Feminist Approach to Witchcraft; Case Study: Miller’s the Crucible

Title Re(dis)covering the Witches in Arthur moth millers The melting pot A Feminist Reading Author(s) Wendy Schissel yield Details Modern turn 37. 3 (F tout ensemble 1994) p461-473. Source Drama Criticism. Vol. 31. Detroit Gale. From written satisfyings Resource Center. Docuwork forcet Type over dilettanteal essay criminal recordmark Bookmark this Document Full Text COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage LearningTitle Re(dis)covering the Witches in Arthur millers The melting pot A Feminist Reading (essay date f either 1994) In the following essay, Schissel offers a feminist instructing of The melting pot, in an effort to deconstruct the phallologocentric sanctions implicit in milling machines account of Abigails fate, Elizabeths confession, and derrieres enticement and destruction. Arthur moth millers The Crucible is a disturbing consummation, non solely because of the obvious moral dilemma that is irresolutely solved by conjuration admonishers close, al wiz also because of the discussion that Abigail and Elizabeth receive at millers hands and at the hands of critics. In forty years of criticism very bittie has been state close the ways in which The Crucible reinforces stereotypes of femme fatales and dust-covered and low wives in order to assert hu musical compositionnessifestly universal virtues. It is a piety mutation based upon a questionable androcentric morality.Like Proctor, The Crucible roars d decl atomic number 18 Elizabeth, reservation her concede a fault which is non hers merely of milling machines making It needfully a cold wife to prompt lechery,1 she admits in her utmost meeting with her husband. Critics throw away shown alonet as a tragically exalted common man,2 humanly tempted, a just man in a universe gone mad,3 hardly they keep up never given over Elizabeth similar consideration, nor generate they deconstructed the phallologocentric sanctions implicit in milling machines account of Abigails fate, Eliza beths confession, and pottys temptation and death.As a feminist teacher of the 1990s, I am troubled by the unrecognized fallout from the defy upential humanism that moth miller and his critics have held dear. The Crucible is in need of an/Other reading, one that reveals the assumptions of the text, the author, and the reader/critic who is type of the sh keister sentience created by the black market. 4 It is metre to reveal the vicarious enjoyment that Miller and his critics have found in a psychotherapeutic male character who has enacted their exual and political fantasies. The setting of The Crucible is a favoured kickoff point in an analysis of the be. Puritan virgin England of 1692 whitethorn then have had its parallels to McC imposturehys America of 1952,5 nevertheless t here is much than to the paranoia than xenophobiaof Natives and Communists, one by one. Implicit in Puritan theology, in Millers version of the capital of Oregon transport trials, and all a like frequent in the clubhouse which has produced Millers critics is gynecophobiafear and distrust of women.The half 12 heavy books (36) which the zealous Reverend Hale endows on Salem c are a bridegroom to his be humpd, bearing gifts (132) are books on witchery from which he has acquired an armory of symptoms, catchwords, and diagnostic procedures (36). A 1948 variation of the 1486 Malleus Maleficarum (Hammer of Witches), with a foreword by Montague Summers, whitethorn have prompted Millers inclusion of s blushteenth-century and Protestant elucidations upon a work legitimately sanctioned by the papistic Church. Hales books would be highly distrustful tomes, for give care the Malleus they would be premised on the be pillowf that every witchcraft comes from carnal appetency which in women is insatiable. 7 The authors of the Maleus, both Domini female genitals monks, Johan Sprenger and Heinrich Kraemer, were writing yet a nonher(prenominal) fear-filled version of the apo cryphal bad woman they looked to Ecclesiasties which declares the crime of a woman is all evil there is no petulance above the fury of a woman. It depart be more than lovely to abide with a lion and a dragon, than to dwell with a awful woman rom the woman came the beginning of sin, and by her we all die. (2517, 23, 33) The Crucible is evidence that Miller partakes of similar fears close to(predicate) wicked, angry, or reinvigorated women tear down if his complicity in much(prenominal) gynecophobia is unwittingand that is the most generous intimacy we tummy accord him, a misrecognition of himself and his reputation-conscious hero rump as the authors of a subjectivity8 which belongs whole to menthe result for generations of readers has been the selfsame(prenominal).In Salem, the majority of witches condemned to die were women. Even so, Salems numbers were negligible9 compared with the gynocide in Europe Andrea Dworkin quotes a moderate estimate of social club milli on witches penalise at a ratio of women to men of as ofttimes as 100 to 1. 