Transcript The Crucible by Arthur Miller - Charleston County School

The Crucible
by Arthur Miller
Historical & Cultural Context
Information
Advanced Composition & Novel
Mrs. Snipes
Arthur Miller (1915-2005)

Known and respected for his intimate and
realistic portrayal of the working class, Arthur
Miller remains one of the most prolific
playwrights of his time. At the peak of his career
immediately following World War II, American
theater was transformed by his profound ability
to capture the heart of the common man and
make his audiences empathize with his plight as
he attempts to find his war in an often harsh
and unsympathetic world.
Arthur Miller (cont.)

Arthur Miller was born in 1915 in New
York, into a middle-class Jewish
immigrant family. His father was a
clothing manufacturer and store owner
who experienced significant loss after
the Stock Market Crash of 1929. Miller
attended Abraham Lincoln High School
in Brooklyn, and was a gifted athlete
and an average student. After being
rejected the first time, Miller was
finally accepted into the University of
Michigan in 1934, where his studies
focused on drama and journalism. He
graduated in 1938 with a Bachelor’s
degree in English. Two years later, he
published his first play, the relatively
unsuccessful The Man Who Had All the
Luck and married his college girlfriend
Mary Slattery, with whom he later had
two children, Robert and Jane.
Arthur Miller (cont.)

Miller’s first prominent play
was All My Sons(1947), a
tragedy about a factory owner
who knowingly sold faulty
aircraft parts during World War
II. All My Sons won the Drama
Critics Circle Award and two
Tony Awards. His 1949 play
Death of a Salesman was also
an enormous critical success,
winning the Drama Critics
Circle Award, the Pulitzer Prize,
and several Tony Awards,
including Best Play, Best
Author, and Best Director. To
this day, Death of a Salesman
remains one of his most
famous and respected works.
Arthur Miller (cont.)

In 1950, Miller’s troubles began. After directing a production of
Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, Miller began getting
negative attention for his very public political and social
commentary. In 1953 The Crucible opened on Broadway, depicting
a deliberate parallel between the Salem Witch Trials and the
Communist Red Scare that America was experiencing at the time.
This production brought more suspicion onto Miller at a very
unstable time in American history, and in June of 1956, he was
called to testify in front of the House Committee on Un-American
Activities (HUAC), for which he was found in contempt of court for
his refusal to cooperate and identify names of Communist
sympathizers. This ruling was later overturned by the United States
Court of Appeals, but damage to his reputation had taken place
nonetheless.
Arthur Miller (cont.)

That same year, he divorced his wife
and married actress and American icon
Marilyn Monroe; however, his marriage
to Monroe did not last long—they
divorced in 1961. His plays After the
Fall (1964) and Finishing the Picture
(2004) are said to loosely depict their
turbulent and unhappy marriage. After
divorcing Monroe, Miller married Inge
Morath, with whom he had a son,
Daniel, in 1962, and a daughter,
Rebecca, in 1963. There have been
unconfirmed reports that Miller’s son
Daniel was diagnosed with Down
Syndrome shortly after he was born
and that Miller institutionalized Daniel
and never saw or spoke to him again,
even in his poignant autobiography
Timebends (1987).
Arthur Miller (cont.)

Miller’s other plays include: Incident at
Vichy (1965), The Price (1968), The
Creation of the World and Other
Business (1972), The American Clock
(1980), The Ride Down Mount Morgan
(1991), Broken Glass (1994), and
Resurrection Blues (2002). He also
wrote a novel, Focus (1945), a book of

short stories in 1967, several
screenplays and television movies, and
Echoes Down the Corridor (2000), a
collection of essays. In addition, he
collaborated with Inge (who was a
photographer) on several books. He
received the Tony Award for Lifetime
Achievement in 1999 and the National
Book Foundation’s medal for his
contribution to American literature in
2001.
Arthur Miller died of heart failure in
February of 2005 at his Connecticut
home. He was 89 years old.
Historical Context: The Red Scare
and McCarthy Trials

In 1950, Arthur Miller wrote The Crucible
as a parallel between the Salem Witch
Trials and the current events that were
spreading throughout the United States at
the time. A similar “witch hunt” was
happening in the United States—and this
time, the accused were those who were a
part of the Communist Party or who were
Communist sympathizers.
Historical Context: The Red Scare
and McCarthy Trials (cont.)

Shortly after the end of World War
I, a “Red Scare” took hold of the
nation. Named after the red flag
of the USSR (now Russia), the
“Reds” were seen as a threat to
the democracy of the United
States. Fear, paranoia, and
hysteria gripped the nation, and
many innocent people were
questioned and then jailed for
expressing any view which was
seen as anti-Democratic or antiAmerican.

