Essay about The Crucible by Arthur Miller

The play “The Crucible” by Arthur Miller this story is based off a true event that happened in Salem, Massachusetts about the Salem witch trials. The story starts off in a nice little town where everyone knows everybody and everyone was friendly with each other. One night there were girls spotted in the woods doing things they shouldn’t. The girl later were brought in for questioning about everything and they denied all of it. One of the girls that was soon later identified being in the woods has gotten terribly “sick” but the people think something else is going on. Soon or later two of the girls thought it would be a good idea for them to start accusing others to try to get their names cleared. The court proceeds to questioning

The setting in The Crucible is Salem, and it was populated with Puritans. Puritans saw the world as a simple matter of “Good Vs. Evil” because of their strict policies, which stated that any action taken against God counted as being aligned with the “Devil,” which spelled out evil. The Salem Witch Trials symbolized the intolerance of McCarthyism, the practice of making arguments without substantial evidence, which may also be connected to the 21st century, as unfair court procedures occur frequently.

    The Crucible uses fear of witchcraft in the America of the 1600s as a metaphor for the fear of communism that was widespread in America in the 1950s. Arthur Miller wished to show that the attitudes and behaviour of the villagers of Salem were as irrational and ill-founded as the attitude and behaviour of the committee chaired by Senator McCarthy. Essentially Miller uses the 17th century setting to provide critical distance between the events described and the emotions that they aroused. After three hundred years everyone understands that witchcraft was never a threat to society and we can look at the way people behaved fairly sensibly. The Crucible argues that communism is

Although at first glance The Crucible seems to be a playwright loosely based on a writer’s own take on The Salem Witch Trials, it actually is based on the events in the 1950s called the Red Scare. The Red Scare was a series of events starting in 1919 and ending in the 1960s that shook America. The cause for the 1950 Red Scare that inspired most of the work in The Crucible comes from a man named Joseph McCarthy who was a former American Senator. Senator McCarthy was one of a few who lead the investigations and allegations during the Red Scare and prospered because of it. McCarthy’s false claims and anti-red crusade are what inspired some of the events that are seen in The Crucible and give the reader a sense that change is considered

The Crucible is a 1958 play, written by playwright Arthur Miller depicting the events occurring in the small town of Salem, Massachusetts. The Crucible is an embellished and fictional interpretation of the Salem witch trials, which took place during 1692. The play follows the story of a small Puritan society, and their eruption of hysteria, as two young girls fall ill causing echoes of witchcraft corruption within the town, leading to further analyse of other ideas within the play. Through Miller’s disapproval of Salem’s history, Miller has written the play as an allegory of McCarthyism, an era of American history where communists were blacklisted and persecuted without regard for evidence.

For this month's book report I read The Crucible by Arthur Miller. This was an interesting and rather strange drama about the Salem Witch Trials. The story is about the girls of Salem accusing just about anyone of witchcraft as a cover up for their dance in the woods. Throughout the play, the conflict intensifies as the list of suspected witches grows and grows, and the families of the accused are in distress, as they know their loved ones could never do such evil things. It's a very extreme case of the classic "who-dunnit" type of mystery.

“The Crucible” was written during the time of the Cold War. America was not only fighting a silent war with Russia, but an internal one with itself. There was a large scare of finding communists on American soil, and it scared the US population. “The Crucible” is an account of the Salem Witch Trials, which was a scare in the early years of America in search of witches. The reason the author wrote the play was to compare the two events and to show how the Communist hunt was like the witch hunt in the sense of how it is

Many people would say that The Crucible by Arthur Miller is a tragedy. In this play the tragic events that happened in salem liked being accused for a witch and hung for it is connected to what happened in mccarthyism era. In this Joe Mccarthy accused politicians and higher power people of being communist. Those accused in both salem and the Mccarthy era were treated with harsh consequences and even death with no way to defend themselves.

In Arthur Miller’s article “Are You Know or Were You Ever” it states that, “In the stillness of the Salem Courthouse, surrounded by the images of the 1950s but with my head in 1692, what the two eras had in common gradually gained definition. Both had the menace of concealed plots, but most startling were the similarities in the rituals of defense, the investigative routines; 300 years apart, both persecutions alleged membership of a secret, disloyal group” (pg 34). Arthur Miller’s play “The Crucible” shows how the Salem Witch Trials and McCarthyism are a lot

The crucible takes place in 1692, in Salem, Massachusetts. The talk of witchcraft starts to spread and people start to talk. After women were spotted in the woods dancing people started to get scared. The people of the town were afraid of the witches they have heard about.