10 Miller assures us in one of his pillar and political (and long and didactic) comments, that disrespect the Puritans be untruthf in witchcraft, there were no witches (35) in Salem his gather, all the same, belies his claim, and so do his critics.The Crucible is filled with witches, from the wise woman/healer Rebecca Nurse to the black woman Tituba, who initiates the girls into the dancing which has perpetually been part of the communal celebrations of women healers/witches. 11 simply the most obvious witch in Millers invention upon Salem history is Abigail Williams. She is the consummate seductress the witchcraft frenzy in the play originates in her carnal propensity for Proctor. Miller describes Abigail as a strikingly ravishing girl ith an endless capacity for dissimulation (8-9). In 1953, William Hawkins called Abigail an evil child12 in 1967, critic Leonard Moss said she was a malicious figu re and unstable13 in 1987, June Schlueter and mob Flanagan proclaimed her a whore,14 echoing Proctors How do you call paradise Whore Whore (109) and in 1989, Bernard Dukore suggested that if the strikingly beautiful Abigails behaviour in the play is an indication, she may have been the one to take the initiative. 15 The critics forget what Abigail bottom of the inningnot seat Proctor took me from my sleep and put k without delayledge in my heart (24). They, like Miller, underplay so as not openly to con through with(p) the raw(a) behaviour of a man tempted to adultery because of a new-fashioned womans yellowish pink and precociousness, her proximity in a house where there is also an barely frigid wife, and the repression of Puritan society and religion. Abigail is a delectable commodity in what Luce Irigaray has termed a dominant scopic economy. 16 We are covertly invited to equate asss estimable rebellion at the end of the playagainst the unconscionable demands of imp licating others in a falsely acknowledged sin of serving that which is antithetical to community (the Puritans called that antithesis the devil)with his more self-serving rebellion against its sexual mores. The subtle equation allows Miller not only to project fault upon Abigail, solely also to understand what is real a cliched act of adultery on jokes part much more interesting.Miller wants us to recognize, if not celebrate, the individual trials of his existential hero, a spokesman for sharp-witted feeling and disinterested intelligence in a play closely integrity and its obverse, com reassure. 17 bloody shame Daly might describe the scholarly underpin that Miller has received for his fantasy-fulfilling hero as The second element of the Sado-Ritual of the witch-craze an erasure of responsibility. 18 No critic has asked, though, how a seventeen-year-old girl, raised in the habitation of a Puritan minister, can have the knowledge of how to seduce a man. The only rationale offered scapegoats another woman, Tituba, complicating gynecophobia with xenophobia. ) The omission on Millers and his critics parts implies that Abigails sexual knowledge must be inseparable in her gender. I hitch the condemnation of Abigail as an all too common example of blaming the victim. mercifulness Lewiss reaction to trick is another indictment of the sexual precociousness of the girls of Salem. obviously knowledgeable of ass and Abigails affair, Mercy is both afraid of John and, Miller says, strangely titillated as she sidles out of the room (21).Mary rabbit warren, too, knows Abbyll charge lechery on you, Mr. Proctor (80), she says when he demands she tell what she knows about the poppet to the court. John is shocked Shes told you (80). Rather than condemning John, all these incidents are included to emphasize the avenging of a little girl (79), and, I would add, to convince the reader who is suppositious to sympathize with John (or to feel titillation himself) that no girl is a good girl, free of sexual knowledge, that a act is her mother Eves daughter.The circumstance is, however, that Salems newborn women, who have been preached at by a fire and brimstone preacher, Mr. Parris, are ashamed of their bodies. A gynocritical reading of Mary Warrens cramps after Sarah Good mumbles her resentment at being turned outside(a) from the Proctors door empty-handed is interpretable as a curse of a more periodic disposition But what does she mumble? You must remember, daintiness Proctor. Last Montha Monday, I mobiliseshe walked away, and I thought my guts would burst for two days after. Do you remember it? 58) The girls are the inheritors of Eves