The fear of devils and witches lead to the problem in Act 1 which never get resolved, just keep getting worse and worse. The major problem then led to other fears – fear of punishment, fear of gossip and a tarnished reputation.
Hysteria ensues as the townspeople of Salem consider there may be witchcraft in their midst, and begin to recall friends and neighbours' past actions that have been suspicious. This becomes clear when Proctor says ‘I'll tell you what's walking Salem now--vengeance is walking Salem. We are what we always were in Salem, but now the little crazy children are jangling the keys of the kingdom, and common vengeance writes the law!’
People took advantage of the situation and used it to the best of their abilities. Conniving and scheming to gain more land for their crops although they ‘always yield a bad harvest.’
The dancing and the contents of the little pot (The Crucible – hence the title of the play) seem to fuel the rumours, lies and tragedy of Salem. Suspicion soon engulfs the community and the little privacy that once existed suddenly shatters. Privacy was quickly interpreted to mean that people had some terrible fault to hide and there was an intense pressure for neighbours to reveal each other’s sins.
Abby uses this climate of fear, accusation and suspicion for her own selfish ends to settle old scores with Elizabeth Proctor. Abigail claims ‘she hates me…Goody Proctor is a gossiping liar.’ She tells her uncle that she was discharged from service because she wouldn’t be Goody Proctors slave. Although, it becomes clear later on when the affair is revealed between John Proctor and Abigail, that she was discharged because she was a ‘harlot.’
When John Hale arrives he is told by Parris of the dancing in the woods of which Abigail was involved with. To avoid being accused of witchcraft, Abigail quickly lays the blame on Tituba for what happened, because she fears for her own safety. The girls know that Tituba did not consort with the Devil but because of the fear and ignorance of the society they did not listen to her. Tituba, afraid of being hanged, confesses her faith in God and accuses Goody Good and Goody Osborne of witchcraft. This is where everything goes from bad to worse as more and more innocent and godly people are blamed.
Throughout the community, word of the supposed “witchcraft” begins to leak out under the immediate concern of Rev. Parris. Rev. Parris fears that the incident could taint his reputation among the other Puritans. As a result, Rev. Parris continually interrogates Abigail with the intent of getting what he feels is the truth. Abigail continually acts innocent in order to eliminate the suspicion of Rev. Parris. To keep the incident a secret, Abigail threatens the girls involved in the incident, so that they will not talk. More specifically, she threatens the girls with death by her hands - ‘a pointy reckoning that will shudder you. And you know I can do it.’ They all fear Abigail for she is older, wiser and above all, what teenagers would now define as ‘cool’.
As the 1st scene develops, Thomas Putnam, John Proctor and Giles Corey are arguing about the land. This is the first instance in which the community is becoming divided, where by as if these people cannot settle their petty disputes then it is unlikely that they will offer support to each other in the forthcoming events. It shows the selfishness is ripe in Salem. Thomas Putnam manipulated the circumstances when he accused Proctor of stealing lumber from the tract that he claims is in his bounds. This is clearly an obvious and corrupt attempt to receive money from Proctor and get more power.
The great power that the girls and the court had over the community made people afraid to speak out against them and criticise the court. The court scenes were times of tension, intensity, pressure and conflicts between powerful authorities refusing to realise they have signed away innocent lives on the strength of a lie. The court considered that there was a problem of organized witchcraft in Salem so therefore government and religious leaders (Danforth, Hawthorne, Hale to name but a few) took it upon themselves to wipe out the evil--without looking carefully to see if it really exists--and since it does not, their actions of ordering many to imprisonment or death resulted in chaos.
Those who opposed the court were considered to be opposing God’s work and therefore on the side of the devil. Giles Corey rushed into the courtroom to stop proceedings but was immediately thrown out. All he claimed was ‘I have evidence for the court…you’re hearing lies, lies.’ Upon explaining about the evidence he had he was automatically told that ‘old age alone keeps you out of jail for this.’
John Proctor had believed that the court and the girls subjected innocent souls to bias terrorising which is what went on naturally in courtrooms – with no option of defending yourself, your choices were narrowed to lying and admitting that you were a witch (a fate John Proctor nearly submitted himself to before realising that it was pure evil to give them such a lie) or to deny it and suffer for many years to come and rot in a cell. When John Proctor was convicted of witchery he wrestled with his conscience about whether he should confess or be hanged. When Rebecca Nurse cries, appearing extremely astonished, in the last act after hearing that John Proctor has confessed that he did indeed ‘consort with the devil’ she doesn’t understand ‘Why, it is a lie, it is a lie; How may I damn myself? I cannot, I cannot.’ He couldn’t decide if he should to protect himself at the expense of others or not - but he chooses the ultimate sacrifice – his life.
The play isn’t only relevant to 17th century America. The Crucible was written by Arthur Miller as an attack on the communist witch-hunts of the McCarthy period in America in the fifties. Arthur Miler saw many similarities between 1950s American “McCarthyism” and the 1692 witch-hunts, such as the completely exaggerated fear of a common evil, the mass overreaction due to fear and suspicion, the distortion of truth to provide a common scapegoat and the completely ludicrous idea that if someone refused to confess it was a sign of guilt.
In the program of a theatre production of another of Arthur Miller’s plays ‘A View From The Bridge’ Joanna McMeikan says of the hopeful who sough a brave new world in twentieth-century America ‘Since its birth, the United Sates has been proclaimed a classless and unified nation. The Statue of Liberty and the ‘golden door’ of the New York harbour embody the ideal of a country open-armed and welcoming; a comfort and haven to the ‘huddled masses’ and the ‘tempest-tossed’; a beacon of light to the dispossessed…By the early 1950s, anti-communism in America had reached outrageous proportions, and had almost become synonymous with the name of Senator Joseph R McCarthy of Wisconsin…Fanatically waging war on anyone who might have been ever vaguely connect with anything resembling communism – and accusing many innocents of the same…In other words, they sold out their neighbour to buy themselves a good game.’ That is exactly what happened to Salem – by the girls, the court, Thomas Puttnam, Parris. The full extent of both events cannot be fully rectified but both caused harm and devastation in many ways – innocent souls terrorised for example.
Many Americans in the 1950s were pressurised into turning informer, betraying their associates and erstwhile friends. Moreover, in 1950, America enforced what it said was ‘the most rigorous system of security and intelligence investigations in the history of America.’ The same happens in The Crucible but obviously on not such a wide scale – just a local town.
Arthur Miller couldn’t write a direct attack on McCarthyism as he would have been condemning the work of Americans and would surely have been discovered to be against them. Although after he had written The Crucible and won the Antoinette Perry and the Donaldson Prizes, he incited the enmity of the House Committee of the Un-American Activities. In 1957 Miller was fined and given a suspended 30-day sentence for contempt of Congress, for refusing to reveal names of those at communist meetings with him in 1947 but a year later in 1958 his conviction was quashed by the Supreme Court.
The play is relevant to any society destroyed by fear, suspicion, paranoia and accusation – other societies where something similar has happened include East Germany under communism after World War 2, Afghanistan under the Taliban and China under the Cultural Revolution when the Red Guards would decry people for being bourgeois reactionaries.
In conclusion I think that the ideas of fear and suspicion appear throughout the play. Initially the suspicion starts on a small scale but gradually develops and destroys the community. The fear of the devil at the beginning extends and includes fear of others and neighbours but when the court comes into action the community are also afraid of the court. All the fears and suspicion mounts up and the community is thrown into turmoil.
