章节名称：The Idea of a Theatre.

Aesthetic studies on theater

Key Concepts, Ideas, Terminology, Goals
- Discussion: What do you think of the development of theater?
the history of theater
the history of African American

章节名称： Fences: Background and culture context

African American in 1950s
About the playwright, culture context, African American Drama
Scene 1
The family relationship in Fences
Themes, characters and comments.
Scene 2
The father-son relationship in the play
The identity of modern African-American
The significance of Fences
Scene 3
Characters
Troy Maxson
The protagonist of Fences, a fifty-three year-old, African American man
who works for the sanitation department, lifting garbage into trucks. Troy
is also a former baseball star in the Negro Leagues. Troy's athletic ability
diminished before the Major Leagues accepted blacks. Hard-working,
strong and prone to telling compelling, fanciful stories and twisting the
truth, Troy is the family breadwinner and plays the dominant role in his
over thirty-year friendship with fellow sanitation worker, Jim Bono. Troy's
character is the centerpiece that all of the other relationships in Fences
gather around. Troy is husband to Rose, father to Lyons, Cory, and
Raynell, and brother to Gabriel. Troy is a tragic-hero who has excessive
pride for his breadwinning role. Troy's years of hard-work for only
meager progress depress him. Troy often fails to provide the love and
support that would mean the most to his loved ones.
 
Cory Maxson
The teenage son of Troy and Rose Maxson. A senior in high school, Cory
gets good grades and college recruiters are coming to see him play
football. Cory is a respectful son, compassionate nephew to his disabled
Uncle Gabriel, and generally, a giving and enthusiastic person. An
ambitious young man who has the talent and determination to realize his
dreams, Cory comes of age during the course of the play when he
challenges and confronts Troy and leaves home. Cory comes home from
the Marines in the final scene of the play, attempting to defy Troy by
refusing to go to his funeral, but Cory changes his mind after sharing
memories of his father with Rose and Raynell.
 
Rose Maxson
Troy's wife and mother of his second child, Cory. Rose is a forty-three
year-old African American housewife who volunteers at her church
regularly and loves her family. Rose's request that Troy and Cory build a
fence in their small, dirt backyard comes to represent her desire to keep
her loved-ones close to her love. Unlike Troy, Rose is a realist, not a
romantic longing for the by- gone days of yore. She has high hopes for
her son, Cory and sides with him in his wish to play football. Rose's
acceptance of Troy's illegitimate daughter, Raynell, as her own child,
exemplifies her compassion.
 
Gabriel Maxson
Troy's brother. Gabriel was a soldier in the Second World War, during
which he received a head injury that required a metal plate to be
surgically implanted into his head. Because of the physical damage and
his service, Gabriel receives checks from the government that Troy used
in part to buy the Maxson's home where the play takes place. Gabriel
wanders around the Maxson family's neighborhood carrying a basket and
singing. He often thinks he is not a person, but the angel Gabriel who
opens the gates of heaven with his trumpet for Saint Peter on Judgment
Day. Gabriel exudes a child-like exuberance and a need to please.
 
Jim Bono
Troy's best friend of over thirty years. Jim Bono is usually called "Bono" or
"Mr. Bono" by the characters in Fences. Bono and Troy met in jail, where
Troy learned to play baseball. Troy is a role model to Bono. Bono is the
only character in Fences who remembers, first-hand, Troy's glory days of
hitting homeruns in the Negro Leagues. Less controversial than Troy,
Bono admires Troy's leadership and responsibility at work. Bono spends
every Friday after work drinking beers and telling stories with Troy in the
Maxson family's backyard. He is married to a woman named Lucille, who
is friends with Rose. Bono is a devoted husband and friend. Bono's
concern for Troy's marriage takes precedent over his loyalty to their
friendship.
 
Lyons Maxson
Troy's son, fathered before Troy's time in jail with a woman Troy met
before Troy became a baseball player and before he met Rose. Lyons is
an ambitious and talented jazz musician. He grew up without Troy for
much of his childhood because Troy was in prison. Lyons, like most
musicians, has a hard time making a living. For income, Lyons mostly
depends on his girlfriend, Bonnie whom we never see on stage. Lyons
does not live with Troy, Rose and Cory, but comes by the Maxson house
 frequently on Troy's payday to ask for money. Lyons, like Rose, plays the
numbers, or local lottery. Their activity in the numbers game represents
Rose and Lyons' belief in gambling for a better future. Lyons' jazz playing
appears to Troy as an unconventional and foolish occupation. Troy calls
jazz, "Chinese music," because he perceives the music as foreign and
impractical. Lyons' humanity and belief in himself garners respect from
others.
 
Raynell Maxson
Troy's illegitimate child, mothered by Alberta, his lover. August Wilson
introduces Raynell to the play as an infant. Her innocent need for care
and support convinces Rose to take Troy back into the house. Later,
Raynell plants seeds in the once barren dirt yard. Raynell is the only
Maxson child that will live with few scars from Troy and is emblematic of
new hope for the future and the positive values parents and older
generations pass on to their young.
 
Alberta
Troy's buxom lover from Tallahassee and Raynell's mother. Alberta dies
while giving birth. She symbolizes the exotic dream of Troy's to escape
his real life problems and live in an illusion with no time.
 
Bonnie
Lyons' girlfriend who works in the laundry at Mercy Hospital.
 
Mr. Stawicki
Cory's boss at the A&P.
 
Coach Zellman
Cory's high school football coach who encourages recruiters to come to
see Cory play football.
 
Mr. Rand
Bono and Troy's boss at the Sanitation Department who doubted that
Troy would win his discrimination case.
 
Miss Pearl
Gabe's landlady at his new apartment.
 
Themes
Coming of Age Within the Cycle of Damaged Black Manhood
Both Troy and Bono relate stories of their childhood in the south and
tales of their relationships with difficult fathers to Lyons in Act One, scene
four. Their often-painful memories provide a context for understanding
 the similarities and differences of the generations separating Troy and
Bono from Lyons and Cory. Troy's father, like many blacks after the
abolishment of slavery was a failed sharecropper. Troy claims that his
father was so evil that no woman stayed with him for very long, so Troy
grew up mostly motherless. When Troy was fourteen, his father noticed
that the mule Troy was supposedly taking care of had wandered off.
Troy's father found Troy with a girl Troy had a crush on and severely beat
Troy with leather reins. Troy thought his father was just angry at Troy for
his disobedience, but proving Troy's father was even more despicable, his
father then raped the girl. Troy was afraid of his father until that moment.
 
At that moment, however, Troy believes he became a man. He could no
longer live under the roof with a man that would commit these
unacceptable acts, so he left home to be on his own, though he was
homeless and broke, with no ties or family elsewhere. Manhood, to Troy,
meant separating from his father because of conflict and abuse. The one
attribute Troy respected and proudly inherited was a sense of
responsibility. Troy's father provided for eleven children, and Troy too
became the sole breadwinner for his family.
 
Bono however, remembers a different type of father. Bono's father was
equally depressed about life as Troy's father, but unlike Troy's father,
Bono's dad never provided a fathering or providing role to Bono and his
family. Bono describes his father as having, "The Walking Blues," a
condition that prevented his father from staying in one place for long
and moving frequently from one woman to the next. Bono could barely
recognize his father and knew little about him. Bono says his father, like
many other African Americans of his father's generation, were "searching
out The New Land." As blacks were freed from slavery and wanted to
escape the often slavery-like conditions of sharecropping, many walked
north in what history calls The Great Migration, to pursue a better life in
the north, particularly in urban centers. Because of Bono's father's
unreliable personality, Bono chose not to father children, to insure he
would not abandon a child like his father. But, contrary to Bono's fears,
his father's personality was not a family trait, but a choice he made to
cope with his particular circumstances. Bono has been loyal to his wife,
Lucille for almost eighteen years.
 
Lyons and Cory had very different upbringings, though their
development into men does not fall too far from the tree of their father's
experience. Lyons spent his entire childhood growing up with only one
parent, his mother, while Troy was in jail. Lyons feels he has the right to
make his own life decisions and pursue his own dreams in music because
he had more familial support and fewer hardships than Troy. Troy was
 not around to mold him into a responsible person, so Lyons tends to
need to borrow money, though he does pay Troy back respectfully. Cory
ends up leaving home in a similar conflict with Troy that Troy had with
Cory's paternal grandfather. To Troy and Cory, becoming a man comes to
mean leaving the man that raised you because of a violent conflict. This
painful process of coming of age is confusing. For both Troy and Cory,
the creation of their own identity when their role model is a creature of
duality—part responsible and loyal, the other side, hurtful, selfish and
abusive, proves a difficult model with which to mold their own identity as
grown men with a more promising future than the father who threatens
their livelihood.
 
Interpreting and Inheriting History
Much of the conflict in Wilson's plays, including Fences, arises because
the characters are at odds with the way they see the past and what they
want to do with the future. For example, Troy Maxson and his son, Cory
see Cory's future differently because of the way they interpret history.
Troy does not want Cory to experience the hardship and disappointment
Troy felt trying to become a professional sports player, so he demands
that Cory work after school instead of practicing with the football team.
Cory, however, sees that times changed since baseball rejected a player
as talented as Troy because of the color of his skin. Cory knows the
possibility exists that the professional sports world will include, not
exclude him. In Act One, Scene Three, Cory provides examples of
successful African American athletes to Troy. Cory says, "The Braves got
Hank Aaron and Wes Covington. Hank Aaron hit two home runs today.
That makes forty-three." Troy responds, "Hank Aaron ain't nobody."
Cory's sport, football, integrated its players years before baseball. For
Troy to accept this change in the world would cause Troy to accept the
death of his own dreams. Troy refuses to see Cory's potential because it
would mean accepting his own misfortune. Troy and Cory see history in a
way that benefits their worldview. Unfortunately this conflict pushes
father and son away from each other. Troy, who learned a responsible
work ethic from his otherwise abusive father, means well when he insists
that Cory return to work at the A&P because he sees the job as fair,
honest work that isn't at the mercy of powerful whites' sometimes
arbitrary decisions, as in Major League baseball. But by attempting to
insure Cory of a harmless future, Troy stifles his son's potential and
prevents Cory from having a promising future.
 
Troy's perception of what is right and what is wrong for Cory, based on
Troy's refusal to perceive a historical change in the acceptance of blacks,
tragically causes Cory to experience a disappointing fate similar to Troy's.
Troy passes his personal history on to his family in other ways
 throughout the play with sayings that represent his philosophies of life
like, "You gotta take the crookeds with the straights." His children also
inherit Troy's past by learning songs he sings like, "Hear It Ring! Hear It
Ring!" a song Troy's own father taught him. Cory tells Rose in Act Two,
scene five, "Papa was like a shadow that followed you everywhere." Troy's
songs and sayings link his family to the difficult life in the south that his
generation was free to run away from, though penniless and without
roots in the north. Troy's purposefully and inadvertently passes on his life
experience to his children and family, for better and for worse.
 
The Choice Between Pragmatism and Illusions as Survival Mechanisms
Troy and Rose choose divergent coping methods to survive their
stagnant lives. Their choices directly correspond to the opposite
perspectives from which they perceive their mutual world. In Act Two,
scene one, Troy and Rose say that they both feel as if they have been
stuck in the same place since their relationship began eighteen years ago.
However, Rose and Troy handle their frustration and disappointment with
their intertwined lives differently. This difference in their viewpoints is
evident early on in the play. In Act One, scene one, Troy proves through
his story about his battle with Death that he is a dreamer and a believer
in self-created illusions. To Troy, his struggle with Death was an actual
wrestling match with a physical being. Rose, on the other hand, swiftly
attempts to bring Troy back to reality, explaining that Troy's story is
based on an episode of pneumonia he had in July, 1941. Troy ignores
Rose's pragmatic, realistic perception of his fight with death. Troy brags
about his wrestling match with Death. Rose unsuccessfully refutes his
story by mentioning that every time he tells the story he changes the
details. Troy is unmoved by Rose's evidence against his illusion. Rose, as
pacifier of the Maxson family, relents, making a final comment, "Troy,
don't nobody wanna be hearing all that stuff." Later, when Troy weaves a
story about encountering the devil, Rose buttons his long account with
two simple words, "Troy lying."
 
The one impractical activity Rose takes part in is playing numbers. She
has dreams and hopes for the future, like Lyons who also plays the
numbers and wants to be successful in a difficult profession, jazz music.
In Act One, scene two, "Troy says to Rose, "You ain't doing nothing but
throwing your money away." And when Cory proposes that they buy a
television in Act one, scene three, Troy makes an excuse that they need
to spend the money on a new roof. When it comes to other characters'
impractical decisions, Troy suddenly becomes a realist, selfishly reserving
the right to dream for him only. This response comes across
hypocritically from a man who later, in the same scene, will refuse to
admit Hank Aaron gets enough playing time or when Cory proves a point
 about Sandy Koufax, Troy's futile response is, "I ain't thinking of no Sandy
Koufax," as if not thinking about him will make Koufax nonexistent.
 
Later, in Act Two, scene one, Troy admits his affair with Alberta to Rose,
excusing his behavior by expressing to Rose that spending time with
Alberta allowed him to provide an illusion of accomplishment and escape
from responsibility. Troy says, "Then when I saw that gal…I got to
thinking that if I tried…I just might be able to steal second." Troy
perceives his relationship with Alberta as a laudable move in a baseball
game, as a personal accomplishment. Rose sees Troy's lies and deception
about the affair as simple and straightforward self-absorbed betrayal. She
says, "We're not talking about baseball! We're talking about you going
off to lay in bed with another woman…[w]e ain't talking about no
baseball." In the final scene, Rose copes with the death of Troy with her
typically pragmatic view. "…I do know he meant to do more good than
harm." Troy dies, swinging a baseball bat, still attached to unfulfilled
dreams of his past while Rose serves as peacemaker and practitioner of
love with her family while they grapple with Troy's confrontational legacy.
 
