Lies In The Crucible

Fear can cause people to make bad decisions causing the situation to worsen. According to the play The Crucible is about a group of girls who were caught practicing witchcraft who were forced to tell lies about the devil forcing them to participate in villainous actions and then forced to name those involved in the fear of being hanged by the court. Head of the group was a young woman named Abigail Williams, who was infatuated with a married man and determined to get rid of his wife. In the play The Crucible, Arthur Miller personifies Abigail Williams as a manipulative character as seen when she successfully manages to convince the court that Elizabeth and other innocent citizens work with the devil and how she controlled the group of girls into pretending to have encounters with evil spirits of the accused. Arthur Miller wrote the play as an allegory of the McCarthyism in the 1950s. Focusing on the inconsistencies of the Salem witch trials in seventeenth-century in Salem Massachusetts, and the extreme behavior that can result from dark desires.

No matter what you may do to stop yourself from lying, you’ll never get away. Lying is just an characteristic of human nature that is always going to happen. In the play, The Crucible, many of the characters lie and are very dishonest, each of them having a different reasons. The straight forward Puritan idea often makes the characters to bargain their honesty because they feel like the only other thing they can do is lie.

In Nicholas Hytner’s 1996 film version of Arthur Millers’ play The Crucible, Tituba and Abigail tell many lies, some of them are justifiable while others aren’t. What makes a lie wrong or justifiable is a matter of personal opinion. When determining what makes a lie wrong I think we should look at three things: the why, the cause, and the consequences. In The Crucible, Tituba and Abigail lie to get out of a situation that they caused themselves. Their lies were not justifiable, because they put the consequences onto somebody else.

One of the biggest lies spread throughout the play, from start to finish was Abigail Williams’ lie. Abigail Williams, stirring the pot, and spreading amuck the false hysteria; Abigail spreads the witchcraft hysteria, in hopes of gaining power and status. Abigail’s lies spread like wildfires as seen in page 48 when Miller writes, “I saw Sarah Good with the Devil! I saw Goody Osburn with the Devil! I saw Bridget Bishop with the Devil!” In Act One, Abigail

In society, we are blind to lies that are taking place around us everyday. Small lies, big lies, lies right in front of our face, and we are oblivious to almost all of it. This is shown really well in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. Throughout the play, which takes place during the witch trials that took place in Salem, lies make up a big portion of the plot. Some of these types of lies that are used are described very well in Stephanie Ericsson’s essay The Ways We Lie. These variations of lies amplify the outrage created, through McCarthyism, and the Salem Witch trials that take place in the play The Crucible.

The phrase “honesty is the best policy,” applies to Arthur Miller’s history-based drama, The Crucible, in a variety of ways. The accusations throughout the story build on lie after lie after lie from those trying to protect their own name, thus putting the whole town in a state of confusion and chaos. Nobody in the small town of Salem, Massachusetts knows whom to trust anymore, after all of the false allegations made. There are three characters in particular in the story that, if they had told the truth from the commencement, the town would have been in a state of peace rather than mayhem. If Abigail Williams, John Proctor, and Elizabeth Proctor had been honest, many innocent lives could have been spared and Salem would not be in such

An unknown speaker once said, “A real man will be honest no matter how painful the truth is. A coward hides behind his lies and deceit.” This quote relates to characters in The Crucible, by Arthur Miller, such as John Proctor, Rebecca Nurse, and Giles Corey. Each person took action and stood up for what was right. Faced with tough decisions, many characters throughout the play are severely tested by others in their surroundings because of the ways they lie, the ways they make false accusations, and the ways that they ultimately die for a cause.

One of the biggest lies spread throughout the play, from start to finish was Abigail Williams’ lie. Abigail Williams, stirring the pot, spreading amuck the false hysteria; Abigail spreading the witchcraft hysteria, in hopes of gaining power and status. Abigail’s lies spreading like wildfires as seen in page 48 she said, “I saw Sarah Good with the Devil! I saw Goody Osburn with the Devil! I saw Bridget Bishop with the Devil!” In Act One, Abigail Williams getting other girls involved in her web of lies spreading around the witchcraft story in hopes of gaining

The Crucible by Arthur Miller is a prime example of the impact of lies. From a young age, people are told to not lie because lying is wrong. Many lies are harmful to others. For example, Elizabeth Proctor lied about her husband’s crimes, which resulted in her and her husband’s imprisonment. However, as I have gotten older, I have realized that not all lies are bad.

In a 2002 study by the University of Massachusetts, 60% of adults cannot have a ten minute conversation without lying at least once. For most people, no matter if they are morally good or bad, lying is an easy, and maybe seemingly harmless, thing to do. In The Crucible by Arthur Miller, lying is a main theme throughout the play. As characters are faced with life or death circumstances, morally good people have to either lie to save themselves and others, or face the unjust consequences. Lying is generally seen throughout society as immoral, however, it is acceptable to lie when faced with a life-threatening or dangerous situation.

With all that is going on in the world today, what is more important to you freedom or Safety? In The Crucible, Abigale choose her own safety over hers of her friends and family, and in Fahrenheit 451, Guy choose his freedom over the safety of him and his wife and, in Berlin you either live on West Berlin were you were free or you lived on the other side of the wall where you had no freedom but you were safe. So which side of the wall do you want to live on?

Most people would not like to be known as a coward. Mary Warren was not aiming for that title, but that is what she ended up with. She gave herself this negative reputation. The Crucible, by Arthur Miller, is a play about the undergoing of the Salem Witchcraft Trials in 1692. A group of Salems girls, are caught dancing in the woods. To take allegation off of themselves, they accuse other innocent townspeople of practicing witchcraft. Multiple victims are murdered or imprisoned. Mary Warren, one of the accusers, plays a big role in this play. Mary Warren’s character changes from cowardly, to brave, and back to cowardly, throughout the story which shows how she evolved throughout The Crucible.

“And they feel if only they can demolish that person, then everything’s going to be okay.” -Margaret Atwood the author of “Half-Hanged Mary”. In The Crucible by Arthur Miller, ¨Why I Wrote The Crucible¨an essay by Arthur Miller, and ¨Half-Hanged Mary¨ a poem by Margaret Atwood, it shows that a society under stress will always scapegoat a person or a group of people. Defending this statement, people from each of these sources have felt betrayed by being blamed and persecuted for actions they have not done. In The Crucible, Abigail and her friends choose to scapegoat people in their society to push the attention away from them. In “Why I Wrote The Crucible”, Arthur shares with us about the communists and how it was a scapegoating society. In “Half-Hanged Mary”, Mary is blamed for witchcraft and hung for having land and being an independent woman.

People are often told that lying is the wrong thing to do; it is evil, inhumane, and overall terrible. Despite this fact, lying has been shown to hand people multiple benefits. These benefits can be anything from getting out of doing house chores to looking cool in front of classmates. Because of this, many people use this form of deception to remove themselves from unwanted problems in the community. The Crucible, a play written Arthur Miller, portrays a disrupted society where people are accused of witchcraft for any abnormal activity. The accused witches are either forced to “confess” to their involvement with witchcraft or be executed in the gallows. The characters in the play display to the readers that lying provides protection towards people in different ways.

Throughout this past semester, we have covered a lot of plays and their films that correspond within those plays. While I have learned a lot along the way I have found that there are certain plays that stuck out. Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, and The Importance of Being Earnest were among some of these plays from this semester. However, one of my personal favorites is The Crucible. I was able to uncover many themes from this play such as secret sin, lies and deceit, and religion.