What is it about this particular tragic segment of American history that appeals to the creative imagination? To support my other endeavors, go here; http://patreon.com/teampomonok. With our Essay Lab, you can create a customized outline within seconds to get started on your essay right away. And it is my face, and yours, Danforth! A witch hunt is surprisingly efficient in dealing with all offenders because once the movement gains momentum, people are accused left and right for many reasons, such as protecting . The doctor diagnosed the cause of the afflictions as "Evil Hand.". No wonder the term witch hunt has entered common political parlance to describe such campaigns as that of the late Sen. Joseph McCarthy in his attempt to root out communists in the United States in the 1950s. Why were the leaders of Salem's clerical and civil community ready to condemn to death 19 people who refused to acknowledge being witches based on spectral evidence and the hysterical words of young girls? The Salem witch trials proved to be one of the most cruel and fear driven events to ever occur in history. Arthur Miller felt as if it were a . While any number of marginalized groups could, in theory, have served as a scapegoat, the shift in attitudes towards witchcraft as heresy created the conditions that allowed populations to turn upon those accused of witchcraft instead. How does he describe the witch-hunts. Any source of witchcraft must be destroyed . Reputation In The Crucible By Arthur Miller | ipl.org Why would the church and government authorities continue to credit these wild and unsubstantiated stories as respectable people from all walks of lifelandowners, women of independent means, neighbors, even clergywere arrested and brought to trial? How do you think Miller uses setting to help create mood in Act I? Arthur Miller's allegorical play, The Crucible, was written in 1956 about the historic witch trials of Salem, Massachusetts. An additional activity would be to ask students to compare two or more recorded or live productions of Arthur Millers The Crucible to the written text. Where central authorityi.e., bishops, kings, or the Inquisitionwas strong, convictions were fewer and sentences milder. Prior to the beginning of the early modern period, before the devastating impact of the Black Plague transformed European institutions and the political dynamic of the entire continent, many people throughout Europe may have believed in magic. Salem, of course, serves as the perfect example of this fanaticism and scapegoating taken to the extreme. Miller cites the reason for the witch-hunts to be "a preserve of manifestation of the panic which set among all classes when the balance began to turn toward greater individual freedom" and "a long overdue opportunity for everyone so inclined to express publicly his guilt and sins." What does the overture imply about human nature? He also portrays the accusers as teenagers when many were in fact much younger. Similar to The Crucible , a majority of the characters reacted the way they did out of fear. Like the Inquisition, the Parlement of Paris (the supreme court of northern France) severely restrained the witch hunts. The current preoccupation with men being falsely accused of harassment or assault, like so many other accepted truths can be traced to a moment in time during which a version of the idea was created and then absorbed into the culture. Current PhD Biblical Studies, BA Classics and Religion. She would also have likely been aware of the unrest in the community when raids were launched in New England, starting up again in 1689 (and called King William's War), with New France using both French soldiers and local Native Americans to fight against the English colonists. That Abigail started, in effect, to condemn Elizabeth to death with her touch, then stopped her hand, then went through with it, was quite suddenly the human center of all this turmoil. In the writing of Arthur Miller he chose to place the focus of the book around the witch trials that took place in Salem in the 1400s. Resentment and fear of the power of the hag, a woman released from the constraints of virginity and then of maternal duties, has been frequently described in Mediterranean cultures. How Does Arthur Miller Use Witch Hunts In The Crucible why did the witch-hunts occur? | The Crucible Questions | Q & A Upon these people, the blame could be laid for all hardships endured by Puritan society. She may have served as a household servant and a companion to Betty. 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. In Spain, Portugal, and southern Italy, witch prosecutions seldom occurred, and executions were very rare. People thought without a trace of logic, accusing and punishing innocent, witches, left and right. Whether she was aware of the political conflicts around Massachusetts' status as a colony is not known. The Crucible Overture Summary | Course Hero "In Act 1, what explanation does Miller give as to why the witch hunts developed in such a community in The Crucible?" There were additional hunts in Spanish America, where the European pattern of accusations continued even though the differences between the folklore of the Europeans and Native Americans introduced some minor variations into the accusations. Rev. As Headley points out, he cites his relationships as instrumental to his writing of The Crucible in an essay he wrote about his process for The New Yorker: I visited Salem for the first time on a dismal spring day in 1952; it was a sidetracked town then, with abandoned factories and vacant stores. We now know that some of the accused were pre-teens. Parris' sermons in late 1691 warning of Satan's influence in town is also not known, but it seems likely that his fears were known in his household. For example, if something bad happened to John that could not be readily explained, and