Symbols
Trains
Troy brings his illegitimate baby, Raynell home for the first time at the
beginning of the Act Two, Scene Three of Fences. Troy sits with his
motherless baby on a porch where he once reigned, but now is an
unwanted presence. Then, Troy sings the song, "Please Mr. Engineer, let a
man ride the line," which echoes the pleas of a man begging a train
engineer to let him ride, in hiding, for free. Especially during the Harlem
Renaissance (the flourishing of African American artists, writers, poets,
etc. in the first half of the Twentieth Century) and during slavery times,
respectively, trains were common literary devices in African American
literature and music. A character that rides a train or talks of trains, or
even goes to a train station came to represent change. Trains represent
the coming or arrival of a major change in a character's life. In Fences,
Troy identifies with the blues song about riding the train. By singing this
particular song, Troy's acknowledges that his actions caused the
upheaval in the lives of his loved ones. Troy sings, "Please Mr. Engineer
let a man ride the line," but in other words he is crying out to his wife,
Rose to let him back into her home. Like the voice in the song, Troy is
homeless and has nothing to offer the one he needs something from in
order to keep going. Especially with a baby in hand, Troy has no future
without his wife. In order to come back into her life, Troy knows he is
asking Rose to give him a free ride of forgiveness. If she does take him
back, Troy knows life with her will never return to the life they once had
together because he lost her trust and respect when he committed
 adultery. The train song also connotes the time Troy and many other
men of his generation spent wandering North during the Great
Migration. He sings, "I ain't got no ticket, please let me ride the blinds,"
which represents the poverty the released slaves and the failed
sharecroppers experienced in Troy's father's generation. Troy sings the
song to his newborn daughter, passing on a song that tells an important
story of her past and links that past to the present. Troy's song
exemplifies the tradition in African American history to make something
from nothing-like the song. Troy hopes his love for his daughter and her
innocence will change Rose's heart and allow Troy another chance at
fatherhood and marriage.
 
Fences
August Wilson did not name his play, Fences, simply because the
dramatic action depends strongly on the building of a fence in the
Maxson's backyard. Rather, the characters lives change around the fence-
building project which serves as both a literal and a figurative device,
representing the relationships that bond and break in the arena of the
backyard. The fact that Rose wants the fence built adds meaning to her
character because she sees the fence as something positive and
necessary. Bono observes that Rose wants the fence built to hold in her
loved ones. To Rose, a fence is a symbol of her love and her desire for a
fence indicates that Rose represents love and nurturing. Troy and Cory on
the other hand think the fence is a drag and reluctantly work on finishing
Rose's project. Bono also observes that to some people, fences keep
people out and push people away. Bono indicates that Troy pushes Rose
away from him by cheating on her. Troy's lack of commitment to
finishing the fence parallels his lack of commitment in his marriage. The
fence appears finished only in the final scene of the play, when Troy dies
and the family reunites. The wholeness of the fence comes to mean the
strength of the Maxson family and ironically the strength of the man who
tore them apart, who also brings them together one more time, in death.
 
The Devil
Troy casts the Devil as the main character of his exaggerated stories that
entertain, bewilder and frustrate his family and friends. Eventually, Troy's
association of the Devil as a harbinger of death comes to represent his
struggle to survive the trials of his life. Many scenes in the play end with
Troy speaking a soliloquy to Death and the Devil. In Act One, Scene One,
Troy spins a long yarn, or tale about his fight for several days with the
Devil. The story of the Devil endears Troy to audiences early on by
revealing his capability to imagine and believe in the absurd. In another
story, Troy turns a white salesman into a Devil. Troy calls a man the Devil
who tried to sell Troy furniture in exchange for monthly payments by
 mail. Again, providing the pragmatic version of the story, Rose explains
why Troy invents stories about the Devil. "Anything you don't
understand, you call the Devil." Troy observes door-to-door salesmen
and the process of layaway for the first time and in his ignorance, turns a
modern occurrence into a mythical story.
 
Troy also describes the Devil's appearance as a man in a white hood.
Wilson conjures the image of KKK members in KKK regalia with this
description. Troy imagines the Devil, not just as an airy spirit from hell
but also as a living human being. To Troy, the Devil sometimes
symbolizes the aggression and cowardice of bigotry. Troy's stories about
the Devil show that Troy sees himself as a man winning a fight against
injustice and hatred. Troy's courage in overcoming racism is also
suggested by Troy's complaint against the Sanitation Department that
eventually hires Troy as the first black man to drive a trash truck.
However, as the play progresses and Troy loses the love of his family and
inadvertently betrays his brother, Gabriel, the less we believe in Troy's
ability to win in his struggle to overcome the bad luck of his fate and the
demons he carries within that become even greater forces than the
racism that curtailed his dreams.
 
Motifs
Death and Baseball
In Act one, scene one, Troy Maxson declares, "Death ain't nothing but a
fastball on the outside corner." With this line, the former Negro League
slugger merges his past experience as a ballplayer with his philosophy.
Troy, Bono, and Rose argue about the quality of the Major League black
ballplayer compared to Troy when he was in his prime. A fastball on the
outside corner was homerun material for Troy. Though Troy feels
beleaguered from work and deeply troubled by coming along too early
to play in the Major Leagues because they were still segregated when he
was in top form, Troy believes he is unconquerable and almost immortal
when it come to issues of life and death. Troy knows he overcame
pneumonia ten years ago, survived an abusive father and treacherous
conditions in his adaptation to surviving in an urban environment when
he walked north to live in Pittsburgh, and jail. Baseball is what Troy is
most proud of and knows he conquered on his own. In this first scene of
the play, Troy is afraid of nothing, values his life, and feels in control.
Troy's attitude toward death is proud and nonchalant. Troy says, "Ain't
nothing wrong with talking about death. That's part of life. Everybody
gonna die. You gonna die, I'm gonna die. Bono's gonna die. Hell, we all
gonna die." He has not recently experienced a personal loss so great that
it humbles and weakens his spirit. In the same scene, Troy compares
Death to an army that marched towards him in July, 1941, when he had
 pneumonia. He describes Death as an army, an icy touch on the shoulder,
a grinning face. Troy claims he spoke to Death. Troy thinks he constantly
has to be on guard against Death's army. He claims he saw Death
standing with a sickle in his hand, spoke to Death and wrestled Death for
three days and three nights. After the wrestling match, Troy saw Death
put on a white robe with a hood on it and leave to look for his sickle.
 
Troy admits, "Death ain't nothing to play with. And I know he's gonna get
me," but he refuses to succumb to Death easily. Troy follows the Bible
quotation, "Be ever vigilant," in his attitude towards Death. In his
perception of Death, Troy mutates the form of Death many times, from
fastball, to a sickle-carrying, devil-like figure and finally composting the
devil into a Ku Klux Klan member in his white hood ceremony regalia. His
image of Death being composed of a marching army or leading an army
transforms into this KKK leader image that has camp followers.
 
As the play progresses, Troy repeatedly merges his baseball metaphors
with his Death rhetoric. In the last lines of numerous scenes Troy speaks
to Death out- loud, taunting Death to try to come after him and/or warns
Cory that his behavior is causing him to strike out. Cory makes three
mistakes in Troy's eyes and when he strikes out, Troy kicks him out of the
house. Troy's death and baseball metaphors are inextricably linked.
Admitting that he was too old to play baseball when the Major Leagues
integrated would kill Troy's belief that he was directly cheated out of a
special life that he deserved and earned. To Troy, it is enough of an injury
that the Major Leagues were segregated during his prime. He sees
baseball as the best time of his life, but also the death of his dreams and
hopes. When Cory was born, Troy promised he would not allow his son
to experience the same disappointment he was subjected to in baseball.
So, Troy equates Cory's pursuit of a dream as strong as his father's as
mistakes worthy of warning and punishment or "strikes" that Troy
believes will prevent Cory from reaching the same fate as Troy did.
 
Seeds and Growth
Characters in Fences literally and figuratively employ the motif of seeds,
flowers, plants, and related actions like growing, taking root, planting,
and gestation—in both their language and actions. Like August Wilson's
mother whose name is Daisy, Rose has the name of a flower. Rose is a
typical African American 1950's housewife and, as the caretaker of the
family and home, she represents loving care and nurturing, attributes
also frequently used to grow plants. Like the characteristics of the flower
after which she is named, Rose is a beautiful soul who protects her family
and protects herself when Troy hurts her. In Act Two, scene, five, Rose
demonstrates to Raynell that seeds take time to grow. Rose says, "You
 just have to give it a chance. It'll grow." She exemplifies patience and
generosity in her relationships with everyone in the play. For instance
when she sides with Cory on his decision to play football, her compassion
and concern for Gabriel when he is arrested and her acceptance of
Raynell as her own child when Alberta dies. When Troy complains in Act
Two, scene one that he needs to escape to Alberta's bed because he feels
as if he has been in the same place for sixteen years, Rose replies, "I been
standing with you! I been right here with you, Troy." Rose is sedentary,
like the flower, growing upward in the same spot. She relates her
decision to live life invested in her husband's life even though she knows
he will never be as successful as they once hoped. In Act Two, scene one
Rose's description of her life is a metaphor of planting. She says, "I took
all my feelings, my wants and needs, my dreams…and I buried them
inside you. I planted a seed and watched and prayed over it. I planted
myself inside you and waited to bloom. And it didn't take me no
eighteen years to find out the soil was hard and rocky and it wasn't never
gonna bloom. But I held on to you, Troy." Rose lessens the rocky and
hard nature of Troy with her love and compassion, providing shelter to
her children from their father's destructive behavior and legacy. She has
raised Cory lovingly and teaches Raynell about loving, a hopeful future
and forgiveness.
 
Blues
August Wilson says he uses the language and attitude of blues songs to
inspire his plays and play characters. The blues is a melancholy song
created by black people in the United States that tends to repeat a twelve
bar phrase of music and a 3-line stanza that repeats the first line in the
second line. A blues song usually contains several blue, or minor, notes in
the melody and harmony.
 
Fences is structured somewhat like a blues song. The play all takes place
in one place like a key of music and the characters each have their own
rhythm and melody that Wilson riffs off of around the common locale.
Characters repeat phrases, or pass phrases around, like a blues band with
a line of melody. Similar to the role of repeated lyrics and melody of a
blues song, Wilson's characters display changes in their life and a
changed attitude toward life by repeating scenarios in which they act. For
instance, Friday, Troy's payday, is the setting of three scenes. By mirroring
the situation in which events in the play take place, we can observe the
change that occurs from one instance to the next. For instance in Act
One, Scene one, Troy and Bono come home after payday as best friends
worried about Troy's future. In Act One, Scene Four, Troy and Bono
celebrate after payday because Troy won his discrimination case, but
Bono is more concerned that Troy will ruin his life with his extramarital
 affair. Troy comes home after payday in Act Two, Scene Four, estranged
from Bono and his family. He drinks and sings to comfort himself. By
now, the good days of the play's first scene seem far-gone. This is a way
playwrights manipulate the sense of time in a play, but for Wilson in
particular, the repeated events and language of the play are in keeping
what he calls a "blues aesthetic."
 
章节名称： Wendy Wasserstein and her The Heidi Chronicles
About Wendy Wasserstein and the second-wave of feminist movement in
United States
Feminine mystique and feminist movement
The dilemma and the future for career women
The significance of The Heidi Chronicles
 
Summary
The Heidi Chronicles focuses on the women’s movement of the late
twentieth century, and is told through the story of Heidi Holland, who is
first introduced as a high school student, and who eventually becomes a
successful feminist art historian. Notable themes include, but are not
limited to: feminism; the role of women in society at different times in
history, specifically the late twentieth century; social justice;
homosexuality; gender roles; and sexuality.
 
The Heidi Chronicles begins with a prologue. It is 1989, and the scene
takes place in a lecture hall at Columbia University. The main character is
a woman named Heidi Holland, who is a forty year old art history
professor. She begins by delivering a lecture on three women artists:
Sofonisba Anguissola, Clara Peeters, and Lilly Martin Spencer. The main
point of the lecture is to highlight that while these women were either
very highly regarded when they were contemporary and/or extremely
talented painters, they are virtually unknown in the present day.
 
Then the play shifts to 1965, and an unknown high school in Chicago.
Heidi Holland is sixteen years old and decides to go to a dance with her
friend, Susan Johnston. At the beginning of the scene, Heidi and Susan
look out at the dance floor and sing along to the song playing, “The
Shoop Shoop Song.” Soon, a boy named Chris Boxer asks Heidi to
dance, but she declines. She says she does not want to leave her friend
alone. Then a ladies’ choice dance is announced, and Susan hikes up
her skirt and runs out on to the floor to ask a boy to dance. Heidi meets
Peter Patrone, who is charming and witty. They get along well, and
promise to know each other all their lives.
 
 Several years later, Heidi is at a Eugene McCarthy rally, and encounters
Scoop Rosenbaum. Scoop is rude, obnoxious and extremely arrogant. He
is a magazine editor who often has many simultaneous affairs. He has an
unpleasant tendency to grade everything, and yet Heidi becomes
contradictorily attracted to him. She eventually understands Scoop to be
a very intelligent man, despite his arrogance. Heidi leaves the party to go
to bed with Scoop, and it is implied that Heidi might have been a virgin
before this. Then she attends a consciousness-raising session, in which a
lesbian explains that, in feminism, “you either shave your legs or you
don’t.” Heidi is left to think about her body hair through the lens of
social norms. She tells the group about her pathetic attachment to
Scoop, and feels distraught. She begs the other women to tell her that all
of their daughters will someday feel more worthwhile than they do.
 
The next noteworthy event is a rally at the Chicago Art Institute, which
Heidi attends. The rally is being held in protest of a major introspective,
which doesn’t contain a single woman artist. Peter Patrone, who is now
a pediatrician, arrives and confesses his homosexuality. Later, it is
revealed that Scoop has been married to another woman. He claims to
love Heidi, but he cannot and does not promise equality.
 
Eventually, as the 1980s comes around, Heidi must face her sense of
betrayal. Scoop and Heidi, despite their differences, go on to form a
rather tense friendship. The final events of the play concern Heidi’s
realization that just because she is not married does not mean she can’t
be a mother. She decides to take matters into her own hands, and
chooses to adopt a child, and raise it on her own.
 
Character
Denise Friedlander
Denise is Lisa’s sister. She works as a production assistant on a show
called Hello, New York. Susan Johnston hires her as her assistant when
she becomes a Hollywood executive.
 
