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Witch Hunt In The Crucible

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There have been many different "witch hunts" that have happened since 1692, that have shaped our world. One of the most known is The Holocaust that happened during WWII. This is important because a large mass of innocent people were killed due to their race. Some may say it was just a part of war; however, it's much more than that. It’s the fact that one person didn’t like a certain group of people besides their own so; they felt like they had the right to take away their lives. In The Crucible, by Arthur Miller, he shows us four ingredients that create a mass hysteria. Those include fear, personal motives, unfair treatment of the accused, and accusers. These can all be related back to The Crucible, in the way in which each character experienced …show more content…

It is easy to point out when he explains in act one how Parris does not want anyone to "speak nothing of unnatural causes" (miller 9). As the play goes on we see why he wants no one to even bring up unnatural causes because he is afraid they will kick him out of Salem, for his daughter's involvement. During WWII a man by the name of Adolf Hitler, a German politician who was the leader of the Nazi Party held power in Germany. He thought there should only be one race in the world, a "superior" race, which was the Germanic race. The Nazi's started capturing Jewish people and others to take them to Death camps. At these camps the captured would sometimes sit up to two days, they didn’t want to keep them alive for long. The Germans were always coming up with new ideas to do a mass slaughtering quickly. An idea they came up with was the gas chambers. Many of the Jewish watched as friends and family were walked to the chambers, "people who were ill or crippled, old, and pregnant women, as well as children"(Gottfried 47) feared more because they knew they would be first. This relates back to the Crucible because Abigail and the girls pointed the finger at everyone else to take the blame off of them so they would not be hanged. Both have the same fear in common, death. Victims who are “living today [are] [in] constant fear of a new war or even a series of wars” (Roosevelt 1). Even though racial persecution is still happening today it is much less, however people still suffer and fear something similar will happen again. Surely the fear we see presented in Arthur Miller’s play models the fear we see in todays “witch

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In both The Crucible and in modern day witch hunts, witch hunts are caused out of fear or for personal gain. Jill Schonebelen wrote a research paper on Witchcraft allegations, refugee protection and human rights. Throughout this article, it mentions the persecution of witches today in communities around the globe, mentioning the flashbacks of similar strategies that were used in the past, doing different types of tortures. In Modern days, recent generations have abandoned wonderful traditions. Rather, recollecting others with distasteful memories such as witchcraft.

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The Crucible and the Japanese internment camps also have something in common, they both were caused by hysteria and greed. In both of these incidents, the people that were being accused were average citizens. The witches that were being accused were normal people whose only fault was not being liked by a fellow citizen. The accused Japanese were average American citizens like you and me; their only fault was

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Society as a whole seeks to satisfy themselves. This may be at the expense of their peers or individuals they are associated with. Arthur Miller brilliantly displays this dark side of humanity’s side in his play The Crucible. This play is based on the Salem witch trials in the early 1690s. During the Salem witch trials over two hundred people were accused of witchcraft and twenty were executed.

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There were a variety of Witch Hunts throughout history. From the Holocaust to the KKK, all of the Witch Hunts have something in common, for example genocide and humiliation of innocent people. Witch Hunts are related to the world because they can occur at anytime on small or large scale. For example 127,000 Us citizens form Japanese Decent, 1942 relocation of all of the Japanese Decent were forced to move to concentration camps and not only did the US put Japanese in camps but so did Canada, and Canada places 23,000 Canadians of Japanese decent to camp. The survivors of these camps were paid 20,000 each in reparations.

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In 1692, the year of the witch hunt in Salem, Massachusetts, fright, and vengeance were among the people. The people being an unforgiving group of people during the time were more prone to causing conflict than they were resolving it. In the historical fiction “The Crucible,” by Arthur Miller, many conflicts prevail in the plot of the story. Some of the many conflicts include Elizabeth Proctor and Abigail Williams, John Proctor and Reverend Parris, and Reverend Parris versus society. John Proctor has a burning dislike for Reverend Parris, for he won’t even let him baptize his last son.

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According to Wikipedia, A witch hunt is “a search for people labelled “witches” or evidence of witchcraft, often involving moral panic or mass hysteria.” Whereas, the definition of a modern day witch-hunt is “an intensive effort to discover and expose disloyalty, subversion, dishonesty, or the like, usually based on slight, doubtful, or irrelevant evidence.” Many theories come about when people think of the causes of witch hunt. Back in the day, witch-hunts were fueled by greed and fear, but also had a huge motivation from jealousy. Modern day witch-hunts are fueled by fear of the unknown.

