...Innocent people die everyday. Some may have died because of violent actions, but some are killed because of a much more frightening reason: A corrupt court system. Courts are put in place to protect us, and when their justice has rotted from the inside, it leads to chaotic and brutal societies. One of these societies, Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692, is described in the play, “The Crucible.” Written in the McCarthy era, this play highlights the injustices during the Red Scare in America. As history continues to unfold, more links can be drawn between the message of “The Crucible” and today’s discrimination. The allegorical qualities of Arthur Miller’s, “The Crucible,” relate strongly to McCarthyism, but still have relevant connections to...
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...Valerie Delgado 1/14/11 Arthur Miller wrote The Crucible in 1953 during the McCarthy Era, when Americans were accusing each other of Pro-Communist beliefs. Many of Miller’s friends were being attacked as communists and Miller himself was brought up guilty of beliefs in communism. Miller was getting sick of this so he put his writing techniques in action and wrote a play called The Crucible to show the injustices. This playwright uses the Salem Witch trials as an allegory to the US injustices toward suspected Communists. The Crucible is set against the backdrop of the mad witch hunts of the Salem witch trials, where innocent people were being accused and hung because of witchcraft. Miller portrays a character that is known as a tragic hero, strong but flawed, to fight against the injustice of the town and to show that a tragic hero can still do what he believes is best even when the majority of society is influenced by lies. The character that Miller chooses to be his Greek tragic hero is John Proctor, who is a good, well known, and respected man in Salem. It is evident that John Proctor fulfills the requirements of the Greek Tragic hero because of his many positive traits, such as his noble characteristics, his honorable and righteous qualities, and always believing in himself fighting for what is true. However, he had a fatal flaw that showed the darker side to his perfect characteristics. His flaw is committing adultery towards his wife. Before the play...
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...The Crucible Thesis: In The Crucible, Miller repeats ideas to emphasize their importance in contributing to Salem; these motifs like names and lies are repeated to show their impact on Salem. In the Salem Witch Trials of 1693, there are many injustices committed against innocent people. The play The Crucible, by Arthur Miller, talks about how people falsely accuse others of witchcraft. It starts when some of the younger girls in Salem, especially the antagonist Abigail, are caught dancing in the woods and lie about the incident. They confess to witchcraft and falsely accuse others so they can be absolved of guilt. In The Crucible, Miller repeats ideas to emphasize their importance in contributing to Salem; these motifs like names and lies are repeated to show their impact on Salem. The motif of names is important to understanding the escalation of the witch trials in Salem. Names help make the situation worse because people falsely name others who are witches, which fills jail cells and makes the number of accused witches go up. People also try to protect their reputation. In Act 1, right after Tituba confesses to witchcraft, Parris and Hale try to convince her to name others who are witches. Tituba then says, “And I look- and there was Goody Good… Aye sir, and Goody Osburn” (Miller 47). Tituba is merely naming people to get herself out of trouble. During this time, it is not enough to just confess, they want you to also name others who are...
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...individual conscience over religion is clearly shown through their use of Pathos and Logos in their books The Scarlet Letter and The Crucible respectively. I personally also agree with the argument in which they have presented. First off, Pathos was used by both authors to show their argument by showing how unjust the characters were treated to help make the reader sense the injustice that has occurred in the story. In the Scarlet Letter, author Nathaniel Hawthorne showed Hester as a kind-hearted woman that helps out the less fortunate, but afterwards he would tell the reader that “If they were resolute to accost her, she laid her finger on the scarlet letter, and passed on...
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..."…. A person is either with this court or they must be counted against it." How do both texts show us that there is little room for justice in an oppressive society? Injustice is often a result of oppression as absolutist societies establish a dichotomy of good and evil to manipulate the powerless into subservience. The allegories by George Orwell and Arthur Miller denounce the harmful effects of tyranny, as it generates deception and fear, enabling despotic individuals to gain power and control. Miller’s play, The Crucible, advocates for the necessity of transgression to gain autonomy, as Salem’s theocracy is eventually broken; however, it is Orwell’s novella, Animal Farm, that exposes the unjust reality in which rebellion does not always guarantee freedom,...
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...Most do not feel a bit remorse when they have made an injustice to another person. Miller sets an example with the character of Proctor that is no other can be the judge of one's action but only one's self. If the truth would have been told beforehand and stop what was still in his control many people's lives would have been saved including his own but because that is what Proctor took too long to figure out it caused his death. Proctor did change throughout the "heat" (problems stirring)which changed him causing him to become purified creating a connection to the title The...
