Hypocrisy By Arthur Miller And The Crucible By Nathaniel Hawthorne

Hypocrisy plagues the pages of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter as a result of the Puritans deceitful and conforming ways. Trials and rumors bring out the worst of the Puritans in The Crucible. While, in The Scarlet Letter, scandal and humiliation overcast the so called holiness of the Puritans. In the Puritan society, pride and selfishness would bring out one’s hypocritical ways if their reputation was at stake. In both The Scarlet Letter and The Crucible a leading male rests his guilt within the woman who is being accused and shunned even though they both played a role in the sin. For example, John Proctor in The Crucible tried to hide his adulterous affair until he eventually confessed: “Because

Proctor realized that his reputation was being blackened and the only way to save it was to confess. He would have rather been remembered as an honest man than to live as one with markings on his soul. Similarly, Dimmesdale in The Scarlet Letter also protects his reputation, Chillingworth notes this about the minister: “His spirit lacked the strength that could have borne up, as thine has been, beneath a burden like thy scarlet letter” (Hawthorne 213). Chillingworth had to bring Dimmesdale’s weakness to Hester’s attention. Dimmesdale could preach about dealing with sin and not doing it all day but could not deal with the repercussions himself. In addition, Dimmesdale also reveals the truth as it bottles up inside him and soon consumes him: “God… is merciful!... By

For example in The Crucible, Abigail points blame to Tituba to avoid being convicted: “Sometimes I wake and find myself standing in the open doorway and not a stitch on my body! I always hear her laughing in my sleep. I hear her singing her Barbados songs and tempting me with-…” (Miller 167). Abigail’s false accusation represents the lengths people would go to and the people they would betray, to avoid the harsh cruelty of being a sinner in the Puritan society of Salem. The fact that Tituba was not from there does not help her case as the Puritans were also extremely closed off to difference. In addition, Abigail claimed that she had devotion to the divine when we know she did not: “I want the light of God, I want the sweet love of Jesus...I go back to Jesus” (Miller 182). Abigail obviously had a devilish way about her as she tried to fraudulently accuse others of witchcraft. She professed her false love of God to gain the support of the people and defer her as a suspect. However, in The Scarlet Letter Hester accepts her sin: “Here, she said to herself, had been the scene of her guilt, and here should be the scene of her earthly punishment; and so, perchance, the torture of her daily shame would at length purge her soul, and work out another purity than that which she had lost; more saint-like, because the result of martyrdom” (Hawthorne 56).