The Crucible is an American classic story that, in the middle of the communist witch hunt in America in the fifties, showed readers that witch hunts can be very dangerous and misleading. The Salem Witch trials depicted a low point in American history in which an entire community unraveled with lies, deceit, and betrayal.
The false testimony of some of the young girls from the town of Salem caused the small town to erupt in religious chaos and, as a result, nineteen innocent people were sentenced to hang until death. The town’s people were puritans, which devout their lives to worshiping God, so it seems to make sense that an outburst of witch hunts would cause the village to crumble into shambles. In their society, if anyone was said to be consorting with evil, the leaders of the town would completely cut them off from everyone else in the town and sometimes sentence them to death.
The selfish attitude that enabled the leaders of the village to decide whether someone was consorting with evil and to shun them after they had been accused and sentence them to death was the catalyst for the whole town to turn against each other. The town’s people acquired arrogance during the trials against anyone that they thought could have been dealing with witch craft or, in some cases, anyone who they felt threatened by. A lot of the women and young women in Salem were terrified of other women in town accusing them of witch craft, so they would accuse who they felt threatened by before those women had a chance to accuse them.
After the town’s people realized that anyone who was accused of consorting with evil was indeed found guilty and harshly sentenced, so the true colors of Salem showed when accusations grew very common. Neighbors accused each other and people starting accusing other people just because they did not like that person. All of this madness began when a few young girls from town went into the woods with a slave from town. When they got in the woods, they began to reform rituals while dancing around a bonfire. After a minister in town found out about the rituals, which closely resembled that of witch craft, the chaos began.
Arthur Miller chose to use a brilliant array of characters and situations to depict the horrors and betrayals that exist within witch hunts. One of the main characters of this story is the Reverend John Hale, whose role thickens as the plot does.
After finding out what the young women from town were up to in the woods with the slave from Barbados, Minister Parris immediately contacted the Reverend John Hale from Beverly to investigate. Reverend Hale was an expert on searching for the devil in his many disguised forms. Minister Parris wanted Reverend Hale to investigate the illness that had come over his daughter, Betty, and to get to the bottom of what was going on with the girls in the woods.
When Reverend Hale first arrives in Salem he is very naïve and ignorant to lots of situations and ways of the world. When Reverend Hale first arrives in town, he is very cerebral, intellectual, and close-minded to the opinions written in the books that he carries and studies. Reverend Hale is described as a “tight-skinned, eager-eyed intellectual.” (Miller) This quote gives you an excellent visual of the cocky, young Reverend at his time of arrival in Salem. At first, he seems very arrogant and, very quickly, thrusts himself into the middle of the action. As he proceeds with his business in Salem, the towns’ folk gain a sense of stability and comfort because of his reputation for being a man of God and his self-assuring sense of expertise on the subject of evil.
Reverend Hale jumped at the opportunity to investigate the potential for witch craft in the town of Salem. Reverend Hale is very cocky and confident in his skills and relishes the chance to prove to himself and to the people of Salem that he is indeed a man of God and that his expertise is valid.
As the investigation proceeds, Reverend Hale’s early enthusiasm for discerning the presence of witchcraft in Salem falters, slightly. He soon loses is fire to find the culprit for the debauchery and begins to side with Proctor on questioning Abigail’s honesty about all the accusations that she presented. He begins to fear that he helped in sentencing innocent people to death by hanging. Reverend Hale enters the Town of Salem, a confident, intellectual man of the system, but as the trials continue and he learns that all of this could be attributed to the ignorance of some young women, Reverend Hale begins to turn in to a broken down man who loses his belief in the judicial system that he once lived by. Reverend Hale changes from a committed Christian and hater of witch craft into an enlightened man, who learned that the system he lived for was flawed and what he once followed with everything inside of him may have caused innocent people to be hanged.
His critical thinking mind and intellectuality keep him from losing his wits throughout his stay in Salem. His arrival in Salem alone played a huge role in the hysteria that plagued the town. When the people of Salem knew that an expert witch hunter had arrived in town, they knew that something big was going on within their walls. As Reverend Hale encounters new facts and catches some of the young girls in various lies, his whole mind frame changes and tests his heart to know the difference between good and evil, if his mind could not differentiate between the two. By the end of the story, Reverend Hale is begging Proctor to sign a confession stating that he is a witch to save his own life. This goes against everything the reader would have thought about Reverend Hale when he first arrives in Salem
Reverend Hale’s character is a perfect example of how a strong-minded and well-respected person, man or woman, can be transformed emotionally throughout times of betrayal and lies that have monumental consequences. When approached by such debauchery, anyone with a strong mind will be tested as to of they can remain headstrong in a complex situation that has deadly implications. In these times, the persons with the strongest hearts will always reign victorious in that though your mind and thought process may be altered or change completely, your heart will always let you know what is wrong and what is right. Reverend Hale had a very strong mind when he arrived in Salem, but not as strong was his heart. By the end of the trials his strength of heart outweighed his strength of mind ten fold.
Works Cited
Miller, Arthur Miller. “The Crucible”. 2003. New York, New York. Penguin Books.
