Theme Of Fear In The Crucible

Fear is an unpleasant emotion caused by the belief that someone or something is dangerous, likely to cause pain or a threat. Our own emotions, especially fear, make us do the things we never saw ourselves doing. In the play “The Crucible” many of the characters actions are driven by fear. President Franklin D. Roosevelt once said “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. This emotion doesn’t have to control our actions.

Fear causes people to act irrationally and lash out at others, causing harm to not only the individual, but others. The Crucible, by Arthur Miller, portrays this well. A Crucible is a vessel in which metallic elements are melted to be cast into new objects or to create a new alloy, and can withstand very high temperatures. In the play The Crucible, fear is. Abigail, Tituba, Elizabeth, etc.

One of the themes is danger and how fear and suspicion can spread so quickly through a town. The witch trails, where accusations and rumors of witchcraft spread throughout Salem, which led to the imprisonment of dozens of innocent people. The fear of the unknown and the desire to protect themselves and their community created suspicion, people were paranoid and there were consequences. The power of abuse is another theme. the positions of authority used their power to control people.

Fear is a common human emotion, but how everyone responds to fear varies. The way we react to fear could depend on a very large spectrum of things. It could depend on the situation or on what one fears, on the person who is expressing fears’ personality, the events leading up what is inflicting the fear, or even past experiences. It could be any number of things. Many different people could be in the exact same situation and fearing the same thing, but each of them may have completely different reactions.

Abby, an average, rebellious teenager, lives her day-to-day life as one might expect. She ignores authority when she is around her friends, keeps secrets, and gets out of trouble by using the outcasts of the school as scapegoats. She seems to have an air of authority and coolness that everyone wants, but little do they know that she is just trying her best to fit in. Some people might say that Abby’s whole life is influenced by the fear of fitting in. In the play The Crucible, there are also many characters who are motivated by fear. This play is about the Salem witch trial and how the conditions escalated to the point that 17 people died. Although some people say fear doesn’t have a big influence on people’s actions, fear is the greatest motivator of human behavior.

“There is no passion so contagious as that of fear,” is a saying by the renowned French Renaissance scholar Michel de Montaigne. This theme is clearly displayed in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. Fear is an ever present notion in day to day existence. It motivates and influences the actions that lead people to decide in which course to move their lives forward. This driving force can be seen within the motivations of the average individual, to political leaders, and characters within literary works.

If there is one thing that is impossible to escape in modern society, it is fear. Whether it be advertisers using frightful hypotheticals to sell a product, or politicians instilling panic into the citizens in order earn themselves a few extra votes, fear is found everywhere and anytime. With this in mind, it is no surprise that the use of fear seeps into the literature of the times, especially when the content of the work has a basis in real events from the past. Fear is an effective motivator as evidenced by the characters in Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible.

The witch hunt formula, being fear + a trigger falling onto a scapegoat, is a great example of how fear holds power over Americans. Americans are afraid of anything that is different, and when they do not know what to do about a situation, they will shun or cast out those who are different, locking them out of normal society. For the Salem Witch trials, anybody that was accused was shunned, and forced into trial, and if found guilty, hanged and removed from society. Those who were accused of becoming a witch were usually an outcast from society, or those who stood in the way of people with power. For example, in the crucible, we are shown an old man waving and saying hello.

Everyone has felt fear, twenty percent of people in the world are constantly fearful, they let fear control their lives, do you? We see fear almost everywhere, everyday in our daily lives, and everyone is fearful to some degree. 52% of people have a fear of death. We can see this fear of death controlling almost all of society at least every century with some type of fear society has made up, whether it is true or false, this is most commonly known as mass hysteria. Fear can influence people to do foolish things, we can see this in modern or older events, the 2016 clown sightings is a great example of this because people were afraid of evil clowns killing them.

There are many things that can trigger fear in someone’s mind. Evil is a type of fear that causes adrenaline to rush through a reader’s heart, muscles to tense and can be distributed in so many different ways. In “The Crucible” fear is enclosed in many lies and in false accusations, but in the story “Young Goodman Brown” fear travels through the forest late at night. In The Crucible Abigail Williams is a brilliant mastermind behind the horrifying images in the minds of the ignorant people in Salem. She was attacking the innocent, and John Proctor was the weakest of all. He had committed adultery with Abigail and was prone to being tormented by her, because she keeps a secret he could never bare to confess. People fear for their lives and just follow along to prevent from being hanged. In “Young Goodman Brown” we see how Goodman leaves his wife, in order to meet someone

Fear, An Unpleasant emotion caused by the belief that something or someone is dangerous. Hysteria, exaggerated or uncontrollable emotion. Revenge, The action of inflicting pain or harm to another after they have caused damage to you. All of these emotion play a huge part of the Crucible, these emotions cause characters to lie, and make decisions that can change the life of them of people around them, sometimes good most times bad. Emotions can play a big part in life or death situations like we saw in the Crucible.

Both Salem, Massachusetts in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, and post 9/11 America are societies that dread witches or terrorists and tries to identify and eliminate them. When people find something that they are afraid of, they will do everything in their power to get rid of that fear. It will not matter to them what they have to do in order to eliminate their unease. Any fear that is great enough can take over people and make them do horrible, unjust things.

When many Americans look back on the Salem Witch Trials, they wonder how it could have happened; they don’t realize that they are currently living in the midst of a modern day witch hunt - this time with a different targeted group: Muslim Americans. In the years since 9/11 occurred, Americans have become obsessed with terrorism and looked for people to blame these terrible attacks on. However, it has been within the past nine months or so that hysteria has hit a fever pitch. Leading up to the 2016 election and following the appointment of President Donald Trump, terrorism and national defense have become topics of intense interest across the nation. Although not supported by many Americans, a hunt for terrorists in the country began, with Muslim Americans being the first to be targeted. Arthur Miller’s The Crucible reveals how fear can make a group of people act in irrational and misguided ways, a lesson that is extremely applicable today in how Muslim

Fear can lead to a lot of things, but unfortunately, in humans it usually leads to something bad. Throughout history, fear has lead to some of the most violent actions by man, and some of the biggest collapses of organized society. In early American history, the people of Salem experienced this for themselves. Arthur Miller shows this in his book. The society of Salem that Miller creates in The Crucible shows how fear can slowly cause rational thought to deteriorate, leading to mass hysteria and eventually the breakdown of civilized behavior.

Fear is definitely not always a harmful emotion. Fear influences people to take extreme measures and act irrationally emotion. While fear is one of the main emotions people face, fear is not a always harmful emotion. In the Crucible, Arthur Miller shows us how fear and suspicion can destroy a community. As the play develops, Miller shows us how fear and suspicion increase and destroy the community. Throughout the play it becomes apparent that the community gets more and more divided as time goes on. In the beginning there were arguments about ownership of land between some of the villagers. As the story progresses people fear for their own safety and begin accusing their neighbours of witchcraft in order to escape being hanged. Salem became overrun by the hysteria of witchcraft. Mere suspicion itself was accepted as evidence. As a Satan-fearing community, they could not think of denying the evidence, because to deny the existence of evil was to deny the existence of goodness; which was God. In the 17th century a group of Puritans migrated from England to America - the land of dreams - to escape persecution for their religious beliefs. As Arthur Miller tells us in the introduction to Act 1 'no one can really know what their lives were like.' We would never be able to imagine a life with 'no novelists' and 'their creed forbade anything resembling a theatre or vain entertainment.' 'They didn't celebrate Christmas, and a holiday from work meant only that they must concentrate