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...The Illusion of Justice One plus one does not always equal two. In the court of mathematics this arithmetic truism may be, yet in reality a courtroom is not pure, but laden with injustice. The courtroom in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, his recreation of the Salem Witch Trials in Salem, Massachusetts, is synonymous. The theocratic court reviews cases regarding witchcraft brought to the gavel by a group of hormonal teenage girls, who have been willing the court to arrest and execute whom they see fit. This literal courtroom is allegorical to the interactions of Senator McCarthy with potential traitors during the 1950’s. As the girls of Salem exploit the fears of their community, McCarthy capitalized on the fear of the entire U.S. nation: Communism. McCarthy’s tactics and actions were highlighted in a CBS broadcasting led by Edward R. Murrow titled, “We Will Not Walk in Fear”. The broadcast was received by the U.S. in 1954 during the Cold War, a decade dubbed ‘The Red Scare’. While the empowered teens of Salem and McCarthy were daunting, their injustices were matched by John Proctor and Edward R. Murrow, respectively. Proctor and Murrow fought against the false accusations and biased plaintiffs to stop the injustice posed. Proctor and Murrow combat their oppressors on the hollow claims made. Proctor is roped in to the Salem courts when his wife is accused. He points out to the judges that “so many of these women have lived so long with such upright reputation” (Miller 84). Proctor’s...
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...The Crucible that Arthur Miller wrote exposed the injustice the witch hunting’s were and hysteria outbreak people had with the fear of witches or anything they consider bad. The Red Scare is a good example of people getting scared and blames anyone they see. The Soviet Union communist were named the “Reds”. In 1940s to the early 1950s people were hysterical thinking that the reds were going to take over. The scare had people with a range of actions that had a profound and enduring effect on U.S. government and society. HUAC was formed they found with harbor hoover 12 prominent leaders of the American Communist Party on charges that they had plans to advocated the overthrow of the government. Two were convicted and executed in 1951, The crucible was an example of how the fear of the public drives people to blame and take action. Joseph R. McCarthy was always trying to expose communist just like the judges in the book and Abby she accused women for being witches and the judges just convicted who ever just to maintain their record. But Joseph pointed the finger at almost everyone in the government he worked with. He even launched a full investigation on them 2,000 government officials lost their jobs even though there was a lack of proof, they were fired anyways. He violated people’s civil rights with harsh integrations of witnesses in hearings. Just like in the Crucible the judges harshly interrogated the claimed to be witnesses making them change stories to fit what they wanted...
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...Morality and the Crucible It is said that everyone has morals, people know when they are doing something wrong but choose to do it anyway out of self-defence. It is seen everywhere people will lie on live television just to protect themselves and so others won't judge them. Everyone is supposed to know what's right and wrong but there are still areas in between where people cannot decide. The truth is right and wrong is on a spectrum some things are more wrong or right than others. This theme is found in the Crucible the moral that Miller is communicating is that not all sin and wrong doings are equivalent. In act four it an example of the morals in the court is found, while many women were hung for not confessing Giles was pressed. Another...
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...Discuss how an idea developed in a text you have studied. In the play ‘The Crucible’ written my Arthur Miller an important idea the developed throughout the text is reputation and injustice. It shows us that in an environment where people are shelter, oblivious, and ignorant, peple may behave in ways that are unjust in order to protect their reputation. Arthur Miller was able to develope these ideas through the setting and characters. He was able to incorporate his own experience into his play as he was a victim himself of McCarthyism. The Crucible is set in a small town, Salem in Massachusetts, America in 1692 where people were oblivious of anything other than God, believing that they were self righteous. In such time, reputation determined how people looked at you and was considered something of great importance. “A man will not cast away his good name“ shows us the importance of people’s reputation at that time. When something is regarded as such a high level of importance to someone, people will do anything in order to protect it even if the means are considered unjust and ‘unrighteous‘. Abigail accuses Elizabeth Proctor of ‘blackening my name in the village‘ after commiting adultery with John Proctor, Elizabeth’s husband. This cause her to fear for her reputation, and how people will view her. Afraid of her reputation, Abigail Williams acts in fear to and pointed the finger at Tituba claiming that she was practising witchcraft ‘she sends her spirit on me in Church; she...
