The Crucible by Arthur Miller

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The Crucibleby Arthur Miller

• Historical Cultural Context Information
• Advanced Composition Novel
• Mrs. Snipes

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Arthur Miller (1915-2005)

• Known and respected for his intimate and
  realistic portrayal of the working class, Arthur
  Miller remains one of the most prolific
  playwrights of his time. At the peak of his
  career immediately following World War II,
  American theater was transformed by his profound
  ability to capture the heart of the common man
  and make his audiences empathize with his plight
  as he attempts to find his war in an often harsh
  and unsympathetic world.

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Arthur Miller (cont.)

• Arthur Miller was born in 1915 in New York, into
  a middle-class Jewish immigrant family. His
  father was a clothing manufacturer and store
  owner who experienced significant loss after the
  Stock Market Crash of 1929. Miller attended
  Abraham Lincoln High School in Brooklyn, and was
  a gifted athlete and an average student. After
  being rejected the first time, Miller was finally
  accepted into the University of Michigan in 1934,
  where his studies focused on drama and
  journalism. He graduated in 1938 with a
  Bachelors degree in English. Two years later, he
  published his first play, the relatively
  unsuccessful The Man Who Had All the Luck and
  married his college girlfriend Mary Slattery,
  with whom he later had two children, Robert and
  Jane.

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Arthur Miller (cont.)

• Millers first prominent play was All My
  Sons(1947), a tragedy about a factory owner who
  knowingly sold faulty aircraft parts during World
  War II. All My Sons won the Drama Critics Circle
  Award and two Tony Awards. His 1949 play Death of
  a Salesman was also an enormous critical success,
  winning the Drama Critics Circle Award, the
  Pulitzer Prize, and several Tony Awards,
  including Best Play, Best Author, and Best
  Director. To this day, Death of a Salesman
  remains one of his most famous and respected
  works.

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Arthur Miller (cont.)

• In 1950, Millers troubles began. After directing
  a production of Henrik Ibsens An Enemy of the
  People, Miller began getting negative attention
  for his very public political and social
  commentary. In 1953 The Crucible opened on
  Broadway, depicting a deliberate parallel between
  the Salem Witch Trials and the Communist Red
  Scare that America was experiencing at the time.
  This production brought more suspicion onto
  Miller at a very unstable time in American
  history, and in June of 1956, he was called to
  testify in front of the House Committee on
  Un-American Activities (HUAC), for which he was
  found in contempt of court for his refusal to
  cooperate and identify names of Communist
  sympathizers. This ruling was later overturned by
  the United States Court of Appeals, but damage to
  his reputation had taken place nonetheless.

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Arthur Miller (cont.)

• That same year, he divorced his wife and married
  actress and American icon Marilyn Monroe
  however, his marriage to Monroe did not last
  longthey divorced in 1961. His plays After the
  Fall (1964) and Finishing the Picture (2004) are
  said to loosely depict their turbulent and
  unhappy marriage. After divorcing Monroe, Miller
  married Inge Morath, with whom he had a son,
  Daniel, in 1962, and a daughter, Rebecca, in
  1963. There have been unconfirmed reports that
  Millers son Daniel was diagnosed with Down
  Syndrome shortly after he was born and that
  Miller institutionalized Daniel and never saw or
  spoke to him again, even in his poignant
  autobiography Timebends (1987).

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Arthur Miller (cont.)

• Millers other plays include Incident at Vichy
  (1965), The Price (1968), The Creation of the
  World and Other Business (1972), The American
  Clock (1980), The Ride Down Mount Morgan (1991),
  Broken Glass (1994), and Resurrection Blues
  (2002). He also wrote a novel, Focus (1945), a
  book of short stories in 1967, several
  screenplays and television movies, and Echoes
  Down the Corridor (2000), a collection of essays.
  In addition, he collaborated with Inge (who was a
  photographer) on several books. He received the
  Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement in 1999 and
  the National Book Foundations medal for his
  contribution to American literature in 2001.
• Arthur Miller died of heart failure in February
  of 2005 at his Connecticut home. He was 89 years
  old.

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Historical Context The Red Scare and McCarthy
Trials

• In 1950, Arthur Miller wrote The Crucible as a
  parallel between the Salem Witch Trials and the
  current events that were spreading throughout the
  United States at the time. A similar witch hunt
  was happening in the United Statesand this time,
  the accused were those who were a part of the
  Communist Party or who were Communist
  sympathizers.

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Historical Context The Red Scare and McCarthy
Trials (cont.)

• Shortly after the end of World War I, a Red
  Scare took hold of the nation. Named after the
  red flag of the USSR (now Russia), the Reds
  were seen as a threat to the democracy of the
  United States. Fear, paranoia, and hysteria
  gripped the nation, and many innocent people were
  questioned and then jailed for expressing any
  view which was seen as anti-Democratic or
  anti-American.

