Arthur Miller's "The Crucible'*:

Tragdey or Allegory?
PHILLIP WALKER*

: HUNTING as an American pastime Is generally regarded as a legacy

from the Puritans of Seventeenth Century New England. This attitude is justified
in the popular mind by the notorious Salem witch hunt of 1692, which, beginning
with the hysterical accusations of a group of young girls, ultimately resulted in the
execution of twenty people as witches. Contrary to common belief, however, the
Salem witchcraft hysteria was not primarily a violent expression of the repressive
doctrines of the puritan sect and the bigotry of its adherents. It was, rather, an
explosion resulting from the collision of several impersonal social forces among
which Puritanism was oniy a minor element. It was a tragedy in which there were
no heroes or villains, in which the accused and the accusers were victimized with
equal blamelessness.^
The elements of conflict, however, in such a situation are too vast, too amor-
phous, to be either confined or defined without some qualification within the
rigidly prescribed limits of a play. It was necessary, therefore, that Arthur Miller,
in using the historical incident as the basis of his play. The Crucible, narrow the
conflict and, more important, define it in terms that could be effectively communi-
cated in the theatre. This he dfd, offering his major character, John Proctor, as an
embryonic philosophical liberal who was victimized by the witch hunt because of
his more or less conscious opposition to Puritanism, whereas his historical counter-
part, and most of the others accused of witchcraft in Seventeenth Century Salem,
believed in Puritanism with an intensity equal to that of their accusers and
judges.^ Proctor, furthermore, is burdened by the author with an intolerable
conviction of guilt in relation to his wife, because of a marital infidelity, antece-
dent to the play's beginning, committed with the girl, Abigail Williams, who
ultimately accuses him of witchcraft, and whose age, due to this dramatic embel-
lishment, has been raised from eleven to seventeen years.^ Also, there is no histor-
ical evidence that the real John Proctor ever confessed to witchcraft. Finally, the

Mr. Walker is Assistant Professor of Speech at Fresno State College.

1 For a complete discussion of the Salem witch hunt and its causes see George Lyman
Kittredge, Witchcraft in Old and New England (Cambridge, Mass.; Harvard University Press,
1929), and Marion L. Starkey, The Devil in Massachusetts (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1949).
2 Kittredge, op. dt., p. 373.
3 Euphemia Van Rensselaer Wyatt, Catholic World, 176:465-6, March, 1953.
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accusers and judges of the play are motivated on the basis of conscious malevo-
lence rather than, as in the actual event, an unthinking emotional paroxysm on
the part of the afEicted girls and, on the part of the judges, an honest desire to
carry through to a logical and just conclusion the dictates of their ideology and
the laws of evidence. Thus, in the play, Abigail Williams, the leader of the accus-
ing girls, is prompted primarily by her lust for John Proctor, hatred of his wife,
and a general resentment toward the respectable people of the town, and Reverend
Parris, the local pastor, and Deputy Governor Danforth, the Judge, by the desire
for and the fear of losing personal prestige and power. These motivations, of
course, might have been present in some of the historical figures of whom Miller's
characters are the representation, but they were not, as in the play, of predominant
importance.
Such departures from fact, undertaken as they are for the purpose of personi-
fying conflict, are, of course, not only excusable, but are representative of sound
dramaturgy. The only criticism that can be leveled justly in this regard is that
Miller did not go far enough. In other words, the action of the play is not suffi-
ciently reenforced by personal character motivation to establish Proctor's soul at
the center of the conflict. At first glance, to be sure, the play seems to be a tragedy
in the classic sense and the action primarily concerned with the personal problems
of John Proctor. But further consideration leads one to a recognition of an appar-
ent duality in the action between Proctor's personal tragedy and a political polemic
in dramatic form, in which Proctor is nothing more than a hollow though major
symbol in a dramatic allegory concerning McCarthyism.
The same confusion is present in the delineation of Deputy Governor Dan-
forth, The potentialities as a tragic antagonist with which the author has attempted
to invest this character, as well as those of the historical models from which that
character has been drawn, are clearly apparent, but, in actual performance, the
Deputy Governor emerges as pretty much of a cardboard villain,* and once again
the audience is placed in the dilemma, this one three horned, of determining
whether Danforth is a tragic antagonist, a symbol of one aspect of McCarthyism,
or simply a "ten-twent-thirt" villain.^
The play, then, does not achieve full identity as either a personal tragedy or
a political allegory but, rather, contains within itself the unfulfilled characteristics
of both. That a play can achieve fulfillment as both an allegory and a tragedy is
indisputable, but an essential fact to recognize is that the fulfillment of each can-
not be simultaneous. Just as two objects cannot occupy the same space at the same
moment, a play cannot at the same moment be received as both an allegory and a
tragedy. Miller's more successful play. The Death of a Salesman, is a case in
point. That this play may be accepted as both the personal tragedy of Willie

4 Richard Watts Junior, New York. Post, January 23, 1953.

5 Almost without exception the New York drama critics chose the last alternative, although
Walter Hampden, in his pertornance of the role, was more consistently praised than any other actor.
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Loman and a preachment against the f alsitj' of some aspects of capitalist ideology
is beyond question, but one can only contemplate the play as it fulfills each of
these two ftinctions from mutually exclusive vantage points, the first frotn that of
empathic stibjectivity as you watch Willie's travail from your seat in the darkened
theatre, and the second from that of analytical objectivity as you rehash the play
on yotir way home from the show. The trotible with The Crucible is that neither
the tragic nor the allegorical aspects of the play are sufficiently developed to be
mutually exclusive; neither is strong enough to exclude the other from one's
consciousness. As a result, one is left hovering in the no-man's-land between alle-
gory and tragedy, between objectivity and subjectivity, between thought and emo-
tion, never sure whether a particular line is to be accepted on its own emotional
terms or as a cryptic comment on the activities of Wisconsin's Junior Senator.
This confusion of function seems to mirror the author's own indecision con-
cerning the import of his play. On one hand. Miller has repeatedly denied any
allegorical intentions and has even excluded from The Crucible certain historical
facts because of the symbolical inferences that might be drawn from them^ and,
on the other hand, as a part of a lengthy interpolation into the text of the play's
published edition, has drawn a parallel between the plot and contemporary polit-
ical problems.''
'This confusion between allegory and tragedy cannot be resolved by the
semantic trick of calling the play an allegorical tragedy or that oi Mr. Milier in
characterizing the play as "the tragedy of a whole society." It only can be resolved
by firmly establishing, throtigh skillful staging, an empathic relationship between
John Proctor and the audience of such strength and intensity that at no moment
dtiring the course of any performance will a connection be established between
the Saiem of 1692 and the Washington of 1954. The audience will have plenty
of time and opportunity for that after the final curtain.

6 Hewes, Henry, "Arthur Miller and How He 'Went to the Devi!." Saturday Review,
33: 24-6, January 31, 1953. pp. 24-5.
7 Arthur Miller, The Crucible (New York: The Viking Press, 1953), p. 34.
8 Hewes, op. dt., p. 24.

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