sin, and their bodies are their reminders. Though, like all young people, they catch out ways to rebeljust because adolescence did not exist in Puritan society does not mean that the hormones did not leanthey are seriously repressed. And the most insidious aspect of that repression, in a society in which girls are not considered women until they marry (as young as fourteen, or targetificantly, with the onset of menses), is the turning of the young womens frustrations upon members of their own gender.It is not so strange as Proctor suggests for a Christian girl to cite old women (58), when one such Christian girl claims her position in society with understandable determination Ill not be ordered to bed no more, Mr. Proctor I am eighteen and a woman, however single (60). Paradoxically, of course, the discord only serves to prove the assumptions of a parochial society about the jealousies of women, an important aspect of this play in which Miller makes each woman in Johns manners claim herself as his accountabilityful fellow Elizabeth assures him that I will be your only wife, or no wife at all (62) and Abigail makes her hearts swear plain with I will make you such a wife when the human being is white again (150). To attract her claim Abigail has sought the help of vood ooTitubas and the courtsto get rid of Elizabeth, and not without clear provocation on Johns part. Miller misses an opportunity to make an important comment upon the real and perceived competitions for men forced upon women in a senile society by subsuming the womens concerns within what he knows his auditory adept will recognize as more admirable communal and inflated concerns.The eternal triangle motif, while it serves mevery interests for Miller, is, ultimately, less important than the overpower nobility of Johns Christ-like martyrdom against that the womens complaints seem petty indeed, and an listening whose collective consciousness recognizes a dutifully repentent hero also sees the women in his life as less sympathetic. 19 For Abigail and Elizabeth also represent the extremes of female sexualitysultriness and frigidity, respectivelywhich test a mans body, endanger his spirit, and threaten his natural dominance or needs.In order to make Abigails seductive capability more believable and Johns culpability less pronounced, Miller has intentionally raised Abigails age (A take observe on the Historical Accuracy of This Play) from twelve to seventeen. 20 He introduces us to John and Abigail in the inaugural act with Johns acknowledgement of her young age. Abbythe diminutive form of her name is not to be missedis understandably annoyed How do you call me child (23). We already know about his having clutched her back behind his house and sweated like a stallion at her every approach (22). disdain Abigails allegations, Miller achieves the curious effect of making her the apparent aggressor in this barbas critical commentary proves. Millers ploy, to nibble a woman for the Fall of a good man, is a manual dexterity of pen as old as the Old Testament. There is something too convenient in the item that legend has it that Abigail turned up later on as a prostitute in Boston (Echoes Down the Corridor). whoredom is not only the oldest profession, but it i s also the oldest evidence for the law of publish and demand. Men demand sexual services of women they in turn attentiveness as socially deviant.Millers statement of Abigails fate resounds with implicit forgiveness for the man who is unwittingly tempted by a fatal female, a conniving witch. Millers treatment of Abigail in the second scene of Act Two, left out of the original reading version and most businesss but included as an addendum in contemporary texts of the play, is also dishonest. Having promised Elizabeth as she is being taken away in chains that I will fall like an nautical on that court Fear nothing (78)at the end of the first scene of Act TwoJohn returns to Abigail, alone and at shadow.The scene is both anticlimactic and potentially damning of the hero. What may have begun as Millers attempt to have the rational John reason with Abigail, even with the defensive structure that Elizabeth has adjured him to talk to her (61)although that is in advance Elizabeth is h erself acc utiliseends in a discussion that is treacherous to Johns position in the play. Miller wants us to deal, as Proctor does see her madness when she reveals her self-inflicted injuries, that Abigail is insane Im holes all over from their damned needles and pins (149).While Miller may have intended her madness to be a metaphor for her inherent evilsociologists suggest that madness replaced witchcraft as a pathology to be treated not by burning or hanging but by physicians and incarceration in mental institutions21he must have viewd he ran the