Hysteria Tears apart a Community in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible

Abstract

The Crucible by Arthur Miller (1953) is the most appropriate representation of the two most relevant witch hunts that took place in the American soil and that inevitably induced fear and hysteria, The Crucible revolves around the Salem Witch Trials of 1692 as an allegory to McCarthy hearings during 1950s when Senator Joseph McCarthy began to accuse government officials and other people of being Communists. Arthur Miller wrote a successful work criticizing the events of the 1950s while using the events of the seventeenth century in an admirable way. The incentive of blame without proof has consumed U.S. citizens two prior times in history, during the Salem Witch Trials, the religious authority condemned alleged witches to death without having substantial proof, the spectral evidence was sufficient testimony to hung a witch, A number of similarities can be found in term of the way of accusing people and the hysteria that originated from these trials. The present study aims at analyzing the reasons for hysteria that happened in The Crucible using the new historicism theory, and how religious absolutisms caused an everlasting scar of hysteria in Salem.