The Crucible (1953)

Overly didactic. ( )

THANK you, English class. Also, watching the movie at the same time didn't hurt :) ( )

uses Salem trials to criticize McCarthyism

A lightning-strike of a play; one of the rare modern classics that not only meets but surpasses its fêted reputation. Arthur Miller's The Crucible dramatizes the infamous Salem witch trials, and it works as a historical interpretation of that fiasco, but it also has a frightening contemporariness.

The parallels can be seen not only in the McCarthyism of Miller's time (surely the intended target, and courageously targeted), but in our current 'cancel culture' of shout-down grievance and groupthink ("Is the accuser always holy now?... the little crazy children are jangling the keys of the kingdom, and common vengeance writes the law" (pg. 72)). Even if the reader lacks a political interest, they will no doubt see analogues of the likes of Abigail Williams and Samuel Parris in the history of their personal life, particularly in the malicious politics of the schoolyard or the office environment. (Alas, John Proctors, or even John Hales, seem to be much rarer.)

This contemporary vitality is not modishness; in fact, many will no doubt find The Crucible unwelcome, as it holds them to a higher moral standard. Rather, the vitality comes from Miller's acute understanding of human nature. He identifies the sort of mind-death that is to be found in dogma and ideology and social climbing, but he also acknowledges chance, fear, envy, jealousy and pique, as well as the indulgence of a corrupt system towards those with more money, higher emotion or lower scruples. Due to the faults (both resolvable and irresolvable) in the human condition, small things catch fire – in the play as in life – and become an inferno of hysteria with alarming rapidity. It's believable; we know there's always a good turnout for a hanging.

The play is infinitely flexible, never becoming brittle or broken, because the "predilection for minding other people's business" is not only "time-honoured among the people of Salem" (pg. 14), but is among us in every era. In The Crucible, all our "old pretence is ripped away," and we are "what we always were, but naked" (pp74-5). It was never about religion, just as it is never about ideology now (though condemn those things too); rather, the "afflicting spirit" (pg. 95) has only ever been hysteria and ignorance and, among the true exploiters, a malicious self-interest. The accusers of Salem use the same crutch as the Spanish Inquisitors, but they are also the same as the McCarthyites and the lynch mobs and the contemporary 'activists'.

Miller's great achievement in the play is not only in recognising this, but in dramatizing it against the background of the unfortunate; the struggle of John and Elizabeth Proctor, for example, which shows the tragedy of the good people being wracked by honour, where the bad are only wrecking-balls. One of the great advantages of art, which The Crucible excels at delivering, is that the immediacy of the injustices and the tragedies and the examples, both good and bad, can be brought to us, and at a heightened pitch. Whereas, with history or discourse – or life – one must wait tens if not hundreds of years until, belatedly, "the worms declare his truth" (pg. 126). ( )

First read in Sept. 1966. I did not know the history or understand the significance, nor did I appreciate the integrity of the characters. Rad today, as an adult I see the play's place in history and its magnificence. ( )