• In June of 1940, Congress passed the Alien
  Registration Act, which required anyone who was
  not a legal resident of the United States to file
  a statement of their occupational and personal
  status, which included a record of their
  political beliefs. The House Un-American
  Activities Committee (HUAC), which was
  established in 1938, had the job of investigating
  those who were suspected of overthrowing or
  threatening the democracy of the U.S. As the
  Alien Registration Act gathered the information,
  the HUAC began hunting down those who were
  believed to be a threat to American beliefs.

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Historical Context The Red Scare and McCarthy
Trials (cont.)

• The HUAC established that Communist beliefs were
  being spread via mass media. At this time, movies
  were becoming more liberal, and therefore, were
  believed to be a threat many felt that Hollywood
  was attempting to propagandize Communist beliefs.
  In September of 1947, the HUAC subpoenaed
  nineteen witnesses (most of whom were actors,
  directors, and writers) who had previously
  refused to comment, claiming their Fifth
  Amendment rights. Eleven of the seventeen were
  called to testify only one actually spoke on the
  standthe remaining ten refused to speak and were
  labeled the Hollywood Ten.

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Historical Context The Red Scare and McCarthy
Trials (cont.)

• After these infamous ten refused to speak,
  executives from the movie industry met to decide
  how best to handle the bad press. They decided to
  suspend all ten without pay. Although the initial
  intention was to save their box office
  reputation, what eventually resulted was as
  decade-long blacklist. Hundreds of people who
  worked in the industry were told to point the
  finger naming those who had any affiliation with
  the Communist party. As a result, over 200 people
  lost their jobs and were unable to find anyone
  who would hire them. The Communist with-hunt
  ruined the careers of hundreds, and ruined the
  reputation of hundreds more.

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Historical Context The Red Scare and McCarthy
Trials (cont.)

• In February of 1950, a Republican senator from
  Wisconsin names Joseph McCarthy claimed to have a
  list of over 200 card-carrying members of the
  Communist party. By 1951, a new flourish of
  accusations began and a new wave were subpoenaed
  to name namesto snitch on those who were
  Communists or believed to be Communist
  sympathizers. Later, the terms McCarthy Trials
  and McCarthyism were coined, which described the
  anti-Communist movement and trials of the 1950s.

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Historical Context The Red Scare and McCarthy
Trials (cont.)

• Arthur Miller wrote The Crucible in 1953, after
  witnessing first-hand the modern witch-hunt that
  had taken place in the United States. Miller
  wrote the controversial play as an allegory, a
  play which represents something much deeper. In
  this case, the story is about the Salem witch
  trials of the 1690s, but warns of history
  repeating these tragic events on the 1950s.

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Miller Reacts to a Witch Hunt

• I had known about the Salem witchcraft
  phenomenon since my American history class at
  the University of Michigan, but it had remained
  in my mind as one of those inexplicable
  mystifications of the long-dead past when people
  commonly believed that the spirit could leave the
  body
• As though it had been ordained, a copy of Marion
  Starkeys book The Devil in Massachusetts fell
  into my hands, and the bizarre story came back as
  I had recalled it, but this time in remarkably
  well-organized detail.

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Miller Reacts to a Witch Hunt

• At first I rejected the idea of a play on the
  subject. My own rationality was too strong, I
  thought, to really allow me to capture this
  wildly irrational outbreak. A drama cannot merely
  describe an emotion, it has to become that
  emotion. But gradually, over weeks, a living
  connection between myself and Salem, and between
  Salem and Washington, was made in my mindfor
  whatever else they might be, I saw that the
  hearings in Washington were profoundly and
  avowedly ritualistic. After all, in almost every
  case the Committee knew in advance what they
  wanted the witness to give them the names of his
  comrades in the Communist Party. The FBI had
  long since infiltrated the Party, and informers
  had long ago identified the participants in
  various meetings. The main point of the hearings,
  precisely as in seventeenth-century Salem, was
  that the accused make public confession, damn his
  confederates as well as his Devil master, and
  guarantee his sterling new allegiance by breaking
  disgusting old vowswhereupon he was let loose to
  rejoin the society of extremely decent people. In
  other words, the same spiritual nugget lay folded
  within both proceduresan act of contrition done
  not in solemn privacy but out in public air.

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Miller Reacts to a Witch Hunt (cont.)

• The Salem prosecution was actually on more solid
  legal ground since the defendant, if guilty of
  familiarity with the Unclean One the Devil, had
  broken a law against the practice of witchcraft,
  a civil as well as a religious offense whereas
  the offender against HUAC could not be accused of
  any such violation but only of a spiritual crime,
  subservience to a political enemys desires and
  ideology. He was summoned before the Committee to
  be called a bad name, but one that could destroy
  his career.

