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Hysteria The Crucible

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The Crucible by Arthur Miller is a historic play but more importantly is a social and psychological drama that takes place in a small puritan town in Salem Massachusetts. Many different themes find their way through this play but the most important theme is the danger of Hysteria, reputation, and Intolerance can destroy a town no matter the strength of the people in the town. As this play was written during the red scare during the cold war this play shows many aspects as McCarthyism which had similar event that the Salem witch trials had but with the red scare. Hysteria was a major factor in the many accusations of witchcraft that occurred throu out the play “The crucible”, the first example is when the young girls of the community of Salem, …show more content…

An example of this is salem is a puritan town this means that the church and the state are one, if you break a law in the church then you are also breaking a law in the state, also In Salem, everything and everyone belongs to either God or the devil; anything that is unlawful, is associated with satanic activity. An example of this is when ,Danforth says in Act III, “a person is either with this court or he must be counted against it.” which means that intolerance is playing a big part, because if you're not with them then you are a witch then you must be related with …show more content…

when all the girls start calling out people who they accused of being witches, they started using reputation on their side. When all the girls in the town hall start screaming at the same thing then they must not be lying because all those girls reputations are good and accurate and why would they be lying about it an example of this is when the girls started to accuse people of being a witch because they didn't have the best reputations throughout the town. An example of this is when someone accused rebecca nurse of being a witch because of goody putnam's had several of her babies die in the protection of rebecca nurse, so she was accused of being a witch because people thought that she had killed goody putnam's

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