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Very few accusations went beyond the village level. Also the fact people would accuse people of witchcraft which would then accuse other people of witchcraft and etc. The differences between inhabitants were expressed as a battle between good and evil. The next spring, the trials ended and various imprisoned individuals were released once their fines were paid. The "parochial snobbery" as well as a "predilection for minding other people's businesses" helped to make Salem a prime place for the trials to emerge and the charges of witchcraft to emerge on such a wide scale. Four-year-old accused witch Dorcas Good went insane after spending months in prison and watching her baby sister die while in jail with their mother, who was later hanged. As just one example, the king of Italy, Charlemagne, dismissed the concept of witchcraft as a pagan superstition and ordered the death penalty for whoever executed someone because they considered them to be a witch. Again, the so-called witches made for the perfect scapegoats. Through works of literature such as the Malleus, witches were broadly blamed for the effects of the Little Ice Age, thus becoming a scapegoat across the Western world. The paradox lies in the fact that the rules which were created and adhered to in order to ensure unity 'were grounded on the idea of exclusion and prohibition.' However, it must be taken into account that different regions experienced a flare-up of witch trials for a variety of localized reasons. Also during the McCarthyism era and the witch trials innocent lives were ruined when people were forced to accuse others or be accused themselves. Updated on January 31, 2020. Why would the church and government authorities continue to credit these wild and unsubstantiated stories as respectable people from all walks of lifelandowners, women of independent means, neighbors, even clergywere arrested and brought to trial? List their beliefs. eNotes.com will help you with any book or any question. In response to the mass hysteria over this communist infiltration, Arthur Miller wrote The Crucible. "Tituba and The Salem Witch Trials of 1692." By Katie BrownCurrent PhD Biblical Studies, BA Classics and ReligionKatie is a postgraduate research student in Trinity College Dublin, where she also received her Bachelor's Degree in Classical Civilisation and World Religions and Theology. The same person may have enslaved John Indian; they both disappear from all known records after Tituba's release. She confessed to witchcraft and accused others. Although some people undoubtedly practiced sorcery with the intent to harm, and some may actually have worshiped the Devil, in reality no one ever fit the concept of the witch. Nonetheless, the witchs crimes were defined in law. Members of the community claimed to have seen a person's spirit performing witchcraft, a crime that would cause a person to be sentenced to death. From 1993 Halloween classic Hocus Pocus to American Horror Story: Coven, the witch hunts that ensued from such simple origins have captured the imagination of many artistic minds over the past 300 years, making it perhaps one of the most famous events in American history. Other peers of Miller's, such as playwright Clifford Odets and actor Lee J. Cobb, also testified. In a piece over at The Daily Beast, Maria Dahvana Headley writes about Arthur Millers history with Marilyn Monroe, and how that affected his plays, which perpetuated very specific ideas about women through the American literary canon. Arthur Miller wrote this play to symbolize 1950s McCarthyism. Salem, of course, serves as the perfect example of this fanaticism and scapegoating taken to the extreme. However, the general consensus is that the witch hunts spanning the two continents resulted in the deaths of between 40,000 and 60,000 people. The Crucible: Questions & Answers | SparkNotes One was Elizabeth (Betty) Parris, the 9-year-old daughter of Rev. By this time, I was sure, John Proctor had bedded Abigail, who had to be dismissed most likely to appease Elizabeth. Witchcraft | Definition, History, Varieties, & Facts | Britannica In both The Crucible and in modern day witch hunts, witch hunts are caused out of fear or for personal gain. The process began with suspicions and, occasionally, continued through rumours and accusations to convictions. The effects of conflicts such as the Thirty Years War were exacerbated by the drastic Little Ice Age with which they coincided, especially in regard to the European witch hunts. Fear, hatred, guilt, jealousy, pain, grief, confusion, lust, and hunger are all feelings with one thing in common: They were the driving force that caused a witch-hunt amongst early modern Europeans. It was because of these that witch hunters