How does the crucible reflect mccarthyism

That Abigail started, in effect, to condemn Elizabeth to death with her touch, then stopped her hand, then went through with it, was quite suddenly the human center of all this turmoil. All this I understood. I had not approached the witchcraft out of nowhere, or from purely social and political considerations.

My own marriage of twelve years was teetering and I knew more than I wished to know about where the blame lay. That John Proctor the sinner might overturn his paralyzing personal guilt and become the most forthright voice against the madness around him was a reassurance to me, and, I suppose, an inspiration: it demonstrated that a clear moral outcry could still spring even from an ambiguously unblemished soul. Moving crabwise across the profusion of evidence, I sensed that I had at last found something of myself in it, and a play began to accumulate around this man.

But as the dramatic form became visible, one problem remained unyielding: so many practices of the Salem trials were similar to those employed by the congressional committees that I could easily be accused of skewing history for a mere partisan purpose.

Inevitably, it was no sooner known that my new play was about Salem than I had to confront the charge that such an analogy was specious—that there never were any witches but there certainly are Communists. And the irony is that klatches of Luciferians exist all over the country today; there may even be more of them now than there are Communists.

As with most humans, panic sleeps in one unlighted corner of my soul. This anxiety-laden leap backward over nearly three centuries may have been helped along by a particular Upham footnote.

After all, only the Devil could lend such powers of invisible transport to confederates, in his everlasting plot to bring down Christianity. It was as though the court had grown tired of thinking and had invited in the instincts: spectral evidence—that poisoned cloud of paranoid fantasy—made a kind of lunatic sense to them, as it did in plot-ridden , when so often the question was not the acts of an accused but the thoughts and intentions in his alienated mind.

The breathtaking circularity of the process had a kind of poetic tightness. Not everybody was accused, after all, so there must be some reason why you were. By denying that there is any reason whatsoever for you to be accused, you are implying, by virtue of a surprisingly small logical leap, that mere chance picked you out, which in turn implies that the Devil might not really be at work in the village or, God forbid, even exist.

Therefore, the investigation itself is either mistaken or a fraud. You would have to be a crypto-Luciferian to say that—not a great idea if you wanted to go back to your farm. The more I read into the Salem panic, the more it touched off corresponding images of common experiences in the fifties: the old friend of a blacklisted person crossing the street to avoid being seen talking to him; the overnight conversions of former leftists into born-again patriots; and so on.

Apparently, certain processes are universal. The thought that the state has lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable And so the evidence has to be internally denied. That plain, craggy English was liberating in a strangely sensuous way, with its swings from an almost legalistic precision to a wonderful metaphoric richness.

But it was not yet my language, and among other strategies to make it mine I enlisted the help of a former University of Michigan classmate, the Greek-American scholar and poet Kimon Friar. He later translated Kazantzakis. As in the film, nearly fifty years later, the actors in the first production grabbed the language and ran with it as happily as if it were their customary speech.

With its five sets and a cast of twenty-one, it never occurred to me that it would take a brave man to produce it on Broadway, especially given the prevailing climate, but Kermit Bloomgarden never faltered. Well before the play opened, a strange tension had begun to build.

I knew of two suicides by actors depressed by upcoming investigation, and every day seemed to bring news of people exiling themselves to Europe: Charlie Chaplin, the director Joseph Losey, Jules Dassin, the harmonica virtuoso Larry Adler, Donald Ogden Stewart, one of the most sought-after screenwriters in Hollywood, and Sam Wanamaker, who would lead the successful campaign to rebuild the Old Globe Theatre on the Thames.

On opening night, January 22, , I knew that the atmosphere would be pretty hostile. To Miller, his plays, especially The Crucible , were an attempt to coax people into asking these questions. How do we as Americans define ourselves, our culture, our sense of humanity in a world that pervasively encroaches our borders and becomes, to some, ever more threatening? To pinpoint an exact answer to these questions is impossible, but the lens which Miller provides in The Crucible can offer a valuable insight into the governing powers of fear in American culture--whether in , , or It also poses a very potent question—how does living in an atmosphere of fear jeopardize our identity as a people and as individuals?

The city, the nation, the world, and now the universe are never far beyond our most intimate sense of life. Even though we may temporarily suspend reality while sitting in this theater, everything in the world around us is still happening. As we see personal dramas unfold on the stage in front of us, we cannot help but get the impression that there is something larger, scarier, more pervasive that governs the actions of these characters. For example, Proctor was against Judge Danforth because he was accused of association with the devil, just like Murrow was accused of communism by Senator McCarthy.

Both were willing to stand up against hysteria even if it would ruin their reputation. McCarthyism resulted in Americans turning against each other because of politicians greed for power, paranoia, and the fear of communist infiltration. Similarly, americans were being blacklisted by McCarthy because they believed these people may have.

The namesake of McCarthyism, his goal was to weed out all communist supporters. Suspected communists were arrested and interrogated. Because of his stance on the matter, he gained mass popularity. Because of this, nobody was willing to put a check on McCarthy 's methods: he helped the party and anyone against the senator would be perceived as a traitor. The Salem witch trials and McCarthyism have an uncanny relation to one another.

Also during the McCarthyism era and the witch trials innocent lives were ruined when people were forced to accuse others or be accused themselves.

Though The Crucible is an allegory for McCarthyism, it focuses some of its attention on the question what is more important, your honor and reputation or your life? By accusing the Army of treason, he lost respect in the population and bad opinions spread around, ruining his power streak.

This risk prevented these kinds of people from succumbing to actions that would sabotage their reputation. In addition, McCarthyism allowed these kinds of nasty people, such as McCarthy, to act upon unsightly desires. Therefore, the McCarthy trials encouraged the conflict between.

Macbeth is used by Shakespeare to show the irony of the Gunpowder Plot. The conspirators created the plot to freely practice their religion, yet planned to murder people, which, in most cases, is probably not the holiest of acts. The irony in Macbeth is that he plans to kill people in power to gain power, yet the same brings him to his demise. Macbeth is not only an entertaining work, but a historical telling of social and political issues of 17th century Protestant England.

Between and , Senator Joseph McCarthy investigated people suspected of being associated with communism. In the writing 'The Crucible,' Miller's purpose was to point out the similarities between the Salem witch hunts and.