In June of 1940, Congress passed
the Alien Registration Act, which
required anyone who was not a
legal resident of the United States
to file a statement of their
occupational and personal status,
which included a record of their
political beliefs. The House UnAmerican Activities Committee
(HUAC), which was established in
1938, had the job of investigating
those who were suspected of
overthrowing or threatening the
democracy of the U.S. As the Alien
Registration Act gathered the
information, the HUAC began
hunting down those who were
believed to be a threat to
American beliefs.
Historical Context: The Red Scare
and McCarthy Trials (cont.)

The HUAC established that
Communist beliefs were being
spread via mass media. At this
time, movies were becoming more
liberal, and therefore, were
believed to be a threat; many felt
that Hollywood was attempting to
propagandize Communist beliefs.
In September of 1947, the HUAC
subpoenaed nineteen witnesses
(most of whom were actors,
directors, and writers) who had
previously refused to comment,
claiming their Fifth Amendment
rights. Eleven of the seventeen
were called to testify; only one
actually spoke on the stand—the
remaining ten refused to speak
and were labeled the “Hollywood
Ten.”
Historical Context: The Red Scare
and McCarthy Trials (cont.)

After these infamous ten refused to speak, executives
from the movie industry met to decide how best to
handle the bad press. They decided to suspend all ten
without pay. Although the initial intention was to save
their box office reputation, what eventually resulted was
as decade-long blacklist. Hundreds of people who
worked in the industry were told to point the finger
naming those who had any affiliation with the
Communist party. As a result, over 200 people lost their
jobs and were unable to find anyone who would hire
them. The Communist with-hunt ruined the careers of
hundreds, and ruined the reputation of hundreds more.
Historical Context: The Red Scare
and McCarthy Trials (cont.)

In February of 1950, a
Republican senator from
Wisconsin names Joseph
McCarthy claimed to have a list
of over 200 card-carrying
members of the Communist
party. By 1951, a new flourish
of accusations began and a
new wave were subpoenaed to
“name names”—to snitch on
those who were Communists
or believed to be Communist
sympathizers. Later, the terms
McCarthy Trials and
McCarthyism were coined,
which described the antiCommunist movement and
trials of the 1950s.
Historical Context: The Red Scare
and McCarthy Trials (cont.)

Arthur Miller wrote The
Crucible in 1953, after
witnessing first-hand the
modern witch-hunt that had
taken place in the United
States. Miller wrote the
controversial play as an
allegory, a play which
represents something much
deeper. In this case, the story
is about the Salem witch trials
of the 1690s, but warns of
history repeating these tragic
events on the 1950s.
Miller Reacts to a Witch Hunt
“I had known about the Salem witchcraft
phenomenon since my American history class at
[the University of] Michigan, but it had remained
in my mind as one of those inexplicable
mystifications of the long-dead past when
people commonly believed that the spirit could
leave the body…”
 “As though it had been ordained, a copy of
Marion Starkey’s book The Devil in
Massachusetts fell into my hands, and the
bizarre story came back as I had recalled it, but
this time in remarkably well-organized detail.”

Miller Reacts to a Witch Hunt

“At first I rejected the idea of a play on the subject. My own rationality was
too strong, I thought, to really allow me to capture this wildly irrational
outbreak. A drama cannot merely describe an emotion, it has to become
that emotion. But gradually, over weeks, a living connection between
myself and Salem, and between Salem and Washington, was made in my
mind—for whatever else they might be, I saw that the hearings in
Washington were profoundly and avowedly ritualistic. After all, in almost
every case the Committee knew in advance what they wanted the witness
to give them: the names of his comrades in the [Communist] Party. The FBI
had long since infiltrated the Party, and informers had long ago identified
the participants in various meetings. The main point of the hearings,
precisely as in seventeenth-century Salem, was that the accused make
public confession, damn his confederates as well as his Devil master, and
guarantee his sterling new allegiance by breaking disgusting old vows—
whereupon he was let loose to rejoin the society of extremely decent
people. In other words, the same spiritual nugget lay folded within both
procedures—an act of contrition done not in solemn privacy but out in
public air.”
Miller Reacts to a Witch Hunt (cont.)