made so many false accusations. . What is it about this particular tragic segment of American history that appeals to the creative imagination? Although, the play is fiction, Miller based the plot of his play on the historical event, the Salem Witch Trials.According to the the Salem witch trials of the late 17th century, The Crucible explores a mass hysteria that its residents must go through because of the witchcraft accusations made by young girls and many other people of the region.These accusations, we learn further in the novel, are not true and are purely for the purpose to put the blame of someone's mistakes or wrongdoings to someone else. As Headley points out, he cites his relationships as instrumental to his writing of The Crucible in an essay he wrote about his process for The New Yorker: I visited Salem for the first time on a dismal spring day in 1952; it was a sidetracked town then, with abandoned factories and vacant stores. In Greco-Roman civilization, Dionysiac worship included meeting underground at night, sacrificing animals, practicing orgies, feasting, and drinking. Across New England, where witch trials occurred somewhat regularly from 1638 until 1725, women vastly outnumbered men in the ranks of the accused and executed. Another accusation that often accompanied maleficium was trafficking with evil spirits. A neighbor of the Parris family, Mary Sibley, advised John Indian and possibly Tituba to make a witch's cake to identify the cause of the initial "afflictions" of Betty Parris and Abigail Williams. Read the document introduction and transcript and apply your knowledge of American history in order to answer these questions. The accusations of witchcraft - at a time when many peope did actively believe in the supernatural - become both a means and a cover for the pursuit of private conflicts. A Conspectus On 'Witch Hunt' | Merriam-Webster By 143550, the number of prosecutions had begun to rise sharply, and toward the end of the 15th century, two events stimulated the hunts: Pope Innocent VIIIs publication in 1484 of the bull Summis desiderantes affectibus (Desiring with the Greatest Ardour) condemning witchcraft as Satanism, the worst of all possible heresies, and the publication in 1486 of Heinrich Krmer and Jacob Sprengers Malleus maleficarum (The Hammer of Witches), a learned but cruelly misogynist book blaming witchcraft chiefly on women. Latest answer posted April 17, 2020 at 1:25:04 AM. English The Crucible Test Flashcards | Quizlet John Hale, were called in by Parris. why did the witch-hunts occur? Students put themselves in the place of the playwright to answer: Aligns with CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RH.11-12.3- Evaluate various explanations for actions or events and determine which explanation best accords with textual evidence, acknowledging where the text leaves matters uncertain. More differences existed among Protestants and among Catholics than between the two religious groups, and regions in which Protestant-Catholic tensions were high did not produce significantly more trials than other regions. It was also believed that they rode through the air at night to sabbats (secret meetings), where they engaged in sexual orgies and even had sex with Satan; that they changed shapes (from human to animal or from one human form to another); that they often had familiar spirits in the form of animals; and that they kidnapped and murdered children for the purpose of eating them or rendering their fat for magical ointments. Whether she was aware of Rev. We have been advised by some Credible Christians yet alive, that a Malefactor, accused of Witchcraft as well as Murder, and Executed in this place more than Forty Years ago, did then give Notice of, An Horrible PLOT & against the Country by WITCHCRAFT, and a Foundation of WITCHCRAFT then laid, which if it were not seasonably discovered, would probably Blow up, and pull down all the Churches in the Country. To prove that the promise of salvation served as a reason for the sudden flare-up of witch hunts during this period of religious turmoil, we only need to look to the notable absence of witch trials in Catholic strongholds. Its interesting to look at this in the context of what was happening in Millers real life. Since 1970 careful research has elucidated law codes and theological treatises from the era of the witch hunts and uncovered much information about how fear, accusations, and prosecutions actually occurred in villages, local law courts, and courts of appeal in Roman Catholic and Protestant cultures in western Europe. For them that quail to bring men out of ignorance, as I have quailed, and as Latest answer posted November 22, 2020 at 12:05:25 PM, In The Crucible, explain what Elizabeth means when she says, "He have his goodness