if John felt that Richard disliked him, John may have suspected Richard of harming him by occult means. She is a former faculty member of the Humanist Institute. I had not approached the witchcraft out of nowhere or from purely social and political considerations. According to author Carol F. Karlsen . Those who were unhappy with their lot and envious towards of who were not now had the chance to voice their suspicions and take revenge against them. The witch hunts provided this outlet. As just one example, the king of Italy, Charlemagne, dismissed the concept of witchcraft as a pagan superstition and ordered the death penalty for whoever executed someone because they considered them to be a witch. Salem witch trials | History, Summary, Location, Causes, Victims It was because of these that witch hunters made so many false accusations. This is highly similar to the homicides that led to rise of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement. Start your 48-hour free trial to get access to more than 30,000 additional guides and more than 350,000 Homework Help questions answered by our experts. The Salem witch trials of the 1690's portrayed by Millers the Crucible parallel The Red Scare of 1920's, both events revolve around the fear of foreign ideology causing hysteria. Miller wrote. It was also believed that they rode through the air at night to sabbats (secret meetings), where they engaged in sexual orgies and even had sex with Satan; that they changed shapes (from human to animal or from one human form to another); that they often had familiar spirits in the form of animals; and that they kidnapped and murdered children for the purpose of eating them or rendering their fat for magical ointments. The Reformation, Counter-Reformation, war, conflict, climate change, and economic recession are all some of the factors that influenced the witch hunts across the two continents in various ways. It would, however, be incorrect to suggest that witch-hunting was something wielded against ones opponents during the many cases of civil unrest ignited by the Reformation. Salvation and Scapegoating: What Caused the Early Modern Witch Hunts? Therefore, to create unity, one also had to exclude and prohibit those who could threaten it. It was also, and as importantly, a long overdue opportunity for every-one so inclined to express publicly his guilt and sins, under the cover of accusations against the victims.'. As exemplified in the play The Crucible by Arthur Miller, witch trials took place. If witchcraft existed, as people believed it did, then it was an absolute necessity to extirpate it before it destroyed the world. The Salem witch scare had complex social roots beyond the communitys religious convictions. Women were certainly more likely than men to be economically and politically powerless, but that generalization is too broad to be helpful, for it holds true for societies in periods where witchcraft is absent. https://www.thoughtco.com/tituba-salem-witch-trials-3530572 (accessed March 4, 2023). The accusers is constitutionally finding scapegoats to back up their culpability. There have been many different "witch hunts" that have happened since 1692, that have shaped our world. Tituba later testified that she saw visions of the devil and witches swarming. Witch trials continued through the 14th and early 15th centuries, but with great inconsistency according to time and place. The economic theories of the Salem events tend to be two-fold: the first attributes the witchcraft trials to an economic downturn caused by a "little ice age" that lasted from 1550-1800; the second cites socioeconomic issues in Salem itself. Most accused children had parents who had been accused of witchcraft. Although accusations of witchcraft in contemporary cultures provide a means to express or resolve social tensions, these accusations had different consequences in premodern Western society where the mixture of irrational fear and a persecuting mentality led to the emergence of the witch hunts. 'The witch-hunt was not, however, a mere repression. Although, the play is fiction, Miller based the plot of his play on the historical event, the Salem Witch Trials.According to the the Salem witch trials of the late 17th century, The Crucible explores a mass hysteria that its residents must go through because of the witchcraft accusations made by young girls and many other people of the region.These accusations, we learn further in the novel, are not true and are purely for the purpose to put the blame of someone's mistakes or wrongdoings to someone else. Many innocent people were accused of witchcraft, and while some got out of the situation alive not everyone was as lucky. Malleus Maleficarum, first published in 1487 by Heinrich Kramer, was a major influence on this attitude shift. One of the most important aspects of the hunts remains unexplained. It was this combination of sorcery and its association with the Devil that made Western witchcraft unique. Arthur Miller's play The Crucible, which forms the basis of many Americans' knowledge of the trials, takes liberties with the story. The Rev. By the late 16th century, many prosperous and professional people in western Europe were accused, so that the leaders of society began to have a personal interest in checking the hunts. 