Commentary on The Crucible

  A common reaction that many people may have after reading Arthur Miller’s The Crucible is a sense of mockery towards the people of Salem. How they were all so easily fooled by the girls and their petty lies. We laugh at the absurdity of the people who believed blindly that the earth is flat1 back in the 16th and 17th century.  We snort at Pope Paul V, Pope Urban and their holy office who condemned Galileo Galilei’s theories of earth revolving around the sun in the years 1616 and 1633 for crudely justified reasons that ‘The Bible was the inerrant word of God. It contained verses which showed that the earth was anchored while the sun moved. It was also the general consensus that the earth was the center of God's plan.’ And as such, all stars and planets, including the sun, revolves around the earth.2

  All of these are examples of blind faith and belief. And we laugh at these beliefs. We laugh because of their ignorance, we laugh because of their stupidity and we laugh because of their absurdity. And so, we laugh.

  However, it is not really a laughing matter is it, this faith and this belief.

  The power of faith, of believe is a horrifying thing. A man once believed himself to death, rather literally. Having locked himself in a freezer by accident, he did not think to check if it was functioning and apparently imagined himself to be freezing and literally thought himself to death3. This was the power of blind faith on one person. What happens, when there is blind faith and belief on a mass scale?

  The Salem Witch trials, the core of The Crucible, a fictional piece of literature, was written based on very true happenings of the actual Salem Witch hunts and trials in 16924. Some say that the incident was a tragedy, some say it was the work of evil that lies in human hearts, others say it is all of the above; I say it is blind faith.

  The Witch trials, both fictionally and realistically occurred because of blind faith. So we ask, what is blind faith? Simply put, blind faith is as it indicates, having faith and believing in something blindly and more importantly, unwaveringly, without any doubt or suspicion.

  Many may think that in the play, the Witch Trials began due to Betty’s ‘ailment’. That is partially true. However, it only escalated to the scale that it was due to Reverend Hale. In act 1, he said this, ‘We cannot look to superstition in this. The devil is precise; the marks of his presence are definite as stone, and I must tell you all that I shall not proceed unless you are prepared to believe me if I should find no bruise of Hell upon her.’4 This line expresses that Hale has unwavering faith in the existence of the devil, Satanism and Hell. And being the minister of Beverly, a man of authority, his unwavering faith thus holds within itself, credibility. This belief of his then cascaded down to the people of Salem. We can to view it as a chain reaction. Reverend Hale’s beliefs of devil being absolute and more of a fact that a fiction is passed onto the people in Parris’ house as fact, who blindly believes him due to his position as a doctor and a minister, and because Parris himself is the minister of Salem, a man of authority in his own right, this belief of the devil and witchcraft is thus spread quickly throughout the small town of Salem as the truth, that people believe in unquestioningly. This is blind faith on a large scale, on a community; this is what cultivated the grounds for the witch trial to flourish.

  We can say that the witch trials itself is the epitome blind faith on community wise, in The Crucible. The court that was set up in Salem to trial and even hang ‘witches’, was figuratively, built on the faiths and believes of the people that devil and witchcraft were fact and not fiction, which besides the credibility of Hale, do not hold any justification. As we know, the court signifies justice, order and above all, cold, hard, facts. It is uncommon and quite often, controversial, to bring in the supernatural or religious into the court room and court cases, much less use it as the ruling evidence for any judgment. However, in The Crucible, for the court in Salem, this evidently does not apply, as seen through a conversation between Mary Warren and Proctor.

‘Mary: Aye, but then Judge Hathorne say, “Recite for us your commandments!” and of all ten, she could not say a single one. She never knew no commandments, and they had her in a flat lie!

Proctor: And so condemned her?

Mary: Why, they must when she condemned herself.

Proctor: But the proof, the proof!

Mary : I told you the proof. It’s hard proof, hard as rock, the judges said.’5

In Salem’s case, simply because a few people accuse someone of sending their spirit out, a spirit that no one can see at that, and a person’s inability to recite commandments, they condemn the accused on the basis that the accusations are solid enough to pass as evidence. This would not be possible if not for the unwavering blind faith that all the people in the courtroom hold that devil is at work in Salem. For, where is the skepticism? Where is the cynicism? How can anyone agree on a judgment based on proof that can barely be comprehended using any of our senses, if not for blind faith?

  The worse part of it all, possibly, is that as majority of the community holds this unwavering belief, the peer pressure eventually percolates to the non-believers and soon, everyone is a believer, simply because everyone else is so sure about this belief, as blindly as they have cast their beliefs. We can suppose that this is the trait of blind faith, the unwavering and unquestioning belief that has others wondering if what they consider as truth are indeed lies.

  And so, we have discussed blind faith on a massive scale, on an entire community. However, blind faith occurs on smaller scales in The Crucible as well. One of such is within a small faction of friends, namely, the group of girls who started it all and individually. In the play, the effects of the two are interrelated, to a certain extent.  Mary once said this in act 3, when asked to feign fainting again.

‘Mary: It’s not a trick! I-I used to faint because I-I thought I saw spirits.

Danforth: Thought you saw them!

Mary: But I did not, Your Honor.

Danforth: How could you think you saw them unless you saw them?

