Learning Guide to the Crucible
SUBJECTS — U.S./1629 - 1750, 1945 - 1991; &
Massachusetts; Drama/U.S.;
SOCIAL-EMOTIONAL LEARNING — Justice; Marriage;
MORAL-ETHICAL EMPHASIS — Trustworthiness;Fairness.
1996 U.S. Version: Age 14+; MPAA Rating -- PG-13 for intense depiction of the Salem witch trials; Drama; 124 minutes; Color; Available from Amazon.com
1957 French Version: (English Subtitles) Age: 12+; No MPAA Rating; Drama; 108 minutes; B & W.
Description: These films present Arthur Miller's play about the Salem witchcraft trials. The play and the films capture the sense of the late 1600s as well as the hysteria and injustice of the red scare of 1947 - 1956.
The 1957 version was produced in France because movie makers in the United States were afraid of being branded as communist sympathizers. The screenplay was written by Jean Paul Sartre. The French title for the film is "Les Sorcieres de Salem."
Arthur Miller wrote the screenplay for the 1996 version. The two films are different in their emphasis and both are worth seeing. For example, the 1957 version has an overlay of class conflict to which Miller objects. The class issues, however, are historically important and serve to explain many of the underlying motivations for the crusade against non-Christian populations worldwide. The class issues, however, are historically important and serve to explain many of the underlying motivations for the crusade against non-Christians world wide.
Benefits of the Movie: "The Crucible" introduces Puritan society, the Salem witchcraft trials of 1692, and the anti-communist hysteria in the United States during the period 1947 - 1956. The play and the films illustrate how a frightened society will ignore fundamental beliefs in justice as well as its own basic principles of the primacy of law. Moreover, the film addresses individual responsibility in terms of honesty, integrity and forgiveness.
Possible Problems:Minor: Tituba is beaten by her master. Proctor beats his serving girl with a whip; she is fully clothed and apparently not injured. There are several just off camera hangings in which the audience sees the rope above and the dangling feet below the victim. One man, Giles Corey, is shown being pressed to death. In the 1996 version a naked female form is seen in the forest and Abigail Williams gropes John Proctor.
The 1957 version begins with a legend asserting that the events depicted in the movie are true. This is incorrect. Arthur Miller, the playwright, stated that the play was not intended to be an historical rendition of events. There is, for example, no historical basis for the affair between John Proctor, who was about sixty years old when he was hanged and Abigail Williams, who was eleven years old. Tituba was from the West Indies instead of Barbados.
Parenting Points:View the film with your child and be prepared to explain the nature of hysteria and to answer any question he or she may ask. Review the background information and the discussion questions for information you may need to help your child understand the issues being addressed in the film.
!996 Version:
Selected Awards, Cast and Director:Selected Awards:1997 Academy Awards Nominations: Best Writing, Best Screenplay based on Material from Another Medium (Miller); Best Supporting Actress (Joan Allen); 1997 Golden Globe Awards Nominations: Best Supporting Actor (Scofield).
Featured Actors:Daniel Day-Lewis, Winona Ryder, Paul Scofield, Joan Allen, Bruce Davison, and Rob Campbell.
Director:Nicholas Hytner
1957 FRENCH VERSION
Selected Awards: None.
Featured Actors: Simone Signoret, Yves Montand, Mylene Demongeot, Jean Debucourt.
Director: Raymond Rouleau.
Helpful Background:
The fear generated by those who sought to profit from the elimination of non-Christian faiths resulted in several centuries of religious persecution against traditional belief systems. Paganism, animism, pantheism, polytheism, shamanism and other esoteric faiths were targeted as heretical by the Catholic Church prior to the rise of Protestantism and continued long after Martin Luther called into question many of the practices of the Papacy. The Inquisition was the official war against these faiths and witchcraft became the catch-all term used to define their various practices. Thus, “witch” evolved into the antilocutive term for a follower of something other than monotheism. In the effort to eliminate these religions, fear became the dominant weapon. One tool used in the war against immanence, which is the general term for a pantheistic concept of God, was a book entitled the Malleus Maleficarum, which rolled through over twenty publications after it first appeared in 1486. Written by Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger, this guide on how to detect, torture and eliminate heretics, was promulgated by the Catholic Church and used throughout Europe and the Americas to justify the murder of hundreds of thousands of pagans.
Witchcraft hysterias resulting from the pulpit-led fear mongering and backed by the instructions in the Malleus, were common in sixteenth to eighteenth century Europe in both Catholic and Protestant areas. They frequently led to more devastating effects than the hysteria in Salem. As women were most often involved in the practice of pre-Christian religions, in some Swiss villages, for example, after the waves of anti-witch hysteria there were scarcely any women left alive.
