We have yet to break free of the mentality of salem

Review of The Crucible by Arthur Miller.

Although I saw the film adaptation of The Crucible upon its release over twenty years’ ago, I have never seen it performed on stage, and it is only during this past week that I finally got around to reading a copy of its script. Whereas many now read this piece in school, it was not on the curriculum all those aeons ago when I studied O Level English, but as a piece of vintage Americana, I certainly preferred this creation of Miller’s to what we had to read at the time: Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men.

Miller’s script is powerful, and taut, with the language of its characters providing a plausible facsimile of the forms of English that would have been spoken in late seventeenth-century New England. It succeeds in generating an atmosphere that is suffused with religious mania, sexual tension and bitter personal rivalries, with the tenor and pace of the play being such, that the reader is left feeling emotionally drained at its conclusion.  

The Crucible is quite rightly lauded as a classic for its portrayal of a tightly-knit community in the grip of religiously-inspired hysteria, but although it is closely based upon the historical witch-hunt and trials that took place in Salem Massachusetts in 1692, Miller made it clear from the outset that this work was intended to possess a wider political resonance. His specific intent was to draw parallels with the paranoia of McCarthyism that then held its malign sway over much of US society, with its frenzied hunt for Reds under seemingly every bed. But these observations were not intended to be restricted to the parochial political situation in America in the early years of the Cold War, for they are applicable to any society in which the maintenance of the social order rests upon a framework of values that has at its core a definable ‘other’ against which it defines itself. Thus Miller noted that both the countries of the Communist bloc and capitalist America, possessed opposing contemporary forms of ‘diabolism’, in which citizens in both societies were enjoined to search for signs of the demonic other. In either social system, the simple act of naming, and then accusing, the alleged deviant – Communist or Capitalist – could be enough to destroy the reputation, and livelihood, of the accused. Accusation proved guilt.

Alas, as you might well observe, the situation today is in many regards but little changed, for although the demonological discourses may now run in different channels, employing different labels and expressing different preferences, the psychological and social mechanisms at play remain essentially unaltered. The ‘righteous’ perceive that the world is out of joint with their ideology, and they then seek to change it so that it is brought into conformity. This they attempt to achieve by hunting for those whom they deem to be impure, following the well-trodden path of select, name, stigmatise, accuse, judge and destroy. In America in particular, and to a lesser extent in the UK, a debased and perverted form of liberalism now reigns, which is anything but liberal, characterised by a pathological obsession with identity politics and collective group ‘rights’, rather than the rights of the individual. There is a great crying out for all to join in the chorus of the ‘righteous’, whatever cause they may espouse at a given time, and if anyone does not do so, they are immediately placed under suspicion, for the ‘righteous’ see in this reticence a sign of their diabolical complicity.

And so, we have yet I am afraid, to break free of the mentality of Salem, for all too often, accusation is taken to be synonymous with guilt. We have need of greater scepticism, rather than of greater faith.

Miller’s play may be previewed and purchased by clicking here.