Реферат: The Crucible Booknotes Essay Research Paper BARRON

And in the last act Elizabeth shows not only wisdom but great love for her husband when he is agonizing over whether to confess. He asks her what he should do. She knows he is so confused that he will probably do whatever she says. She desperately wants him alive, especially now that a baby’s on the way. But she refuses to choose for him: “As you will, I would have it,” leaving him free to decide his own destiny. But she does give him her blessing:

Only be sure of this, for I know it now:

Whatever you will do, it is a good man does it.

^^^^^^^^^^THE CRUCIBLE: ABIGAIL WILLIAMS

If there is a “bad guy” in The Crucible, Abigail Williams is it. She is the one who first led the girls to Tituba for dancing in the woods and conjuring spirits. When Tituba is forced to “confess,” Abigail jumps right in and the other girls follow her. During the witch trials she is the girls’ leader, bringing them into the court and presiding over their “torments.” She intimidates everyone–the girls, the townsfolk, even the judges. And then, when it begins to look as if the tide is turning against her, she gets out while the getting is good, robbing her uncle, Reverend Parris, before she goes.

Abigail is a lot like the little girl in the movie The Bad Seed. In the movie, a nine-year-old terrorizes her family and the whole community. She murders several people, including her parents. She gets away with it because no one can believe that a child could be so evil. Anyone who does find her out, she kills.

Abigail lies without shame, threatens without fear, and thinks of nothing of sticking a needle two inches into her own belly in order to bring about the murder of Elizabeth Proctor. And she gets away with most of it.

But Abigail isn’t a child. She’s had a grown-up love affair with John Proctor, and has lost her childish faith in “the lying lessons I was taught by all these Christian women and their covenanted men.” A child, when hurt, may strike back in anger. But only an adult could so coolly plot and execute the ingenious revenge Abigail plans for Elizabeth.

The important thing to decide about Abigail is whether you think she’s evil or not. Without doubt, almost all her actions have evil consequences, and if there is good in her, we don’t get to see much of it. She takes the lead in “crying out” witches; the other girls take their cues from her. In a very short time she has the whole town at her mercy, and she uses this power unscrupulously. In fact, a real witch could hardly have done a better job of destroying the community.

But is Abigail the only one to blame? if so, then what happened in Salem was a fluke, a case of one bad apple spoiling the barrel. Everyone else is therefore innocent; they just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

One thing that supports this idea is an old convention of writing plays that goes back to the Middle Ages. Certain plays called “moralities” always had a stock character called the Vice. The Vice was a troublemaker; his whole purpose was to stir things up, to set characters against each other, and to try to destroy the established order of things. Often the Vice was the Devil in disguise, but since these plays were put on by the church, he always lost in the end, most of the time by getting caught in one of his own traps. Abigail certainly fits this description, except for the last item–she doesn’t get caught.

But some believe that considering Abigail the “bad guy” misses Arthur Miller’s point. These people think that the real “bad guy” in The Crucible is superstition. With or without Abigail, there’d have been no witch madness if there’d been no belief in witches. If you look at it this way, Abigail, although you’d hardly call her innocent, is not entirely to blame either. Other girls cry out witches too; and it looks as if they were prompted, not by Abigail, but by their parents. If Abigail is evil, she’s not alone. The madness itself, caused by superstition, is to blame. One person alone could never wreak such havoc.

But however you think of her, Abigail Williams is a fascinating character. We see her only twice–in Act I and Act III–but her presence and her influence dominate the whole play.

^^^^^^^^^^THE CRUCIBLE: MARY WARREN

Poor Mary Warren! When we first meet her briefly in Act I, she’s afraid of everything. She was afraid to dance with the other girls in the woods. Now that the girls have been caught, she’s afraid she’ll be hanged as a witch, if Abigail doesn’t tell the whole truth. Most of all she’s afraid of Abigail–until John Proctor comes in and scares her back home.

But in Act II, when Proctor calls Mary a mouse, Elizabeth corrects him: “It is a mouse no more.” Now that Mary’s an official of the court, she can stand up even to John Proctor’s rage. Has Mary Warren suddenly become brave? Of course not. Her courage comes from the court, from being one of the group.