The Salem Witchcraft trials, which on a timeline of witch-hunts can be regarded as one of the last battlefronts in the war against immanence, led to the imprisonment of more than 100 people and the execution of 20. Four died in prison. Men were executed as well as women. The accusations were made by a group of young women demonstrating symptoms of hysteria. The women asserted that specters of witches would pinch, suffocate or stab them.They named names and often the only way those accused couldavoid being hanged was to confess guilt and to give the names of other alleged witches. The twenty who were executed continued to maintain their innocence, refused to confess, and would not name others. Nineteen were hanged. One man, Giles Corey, was pressed to death, a method of torture used in England on people who would not plead in court. A plea was necessary before the court could take jurisdiction and condemn the prisoner. The idea was that the weight of the rocks on the chests of the accused would push the words "guilty" or "not guilty" from their lips. The only words that pressing got out of Giles Corey were, "more weight, more weight." Historians believe that Corey thought he would be condemned anyway and by refusing to plead he prevented the court from finding that he was a witch. Upon conviction as a witch, his property would have been confiscated and his children would have been without an inheritance. This fact supports the suggestion that the witch trials were motivated on the part of some individuals for material gain.
In writing about the Salem witch trials, Miller sought to re-create the atmosphere in which such hysteria can thrive; he never claimed that his play was historically accurate. Most historians agree that he gets the sense of the times right: the fear, the use of the hysteria for material gain, the infectious nature of the hysteria, and the retribution brought down upon those who doubted the accusers. The material gain came from the fact that, as is spelled out in the Malleus, land owned by those guilty of witch craft could be expropriated and sold. This came at a time when enclosure, the expropriation of commonly held land, was sweeping villages throughout Europe and the colonies. Miller also alludes to midwifery, and in so doing he raises but does not fully address the expropriation of traditional medical practices and knowledge of the use of herbsand other healing arts. During this period in history, doctoring was transferred from women into the hands of men exclusively through a system of licensing that effectively eliminated competition from women even in the domain of childbirth.
The most important departure from the historical record in “The Crucible” is the affair between Abigail Williams and John Proctor. Although there is no evidence of the sexuality implied in the motivations of these two characters, the mind set of the individuals involved, including Proctor’s wife, is important in developing universality and in portraying the moral struggles of those caught up in such terrible times.
Miller was clearly more interested in the story of the Salem witch trials as a metaphor for the fear of communism in the U.S. during the period 1947 - 1956 than in a study of a piece of American history per se. In the years after World War ll, when competition between the U.S. and the Soviet Union became intense, there began an effort to purge communists from the government and from positions of influence in society. However, the charges made by what came to be known as “redbaiters” because of the association of the color red with communism, were almost always undocumented and false. In reality, the redbaiters were using the fear of communism for their own political and economic gain by grossly exaggerating the influence of communists in the U.S. In the process the redbaiters ruined the careers and damaged the lives of many innocent Americans whose only offense was to disagree with them politically. They also created a sense that communism, a social system based upon the distribution of wealth according to need, was an evil doctrine whose intention was to destroy American society.
The Communist Party of the United States was organized in 1919. In the 1930s and early 1940s, in response to the inability of the American economy to provide jobs and financial security during the Great Depression, many socially conscious Americans joined liberal, organizations. Some joined the Communist Party. However, voters in the U.S. have never supported the Communist Party; it has never elected a representative to Congress nor has it been popular with the "oppressed masses" it sought to champion. After the Second World War, as the authoritarian and anti-U.S. nature of the Soviet Union became apparent, membership in the Communist Party, USA dropped to virtually nothing. Just as paganism in the centuries earlier, communism had become a threat to the dominant paradigm and had to be eliminated.
Because of protections specified in the First Amendment, it has never been illegal to belong to the Communist Party. However, during the Cold War, a time when the U.S. and communist countries were locked in competitive struggle, members of the Communist Party were considered potential Russian agents and threats to U.S. security. Loyalty oaths were required of government employees and contractors. From 1947 to 1956 many persons of left wing political views were required by Congressional committees, most often the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), to testify about their own past political affiliations as well as those of people with whom they were associated. People who refused to cooperate with the investigation were blacklisted and not permitted to work in certain professions, including teaching. The most notorious blacklist was in the entertainment industry. It included the names of hundreds of persons and was extended to include those who had supported many of the reforms that the communists had also supported and even those who simply opposed the blacklist. Hollywood studios hired a business called "Red Channels" to investigate the background of people seeking to work in the film industry. The blacklisters came to have a financial interest in extending the hysteria just as did many of the participants in the witch hunts centuries earlier.
