The minister committed adultery and tried to hide it from the town’s people with the veil. Ahab committed the biggest crime of all, turning his back to God. At the end of both stories the minister and Ahab end up losing their
He feels like he’s failed because he cannot prove that the condemned are innocent. The only thing he could do to help them is to convince them to sin. He tries to convince Proctor and the others to lie and say that they’ve seen and talked with the devil himself in order to save their lives. In the end he couldn’t force Proctor to lie which hurt Hale deeply. The day of the hanging of Proctor had come and Hale tries one last time.
Miller leaves the audience with a negative impression of the affect that these with power can have over others as he conveys the suffering that can result from such situations. Abigail lies to conceal her affair, and to prevent charges of witchcraft. Lowering her eyes to Parris, Abigail innocently pleads “we never conjured spirits”. Abigail shifts the focus away from herself, finding an avenue of power and takes full advantage of it. Ruthlessly accusing others of witchcraft she changes her story as a desperate act of self-preservation, “I danced with the devil; I saw him; I wrote in his book; I go back to Jesus; I kiss his hand.
Because of the monster's cruel act of causing death, Victor faces inevitable conviction. Justine confesses she is the murderer of Victor's brother, William, when she was placed on trial. However, she is innocent and claims she is the murderer hoping to gain salvation. Not only does Justine blame herself, Victor knows she has nothing to do with the case and he feels horrible. “Anguish and despair had penetrated into the core of my heart; I bore a hell within me, which nothing could extinguish.” (Shelley 75) However, Victor cannot explain the truth because he is afraid people will think he is crazy.
He feels shamed for having broken his code of honor with Abigail, saying “Abby, I may think of you softly from time to time, but I will cut off my hand before I ever reach for you again.” This shows that he doesn’t want to go through what he did with Abigail ever again. At the end of Act IV, he rips up his confession because he doesn’t want his name being used to sway others. He says “Because it is my name! Because I cannot have another in my life! Because I lie and sign myself to lies!
Hamlet also knew that he could not tell anyone that Claudius has murdered his father or that he had seen the ghost of his father because no one would believe him. Throughout the play Hamlet expresses his “madness” an example would be when he meets Ophelia in the court. In the beginning of their conversation he tells her that he once loved her but then is also confused saying that he didn’t love her at all. This is due to the fact that he sees woman as deceivers because of his mother’s relationship with his uncle. When Hamlet discovers that Polonius and the King are hiding nearby he explodes in a fit of rage, violently attacking her verbally and physically almost like a mad person would.
This leads into the deaths of the innocent people who are accused and automatically found guilty. In Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, the people of Salem are responsible for the witch hysteria. The person with the most influence on the hysteria is Abigail. In the past, Abigail had an affair with John Proctor. She gets jealous when Proctor leaves her to go back to his wife, Elizabeth.
In The Crucible, Giles Corey gets himself in a dilemma with the court after worrying about his wife, who was later thrown in jail under allegation of witchcraft, and then accusing Thomas Putnam of killing his neighbors for their land. In order for Giles to not endanger the informant who gave him this proof, he refuses to tell the court and in turn is crushed to death for remaining silent. Although this was a tragic death for a man of such integrity, Giles was willing to die honorably so that no one else would be put in harms way for lies and falsehoods that could potentially take away their lives as well. The “Hollywood Ten” were put in the same situation when being accused of communism and had also refused to ‘name names’. Each of them was regrettably thrown into prison for six to twelve months.
The Exploitation of Authority and The Neglecting of Knowledge Throughout history, innocent people have often been the victims of another’s ambition. In literature, authors often exploit abuses of power to provoke change in their own eras. Arthur Miller wrote his famous play, The Crucible, to portray the cruelties of power in Salem and connect those abuses to those in his own day and age. Through the characterization of Abigail Williams, Thomas Putnam, and John Proctor, Arthur Miller depicts the exploitation of authority and the abuse of information for ulterior motives in an effort to attack the abuses in the American government in the 1950s. In an endeavor to execute an innocent woman, Abigail Williams falsely accuses the wife of John Proctor of witchcraft in order to have a future with her husband.
Explain why the assassination of Kirov led to a period of great terror In December 1934 Sergei Kirov, the boss of the Leningrad party was shot dead by a lone assassin, Leonid Nikolaev. His death shocked the Party and its leadership. Kirov's murder led to a period of great terror for several reasons including; Kirov's willingness to argue with Stalin in public, Stalin's paranoia, and the purges of the moderates. After years of arranging for the removal of his opponents from the party, Joseph Stalin realized he still could not rely on the total support of the people whom he had replaced them with. Stalin no doubt began to wonder if Sergey Kirov was willing to wait for his mentor to die before becoming leader of the party.