Lisa Friedlander
Lisa Freidlander marries Scoop Rosenbaum and works as an illustrator of
children’s books. She accepts the role of housewife and mother to
Scoop’s children. She is always cheery and sweet, despite the fact that
her husband is cheating on her. She and Scoop have two children,
Maggie and Pierre.
 
Heidi Holland
Heidi is the woman around whom The Heidi Chronicles is constructed.
Over the course of the play, episodes of Heidi’s life are depicted, from
 the 1960s to the 1980s, from ages 16 to 40. As an adult, she is an art
historian; it is through a series of art lectures that her story unfolds. Two
of her lectures describe overlooked female artists who remained on the
periphery of the art world, artists whose works are notable for their
observational nature.
 
Like the artists she describes, Heidi is often a spectator in her own world.
As the play advances chronologically, she becomes increasingly
disillusioned with her role in the world. She also becomes disenchanted
with the women’s movement, the men in her life, and her own quest for
happiness; she laments her lack of identity. Despite attaining
independence and professional distinction she finds her life empty. At
the end of the play, she hopes to find fulfillment when she adopts a baby
from Panama.
 
Huron Street Ann Arbor Women’s Consciousness-raising Rap Group
This women’s group includes Jill, a housewife with four children; Fran, a
lesbian physicist friend of Susan’s; and Becky Groves, a seventeen-year-
old high school student who live with an abusive boyfriend. The group is
influential in Heidi’s emergence as a feminist.
 
Susan Johnston
Susan is Heidi’s best female friend. She changes careers and political
leanings as the times dictate. She goes to law school only to quit a
Supreme Court clerkship to move to a woman’s collective in Montana.
She then goes to business school, ostensibly for the collective, but, upon
graduation, is offered a job in Hollywood as an executive for a new
production company that wants to target a young, female audience. She
rationalizes that she is taking the job for the good of all women, so that
someone who isn’t sensitive to women’s issues won’t take the job.
Yet she turns into a stereotypical dealmaker, bent on greed and power.
She turns a lunch in which Heidi wants to talk about personal matters
into a business deal.
 
April Lambert
April hosts Hello, New York, the show on which Peter, Scoop, and Heidi
appear to talk about their generation. She is married to an important real
estate magnet, David Lambert, with whom Scoop wants to do business.
 
Peter Patrone
Peter is one of Heidi’s best friends, a caustic cynic. He meets her at a
high school dance and is impressed by her boredom. Over the course of
the play, Peter reveals to Heidi that he is homosexual. Following college,
he becomes a successful pediatrician living in New York City. When Heidi
 complains about her unhappiness, he tells her that he is tired of his
friends dying of AIDS and that her boredom and discontent are luxuries.
When she announces her intentions to leave New York City, Peter talks
Heidi into to staying for him.
 
Scoop Rosenbaum
Scoop Rosenbaum is another friend of Heidi’s and her former lover.
They first meet at a political fundraiser for Eugene McCarthy. From the
beginning, he is arrogant, glib, and self-assured, though not without
charm. He is Heidi’s intellectual equal. He has a habit of grading or
assigning points to everything, from cookies to songs to experiences.
 
Scoop works primarily as a journalist, starting his own newspaper after
dropping out of Princeton. He briefly becomes a lawyer before starting a
magazine targeted at Baby Boomers titled Boomer. Scoop marries Lisa,
who he knows will stay home, have his children, and be a devoted wife—
he cheats on her while she is pregnant. Though she is essentially his soul
mate, he does not marry Heidi because she would compete with and
challenge him.
 
Themes
Success and Failure
Underlying much of the tension of The Heidi Chronicles is how success
differs for men and women. Though it is known from the prologue of the
first act that Heidi has a successful career as an art historian, the play
focuses more on her success as a feminist and autonomous person;
unlike the male characters, career success for Heidi does not equal a
fulfilled life.
 
As Heidi’s generation demanded, she became an independent woman
in a male-dominated world. Yet this success seems hollow to Heidi near
the end of the play. She hoped that feminism would provide solidarity
with her fellow women and offer significance in society, but her reality
has proven this false. Her women friends have bought into superficial
happiness and material success: Susan Johnston changes identities
frequently, going from an idealistic law student to a feminist to a
Hollywood power broker; she ultimately becomes disenchanted with the
feminist cause and insensitive to her friend’s problems. Heidi also has
little luck with men, sustaining no real lasting relationships and ultimately
having her life choices shaped by them. Only in her decision to adopt a
child does Heidi achieve an independent success.
 
Identity
 One primary theme that Heidi is concerned with is the search for her own
identity. In the first two scenes of the play, she is young, sixteen- and
nineteen-years-old, but she is sure of her intellect and her belief in
women’s causes. Her allegiance to feminism is illustrated in the
women’s consciousness-raising group scene. Heidi commits to other
women, promoting their equality in art and in life.
 
Yet this identity undergoes rigorous tests, such as Scoop’s wedding
reception, during which he tells Heidi that he could not have married her
because she would have wanted to be his equal. His statement is a
harbinger for future disappointment in her life. Throughout the second
act, she finds herself out of step with other women, at a baby shower, at
the gym, and even at a friendly lunch gathering. Her friend Susan reflects
these changes. Susan begins as a feminist lawyer but ultimately
renounces her ideals. Near the end of the second act, Heidi decides
 
Coming of Age
The Heidi Chronicles shows the evolution of its title character, depicting
her awkward teen years through her adult life. The backdrop is the mid-
1960s to the late-1980s, when the United States underwent profound
political and social changes such as the Vietnam War, the rise of
feminism, and the threat of the AIDS virus. As she matures, Heidi finds
herself caught up in the politics of the moment, first in the Eugene
McCarthy for President movement (“clean for Eugene”), then the
burgeoning feminist movement. While the latter gives her an identity and
purpose—Heidi protests the lack of women artists exhibited at the
Chicago Art Institute—it is not everything she expected. When Heidi
realizes how out of step she is with other women—a feeling personified
by Susan—and unexpectedly announces it to a roomful of fellow
alumnae from her high school, she has accepted her reality. Near the
play’s conclusion, she decides to move to Minnesota but ends up
staying in New York City and adopting a child. While the other events in
her life have shaped her maturity, it is her individual decision to care for
another life, the choice of motherhood, that ultimately reflects her
coming of age.
 
Friendship
Almost every relationship depicted in The Heidi Chronicles is a friendship.
Friendships sustain each of the major characters. Heidi’s closest
friendships are with two men, Peter and Scoop, who, for a time, also
functions as her lover. While Susan is a close friend in the first act—she
takes Heidi to the Eugene McCarthy party and the women’s
consciousness-raising group—her defection to traditional society and
 values alienates Heidi. Women’s solidarity is supposed to be the point,
in Heidi’s mind, and this betrayal upsets Heidi’s sense of the world.
 
Heidi’s friendship with Scoop is also troubled. Scoop flirts with her at
the McCarthy party, while simultaneously undermining her beliefs; he
reveals his belief that women exist for the pleasure of men, not as
intellectual equals. When they are sexually involved, she puts aside
everything to see him. Heidi and Scoop’s breaking point comes at his
wedding, when he admits he could not marry her because she would
compete with him. After that, they remain friends but are no longer close.
In the last scene, he reflects on this fact and is jealous of the closeness
that she and Peter share.
 
Peter and Heidi are friends from the first scene. Though they bicker—and
he frequently trivializes her concerns—they are devoted to and respect
each other. Heidi stays in New York City for him in the second-to-the-last
scene, instead of moving to Minnesota as she had planned. While Peter
and Scoop are similar characters, the large distinction is Peter’s
homosexuality, which allows his friendship with Heidi to function on a
level removed from the sexual tensions that exist between her and
Scoop. Peter also accepts Heidi as a complete person and a relative
equal, status that Scoop’s worldview prohibits him from bestowing.
 
Style
Setting
The Heidi Chronicles is a comedic drama that spans the years 1965 to
1989 and employs numerous locations for its setting. The play is framed
by two scenes that open each of the acts. These are set in the present in
a lecture hall at New York City’s Columbia University where Heidi
teaches. While these scenes frame and define the action, the main body
of the play is told through a series of flashbacks that span Heidi’s adult
life.
 
In Act I, locales include a high school dance at Miss Crane’s School in
Chicago in 1965; a party for Eugene McCarthy in Manchester, New
Hampshire, in 1968; a church basement in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where
the women’s group meets, in 1970; outside of the Chicago Art Institute
in 1974; and the anteroom to the Pierre Hotel in New York City where
Scoop has married Lisa Friedlander in 1977.
 
Act II takes place entirely in New York City. The first scene occurs in
Scoop and Lisa’s apartment in 1980. The next scene shifts to 1982 and a
television studio where the show Hello, New York is taped. Susan, Denise,
and Heidi have lunch in a trendy restaurant in 1984, and two years later,
 Heidi gives an address to a luncheon at the Plaza Hotel. Heidi visits Peter
in the children’s ward at a hospital in 1987. The final scene takes place
in Heidi’s new, unfurnished apartment in 1989.
 
By spreading the play across some twenty-five years, Wasserstein is able
to illustrate the development of her protagonist. The time span and the
often shifting locations lend the play an epic feel that recalls such classic
works as Homer’s The Odyssey, in which the exploits of a heroic
character are charted over a great period of time. While The Heidi
Chronicles is not a narrative on the scale of Homer’s work, it is
presented as a sort of epic for modern women. By taking Heidi through
several eras and social/political movements, Wasserstein attempts to
illustrate the life of a typical late-twentieth century woman.
 
Point of View and Narrative Structure
The Heidi Chronicles is told from the point of view of Heidi Holland,
primarily in episodic flashback. In three scenes, Heidi directly addresses
the audience with monologues: a prologue opens each act while in Act II,
scene 4, Heidi addresses a group at a luncheon. In the rest of the play,
Heidi is present in every scene, primarily reacting to the characters and
events around her. Such a technique enables Wasserstein to direct the
audiences’ attention to what is occurring in Heidi’s life. By showing
the various struggles and triumphs from the point of view of her lead
character, Wasserstein is able to show the audience what a feminist
might go through in attempting to build an independent life.
 
Symbolism and Imagery
Wasserstein uses symbolism in several ways in The Heidi Chronicles. She
frequently uses popular songs to link scenes, emphasizing their symbolic
meaning. For example, the tone for the women’s group scene is set by
Aretha Franklin’s “Respect,” a song about a woman demanding
better, equal treatment from her man. Heidi admits her relationship with
Scoop is not good for her, and she, in fact, deserves respect. The
women’s solidarity is solidified when they sing a campfire song
together. To emphasize the point, the scene closes with a reprise of
“Respect.”
 
At the end of Act I, Heidi dances with Scoop to the romantic song “You
Send Me,” which speaks of a love that elevates a person, taking them
above the trivial concerns of the world. In this context the song is
bittersweet. Scoop and Heidi still love each other, but they know they
cannot have a lasting relationship. At the end of Act II, Heidi’s life
changes again when she adopts a daughter and moves into a new
apartment. She rocks her daughter, singing “You Send Me” to her. In
 this scene, the song represents Heidi’s love for her new baby; the song
now symbolizes a much purer love, one that is based in nurture rather
than romance.
 
More literal symbolism is found in the art Heidi describes in the lecture
scenes. The women artists she discusses are ignored by much of the
mainstream art world. Heidi sees their value, describing two works in
particular, Lilla Cabot Perry’s “Lady in Evening Dress” and Lily Martin
Spencer’s “We Both Must Fade.” Heidi sees that the women in both
paintings are spectators in their own pictures, helping others ease in.
Heidi’s life is similarly spent reacting to others and aiding them. This
comes to a head in the television interview scene, when Heidi sits
crunched between Peter and Scoop, unable to speak more than a few
words. Her thoughts are never complete but merely give the men a point
from which to expound on their own opinions.
 
The art symbolism also extends to Lisa, Scoop’s wife. She is an under-
appreciated artist like the women Heidi discusses, an award-winning
illustrator of children’s books. Only Peter recognizes the value of her art
because he is a pediatrician and his patients like it. Scoop approves of his
wife’s career because she does not compete with him—in fact, he
chooses to think of it as more of a hobby than a career.
 
章节名称：Thornton Wilder’s Our Town
About the playwright, culture
What is WASP
context and the plot,
Characters and comments
The relationship between characters,
New skills of playwriting,
How to transfer the simple events of human life into universal reverie?
 
Characters
Stage Manager
The host of the play and the dramatic equivalent of an omniscient
narrator. The Stage Manager exercises control over the action of the play,
cueing the other characters, interrupting their scenes with his own
interjections, and informing the audience of events and objects that we
cannot see. Although referred to only as Stage Manager and not by a
name, he occasionally assumes other roles, such as an old woman, a
druggist, and a minister. Interacting with both the world of the audience
and the world of the play’s characters, he occupies a godlike position of
authority.
 
 An authoritative figure who resembles a narrator as he guides the
audience through the play, the Stage Manager is an unconventional
character in the canon of dramatic literature. He is not simply a character
in the play. As his name suggests, he could be considered a member of
the crew staging the play as well. He exists simultaneously in two
dramatic realms. At the beginning of Act I, he identifies the play and the
playwright, and introduces the director, the producer, and the actors.
Furthermore, every act begins and ends with the Stage Manager’s
expositions and announcements. During each act, he frequently
interrupts the play’s action for the purpose of cueing another scene,
providing the audience with pertinent information, or commenting on
what has just happened or what is about to happen. All of these
functions suggest that even though the Stage Manager occupies center
stage, he is neither an actor nor a character, but rather someone who
works behind the scenes.
 
George Gibbs
Dr. and Mrs. Gibbs’s son. A decent, upstanding young man, George is a
high school baseball star who plans to attend the State Agricultural
School after high school. His courtship of Emily Webb and eventual
marriage to her is central to the play’s limited narrative action. Wilder
uses George and Emily’s relationship to ponder the questions of love
and marriage in general.
 