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The Salem witch trials proved to be one of the most cruel and fear driven events to ever occur in history. Many innocent people were accused of witchcraft, and while some got out of the situation alive not everyone was as lucky. Arthur Miller the author of The Crucible conveys this horrific event in his book and demonstrates what fear can lead people to do. But the reason as to why Arthur Miller felt the need to write The Crucible in the first place was because the unfortunate reality that history seemed to have repeated itself again. In the article “Are You Now or Were You Ever”, Arthur Miller claims that the McCarthy era and the Salem witch trials were similar and he does this through his choice of diction, figurative language, and rhetorical questions.

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The Crucible Fear has effected much of history. Many of these events in history are very similar. One of the biggest examples in history would be The Holocaust. An example would be the Salem witch trails which were depicted in the book The Crucible by Arthur Miller. The Crucible and The Holocaust are related because one person was to blame for the mass hysteria, there was one person in power, fear was used to control the people and many people were wrongly punished.

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The Crucible by Arthur Miller is a play about what happened during the Salem Witch Trials. It gives insight about what people had to deal with in this situation and how they handled it. The trials were basically a big test which helped figuring out whether or not people were guilty of witchcraft. This is an example of what a crucible is. In our world today we still have crucibles and even though they are different than back then, they all relate to each other because of what influence they have on people.

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The Salem Witch Trials was an event caused by much more than a town full of “witches”. The small town in New England in 1962 faced one of the United States’ most disastrous mass genocides. A group of ten young girls accused roughly 200 people of making deals with the devil. Many of the accused were hanged at Proctor’s Ledge by Gallows Hill, while a few died in the jails waiting for their death sentence. The accusations were based almost entirely on spectral evidence, or evidence from the supernatural.

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Modern day witches get more dangerous and get more punishments then the witches in the past, modern day witches are terrorists while witches in the past are people like Abigail and her group of friends. The Crucible by Arthur Miller was published in 1953 and was written to try and inform the audience about what happened during the Salem Witch Trials and how it can affect present time and modern audiences with how big the impact of the trails were. The Crucible showed the way witches and people’s misconceptions can affect one civilization at that moment in time, like Salem, but that event caused a effect on modern day “witches” and how they are handled. The Salem Witch Trials affected modern society but it wasn’t the witches that were the biggest problem, it was everyone else. Modern day witches have been created by how people see muslims.

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The Crucible by Arthur Miller and Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne are two stories that are based on mass hysteria and public shaming. Both stories and their topics are what helped to shape America’s early identity. In The Crucible, the townsfolk accept and become active in the hysterical climate not only out of genuine religious piety but also because it gives them a chance to express repressed sentiments and to act on long-held grudges”. This shows that there is mass hysteria in the story based on the quotation and its explain why people have mass hysteria or why they do it. A group of teenage girls is discovered dancing naked in the woods by the town minister.

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Have you ever gotten blamed for something that you didn’t do or didn’t deserve? I have experienced many times in my life that I have gotten blamed for something I didn’t do or deserver. In the play, The Crucible, by Arthur Miller there are many times that witch hunts happen here are a few example of when they happen: when Abigail gets accused of drinking chicken blood, when Abigail and Proctor has an affair, and finally when Elizabeth and Mary were accused of putting the pin in the poppet. In the play, Abigail and many other people get accused of witch hunts.

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the Crucible Themes In Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible, the two main themes are, hysteria causes people to make harmful decisions and peer pressure is more influential than the pressure to do the right thing. These themes are intertwined and build off each other throughout the play due to the character's actions during the witch trials in Salem 1692. The first theme statement in The Crucible is hysteria causes people to make harmful decisions. This theme is used many times throughout the play.

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Fear that spread among a group of people in Salem during the Salem Witch Trials, that event in history is a prime example of Mass Hysteria. In Salem the reason why so many women were killed was because of Mass Hysteria. It caused many people, in Salem during this event to think fast, rash and jump to conclusions. “The Crucible”, a short play dedicated to these events in Salem shows us how hysteria was such a leading cause of why the Witch Trials had even occurred. Reverend Hale, Abigail Williams and Judge Danforth.

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