However, Rebecca is convicted of witchcraft by the court, and Hale begins to see the hysteria at work in the community, and begins to feel he is responsible. He tells the judge, "I have this morning signed away the soul of Rebecca Nurse, Your Honor. I'll not conceal it, my hand shakes yet as with a wound!" (Miller 92). He begins to see how his own actions helped create more hysteria and confusion, and he questions his faith and his conviction that the Devil exists. By the end of the play, Hale has become disillusioned with the trials and the hysteria. He says, " I came into this village like a bridegroom to his beloved, bearing gifts of high religion; the very crowns of holy law I brought, and what I touched with my bright confidence, it died; and where I turned the eye of my great faith, blood flowed up. Beware, Goody Proctor -- cleave to no faith when faith brings blood" (Miller 122). He realizes his mistakes and his zealous ways,...
His actions have set the trials and accusations in motion, and it is too late for him to control the outcome. He tries to get the girls to confess to save their lives, but they will not. His learning and authority have failed him, and he has failed the community.
While he resists coming completely clean and exposing his affair, he eventually tells the whole truth, but only after the town is in chaos. The climax of The Crucible occurs toward the end of the play when Mary accuses Proctor of being a witch and he is summarily arrested. Prior to this the action builds as several girls in the play get caught up in the witch hysteria. Proctor's arrest
Crucible Arthur Miller's play "The Crucible" is set in Salem, Massachusetts in the last part of the 17th century. The play itself is based on the Salem witch trials that took place during that time. People who lived during that time period were very religious, and also very superstitious. The play revolves around power, jealousy, and superstition, all of which were very common during the Salem witch trials and the
Crucible is a play by Arthur Miller with layers of meaning and subtext. Miller's mission was to draw a direct analogy between the social and political themes of the 20th century with those of pre-Revolutionary America. Setting the play in Puritan New England, in the town of Salem, allows the playwright to explore the thematic connections between the witch trials and McCarthyism. Doing so seems seamless, as the audience perceives
Crucible Dramatic Tension in the Crucible One of the reasons that The Crucible is such a successful play is that the drama is established early. A consideration of the first 20 pages of the play will show that Arthur Miller creates dramatic tension in the first scene and establishes the themes, setting, and plots that will continue throughout the play. The play opens the day after the girls were seen dancing in the
He was labeled for a belief that he did not openly admitted subsisting to; he was labeled based on the fact that he refused to testify against an ideology. It is not surprising, then, that the primary message of "The Crucible" resonated his thoughts and feelings about the McCarthy administration's containment policy against Communism. The arguments he presented in the play showed how Miller viewed the government's offensive action against
However, using today's less rigid religious standards make the outcome of the trials seem ridiculous and completely unjust. Today, most people do not consider witchcraft a reality, and so, basing a court decision on the confession of bewitched young women seems almost ludicrous. As critic Bloom maintains, "Today's audience cannot take the possibility of witchcraft seriously; the implication for us is that no enlightened citizen of any age would
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