He is always battling it out with others in Salem, he has problems with Abigail in terms of their previous affairs (“Do you look for a whippin’?” p19); he has problems with Elizabeth over their marriage (“You will not judge me more Elizabeth.” P45); he despises Hale to begin with in the play (“*flushed with resentment but trying to smile* What’s your suspicion Mr Hale?” p54); he even has personal conflictions with himself (“I’ll cut off my hand before I ever reach for you again.” P18).
His biggest confliction is probably with Danforth, the judge of the high court during Act Three. He stands up to Danforth and as usual, stirs up trouble like the confrontational person he is:
“I say – I say God is dead!”
“I have seen the boot of Lucifer, I see his filthy face! And it is my face, and yours Danforth!”
Not only has he said something extremely controversial in front of everyone in the court, he has also made a mockery of Danforth’s name by implying that Danforth is the devil himself. From the people’s point of view on stage – this would be an incredibly insane thing for someone to do. But for someone like Proctor, it somehow appeared normal.
Alongside his iconoclastic figure, Proctor also plays a choric role in the story. He is the man who possesses the beliefs of a modern person; he uses a rational method of thinking and is generally the type of person who gets along with the audience despite his conflict with others on stage.
The play is originally set in 1692 and is first produced in 1953, this means that there is a great variation in the way people would think between these two time periods. Unlike others in this play, Proctor is a voice of reason, sanity and common sense. A good example of his logical thinking style comes on page 56 when the people are discussing the confessions of those accused of witchcraft:
“And why not confess, if they must hand for denyin’ it? There are them that will swear to anything before they’ll hang; have you ever thought of that?” (p56)
Even though his ‘Choric Role’ and ‘Public Enemy’ characteristics appear the opposite of each other, if we examine it closely, each characteristic is in fact the cause of the other.
The village of Salem is one of utter chaos and disorder. The most primitive forms of crime punishment are used and people are often condemned guilty without any feasible proof. The strength of authority had even reached the stage whereby the court was able to put a woman as innocent as Rebecca Nurse down to death simply because she failed to confess to witchcraft.
It was insane, by the end of Act Three; it seemed apparent that anyone accused had no choice but to either confess to witchcraft and live a damned life or refuse to confess and be hanged at dawn. From the point of view of the audience, we must be thinking:
“Is this insane? So basically you’re telling me if you confess to witchcraft, you’re let off but if you don’t admit you’re wrong you get hanged?”
This is what causes Proctor to bear the Choric Role in the story as he is the one who stands up against all of this insanity. He is the only one who had the valour to stand up and speak out against this corrupt court and that is what makes ‘us’, the audience sympathise with him and generally have a positive opinion of him as we too despise this court.
There is also a sense of sympathy we feel for Proctor when it comes to his marriage with Elizabeth. Looking on page 42, we can tell that Proctor is trying his hardest to please her (eg. Complimenting her with the seasoning of the rabbit when he blatantly thinks it’s badly seasoned). He had already apologised for his previous sins and had tried to make it up to her in every possible way. Yet for some reason, Elizabeth just refused to accept his genuine apology and continued to give him the cold shoulder.
“Proctor: I think you’re sad again. Are you?
Elizabeth: You come so late I thought you’d gone to Salem…” (p43)
Through these stage directions that Proctor follows, the audience can see that he has changed from what he previously was and is in fact genuinely apologetic for what he has done (concerning his affair with Abigail). But it just seems that in these opening stages of the play – Elizabeth is showing no intentions of letting him get away with it and constantly rubs it in:
“Proctor: You doubt me yet?
Elizabeth: John, if it were not Abigail that you must go to hurt, would you falter now? I think not.
Proctor: Now look you –
Elizabeth: I see what I see John.” (p45)
Besides his atmosphere-changing attributes, there is another thing that Proctor contributes to this play and that is the ability to give the crowd an opportunity to interact with the characters on stage. Through Proctor’s choric role, the audience are able to communicate their own thoughts and opinions to others in Salem.
Due to the distinct resemblance in beliefs, a person watching the crucible would be able to imagine that they are Proctor on stage, acting out the play and taking part in a trial of the 17th century. Equipped with this ability, the audience are inevitably insured to bear a higher level of interest towards what awaits in the mysterious and twisted plot.
Since the audience sympathises with Proctor, it adds to the tragic effect of the ending. The emphasis upon it being a ‘tragedy’ is subtle yet the factors among it are probably strong enough to categorise it as what is known as a ‘Shakespearean Style Tragedy’. Even Arthur Miller himself stated that this was in fact his intention when writing this play:
“Every tragedy is the story of how the birds come home to roost. You do something, and then you try to undo it and it won’t undo; it keeps pursuing you until it catches up to you.”
This is basically what happens to Proctor in this story. Out of the goodness of his own heart, he attempts to save his wife Elizabeth from the rope. However, he is instead inadvertently dragged into the situation and placed upon the grand podium himself; thus finding himself suspended in a state of affairs which turn out to be both uncertain and inescapable.
Aside from the inescapable factor, an ordinary tragedy also tells the story of a fall from a great height. Even though Proctor is only a mere salesman, he still has a family of his own. He has a loving wife (who has finally accepted his apology towards the end of the play) and he also has an upcoming child that he shall leave behind should he die.
“Proctor: The child?
Elizabeth: It grows.
Elizabeth: You have been tortured?