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...The Crucible Research Paper Assignment During 1692, mass hysteria emerged in Massachusetts over the growing beliefs of witchcraft. People who believed in witchcraft had the notion that that the Devil could give certain people known as witches the power to harm others in exchange for their loyalty. This craze was probably inspired by a similar incident in Europe that just recently ended at the time. Within one year in Salem, over 200 people were accused of being witches and 19 men and women were convicted and hanged at Gallows Hill as punishment. In addition, a man over 80 years old was killed after put under mass amounts of weight as a result from denying the charges put on him. These accusations were all lies that resulted from the ongoing frontier war, economic conditions, congregational strife, teenage boredom, fear of Native Indian attacks, and personal jealousies. In 1689, a few years before the whole witchcraft hysteria began, the English rulers William and Mary proclaimed war with France in the 13 colonies of the United States. Known as King William’s war, it caused hundreds of people to migrate into Salem, Massachusetts for refuge. The population in fluctuation affected the economy because resources became scarce. As a result, people started to become sick and social relations became tense. In response, people became aggravated and a lot of quarreling occurred. In addition, the people were very scared about being attacked by the Native Americans. People started to...
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...In the past years, people have gone through extreme measures to protect themselves of accused witchery. These accusations have led to death, hate, and fear to rise as a result, people would no longer trust each other and everything would be said carefully in order to avoid being blamed for something unreal. Arthur Miller demonstrates these events of witchery in the story The Crucible, the story shows the lengths that people go through to protect themselves and how it affected the society as a whole. In the 1950s, however, a similar event happened in which the Communist Party brought distrust and tensions in society. Millers article “Are You Now or Were You Ever?”, discusses how the McCarthy Era in the 1950s and the Salem Witch Trials are abundantly similar since both dealt with fear and paranoia in society, this led to the writing of The Crucible to begin as a result with rhetorical strategies such as rhetorical questions and the appeal to ethos....
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...The Crucible Act Four Questions Short Response Answer the following questions based on your knowledge of the drama. Write a response on a separate sheet of paper. 1. Where does Tituba think that the Devil is going to take her? 2. Give one example of how Abigail shows her dishonesty in this act. 3. What effect do the trials have on Salem? Use three details from the drama to support your answer. 4. When first arrives at the Salem jail, Danforth complains, “There is a prodigious stench in this place.” How might this line be read to mean something besides a comment on the smell? 5. How is Giles Corey’s character reflected in his death? Use one detail from the drama to support your response. 6. What qualities does Proctor find within himself that prevent him from at last saving himself and signing the confession? Use details from the text to support your response. 7. Explain how Proctor is right or wrong for refusing to sign the confession. Use details to support your response. 8. A tragic hero’s fate, according to Aristotle, inspires pity and horror. Name the tragic hero in The Crucible, and describe how his or her fate inspires both pity and horror. 9. People accused of being Communists had a difficult time getting jobs; some even moved out of the United States in order to try to resume normal lives. How is Proctor’s situation like that of the people accused of Communist activities? 10. Based on the conversation involving Tituba, Sarah...
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...In The Crucible, Arthur Miller carefully describes a society which has plummeted into a pit of hysteria, with citizens hurling desperate accusations and lies at one another. In the midst of the chaos, Rebecca Nurse emerges as one of the rare rational characters who represents hope and strength in the face of her community’s growing disharmony. In return for her sensible advice to her fellow citizens, they turn and accuse Rebecca of witchcraft and cause her execution: within this blatant abuse of the justice system lies the greatest injustice in the play. Arthur Miller establishes situational irony surrounding Rebecca Nurse’s execution. Throughout the play, Rebecca Nurse acts as the moral compass to which Miller compares all the other characters....
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...several different meanings, such as morally bad or wrong, the act of causing others to reevaluate their beliefs and assuming a completely new persona, or abusing an immense amount of power. One can only vaguely grasp the term evil given the definition of it. It takes one’s own experiences to thoroughly understand evil. Evil is when one purposefully outcasts a mass of people as a result of a common attribute. It is proceeding to do something immoral while recognizing its potential risks. Through the voice of Elaine Aron, Zimbardo claims that such qualities are embodied among ordinary people put under various pressures to create an evil situation. These traits repeatedly appear among characters in both American literature and history in The Crucible by Arthur Miller, The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson, and the events related to McCarthyism. Authority gives one the right the apparent right to demand obedience and expect the norm from “their people”. They are expected to use beneficial judgment and lead society forward and on the right path, but given power, leaders’ minds are tainted. People of authority are often given “responsible sounding roles such as “guardian,” “teacher,” [or] “defenders of the law” (Aron 4). This results in the manipulation of peoples’ minds as they tend to trust those with a name of great significance and respect. The society in “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson often faces the challenging task of distinguishing between...
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