And in Act III, not even John Proctor’s great strength can keep her from breaking under the stress of being “cried out” by Abigail and the other girls. Mary’s more afraid of Abigail than anything, even the fact that “God damns all liars,” and this fear fully overwhelms her.

Is this a totally spineless creature? Probably not. Few people could stand up under the ordeal that Mary Warren is put through in Act III, and it’s a wonder she holds out as long as she does. Considering how easily frightened Mary is by nature, she shows tremendous courage in coming to the court at all. True, Proctor is making her do it; but once the ordeal has begun, Mary holds her own against Abigail longer than anybody. But when Proctor is discredited, she loses his support; and when even the judges turn against her, Mary finally breaks.

Mary can hardly be called evil. She tells the truth, unless she is intimidated into doing otherwise. She makes the poppet as a gift for Elizabeth. Maybe Mary does this to make up for being away from her chores for so long, but maybe this is the action of a kind heart as well as a guilty conscience.

Above all, Mary’s naive: she’s slow to believe evil of anyone. Perhaps this is why she cannot resist the evil that overwhelms her–she didn’t know how strong it was because she didn’t know it was there in the first place.

And could it also be loneliness that draws Mary Warren into this catastrophe? Out on Proctor’s farm, John and Elizabeth have each other and the children for companionship–they are a family. Mary is an orphan, an outsider, living on the Proctor’s charity. Three times she disobeys Proctor’s orders and sneaks into town: once to watch the other girls dance, again the next day “to see the great doings in the world,” and finally to go to court as an “official.” Is it excitement she’s after? In part, perhaps, but in town she is a member of a group; at home, she is just a lone servant. Maybe what crushes her in Act III is not just the harshness of the judges and the hysteria of her friends, but her isolation. She’s not afraid to tell the truth, she’s afraid to stand alone.

^^^^^^^^^^THE CRUCIBLE: REVEREND JOHN HALE

Arthur Miller describes Reverend Hale as “nearing forty, a tight-skinned, eager-eyed intellectual.” An intellectual is usually thought of as someone with his head in the clouds, who spends so much time thinking great thoughts that he’s inept in the real world of human emotions. There is some truth in this image of John Hale. He knows a lot about witchcraft; but he knows almost nothing about the people of Salem or the “contention” that is wracking the town. How pompous and arrogant he must sound when he says, “Have no fear now–we shall find [the Devil] out if he has come among us, and I mean to crush him utterly if he has shown his face!”

And yet he has every reason to be confident. To Hale, demonology is an exact science, for he has spent his whole life in the study of it. But he is not just a bookworm, he is a minister of God. “His goal is light, goodness and its preservation,” and he is excited by being “called upon to face what may be a bloody fight with the Fiend himself.” All his years of preparation may now finally be put to the test.

He fails, and the evil that follows his first appearance totally overwhelms him. Why? Is the fault in his character? Is he not as smart as he thinks he is? Is he a fool, whose meddling lit the fuse to the bomb that blew up the town? Some say yes, and much of the play supports this answer. What looks like success at the end of Act I soon carries Hale out of his depth, and every time he appears after that he is less sure of himself. At the end of the play he has been completely crushed: he, a minister of the light, has “come to do the Devil’s work. I come to counsel Christians they should belie themselves. There is blood on my head! Can you not see the blood on my head!!”

It’s hard to imagine going through a more horrifying experience than the disillusionment of the Reverend Mr. Hale. All those years of dedicated, loving study made worthless by a band of hysterical and not-at-all innocent girls. Made worse than worthless–his learning ends up sending nineteen people to the gallows. And worst of all, he is helpless to stop it, having started it in the first place.

Is there evil in this man? Perhaps. According to Christian doctrine, one of the seven deadly (or damnable) sins is pride. In a way it’s the worst one, because it was pride that made the devil rebel against God. And Reverend Hale, when he first appears, feels “the pride of the specialist whose unique knowledge has at last been publicly called for.”

He certainly gets his comeuppance.

^^^^^^^^^^THE CRUCIBLE: REVEREND SAMUEL PARRIS