2023 eNotes.com, Inc. All Rights Reserved, Essential Quotes by Character: John Proctor, Critical Context (Masterplots II: Juvenile & Young Adult Literature Series), Critical Context (Comprehensive Guide to Drama). Abigail's Obsession With Proctor In The Crucible By Arthur Miller The playwright sets that story as the catalyst for a larger, quite literal witch hunt, stoked into a frenzy by a mostly unprovoked confession of witchcraft spoken by a fantastically-minded woman of color whos been practicing sexy voodoo in the woods with the girls of Salem. Immediately Abigail cried out her fingers, her fingers, her fingers burned . Many critics described Death of a Salesman as the first great American tragedy, and Miller gained an associated eminence as a man who understood the deep essence of the United States. Girls had specific roles in society and were expected to follow the rules of the church without question, so when they acted out and danced or strayed from the church, chaos was unavoidable. In response to the mass hysteria over this communist infiltration, Arthur Miller wrote The Crucible. She confessed to witchcraft and accused others. The setting of a literary work refers to the time and place in which the action occurs. All this I understood. What part might this physical separation have played in turning neighbors against one another and stoking fears of demons? The most common suspicions concerned livestock, crops, storms, disease, property and inheritance, sexual dysfunction or rivalry, family feuds, marital discord, stepparents, sibling rivalries, and local politics. ", EDSITEment is a project of theNational Endowment for the Humanities, Salem Witch Trials: Understanding the Hysteria, Origins of Halloween and the Day of the Dead. In his telling, witch hunts are perpetrated by the marginalized rather than upon them, since, when sex is involved, women are inclined toward group-malice, sexual irrationality, and wholesale invention. Like the Spanish colonies, the English colonies repeated the European stereotype with a few minor differences. The Crucible: McCarthyism and a Historical View of Witch Hunts More differences existed among Protestants and among Catholics than between the two religious groups, and regions in which Protestant-Catholic tensions were high did not produce significantly more trials than other regions. Most scholars agree that the prosecutions were not driven by political or gender concerns; they were not attacks on backward, or rural, societies; they did not function to express or relieve local tensions; they were not a result of the rise of capitalism or other macroeconomic changes; they were not the result of changes in family structure or in the role of women in society; and they were not an effort by cultural elites to impose their views on the populace. How does Abigail turn the court against Mary Warren in The Crucible? In The Crucible by Arthur Miller, what does the author mean by his statement that "the Salem tragedy developed from a paradox". Whereas womens sexuality has long since been tied to the idea of personal hysteria, Miller updated that by singling out womens desire for love and sex as a direct cause of mass hysteria. Log in here. What was it about the time period that made such hysteria, and ultimately tragedy, possible. The gradual demise during the late 17th and early 18th century of the previous religious, philosophical, and legal worldview encouraged the ascendancy of an existent but often suppressed skepticism; increasing literacy, mobility, and means of communication set the stage for social acceptance of this changing outlook. Witches: Real Origins, Hunts & Trials - HISTORY In this text, the year is 1692 and the witch trials have diminished and are almost over in Europe. As Miller puts it: 'Land-lust which had been expressed before by constant bickering over boundaries and deeds, could now be elevated to the arena of morality; one could cry witch against one's neighbor and feel perfectly justified in the bargain.'. Tituba was among the first three people accused of being a witch during the Salem witch trials of 1692. The Crucible by Arthur Miller is based on the true events of the Salem witch trials. Have a tip or story idea? Parris and his wife. Ultimately, 19 individuals who had refused to admit guilt were hanged and another was pressed to death. To prove that the promise of salvation served as a reason for the sudden flare-up of witch hunts during this period of religious turmoil, we only need to look to the notable absence of witch trials in Catholic strongholds. Miller argues that the fundamental nature of Salem's construction made it a community where the Witch Trials were inevitable. B.A. Now, after more than three-quarters of a century of fascination with the great snake of political and social developments, I can see more than a few occasions when we were confronted by the same sensation of having stepped into another age. In other words, there was how things actually happened during the Salem Witch Trials, and there was how Miller wrote about them, taking lots of liberties to tell this story through a prism that made sense to him. Two of the accused women confessed to being witches and were reprievedparadoxically, if you admitted to being a witch, you were freed. Analysis. Local priests and judges, though seldom experts in either theology or law, were nonetheless part of a culture that believed in the reality of witches as much as modern society believes in the reality of molecules. Under the rules of the colony, similar to rules in England, even someone found innocent had to pay for expenses incurred to imprison and feed them before they could be released. The next day, Betty and Abigail named Tituba as a cause of their behavior. Log in here. This idea that when trouble comes, particularly when it comes to a man whos just trying to get laid, it comes at the hands of an unstable woman who should never be believed. An author named Arthur Miller wrote the play The Crucible based of the true events of the Salem witch trials. Most of the factors influencing the widespread witch hunts over the course of the early modern period can be summarized under two headings; salvation and scapegoating.. The play is set in Puritan Society in the late 1600s in Salem, where most people are devout Christians and hold a strong belief of both God and the Devil.
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