The Crucible Essay

Lizzie Winegard

Mr. Barrett

4A

10/19/16

Prompt 2

Live or Die

The crucible is a tragedy play written by Arthur Miller to warn against intolerance and mass hysteria, and to criticize the McCarthy Hearings. The McCarthy hearings questioned and arrested suspected communist. There was a time in Salem, Massachusetts when the whole town thought that they had witches. They all started to go crazy. The Salem Witch Trial began and they said that if you confessed to witch craft you would only have to serve time in jail and if you turned someone in for witch craft you get less of a penalty. If you don’t confess and someone says that you were involved with the devil then you were killed. It was all very crazy and didn’t make much sense. At the end of The Crucible John Proctor, one of the main characters, is faced with a huge internal conflict. He either signs the paper saying he confesses to witch craft and lives. Or he doesn’t sign the paper and dies.

If John Proctor signed the confession he would have lived. He would have grown up with his two sons and he would have raised his new baby that Elizabeth Proctor, John’s wife, was pregnant with. Before John was taken away he got to see Elizabeth and the first thing he said was “the child?” (Miller 5340) This shows that john is very concerned about his new child and it gives him a reason to live. John had just became close with his wife Elizabeth. They’d had some problems with their marriage before. John had cheated on Elizabeth with Abigale, their servant, Elizabeth found out and fired Abigail. She couldn’t trust john again. But before John was killed Elizabeth said, “It needs a cold wife to prompt lechery.” (Miller 535) She is confessing that she was not a good wife to him and that it isn’t his fault that he needed someone else. Now john has to figure out what he is going to do knowing that Elizabeth trust and loves him again.

John also didn’t want to sign the paper because he would “lose his name”.  He means that he didn’t want to lose his pride and he didn’t want the village too look down at him. John said, “I have three children- how may I teach them to walk like men in the world, and I sold my friends?” (Miller 538) When he said this he meant that there is no way he could be a role model for his children when he lied and sold his friends out when they were killed for not saying anything.

All of this affects the plot of the story because it shows that the best of people still got accused for something they didn’t do. It shows that the witch trial were stupid and shouldn’t have happened. It shows that all of this was just a waste of time.