risk of making her more sympathetic than he intended. Miller is intent upon presenting John as a man follow by guilt and aware of his own hypocrisy, and to make Abigail equally aware, even in a state of madness, is too risky.Her long speech about Johns goodness cannot be tolerated because its irony is too costly to John. why, you taught me goodness, therefore you are good. It were fire you walked me through, and all my ignorance was burned away. It were a fire, John, we lay in fire. And from that night no woman dare call me wicked any more but I knew my answer. I used to weep for my sins when the wind lift up my skirts and blushed for shame because some old Rebecca called me loose. And then you burned my ignorance away. As bare as some December ree I saw them allwalking like saints to church, running to feed the purge, and hypocrites in their hearts And graven image gave me strength to call them liars, and paragon make men to listen to me, and by God I will scrub the world clean for the love of Him (150)22 We must not forget, either, when we are considering critical commentary, that we are dealing with an art form which has a specular dimension. The many Abigails of the stage have no doubt contributed to the unacknowledged view of Abigail as siren/witch that so many critics have.In Jed Harriss original production in 1953, in Millers own production of the same year (to which the later excised scene was first added), and in Laurence Oliviers 1965 production, Abigail was contend by an actress in her twenties, not a young girl. The intent on each directors part had to have been to make Abigails lust for John believable. one-on-one performers have consistently enacted the sirens role The eyes of Madeleine Sherwood, who played Abigail in 1953, glowed with lust but Perhaps the most impressive Abigail has been that of Sarah Miles in 1965. A plaguingly sexy compartmentalization of beauty and crossness Miles reeks with the cunning of curb evil and steams with the promise of suppressed passion. 23 Only the 1980 production of The Crucible by Bill Bryden active girls who looked even younger than seventeen. Dukore suggests that Brydens solution to the fact that Johns seduction of a jejune girl half his age appears not to have impressed critics as a major fault was ingenious yet (now that he has done it) obvious. 24 Abigail is not the only witch in Millers play, though Elizabeth, too, is a ha g. But it is Elizabeth who is most in need of feminist reader-repurchase.If John is pocket-size as Christian hero by a feminist deconstruction, the fall is necessary to a balanced reading of the play and to a rewrite mythopoeia of the paternalistic monotheism of the Puritans and its twentieth-century equivalent, the existential mysticism of Miller. Johns sense of guilt is intended by Miller to act as salve to any emotional injuries given his wife and his own sense of right and wrong. When his conscience cannot be calmed, when he quakes at doing what he knows must be done in revealing Abigails deceit, it is upon Elizabeth that he turns his temper Spare me You forget nothin and forgive nothin.Learn charity, woman. I have gone angle in this house all seven month since she is gone. I have not moved from there to there without I think to select you, and still an everlasting funeral marches round your heart. I cannot speak but I am doubted, every moment judged for lies, as though I come into a court when I come into this house. (54-55) What we are meant to read as understandably defensive angerthat is if we read within the patriarchal framework in which the play is writtenmust be re-evaluated such a reading must be done in the fall down of Elizabeths logicparadoxically, the only cold thing about her.She is right when she turns his anger back on him with the magistrate sits in your heart that judges you (55). She is also right on two other counts. First, John has a faulty instinct of young girls. There is a promise made in any bed (61). The uninitiated and obviously self-punishing Abigail may be excused for mentation as she does (once again in the excised scene) that he is singing secret hallelujahs that his wife will hang (152) Second, John does retain some tender feelings for Abigail despite his indignation.Elizabeths question reverberates with insight if it were not Abigail that you must go to abide, would you falter now? I think not (54). John has alr eady admitted to Abigailand to usin the first act that I may think of you softly from time to time (23), and he does look at her with the faintest suggestion of a sagacious smile on his face (21). And Johns use of rimed images of Elizabeth and their home in Act TwoIts overwinter in her yet (51)echoes the resourcefulness used by Abigail in Act wiz. 25 John is to Abigail no wintry man, but one whose heat