If Emily displays an awareness—even if only after death—of the
transience of human existence, George Gibbs lives his life in the dark.
George is an archetypal all-American boy. A local baseball star and the
president of his senior class in high school, he also possesses innocence
and sensitivity. He is a good son, although like many children he
sometimes neglects his chores. George expects to inherit his uncle’s
farm and plans to go to agriculture school; he ultimately scraps that plan,
however, in favor of remaining in Grover’s Corners to marry Emily.
Indeed, all of George’s achievements prove less important to him than
Emily. She is George’s closest neighbor since early childhood, and he
declares his love for her in all-American fashion, over an ice-cream soda.
 
The revelation of Emily’s death at the start of Act III draws attention to
the thematic significance of George’s life. The fact that George lays
down prostrate at Emily’s grave vividly illustrates Wilder’s message
that human beings do not fully appreciate life while they live it. The
group of dead souls looks on George’s prostrate body with confusion
and disapproval, and Emily asks, rhetorically, “They don’t understand,
do they?” Instead of mourning for his lost wife, the dead suggest,
George should be enjoying his life and the lives of those around him
 before he too dies. Wilder forces the audience to pity George, partly
because of the tragedy he has suffered in Emily’s death, but also
because he epitomizes the human tragedy of caring too much about
things that cannot change. At the same time, seeing George’s pitiable
condition, we realize that the dead souls’ demand that George stifle his
emotions is difficult, if not impossible. In this light, Wilder implies that
perhaps the demanding dead souls “don’t understand” either.
 
Emily Webb
Mr. and Mrs. Webb’s daughter and Wally’s older sister. Emily is
George’s schoolmate and next-door neighbor, then his fiancée, and
later his wife. She is an excellent student and a conscientious daughter.
After dying in childbirth, Emily joins the group of dead souls in the local
cemetery and attempts to return to the world of the living. Her
realization that human life is precious because it is fleeting is perhaps the
central message of the play.
 
With the exception of the Stage Manager, Emily is Our Town’s most
significant figure. Emily and George Gibbs’s courtship becomes the
basis of the text’s limited narrative action—these two characters thus
prove extremely significant not only to the play’s events but also to its
themes. In Act I, Emily displays her affection for George by agreeing to
help him with his homework. In Act II, the play bears witness to Emily’s
marriage to George, and the young couple’s wedding becomes
emblematic of young love. In Act III, when the play’s themes become
fully apparent, Emily emerges as the primary articulator of these themes.
After her death, Emily joins the dead souls in the town cemetery and
begins to view earthly life and human beings from a new perspective. She
realizes that the living “don’t understand” the importance of human
existence. After reliving her twelfth birthday, Emily sees that human
beings fail to recognize the transience of life and to appreciate it while it
lasts. This conclusion, which Emily expresses in her agonized wish to
leave her birthday and return to the cemetery, encapsulates the play’s
most important theme: the transience of individual human lives in the
face of general human and natural stability.
 
Dr. Gibbs
George’s father and the town doctor. Dr. Gibbs is also a Civil War
expert. His delivery of twins just before the play opens establishes the
themes of birth, life, and daily activity. He and his family are neighbors to
the Webbs.
 
Mrs. Gibbs
 George’s mother and Dr. Gibbs’s wife. Mrs. Gibbs’s desire to visit
Paris—a wish that is never fulfilled—suggests the importance of seizing
the opportunities life presents, rather than waiting for things to happen.
At the same time, Mrs. Gibbs’s wish for the luxurious trip ultimately
proves unnecessary in her quest to appreciate life.
 
Mr. Webb
Emily’s father and the publisher and editor of the Grover’s Corners
Sentinel. Mr. Webb’s report to the audience in Act I is both informative
and interactive, as his question-and-answer session draws the audience
physically into the action of the play.
 
Mrs. Webb
Emily’s mother and Mr. Webb’s wife. At first a no-nonsense woman
who does not cry on the morning of her daughter’s marriage, Mrs.
Webb later shows her innocent and caring nature, worrying during the
wedding that she has not taught her daughter enough about marriage.
 
Mrs. Soames
A gossipy woman who sings in the choir along with Mrs. Webb and Mrs.
Gibbs. Mrs. Soames appears in the group of dead souls in Act III. One of
the few townspeople we meet outside of the Webb and Gibbs families,
Mrs. Soames offers a sense of the interrelated nature of the lives of the
citizens of Grover’s Corners.
 
Simon Stimson
The choirmaster, whose alcoholism and undisclosed “troubles” have
been the subject of gossip in Grover’s Corners for quite some time.
Wilder uses Mr. Stimson’s misfortunes to explore the limitations of
small town life. Mr. Stimson appears in the group of dead souls in Act III,
having committed suicide by hanging himself in his attic. He is perhaps
most notable for his short speech in Act III, when he says that human
existence is nothing but “[i]gnorance and blindness.”
 
Rebecca Gibbs
George’s younger sister. Rebecca’s role is minor, but she does have
one very significant scene with her brother. Her remarks in Act I—about
the location of Grover’s Corners in the universe—articulate an
important theme in the play: if the town is a microcosm, representative of
the broader human community and the shared human experience, then
this human experience of Grover’s Corners lies at the center of a grand
structure and is therefore eternal.
 
Wally Webb
 Emily’s younger brother. Wally is a minor figure, but he turns up in Act
III among the group of dead souls. Wally dies young, the result of a burst
appendix on a Boy Scout trip. His untimely death underscores the brief
and fleeting nature of life.
 
Howie Newsome
The local milkman. Howie’s reappearance during every morning scene
—once each in Acts I, II, and III—highlights the continuity of life in
Grover’s Corners and in the general human experience.
 
Joe Crowell, Jr.
The paperboy. Joe’s routine of delivering papers to the same people
each morning emphasizes the sameness of daily life in Grover’s Corners.
We see this sameness continue when Joe’s younger brother, Si, takes
over the route for him. Despite this sameness, however, each of the
conversations Joe has while on his route is unique, suggesting that while
his activities are monotonous, daily life is not.
 
Si Crowell
Joe’s younger brother, also a paperboy. Si’s assumption of his
brother’s former job contributes to the sense of constancy that
characterizes Grover’s Corners throughout the play.
 
Professor Willard
A professor at the State University who gives the audience a report on
Grover’s Corners. Professor Willard appears once and then disappears.
His role in the play is to interact with the audience and to inform
theatergoers of the specifics of life in Grover’s Corners. His reference to
Native Americans reflects Wilder’s understanding that the European
ancestors of the current population in Grover’s Corners replaced and
extinguished the existing Native American populations.
 
Constable Warren
A local policeman. Constable Warren keeps a watchful eye over the
community. His personal knowledge of and favor with the town’s
citizens bespeaks the close-knit nature of the town.
 
Sam Craig
Emily Webb’s cousin, who has left Grover’s Corners to travel west, but
returns for her funeral in Act III. Though originally from the town, Sam
has the air of an outsider. His unawareness of the events that have
occurred in Grover’s Corners during his absence parallels the
audience’s own unawareness.
 
Joe Stoddard
The town undertaker. Joe prepares Emily’s grave and remarks on how
sad it is to bury young people. This statement emphasizes a theme that
grows ever more apparent throughout the play and receives its most
explicit discussion in Act III: the transience of human life.
 
Themes
The Transience of Human Life
Although Wilder explores the stability of human traditions and the
reassuring steadfastness of the natural environment, the individual
human lives in Our Town are transient, influenced greatly by the rapid
passage of time. The Stage Manager often notes that time seems to pass
quickly for the people in the play. At one point, having not looked at his
watch for a while, the Stage Manager misjudges the time, which
demonstrates that sometimes even the timekeeper himself falls victim to
the passage of time.
 
In light of the fact that humans are powerless to stem the advance of
time, Wilder ponders whether human beings truly appreciate the
precious nature of a transient life. Act I, which the Stage Manager entitles
“Daily Life,” testifies to the artfulness and value of routine daily activity.
Simple acts such as eating breakfast and feeding chickens become
subjects of dramatic scenes, indicating the significance Wilder sees in
such seemingly mundane events. Wilder juxtaposes this flurry of
everyday activity with the characters’ inattentiveness to it. The
characters are largely unaware of the details of their lives and tend to
accept their circumstances passively. The Gibbs and Webb families rush
through breakfast, and the children rush off to school, without much
attention to one another. They, like most human beings, maintain the
faulty assumption that they have an indefinite amount of time on Earth.
Mrs. Gibbs refrains from insisting that her husband take her to Paris
because she thinks there will always be time to convince him later.
 
The dead souls in Act III emphasize this theme of transience,
disapproving of and chastising the living for their “ignorance” and
“blindness.” The dead even view George’s grief and prostration upon
Emily’s grave as a pitiable waste of human time. Instead of grieving for
the dead, they believe, the living should be enjoying the time they still
have on Earth.
 
The medium of theater perfectly suits Wilder’s intent to make ordinary
lives and actions seem extraordinary, as the perspective of the dead souls
parallels the audience’s perspective. Just as the dead souls’ distance
finally enables them to appreciate the daily events in Grover’s Corners,
 so too does the audience’s outsider perspective render daily events
valuable. We have never before witnessed a Gibbs family breakfast, and
when the scene is dramatized on the stage, we see it as significant.
Indeed, every action on the stage becomes significant, from Howie
Newsome’s milk delivery to the town choir practice.
 
The Importance of Companionship
Because birth and death seem inevitable, the most important stage of life
is the middle one: the quest for companionship, friendship, and love.
Humans have some degree of control over this aspect of life. Though
they may not be fully aware of their doing so, the residents of Grover’s
Corners constantly take time out of their days to connect with each other,
whether through idle chat with the milkman or small talk with a neighbor.
The most prominent interpersonal relationship in the play is a romance—
the courtship and marriage of George and Emily—and Wilder suggests
that love epitomizes human creativity and achievement in the face of the
inevitable advance of time.
 
Though romance is prominent in Our Town, it is merely the most vivid
among a wide range of bonds that human beings are capable of forging.
Wilder depicts a number of different types of relationships, and though
some are merely platonic, all are significant. From the beginning of Act I,
the Stage Manager seeks to establish a relationship with the audience,
which forges a tie between the people onstage and the audience
offstage. Within the action of the play, we witness the milkman and the
paperboy chatting with members of the Gibbs and Webb families as they
deliver their goods. The children walk to and from school in groups or
pairs. Mrs. Gibbs and Mrs. Webb, next-door neighbors, meet in their
yards to talk. We glimpse Mr. and Mrs. Webb and Dr. and Mrs. Gibbs in
private conversation. As Mrs. Gibbs articulates, “Tain’t natural to be
lonesome.”
 
Even the play’s title—using the collective pronoun “[o]ur”—
underscores the human desire for community. Many aspects of the play
attest to the importance of community and companionship: the
welcoming introduction from the Stage Manager; the audience
participation, through the placement among the audience of actors
within the audience who interact with those onstage; and the presence of
numerous groups in the play, such as the choir, the wedding party, the
funeral party, and the group of dead souls.
 
The Artificiality of the Theater
Wilder does not pretend that his play represents a slice of real life. The
events that occur onstage could easily be moments in real lives—a
 milkman delivers milk, a family has a hurried weekday breakfast, two
young people fall in love—but Wilder undermines this appearance of
reality by filling the play with devices that emphasize the artificiality of
theater. The Stage Manager is the most obvious of these devices,
functioning as a sort of narrator or modernized Greek chorus who
comments on the play’s action while simultaneously involving himself in
it. The Stage Manager speaks directly to the audience and acknowledges
our lack of familiarity with Grover’s Corners and its inhabitants. He also
manipulates the passage of time, incorporating flashbacks that take us—
and the characters—back in time to relive certain significant moments.
These intentional disruptions of the play’s chronology prevent us from
believing that what we see onstage could be real. Rather, the life we see
on the stage becomes merely representative of real life, and is thus a fair
target for Wilder’s metaphorical and symbolic manipulation. Wilder’s
parallel positioning of the realm of the play and the real world implies a
separation between the two. However, rather than distance the audience
from the events on the stage, Wilder acknowledges the artificial nature of
the stage and thus bridges the gap between the audience and the
onstage events. This closeness between the audience and the story forces
the audience to identify more fully with the characters and events.
 
Motif
The Stages of Life
The division of the play’s narrative action into three acts reflects
Wilder’s division of human life into three parts: birth, love and marriage,
and death. The play opens at the dawn of a new day with a literal birth: at
the very beginning of Act I, we learn that Dr. Gibbs has just delivered
twins. Act II details George and Emily’s courtship and marriage. Act III
features a funeral and delves into the possibilities of an afterlife. The
overall arc of the story carries the audience from the beginning of life to
its end. Our observation of the lives of the Gibbs and Webb families,
condensed into a few short hours, leads us to realize that the human
experience, while multifaceted, is nevertheless brief and precious. Indeed,
Wilder demonstrates how quickly the characters proceed from stage to
stage. George and Emily marry in Act II, but they appear just as nervous
and childish as they do in Act I. The second stage of life has snuck up on
them. This intermingling of the stages of life recurs later, when the
second stage of Emily’s life, her marriage, is suddenly cut short when
she dies in childbirth.
 
Natural Cycles
While Our Town spans the course of many years, from 1899 through
1913, it also collapses its events into the span of one day. It opens with a
morning scene and ends with a nighttime scene: Act I begins just before
 dawn, and Act III ends at 11 P.M. The play also metaphorically spans the
course of a human life, tracing the path from birth in Dr. Gibbs’s
delivery of twins in the opening scene, to death in Emily’s funeral in the
final scene. The span of a life parallels the span of the day: birth is related
to dawn, and death is related to night. Wilder’s attention to natural
cycles highlights his themes of the transience of life and the power of
time. While a single human life comprises only one finite revolution from
birth to death, the world continues to spin, mothers continue to give
birth, and human beings continue to exist as just one part of the
universe.
 
Morning
Morning scenes are prominent in each of the play’s three acts: Act I
depicts the ordinary morning activities of the townspeople, Act II
portrays the Gibbs and Webb families on the morning of Emily and
George’s wedding, and Act III includes Emily’s return to the morning
of her twelfth birthday. Despite differences in context and circumstance,
each morning scene appears strikingly similar to the others, which
emphasizes the lack of change in Grover’s Corners. In each of the three
scenes, Howie Newsome delivers milk and a Crowell boy delivers
newspapers. Yet while stability is clearly a feature of life in the town,
Wilder shows that it often leads to indifference. Because each day
appears more or less the same as the previous one, the townspeople fail
to observe or appreciate the subtle, life-affirming peculiarities each day
brings.
 