“The Salem prosecution was actually on more
solid legal ground since the defendant, if guilty
of familiarity with the Unclean One [the Devil],
had broken a law against the practice of
witchcraft, a civil as well as a religious offense;
whereas the offender against HUAC could not be
accused of any such violation but only of a
spiritual crime, subservience to a political
enemy’s desires and ideology. He was
summoned before the Committee to be called a
bad name, but one that could destroy his
career.”
Miller Reacts to a Witch Hunt (cont.)

“In effect, it came down to a
governmental decree of moral
guilt that could easily be made
to disappear by ritual speech:
intoning names of fellow
sinners and recanting former
beliefs. This last was probably
the saddest and truest part of
the charade, for by the early
1950s there were few, and
even fewer in the arts, who
had not left behind their
illusions about the Soviets.”

“It was this immaterial
element, the surreal spiritual
transaction, that now
fascinated me, for the rituals
of guilt and confession
followed all the forms of a
religious inquisition, except, of
course, that the offended
parties were not God and his
ministers but a congressional
committee…”
Notes from Christopher Bigsby’s
Introduction to the play:

“The question is not the reality of witches
but the power of authority to define the
nature of the real, and the desire, on the
part of individuals and the state, to identify
those whose purging will relieve a sense of
anxiety and guilt. What lay behind the
procedures of both witch trial and political
hearing was a familiar American need to
assert a recoverable innocence even if the
only guarantee of such innocence lay in the
displacement of guilt onto others. To sustain
the integrity of their own names, the
accused were invited to offer the names of
others, even though to do so would be to
make them complicit in procedures they
despised and hence to damage their sense
of themselves. And here is a theme that
connects virtually all of Miller’s plays:
betrayal, of the self no less than of others.”
Notes (continued):

“…in Miller’s plays there usually comes a moment when
the central character cries out his own name,
determined to invest it with meaning and integrity.
Almost invariably this moment occurs when he is on the
point of betraying himself and others. A climactic scene
in The Crucible occurs when John Proctor, on the point
of trading his integrity for his life, finally refuses to pay
the price, which is to offer the names of others to buy
his life…Three years later, Miller himself was called
before the Committee. His reply, when asked to betray
others, was a virtual paraphrase of the one offered by
Proctor. He announced, “I am trying to, and will protect
my sense of myself. I could not use the name of another
person and bring trouble on him.’”
Notes (continued):

“[The Crucible] is Arthur Miller’s most frequently
produced play not, I think, because it addresses
affairs of the state nor even because it offers us
the tragic sight of a man who dies to save his
conception of himself and the world, but
because audiences understand all too well that
the breaking of charity is no less a truth of their
own lives than it is an account of historical
processes…The Crucible reminds us how fragile
is our grasp on those shared values that are the
foundation of any society.”
Notes (continued)

“Beyond anything else The Crucible is
a study in power and the mechanisms
by which power is sustained,
challenged, and lost…In the landscape
of The Crucible, on the one hand
stands the church, which provides the
defining language within which all
social, political, and moral debate is
conducted. On the other stand those
usually deprived of power—the black
slave Tituba and the young children—
who suddenly gain access to an
authority as absolute as that which
had previously subordinated
them…Those socially marginalized
move to the very center of social
action…The Crucible is a play about
the seductive nature of power…”
Notes (continued)

The Crucible is both an intense
psychological drama and a
play of epic proportions…this is
a drama about an entire
community betrayed by a
Dionysian surrender to the
irrational; it is also, however, a
play about the redemption of
an individual and, through the
individual, of a society. Some
scenes, therefore, people the
stage with characters, while
others show the individual
confronted by little more than
his own conscience. That
oscillation between the public
and the private is a part of the
rhythmic pattern of the play.”
Notes (continued)

“…the play’s success now owes little to the
political and social context in which it was
written. It stands, instead, as a study of the
debilitating power of guilt, the seductions of
power, the flawed nature of the individual and of
the society to which the individual owes
allegiance. It stands as a testimony to the ease
with which we betray those very values essential
to our survival, but also the courage with which
some men and women can challenge what
seems to be a ruling orthodoxy.”
Notes (continued)

“Like so many of Miller’s other
plays, it is a study of a man who
wishes, above all, to believe that
he has invested his life with
meaning, but cannot do so if he
betrays himself through
betraying others. It is a study of
a society that believes in its
unique virtues and seeks to
sustain that dream of perfection
by denying all possibility of its
imperfection…America is to
believe that it is at the same
time both guilty and without
flaw.”
Sources

The Crucible Literature Guide. Secondary
Solutions, 2006.
 The Crucible. Latitudes. Perfection
Learning, 1995.
 Christopher Bigsby’s Introduction in the
Penguin Books version of The Crucible,
1995.