Effects Of Hysteria In The Crucible

When a community gets so caught up and engulfed in the hysteria surrounding them they will be ravaged and ripped apart. In the Crucible Arthur Miller shows the effects of terror on the town of Salem Massachusetts by showing the role that hysteria has in deconstructing a person's common sense and ability to recognize what is true and what is a lie. The town of Salem is entirely consumed by the effects of hysteria surrounding witchcraft. Hysteria put a fog over their eyes and had the townspeople and the court believing that their neighbors, the people they have known their whole lives, were capable of witchcraft. Capable of casting their pure and devout souls into the night. People were in cohorts with the devil and were killing each other's

Many others in Salem use the chaos of the witch trials to their advantage. The Putnams wish to have the most land in Salem. When someone is tried for witchcraft and hanged, they must forfeit their land. “There is none but [the] Putnam[s] with the coin to buy such [land]”. Since the Putnams were the only ones with the money to buy the forfeited land, they started falsely accusing and thereby killing their neighbors for the land. When someone feels protected in the haze of this level of hysteria where what usually would be considered baseless accusations are now being taken as hard evidence, the neighbor can turn on neighbor, to exact revenge, or to play out petty jealousy. In the film Trumbo, Dalton Trumbo was sold out for being a communist by Edward G. Robinson, a man he thought to be his best friend, a man “he loves’ just so that Edward could resume his acting career. This goes to show that when people are backed by others who are being controlled by hysteria they will say and do whatever they please to benefit themselves because their actions no longer have consequences that matter to

Dalton Trumbo And the rest of the Hollywood Ten had their lives flipped upside down when the United States Government started going after anyone who was, has been or was suspected to be a communist. The second red scare was running wild through America and in its path formed McCarthyism, “the practice of making unfair allegations or using unfair investigative techniques, especially in order to restrict dissent or political criticism”. While McCarthyism ran rampant like a mad dog through the United States there were aggressive and unjust hearings taking place across America for those who had any ties to communism. The Hollywood Ten and Dalton Trumbo were all named as communists and during their trials were charged with contempt of court. The communist hysteria was running wild. The government had to charge them with whatever they could so it could look like they were fighting the communists. It didn't matter who was right and who was wrong it only mattered that the communists were being fought and the Americans were winning the war they concocted in their head. Both texts show their respective characters fighting in preventable mind wars that are being fueled by the fear and hatred created by the hysteria surrounding either communism or witchcraft. In both texts, the effects of Hysteria