has drawn her to her window to see him look up (23).She is the one who describes Elizabeth as a cold, snivelling woman (24), but it is Millers favoured imagery for a stereotypically frigid wife who is no less a witch (in patriarchal lore) than a hot-blooded sperm-stealer like Abigail. Exacerbating all of this is the fact that John lies to Elizabeth about having been alone with Abigail in Parriss house Miller would have us believe that John lies to save Elizabeth pain, but I believe he lies out of a rationalizing habit that he carries forward to his death. Miller may want to be k ind to Elizabeth, but he cannot cope that and Johns heroism, too.Act Two opens with Elizabeth as hearth angel singing softly wing to the children who are, significantly, never seen in the play, and bringing John his supperstewed rabbit which, she says, it hurt my heart to strip (50). But in the space of four pages Miller upbraids her six times. First, John is not quite pleased (49) with the taste of Elizabeths stew, and before she appears on stage he adds salt to it. Second, there is a accepted disappointment (50) for John in the way Elizabeth receives his kiss. Third, Johns request for Cider? made as gently as he can (51) leaves Elizabeth reprimanding herself for having forgot (51). Fourth, John reminds Elizabeth of the cold atmosphere in their house You ought to bring flowers in the house Its winter in here yet (51). Fifth, John perceives Elizabeths melancholy as something unending I think youre grim again (51, emphasis added). And sixth, and in a more overtly condemning moo d, John berates Elizabeth when he discovers that she has allowed Mary Warren to go to Salem to testify It is a fault, it is a fault, Elizabethyoure the mistress here (52).Cumulatively, these criticisms work to arouse almsgiving for a man who would season his meal, his home, and his amour, a man who is meant to appeal to us because of his sensual consciousness of springs erotic promise Its warm as blood beneath the clods (50), and I never see such a load of flowers on the earth. Lilacs have a empurpled smell. Lilac is the smell of nightfall (51). We, too, are seasoned to believe that John really does aim to please Elizabeth, and that Elizabeth is relentless in her admonishing of John for his affair, of which she is knowledgeable.It is for John that we are to feel sympathy when he says, Let you look to your own improvement before you go to judge your husband more (54). Miller has informed us of several(prenominal) ways in which Elizabeth could improve herself. Neil Carson claims t hat Miller intends the audience to view Proctor ironically in this scene Proctor, he says, is a man who is rationalising in order to avoid facing himself, and at the beginning of Act Two Proctor is as guilty as any of projecting his own faults onto others. 26 While I find much in Carsons entire chapter on The Crucible as nice a criticism of the play as any written, I am still uncomfortable about the fact that a tragic victory for the protagonist27 necessarily means an introduction of guilt for his wifeonce again, it seems to me, a victim is being blamed. No critic, not even Carson, questions Millers insistence that Elizabeth is at least partly to blame for Johns infidelity. Her fate is sealed in the lie she tells for love of her husband because she proves him a liar as in All My Sons, says critic Leonard Moss, a woman inadvertently betrays her husband. 28 John has told several lies throughout the play, but it is Elizabeths lie that the critics (and Miller) settle upon, for once a gain the lie fits the stereotypewoman as liar, woman as schemer, woman as witch sealing the fate of man the would-be hero. But looked at another way, Elizabeth is not a liar. The question put to her by taste Danforth is Is present tense your husband a lecher (113). Elizabeth can in good conscience respond in the negative for she knows the affair to be over. She has no desire to condemn the man who has betrayed her, for she believes John to be nothing but a good man nly somewhat bewildered (55). Once again, though, her comment condemns her because an audience hears (and Miller by chance intends) condescension on her part. The patriarchal reading is invited by Johns ironic response Oh, Elizabeth, your justice would freeze beer (55). What seems to be happening is that Goody Proctor is turned into a goody two-shoes, a voice of morality. Why we should expect anything else of Elizabeth, raised within a Puritan society and a living example of its valued good woman, escapes me.I find i t amazing that the same rules made but not obeyed by good men can be used to condemn the women who do adhere to them. The other thing which Miller and the critics seem unwilling to acknowledge is the hurt that Elizabeth feels over Johns subversiveness