American Lit Notes - the Crucible

American Literature – The Crucible week 3        

• For Week 4 – Essay Planning Week: 2-page essay plan 200-word thesis/ outline on 2 extracts you’re writing about, specific about paragraph not general talk, briefly link back to historical context, 5/6 metaphors, check vle for examples essays.
• Arthur miller’s version of Puritan America, what significance does this have?
• Projecting fears on someone else, notion of hysteria in society, society enters a mass psychosis, looking for reasons why you wouldn’t be a sinner.
• 1950’s puritanism – Miller’s America
• themes: sexuality and repression, race bureaucracy and rationalised society, individualism, the holocaust.
• The plays meaning today
• Aversion of house un-American activities committee. Huac was effectively a government investigative body charges with the task of identifying communist infiltration in American society. What America feared most was that these others looked just like Americans and were unable to detect. People of Hollywood were seen as liberal. The crucible may be seen as Miller’s way of biting back.
• Idea of trying to make everyone the same, everybody conforms to society. What happens when conformity is undermined? Various versions of American identity.
• ‘I am trying to, and I will protect my sense of myself’ Arthur miller, no social responsibility, miller individual society link to the crucible and puritan America. Selfish?
• miller had a disabled son which he disowned and confined, his own handling of his son was unfair, compared to unfairly treated Jews.
• Miller’s testimony reads remarkably like the dialogue between Proctor and Danforth Page 124, penguin edition. Crucible was written 1953, 3 years before AM’s appearance at HUAC.
• New world was an escape from the religious intolerance of Old World and an attempt to reverse the Fall of man- to reconstruct a city of god that would shine out as a kind moral beacon over a corrupt and fallen Old World.
• Puritan mission ordained by god, idea of a divinely ordained society that was exceptional compared to the old world was inherited by the post revolution America.
• Strains on belief system and ideology are mot admitted as being caused by the ideology itself but are projected outwards as caused by some external thing, some outside force, therefore supernatural forces are blamed for very natural, human responses t an overbearing system.
• Accusations are motivated by politics and power, opportunity for people of society to act on previous grudges.
• Religion isn’t enough in the crucible, (religion) could be a form of violent power exercised by the minority over the majority but given a kind of religious gloss.
• Typology – hunting of signs, types (in bible) and antypes (your own)
• Constant vigilance and seeking out adversaries, Salem is divided into a prosperous town – second only to Boston and a farming village, villagers agree that the town has become more corrupt
• Lacking a natural explanation for the actions of the girls, puritans turned to the supernatural – the girls bewitched, prodded by parris they named their tormenters.
• Finding witches became a crusade not only for Salem but for Massachusetts.
• Dramatic purposes have sometimes required many characters to be fused into one; the number of girls involved in the crying out had been reduced; Abigail’s ae has been raised
• Miller has sexualised the girls, as the first exchange between proctor attests, sexual jealousy over proctor motivates accusations of devilry
• Another example of the way in which contradictions between puritanism and reality are projected onto external causes, puritanism definition or prescription of the role women should play in society
• Marriage was a means of domesticating women 1950’s, female hysteria and mental illness was often seen as an inherent aspect of femininity. How are women manifested in the play?
• Race identities can be deemed supernatural for the threat they pose. Tituba’s songs from Barbados are mistaken by Parris as demonic incantations. Her slave culture and self definition are demonised.
• ‘Are their names still white?’ asks parris. racial codification in the play, becomes index in itself.
• ‘I am not black, I will not black myself’ Abigail, treated as a slave like Tituba, her moral integrity.
• The holocaust- in mid 60’s AM talks about looking into darkness, by meeting a Nazi, the crucible in implicit and also a symbol in the crucible by looking into darkness.
• The irrational persecution of group denied all possibility of self defenced and the deliberate creation of scapegoats which a society can blame for its problems sounds like the Nazi persecution of Jews as does the organised hysteria with which that persecution was carried out.
• ‘evil is not a mistake but a fact in itself’ is Arthur miller criticising puritanism?
• What kind of society facilitates evil? Concerned with increasing bureaucratisation of American society, its increasing rationalisation, its total organisation in which individualism gives way to conformity. This is facilitated buy the increasing technologisation of the world of word, man becomes a unit – the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
• Am called Nazi Germany; ‘a chilling of the soul by technological apparatus… the obstruction of the individual’s capacity for choosing, or erosion of what used to be thought of as an autonomous personality’ and said contemporary America ‘struggling with the same incubus’.

Seminar

• American Jeremiad ‘sadon bervabicz’ (sp)
• Is the play American? Universal, cultural?
• Notion of social and personal relationships- revenge culture
• Importance of reputation – john refuses to make a false confession to keep his reputation, idea of America being constructed as an exemplary nation
• Contemporary syntax could amplify what was going on at the time ‘communism’
• We wouldn’t know what Puritan writing was, which could be a reason why miller used modern colloquial language.
• Different forms of writing – prose writer by times and then dramatic writer
• Moral ambiguity of Puritan world: reverend hale, once he witnesses hysteria realises the ridiculousness of it, loses faith towards the end. Hale’s conversion- idealism vs reality. From sending people to their death for witchcraft to empathising with proctor. Impossible to keep up puritan faith, it becomes deconstructed. Conformity is still kept up until the end. Loss of faith is to keep humanity.
• Extremism vs morality
• So ingrained in keeping the religious laws that innocent people were sent to their death
• Get together to come to new world, join to defeat natives and stay together in a Puritan community to accuse others of witchcraft, community is central to puritans
• Expectations of women, way women are sacrificed compared to men.
• Page 244-5 theodore boseman on vle