Wilder treats each of the three mornings differently, which highlights the
subtle differences between them. He presents the first morning as merely
an average day, but as foreign observers, we appreciate the novelty of
the experience. On the morning of the wedding, Wilder shows how
impending events disturb the morning rituals and create a unique
experience. Lastly, Wilder presents the morning of Emily’s twelfth
birthday through the eyes of her dead soul, a perspective that gives the
morning a truly extraordinary and beautiful transience. Wilder implies
that though mundane routines and events may generally be repetitive,
the details are what make life interesting and deserve attention.
 
The Manipulation of Time
Events do not progress chronologically in Our Town. The Stage Manager
has the ability to cue scenes whenever he wishes, and can call up
previous moments in the lives of the characters at will. The most
prominent of these manipulations of time are the flashbacks to Mr.
Morgan’s soda fountain and to Emily’s twelfth birthday. Wilder
explicitly shuffles the flow of time within the play to engage, please, and
 inform his audience in three ways. First, Wilder uses the lack of
chronological order to engage his audience by overturning their
expectations of the theater. As opposed to showing us the progression of
a day, or of a life, Wilder shows us disparate moments, reordering them
in a way that best reflects his—and the Stage Manager’s—philosophical
themes. Second, the Stage Manager’s informal treatment of the flow of
time adds to the play’s pleasing conversational tone. The Stage
Manager’s desire to flash back to George and Emily’s first date at the
drugstore makes him seem just as curious about the origins of the
couple’s relationship as we are. Third, by including flashbacks within a
linear narrative, Wilder reminds the audience how swiftly time passes.
The characters spend precious time flashing back in their own minds,
appreciating past moments in retrospect rather than recognizing the
value of moments as they occur in the present.
 
Symbols
The Time Capsule
In Act I, the Stage Manager briefly mentions a time capsule that is being
buried in the foundation of a new building in town. The citizens of
Grover’s Corners wish to include the works of Shakespeare, the
Constitution, and the Bible; the Stage Manager says he would like to
throw a copy of Our Town into the time capsule as well. The time capsule
embodies the human desire to keep a record of the past. Accordingly, it
also symbolizes the idea that certain parts of the past deserve to be
remembered over and above others. Wilder wishes to challenge this
latter notion. He has the Stage Manager place Our Town into the capsule
so the people opening it in the future will not only appreciate the daily
lives of the townspeople from the past, but also their own daily lives in
the future.
 
The self-referential notion of placing the play into the time capsule also
carries symbolic weight. The fact that Our Town is actually mentioned
within Our Town clearly shows Wilder’s intent to break down the wall
that divides the world of the play from the world of the audience. By
mentioning his own play within his play, Wilder acknowledges that his
text is artificial, a literary creation. Even more important, however, the
Stage Manager’s wish to put the play into the capsule lends historic
significance to the audience’s watching of Our Town. He implies that
even the current production of the play—its sets, lights, actors, and
audience—is in itself an important detail of life.
 
Howie Newsome and the Crowell Boys
Each of the three morning scenes in Our Town features the milkman,
Howie Newsome, and a paperboy—either Joe or Si Crowell. Throughout
 the play, the Stage Manager and other characters, such as Mr. Webb in
his report in Act I, discuss the stability of Grover’s Corners—nothing
changes much in the town. Howie and the Crowell boys illustrate this
constancy of small town life. They appear in 1901, just as they do in 1904
and in the flashback to 1899. Because Grover’s Corners is Wilder’s
microcosm of human life in general, Howie and the Crowells represent
not only the stability of life in Grover’s Corners, but the stability of
human life in general. The milkman and the paperboys embody the
persistence of human life and the continuity of the human experience
from year to year, from generation to generation. Moreover, the fact that
Si replaces his brother Joe shows that the transience of individual lives
actually becomes a stabilizing force. Growing from birth toward death,
humans show how the finite changes in individual lives are simply part of
stable cycles.
 
The Hymn “Blessed Be the Tie That Binds”
A choir sings the hymn “Blessed Be the Tie That Binds” in the
background three different times throughout the play. In part, the
repetition of the song emphasizes Wilder’s general notion of stability
and tradition. However, the Christian hymn primarily embodies Wilder’s
belief that the love between human beings is divine in nature. The “tie”
in the song’s lyrics refers to both the tie between humans and God and
the ties among humans themselves.
 
The three scenes that include the hymn also prominently feature Emily
and George, highlighting the “tie that binds” the two of them. The first
instance of the song comes during a choir practice, which occurs
simultaneously with George and Emily’s conversation through their
open windows in Act I. The second instance comes during the wedding
ceremony in Act II. The third instance comes during Emily’s funeral, as
her body is interred and she joins the dead in the cemetery, leaving
George behind. By associating this particular song with the play’s
critical moments, Wilder foregrounds the notion of companionship as an
essential, even divine, feature of human life. The hymn may add some
degree of Christian symbolism to the play, but Wilder, for the most part,
downplays any discussion of specifically Christian symbols. He
concentrates on the hymn not because of its allusion to the fellowship
between Christians in particular, but rather because of what it says about
human beings in general.
 
章节名称：Arthur Miller and his The Crucible
Historical and Political Sources in the Play
The tradition of witchcraft
What is McCarthyism?
The plot and the characters
Themes and significances of the play
Many questions purposely left unanswered or ambiguous, what’s your
comments?
The playwright’s techniques in the play
 
Full Book Analysis
In telling the story of a New England so gripped by hysteria they killed
many of their own residents, The Crucible explores the tension between
the repressive forces of a social order and individual freedom. The
antagonist in The Crucible is broadly the town of Salem, whose residents
temporarily lose their sense of community and vilify one another. But the
hysteria of the witch hunts exposes long-simmering resentments and
grievances. Even before the witch hunt begins, Proctor’s primary
motivation is to restore reason in the town. Proctor attacks Parris for
focusing on everything other than prayer in his sermons, chastises
Putnam for obsessing over his land as a means to increasing his
influence, and teases Giles for generally causing trouble throughout
Salem. Proctor’s rationality blinds him, however, to the dangers of his
own indiscretions as he struggles to repair his life in the wake of his
affair. The inciting incident of the play occurs when Abigail confesses to
witchcraft and the accusations rapidly spiral out of control. The town,
already on the brink of fracture, quickly falls apart and neighbor turns on
neighbor both as a way of releasing past anger and also out of fear of
being implicated in the witch hunts.
 
The rising action accelerates as the trials begin, and Abigail accuses
Proctor’s wife Elizabeth. Although Abigail told him that Betty isn’t
actually bewitched, Proctor is hesitant to testify because he fears
exposing his affair with Abigail. Here, the antagonist is Proctor’s own
divided self – the flaw of lust that made him commit the affair, conflicting
against his moral sense that what’s happening isn’t just. Proctor
compounds his errors by relying on Mary to exonerate Elizabeth. When
Hale rejects Mary’s confession as an accusation against Abigail, Proctor
exclaims, “common vengeance writes the law!” Though alluding to
Abigail’s feelings, Proctor hides that her revenge stems from jealousy of
Elizabeth, not simply anger at Elizabeth for firing her. Proctor decides to
go to court as a last resort only after Herrick takes Elizabeth away in
chains. The play’s climax comes when Proctor finally confesses the affair
with Abigail, at last releasing the guilt of his sins and sacrificing his good
name to save his wife. His sacrifice is in vain as Elizabeth, seeking to
protect her husband’s reputation, refuses to verify his story, and Mary
accuses Proctor of witchcraft. At this point, most of the town is in such a
 frenzy, the difference between fact and fiction has been completely
destroyed, and the characters have lost all sense of reason.
 
The falling action of the play occurs three months later, when Elizabeth
forgives her husband for adultery, and says she doesn’t want him to die.
Realizing that concepts like honesty, honor, and truth have lost all
meaning in the town’s fearful, paranoid, and vengeance-seeking
environment, Proctor agrees to confess, even though he knows “it is
evil.” When Danforth insists on recording and publishing the confession
“for the good instruction of the village,” however, Proctor realizes that
the confession not simply a formality but a political opportunity for the
court to validate the witch hunt and justify the executions. His confession,
then, is in direct opposition to his desire to end the hysteria in Salem.
While a verbal confession may have no relationship to the truth, signing
his name on paper will give credence to the falsehoods being
perpetuated by the trial, blackening the names of his friends who have
died denying the charges against them. Proctor considers himself as
good as dead if he has compromised all of his values to escape the
gallows: “How may I live without my name?”
 
The play reaches its resolution when Proctor recants and rips up his
confession. In doing so, he is signing his death warrant, but preserving
the good names of his friends, and exposing the hypocrisy of the witch
hunts. In ripping up the confession, Proctor reasserts his identity as an
individual, while also taking a step toward restoring his community to
sanity. “I do think I see some shred of goodness in John Proctor,” he
says, referring to himself in the third person. This formulation suggests
that he knows that rather than going down in history for signing a false
confession against his neighbors, his name will be remembered for his
refusal to compromise, even at the cost of his life. But because his tragic
flaws have led to the deaths of other innocent characters, he knows he
cannot live. Elizabeth seems to understand the sacrifice he is making
both for the town and for their family, and doesn’t ask him to
reconsider. The play ends with Proctor and Rebecca Nurse, who has also
refused to confess, being led to the gallows.
 
Characters
John Proctor
A local farmer who lives just outside town; Elizabeth Proctor’s husband.
A stern, harsh-tongued man, John hates hypocrisy. Nevertheless, he has a
hidden sin—his affair with Abigail Williams—that proves his downfall.
When the hysteria begins, he hesitates to expose Abigail as a fraud
because he worries that his secret will be revealed and his good name
ruined.
  
In a sense, The Crucible has the structure of a classical tragedy, with John
Proctor as the play’s tragic hero. Honest, upright, and blunt-spoken,
Proctor is a good man, but one with a secret, fatal flaw. His lust for
Abigail Williams led to their affair (which occurs before the play begins),
and created Abigail’s jealousy of his wife, Elizabeth, which sets the
entire witch hysteria in motion. Once the trials begin, Proctor realizes that
he can stop Abigail’s rampage through Salem but only if he confesses
to his adultery. Such an admission would ruin his good name, and
Proctor is, above all, a proud man who places great emphasis on his
reputation. He eventually makes an attempt, through Mary Warren’s
testimony, to name Abigail as a fraud without revealing the crucial
information. When this attempt fails, he finally bursts out with a
confession, calling Abigail a “whore” and proclaiming his guilt publicly.
Only then does he realize that it is too late, that matters have gone too
far, and that not even the truth can break the powerful frenzy that he has
allowed Abigail to whip up. Proctor’s confession succeeds only in
leading to his arrest and conviction as a witch, and though he lambastes
the court and its proceedings, he is also aware of his terrible role in
allowing this fervor to grow unchecked.
 
Proctor redeems himself and provides a final denunciation of the witch
trials in his final act. Offered the opportunity to make a public confession
of his guilt and live, he almost succumbs, even signing a written
confession. His immense pride and fear of public opinion compelled him
to withhold his adultery from the court, but by the end of the play he is
more concerned with his personal integrity than his public reputation. He
still wants to save his name, but for personal and religious, rather than
public, reasons. Proctor’s refusal to provide a false confession is a true
religious and personal stand. Such a confession would dishonor his fellow
prisoners, who are brave enough to die as testimony to the truth.
Perhaps more relevantly, a false admission would also dishonor him,
staining not just his public reputation, but also his soul. By refusing to
give up his personal integrity Proctor implicitly proclaims his conviction
that such integrity will bring him to heaven. He goes to the gallows
redeemed for his earlier sins. As Elizabeth says to end the play,
responding to Hale’s plea that she convince Proctor to publicly confess:
“He have his goodness now. God forbid I take it from him!”
 
Abigail Williams
Reverend Parris’s niece. Abigail was once the servant for the Proctor
household, but Elizabeth Proctor fired her after she discovered that
Abigail was having an affair with her husband, John Proctor. Abigail is
smart, wily, a good liar, and vindictive when crossed.
  
Of the major characters, Abigail is the least complex. She is clearly the
villain of the play, more so than Parris or Danforth: she tells lies,
manipulates her friends and the entire town, and eventually sends
nineteen innocent people to their deaths. Throughout the hysteria,
Abigail’s motivations never seem more complex than simple jealousy
and a desire to have revenge on Elizabeth Proctor. The language of the
play is almost biblical, and Abigail seems like a biblical character—a
Jezebel figure, driven only by sexual desire and a lust for power.
Nevertheless, it is worth pointing out a few background details that,
though they don’t mitigate Abigail’s guilt, make her actions more
understandable.
 
Abigail is an orphan and an unmarried girl; she thus occupies a low rung
on the Puritan Salem social ladder (the only people below her are the
slaves, like Tituba, and social outcasts). For young girls in Salem, the
minister and the other male adults are God’s earthly representatives,
their authority derived from on high. The trials, then, in which the girls
are allowed to act as though they have a direct connection to God,
empower the previously powerless Abigail. Once shunned and scorned
by the respectable townsfolk who had heard rumors of her affair with
John Proctor, Abigail now finds that she has clout, and she takes full
advantage of it. A mere accusation from one of Abigail’s troop is
enough to incarcerate and convict even the most well-respected
inhabitant of Salem. Whereas others once reproached her for her
adultery, she now has the opportunity to accuse them of the worst sin of
all: devil-worship.
 
 
Reverend John Hale
A young minister reputed to be an expert on witchcraft. Reverend Hale is
called in to Salem to examine Parris’s daughter Betty. Hale is a
committed Christian and hater of witchcraft. His critical mind and
intelligence save him from falling into blind fervor. His arrival sets the
hysteria in motion, although he later regrets his actions and attempts to
save the lives of those accused.
 
