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Thoughts on the Background of the Crucible

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Thoughts on the Background of the Crucible

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In the 1600’s, the Puritans were a group of people who wanted religious freedom from the Church of England, so they set off to the New World to establish the Massachusetts Bay Colony. One of their beliefs was total depravity where every human is a sinner due to the fall of Adam and Eve. However, when Betty Parris, a Puritan, started to act strange, her conditions were blamed on witchcraft, and therefore, witches, because of the beliefs that Satan was acting in the world through witches. As a result, over 200 men and women were hanged by the end of 1692 due to the mass hysteria. Arthur Miller, a modern American playwright, has written about the events in a play called “The Crucible”, alluding to McCarthyism the hunts for Communists or Communist sympathizers within the story’s portrayal of the witch hunts.

Thinking about it now, I thought Miller was right to base “The Crucible” on America’s Communist hysteria through the Salem Witch Hunts because of how similar they were to each other. Little evidence was involved, because all the Puritans/Americans had to do was call someone a witch/Communist, and the victim would be shunned. “The Crucible” also showed that not everything about the Puritans were good because of, well, the Salem witch trials. That said, both “The Crucible” and McCarthyism serve as a reminder of what happens when you take particularly harsh accusations as the gospel and react upon that.