Putnam insists that Rebecca was the cause behind the death of her seven children; therefore, she seeks revenge on Rebecca for this unforgivable act. The Nurse family also owns more land than the Putnams, and this results in Mr. Putnam searches for his own form of retribution by accusing the Nurse family of witchcraft. Both of the Putnams start their accusation of Rebecca early on in the play, with Mr.
And yet I have but one child left. There are wheels within wheels in this village, and fires within fires! John Proctor, Francis Nurse, and Giles Corey are all shown to be honest and just characters, for the most part. All three women married to these men, however, get accused and tried for witchcraft because of mere petty quarrels that they had been trapped in the midst of.
Nurse constructs a petition for the townspeople to sign in order to show how harmless and pure his wife truly is. The judge says to Mr. Giles is the last to attempt at receiving justice for his wife in Act III.
Giles strived for the justice in order to free his wife and clear her name, but in order to keep his good name, he knew that he could not set the blame on others, so he thus shuts down and refuses to cooperate. This proves to only worsen the charges for the Corey family, and show how inescapable the conflict of the trials are, and how true justice can never be achieved in this situation when revenge is a much more powerful source.
Abigail Williams is the ultimate cause of the Salem Witch Trials. However, Abigail soon learns that she can use the accusations of the trials to her advantage; she starts accusing the townspeople as a form of revenge. John Proctor sabotages his own reputation in Act 3 after realizing it's the only way he can discredit Abigail. This is a decision with dire consequences in a town where reputation is so important, a fact that contributes to the misunderstanding that follows.
She continues to act under the assumption that his reputation is of the utmost importance to him, and she does not reveal the affair. This lie essentially condemns both of them. Danforth also acts out of concern for his reputations here.
This fact could destroy his credibility , so he is biased towards continuing to trust Abigail. Danforth has extensive pride in his intelligence and perceptiveness. This makes him particularly averse to accepting that he's been fooled by a teenage girl. Though hysteria overpowered the reputations of the accused in the past two acts, in act 4 the sticking power of their original reputations becomes apparent.
Parris begs Danforth to postpone their hangings because he fears for his life if the executions proceed as planned. In the final events of Act 4, John Proctor has a tough choice to make between losing his dignity and losing his life.
The price he has to pay in reputation to save his own life is ultimately too high. I have given you my soul; leave me my name! Here are a few discussion questions to consider after you've read my summary of how the theme of reputation motivates characters and plot developments in The Crucible :.
If you're an old beggar woman who sometimes takes shelter in this creepy shack, you better believe these jerks are gonna turn on you as soon as anyone says the word "witch. Where before she was just an orphaned teenager, now, in the midst of the trials, she becomes the main witness to the inner workings of a Satanic plot. The main pillars of traditional power are represented by the law and the church.
These two institutions fuse together in The Crucible to actively encourage accusers and discourage rational explanations of events. The girls are essentially given permission by authority figures to continue their act because they are made to feel special and important for their participation. The people in charge are so eager to hold onto their power that if anyone disagrees with them in the way the trials are conducted, it is taken as a personal affront and challenge to their authority.
Danforth, Hathorne, and Parris become even more rigid in their views when they feel they are under attack. As mentioned in the overview, religion holds significant power over the people of Salem.
In the community of Salem, John Proctor is important, not for what he is--he's just a farmer--but for who he is. No one is more generous in helping his neighbors, and no one is more honest in his dealings. If he has a fault, it's that he's too honest: when he thinks you're wrong, he'll tell you to your face, even in front of other people.
Anyone on the receiving end of such blunt criticism is bound to resent it. And John Proctor has made some enemies in Salem by his plain speaking. Reverend Parris is one. But maybe if Proctor hadn't been so admirable, he wouldn't be in the mess he's in. Abigail Williams fell in love with John Proctor's strength and honesty. What young woman wouldn't see him as the man of her dreams?
His wife was sick, he was lonely, and he made the perfectly human mistake of succumbing to Abigail's adoration. But he made an even bigger mistake, as far as Abigail is concerned, when he rejected her and went back to his wife.