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Miller Reacts to a Witch Hunt (cont.)

• In effect, it came down to a governmental decree
  of moral guilt that could easily be made to
  disappear by ritual speech intoning names of
  fellow sinners and recanting former beliefs. This
  last was probably the saddest and truest part of
  the charade, for by the early 1950s there were
  few, and even fewer in the arts, who had not left
  behind their illusions about the Soviets.

• It was this immaterial element, the surreal
  spiritual transaction, that now fascinated me,
  for the rituals of guilt and confession followed
  all the forms of a religious inquisition, except,
  of course, that the offended parties were not God
  and his ministers but a congressional committee

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Notes from Christopher Bigsbys Introduction to
the play

• The question is not the reality of witches but
  the power of authority to define the nature of
  the real, and the desire, on the part of
  individuals and the state, to identify those
  whose purging will relieve a sense of anxiety and
  guilt. What lay behind the procedures of both
  witch trial and political hearing was a familiar
  American need to assert a recoverable innocence
  even if the only guarantee of such innocence lay
  in the displacement of guilt onto others. To
  sustain the integrity of their own names, the
  accused were invited to offer the names of
  others, even though to do so would be to make
  them complicit in procedures they despised and
  hence to damage their sense of themselves. And
  here is a theme that connects virtually all of
  Millers plays betrayal, of the self no less
  than of others.

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Notes (continued)

• in Millers plays there usually comes a moment
  when the central character cries out his own
  name, determined to invest it with meaning and
  integrity. Almost invariably this moment occurs
  when he is on the point of betraying himself and
  others. A climactic scene in The Crucible occurs
  when John Proctor, on the point of trading his
  integrity for his life, finally refuses to pay
  the price, which is to offer the names of others
  to buy his lifeThree years later, Miller himself
  was called before the Committee. His reply, when
  asked to betray others, was a virtual paraphrase
  of the one offered by Proctor. He announced, I
  am trying to, and will protect my sense of
  myself. I could not use the name of another
  person and bring trouble on him.

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Notes (continued)

• The Crucible is Arthur Millers most
  frequently produced play not, I think, because it
  addresses affairs of the state nor even because
  it offers us the tragic sight of a man who dies
  to save his conception of himself and the world,
  but because audiences understand all too well
  that the breaking of charity is no less a truth
  of their own lives than it is an account of
  historical processesThe Crucible reminds us how
  fragile is our grasp on those shared values that
  are the foundation of any society.

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Notes (continued)

• Beyond anything else The Crucible is a study in
  power and the mechanisms by which power is
  sustained, challenged, and lostIn the landscape
  of The Crucible, on the one hand stands the
  church, which provides the defining language
  within which all social, political, and moral
  debate is conducted. On the other stand those
  usually deprived of powerthe black slave Tituba
  and the young childrenwho suddenly gain access
  to an authority as absolute as that which had
  previously subordinated themThose socially
  marginalized move to the very center of social
  actionThe Crucible is a play about the seductive
  nature of power

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Notes (continued)

• The Crucible is both an intense psychological
  drama and a play of epic proportionsthis is a
  drama about an entire community betrayed by a
  Dionysian surrender to the irrational it is
  also, however, a play about the redemption of an
  individual and, through the individual, of a
  society. Some scenes, therefore, people the stage
  with characters, while others show the individual
  confronted by little more than his own
  conscience. That oscillation between the public
  and the private is a part of the rhythmic pattern
  of the play.

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Notes (continued)

• the plays success now owes little to the
  political and social context in which it was
  written. It stands, instead, as a study of the
  debilitating power of guilt, the seductions of
  power, the flawed nature of the individual and of
  the society to which the individual owes
  allegiance. It stands as a testimony to the ease
  with which we betray those very values essential
  to our survival, but also the courage with which
  some men and women can challenge what seems to be
  a ruling orthodoxy.

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Notes (continued)

• Like so many of Millers other plays, it is a
  study of a man who wishes, above all, to believe
  that he has invested his life with meaning, but
  cannot do so if he betrays himself through
  betraying others. It is a study of a society that
  believes in its unique virtues and seeks to
  sustain that dream of perfection by denying all
  possibility of its imperfectionAmerica is to
  believe that it is at the same time both guilty
  and without flaw.

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Sources

• The Crucible Literature Guide. Secondary
  Solutions, 2006.
• The Crucible. Latitudes. Perfection Learning,
  1995.
• Christopher Bigsbys Introduction in the Penguin
  Books version of The Crucible, 1995.