all of this was possible because people would believe that these high ranking people could be a threat to society so they were willing to get rid of them. ‘Traditional intolerance in America which surfaces periodically’ this is a quote from William Chafe in which he talks about how America and its fear of internal subversion, a very chronic fear of this which causes them to name names.

One such man accused was playwright Arthur Miller, He had written many successful plays before all of this, He didn’t like all these accusations, he was accused he spared his friends and co-workers and decided not to name names, This caused great ruin to his career and his name was tainted, and he wasn’t allowed to write again for a while, and the things he did write just weren’t published or not put into a play format that he would have wanted them to be.

   Now I have given you a background of what happened, I am going to go into more detail and analyse the language used in the play and film. Miller researched the Salem witch hunts and found he could identify many links with what was happening in America at that time. In Salem in the 1600’s, there was mass hysteria in this period, but instead of people being afraid of communism they were afraid of evil. Anything that wasn’t seen as right and proper in religious eyes came from ‘Lucifer’ or the Devil; People in Salem were very puritans. They had laws against anything that wasn’t fully Christian. They got whipped for dancing, got punished for not turning up to church, they were not a huge community but together they had very strong beliefs.

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    People started to believe that witches and evil was in their town. There was proof that something was going wrong as some of the children of the town had fallen into what was sort of a trance or sleep and they would not wake up. They had a wood surrounding their town, now they were comfortable in their town but anywhere outside it was the unknown. Salem were a fairly close knit and self reliant community, and they had their own beliefs and their own laws, but once they got outside of this, to the outskirts of their ...

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