A context of fear
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| The Salem Girls in The Crucible (The Old Vic, London, 2014) |
Arthur Miller wrote The Crucible in the 1950s, in a climate of fear, during the Cold War,
when communist infiltration of US culture was considered a pathology, a virus
that could kill their politics and their nation.
Writers and intellectuals gravitated to communism
during the 1930s Depression, either hoping its precepts could lead to social
reform or as a way to protest America’s isolationism, specifically the nation’s
neutrality in the Spanish War. In the
50s, in a period of right-wing paranoia, they became Senator McCarthy’s
scapegoats. They were considered Un-American. The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) turned its attention
to writers and actors who were
supposedly seen as a threat to the republic. Those who in the 1930s had
embraced radical politics were now to be made to pay.
In January 1952 Elia Kazan,
Miller’s friend and film director, was summoned by the Committee. Although at
first he refused to name names, he changed his mind, confessing what he had
done and said to Miller, who then left Kazan’s
house and drove directly to Salem, Massachusetts to research what would become The Crucible.
Crossing Frontiers
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| Arthur Miller (1915 -2005) |
Arthur Miller was the son of an
immigrant father and a mother , born in America but from a family who came from
the same Polish town. Beginning in a building on the Lower East Side of New
York, they worked their way to wealth,
moving to an extensive and expensive apartment at the top of Central Park. They were the embodiment of the
American Dream until the Wall Street
Crash of 1929 stripped them of their money and they downsized to a small frame
house in Brooklyn. The lesson that Miller learnt early was that it could all go
away. Capitalism seemed a failure, a disappointing lie, and 17-year-old Arthur was introduced to
Marxism by a fellow student in 1932. He
worked in a car parts warehouse for two years to pay for his University studies
and in those years, though he never became a member of the party, he wrote a
long letter to his mother explaining why communism was the only answer. He also
wrote to the President of the United States complaining of his policy toward
Spain during the Civil War. That letter was passed to the FBI and became the
first of over 600 pages that would eventually constitute Miller’s file.
Witchcraft in Salem
The main source for Miller’s The Crucible was The Devil in Massachusetts by
Marion Starkey, which was based on the documents of the 1692 trials in Salem.
They recorded that, as a result of some
amateur dabbling in the supernatural by a group of adolescent girls the jails
were filled with men and women accused of witchcraft and twenty people were
hanged.
The girls were joined by a West
Indian slave, Tituba, with her spells and beliefs. Probably more serious was
the intervention of Mrs Putnam, seven of whose children had died on the night
of their births, and who sent her surviving daughter to Tituba’s gatherings to
call back their spirits to name their murderers.
Then Betty Parris, the daughter
of the minister, started to behave as a child possessed, lying in a trance and
sometimes crawling around like an animal with her cousin, Abigail Williams.
Their behaviour was probably what we would call now psychosomatic but in 17th
century Salem, the explanation was that the children were indeed possessed by
the Devil.
In court a hysteria seized the
girls as they discovered their power in naming innocent people as accomplices of the Devil. There was
of course no refuting their accusations because the only witnesses to the
witchcraft were the children themselves. Anyone sceptical either about
witchcraft or the truth of the accusations was liable to the same fate and it
is not surprising to learn that so many confessed to the sin of trafficking
with the Devil when the only alternative was to be hanged.
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| Daniel Day-Lewis as John Proctor in The Crucible 1996 film adaptation |
In naming people, the girls were
probably projecting their own guilt on to the innocent. One such innocent was
Elizabeth Proctor, who was accused by her former maid, Abigail Williams. Miller
was particularly impressed by the testimony he read on the trial records: when
confronted by Elizabeth Proctor in court Abigail stretched her hand and cried
out that her fingers were burning.
Elizabeth’s husband, John
Proctor, becomes the central character in Miller’s play, The
Crucible. After his wife, his friends and then he himself have to face
the girls’ false accusations, he goes through an ordeal by conscience, finally
accepting his own death rather than make a false confession.
In a sense, The Crucible has the structure of a classical tragedy, with John Proctor as its tragic hero. Honest, upright, and blunt-spoken, Proctor is a good man, but one with a secret, fatal flaw: his lust for Abigail Williams.
The title
A crucible is a container in which metals are heated to extract the pure element from dross or impurities. In the play John Proctor is tested in a life threatening ordeal and his death at the end rather than betrayal of his conscience shows us that he too has come through the fire to be purified.
The Crucible at the theatre
The Crucible is one of the most
widely and frequently staged plays for its timeless resonance with deeply felt
themes. In recent years movie stars like Richard Armitage (The Old Vic, London,
2014) or Ben Whishaw (Broadway, New York, 2016) have played acclaimed John
Proctors in very successful stagings.
The Crucible at
The Old Vic 2014
The Crucible with Ben Whishaw and Saoirse Ronan (2016)
Worksheet - The Crucible Questionnaire
The Crucible at the cinema
The Crucible also had a movie adaptation directed by Nicholas Hytner and starring Daniel Day Lewis as John Proctor and Wynona Ryder as Abigail Williams in 1996.
Sources:
1) Arthur Miller, The Crucible,Preface and Introduction, Heinemann 1992
2) Arthur Miller, The Crucible, The Old Vic London, Theatre Program Book, 2014
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