The Crucible

     Crucible- 1. A heat resistant container in which ores or metals are melted 2. A place or a set of circumstances where people or things are subjected to forces that often make them change. In Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, the unhappy plot unfolds as fear and revenge heat up the whole town, despite their best resistance to it. The hot temperature of the fire around the crucible continually soars as Reverend Parris tries to serve his own needs by interrogating his niece Abigail. Abigail helps intensify the heat of the inferno even more as she takes revenge on her lover John Proctor and his wife. Following in her wake, the whole town becomes a raging blaze, accusing others so that they may remain unaccused.

     Fear can change a person into someone completely different from who they truly are inside. As in the case of Mary Warren, she ended up having to choose between risking her own life to hanging or condemning the innocent John Proctor to his own death. Eventually her courage broke, and she accused Proctor of witchcraft even though that was something totally against her value of honest. The town girls kept accusing others so that the blame for their dancing in the woods would shift onto someone else. Realizing when they first started accusing that they were completely lying, knowing that lying was a huge sin, they tried to justify their own sin of lying by accusing others who had also sinned. Fearful of what might happen if they were caught lying made them feel like they had to continue these lies to remain safe.

     Gossip appeals to people emotionally because it spreads other people’s private actions and thoughts in a dramatic fashion that appeals to our senses. Eventually our strong belief in something that can’t be proved becomes so strong through our own self analysis that we begin to believe gossip that could be completely untrue about others. John Proctor rightfully accused Abigail of lying and trying to kill his wife, but Elizabeth ended up condemning her and her husband’s lives by not revealing the actual truth. Because of Elizabeth’s inability to tell the truth, gossip and lies seemed to be the only truth. The lies by gossip could not be proved or disproved, but the actual truth ended up being told and perceived as a lie, thus furthering the “evidence” that Abigail’s and the girls’ accusations were true.

     Because of the flames started by Reverend Parris’s questioning Abigail and Abigail’s lying, the heat that they caused in the town eventually melted their crucible, the once resistant resolve of the town completely crumbled. When Proctor chose to die in innocence of crime rather than living a lie and dishonoring his name, he took the heat of the whole town into his whole being. Proctor chooses to let them kill him in innocence rather than giving them the means to justify the fact that they had killed so many people already. A name can be compared to a person’s soul; a name is a personal describing adjective that describes who you truly are as a person. John Proctor realized that he could not be true to his name or himself by continually living a lie for the rest of his life; he knew that he hadn’t been true to himself in the past by cheating with Abigail, but he also knew that integrity was a value worth dying for. At the end of the book, an honest man realized that living life after denying who you truly are isn’t even worth it.