Elizabeth's Effect In The Crucible By Arthur Miller

Small things can create major effects In Arther Miller's play, the Crucible, he demonstrates how the reader feels about the Salem witch trials through his choice of characters and their interactions. Throughout the book, he chooses what language to capture Elizabeth, how he wants her to seem. At the beginning of the book he uses words such as sickly to portray how Elizabeth may have seen through John Proctor's eyes. The author portrays Elizabeth at the beginning of the play as a cold and lying woman by having Abigail say that she was “a bitter woman, a lying, cold, sniveling woman”(Miller, Act 1, pg.6). The author gives this information as soon as possible to the readers to show them why John Proctor would possibly cheat on his wife for Abigail.

This plays into us realizing how she actually acts and interacts with other characters. We slowly learn that she does not fully seem to know what we already know about her. We would have to trust the author about how she was actually being presented. If she was as sick as she seemed it would have been months before we saw her, we know this because John refuses to cheat on his wife again for the child named Abigail. Later in the book, the author shows us that it's not just Abigail that thinks of Elizabeth as a person that has no heart and does not care about anything. This is shown when John Proctor is arguing with Elizabeth about what John is doing wrong. He says “it's winter here yet”(Miller, Act 2, pg.7). This means that she was not showing any compassion towards John and he uses this as an excuse why he would possibly cheat on her. John plays a very big role in this argument because he wants to be in control of certain things, and this is one of them. He wants to be right and won't accept Elizabeth's views, such as cheating on her just because she was sick and was not the most

This is shown in the book by constantly holding John to his previous mistakes and constantly insisting to him that he must tell the village that the girls are full of it. Once again she is shot down instantly by John, he takes over her power yet again by saying “Oh, Elizabeth, your justice would freeze beer”(Miller, Act 2, pg.9). She is constantly trying to get power to persuade people into doing things that are right, but she is never allowed to get what she thinks she deserves. The author plays little of a part in the first scenes that change Elizabeth's life dramatically. The girls have been going through the townspeople and convicting people of practicing the dark arts, and Abigail thinks it's finally time to test out how powerful they are. To test this, they decide to take on Elizabeth even though she has been seen as a halfway decent person. Even though she would be hard to take down, Abigail will try to do anything to take away John from her grip. Like some accusations, the people don't necessarily agree with the statement until they are persuaded to believe