As the saying goes, "Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned," and Abigail pays him back with a vengeance. Elizabeth Proctor must have fallen for John just as hard as Abigail did. But Elizabeth seems almost afraid of her feelings, and doesn't express them easily. Her husband's passion and sexuality no doubt frightened her, and he probably felt rebuffed and disappointed when she didn't--or couldn't--return his ardent expressions of love. Then after his affair with Abigail, he not only felt guilty but shamed by Elizabeth's self-control.
She says, "I never thought you but a good man, John--only somewhat bewildered. If their positions were reversed, he'd have torn her limb from limb.
John Proctor is not the same man to himself as he is to others. In a way, their admiration revolts him, because he is disgusted with himself.
Elizabeth hints at his problem when she says, "The magistrate sits in your heart that judges you. Before Abigail came along and ruined his peace, he was always sure of himself.
He still is, but what he is sure of now is that nothing he can ever do will be pure and honest again. In Christian doctrine, there is one sin for which there can be no forgiveness. It is called despair, and it means giving up hope because you're so bad not even God can forgive you. John Proctor is heading toward despair when the play begins, and he is pushed closer to the edge as the witch madness unfolds. In the end he finds his goodness and is saved, but it's a close call. The first we hear of Elizabeth Proctor is from Abigail Williams, who calls her a bitter, lying, cold, sniveling woman.
Abigail has a tendency to blacken anyone who doesn't like her. But when we finally meet Elizabeth herself, she does seem pretty cool toward her husband, John. And if she's not exactly bitter about John's fling with Abigail, she isn't happy about it either. But who would be? She has a right to be jealous, and suspicious, too, especially when she finds out that the last time John was in town he saw Abigail alone--not in a crowd, as he had first told her.
Elizabeth wants John to go back to the judges and expose Abigail's lie about there being witchcraft in Salem, not just to help the town, but to prove he's not still in love with Abigail. When John loses his temper because he can't stand being judged any more, Elizabeth stands up to him:. Cold, suspicious, possessive: not an attractive picture of Elizabeth Proctor. The question is, what was she like before John "strayed"?
Later on, when she sees him for the last time before he's hanged, she answers this question herself: "It needs a cold wife to prompt lechery. This painful honesty about herself brings out another quality in Elizabeth Proctor. Abigail calls her a gossiping liar, but John thinks of her as "that goodness," and tells everyone that Elizabeth never told a lie in her Life.
Indeed, according to her husband, Elizabeth can't lie. This sounds like an exaggeration, and maybe John is making her out to be better than she is because he himself feels so guilty about having betrayed her. He could also be bragging because he's proud of her goodness. When she does tell a lie, it is to save John's name: she denies to the court that her husband was an adulterer.
Ironically, this lie does the opposite of what she intended, because John's already confessed--now it looks like he's lying. As Reverend Hale says, it's a natural lie to tell, and even though it didn't work, it took some courage for Elizabeth to lie to the most powerful authority in the province. Courage has been defined as "being scared and doing it anyway. Although obviously scared to death, she promises to fear nothing. And then, as if to prove it, perhaps to herself as well as the others in the room, she says, "Tell the children I have gone to visit someone sick.
But Elizabeth's courage is not blind--she's intelligent as well as brave. When she hears that her name has been "somewhat mentioned" in court, she realizes Abigail is out to get her.
It won't be enough for John to talk to the court about Abigail; he will have to go to Abigail herself. From one tiny due, Elizabeth figures out Abigail's whole monstrous plan to take her place with John. And she instantly knows what to do about it. After her arrest, and all through her trial, Elizabeth refuses to confess to witchcraft, even though this lie would save her life. This is brave and noble. But as soon as she discovers she is pregnant, she doesn't hesitate to tell her jailers immediately, knowing that this fact will probably spare her, at least for a while.
And in the last act Elizabeth shows not only wisdom but great love for her husband when he is agonizing over whether to confess. He asks her what he should do. She knows he is so confused that he will probably do whatever she says. She desperately wants him alive, especially now that a baby's on the way. But she refuses to choose for him: "As you will, I would have it," leaving him free to decide his own destiny.
But she does give him her blessing:. If there is a "bad guy" in The Crucible, Abigail Williams is it. She is the one who first led the girls to Tituba for dancing in the woods and conjuring spirits. When Tituba is forced to "confess," Abigail jumps right in and the other girls follow her.
