Arthur Miller, The Crucible
Video from the lectures by Robert Crawford and Derek Gladwin for the Repetition Compulsion theme, March 2015.
On sympathizing with Abigail Williams
In Arts One this week we talked about Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. In both our seminars this week there were presentations by students that led me to question my initial response to the play (okay, actually, quite often I question my initial responses to texts during seminars! But I’m going to write about one such […]
The Crucible
Whether human nature is good or bad has been discussed in a few works we have read. Hobbes argues that human being is naturally bad and the existence of sovereignty and laws is primarily to stop people hurting each other. I agreed with Hobbes’s idea when reading Leviathan, but when reading The Crucible, I feel that laws and society […] Continue reading →
The Crucible
When first starting The Crucible the thing I was fairly unnerved. Almost immediately I noticed the concept of the ‘private life’ of a citizen becoming entwined with the affairs of the state. Salem being a theocracy relied on the same source for moral guidelines as it did for laws: The Bible. This makes the private affairs of the citizen the […]
The Crucible–Arthur Miller
This play is really quite terrifying; I cannot think of any other way to describe it. This is the first time I’ve heard of the Salem Witch Trials, and when exposed to this book it brought to mind The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne which was also set in Puritan 17th century Massachusetts. In it, […]
My Favorite Scene in The Crucible
Personally, I found that Miller often made efforts to showcase peoples’ hypocrisy. I really enjoyed reading about how Proctor commits adultery with Abigail and not only denies it when talking to her young lover, but also openly denies it to his wife. Nevertheless, I found it lovely and even comical when Hale arrives to his […]
The Crucible
I actually wasn’t aware that The Crucible had anything to do with the cold war, but that comparison really made me appreciate the play more. The story becomes richer when you think of it as just an earlier example of the human potential for mass hysteria, which was also present in Miller’s time. The cultural […]
Still Falling Apart
While reading the Crucible, I was reminded of the scene where Ezinma leads folks to her iyi-uwa (a stone that the ogbanje used as a link between worlds so they could “die and return again to torment [their] mother[s]” (Achebe 81)). Since my belief system does not involve ogbanje, I felt while reading that Ezinma was leading her parents and the medicine man on. Just as the people in the Crucible bowed to external pressures when confessing and convicting others, Ezinma leads them to her iyi-uwa and admits to being an ogbanje only because that is…read more
Names in “The Crucible”
The first time I read The Crucible in grade 12, I picked up on a quote by John Proctor near the end of the play: Because it is my name! Because I cannot have another in my life! Because I lie and sign myself to lies! Because I am not worth the dust on the […]
When the feeling’s gone and you can’t go on it’s…
Tragedy to me has always involved strong feelings of catharsis with a climactic final scene featuring a lot of death. Therefore the Salem witch trials are perfect for this. The only problem is witches seem a lot less fun, so now my childhood is r…