John Hale, the intellectual, naïve witch-hunter, enters the play in Act I
when Parris summons him to examine his daughter, Betty. In an extended
commentary on Hale in Act I, Miller describes him as “a tight-skinned,
eager-eyed intellectual. This is a beloved errand for him; on being called
here to ascertain witchcraft he has felt the pride of the specialist whose
unique knowledge has at last been publicly called for.” Hale enters in a
flurry of activity, carrying large books and projecting an air of great
 knowledge. In the early going, he is the force behind the witch trials,
probing for confessions and encouraging people to testify. Over the
course of the play, however, he experiences a transformation, one more
remarkable than that of any other character. Listening to John Proctor
and Mary Warren, he becomes convinced that they, not Abigail, are
telling the truth. In the climactic scene in the court in Act III, he throws his
lot in with those opposing the witch trials. In tragic fashion, his about-
face comes too late—the trials are no longer in his hands but rather in
those of Danforth and the theocracy, which has no interest in seeing its
proceedings exposed as a sham.
 
The failure of his attempts to turn the tide renders the once-confident
Hale a broken man. As his belief in witchcraft falters, so does his faith in
the law. In Act IV, it is he who counsels the accused witches to lie, to
confess their supposed sins in order to save their own lives. In his change
of heart and subsequent despair, Hale gains the audience’s sympathy
but not its respect, since he lacks the moral fiber of Rebecca Nurse or, as
it turns out, John Proctor. Although Hale recognizes the evil of the witch
trials, his response is not defiance but surrender. He insists that survival is
the highest good, even if it means accommodating oneself to injustice—
something that the truly heroic characters can never accept.
 
Elizabeth Proctor
John Proctor’s wife. Elizabeth fired Abigail when she discovered that her
husband was having an affair with Abigail. Elizabeth is supremely
virtuous, but often cold.
 
Readers first encounter Elizabeth through the words of Abigail, who
describes Elizabeth as a “bitter woman, a lying, cold, sniveling woman.”
When Elizabeth enters the action of the play in the second act, we
immediately see that Abigail is the liar: Elizabeth is anything but bitter
and sniveling. She is solicitous of her husband, John, as well as deeply
caring and sensitive, if still hurting from what has happened to her. John
had an affair with Abigail when she was a servant in the Proctors’
household. Elizabeth was ill after giving birth to a child when the affair
happened. Now, Elizabeth and John are trying very hard to repair their
broken marriage. But Elizabeth is human: she doesn’t trust John yet. She
senses that he wants to do all he can to make up for his mistake, but she
isn’t ready to fully love him without reservation again. Her pride won’t
let her.
 
Reverend Parris
The minister of Salem’s church. Reverend Parris is a paranoid, power-
hungry, yet oddly self-pitying figure. Many of the townsfolk, especially
 John Proctor, dislike him, and Parris is very concerned with building his
position in the community.
 
 
Rebecca Nurse
Francis Nurse’s wife. Rebecca is a wise, sensible, and upright woman,
held in tremendous regard by most of the Salem community. However,
she falls victim to hysteria when the Putnams accuse her of witchcraft and
she refuses to confess.
 
Francis Nurse
A wealthy, influential man in Salem. Nurse is well respected by most
people in Salem, but he is an enemy of Thomas Putnam and his wife.
 
Judge Danforth
The deputy governor of Massachusetts and the presiding judge at the
witch trials. Honest and scrupu-lous, at least in his own mind, Danforth is
convinced that he is doing right in rooting out witchcraft.
 
Governor Danforth represents rigidity and an over-adherence to the law
in The Crucible. Danforth is clearly an intelligent man, highly respected
and successful. He arrives in Salem to oversee the trials of the accused
witches with a serene sense of his own ability to judge fairly. The chaos of
the trial doesn’t affect his own belief that he is the best judge. At the
end of the play, Salem is falling apart, Abigail has run away, having stolen
Parris’s life savings, and many other lives have been ruined yet Danforth
still cannot agree that the trials were a sham. He remains firm in his
conviction that the condemned should not be executed. When John
refuses to let him post his confession in town, Danforth sends him away
to be hanged, “high over the town.” Danforth believes in sticking by a
principle in spite of all evidence that his belief is wrong.
 
Despite his intelligence and prestige, Danforth is the most deluded
character in the play. While modern audiences many find the idea of
witches laughable, Danforth reflects his time, an era when many people
believed in witches and witchcraft, (although it should be noted that
Miller makes it clear that at least a few of the residents of Salem are
skeptical of witches). But even in Salem, in 1692, some people did not fall
for the girls’ “pretense” as easily as Danforth does. Once he believes
the girls, lead by Abigail, really are possessed, Danforth is trapped by his
own ego, unable to see that they’re lying despite mounting evidence.
He just can’t go back and admit that he was fooled. Danforth represents
the evil of blind certainty in the play: he refuses to accept the truth
because to do so would humiliate him. He’d rather see people die.
  
Giles Corey
An elderly but feisty farmer in Salem, famous for his tendency to file
lawsuits. Giles’s wife, Martha, is accused of witchcraft, and he himself is
eventually held in contempt of court and pressed to death with large
stones.
 
Giles is a noble character in the play. He represents strength of will to the
other characters, who end up looking up to him or feeling cowed by him,
depending on how they have acted themselves. Early on the play, Giles
sees the possibility of witchcraft in town as intriguing, and he asks Rev.
Hale why his wife seems to be able to stop him from reading just by
being in the room. But by the middle of the play, when his wife has been
arrested for witchcraft, Giles realizes his mistake and joins John in
approaching the court to tell Danforth he’s wrong. Giles is also smart
enough to realize that Putnam is using the accusations of witchcraft as
cover to try to take back property they’ve fought over for many years.
He refuses to confess to witchcraft, even when he is tortured. In a town
where many people lie to save their own skins, and accuse their
neighbors rather than speak up for what is right, Giles stands apart as a
truly noble and brave man.
 
Thomas Putnam
A wealthy, influential citizen of Salem, Putnam holds a grudge against
Francis Nurse for preventing Putnam’s brother-in-law from being
elected to the office of minister. He uses the witch trials to increase his
own wealth by accusing people of witchcraft and then buying up their
land.
 
Ann Putnam
Thomas Putnam’s wife. Ann Putnam has given birth to eight children,
but only Ruth Putnam survived. The other seven died before they were a
day old, and Ann is convinced that they were murdered by supernatural
means.
 
Ruth Putnam
The Putnams’ lone surviving child out of eight. Like Betty Parris, Ruth
falls into a strange stupor after Reverend Parris catches her and the other
girls dancing in the woods at night.
 
Tituba
Reverend Parris’s black slave from Barbados. Tituba agrees to perform
voodoo at Abigail’s request.
 
Mary Warren
The servant in the Proctor household and a member of Abigail’s group
of girls. She is a timid girl, easily influenced by those around her, who
tried unsuccessfully to expose the hoax and ultimately recanted her
confession.
 
Mary is the Proctors’ servant after Abigail was let go. She’s a weak
person, prone to hysterics and drawn to drama. She moves back and
forth between the pack of lying girls and the Proctors, drawn by the girls
but knowing the Proctors are innocent. She knows that the girls are lying
and that there is no witchcraft in Salem. She realizes that Abigail intends
to use the ruse of accusing Elizabeth of being a witch to get Elizabeth
executed so Abigail can marry John, and she knows that Elizabeth has
never done anything wrong. For much of the third act, Mary tries to help,
despite her intense and justified fear of Abigail and the girls. Yet she is
not strong enough to stand up for what is right, and eventually gives in
to the girls, going so far as accusing John of being a witch, too.
 
Betty Parris
Reverend Parris’s ten-year-old daughter. Betty falls into a strange
stupor after Parris catches her and the other girls dancing in the forest
with Tituba. Her illness and that of Ruth Putnam fuel the first rumors of
witchcraft.
 
Martha Corey
Giles Corey’s third wife. Martha’s reading habits lead to her arrest and
conviction for witchcraft.
 
Ezekiel Cheever
A man from Salem who acts as clerk of the court during the witch trials.
He is upright and determined to do his duty for justice.
 
Judge Hathorne
A judge who presides, along with Danforth, over the witch trials.
 
Herrick
The marshal of Salem.
 
Mercy Lewis
One of the girls in Abigail’s group.
 
Themes
Intolerance
 The Crucible is set in a theocratic society, in which the church and the
state are one, and the religion is a strict, austere form of Protestantism
known as Puritanism. Because of the theocratic nature of the society,
moral laws and state laws are one and the same: sin and the status of an
individual’s soul are matters of public concern. There is no room for
deviation from social norms, since any individual whose private life
doesn’t conform to the established moral laws represents a threat not
only to the public good but also to the rule of God and true religion. In
Salem, everything and everyone belongs to either God or the devil;
dissent is not merely unlawful, it is associated with satanic activity. This
dichotomy functions as the underlying logic behind the witch trials. As
Danforth says in Act III, “a person is either with this court or he must be
counted against it.” The witch trials are the ultimate expression of
intolerance (and hanging witches is the ultimate means of restoring the
community’s purity); the trials brand all social deviants with the taint of
devil-worship and thus necessitate their elimination from the community.
 
Hysteria
Another critical theme in The Crucible is the role that hysteria can play in
tearing apart a community. Hysteria supplants logic and enables people
to believe that their neighbors, whom they have always considered
upstanding people, are committing absurd and unbelievable crimes—
communing with the devil, killing babies, and so on. In The Crucible, the
townsfolk accept and become active in the hysterical climate not only out
of genuine religious piety but also because it gives them a chance to
express repressed sentiments and to act on long-held grudges. The most
obvious case is Abigail, who uses the situation to accuse Elizabeth
Proctor of witchcraft and have her sent to jail. But others thrive on the
hysteria as well: Reverend Parris strengthens his position within the
village, albeit temporarily, by making scapegoats of people like Proctor
who question his authority. The wealthy, ambitious Thomas Putnam gains
revenge on Francis Nurse by getting Rebecca, Francis’s virtuous wife,
convicted of the supernatural murders of Ann Putnam’s babies. In the
end, hysteria can thrive only because people benefit from it. It suspends
the rules of daily life and allows the acting out of every dark desire and
hateful urge under the cover of righteousness.
 
Reputation
Reputation is tremendously important in theocratic Salem, where public
and private moralities are one and the same. In an environment where
reputation plays such an important role, the fear of guilt by association
becomes particularly pernicious. Focused on maintaining public
reputation, the townsfolk of Salem must fear that the sins of their friends
and associates will taint their names. Various characters base their actions
 on the desire to protect their respective reputations. As the play begins,
Parris fears that Abigail’s increasingly questionable actions, and the
hints of witchcraft surrounding his daughter’s coma, will threaten his
reputation and force him from the pulpit. Meanwhile, the protagonist,
John Proctor, also seeks to keep his good name from being tarnished.
Early in the play, he has a chance to put a stop to the girls’ accusations,
but his desire to preserve his reputation keeps him from testifying
against Abigail. At the end of the play, however, Proctor’s desire to
keep his good name leads him to make the heroic choice not to make a
false confession and to go to his death without signing his name to an
untrue statement. “I have given you my soul; leave me my name!” he
cries to Danforth in Act IV. By refusing to relinquish his name, he
redeems himself for his earlier failure and dies with integrity.
 
Goodness
In The Crucible, the idea of goodness is a major theme. Almost every
character is concerned with the concept of goodness because their
religion teaches them that the most important thing in life is how they
will be judged by God after they die. They want to be found good,
because being good will make them right with God. Their neighbors’
opinion guides them, too. The characters want to be seen as good by the
whole village. From the opening of the play, when the Rev. Parris is far
more concerned with what his parishioners will think of him than his
daughter’s illness, this theme is clear. Parris bullies his niece and slave
to get them to reveal what they’ve done to tarnish his reputation. When
Abigail follows Tituba’s example by falsely confessing to witchcraft, she
does so because she sees an opportunity to convince the residents of
Salem that she is a good person. Other characters, such as Mary Warren,
confess because being seen as good is more important to them than
telling the truth.
 
Several characters’ concern over goodness goes beyond how they are
seen and requires that they actually examine what it means to be good.
We see this struggle in the Rev. Hale, Elizabeth Proctor, and John Proctor.
Hale enters the play convinced he’s a good man who can spot a witch
easily. By the end of the play, he has examined his conscience and
realized that if he wants to be at peace with himself, he has to encourage
the prisoners to falsely confess. Elizabeth is also convinced of herself as a
good woman, but by the end of the play, she has reconsidered her
treatment of her husband after he confessed to an affair, and realizes
that she was unforgiving. John struggles the most with goodness: it takes
signing a false confession, then ripping it up, for him to recognize that
the only way he can be good is by being honest and true to himself.
 
Judgment
Another major theme in The Crucible is that of judgment, especially seen
in the characters of Danforth and Rev. Hale. In the third act of the play,
Deputy Governor Danforth sits in judgment over the accused and
imprisoned residents of Salem. Danforth’s judgments, which he is
always firm and resolute about, are clearly wrong: Elizabeth, Martha
Corey, Rebecca Nurse, and many others are not witches at all. Danforth is
unable to change his mind, even when all evidence and logic points him
towards concluding he is incorrect. Danforth mistakenly believes that a
reliable judge never reconsiders his stance. Hale, on the other hand, Hale
learns the foolishness of sitting in judgment over his fellow humans. By
the end of the play, he no longer cares about the official judgments of
the court of the land, only about saving peoples’ lives. Danforth has not
learned the danger of judging others, while Hale has.
 
Social Status
The world of Salem in the 1600s contained many class divisions. Men
were considered much more important than women. White people were
considered more valuable than people of color. And wealthy people had
more status than the poor. The Crucible reflects these divisions, and the
way they privilege certain characters over others. The first character to
confess to witchcraft is Tituba, the only person of color in the play. She
knows that her status is too low to withstand the accusations of being a
witch and the only way she’ll survive is to confess. The girls are quick to
accuse the poorest and weakest members of their society (like Goody
Good and Goody Osburn), correctly sensing that no one will bother to
protect those women. When Elizabeth learns that Abigail has accused
her, she immediately tells John that Abigail is taking a big risk in accusing
her, since Elizabeth is a farmer’s wife and has some status in the town.
Her quick realization shows that Abigail is risking it all to go after John.
 
