Abigail is part of many dramatic moments throughout the play. She even creates many of them in order to achieve her own ends. She can be callously persuasive, coy and gentle, as we see when she is with Proctor. She is wide eyed and innocent with her judges and fierce and frightening with the girls and continually manipulative. She is an evil girl and yet we as the audience never really hate her, but we feel pity for her and we seem to understand the reason behind all her actions. She may be the character who drives much of the plot but it is her elders whom we are meant to despise; Parris, Putnam and Danforth.
At the start of Act One she is already at the centre of attention, almost from the beginning: when Parris interview her, she is able to deny it to him, but when the girls appear, more details emerge. Miller raises the tension here, but no more so than in Abigail’s speech. She says to little girls that if they say a word she will come to them “in the black of some terrible night and will bring a pointy reckoning that will shudder” them. It is from here that we realise she is not the innocent child she seemed to be.
We next see her with John Proctor in a very different mood. This seems playful enough to begin with, all she wants is “a soft word”, but we soon realise how serious Abigail is because she is “waitin for you every night”. By the time Hale arrives to examine Betty, Abigail seems to be in more difficulty with the religious authorities. It is here that Abigail attempts to blame everything on Tituba. The plan to use the witchcraft accusations against others has not really developed in her mind.
Only later on does she see how she might avoid punishment herself by naming other witches and the children are all too ready to follow her, leading to the extraordinary hysteria of the final moments of Act one where the girls start calling out names and Abigail wanting “the light of god, I want the sweet light of Jesus.”
Abigail does not reappear until Act three - the trial scene. It is at this point that Proctor introduces Mary Warren to tell the court that all of the accusations so far have been mere pretence, and for a while, it seems that Abigail will be uncovered to be a manipulative liar. Especially when she had stuck a needle through herself just to get Elizabeth accused of witchcraft.
When Danforth confronts Abigail; the speech is important because at this point he really does believe that she may have been lying to him. Immediately after this, there is another dramatic climax as Abigail proves too powerful even for Danforth to control. “Let you beware, Mr. Danforth”. And now she turns on Mary Warren. “I know not. A wind, a cold wind has come.”
This trickery indirectly forces Proctor into the plays most dramatic moment; he calls her a whore and confesses his adultery to the court. He has ruined his reputation in Salem and he has had to make this decision in order to persuade the court of Abigail’s reasons to manipulate the court as “she thinks to dance with me on my wife’s grave.”
Once again, Abigail is at the centre of attention and this scene is followed immediately by the trial of Elizabeth who is brought into the court-room in order to support or deny Proctors allegations. Again in this moment of drastic tensions, she attempts to support her husband by denying that he was ever intimate with Abigail and as a consequence Proctor is himself accused of attempting to overthrow the court and of being a servant of the Devil himself.
This act ends like the first with Abigail orchestrating another horrifying bout of hysteria as she sees the bird in the roof “the wings her wings are spreading” and conducts the little girls to persuade the court that Mary has lied. At this point Mary surrenders to Abigail and Proctor is consequently arrested.
Abigail is never seen again. We hear that she has run away with Mercy Lewis and thirty one pounds was stolen from her uncle Parris. In the screenplay, written by Miller, she asks him to run away with him but this scene is not in the play.
Her frustrated need to be loved and cared for in a community, which was always short of love and care and fierce in its religious demands, has brought chaos and death to the town of Salem, which is still remembered today. And yet although it is Abigail who is at the heart of most of the action of the play, Miller does not really appear to blame her for the events that took place. It is those men who should have known better; Danforth, Hale, Parris, Putnam and even Proctor, who must bear the moral responsibility for this tragedy.
