“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. ”(Roosevelt). The Crucible by Arthur Miller is a historical fiction about how hysteria and groupthink can have drastic consequences. It follows the Salem witch trials and the events that led to 19 people being convicted of witchcraft and subsequently killed. The most important subject in The Crucible is how fear can affect decisions.
During the late 1600’s, numerous accusations of witchcraft were spreading throughout the New England colonies, primarily focusing in Salem Village, Massachusetts. Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible”, paints a very descriptive image of the several different facets of guile and deception that were instituted in “The Crucible.” In contrast, Miller focuses on one utmost theme, hysteria. Clinical mass hysteria describes the spread of a psychologically-manifested illness.
In this world, it is not the gentle rain that people will listen to, but thunder and lightning. The storm is what catches people’s attention, and it is the storm that is used by individuals to make others look at them. In my opinion, hysteria is a man-made storm prevalent throughout all of human history. People will use this hysteria for two major reasons, to gain power in the world, or to create change in it.
The last, but not least example of why mass hysteria takes over this town is when at the end of act two John Proctor said, “We are what we always were in Salem, but now the little crazy children are jangling the keys of the kingdom, and common vengeance writes the law!” this quote shows that most of the things that are happening are because of vengeance, people are accusing people that no one likes in town in order to become powerful in the town, or to get rid of that people. Mass hysteria conducts people to believe that all people that is being accused are witches without even proving it or listening to what they say in their defense. for this reason hysteria caused the death of many innocent people, just because they were unfairly accused
“The Crucible” In “The Crucible” by Arthur Miller, the play reflected the “Red Scar” in early 1953 to 1950s which it dedicated the play as against liberalism and socialism. John Proctor and Abigail Williams could potentially end the hysteria by standing against the trial. Americans also became afraid of immigrants during the Red Scar, which created fear. They could have also avoided the affair and admitted their sins during the trial. I also believe they both admitted that the accusations were made about innocent people.
First, in The Crucible it displays hysteria in many different ways, and was a major factor in the numerous accusations of witchcraft. Hysteria’s role in The Crucible was tearing the community apart, and causing neighbors to turn on each other and stab each other in the back. In the beginning not every character falls into mass hysteria , but it ended up spreading throughout the whole community. It first started when Betty was in a coma.
In The Crucible -a play based on the catastrophic Salem Witch Trials in 1962- Arthur Miller, a famous playwright, uses a sarcastic tone to vilify hysteria to mock McCarthyism. When Miller went to Massachusetts, he believed that “there was something of the… whole village… whose imagination was captured by a vision of something that wasn’t there.” (Miller 1) People during the Red Scare started to see things that was not there because of hysteria and started accusing others that they were communists. The same things happened during the witch trials: “Why do you come here bird? Oh, Mary, this is a black art to change your shape.”
On September 11th, 2001, a terrorist group attacked the United States by crashing commercial jet planes into the twin towers in New York City, and The Pentagon in Virginia. The terrorist group was an islamic extremist group called al-Qaeda. Since 9/11, ¨Anti-Muslim hate crimes are approximately five times more frequent than they were before 2001, according to the FBI¨ (Fruman and Sakuma n.pag.). This profiling has similarities to the Salem Witch Trials in the thought that trauma caused a sense of hysteria. Individuals in The Crucible by Arthur Miller, feared that witches inhabited Salem's deeply religious community.
The Crucible portrays society’s tendency to react illogically when frightened, and this fear is often manipulated by demagogues, thus, The Crucible often goes hand in hand with Politics of Terror. This concept is nothing new to this day and age and certainly wasn’t to Arthur Miller, as he explained that ‘The Crucible was an act of desperation’ (Miller, 1996)
As to yet another explanation for the hysteria, Cawthorne points out one of the theories claiming that in Europe and America there spread a kind of fungus whose activity was similar to some hallucinogenic substances. People who ate it, passed into a state of hallucinations, unconsciously giving themselves up to behaviour that awoke suspiciousness among the other villagers (1). Maple states that in 1946 a doctor, Letitia Fairfield, analysed the data from the old witch trials and diagnosed the complaints from which people accused of witchery suffered. The identified diseases, such as cerebral haemorrhage, malaria, rheumatic fever, gangrene, a disease of rye, etc., and the demeanour they brought on, could not be comprehended by primitive medicine and thus was put down to witchcraft (190-191).
A prince revels in wealth, listens to an orchestra of music, gorges on food, and barks at servants; what else could he possibly need? Outside of his lavish quarters, the red death devastates the country. Everywhere, people were bleeding profusely through their pores, along with this, the people were plagued by fevers and seizures. Puss and blood was always in the line of one's sight. No one was safe except for Prince Prospero, cowering in his castle, refusing to help his dying kingdom.
In the Crucible, fear, hysteria, and revenge are the most important elements where fear spreads around the whole village. Hysteria involving witchcraft would end up with many innocent people killed. With many false accusations of a long held grudge with another villager would kill others they would have problems with. Revenge would later involve the slaughter of another bad blood of another villager. “God help me, I lusted, and there is a promise in such sweat.
Born on December 27, 1571 in Weil der Stadt, Württemberg, Johannes Kepler wasn’t your first pick as a genius. A sickly child, Kepler didn’t look like the next mathematician or astronomer, but with an IQ of about 175, he became just that! After his intelligence was revealed, he obtained a scholarship to the University of Tübingen. He studied Copernicus and his theories, and it was there at the university where he found his love for astronomy. Later on, Kepler taught math, became a mathematician and astronomer, wrote multiple books, and devised multiple theories and ideas.
Brook Mills Mrs. Brown English 10 11/03/15 Many individuals of Salem have to deal with everyday hysteria with many people accused of being a witch and being executed. Other than Abigail, three characters who are to blame for the hysteria in The Crucible are Judge Danforth, John Proctor, and Mary Warren. A character that contributed to the hysteria in The Crucible was Judge Danforth. He contributed to the hysteria because he sent men and women to be executed for no reason.
Hysteria in Salem The Crucible is a play written by American author, Arthur Miller, in 1953. It is a somewhat fictional play about the Salem Witch Trials. Miller wrote it as an allegory to the Red Scare, the promotion of fear of a potential rise of communism. Miller himself was blacklisted for refusing to testify in front of the HUAC, a committee that was created to investigate any person who might be a communist.