Ownership And Property
In The Crucible, concerns over property and ownership affect many of the
decisions characters make. John Proctor reveals to Reverend Hale that he
doesn’t go to church because he doesn’t like Reverend Parris’s
obsession with money. Tituba falsely confesses to witchcraft because she
knows, as a slave, she is the legal property of Parris, who can beat her if
she doesn’t confess. Mr. Putnam, who has a long history of false
accusations, encourages his daughter to falsely accuse their neighbors of
witchcraft so he can claim their property after the neighbors are jailed or
executed. Giles Corey dies rather than falsely confess so that his children
can inherit his land. In the new world of America, owning property was
one of the few ways people could feel secure. The relentless ambition to
own more and more land created an environment that encouraged
 falsehoods and deception among neighbors. The extreme lengths
characters go to to protect what they own leads to the witch trials.
 
Justice
Many characters struggle with choices they made before and during the
events of the play, trying to understand if the results of their actions are
just or not. Elizabeth Proctor has a difficult time forgiving John for his
affair with Abby, but by the end of the play, Elizabeth has come to feel
that she is at least partly to blame for her husband’s adultery. Elizabeth
accepts her imprisonment and John’s decision to die as justice being
served. Reverend Hale also changes his understanding of justice: at the
beginning of the play, he believes himself adept at finding and
combating witchcraft. By the end, he is encouraging residents of Salem
to falsely confess to save themselves. While he would have once found
false confessions a perversion of justice, he now sees false confession as
a necessary act of self-preservation. Elizabeth doesn’t agree with Hale,
and their different definitions of justice end the play on an ambiguous
note.
 
Consequences
John’s affair with Abby has ended by the time the events of the play
begin, but the consequences of that affair have just begun. Because Abby
doesn’t believe that John no longer is interested in her, she seizes upon
accusations of witchcraft as a way to get rid of Elizabeth. Because John
allowed Abby to believe that he loved her, she thinks she can take
Elizabeth’s place as his wife. She’s wrong, but she doesn’t realize her
error until both John and Elizabeth have been accused of witchcraft.
Another example of the unexpected consequences of one’s actions can
be seen in Tituba’s false confession. She says she performed witchcraft
in hopes of ending her master’s beating, but soon the girls of Salem
realize that they can punish many of their neighbors by accusing them.
The girls fail to anticipate the consequences of their lies. Giles Corey also
brings about unintended consequences when he tells Reverend Hale that
his wife sometimes hides books she was reading from him. The result of
this revelation is that Corey’s wife is imprisoned and Giles himself is
accused of, and killed, for witchcraft.
 
Motifs
Empowerment
The witch trials empower several characters in the play who are
previously marginalized in Salem society. In general, women occupy the
lowest rung of male-dominated Salem and have few options in life. They
work as servants for townsmen until they are old enough to be married
off and have children of their own. In addition to being thus restricted,
 Abigail is also slave to John Proctor’s sexual whims—he strips away her
innocence when he commits adultery with her, and he arouses her
spiteful jealousy when he terminates their affair. Because the Puritans’
greatest fear is the defiance of God, Abigail’s accusations of witchcraft
and devil-worship immediately command the attention of the court. By
aligning herself, in the eyes of others, with God’s will, she gains power
over society, as do the other girls in her pack, and her word becomes
virtually unassailable, as do theirs. Tituba, whose status is lower than that
of anyone else in the play by virtue of the fact that she is black, manages
similarly to deflect blame from herself by accusing others.
 
Accusations, Confessions, And Legal Proceedings
The witch trials are central to the action of The Crucible, and dramatic
accusations and confessions fill the play even beyond the confines of the
courtroom. In the first act, even before the hysteria begins, we see Parris
accuse Abigail of dishonoring him, and he then makes a series of
accusations against his parishioners. Giles Corey and Proctor respond in
kind, and Putnam soon joins in, creating a chorus of indictments even
before Hale arrives. The entire witch trial system thrives on accusations,
the only way that witches can be identified, and confessions, which
provide the proof of the justice of the court proceedings. Proctor
attempts to break this cycle with a confession of his own, when he admits
to the affair with Abigail, but this confession is trumped by the
accusation of witchcraft against him, which in turn demands a confession.
Proctor’s courageous decision, at the close of the play, to die rather
than confess to a sin that he did not commit, finally breaks the cycle. The
court collapses shortly afterward, undone by the refusal of its victims to
propagate lies.
 
Symbol
The Witch Trials And McCarthyism
There is little symbolism within The Crucible, but, in its entirety, the play
can be seen as symbolic of the paranoia about communism that
pervaded America in the 1950s. Several parallels exist between the House
Un-American Activities Committee’s rooting out of suspected
communists during this time and the seventeenth-century witch-hunt
that Miller depicts in The Crucible, including the narrow-mindedness,
excessive zeal, and disregard for the individuals that characterize the
government’s effort to stamp out a perceived social ill. Further, as with
the alleged witches of Salem, suspected Communists were encouraged to
confess their crimes and to “name names,” identifying others
sympathetic to their radical cause. Some have criticized Miller for
oversimplifying matters, in that while there were (as far as we know) no
actual witches in Salem, there were certainly Communists in 1950s
 America. However, one can argue that Miller’s concern in The Crucible
is not with whether the accused actually are witches, but rather with the
unwillingness of the court officials to believe that they are not. In light of
McCarthyist excesses, which wronged many innocents, this parallel was
felt strongly in Miller’s own time.
 
Protagonist
John Proctor is the protagonist of the play. Once he enters the play, the
real plot begins. Up to that point, the play’s exposition has introduced
the town, some of the people in the town and the situation that will drive
the plot: the accusations of witchcraft. Without John, the play would be a
historical retelling of a terrible time in American history. His arrival makes
the stakes of the play more specific, because John has a real dilemma: he
wants to free his wife and his friends (and, eventually, himself) from false
accusations of witchcraft, but he is asked to give up his dignity, honor
and good name to do so. While the audience sympathizes with John, we
also recognize that he’s a flawed protagonist. His flaw of lust led him to
commit the adultery that makes him vulnerable to Abigail’s
manipulations.
 
Antagonist
Abigail is the antagonist of the play. She stands opposed to John Proctor,
even though she claims to love him and want to be with him. Her refusal
to believe that their affair is over, and her desire for revenge on John and
his wife, Elizabeth, drive the action of the play. Abigail accuses Elizabeth
of witchcraft and makes up lies that send both Proctors to jail, and John
to his death. Abigail always acts selfishly and to save her own skin. At the
same time, Abigail serves as a “crucible” for the other characters,
especially John. Her actions cause him to choose between his honor and
his life, and renounce his past mistakes. Abigail also causes Elizabeth to
reconsider whether she’s been a good wife to John. While Abigail
doesn’t change much over the course of the play, she inspires great
change in others. None of the events of the plot of the play would have
happened if Abigail had simply confessed to dancing in the woods with
Tituba. Instead, her lies end up killing dozens of people, including the
man she claims she loves.
 
Setting
The Crucible is based on historical events, and thus, reflects the real
setting where the Salem witch trials took place: Salem, Massachusetts, a
little town on a bay on the north coast of Massachusetts that still exists
today. The real witch trials began in February of 1692 and lasted until
May of 1693. Visitors to Salem today can explore a number of trial-
related sites, from a museum about the trials to a memorial to those
 executed. In 1692, what we today call New England was still an English
colony, founded by the Puritans around 1630. They had arrived seeking
religious liberty, having been persecuted in England. But Arthur Miller
writes that the “people of Salem in 1692 were not quite the dedicated
folk that arrived on the Mayflower.” They were living in a confused time
of political unrest, which would lead to the American Revolution in a little
under 100 years. Their sense of mission was less strong than it had been
for their ancestors. Most didn’t remember the life their people had left
behind in a more civilized country and thus couldn’t imagine anything
but the grim existence of their daily lives.
 
In the play, Salem is called a “town” but really was what we’d think of
as a village today, with a meeting house, a tavern, perhaps a store, and a
few houses. Salem had been established fewer than forty years before,
and existed mostly to produce and ship products to England. The
townspeople had few amenities: they produced almost everything they
had, from cloth to food to medicine. Houses were basic and very rustic,
barely keeping out the New England cold. To the north and east was the
bay, and to the west and south, farmland. Beyond the farmland was
wilderness, inhabited by Native Americans who could be friendly or
antagonistic, and who made the residents of Salem very uneasy. The
town offered nothing in the way of amusements, in keeping with the
Puritan religion. Men, women, slaves and even children worked very hard.
It was not unusual for boys to be working the fields by the age of eight,
and girls to be in charge of some of the cooking at that age. People in
Salem worked hard almost all the time, went to church on Sundays, and
tried to survive.
 
Genre
Tragedy
The Crucible is a tragedy in that it features a tragic hero whose fatal flaw
of adultery results in his downfall, and who only repents his error after it
is too late to alter his fate. While making notes for the play, Arthur Miller
wrote, “here is real Greek tragedy,” and reminded himself that
Proctor’s death by hanging at the end of the play “must be ‘tragic’
– ie; must be result of an opportunity not grasped when it should have
been, due to ‘flaw.’” Greek tragedies told stories of noble characters
whose flaws, or deficits, caused them to compound one bad decision
after the other, making their deaths at the end of the plays inevitable. In
The Crucible, John Proctor is in most ways an upstanding character,
honest and highly moral. But his flaw is his extramarital lust, which has
resulted in an affair with his family’s servant, Abigail. Proctor’s guilt
over the affair and fear of his secret being revealed causes him to remain
silent while Abigail accuses many townspeople of witchcraft. He then
 compounds this error by falsely confessing to witchcraft himself. He is
finally redeemed when he retracts his confession, but it’s too late, the
damage has been done, and Proctor, like all tragic heroes, dies.
 
Allegory
In using the 1692 setting of the Salem witch trials to warn audiences
about the dangers of present-day McCarthyism, The Crucible also
functions as an allegory. An allegory is a story in which characters or
images represent specific ideas. At the time that Miller wrote The
Crucible, an American senator named Joseph McCarthy was leading
Senate hearings accusing American citizens of being members of, or
sympathetic to, Communism. Suspected Communists could be
blackballed from work or even imprisoned, and many accused informed
on friends and neighbors to save themselves. The events of The Crucible
parallel McCarthyism, with intolerance, hysteria, and fear causing
characters to implicate each other as witches, and legal trials determining
the fates of the accused. However, the narrator explains how the Salem
witch trials are only one example of mass hysteria, relating them to
similar events throughout history, both before and after 1692. The
narrator argues that the “political inspiration of the Devil” began
centuries ago and provides examples like the Spanish Inquisition and
Martin Luther. By linking his story to instances of mass hysteria
throughout the ages, Miller presents an allegorical story about the
dangers of mob mentality and unchecked political authority.
 
Historical Fiction
In using a real-life setting, real people, and historically accurate details to
tell a fictional story, The Crucible is also an example of historical fiction.
Miller had studied the Salem witch trials in college, and he traveled to
Salem in 1952 to conduct extensive research at the Salem courthouse
while working on the play. Miller writes in the play’s preface that
although he took some artistic license, “the fate of each character is
exactly that of his historical model, and there is no one in the drama who
did not play a similar—and in some cases exactly the same—role in
history.” Miller consolidated several historical figures into one or a few
characters and, most significantly, raised Abigail’s age and lowered
John Proctor’s, so their affair would be plausible. In doing this, he
presented a personal motivation for the two main character’s actions:
Abigail acts out of jealousy, while John acts, or fails to act, out of guilt. In
truth, people’s motivations for accusing each other of witchcraft often
remain unknowable, as many people may have been caught up in the
hysteria of the moment and believed their accusations were justified. In
fictionalizing the plot of the play and making the two protagonists’
 motivations specific and clear, Miller ensured their actions would feel
relatable to modern audiences.
 
Style
The Crucible’s style mixes historically accurate phrases with more
contemporary-sounding speech, grounding the play in its time period
while reminding audiences the ideas remain relevant today. Characters’
speech patterns in the play reflect the language Miller found in legal
documents and court transcripts in the Salem courthouse. Miller even
embedded direct quotations into his dialogue, such as when Giles pleads
for “more weight.” One word may be particularly foreign to readers:
“Goodwife,” sometimes shortened to “Goody.” This word was typical
nomenclature for “wife” in the seventeenth century, and the girls
repeat it when accusing various townswomen of witchcraft. At the same
time, characters often speak in plain, contemporary-sounding English,
modernizing archaic words like ‘saith’ to ‘said.’ Most other words
are familiar though less common in everyday speech, especially biblical
words like “abomination,” “damnation,” and “heathen.” Parris uses
“heathen” to characterize the girls when their dancing is deemed sinful,
and Abigail repeats it as a pejorative term for Native Americans and
similar to “savage.” This usage reflects how settlers viewed Native
Americans and the frontier, which the narrator describes as mysterious
and terrifying.
 
The diction varies between characters based on their education and
profession, so while Parris, Hale, and Danforth speak formally even
outside of the courtroom, the Salemites’ language is less polished and
sometimes contains grammatical errors. Characters’ grammar and
pronunciation also depend on social status, much like how accents today
affect speech. The Salemites regularly omit the “g” at the end of words
with “ing” endings. Some characters, especially those with less
education, forgo subject-verb agreement, confuse tenses, and use double
negatives. Tituba’s speech is especially unique as the play’s only non-
native English speaker, although her speech is probably not historically
accurate to the real-life Tituba. According to records from the Salem
witch trials, Tituba was referred to as Indian, possibly meaning she was
Native American. Another woman, named Candy, was from Barbados, as
Tituba is in the play. Tituba makes specific errors when referring to the
other members of the Parris household, like omitting “to be” verbs and
confusing subject and object pronouns. She bypasses the word “is”
when claiming that the Devil told her, “Mr. Parris no goodly man, Mr.
Parris mean man and no gentle man!” When Mrs. Putnam accuses
Tituba of feeding her baby’s blood to Abigail, Tituba clarifies that “I
give she chicken blood!” instead.
 
