Babylonian Confusion and Biblical Inversion in Miller's the Crucible

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

Criticism of Arthur Miller's The Crucible has focused on seven related areas of concern. The most frequent critical emphasis, which began with the first performance of the play in 1953, concerned Miller's analogy between the McCarthyism of the 1950's and the Salem, John Gassner, Eric Bentley, and Robert Warshow, among others, questioned the validity of the analogy and attacked Miller's liberal dismissal of anti-communism. A related issue involved the authenticity of the Puritan world Miller depicted. David Levin and Herbert Blau argued that the Puritanism of the playworld reflected Miller's adaptation of its tenets to suit his liberal viewpoint. Drawing upon these concerns over the play's authenticity, other critics attacked its overall quality. Walter Kerr, Joseph Shipley, and Philip Hill lambasted the play for its contrived and mechanical plot, wooden characters, and predictable themes. However, M.W. Steinberg argued that the play is raised to true tragic status by means of the higher consciousness that John Proctor achieves through his ordeal by fire. Moreover, Robert Hogan maintained that The Crucible qualifies as a Greek tragedy because it involves Proctor's overcoming his guilt about his past infidelity with Abby to achieve a social conscience which benefits the community. Other critics concentrated on delineating the nature and process of development of Proctor's heroism. Arthur Ganz argued that Proctor's hard-earned achievement of self-awareness and acceptance constitutes the central character development of the play. Sheila Huftel explained that Proctor rejects compliance and embraces a radical dissent from the tenets of an irrational society. Michelle Pearson specified the steps that Proctor undergoes in his progress toward an authentic self. The emergence of Proctor's heroism has been contrasted with the growth of Abby's evil madness. Iska Alter asserted that Abby represents the chaos created by the release of irrational energy and forces. Thomas A. Porter further explained that Abby achieves transcendent wickedness because she is determined to sacrifice everyone to her willfulness. Porter identified her most dangerous skill as the perversion of the sacrosanct office of bearing witness. Abby has also been castigated as the creator of mass hysteria, which many critics consider the most important theme of the play. As Leonard Moss has argued, McCarthyism represents for Miller the cause of moral and political disintegration through the creation of hysteria and paranoia. Miller himself has explained that his chief focus concerned the paralysis of mind caused by accepting a right-wing mysticism and moral absolutism. Penelope Curtis and Stephen Fender have ably demonstrated that the scene of Mary Warren's attempted recantation of her original accusations represents the dramatic highlight in which hysteria is enacted and a possessed community is created. In this scene, as E. Budick and James Douglas have also argued, the moral absolutism of the prosecution causes it to become the ally of the devil rather than his opponent. Similarly, William McGill has concluded that the resulting hysteria destroys all possibility of a rational community. The hysteria generated by the released irrationality has been related to the language Miller uses to delineate character and to indicate the perversion of the political, legal, social, and moral dimensions of Salem. Curtis, John Prudhoe, and Richard Hayes have argued that the characters use language that is rough-hewn and half metaphoric, drawing upon the traditional tenets of the Bible for their imagery. Stephen Marino has analyzed the various meanings of the word weight throughout the play as the means of showing how truth is defeated by Abby and her disciples. Like Edmund Morgan and A.P. Foulkes (100), Marino concludes that the truth is traduced by the young girls who pervert the nature of language by bearing false witness. Finally, Fender maintained, that the language of the witch hunters and accusers has no moral or biblical referents because the town lacks ethics and a valid religion. …