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The Crucible

Background Reading

What is Social Drama?

A social drama is more or less directly social and political in orientation. This does not mean it is blatantly didactic or does not concern itself with the more subtle and personal aspects of human relationships.  It simply focuses on man in his social and political context.  Arthur Miller attempts to found his art on themes centring around what he has called "the right way of living". 

What is a tragedy? K. W. Krutch

And yet nevertheless the idea of nobility is inseparable from the idea of tragedy which cannot exist without it.  Its action is usually calamitous, because it is only in calamity that the human spirit has the opportunity to reveal itself triumphant over the outward universe which fails to conquer it. 

Tragedy is essentially an expression of despair, but of the triumph over despair and of confidence in the value of human life. 

The Crucible - The essence of drama is conflict.  This play abounds in conflicts which tend to arise from human failings.  These human failings result in a lack of responsibility to oneself and to one's society. 

Tragedy - a consequence of a man's total compulsion to evaluate himself justly, his destruction in the attempt posits a wrong or an evil in his environment.  And this is precisely the morality of tragedy and its lesson. 

Tragedy enlightens - and it must, in that it points the heroic finger at the enemy of man's freedom.  The trust for freedom is the quality in tragedy which exalts. 

Why Miller wrote the play - I wished for a way to write a play that ... would show that the sin of public terror is it divests man of conscience, of himself.  I had known of the Salem witch hunt for many years before "McCarthyism" had arrived and it had always remained in inexplicable darkness to me.  When I looked into it now, however, it was with the contemporary situation at my back, particularly the mystery of the handing over of conscience which seemed to me the central and informing fact of the time. The central impulse for writing was not the social, but the interior psychological question ... of that guilt residing in Salem which the hysteria merely unleashed, but did not create.  Consequently, the structure reflects that understanding, and it centers in John, Elizabeth, and Abigail. Miller had the following to say when asked who the people were at the Communist meetings.

"When I say this I want you to understand that I am not protecting the Communists or the Communist party.  I am trying to and will protect my sense of myself.  I could not use the name of another person and bring trouble on him.  I take responsibility for everything I have done but I cannot take responsibility for another human being".  "Nobody wants to be a hero... but in every man there is something he cannot give up and still remain himself - a core, an identity, a thing that is summed up for him by the sound of his own name on his own ears.  If he gives that up, he becomes a different man, not himself. 

Miller says:

"In Salem these people regarded themselves as holders of a light.  If this light were extinguished, they believed, the world would end.  When you have ideology which feels itself so pure, it implies an extreme view of the world.  Because they are white, opposition is completely black". 

In the actual Salem trials, Mary Warren (Abigail in The Crucible) convicted Elizabeth, not John.  This showed Miller that it was the first of a succession of mordant proofs that the great "issues" which the hysteria was allegedly about were covers for petty ambitions, hard-headed political drives, and the fantasies of very small and vengeful minds. 

In Proctor's drama, three fundamentals of tragedy are fulfilled.
First, through a torturous process of self-examination an individual arrives at a new realisation of himself and his relationship to the world at large.
Secondly, the individual discovers in the necessity of making a decision in the face of insurmountable odds.
Thirdly, although the movement toward self-recognition leads to destruction, an affirmation of life is ultimately propounded. 

One of the most important influences on Miller's way of writing is to say why a man doesn't simply walk away and say to hell with it, the moment when a man differentiates himself from every other man. 

The assumption behind Miller's plays is that life has meaning.  Idea is important to Miller. 

For Miller, the theatre is a place where an audience realises that its anxiety, hopes, are mutual.  Realisation of what they already know makes man more human, that is to say, less alone. 

Two comments by Miller about "McCarthyism" - that so interior and subjective an emotion could have been so manifestly created from without was a marvel to me.  It underlies every word in The Crucible- conscience was no longer a private matter but one of state administration.  I saw men handing conscience to other men and thanking other men for the opportunity of doing so. 

Miller believes there are people dedicated to evil in the world, that without their perverse example we should not know the good.  Hence Abigail refuses to accuse Proctor, despite the prosecutors' urgings. 

Themes  

·	"What a man should do in the face of evil". 
·	Individual freedom versus Social order. 
·	The Human Bond 
·	Need for Integrity. 

(Miller's answer for evil in the world = the need for integrity, the need for a bond between humans.)

© Ministry of Education, Wellington, New Zealand (First published 1998)