The Crucible Read Online Free

perversion, just as to deny witchcraft was seen as diabolic in Puritan New England.
    Did the young girls in Salem, then, see no witches ? Were they motivated solely by self-concern or, in Abigail’s case, a blend of vengeance and desire? The Crucible is not concerned to arbitrate. Tituba plainly does dabble in the black arts, while Mrs. Putnam is quite prepared to do so. Abigail seems a more straightforward case. Jealous of Elizabeth Proctor, she sees a way of removing her and marrying John. In Miller’s screenplay, however, Abigail has a vision of Elizabeth’s spirit visiting her in her bedroom:
    INT NIGHT ABIGAIL BEDROOM
She is asleep in bed. She stirs, then suddenly sits up and sees, seated
in a nearby chair, a WOMAN with her back to her. ABIGAIL
slides out of bed and approaches the woman, comes around to see
her face-it is ELIZABETH PROCTOR.
ABIGAIL: Elizabeth? I am with God! In Jesus’ name begone
back to Hell!
ELIZABETH’S FACE is transformed into that of a HAWK, its
beak opening. ABIGAIL steps back in terror.
    Whatever her motives, she plainly sees this phantom even though it is conjured not from the devil but from guilt and desire, which in Puritan New England were seen as synonymous. In the screen version Abigail is described as “Certain now that she’s mad.” This takes us beyond the portrait we are offered by the play, where she is presented as more clearly calculating, but the essential point is not the nature of her motivation nor even the substantiality or otherwise of witches, but the nature of the real and the manner in which it is determined. Proctor and the others find themselves in court because they deny a reality to which others subscribe and in which, whatever their motives, they in part believe, until, slowly, skepticism begins to infect them with the virus of another reality.
    It is the essence of power that it accrues to those with the ability to determine the nature of the real. They authorize the language, the grammar, the vocabulary within which others must live their lives. Miller observed in his notebook, “Very important. To say ‘There be no witches’ is to invite charge of trying to conceal the conspiracy and to discredit the highest authorities who alone can save the community!” Proctor and his wife try to step outside the authorized text. They will acknowledge only those things of which they have immediate knowledge. “I have wondered if there be witches in the world,” observes John Proctor, incautiously, adding, “I have no knowledge of it,” as his wife, too, insists: “I cannot believe it.” When Proctor asserts his right to freedom of thought and speech—“I may speak my heart, I think”—he is reminded that this had been the sin of the Quakers, and Quakers of course had learned the limits of free speech and faith at the end of a hangman’s noose on Boston Common.
    There is a court that John and Elizabeth Proctor fear. It is one, moreover, which if it has no power to sentence them to death does nonetheless command their lives. Proctor says to his wife, “I come into a court when I come into this house!” Elizabeth, significantly, replies, “The magistrate sits in your heart that judges you.” Court and magistrate are simply synonyms for guilt. The challenge for John Proctor is to transform guilt into conscience and responsibility. Guilt renders him powerless, as it had Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman; individual conscience restores personal integrity and identity, and places him at the center of social action. Miller has remarked of Proctor, “I suppose I had been searching a long time for a tragic hero, and now I had him; the Salem story was not going to be abandoned. The longer I worked the more certain I felt that improbable as it might seem, there were moments when an individual conscience was all that could keep the world from falling apart.”
    Despite the suspicions of his judges, though, Proctor does not offer himself as social rebel. If he