now, God forbid I take it from him. People demanded one to be hung or burned if the person sinned unless they confessed, turned back around to God, and blamed others for their sin. The Salem witch trials end up being a crucible, that is, a time of great testing and purifying, for the townspeople. The witches and judges of Arthur Miller's "The Crucible" Immediately Abigail cried out her fingers, her fingers, her fingers burned . Torture was not allowed in witch cases in Italy or Spain, but where used it often led to convictions and the identification of supposed accomplices. If theyre that much trouble? As the trials wore on, Miller traveled between Massachusetts and New York, researching what he saw as a clear correlation between the Red Scare and the Salem witch trials, both of which depended on a mass hysteria propelled by fear. To find out what was causing the afflictions, a local doctor (presumably William Griggs) and a neighboring minister, Rev. This unrest also contributed to the witch-hunting hysteria in another way. Biography of Elizabeth Parris, Accuser in the Salem Witch Trials, A Brief History of the Salem Witchcraft Trials, Biography of Rebecca Nurse, Victim of the Salem Witch Trials, Profile of Elizabeth How, Persecuted Salem Witch, Rev. John Indian, through the trials, also had a number of fits when present for the examination of accused witches. Arthur Miller's . Conventional wisdom has it that mankind has evolved so far that the idea of targeting innocents is no longer an issue; however, Senator McCarthy and targeting of innocent Muslims after 9/11 remind us that witch hunts still exists in modern times. The number of trials and executions varied widely according to time and place, but in fact no more than about 110,000 persons in all were tried for witchcraft, and no more than 40,000 to 60,000 executed. Many critics described Death of a Salesman as the first great American tragedy, and Miller gained an associated eminence as a man who understood the deep essence of the United States. On a more material level, the fact that the land charters to Salem had been revoked helped to create an air of tension about land ownership. They may evaluate how each version interprets the source text and debate which aspects of the enacted interpretations of the play best capture a particular character, scene, or theme. When Samuel Parris moved to Boston from New Spain, he brought Tituba,John Indian, and a young boy with him as enslaved persons forced to work in a household. Judicial torture, happily in abeyance since the end of the Roman period, was revived in the 12th and 13th centuries; other brutal and sadistic tortures occurred but were usually against the law. Older women were more frequently accused of casting malicious spells than were younger women, because they had had more time to establish a bad reputation, and the process from suspicion to conviction often took so long that a woman might have aged considerably before charges were actually advanced. Retrieved from https://www.thoughtco.com/tituba-salem-witch-trials-3530572. The story of that peripheral village is one that has lodged itself into the cultural mindset of people everywhere as a cautionary tale against the dangers of extremism, groupthink, and false accusations, perhaps calling to mind Arthur Millers The Crucible or Cold War era McCarthyism. In the play The Crucible by Arthur Miller, the weak people are taunted by the stronger people to give in to admitting to witchcraft. This is also the place Arthur Miller has written about in his book The Crucible. My basic need was to respond to a phenomenon which, with only small exaggeration, one could say paralyzed a whole generation and in a short time dried up the habits of trust and toleration in public discourse. In the early modern period, Protestantism emerged as a viable challenge to the Catholic Churchs firm hold on the Christian population of Europe. This pattern took shape in 10501300, which was also an era of enormous reform, reorganization, and centralization in both the ecclesiastical and secular aspects of society, an important aspect of which was suppressing dissent. The hunts were not pursuits of individuals already identified as witches but efforts to identify those who were witches. The accusers is constitutionally finding scapegoats to back up their culpability. Accessed 4 Mar. Many innocent people were accused of witchcraft, and while some got out of the situation alive not everyone was as lucky. ", Latest answer posted October 02, 2020 at 10:46:39 AM. Society was undeniably affected by witch hunts, as people did everything in their power to either free themselves from blame or accuse someone else. Tituba would not likely have been directly involved in the growing church conflict involving Rev. And it