Sunday, February 2, 2014
Response to Arthur Miller's The Crucible: Acts 1-2
Arthur Miller's The Crucible is a great allegorical commentary on McCarthyism in the 1950s (the period that Miller wrote The Crucible) about the Salem witch trials in the seventeenth century. As it pertains to the class, The Crucible touches on the idea of torture and confession in the first two acts, namely in the antagonists John Proctor and Abigail. While the physical act of torture doesn't happen in acts one and two, the threat and possibility of it occurs repetitively. What's interesting is that Abigail uses it to hide information and her secrets, while when Proctors threatens torture, it exposes the truth from Mary Warren. On a broader scale, the Deputy Government acts very much like the torturers in the past examples we've seen in class, like The Wall and Abu Ghraib. The plot is centered around how the government is mad with paranoia, threatening just about everyone. Whether or not the accused are in fact perpetrators of witchcraft, some are willing to say so to save their life. Others are sent to the gallows. It's interesting to see how various people react to the threat of pain and death. Some with the actual truth (or suppression of it), and others with a fabricated truth - which is not the truth at all.
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I really like your take on this play and what you saw from it. I definitely found it interesting the way you talked about the threatening of torture being used in different ways. I thought it was interesting while reading The Crucible that torture was threatened on people not only to force the truth out of them, but also to keep the truth a secret. I also really liked your connections to The Wall and Abu Ghraib how they will threaten anyone because they do not know what the actual criminal looks like. I agree it was really fascinating to see how the different characters reacted when they knew the truth lead to pain and death because some would lie and go against themselves to survive, but others strongly wanted to stay true to themselves even though the truth meant being hanged.
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