Witch-Hunts Were Justifiable

Whether or Not “Witch-Hunts” Were Justifiable

“Witch-hunts” take place when a specific group of people, accused of having opinions that are thought to be vile, are searched for and punished. This has happened on multiple accounts all throughout history for a variety of reasons, and is left up to the reader in The Crucible to decide whether or not they were justifiable. Arthur Miller, the writer of the play The Crucible, created this masterpiece in 1953 to portray the events of the Salem Witch Trials which took place in Massachusetts. In the play, there is a group of girls that get caught by the town’s minister for dancing in the forest, where they are eventually blamed for witchcraft. Throughout The Crucible, Miller makes a statement about how witch-hunts took place in Puritan society by showing the beliefs the people of this time had towards witches. During the Salem Witch Trials, a

This is shown when Rebecca Beatrice Brooks stated, “As a devout and strongly religious community living in near isolation in the mysterious New World, the community of Salem had a heightened sense of fear of the Devil and then experienced a ‘trigger’ when Tituba, one of the accused witches, confessed that she and others were in fact witches working for the Devil” (Brooks). This example shows how the Puritan society transitioned to the blaming of witch-craft in order to avoid the real situations. An example of hysteria in the play is, “I--I heard the other girls screaming, and you, Your Honor, you seemed to believe them, and I--It were only sport in the beginning sir, but then the whole world cried spirits, spirits, and I--I promise you, Mr. Danforth, I only thought I saw them but I did not” (Miller). Through this quote, it shows that the girls are playing the “blame game” in order to put the spotlight on other