is my face, and yours, Danforth! By the 14th century, fear of heresy and of Satan had added charges of diabolism to the usual indictment of witches, maleficium (malevolent sorcery). This idea that when trouble comes, particularly when it comes to a man whos just trying to get laid, it comes at the hands of an unstable woman who should never be believed. With The Crucible, Miller extrapolated that, citing womens instability when it came to the instability of an entire community. Log in here. They viewed their difficulties through a theological lens, and rather than attribute the blame to chance, misfortune, or simply nature; they thought that they were the Devils fault in collaboration with witches. The latter was the greatest evil of the system, for a victim might be forced to name acquaintances, who were in turn coerced into naming others, creating a long chain of accusations. Both he and you are wrong. Latest answer posted November 22, 2020 at 10:36:50 AM. Two of the accused women confessed to being witches and were reprievedparadoxically, if you admitted to being a witch, you were freed. How Does Arthur Miller Use Witch Hunts In The Crucible She may have served as a household servant and a companion to Betty. The events in 1692 parallel the witch hunts in 1950s. Jill Schonebelen wrote a research paper on Witchcraft allegations, refugee protection and human rights. Most Americans knowledge of the seventeenth century comes from heavily mythologized events: the first Thanksgiving at Plymouth, Pocahontas purportedly saving Captain John Smith from execution in early Virginia, and the Salem witch trials of 1692. This helped to feed the paranoia that people felt about one another. Another was Abigail Williams, age 12, called "kinfolk" or a "niece" of Rev. In Spain, Portugal, and southern Italy, witch prosecutions seldom occurred, and executions were very rare. Texas Zero Property Tax Bill Has Extreme, Discriminatory Catches, Eurovision 2023 Tickets Announced on Ticketmaster, Celebrating Womens History With Qiu Jin, Chinese Revolutionary, The Penguin Tells a Batverse Scarface Story. Tituba was questioned for two more days. Presumably, whoever paid the fine had become Tituba's enslaver. The legal use of torture declined in the 17th and 18th centuries, and there was a general retreat from religious intensity following the wars of religion (from the 1560s to 1640s). In The Crucible by Arthur Miller, what does the author mean by his statement that "the Salem tragedy developed from a paradox"? and Quakers; and between American Indians and Englishmen on the frontier. Because we are all taught that if we listen to women too closely, that way lies the unraveling of the fabric of society. . What is a quote said by John Proctor in Act 3 in which he reveals his sin of adultery? An additional activity would be to ask students to compare two or more recorded or live productions of Arthur Millers The Crucible to the written text. Rev. According to a theory posited by economists Leeson and Russ, churches across Europe sought to prove their strength and orthodoxy by relentlessly pursuing witches, demonstrating their prowess against the Devil and his followers. Our summaries and analyses are written by experts, and your questions are answered by real teachers. The Crucible Act One: An Overture Flashcards | Quizlet In the 16th and 17th centuries, they left Britain for the New World to establish a society that, they believed, reflected their religious beliefs. Most scholars agree that the prosecutions were not driven by political or gender concerns; they were not attacks on backward, or rural, societies; they did not function to express or relieve local tensions; they were not a result of the rise of capitalism or other macroeconomic changes; they were not the result of changes in family structure or in the role of women in society; and they were not an effort by cultural elites to impose their views on the populace. The play is set in Puritan Society in the late 1600s in Salem, where most people are devout Christians and hold a strong belief of both God and the Devil. Abigail's Obsession With Proctor In The Crucible By Arthur Miller In Boston, he married and later became a minister. Accusations originated with the ill-will of the accuser, or, more often, the accusers fear of someone having ill-will toward him. Although the proportions varied according to region and time, on the whole about three-fourths of convicted witches were female. The figurative 'witch hunt' of McCarthyism becomes literal in Miller's play, which is . [emailprotected], For more info, go here: https://teresajusino.com Witch Hunts In Arthur Miller's The Crucible | ipl.org In The Crucible, what message is Arthur Miller trying to get across to the reader? Margaret Atwoods theory that societies