Mary Warren and the other girls all followed what they thought was right to do because Abigail made them believe that it was, Mary did start to believe in herself and realise that what the girls were doing was wrong but she wasn’t strong enough or independent enough to follow through her accusations about what Abigail was doing. Abigail seems not to know the difference between right and wrong. At one point she did apologise but by then it was too late, she broke many of the ten commandments and so didn’t see the point in going back on her words as she had already sinned. If she had known the difference between right and wrong then she would have told the truth from the beginning and none of this would have happened and no one would have died. At one point Abigail also claims to be doing God’s work, this is ironic as she is in fact doing the exact opposite and doing the work of the Devil. In one way you could accuse her of being a murderer as she was responsible for the deaths of many innocent people.
Reverend Parris, Abigail’s uncle, also had problems with the concepts of right and wrong. Being the minister the people of Salem should be able to look up to him but he is more interested in material things like the amount of money he gets paid and his house. At the beginning of the play he’s worrying about himself when his daughter was lying in bed unable to do anything.
Hale had strong moral values at the beginning of the story and did everything by his books, which were “weighted with authority.” He was sure he was right about the devil being present in Salem and so did everything he could to find out who was guilty of witchcraft. By the end of the story Hale has realised how wrong he had been but by this time it was too late, people had already hung for what him and Danforth had said, this shows how strong his morals were again at the end of the play, even though he shouldn’t have lied he did the right thing in order to save any more people from death. Danforth was the combined authority of church and state, it appears that he’s afraid of correcting himself and admitting when he’s made a mistake because it would undermine the authority of the court. This is an example of how he doesn’t want to hurt his pride, which is one of the seven deadly sins. By the end of the story, the audience can clearly see that Danforth is now only convicting people to give himself the feeling that something was wrong in the first place and that he didn’t kill all those people for no reason.
The language used in the book also represents the importance of religion. The characters regularly refer to the Bible when simply talking in conversation, there are often remarks like, “God be praised”, used when characters are happy, or talk of hell and the devil when something goes wrong. As all of the people in Salem know the Bible very well they use stories out of it in reference to their current situations. Hale, who has come to Salem only to try and solve the problems cause by Abigail and her friends, talks of the books he uses and the knowledge he has as “the very crowns of the holy law”. “I have gone this three months like our lord into the wilderness”, Hale shows here how, like Jesus, he’s had a lot to cope with and a lot to think about. This is also a chance for him to show off his knowledge of the Bible and in some way prove that he is completely dedicated to his religion.
Elizabeth Proctor also manages to turn the story of Moses and the Israelites into a current situation, she knows how Abigail influences the other girls’ minds and “where she walks, the crowd will part like the sea of Israel”.
The first names of the characters in the play and others who are mentioned are taken from the Bible. This was usual in this time, giving someone a name, which will give them a kind of role model, or someone to look up to. If they acted like the people they were named after they would have a good life and be happy. Names such as Ezekiel, Isaac and Susannah are taken from the Old Testament and names like John, Martha and Elizabeth are lifted from the New Testament.
In the first scene of the play, set in Betty’s bedroom, there is very little light coming in through the small window on the far side of the room, this represents how there is only a very small amount of goodness in Salem at this time. There are only a few people who are truly practicing the religion as it should be done, the rest have either broke one of the Ten Commandments or one of the seven deadly sins. The people who have sinned are those represented by the almost complete darkness filling the rest of the room, dark being related to the Devil and his work. The room is almost like a small version of Salem, both are basic and dull and lack any form of excitement. Towards the end of this act there are a lot of people all crammed into this one room, it makes it seem a lot smaller and a lot more frantic, the lack of goodness to do with the fact that the girls are starting to point the finger at people as being witches when they’re just making it up. This is similar at the end of each act, tension mounts about lies or something gets found out, this is all connected to how the devil seems to be taking over in Salem. The idea of the crucible bubbling away and then turning into a fiery blaze, just like Hell.
There are ironic situations in the play where the audience know something that some of the characters on stage don’t. When Proctor’s being questioned about whether he knows the 10 commandments or not, it’s ironic how he will say all but adultery because he doesn’t want to admit that adultery is a sin. Even though he has broken one of the Ten Commandments, he’s obviously very ashamed of it. Also, we know that Mary Warren stuck the needle in the poppet she gave to Elizabeth for safe keeping, but Abigail played on the fact she saw her put it there and decided to try and get Elizabeth into trouble for it. The judges think that this is an act of witchery so they arrest Elizabeth, not knowing that Elizabeth really is telling the truth. When John and Abigail are in court and John confesses to have “known” Abigail, we know that he has confessed but when Elizabeth comes in she wants to save her husband from the humiliation of breaking one of the Ten Commandments and so tells the judge a lie, this causes both her and John to end up imprisoned and in the long run is the evidence that killed John.
The play is ended with the sun coming back through onto the people of Salem, showing how after all of the executions, God has finally been brought back into the town and the Devil has gone.
It was hard for the people of Salem to fit in work, God and have time to themselves as well. Religion was obviously the main factor in their lives, but work was starting to take over, as people were becoming more greedy, power hungry, lazy and sick of religion on such a scale. Their lifestyle was a very basic one, and didn’t have too many good points, but the Salem townsfolk show how people had started to do what they wanted more, Proctor had an affair and Abi and the girls went dancing in the woods. The religion was meant to be what people’s lives were revolved around and it mostly was, but it seemed that the more power you had in the community the more of a religious front you would have on. You could say that the people in Salem that were truly religious stayed out of the witch trials and all the controversy that surrounded them. Work came second to religion even though work was so hard in this time. Land lust was a problem because in order to make anything out of your land you needed as much of it as possible, this led to many disputes between the people of Salem. You couldn’t work on a Sunday, this is a tradition that was still practiced until recently, one of the characters that did work on a Sunday though was Proctor. It is obvious that Proctor doesn’t enjoy to “labour the earth from dawn of day to blink of night”, but it had to be done to make money to support his family. Proctor didn’t go to church because he didn’t agree with Parris’ preaching methods and didn’t like the way that the sermons were about the badness of the Devil and not the goodness of God. Therefore he spent his Sundays away from the church to try and make the point that Parris’ preaching technique wasn’t at all what it should have been. Unfortunately at this time there had been people appointed to see who were working on the Sabbath and who wasn’t in church and Hale pointed out to Proctor when he spoke to him that he hadn’t been to church “twenty six time in seventeen month”, judging that each month there are at least four Sundays then this would mean that out of seventeen months John Proctor had missed nearly seven months worth of going to Church, not at all a good thing.
Overall it has been shown that religion might seem like it is the integral part of Salem life but the people living there are really not following the commandments. This ends up costing many innocent people their lives and is very selfish. The idea of moving to Salem purely so they could practice their religion freely seems ironic when all they did when they got there was break the commandments, commit the deadly sins and go completely against the words of the bible. Although there are a small minority that are completely Christian and do the right thing throughout the play it is clearly shown that the majority of the townsfolk are selfish, and greedy. Unfortunately the people who were completely innocent and who stuck to all of the commandments were the ones who got picked upon as being a witch and therefore were killed. But if looking for someone from outside the community to blame then there would not be one, the only people that can be blamed are the villagers themselves and the people of the court.