instead, her anger, elicited not specifically about the affair but about the incident with the poppet, following hard upon the knowledge of Giles Coreys wife having been taken, is evidence that she is no good woman. Her language condemns her Abigail is murder She must be ripped out of the world (76).Anger in woman, a danger of which Ecclesiastes warns, has been cause for locking her up for centuries. by and by Elizabeths incarceration, and without her persistent logic, Miller is able to focus on John and his sense of failure. But Elizabeths last words as she is taken from her home are about the children When the children wake, speak nothing of witchcraftit will frighten them. She cannot go on. Tell the children I have gone to visit someone sick (77-78). I find it strange that Johns similar concerns when he has torn up the confessionI have three childrenhow may I apprise them to walk like men in the world, and I sold my riends? (143)should be valued above Elizabeths. Is it because the children are boys? Is it because Elizabeth is expected to react in the enatic fashion that she does, but for John to respond thus is a sign of sensitive masculinity? Is it because the communal as defined by the raillery is threatened by the integrity of women? And why is maintaining a name more important than living? At least alive he might attend to his childrens daily needsafter all, we are told about the sad situation of the orphans walking from house to house (130). 9 It would be choppy to argue that John does not sufferthat, after all, is the point of the play. But what of Elizabeths suffering? She is about to lose her husband, her children are without parents, she is sure to be condemned to death as well. Miller must, once again, diminish the threat that Elizabeth offers to Johns martyrdom, for he has created a woman who does not lie, who her husband believes would not give the court the admission of guilt if tongs of fire were singeing her (138).Millers play about the life and death struggle for a mans soul, cannot be threatened by a womans struggle. In order to control his character, Miller impregnates her. The court will not time an unborn child, so Elizabeth does not have to make a choice. Were she to strike to die without wavering in her decision, as both John and Miller think she would, she would be a threat to the outcome of the play and the sympathy which is supposed to accrue to John.Were she to make the decision to live, for the reasons which Reverend Hale stresses, that Life, woman, life is Gods most precious gift no principle, however glorious, may let off the taking of it (132), she would undermine existential integrity with compromise. I am not reading another version of The Cruc ible, one which Miller did not intend, but rather looking at the assumptions inherent in his intentions, assumptions that Miller seems oblivious(predicate) to and which his critics to date have questioned far too little.I, too, can read the play as a psychological and ethical contest which no one wins, and of which it can be said that both John and Elizabeth are expressions of men and women with all their failings and nobility, but I am troubled by the fact that Elizabeth is seldom granted even that much, that so much is made of Elizabeths complicity in Johns adultery, and that the victim of Johns virility,30 Abigail, is blamed because she is evil and/or mad. I do want to question the gender stereotypes in the play nd in the criticism that has been written about it. Let me indulge finally for a moment in another kind of criticism, one that is a fictionalization, or more precisely, a crypto-friction that defies stratifications of canonical thought and transgresses generic boundarie s of drama/fiction and criticism. 31 Like Virginia Woolf I would like to speculate on a play written by a fictional sister to a famous playwright. Let us call Arthur Millers wide-eyed younger sister, who believes she can counter a scopic economy by stepping beyond the mirror, Alice Miller.In Alices play, Elizabeth and John suffer equally in a domestic task which is exacerbated by the furor around them. John does not try to intimidate Elizabeth with his anger, and she is not draw as cold or condescending. Abigail is a victim of an older mans lust and not inherently a bad girl she is not beautiful or if she is the playwright does not make so much of it. Her work out of witches would be explained by wiser critics as the result of her fear and her confusion, not her lust.There is no effort made in Alices play to create a hero at the expense of the female characters, or a heroine at the expense of a male character. John is no villain, butas another male victim/hero character, created by a woman, describes himselfa trite, commonplace sinner,32 trying to right a wrong