under a lot of stress will give in to a person or a group proves a struggle between weak people giving into stronger people. By the late 16th century, many prosperous and professional people in western Europe were accused, so that the leaders of society began to have a personal interest in checking the hunts. Perhaps the most intense reason why Salem had to be the birthplace for the witch trials resided in the idea of the authenticity and self- certainty that gripped Salem. Educators go through a rigorous application process, and every answer they submit is reviewed by our in-house editorial team. ThoughtCo, Jan. 5, 2021, thoughtco.com/tituba-salem-witch-trials-3530572. They were a wide cultural, social, political phenomenon. Societies under a lot of stress will always give into taunters. Studying the American and European witch hunts today serves as a reminder of how hardship can bring out the very worst in people, turning neighbor against neighbor and brother against brother. Start your 48-hour free trial to get access to more than 30,000 additional guides and more than 350,000 Homework Help questions answered by our experts. In The Crucible, what message is Arthur Miller trying to get across to the reader? For instance Putnam accuses people whose land he covets, while Abigail wants rid of Elizabeth Proctor, her rival for John Proctor's affections. Their father had, of course, been persecuted in England. How does Abigail turn the court against Mary Warren in The Crucible? For The Crucible, Miller aged Abigail up from her actual age of 11 to a more easily sexualized 17, while aging down John Procter, who was historically 60 at the time the trials went down to 35. Over seventy people were implicated as part of the North Berwick trials and seven years later King James came to write Daemonologie. The Crucible shows how fear can inspire hysteria, intolerance, and paranoia and mirrored what was happening in America in the 1950s when a different kind of witch hunt was afoot. eNotes Editorial, 4 Aug. 2011, https://www.enotes.com/homework-help/in-act-1-what-explanation-does-miller-give-as-to-270640. But Tituba recanted her confession, and Parris never paid the fine, presumably in retaliation for her recantation. Tituba, also known as Tituba Indian, was an enslaved person and servant whose birth and death dates are unknown. All three of the accused were examined the next day at Nathaniel Ingersoll's tavern in Salem Village by local magistrates Jonathan Corwin and John Hathorne. These allegations would have important implications for the future because they were part of a broader pattern of hostility toward and persecution of marginalized groups. Arthur Miller felt as if it were a . In 1964, Ann Petry published "Tituba of Salem Village", written for children 10 and older. We now know that some of the accused were pre-teens. As questions of, When witchcraft arose, the state began executing anyone affiliated with witchery. In the play, the people of Salem, Massachusetts in 1692 sought to destroy the devils influence by seeking and destroying witches. Latest answer posted December 16, 2019 at 7:31:02 AM. Tituba served as a housekeeper. Witch hunts primarily target women and exploit India's caste system and culture of patriarchy. Crude practices such as pricking witches to see whether the Devil had desensitized them to pain; searching for the devils mark, an oddly-shaped mole or wart; or swimming (throwing the accused into a pond; if she sank, she was innocent because the water accepted her) occurred on the local level. Miller transforms Tituba, a young Native American girl, into an African slave who led a group of young women into the forest to participate in magic rites. Analysis. Sarah Good claimed her innocence but implicated Tituba and Osborne. Salvation and Scapegoating: What Caused the Early Modern Witch Hunts? Moving crabwise across the profusion of evidence, I sensed that I had at last found something of myself in it, and a play began to accumulate around this man. In the gloomy courthouse there I read the transcripts of the witchcraft trials of 1692, as taken down in a primitive shorthand by ministers who were spelling each other. Poor, poor men and their cold wives and their not being able to help being drawn to younger women only to ruin their lives, too. What caused them? The responsibility for the witch hunts can be distributed among theologians, legal theorists, and the practices of secular and ecclesiastical courts. Latest answer posted November 22, 2020 at 10:36:50 AM. Why did Arthur Miller write The Crucible? The early modern period was a time of calamity, plagues, and wars, while fear and uncertainty were rife. The playwright sets that story as the catalyst for a larger, quite literal witch hunt, stoked into a frenzy by a mostly