Proctor: Aye, they come for my life now. (p107)”
Proctor has always fought for what he believed in; protesting against the corrupt court that exists in Salem. Throughout the play, there is a constant ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factor involved in it, like a pendulum swinging. The favour always seems to swing in favour of the court yet every now and then, Proctor adds shards of hope to this downward spiral.
Each time hope is added, a contribution to this ‘tragic’ effect has been made. It gives the audience an impression that Proctor has fought so hard and come so close to achieving his final goal, yet in the end; he was just another victim. Towards the end of the play, Proctor was forced to make a decision which would eventually decide his fate.
His choice was to either:
- Lie and confess to witchcraft: Being the family man, staying alive; yet doing this would blacken the reputation of others.
- Tell the truth and refuse to confess: His name is kept and he dies an honourable death.
In the end, we find that he decides to pick the latter, to die honourably keeping his dignity. This is what gives the tragedy its finishing touches. Proctor had been given the opportunity to escape the inescapable but was in fact too egoistic to swallow his own pride. Even though he did what a typical hero of a play would have done, his course of action was not necessarily rational.
Because Proctor faced the rope, the sole motivator of protest against the court had been killed. All possibilities and glimpses of hope that Proctor had previously added had been destroyed along with him, thus creating a pessimistic mood towards the end of the play. They tried hard but the court had still suppressed all forms of resistance that stood against them.
Therefore the audience is inclined to believe that the court shall continue its reign of terror upon Salem and further claim the lives of innocent people. From our point of view the court has killed our choric role and in turn has also dismissed the ideas the audience has given to the court.
This makes both Proctor and the audience feel like the losers. It feels like he came so close, yet in the end was shot down from the height he spent so long reaching up to. As horrid as the ending was, this was no less than what Arthur Miller had intended to create. For this play was more than just a fictional story, it held a far deeper metaphor within it.
If we examine the time period when this play was written, we find that there was a similar style of social disorder in the 1950s in America. During this era, there was an American senator known as Joseph McCarthy who fought a battle against the ‘communists’ that existed in the country.
“This is a time when all the world is split into two vast, increasing hostile armed camps… we are engaged in a final, all-out battle between communistic atheism and Christianity.”
He believed that the world had been divided into two groups – Communists and Christians.
“As one of our outstanding historical figures once said: When a great democracy is destroyed, it will not be because of enemies from without, but rather because of enemies from within.”
Along with this, he also suggested that America’s democratic policy was being broken down by enemies who didn’t reside in other countries but within the USA itself. He claimed that the only way to counter act this problem was to start a witch hunt to destroy all communists that were in the country.
He was almost saying: ‘You are guilty until proven innocent, you are either with us or against us and those who are against us shall have their brains fried on the electric chair. I am right and you are wrong for I am the great Senator McCarthy and you’re just some random loser!’
“Gradually, over weeks, a living connection between myself and Salem, and between Salem and Washington, was made in my mind.” ~Arthur Miller
The Crucible is a blatant attack on McCarthyism but because it is cleverly written out as a metaphor, it is subtle enough to allow it to appeal to a wider audience and also prevent Arthur Miller from facing any legal charges. The change in time scale also allows the play to be more creative and engaging.
This play shows anyone who sees it just how primitive this McCarthy’s ideas were, it tells people that this demagogue was using inhumane policies of many years ago. It also emphasised how segregated and close-minded America was from the rest of the world and this was a test to the American people to see if they were aware of the state their country was in. It was a warning of what was going on. That’s what is so powerful about this play, what goes on within it not only appeals to that time scale inside but also repeats in modern times.
Even today, we can see similarities between Salem and our modern world. For example, if we were to examine George W. Bush’s speech concerning the war on terror:
“I will put every nation on notice that these duties involve more than sympathy or words. No nation can be neutral in this conflict, because no civilized nation can be secure in a world threatened by terror.
You are either with us or against us in the fight against terror.”
We can suddenly see a direct resemblance with a certain character in the play:
“But you must understand sir, that a person is either with this court or he must be counted against it, there be no road between.” ~ Danforth
This is the point where Proctor comes into this, since he is the man who was placed in the play by Arthur Miller in order to protest against all of this injustice. He is the one that Arthur Miller is using as the ‘vehicle’ for social criticism. Due to the fact that he plays the choric role that the crowd favour, and since Danforth resembles the court/senate that the crowd dislike, it automatically causes the crowd to switch perspective and see what is going on from Miller/ Proctor’s point of view. Proctor is almost the character that Arthur Miller puts inside the play as a representation of himself. Although their personalities may be different, Miller and Proctor both share the same thoughts and this itself is another metaphor concerning what the play stands for.
As a summary, there are four main things that Proctor contributes to this play:
- Conflict: through his dominant personality and iconoclastic figure.
- A higher level of involvement concerning the crowd: via his Choric Role.
- Tragic Effect: as he adds hope to a lost cause and climbs up to fall back down.
- Vehicle of protest against social disorder: by expressing Miller’s thoughts.
Arthur Miller put his own heart and soul into the character of John Proctor and as a result placed himself and the audience into the play. Thus, he has expressed his opinions to the crowd and given them an underlying habit of thought concerning the social disorder in modern society. Without a character like Proctor in this play, Arthur Miller would have had a harder time creating drama and conflict. It would have been difficult to raise interests and affairs concerning the audience and there would have been no way to reach such a climatic ending. As said before, Proctor is the key contributor to the striking effectiveness of this story and without some to play a role like this, a play is just not the same.