he admitswithout blaming others. Or, here is another version, written by another, more radical f(r)ictional sister, Mary Miller, a real hag. In it, all the witches celebrate the death of John Proctor.The idea comes from two sources first, a question from a female educatee who wanted to know if part of Elizabeths motivation in not pressure sensation her husband to confess is her desire to pay him back for his betrayal and second, from a response to Jean-Paul Sartres ending for the film Les Sorcieres de Salem. In his 1957 version of John Proctors story, Sartre identifies Elizabeth with the God of prohibiting sex and the God of judgment, but he has her save Abigail, who tries to break John out of jail and is in danger of being hanged as a traitor too, because Elizabeth realizes she loved John. As the film ends, Abigail stands shocked in a new understanding. 33 In Mary Millers version Elizabeth is no t set with the male God of the Word, but with the goddesses of old forced into hiding or hanged because of a renaissance of patriarchal ideology. Marys witches come together, alleged seductress and cold wife alike, not for love of a man who does not deserve either, but to celebrate life and their victory over male character, playwright, and critics, men in power ho create and identify with the roles of both the victimizers and the victims, men who Mary Miller would suggest vicariously enjoyed the womens suffering. 34 Notes 1. Arthur Miller, The Crucible (New York, 1981), 137. The play was originally make in 1953, but all further references to The Crucible are to the 1981 Penguin form, and will be noted parenthetically in the text. 2. June Schlueter and James K. Flanagan, Arthur Miller (New York, 1987), 68. 3. Neil Carson, Arthur Miller (New York, 1982), 61. 4. Sandra Kemp, But how describe a world seen without self? Feminism, fiction and modernism, Critical quarterly 321 (1990) , 99-118 104. 5. Millers interest in the Salem witchcraft trials predated his confrontation with McCarthyism (see E. Miller Budick, History and Other Spectres in The Crucible, Arthur Miller, ed. Harold Bloom (New York, 1987), 127-28, but it is also clear from the Introduction to Millers Collected Plays Vol 1 (New York, 1957) that he capitalized upon familiar response and critical commentary which linked the two. Miller has been, it seems, a favoured critic on the subject of Arthur Miller. 6. In 1929 George L.Kittredge published a work called witchcraft in Old and New England (Cambridge) in which he remarked that the doctrines of our forefathers differed in regard to witchcraft from the doctrines of the Roman and Anglican Church in no essentialone may safely add, in no particular (21). In GynEcology The Metaethics of ascendent Feminism (Boston, 1978), Mary Daly says that during the European witch burningsshe does not deal with the Salem witch trialsProtestants vied with and even ma y have surpassed their catholic counterparts in their zeal and cruelty (185-86). . Cited by Peter Conrad and Joseph W. Schneider, Deviance and Medicalization From Badness to Sickness, expanded edition (Philadelphia, 1992), 42. 8. Chris Weedon, Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory (Oxford, 1987), 30-31. 9. Nineteen women and men and two dogs were hanged, one man was pressed to death for refusing to plead, and 150 were imprisoned (see Schlueter and Flanagan, 72). 10. Remembering the Witches, Our Blood Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics (London, 1982), 16-17.See also the 1990 National Film Board production, The yearning Times, directed by Donna Read, which declares the European executions for witchcraft to have been a womens holocaust. Of the nine million people the film numbers among the burned, hanged, or otherwise accustomed of, 85 per cent, it reports, were women. 11. The Burning Times discusses at length the place of women healers in Third-World cultures. 1 2. From Hawkinss reappraisal of the play in File on Miller, ed. Christopher Bigsby (London, 1988), 30. 3. Leonard Moss, Arthur Miller (New York, 1967), 60, 63. 14. Schlueter and Flanagan, 69. 15. Bernard Dukore, termination of a Salesman and The Crucible Text and Performance (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire and London, 1989), 50. 16. Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, New French Feminisms An Anthology, ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (Amherst, 1980), 101. 