Imagine being hanged. Your body involuntarily pushed from a stoop, suspended by the rope wrapped suffocatingly around your neck. Imagine being ripped away from your family. Knowing you’re never going to see your children grow up. Knowing this is all because you wanted to keep your reputation alive and to keep your name from being tarnished. In the times of The Crucible written by Arthur Miller, you wouldn’t have to imagine – it would be your reality. The Crucible is a play written in 1953 about the Salem witch trials. The Salem witch trials began in 1692, subsequent to a group of young girls in Salem, Massachusetts claiming to have been possessed by the devil. Accusing several innocent women of witchcraft, caused hysteria to spread throughout the colony. A special court was assembled to hear the cases. …show more content…
Kids that have grown up together learn to fear one another. People start to accuse those they know best of witchcraft and devil worship. A wave of mass hysteria had washed over Salem – a town now more subjected to fear than to logic or reason. Despite some accusing others of witchcraft for personal gain, most were genuinely a part of the town’s collective hysteria. If your town seems to be “harboring the devil”, then to blame someone for witchery based upon them selling you a sick pig becomes something to set yourself away from being accused yourself; it becomes a way to serve religious justice. “…Now he goes to court and claims that from that day to this he cannot keep a pig alive for more than four weeks because my Martha bewitch them with her books!” The Crucible shows how an intense passion for religion can lead to mass hysteria and the forgoing of social and judicial justice and