The Power of Manipulation: The Dark Side of This Common Word Have you ever felt like you were being controlled or used? Have you ever felt like you were being lied to for someone to get what they want? Maybe you didn’t even realize it was happening. If you have ever found yourself in this situation, you were probably being manipulated. Manipulation is the act of controlling or influencing a person or situation cleverly, unfairly, or unscrupulously. Manipulation is shown and demonstrated numerous times throughout The Crucible. Throughout the play, it is displayed between Abigail and nearly everyone involved in the Salem witch trials by threatening her friends and convincing people of deadly apparitions that aren’t there. Abigail manipulated the entire town of Salem to get rid of people she didn’t like. The first thing she did was manipulate her friends into not talking about how she drank blood. During Act Ⅰ of The Crucible, Abigail says, “Let either of you breathe a word, or the edge of a word, about the other things, and I will come to you in the black of some terrible …show more content…
When John Proctor and Mary Warren were trying to prove that the girls are lying Abigail starts crying out about a bird flying around the top of the courtroom. Abigail yells, “Why—? She gulps. Why do you come, yellow bird (Miller, PG#)? The only person she is not fooling is John Proctor. He knows that she is bluffing as he says, “They're pretending, Mr. Danforth (Miller, PG#)! We also see that she manipulates the other little girls into mirroring her actions. Anything that Mary Warren said, Abigail, repeated. The girls soon caught on and did the same. Once Abigail had the girls under her belt, all she needed was Mary Warren. When Mary Warren knew there was no way to convince Danforth, she turned on John Proctor and mimicked Abigail's every move. Abigail had once Again manipulated people to get her way and get her