Analysis
The Crucible is a play about the intersection
of private sins with paranoia, hysteria, and religious intolerance.
The citizens of Arthur Miller’s Salem of 1692 would
consider the very concept of a private life heretical. The government
of Salem, and of Massachusetts as a whole, is a theocracy, with
the legal system based on the Christian Bible. Moral laws and state
laws are one and the same; sin and the status of an individual’s
soul are public concerns. An individual’s private life must conform
to the moral laws, or the individual represents a threat to the
public good.
Regulating the morality of citizens requires surveillance.
For every inhabitant of Salem, there is a potential witness to the
individual’s private crimes. State officials patrol the township,
requiring citizens to give an account of their activities. Free
speech is not a protected right, and saying the wrong thing can
easily land a citizen in jail. Most of the punishments, such as
the stocks, whipping, and hangings, are public, with the punishment
serving to shame the lawbreaker and remind the public that to disagree
with the state’s decisions is to disagree with God’s will.
The Crucible introduces a community full
of underlying personal grudges. Religion pervades every aspect of
life, but it is a religion that lacks a ritual outlet to manage
emotions such as anger, jealousy, or resentment. By 1692,
Salem has become a fairly established community, removed from its
days as an outpost on a hostile frontier. Many of the former dangers
that united the community in its early years have lessened, while
interpersonal feuds and grudges over property, religious offices,
and sexual behavior have begun to simmer beneath the theocratic
surface. These tensions, combined with the paranoia about supernatural
forces, pervade the town’s religious sensibility and provide the
raw materials for the hysteria of the witch trials.
On the surface, Parris appears to be an anxious, worried
father. However, if we pay close attention to his language, we find
indications that he is mainly worried about his reputation, not
the welfare of his daughter and their friends. He fears that Abigail,
Betty, and the other girls were engaging in witchcraft when he caught
them dancing, and his first concern is not the endangerment of their
souls but the trouble that the scandal will cause him. It is possible—and likely,
from his point of view—that members in the community would make
use of a moral transgression to ruin him. Parris’s anxiety about
the insecurity of his office reveals the extent to which conflicts
divide the Salem community. Not even those individuals who society
believes are invested with God’s will can control the whim of the
populace.
The idea of guilt by association is central to the events
in The Crucible, as it is one of the many ways
in which the private, moral behavior of citizens can be regulated.
An individual must fear that the sins of his or her friends and
associates will taint his or her own name. Therefore, the individual
is pressured to govern his or her private relationships according
to public opinion and public law. To solidify one’s good name, it
is necessary to publicly condemn the wrongdoing of others. In this
way, guilt by association also reinforces the publicization of private
sins. Even before the play begins, Abigail’s increasingly questionable
reputation, in light of her unexplained firing by the upright Elizabeth
Proctor, threatens her uncle Parris’s tenuous hold on power and
authority in the community. The allegations of witchcraft only render
her an even greater threat to him.
Putnam, meanwhile, has his own set of grudges against
his fellow Salemites. A rich man from an influential Salem family,
he believes that his status grants him the right to worldly success.
Yet he has been thwarted, both in his efforts to make his brother-in-law
minister, and in his family life, where his children have all died
in infancy. Putnam is well positioned to use the witch trials to
express his feelings of persecution and undeserved failure, and
to satisfy his need for revenge. His wife feels similarly wronged—like
many Puritans, she is all too willing to blame the tragic deaths
of her children on supernatural causes—and seeks similar retribution
for what she perceives as the malevolent doings of others.
