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Character Analysis Of Abigail Williams In The Crucible

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Abigail Williams is a character in the tragedy, The Crucible by Arthur Miller, who exhibits deceiving and dishonest traits throughout the play. Abigail Williams portrays to be a 17 year old female in Salem, and the niece of the minister of the Salem church, Reverend Parris. Abigail was once the servant of the Proctor household until Elizabeth Proctor, the wife of John Proctor, head of house and local farmer, discovered that her husband John was having an affair with young Abigail Williams. When Abigail gets fired she then brings a group of local girls with her to the woods with Tituba, Reverend Parris’ slave from the Barbados, to wish death upon Elizabeth Proctor because of what she had done to her and John Proctor’s ‘relationship’. This event that happens in the play is the main event that carries on the play because if it hadn’t happened, the rest of the events in the play wouldn’t have happened. Right from the start of the play, Abigail is not telling the whole story of her and the local girls and their night in the woods to her uncle, Reverend Parris. “Uncle, we did dance; let you tell them I confessed it---and I’ll be whipped if I must be. But they’re speakin’ of witchcraft. Betty’s not witched”(10). Reverend Parris’ 10 year old daughter, Betty was one of the local girls with Abigail that night in the woods, and ever since has been in a strange illness that Reverend Parris believes to be witchcraft in the woods, although, Abigail bares to differ. Reverend Parris names off things that he was seeing when he caught the girls and Tituba in the woods, but Abigail denies all of it and ends the conversation saying, “There is nothin’ more. I swear it, uncle”(11), leaving Reverend Parris half convinced. Although, still in Act I of the play, Abigail says to the girls,”----We danced, And Tituba conjured Ruth Putnam’s dead sisters. And that is all. And mark this. Let either of you breathe a word, or edge of a word, about the other things, and I will come get you in the black of some terrible night----”(20). This therefore shows to the readers of the play that she is not telling the whole truth and is deceiving her uncle and everyone else that she has told her story to. In The Crucible, Abigail shows that she is

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