Comparing The Crucible And Witc Jealousy

During the 1600s, young girls in a village located in Massachusetts began accusing women for performing witchcraft. The result of these accusations led to hysteria and the hanging of many people throughout the village. The playwright, The Crucible, by Arthur Miller, and the novel, Witch Child, by Celia Rees, have both fictionalized the Salem Witch Trials. In The Crucible, the antagonist Abigail Williams is the source of conflict. She falsely accuses several village people of performing witchcraft, which resulted from her jealousy of her lover’s wife. While in Witch Child, Mary Newbury, the protagonist lives a life of deceitfulness, concealing her identity as a witch when she moves to Salem. The authors, Arthur Miller and Celia Rees in The Crucible and

Abigail loved John Proctor, a married man, in which her jealousy of his wife leads her to practice witchcraft. Abigail’s friend, Betty, accuses her of practicing witchcraft, “You did, you did! You drank a charm to kill John Proctor’s wife!” (Miller 18). Abigail's jealousy of wanting to be with John Proctor led to her accusations of witchcraft against innocent people in order to conceal her displays of witchcraft on John Proctor’s wife. Similarly, in the Witch Child, jealousy occurs amongst three young girls who desire a husband. They believe that Mary is capable of using witchcraft to have a husband, “‘Like your future husband,’ Hannah supplied. ‘And bind him to you, if you have the skill!’ . . . ‘That’s where you can help us’” (Rees 218). The girls were jealous of Mary’s friend Rebekah, who recently married, in which they felt Mary’s witchcraft was the root of the marriage. Their jealousy then turned into revenge by them accusing her of witchcraft because Mary refused to help them in order to not expose her true identity. Jealousy was displayed when women used witchcraft to obtain a