17. The only critic I have read who has made comments even remotely similar to my own regarding Abigail is Neil Carson.In a 1982 book he remarks that Abigail is portrayed as such an obviously bad piece of goods that it takes a clear-eyed French critic to point out that Proctor was not only twice the age of the girl he seduced, but as her employer he was breaking a double trust (75). Despite his insight, when it comes to explaining the effect of Millers omission of detail regarding the early stages of the aff air, he does not, I think, realize its full implications.He says that Proctors sense of guilt seems a little forced and perhaps not really justified, but I think the choice was deliberately made so as to minimize Johns guilt and emphasize his redemption as an existential man. Conversely, Abigail is more easily targeted (as the critics prove) for her active role in her seduction. 18. Daly, 187. 19. Carol Billman (Women and the Family in American Drama, Arizona Quarterly 36 1 1980, 35-48) discusses the study of everyman made in the family dramas of ONeill, Williams, Albee, and Miller (although she does not mention The Crucible) women ecessarily occupy a central position, but little attention is paid to their subordination or suffering. Linda Loman and I would add Elizabeth Proctor suffers at least as much as her husband (36-7). Victoria Sullivan and James Hatch, as well, have complained about the standards of review a complaining female protagonist is automatically less statuesque than Stanley Kowalski or Willy Loman only men suffer greatly (quoted in Billman, 37, emphasis added). 20. Carson, 66.In a play that is historically accurate in so many ways, it is significant to note that the affair between John and Abigail was invented by Miller (Dukore, 43). 21. Conrad and Schneider, 43. 22. I think that whether or not one sees the irony as intentional on Abbys part, she becomes more sympathetic. If intentional we can agree with her realization that Johns hypocrisy was least when he was seducing her he is a commonplace lecher. If Abigail is not cognizant of the consequence of the irony of what she is saying, then she truly is too youngor too emotionally disturbedto understand the implications of what she is doing.Carson again comes close to making a very astute judgment about Abigails awareness of events going on around her It seems clear that we are to attribute at least a little of Abbys wildness and sensuality to her relationship with John, and to assume that the knowledge which Proctor put in Abigails heart is not simply carnal, but also includes some awareness of the hypocrisy of some of the Christian women and covenanted men of the community (68). Carsons insight, however, is limited by his belief in the radical side of Proctors nature, something with which modern audiences are sure to identify.The problem here is that the focus is once more removed from Abigails plight to her vicarious participation in one more of John Proctors admirable traits, for his is not a simple personality like that of Rebecca Nurse (68). 23. Dukore, 102. 24. Ibid. , 95. 25. One critic, who celebrates Johns playfulness and who does not want his description of John as a liar to be taken in a pejorative sense, suggests that John and Abigail share a kindred spirit The physical attractiveness of Abby for John Proctor is obvious in the play, ut, I think, so is the passionate whim which finds its outlet in one way in her and in another in Proctor (William T. List on, John Proctors Playing in The Crucible, Midwest Quarterly A Journal of Contemporary Thought 204 (1979), 394-403 403). John is a liarthat is part of his guiltand to suggest that Abigail offers John something that Elizabeth does not condemns Elizabeth and exonerates John even more than Miller intends. 26. Carson, 69-70. 27. Ibid. , 75. 28. Leonard Moss, Arthur Miller, revised edition (Boston, 1980), 40, emphasis added. 29.I think it significant that the orphans are but one of the soft-witted possessions unattended to in Salem. The next part of the same sentence mentions abandon cattle bellowing and rotted crops stinking. Miller has described a material and contemporary world. 30. Richard Hayes, Hysteria and Ideology in The Crucible, Twentieth Century Interpretations of The Crucible, ed. John H. Ferres (Englewood Cliffs, 1972), 34. I find it interesting and instructive that a 1953 review of the play uses the term to describe Arthur Kennedys portrayal of John Proctor. 31. Aritha Va n Herk, In gross Ink (crypto-frictions) (Edmonton, 1991), 14. 2. Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre (Harmondsworth, 1984), 160. 33. Eric Mottram, Jean-Paul Sartres Les Sorcieres de Salem, Twentieth Century Interpretations of The Crucible, 93, 94. 34. Daly, 215. Source Citation Schissel, Wendy. Re(dis)covering the Witches in Arthur Millers The Crucible A Feminist Reading. Modern Drama 37. 3 (Fall 1994) 461-473. Rpt. in Drama Criticism. Vol. 31. Detroit Gale, 2008. Literature Resource Center. Web. 27 July 2011. Document URL http//go. galegroup. com/ps/i. do? &id=GALE%7CH1420082425&v=2. 1&u=uq_stpatricks&it=r&p=LitRC&sw=w Gale Document Number GALEH1420082425