The Crucible

Reverend Paris

"But if you trafficked with spirits in the forest I must know it now, for surely my enemies will, and they will ruin me with it."

Parris is Salem’s church’s pastor; he is controlling and selfish. He worries about what people of the community will think of him instead of caring about what will happen to his family.

When Mary Warren comes to the Proctor's home and speaks of Elizathbeth's name being mentioned in the court, she is foreshadowing Elizath's arrest to go to the court. Irony in the play in one way was that Abigail started everyhting to get John Proctor and he wound up dead. Abigail was out accusing everyone to get to John, and John was trying to stand up for them. That is called conflict.

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Throughout Christian history, the “pursuit of the millennium” comes upon many times. “The concept of the millennium derives from the early Christian belief that Jesus Christ would come to earth a second and last time to establish a messianic kingdom that would last for a thousand year (a millennium).” (Finkelman, 1) There are two types of millennium beliefs: premillennial and postmillennial. Premillennial people believe that they should separate from society that isn’t the way they believe it should be, and postmillennial people believe they should work towards changing the society. A man that once lived, named William Miller, born in 1782, was once a deist, or a non-believer in God. He served in the war of 1812 and believed that God had the control of the war. He started joining in a Baptist Church four years later in 1816. Miler studied the Bible very diligently until he came across what he believed were clues as to when the millennium may come. He concluded it would come “in about the year 1843 and that non-believers of God would be denied entry to the kingdom.” (Finkelman, 3) He preached “to about 500,000 people by 1844.” (Finkelman, 3) people were worried and prepared all kinds of things like ascension robes for the greeting of the Second Coming. He announced the date to April 18, 1844. Nothing happened when the day came and he had confessed to his error. He never said his belief of it near again. Others led to believe the real date was October 22, 1844 (also known as the Great Disappointment). People all around New England began closing their businesses for this and yet again nothing happened. Miller spoke of no one actually going to figure out when the day is coming. He died on December 20, 1849. “…from the ashes of the failed prophecy came the Seventh Day Adventist Church under James and Ellen White, which continues to this day.” (Finkelman, 3)

The Crucible

The Crucible is a well-constructed play despite of the outrageous belief of these evil forces within the town. Penelope Curtis finds the play “striking” and likes how Miller used the characters to make the story more malignant then it actually ways. P. Curtis writes, “A possessed community: that is what the staging inevitably rationality of Miller’s notes.” (Curtis, 1) The Community was really close and they seemed to share all the same emotions and beliefs.Most of Miller’s play’s models were based off of the Greek cultures, but “The Crucible is the only one in which a whole community is directly, and tragically, implicated,” Curtis says on page one. Miller wrote this play as an idiom, and idioms are not common from him. Since Miller changed it up a bit, he decided to turn it up a notch with the dramatic court scenes and barbaric rulings. “The phrase ‘mass hysteria’ cannot by itself do the work. Even now most people seem to read the play in the way first indicated by the commentary, and suggested, to the lesser extent, by the commentary.” (Curtis, 1) Curtis believes this play is much more than everyone else sees it to be when they read it.

Arthur Asher Miller was born on October 17, 1915. He was born in Harlem, in the New York City division of Manhattan. In 1940, Author Miller, writer of The Crucible, got married to Mary Grace Slattery and they both had two kids. He didn’t have to go into war because when he was on his high school football team, he injured his kneecap. His parents were Austrian Jewish, and owned a prosperous, women’s clothing business. He grew up very wealthy, but in the Wall Street Crash of 1929, when he was fourteen years old, the family almost lost everything and moved to Gravesend, Brooklyn. He went to the University of Michigan majoring in journalism and worked for the Michigan Daily. He switched his major to English after writing his first play called, No Villain, and received an award called Avery Hopwood Award for it. This award opened his eyes to a possible future career in playwriting. Miller then joined a playwriting seminar. In 1949, he and Mary Grace Slattery got married and had two kids. He didn’t have to go into the military because he had a kneecap injury from high school football. The Red Scare and the Salem Witch Trials relation is the play was a reaction by Miller to the mayhems he supposed were being committed at the time of the Red Scare. He uses the Salem Witch Trials as an instance of groups of people being pulled out as evil. He recounts the witch trials of old to the "witch hunt" of his time: The Red Scare. He uses a way of relation to point out our inability to learn from our past mistakes.

Aynsley SmithLemoine 2