During the witch trials she is the girls' leader, bringing them into the court and presiding over their "torments. And then, when it begins to look as if the tide is turning against her, she gets out while the getting is good, robbing her uncle, Reverend Parris, before she goes.
Abigail is a lot like the little girl in the movie The Bad Seed. In the movie, a nine-year-old terrorizes her family and the whole community. She murders several people, including her parents.
She gets away with it because no one can believe that a child could be so evil. Anyone who does find her out, she kills. Abigail lies without shame, threatens without fear, and thinks of nothing of sticking a needle two inches into her own belly in order to bring about the murder of Elizabeth Proctor. And she gets away with most of it.
But Abigail isn't a child. She's had a grown-up love affair with John Proctor, and has lost her childish faith in "the lying lessons I was taught by all these Christian women and their covenanted men. But only an adult could so coolly plot and execute the ingenious revenge Abigail plans for Elizabeth.
The important thing to decide about Abigail is whether you think she's evil or not. Without doubt, almost all her actions have evil consequences, and if there is good in her, we don't get to see much of it. She takes the lead in "crying out" witches; the other girls take their cues from her. In a very short time she has the whole town at her mercy, and she uses this power unscrupulously. In fact, a real witch could hardly have done a better job of destroying the community.
But is Abigail the only one to blame? Everyone else is therefore innocent; they just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. One thing that supports this idea is an old convention of writing plays that goes back to the Middle Ages.
Certain plays called "moralities" always had a stock character called the Vice. The Vice was a troublemaker; his whole purpose was to stir things up, to set characters against each other, and to try to destroy the established order of things. Often the Vice was the Devil in disguise, but since these plays were put on by the church, he always lost in the end, most of the time by getting caught in one of his own traps.
Abigail certainly fits this description, except for the last item--she doesn't get caught. But some believe that considering Abigail the "bad guy" misses Arthur Miller's point. These people think that the real "bad guy" in The Crucible is superstition. With or without Abigail, there'd have been no witch madness if there'd been no belief in witches. If you look at it this way, Abigail, although you'd hardly call her innocent, is not entirely to blame either.
Other girls cry out witches too; and it looks as if they were prompted, not by Abigail, but by their parents. If Abigail is evil, she's not alone. The madness itself, caused by superstition, is to blame. One person alone could never wreak such havoc. Who was behind the madness?
A women named Mary Batemen. Abigail Williams and Mary Batemen are very similar characters because they both created a mass hysteria based off an event that they staged. Witchcraft was defined as entering into a compact with the devil in exchange for certain powers to do evil. Although the Salem witch trials was an important and remarkable event that occurred to the Puritan people, there were not really witches in Salem, only hysteria and suspicion.
In , sequences of women had begun to have fits. Young girls who were trying out fortune-telling had begun to start acting as though they were being tormented. In , the only reasonable explanation was that specters were hurting them. Specters can be initiated by witches, and that means that there are witches in this village. Before long, more girls from the age of were being attacked by specters.
People were worried. At last, they concluded that there are witches in their society, and they were strong-willed to find the witches. In both pieces, the entire plot is based upon the Salem Witch Trials, connecting these together yet again.
In both, it all starts with Betty Parris and Abigail becoming sick and then going insane. Parris returned from the lecture, their girls were suffering worse than ever. Hysteria In , in Salem Massachusetts, the superstition of witches existed. In The Crucible, by Arthur Miller, a group of young girls act up and are then accused of being witches.
These girls then blame other people in order to get out of trouble and even pretend to be "bewitched" in front of the court during a trial. This leads into the deaths of some innocent people who were accused found guilty. The leader of the group is Abigail, who is in love with John Proctor.
Open Document. Essay Sample Check Writing Quality. In Salem, Massachusetts, a group of teen girls caught in an innocent act of love potions to catch the love of men are compelled to tell lies that Satan had invaded them and forced them to participate in the rituals and are then forced to name those involved. Thrown into the mix are greedy preachers and other major landowners trying to steal others ' land and one young woman infatuated with a married man and determined to get rid of his innocent wife.
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