unprovoked confession of witchcraft spoken by a fantastically-minded woman of color whos been practicing sexy voodoo in the woods with the girls of Salem. The Crucible: McCarthyism and a Historical View of Witch Hunts The witch roused Samuel, who then prophesied. Those who did believe saw witchcraft as something to be availed of at best and dismissed at worst. Because of the continuity of witch trials with those for heresy, it is impossible to say when the first witch trial occurred. Scholars have attempted to answer these questions with a variety of economic and physiological theories. Arthur Miller's play The Crucible, which forms the basis of many Americans' knowledge of the trials, takes liberties with the story. John Proctor, as Miller portrays him, is a good man whos made a bad, but human, mistake. Miller presents the idea that vengeance ruins peoples lives or reputation so that you can get what you want and be satisfied. Little is known of Tituba's background or even origin. As competition flared up following the Reformation, churches turned towards offering salvation from sin and evil to their congregations. With our Essay Lab, you can create a customized outline within seconds to get started on your essay right away. Vengeful witch hunters left no time to spare when making accusations on their neighborhood enemies. However, many were guilty of caving into their own weaknesses and only feared to be caught in their acts of hypocrisy. George Burroughs and the Salem Witch Trials, Mary Easty: Hanged as a Witch in Salem, 1692, M.Div., Meadville/Lombard Theological School. In other words, there was how things actually happened during the Salem Witch Trials, and there was how Miller wrote about them, taking lots of liberties to tell this story through a prism that made sense to him. Along with this older tradition, attitudes toward witches and the witch hunts of the 14th18th centuries stemmed from a long history of the churchs theological and legal attacks on heretics. The setting of a literary work refers to the time and place in which the action occurs. Tituba was among the first three people accused of being a witch during the Salem witch trials of 1692. It was from a report written by the Reverend Samuel Parris, who was one of the chief instigators of the witch-hunt. The first hanging for witchcraft in New England was in 1647, after the witch hunts had already abated in Europe, though a peculiar outbreak in Sweden in 166876 bore some similarity to that in New England. One of the more infuriating things about this #TimesUp moment is that there are far too many men continuing to be more concerned with the hypothetical possibility of false accusations (even though most of the accusations either come from multiple women corroborating stories about the same person, or have been confirmed by the accused themselves in self-serving apologies) than they are with the suffering of victims of sexual harassment, assault, or abuse. Witches were considered Satans followers, members of an antichurch and an antistate, the sworn enemies of Christian society in the Middle Ages, and a counter-state in the early modern period. The Reformation, Counter-Reformation, war, conflict, climate change, and economic recession are all some of the factors that influenced the witch hunts across the two continents in various ways. Salem Witch Trials | The First Amendment Encyclopedia This Map Shows the Scale of 16th- and 17th-Century Scottish Witch Hunts This began the Salem Witchcraft Trials. In each paragraph these traits will be further explained. Where central authorityi.e., bishops, kings, or the Inquisitionwas strong, convictions were fewer and sentences milder. Explanations of the witch hunts continue to vary, but recent research has shown some of these theories to be improbable or of negligible value. The salem witch trials hysteria of 1692 was caused by the Puritans strict religious standards and intolerance of anything not accepted with their scripture. The Crucible Overture Summary | Course Hero They simply used accusations of witchcraft and magic to prove their moral and doctrinal superiority over the other side. Under the rules of the colony, similar to rules in England, even someone found innocent had to pay for expenses incurred to imprison and feed them before they could be released. Historical Context. To fully understand what caused the witch-hunt, one must analyze the triggers behind these feelings. ", EDSITEment is a project of theNational Endowment for the Humanities, Salem Witch Trials: Understanding the Hysteria, Origins of Halloween and the Day of the Dead. Whereas womens sexuality has long since been tied to the idea of personal hysteria, Miller updated that by singling out womens desire for love and sex as a direct cause of mass hysteria.