Mary: I-I cannot tell you how, but I did. I-I heard the other girls screaming, and you, Your Honor, you seemed to believe them, and I-It were only sport in the beginning, sir, but then the whole word cried spirits, spirits, and I-I promise you, Mr Danforth, I only thought I saw them but I did not. ‘6

The reason why Mary could not feign fainting anymore, is probably because she no longer had the unwavering belief that there were spirits. She could no longer ‘believe’ her brain into thinking that there were spirits choking her and that her body would turn cold and she would then lose consciousness. It is proven, as aforementioned, with the man who ‘thought’ himself to death in the freezer, that a strong enough belief could lead to physical manifestations on a person, in Mary’s case, fainting. She willed her own body to turn cold and lose consciousness because she believed that that was what was happening to her in reality. Her strong belief was thus reflected into reality. However, it is not simply a strong belief in Mary’s case, it was blind belief. She did not question herself whether or not the other girls were pretending even though part of her knew they were because the judge believed them and so did the entire courtroom, and as the time went on, the whole town began to have the same ‘physical manifestations’, Mary too blindly followed everyone’s believes and with every inch of reality that she knows all generating this insanity, she has every reason to have an unwavering belief that spirits were real and that they were choking her to death. There was no reason to doubt this for everyone believed in it as well. And so Mary blindly followed suit just as everyone else blindly followed, well, everyone else. Furthermore, Mary was part the group of girls who were dancing in the forest and believed that they were summoning spirits with Tituba. Having personally experienced the ‘supernatural’, or what their group considers supernatural, Mary would thus naturally belief that communally, they would perceive the same experiences in the courtroom due to their previous common experiences in the woods. This thus gives another basis for Mary’s blind faith and a convincing reason ( to herself ) to psyche herself into believing that she would faint and turn cold and truly faint and turn cold physically.

  Another case of blind faith, one in a context that we are far more familiar with, is Abigail. With Abigail, it is not really blind belief in the witchcraft or the devil, for she was the person who orchestrated this entire uproar. With Abigail, her blind faith lies in her belief that Proctor loves her. Now this is something many of us can relate to. More often than not, we would convince ourselves about something that is actually not what we think they are. A great example is girls who are anorexic. They refuse to eat because they are convinced that they are fat, even though all physical evidence points the other way. We could say that they are thinking with their emotions rather than logic. This is precisely the issue with Abigail. She believes that Proctor is interested in her and that he made to her an unspoken promise in bed. As such, she holds a belief, a belief that has no rational basis, a blind belief, that Proctor loves her. Because of this, blind belief, which as all beliefs of its type, is unwavering and firm, Abigail is strongly convinced that whatever Proctor does around her are indicators of interest. When Proctor blushes as he sees her out of shame, Abigail thinks that it is out of lust and affection.7 Even when Proctor outright denies his interest in her and turns her town repeatedly, she still convinces herself that it was all Elizabeth’s doing and that he is merely playing hard to get.8 We can thus from this understand that a person’s faith and beliefs, changes to adhere to their inner personal desires and in turn shifts and twists their perception of things.

  Indeed, Reverend Hale started the ball rolling by diagnosing Betty as being inflicted by the devil, and due to his credibility as a minister and a doctor, the rest of Salem blindly followed suit and believed that the devil was at work in Salem. However, in truth, it was Abigail who in line with her blind belief began to orchestrate events in such a way that she will eventually be able to bring down Elizabeth and be with Proctor, or so she convinces herself. Though a speculation, chances are that it was Abigail who told Betty to feign sick so as to get out of trouble for sporting in the woods in Tituba, which led up to appearance of Reverend Hale and the following sequence of events. Was it not Abigail who first accused Tituba of allying with the devil and forcing them to conduct in witchcraft so as to weasel her way out of the trouble? In fact, the entire reason why the girls began dancing and conducting these ‘witchcraft’ in the woods in the first place was because Abigail begged Tituba to curse Elizabeth for her so as to take her place as Proctor’s wife. All of this occurred because of Abigail’s blind beliefs that Proctor loves her. And so, if we imagine The Crucible as an onion and peel back all the pieces, we would see right in the core of it all, the reason why the Salem Witch Trials began, the true ‘devil’ at work in Salem,  Abigail’s blind faith.



Citations:

1: http://www.entrypoints.com/LogicPage/Galileo'sRebuttal.html

2: http://www.entrypoints.com/LogicPage/Galileo'sRebuttal.html

3: http://www.snopes.com/horrors/gruesome/freezer.asp

4: The Crucible by Arthur Miller, Penguin Classics publication, Act 1, page 35, last line

5: The Crucible by Arthur Miller, Penguin Classics publication, Act 2, page 55, line 9-13

6: The Crucible by Arthur Miller, Penguin Classics publication, Act 3, page 99-100, line 16-2(following page)

7: The Crucible by Arthur Miller, Penguin Classics publication, Act 2, page 58-59, ‘Elizabeth: John, have you ever shown her somewhat of contempt? She cannot pass you in the church but you will blush- Proctor: I may blush for my sin. Elizabeth: I think she sees another meaning in that blush.’

8: The Crucible by Arthur Miller, Penguin Classics publication, Act 1, page 21, most prominently in the line ‘Abigail: You’re surely sportin’ with me.’