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Universal Themes In The Crucible By Arthur Miller

735 Words3 Pages
“The Crucible by Author Miller is a fictional play that retells the historical event of the Salem Witch Trials that took place in a minute puritan village in Massachusetts in 1992. Miller fixates on the revelation of several girls and a slave, Tituba, dancing around in the woods endeavoring to conjure spirits from the dead. To avoid punishment for their demeanor, the girls started to accuse others of the same thing they were guilty of. This finger pointing game was very juvenile and they engendered a community in which everyone feared that everyone was a potential witch. The number of arrests increased and so did the distrust within the community. By the end of 1962 Salem court executed nineteen men and women. The themes Author Miller addressed in “The Crucible” are well thought out universal themes. A universal theme is a widely apperceived and recurring lesson or moral of a story. In a story, the events within the plot reinforce the overarching principle. This overarching principle is the theme. Two of the themes I mentally conceived stood out in “The Crucible” were hysteria and reputation.
Author Miller uses authentic life events from the Salem Witch Trials in 1692 to show that fear and suspicion are infectious and engender a mass hysteria that ravages public order and rationality. One example of this is the afflicted girls utilize the peoples fear of witches to get rid of people that they don’t like. The court also goes with the theme by utilizing the fear of being hung
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