When told that his daughter, Betty, was ill because of "unnatural causes," Paris quickly interjected, "No, no. There be no unnatural causes here." The Reverend denied this all even with seeing the girls dancing in the woods. With Reverend being in denial, he was unable to consider all causes of the problem. He was so quick to blow off the idea that witchcraft caused her sickness because he was too worried his reputation would get shot with that possibility.
Reverend Hale's closed mind prevented him from seeing the true John Proctor Hale arrives at Proctor's house to warn him that Elizabeth has been accused of witchcraft. Despite their reputation as model citizens, Hale jumps a to any opportunity to label them as evil. Elizabeth does not give him what he wants to hear, so he turns his attention to
The Puritan community in The Crucible was vulnerable in many ways and susceptible to irrational and panicky accusations of the Salem Witch Hunts because of their strict and constricting ways. The children in the community are treated very poorly and less than everyone else in the town. As the Salem Witch Hunts were essentially started by the children the fact that they were treated as lesser beings contributed to the communities demise. “He (Reverend Parris) regarded them as young adults, an until this strange crisis he, like the rest of Salem, never conceived that the children were anything but thankful for being permitted to walk straight, eyes slightly lowered, arms at their sides, and mouths shut until bidden to speak,” (Miller 3). Miller foreshadows the Witch Hunts to come.
Parris, distraught and troubled because he knows that Abigail has not been entirely truthful regarding her activities in the woods, confronts Abigail. Parris says that he saw her and Betty dancing "like heathen[s],"
How does miller present Abigail as a powerful character in The Crucible? Abigail first shows her power when she is heavily questioned about what was going on in the woods. Abigail starts answering the questions that she is given but soon realises that she will be court and get into trouble. So she uses her power to shift the attention to someone and make people forget about her. Miller presents this when Abigail is asked about the devil and she responds by saying, “I never called him!
The absence of a fair and honest trial for the prosecuted in the small Protestant town is thought to be approached in a different manner today. And although in some situations this may be true, the past still dwells. The initial start of the hysteria originated in Salem Village in 1692. The instigators, Abigail Williams and her cousin Betty Parris were constantly faced with boredom, along with other young people of the Puritan communities because of the adult’s beliefs that the young adults should be doing things of a higher maturity level and not spending their time with play, engaged in magic and voodoo led by their servant, Tituba. started having fits described as “beyond the power of Epileptic Fits or natural disease to effect.”1 During one of the girl’s outbreaks, they would yell strange sayings and throw things around the room.
People are not comfortable with the unknown, which is why they fear moving out of norms. Arthur Miller’s The Crucible validates his claim that when faced with their fear of the unknown, particularly the dread of social isolation, humans show trepidation. Arthur Miller supports this claim in his The Crucible through Abigail’s manipulation of the judges in this play. Abigail manipulates the judges by threatening them with the unknown so that she can continue her twisted game of accusing people of witchcraft. When Abigail first enters this play, Miller describes her in the stage prompt as a girl who has “an endless capacity for dissembling,” (7) to inform the reader that she is capable of justifying her means with her ends.
She had people fooled to believe that she had god in her and she could see the evil in people and could tell if they were in witchcraft. One person after another she had them hung. People so clueless of her intentions saw her as a saint for getting rid of the “evil” in the town. In the end of the play Abigail’s reputation was soon found out about, she knew people would come back and accuse her of murder so she ran away with her uncle’s money and Mercy Lewis. In contrast with Abigail Williams Elizabeth Proctor was not your ideal woman.
Parris can also be paranoid or thinks too much about what other people are going to think of him, as he did when Abigail told Parris that he should tell people that there is no witchcraft, and Parris replied “And what shall I say to them? That my daughter and my niece I discovered dancing like heathen in the forest?” (1238), this shows how he isn’t just going to tell people about what happened in the forest because they might take it a different way than he thinks about it. Abigail Williams is a liar not just a regular liar but a compulsive liar Abigail has a habit of lying as she did telling people Tituba forced the girls to dance “she made me do it! She made Betty do it!” (1260), this was when Abigail was accusing Tituba for the dances in the forest. Abigail is the leader of the group of girls, telling them what to do “Now look you.
An example of this would be the story the crucible by Arthur Miller. In this story there is one girl named Abigail who accuses people of being witches because she didn’t want anyone to know what she had done in the forest. Eventually people started accusing anyone they disliked of being a witch, and people believed them and killed them because of what someone said. This just goes to show that social media nowadays is somewhat like this story from the Salem witch trials. With knowing this I believe that it would be smarter to block social media while there was a mass-hysteria