A Reason To Burn

A Reason to Burn

Arthur Miller's play, The Crucible, is a masterpiece all to itself. The play gives its audience an insight into the lives of the Salem, Massachusetts Puritans and the disturbing witch trials of the seventeenth century. Miller wrote The Crucible in 1953 during a time of chaos in twentieth century America, when Communism started to take its strong grasp upon society. The play itself is a vital contrast of the 1692 witch scare and McCarthyism of the 1950s. The characters in Miller's play are realistic, because they demonstrate greed, selfish tendencies, and the desire to be claimed innocent when put to the test, much like the society that Miller lived in as a playwright. Therefore, The Crucible reveals a correlation between the witch trials of the seventeenth century and the twentieth century McCarthyism by comparing the behaviors, the characters, and the incidents of both eras.

Arthur Miller was born on October 17, 1915 in Harlem, New York. His family consisted of his father, a manufacturer, his mother, older brother, and younger sister (Huftel 19-20). Miller grew up during the Great Depression, where he witnessed life in its most realistic manner. He is not remembered by his teachers or pupils as being a respectable student nor pupil; in fact, he is not remembered by them at all. Miller states that, "Until the age of seventeen I can safely say that I never read a book weightier than Tom Swift, and Rover Boys, and only verged on literature with some of Dickens" (Unger 146). It was not until he read The Brother Karamazov that he was inspired by "an invisible world of cause and effect, mysterious, full of surprises, implacable in its course" (Huftel 21). Huftel argues that Miller's reason for writing is to identify this world and gradually reveal it to his audience (21).

After Miller went to the University of Michigan and received a BA in journalism, he continued to work in unstable jobs such as the Federal Theatre Project and for the radio, which he loathed (Unger 146). After writing various scripts for the radio, Miller began to write plays. His ideas eventually evolved from the scripts that he wrote for the radio and develop into themes and ideas that he incorporated into his playwriting. One common theme used from a radio script he wrote in the '40s had the common theme of man versus society. This theme is repeated in many of Miller's pieces, including The Crucible.

Arthur Miller is known to dissect the individual human consciousness when it comes to his characters and the particular behaviors that they exhibit in certain situations. The tragic hero of The Crucible is John Proctor, who is accused of practicing witch craft by Abigail Williams, who actually practiced witch craft. Johnson proclaims that "the theme of a play is made more intense by the hero's either making a discovery of past folly... or being presented with an agonizing dilemma... Proctor's story has elements of both situations" (157). Thus, Proctor suffers from the false accusations when he loses his wife and the respect of other Salem citizens as a result. Proctor does not deny the charges because of the consequence of having his name pinned on the church door claiming him to be a witch. Instead, he decides his own fate of execution because he would rather die an innocent man than live a life given to him based on a false affidavit. Miller declares his view towards the individual behavior by believing that the individual "had an abiding moral responsibility for his or her own behavior, and for the behavior of society as a whole" (Herbert A23). This belief is one of Miller's own, thus it is not only universal, but also an underlying principle that he incorporates into his life as well as his work.

Although Miller lived in a time of chaos and skewed judgments, he does not directly correlate his era into his plays. Rather, he uses his talent as a playwright and incorporates the widespread feelings and rash behaviors into his plays by his characters. Miller affirms that the era in which he wrote The Crucible was prone to the "politics of alien conspiracy" which "bid fair to wipe out any other issue" (The New Yorker 2). Subject to such conspiracy was enough to drive a man mad, but instead Miller put his own opinions indirectly into his plays, especially The Crucible. This was an action that Miller, as a playwright and as an American, did not think was going to have a consequence, considering it as an indirect way of utilizing his freedom of speech. Unfortunately, Miller did not expect that he would be claimed as a possible Communist in June of 1950 (Johnson 134).

After World War II, the United States faced two very powerful dilemmas: "the exploding of an atomic bomb by the Soviet Union and the takeover of China by Communists" (Johnson 134). Both incidents triggered the fear of Communism and its potential to spread to America. Under the "Executive Order 9835" issued by President Truman, Senator Joseph McCarthy was authorized to the job of searching for Communists in the American government. Supposedly, the government went so far as to pay informers to release information to the government about employees and various American citizens (Johnson 13-14). The result was detrimental. People were "publicly humiliated and discredited, and watched as their families were torn apart and their livelihoods dissolved. They found it difficult if not impossible to find other jobs. They were, in effect blacklisted" (Johnson 13). During the McCarthy era, charges were made upon the innocent, which quickly turned the fear of Communism into the fear of McCarthyism.

What made McCarthyism so powerful was the fact that the Soviet Union was becoming a stronger realm and threatened Communism upon the rest of the world (New Yorker 1). McCarthy used this fact and the threat of Communism to spread the fear among Americans, who now considered the threat to their own lives as the "Red Scare." McCarthy eventually found his way into Hollywood, where he and three former FBI agents released the names of potentially Communist citizens (Johnson 134). Among the list was Arthur Miller, who was convicted of attending the meetings of Communists in the 1930s. In the 1930s Communism was regarded as possibly beneficial to a capitalist country rather than a threat. When Miller was called upon to address the Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Government, he stated that he believed in establishing positive relations with the Soviet Union, just to avoid a nuclear war. This statement among others addressed to HUAC (House Committee on Un-American Activities) in the previous years, almost ruined his reputation as a famous playwright, and only provoked him to strike