Summary Of The Crucible By Arthur Miller

The fatal tendency of people within communities to divide into warring groups – us and them – is a historical constant and one that is well represented in Miller’s play The Crucible.
This utilisation of ‘scapegoats’ is characteristic of historical human interaction, whereby the aggressors blame their victims, often times the minority, for every kind of evil. This was clearly represented in the play through allegorical references made about America during the McCarthy era through the events of Salem in 1692.
In Salem, ‘despite the Bible’s charitable injunctions’ the community was divided by ‘long held hatreds’ that, for this highly religious community, enabled its members to ‘cry witch against one’s neighbour and feel perfectly justified’. This undercurrent of ‘vengeance’ empowered children, like Abigail and Mary Warren, with the ability to accuse adults of ‘evil’ in a fury of fanaticism and paranoia. The ‘Christian women and their convenanted men’ who facilitated the hysteria that fuelled the ‘invisible crime’ of witch craft did so with the full support of the court, and under the guise of piety, even when they knew ‘in all [their] black hearts’ that they were complicit in a very public trial rooted in pretence and fraud. The social disintegration of the Salem community that
lted from this was fully represented through Hale’s discourse in Act Four, when he declared that ‘[he] came to this village…bearing gifts of high religion…it died…and…blood flowed up.’ It was clear in the play that the façade of godliness was not enough to save the community from