Understanding The Crucible begins with knowing the events that were taking place at the time of its writing. The Crucible was a play that took place during the Salem Witch Trials and is used as a metaphor for the McCarthy hearings that took place at the time of its writing. In the time period the play was set, American Puritans are fearful that the Devil is out to get them and stop their religious mission in America, as said in the Crucible: “...the Salem folk believed that the virgin forest was the Devil’s last preserve, his home base and the citadel of his final stand...the American forest was the last place on earth that was not paying homage to God” (Miller Act 1). When the play was written, America was fearful of Communism and its spread, also called the “Red Scare.” This is evidenced in a textbook passage that says “Throughout the 1940s and 1950s America was overwhelmed with concerns about the threat of communism growing in Eastern Europe and China” (“McCarthyism” 77). Even thought these dates are about 250 years apart, they are both similar circumstances. The fear of the Devil in America in the 1690s led to false accusations based on personal grudges or disputes, as evidenced in The Crucible when Rebecca Nurse, the most devout Christian in Salem, is accused of “...the marvelous and supernatural murder of Goody Putnam’s babies” (Miller Act 2 693-694). If a person didn’t like someone, they could accuse them of witchcraft and they would be tried by the court. These

In the 1690s and the 1950s, people lived in a long time of great fear and nonsense accusations. In 1950, Joseph McCarthy who was a Republican created a society named “The red scared” known as McCarthyism. Arthur Miller was influenced by this period because he had been convicted of failing to name his communist sympathizers. Therefore, The Crucible was written to be a metaphor of this period. They have some same details and both of them are the consequences of paranoid. Firstly, both periods have false accusations with no evidence. Secondly, people who were accused of have some signals of being in Communist party and a witch, were killed or in jail and those accusations impact to the society. Thirdly, people who live in those periods have a fear of being accused, so they can’t stand up to protect those people accused although they know that there are wrong accusations.

The Crucible by Arthur Miller is a play that was based on the historical account of the witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts. The play demonstrates the extreme behaviors and irrational thinking that can result from a traumatic event like the witch trials. Miller wrote the play as an allegory to the McCarthy Era in the 1950s, where Senator Joseph McCarthy decided that he had to uncover all of the communists in the U.S. government. This fear of communists spiraled out of control and thousands of Americans ended up being accused of being communists or communist sympathizers. The Crucible and the McCarthy Trials have similar corrupt court procedures to handle the accusations made by the public.

At first, Arthur Miller has us, as readers, flipping back to the beginning of the book and checking the page numbers to make sure that we didn’t miss anything or to make sure that there weren’t pages ripped out of our books. Miller introduces the story after a big event (the event that caused the story) has already occurred. This can make it confusing for the reader to understand what more can happen, for Miller left out what seems to be an essential part of the story. Miller’s style in The Crucible requires the reader to think and draw their own conclusions about what happened the night before the play begins, and it is necessary for the reader to read all of the book to truly understand how the play follows the typical arc of Freytag’s Pyramid. Arthur Miller’s The Crucible follows the typical arc pattern of tragedy as defined by Freytag’s Pyramid because it has all the aspects of the pyramid, despite the fact that it seems as if (when first beginning the play) the reader is thrown into the middle of the drama.

The Crucible by Arthur Miller is a fantastic representation of events that occurred in 1692 in Salem, Massachusetts. These events were infamous for a variety of reasons, one being that many citizens were executed on the charge of being a witch. Another reason the Salem Witch Trials were so infuriating and ridiculous is because witches don’t actually exist. The play represents the fear of the unknown and was very relevant the time in which it was written. However the fear of the unknown wasn’t the only reason for the start of the Salem Witch Trials. Superstition, Vengeance, and Theocracy are some of the driving forces behind many hateful and outlandish acts portrayed in The Crucible. These themes were much more prevalent back then than they are now, but they still had a heavy impact on puritan society at the time. However these themes will exist as long as humans exist, because actions like the ones taken in the story only portray human instincts that will never go away. The Crucible was not only about the Salem Witch Trials, but human behavior as a whole.