The Crucible
Arthur Miller
Initial release: January 22, 1953 (USA)
If there’s a story so solidly lodged in the American literary canon yet so thoroughly misunderstood, it’s probably Arthur Miller's The Crucible, the legendary play and high school English class regular by the same guy who did Death of a Salesman. Most
Americans have at least heard of the play, if not actually read it (my
teachers preferred to ruin Shakespeare for me.) It usually comes up when
discussing the Cold War, and the so-called “witch hunts” that gripped
America during the 1950s Red Scare. But that feels… incomplete.Sure, there’s an obvious, intentional parallel. Miller’s friends were all getting hauled in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee, made to rat out all their friends, all in the name of rooting out dirty Communists. And Miller’s play got him HUAC’s attention, too (which seemed to prove his point…) But there’s clearly a bigger story here than a mere political allegory (which may or may not continue to hold particular relevance in today’s world of clear political intimidation of protected speech and repression of marginalized groups. It seems to me that the real story is more human than that: petty vengeance. The historical record is clear: a bunch of humorless white folk too weird for Europe moved to the middle of nowhere; with nothing to do but farm they inevitably grew to hate each other, with only their religious convictions to keep the peace. Little wonder something bad happened.
By the late 1600s, witch panics had faded out in Europe; the Salem Witch Trials were a comparatively late paroxysm of the paranoia that had so long gripped the Old World. There’s plausible guesses as to the cause of the whole mess, biological and psychological, but I think it was really just a question of hatred. The play isn’t an accurate relation of the events, nor does it try to be. You can read up on the Salem Witch Trials if you want — it was pretty well documented in legal papers and correspondence, because back then witchcraft was seen as a legal crime as well as a moral one. Miller himself explains that several of the persons in the real-life case were condensed into fewer, and the specific order of events were moved around some to better create drama (and keep the focus on the character of John Proctor.) Fair enough.
But
what remains intact, however, is the sense that something is amiss in
Salem society. It’s clear that there’s a gulf between two rival
families, with the local reverend, new to the region and not as ascetic
as Puritans were supposed to be, caught in the middle. And when it
becomes clear that whatever silly games the kids were doing out in the
woods was going to get them in big trouble, that’s when the accusations
start — and this, after young Abigail (aged up in the play) is rebuffed
by Proctor (aged down) after a brief affair. It doesn’t take long for
Proctor’s wife Elizabeth to get accused and dragged off either. She
knows of the affair and it’s been driving a wedge between her and Proctor; Proctor, meanwhile, suspects Abigail of trying to get rid of his wife and
take her place. There’s
a deleted scene that was removed from the play shortly after its first
run; it’s the only scene set outdoors, the night before Act III. In it,
Proctor attempts to talk sense into Abigail, but it’s clear that she’s
gone over the deep end. Why this scene was deleted, I can’t say. Perhaps
it’s because it removes some of the mystery of Abigail’s character; as
central as she is to the early plot, she’s largely a shrieking prop for
Act III, and absent entirely for Act IV, which leaves her feeling
half-finished as a villain.
Make no mistake: she is a villain, inasmuch as anyone can be a villain in this mess — with the real case, we can only guess at motives. Perhaps the real villain here is, if not religious superstition, the way petty grievances have a way of getting out of hand. That being said, there’s often a conflict between sex and politics in Miller’s work, in that the story doesn’t know which one it’s about. The Crucible is no different. Arguably miller’s handling of Abigail and Elizabeth is the play’s biggest fault, for a few reasons. The first, obvious one is that Abigail’s pretty much a red herring. The play sets her up as this femme fatale stereotype, only to discard her as soon as the story stops being about her and starts being about Proctor growing a fucking spine and confronting his own sins. The other problem is Elizabeth, in that Miller basically pisses on her from on high, cramming her into this meek, forgiving, submissive wife who blames herself for her husband’s lechery. That he sacrifices himself to preserve her good name is small comfort. Yet, in spite of this, Proctor is held up as the fundamental hero of the story, the proud man who goes to his death knowing he’s preserved his reputation, made a statement against the proceedings, and potentially started a riot against the cowards behind it.
This,
I think, is perhaps the fundamental failing of the play. It’s not just
that the primary female characters are mishandled; it’s that the stories
of witch panics are fundamentally stories of women, because it’s always
women who get hurt most in these things. And yet the play prefers to
instead frame everything around John Proctor, and he’s only involved
because he couldn’t keep his dick in his pants. It’s disappointing, all
the more so because this is so often overlooked in high school and even
college-level academic examinations of the work. The
play insists that there are no witches, but there are, aren’t there? I
don’t mean Tituba the slave, who’s just practicing her religion from
Barbados; I mean Abigail, a very different kind of witch, though it
raises the question as to how a 17 year old Puritan girl can be solely
blamed for seducing a grown man, especially one who’s married. And as
with so many other works about witches, especially ones based on real
life, the presumption that witches are real (be they magical or merely
seductive) undermines the fundamental fact that women have long been the
victims, not the villains.
So yeah, the play’s an allegory for the Red Scare, whatever, go off. But the Red Scare didn’t hurt only Communists, and anyway what’s wrong with being a communist (or a witch) in a free country? By ignoring the plight of women in Salem, Miller undermines his whole point.