The crucible

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.The Crucible

Show how Miller presents the character of Abigail Williams in The Crucible. Does he allow the audience to feel any sympathy for her?

The Crucible by Arthur Miller is set in Salem, Massachusetts in the year 1692. The Crucible is based on real events, where over 200 people were accused of witchcraft and 20 were killed. Miller has changed the age of the main character Abigail Williams by 5 years, making her 17 years old. I think he changed her age because the audience may find it hard to believe that a 12 year old could be so manipulative and be so malice.

Abigail in real life was said to have turned up in Boston as a prostitute, but no one can be sure of this, this also may have changed Miller’s views of Abigail.

Miller presents Abigail as a scared girl as she enters the room, but he also says she is ‘a strikingly beautiful girl’, he also says that ‘an orphan, with an endless capacity for dissembling’, the audience that read the book would then expect her to lie a great deal. In her conversation with Paris she lies 9 times and shifts the blame on to Tituba, she does this because he is the minister and if he found out what she was doing he would have her hanged. In this scene Abigail makes her first accusation against Elizabeth Proctor of lying (which is a sin) and also accuses Elizabeth of treating her like a slave.

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Abigail is caught in a lie when Mrs Putnam says that they were conjuring spirits because she sent her daughter Ruth to contact her 7 deceased babies to find out who killed them, Abigail said that they didn’t do any conjuring at all. When Abigail is caught she blames it on Tituba and Ruth, if she was conjuring spirits she would have been hanged.

Miller portrays Abby as vicious and focused, she says to the other girls ‘let either of you breathe a word, or the edge of a word, about the other thing, and I come to ...

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