Abigail Williams: Character Analysis

Leading a multitude of people to find the "truth" about a village's most respected townspeople is Abigail Williams. She was the finger that accused dozens of people, who in all likelihood were innocent of the crimes brought against them. Abigail was not the single candle that showed the judges of Salem the way but merely the candle that lit the others. Arthur Miller's "The Crucible" makes Abigail the conveyance of everything the Puritans would have thought as evil. She had committed sins that made any upright citizen flinch at the mere mention of them. All this appalling information about Abigail makes a person stop and wonder what her motive was. Was she merely being selfish or is there a deeper meaning hidden beneath all the layers she is covering her past with?

Imagine this if you will; a town where everyone that is under twenty and not married is expected, no not expected, commanded to be silent, not to play, and to never have fun. What's more they were expected to be happy in this dismal existence. This is Salem, 1692. This is the world of Abigail Williams. Day after day she would go through the motions of fulfilling the expectations of those around her while inside a battle was raging. She was fighting the urge to fight against all that had been embedded in her since the moment she came to live with her Uncle Parris. She hadn't wanted to live with him, that's probably a pretty good point to mention. She was forced to live there after she had to go through the traumatizing experience of watching her parents die before her very eyes. This probably played a vital role in why she reacted the way she did throughout the play. She also had to contend with the mishap of loving a married man and the fantasy of him returning that love. These few emotional tragedies are probably a key factor in the hysteria that overtook Salem. They drove her to seek the attention that was attained by acting the way she did. If she and the other girls alone had the ability to point out these alleged witches the whole town would be looking to them in order to put an end to the witchcraft. The attention became their very downfall. Everybody was scrutinizing their every move until they figured out that there was no way that they were telling the truth. Pretty soon they were ill-famed because of this and it caused Abby to leave Salem in hopes of a fresh start. The only really irrefutable statement that can be made is that no matter how disturbing her childhood was, killing a dozen people or more was not the way to help make the pain go away.

Abigail's character is full of little intricacies that cannot be explained without pages and pages. She seems very devious but maybe this was her defense. Maybe she didn't want anyone to know the horrors she had to go through. She sought any means of release. She sought the liberation of these horrors through an affair with a farmer named John Proctor. John fulfilled several of Abby's deep needs. He satisfied her longing for love, attention, and self gratification. Abigail probably wasn't really in love with John, just