Witnesses who cooperated with the HUAC, disavowed their prior leftist connections, and gave names of others who had liberal political associations, were exonerated and not subject to the blacklist. Some courageous people took the position that the First Amendment prohibited governmental inquiry into the lawful political associations of American citizens. When they refused to answer the Committee's questions, they were branded as subversives and prosecuted for contempt of Congress.
Arthur Miller, in his autobiography, Timebends, A Life, commented on the connection between the Salem witch trials and the red scare. Describing the time he spent going over original documents from the time of the trials, he wrote:
“... [G]radually, over the weeks a living connection between myself and Salem, and between Salem and Washington, was made in my mind -- for whatever else they might be, I saw that the hearings in Washington were profoundly and even avowedly ritualistic. After all, in almost every case the [House Un-American Activities] Committee knew in advance what they wanted the witness to give them: the names of his comrades in the [Communist] Party. The FBI had long since infiltrated the Party, and informers had long ago identified the participants in various meetings. The main point of the hearings, precisely as in Seventeenth Century Salem, was that the accused make public confession, damn his confederates as well as his Devil master, and guarantee his sterling new allegiance by breaking disgusting old vows -- whereupon he was let loose to rejoin the society of extremely decent people. In other words, the same spiritual nugget lay folded within both procedures -- an act of contrition done not in solemn privacy but out in the public air. The Salem prosecution was actually on more solid legal ground since the defendant, if guilty of familiarity with the Unclean One, had broken a law against the practice of witchcraft, a civil as well as a religious offense; whereas the offender against HUAC could not be accused of any such violation but only of a spiritual crime, subservience to a political enemy's desires and ideology. He was summoned before the Committee to be called a bad name, but one that could destroy his career.” Timebends, A Life by Arthur Miller, page 331.
Several years after he wrote "The Crucible" Arthur Miller himself was called before the HUAC. When he refused to answer the Committee's questions about the names of persons who had been present at meetings of writers that he had attended in the 1930s, Miller was convicted of contempt of Congress. The conviction was later thrown out by the U.S. Supreme Court.
It has been argued that there were no real witches while there actually were real communists, some of whom were subservient to the Soviet Union, a real threat. Miller responds that during the time of the Salem trials, the best minds in America and in Europe believed in the existence of witches. He notes that on three occasions the Bible warns against witches. Historians, both secular and religious, confirm that witches have existed and continue to exist, though not in the stereotypical image used to raise hysterical fear in centuries past; they never rode broomsticks, had green skin and warts, though they may have used frogs in some of their traditional remedies. Both witches and communists were feared, both reviled. Both were seen as a serious threat to the dominant paradigm, with its concomitant economic factors, and as such had to be eliminated. Miller comments on the offense of the accused in both situations:
“The House Un-American Activities Committee has been in existence since 1938, but the tinder of guilt was not so available when the New Deal and Roosevelt were openly espousing a policy of vast social engineering often reminiscent of socialist methods. But as in Salem, a point arrived, in the late forties, when the rules of social intercourse quite suddenly changed, or were changed, and attitudes that had merely been anticapitalist-antiestablishment were now made unholy, morally repulsive, and if not actually treasonous then implicitly so. America had always been a religious country.” Timebends, A Life by Arthur Miller, pages 341 & 342.
This religious fervor Miller mentions can be seen in the term “godless communists” that was commonly used in the period following World War ll and in the sudden inscription of “In God We Trust” on coins, something that may have been seen as irreligious in prior national moods. In their efforts to capitalize on fear of communism, certain politicians made unsupported accusations about the presence of communists in the government or other institutions. The most notorious was Senator Joseph McCarthy who made claimed that communists had infiltrated the State Department and many other departments of the government. When he turned on the U.S. Army and attacked the generals who had led the country to victory during World War II, the irresponsibility of this conduct was made manifest and McCarthy was eventually censured by the Senate.
The scars of the 1947 - 1956 red scare are still healing. It was not until 1996, five years after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, that "The Crucible" was made into a film by Hollywood, despite itspopularity and the fact that it was awarded the highest honor for a play, the Tony Award, in 1953. Not until 1997 did the Writer's Guild restore the credits of blacklisted writers who had written for Hollywood under pseudonyms. In 1999 when the Academy of Motion Picture Artists gave a lifetime achievement award to Elia Kazan a considerable number of voices were raised in protest against because Kazan had testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee and provided the investigators with the names of other persons who had attended meetings with him in the 1930s. One of Kazan's classic films, On the Waterfront, portrays a longshoreman who breaks the code of silence to talk to an investigating committee about corruption in his union. This was Kazan's artistic defense for his actions. Miller responded with the play "A View from the Bridge" which is also set among dock-workers. In the play, which later became a motion picture, the main character informs on two illegal immigrants based on self-serving motivations.