Throughout the play, the action is interrupted for extended passages of
narration by a narrator who serves as a bridge between the
contemporary reader and the historical characters we are reading about.
As the narrator refers to past productions of the play, we can assume
Miller added portions of the narration after the play’s premiere. For
example, the narrator says certain lines always get a laugh, suggesting
“we are not quite certain even now whether diabolism is holy…it is no
accident that we should be so bemused.” The narrator’s style is more
familiar than the characters’, and is characterized by witty and
sometimes biting asides, implying a judgmental attitude toward the
characters and actions being narrated. The narrator explains that Parris
“believed he was being persecuted wherever he went, despite his best
efforts to win people and God to his side.” By saying Parris only
“believed” he was persecuted, the narrator implies that Parris’s
troubles stem from his poor personality and inflated sense of ego. This
narrative style, skeptical, opinionated, and judgmental, informs our
reading of the play as a cautionary tale about the worst, weakest aspects
of human nature.
 
Tone
The tone of The Crucible is cautionary and largely unsympathetic,
suggesting that the characters actively created the disastrous events of
the play, rather being victimized by them. The play opens with the
narrator characterizing Reverend Parris as “villainous,” saying, “there
is very little good to be said for him.” We soon see that although his
daughter Betty is bedridden, Parris is more concerned with avoiding his
“enemies,” while the Putnams, who also have a sick daughter, are
eager simply to antagonize other characters. The narrator describes the
townspeople in general in unflattering terms, saying that unlike earlier
Puritan settlers they are “not quite the dedicated folk that arrived on the
Mayflower.” Rather, their faith is an excuse to fuel local spats between
families, which makes their accusations of witchcraft and blasphemy even
more outrageous. The narrator’s descriptions of Parris and Putnam are
especially scathing, and the townspeople are characterized by their
“parochial snobbery” and “land-lust.” The only characters the
narrator defends are the accused, and even the protagonist, John Proctor,
is described as too sarcastic, outspoken, and impatient with people he
thinks are foolish – and therefore “always marked for calumny.”
 
After Act I, the narrator departs and the play’s tone becomes
increasingly pessimistic. Without the narrator’s commentary, readers
also lose historical distance from the story. Whereas Act I is sometimes
lighthearted when detailing the girls’ antics, Act II reveals the aftermath
 of Proctor’s affair with Abigail as he and Elizabeth struggle to repair
their marriage. Nevertheless, Mary’s disrespect for Elizabeth seems
almost comical when she returns home with a handmade doll and
indignantly announces “with a stamp of her foot” that she will “not be
ordered to bed no more, Mr. Proctor! I am eighteen and a woman,
however single!” The tone sours once Proctor’s affair and the girls’
accusations converge and Cheever arrests Elizabeth. The action moves to
increasingly uncomfortable settings, beginning in Parris’s and
Proctor’s homes, then moving to the courthouse and finally a jail cell.
When Proctor leaves for the gallows, the play concludes with a mix of
solemnity and hysteria as Elizabeth stands stoically beside the crumbling
ministers.
 
The tone of the final act is extremely solemn. It’s the only act that does
not include any of the girls, but their absence is appropriate since they so
masterfully manipulated both the church and the court. The ministers,
judges, and clerks no longer depend on the girls to justify their behavior
and have almost entirely abandoned the values that initially led them to
pursue the accusations. Hale prioritizes reason over piety by encouraging
the accused to lie and confess, while Danforth prioritizes reputation over
justice by refusing to even postpone the executions when confronted
with new evidence. Miller portrays the court officials Cheever and Herrick
somewhat sympathetically by showing their increasing reluctance to
participate in the proceedings, but only because it exposes their
complicity and cowardice. The girls’ absence highlights how the
consequences for their actions fall solely on the innocents’ shoulders,
and the only deaths Miller includes are the play’s most sympathetic
characters—Corey, Rebecca, and Proctor. The concluding tone is
remorseful and unforgiving. If any hope is to be found in the final act of
the play, that hope comes from the fact that Proctor died with his dignity
and integrity intact, and his wife understands the significance of his
sacrifice.
 
Q&A
Why is the play called The Crucible? What is a crucible?
One definition of a crucible is a vessel, often ceramic or porcelain, used
for melting down and purifying metal. Another definition is that a
crucible is a time or trial of great severity, in which different elements
react and something new is formed. This definitely often refers to a
courtroom trial in particular. Clearly, both definitions apply to the title of
the play. The Salem witch trials end up being a crucible, that is, a time of
great testing and purifying, for the townspeople. Some of the trial takes
place in the actual courtroom, but the metaphor extends beyond the
courtroom scenes. For example, both John’s and Elizabeth’s
 imprisonments were a kind of testing too. By the end, their true natures
are revealed. Miller never actually uses the word “crucible” in the play,
perhaps because the entire series of events acts as the purifying trial.
 
Did the girls really see the Devil or witches?
No. The girls were caught dancing in the woods with Tituba, who was
apparently performing love charms for them. It’s not clear whether
Tituba was actually practicing some kind of magic that she believed in
and learned in Barbados, or if she made up the “charms” to keep the
girls happy. Abigail definitely wanted to believe Tituba could come up
with a spell to kill Elizabeth, but Tituba most likely didn’t believe in her
own spells. Nevertheless, none of them actually saw the Devil. Tituba
falsely confessed to save herself from being beaten to death, and the
girls went along with her confession, making up new lies. Abigail went
along with the girls as a way out of the trouble she was in with her uncle.
Later, she and others in the town realized that an accusation of witchcraft
was an effective way to punish people they were angry with.
 
Why did Tituba confess to dancing with the Devil?
As a slave, Tituba had no status in Salem. Parris could have legally beaten
her to death to try to get her to confess. So while we don’t have direct
knowledge of her thoughts, we can infer that having realized how dire
her situation was, she concluded that it was better to give the
townspeople what they wanted by confessing to something she did not
do. She ended up in jail, but at least she was not beaten to death. She
hates John Parris, who was cruel to her, and she uses her confession to
scare him by telling him that the Devil told her “Mr. Parris no goodly
man.” In her confession, Tituba says the Devil offered to fly her back to
Barbados, an opportunity for Tituba to be released from slavery and
returned to her home, which she misses terribly. Once she’s decided to
confess to something she didn’t do, Tituba indulges the fullness of her
fantasy, which ironically makes her confession seem very convincing in its
detail and anger.
 
Was John still in love with Abigail?
John’s feelings for Abigail are not entirely clear to us at the beginning
of the play. He spends time with her in the first act, and is kind to her,
although he also makes it clear that he is not going to resume their affair.
Arthur Miller wrote a second scene for the second act of the play which
he later cut and isn’t performed now when the play is staged. In that
scene, Abigail and John confront each other again, and John tells her he
will ruin her to save his wife. In the third act, John does indeed tell the
court about his affair with Abigail to try to save Elizabeth. This confession
seems to indicate if John ever loved Abigail, he loves Elizabeth much
 more. John has already realized he should not have cheated on his wife
with Abigail, but he doesn’t believe Elizabeth at first when she tells him
Abigail wants her dead. By the end of the play, he believes Elizabeth, and
hates Abigail.
 
Why didn’t more people sign false confessions that they were witches to
save their lives?
Plenty of people did sign false confessions, in which they were required
to name others that they saw with the Devil. But many other people
could not bear to falsely accuse their friends, neighbors, and families,
especially since the only way those people could clear their names would
be by implicating more members of the community. Like John Proctor,
some people in Salem preferred to die rather than sign something that
they knew was a lie. These people may have had strong religious beliefs
and felt God would damn them for lying, and they may also have realized
that their reputation would be restored after the witch trials were over,
even if they had lost their lives. At the same time, it’s not hard to
understand why someone would sign a false confession. For some, it was
easier to lie and say they were witches so that they could return to their
lives and families. They may have thought that they could confess to
falsely confessing and be forgiven at some future point.
 
What is Reverend Parris’s biggest concern?
Reverend Parris is most concerned with being highly regarded and
treated well. He says to his niece, Abigail Williams: “I have fought here
three long years to bend these stiff-necked people to me, and now, just
now when some good respect is rising for me in the parish, you
compromise my very character.” Parris is worried that his career in
Salem as the town’s minister is in jeopardy because his daughter Betty,
his maid Tituba, and his niece Abigail have seemingly practiced
witchcraft. He is also concerned with getting paid sufficiently well and
complains that he has not been provided with firewood. In response to
Parris’s complaints, John Proctor observes, “Mr. Parris, you are the first
minister ever did demand the deed to his house[.]”
 
What causes tension between John and Elizabeth Proctor?
John Proctor’s past infidelity with Abigail Williams causes continued
tension between John and Elizabeth Proctor. John feels Elizabeth’s
lingering suspicions and thinks she is not sufficiently forgiving. In a
heated moment, John says to Elizabeth, “You forget nothin’ and
forgive nothin’. Learn charity, woman.” But Elizabeth wants John to
make sure that Abigail understands that there is no hope of John and
Abigail being together ever again. Elizabeth believes that Abigail is
holding onto a promise—spoken or unspoken—made between Abigail
 and John that would make Abigail want to have Elizabeth killed in order
to take her place.
 
Why is Rebecca Nurse accused of witchcraft?
Rebecca Nurse is blamed for “the marvelous and supernatural murder
of Goody Putnam’s babies.” A number of Mrs. Putnam’s babies have
died, and she is looking for an explanation. She decides that Rebecca
Nurse is responsible because Ruth, Mrs. Putnam’s daughter, “accused
Rebecca’s spirit of ‘tempting her to iniquity.’” The Putnam family
may also be looking to punish Rebecca Nurse because of a land dispute
they have with her husband, Francis.
 
Why is Elizabeth Proctor accused of witchcraft?
Elizabeth Proctor is accused of witchcraft by Abigail Williams because
Abigail wants to marry Elizabeth’s husband, John, with whom she had
an affair while serving in the Proctor household. “She wants me dead,”
says Elizabeth of Abigail, and indeed, Abigail does intend for Elizabeth to
die. To accomplish this, Abigail makes it look like Elizabeth is practicing
witchcraft by claiming that Elizabeth sticks needles in the poppet that
Mary Warren gave Elizabeth in order to cause Abigail pain. Readers
know, however, that Abigail sticks herself with needles in order to
provide evidence of Elizabeth’s “crime.”
 
Why doesn’t John Proctor attend church often?
The primary reason John Proctor rarely attends church is that he
doesn’t like Reverend Parris. John complains that Parris is too
concerned with his own wealth, stating, “Parris came, and for twenty
week he preach nothin’ but golden candlesticks until he had them.”
John is also unhappy with the substance of Parris’s sermons. He says,
“I have trouble enough without I come five mile to hear him preach only
hellfire and bloody damnation.” John also explains to Reverend Hale
that he stayed at home on Sundays during the winter because his wife,
Elizabeth, was sick.
 
What happens when Mary Warren tells the court the truth about the girls
acting bewitched?
When Mary Warren tells the court the truth that the girls were just
pretending that they were being affected by witchcraft, she is challenged
by Parris, Hathorne, and Danforth, and she is intimidated by the other
girls. Mary explains that she fainted because she thought she saw spirits.
Hathorne responds, “How could you think you saw them unless you saw
them?” To combat Mary’s revelation, Abigail stirs up the other girls to
act as though Mary is trying to bewitch them. The tension of the scene
and hysteria of the girls mount until Mary cracks under the pressure and
 accuses John Proctor of threatening to murder her if she didn’t try to
help him overthrow the court.
 
How does John Proctor know that the witchcraft isn’t real?
Abigail Williams tells John Proctor that the witchcraft is not real. After
Reverend Parris finds Abigail, Betty Parris, and some other girls dancing
in the woods, Betty becomes unresponsive. This makes the townspeople
think witchcraft is involved, and the girls play along with the idea,
accusing other townspeople of being witches. But when John mentions
to Abigail—with whom he had an affair—the town’s belief that
witchcraft is involved, she responds, “Oh, posh! We were dancin’ in the
woods last night, and my uncle leaped in on us. [Betty] took fright, is
all.”
 
Why doesn’t Danforth believe John Proctor’s confession of his infidelity
with Abigail Williams?
Danforth decides that John Proctor’s confession is not true because it
isn’t substantiated by Elizabeth Proctor. Danforth asks John, “And
when she put this girl out of your house, she put her out for a harlot?”
to which John responds that, yes, Elizabeth knew of his infidelity. But
when Danforth asks Elizabeth, “Is your husband a lecher?” she
responds, “No, sir.” Elizabeth, who John describes as never having lied,
lies in this instance to protect John’s reputation. Tragically, it is this
protection that contributes to John’s death sentence.
 
Why does Reverend Hale change his mind about the witch trials?
Reverend Hale loses faith in the witch trials in the face of Deputy
Governor Danforth’s zealousness and the doubts John Proctor brings to
the girls’ claims of witchcraft. When Danforth dismisses John’s
evidence, Hale says, “I dare not take a life without there be a proof so
immaculate no slightest qualm of conscience may doubt it.” Hale is also
doubtful about Rebecca Nurse’s and John’s guilt. Hale presses
Danforth to pardon them when they refuse to confess to witchcraft, but
Danforth will not relent. Hale sees that the court has become feared in
Salem for its brutality and lack of justice.
 
Why doesn’t John Proctor save himself?
Instead of saving his own life, John Proctor chooses to guard his
reputation and not accuse others of witchcraft. When John confesses to
being guilty, Deputy Governor Danforth pressures John to name other
people who might have sided with the devil. John refuses to do so,
explaining, “I have three children—how may I teach them to walk like
men in the world, and I sold my friends?” John also refuses to sign a
written confession. John dies with his integrity intact.
 
 
章节名称：William Shakespeare and his Othello (Merchant of Venice)
William Shakespeare as the greatest dramatist in British Literature
William Shakespeare and Renaissance
The characters in the play
The issue of race and gender in the play
Themes and questions
The modern significance of the play
 
章节名称：Bernard Shaw and his Pygmalion
Victoria Era and Bernard Shaw
New Drama and Pygmalion
Main characters
Reversal of traditional comedy
Discussion drama, the power of discussion
The transformation of the female character
 
章节名称：Tom Stoppard and his Arcadia
historical, social and political context of Arcadia
What is history? What is meta history?
What is the truth? How to get the truth?
Themes and significance of the play
Tom Stoppard and his Arcadia in theater
Themes and questions