[It turns out that I don't have a great deal of energy tonight because of dissertationing all day, so this is a kind of 1/3 of a post I started working on. In the end it might be best I do it this way than write something a mile long anyway...]
Before I really get started on Arthur Miller's play, I want to say something about his film. I mean the adapted screenplay he wrote of The Crucible (and won an Oscar for in 1996) and which stared (the brilliant) Daniel Day Lewis and Winona Ryder. I've seen it a couple of times and I think its rather snazzy. Lewis made me love John Proctor: he makes him a nigh-on perfect tragic hero on a beautiful arc of self-loathing and redemption. And there's lots of tear-jerking pathos at the end. Having read the play in its original though, without the blood-tingling acting, I'm not so sure what I think about Proctor or the pathos; if there is any one single part of this month's Alexandria book club that brings me into conflict, it's this. How the moving narrative I know is tempered and changed and made different by the colder, clearer experience of reading it... (I suppose this is often the experience of reading plays/scripts and watching them brought to life...) In many ways I feel this has made me see it and know it better... So, anyway...here are my immediate thoughts on The Crucible in a freeflow, note-taking kind of way.
First, I think I want to do what Nic has done and think about the historical setting. So I went off and sought out The Truth, or rather The Facts as far as we Know Them. As far as I can see the general outline of what happened in Salem in 1692 is all in The Crucible and the names of characters are the names of the real historical actors. However, and this strikes me as very significant to reading the play, Miller's central plot device - Abigail's adultery with John Proctor - has no grounding in reality. Indeed, if it had it would have been a little icky since Abby was 11 at the time of the real trials and John well into his sixties. See how that changes the whole dynamic of a) the Salem witch trials and b) The Crucible? What Miller does in foregrounding sexual repression and jealousy as the basis of Abby's wild accusations is all a contrivance. It's a good conceit and it works well, at least partly because it feeds into what we know about a particularly repressive Puritan morality that considered most sexuality as a sinful abberation. But when you think about it it's also a very provactive move on Miller's part. For a start it re-raises those difficult questions about fictionalising historical individuals that Nic and I toyed with in these posts. Then it does something we're almost uninclined to expect: it plays on the stereotypes of women and witches that Miller apparently debunks. He makes the story of the Salem trials sexier, more nubile and more controversial than it is, and he does it *despite* the materials already sensational character. In fact... all those books about fear of women's "dangerous" sexuality being the root of the witch-hunt craze of the 17th century? Miller writes that theory large in his play. He makes it true , although in a different way to how historians imagined it. They have posited that men, feeling threatened by the independence of certain females (widows, spinsters etc), imagined them as fiendish and hurtful; many accusations made against "witches" were sexual in nature - dancing naked, have sex with the devil, being pleasured by animals. Miller kind of reworks these anxieties, making his sexualised female (Abby) into the accuser rather than the accused and in doing so kind of reasserts the "truthfulness" of her dangerous taboo. I'm not at all sure that he did it consciously. Which could very easily lead into a negative feminist reading of the play as deeply mysogynist (e.g. instead of rescuing the reputation of the female victims of the trials, he focuses on a man...a man who is a victim of rampant feminine desire...). I think you could make quite a good argument for Miller's writing Abby as exactly the kind of "witch" or "devil" that the original Salemites envisioned - someone who uses the power of their will, the vulnerability of others and the sexual power of their body to unleash mayhem? So perhaps there are witches in Miller's Salem, just not how you'd suspect? I'll step back from that a little, but I'm interested in other people's thoughts on this. How does the play pander to or deny historical/biblical stereotypes about witches and witch-hunting?
Moving away from Abby I want to talk a little about Elizabeth, John's wife. I found her far more interesting in the written play than I did in the film version. There she seems clingy and very cold, whereas I found her both moving and incisive in book form. In many ways she seemed to me a much better person than John and far braver too. Thoughts?
Finally for tonight: is Proctor's decision to hang at the end really a heroic act (as the film suggests; I'm not sure the play does), or, like Hale says, just pride and vanity? I certainly think you could read it the latter way (I'm not saying I do yet, only that you could)....you could see Elizabeth's statement at the end as a very bitter one. "He has his goodness now. God forbid I should take it from him"...as in the idea of his potential goodness that he's always had, which seems to me rather superficial. He is prepared to give his soul (as he says) for the lie in his confession but not his name? He'll sign the paper in that room with the judges, but he doesn't want anyone to know...and it's not that he's afraid the people of Salem will think he's a "witch" but that he'll look bad having not had the courage to die with the others maintaining he wasn't one. Elizabeth is very interesting in that final act too - she says again and again that she can't make his decision for him. She wants him to do what is right for himself. Or does she? All through the play it seemed to me that what she wants is for him to give up what's right for him in the name of what is simply right. He won't do it earlier in the play when he could have revealed Abby's deceit by revealing his own sin and in the end he can't do it either. He can't give up his reputation - evidently the thing that means most to him - for his wife and their unborn child. He nearly does it, but in the end he can't face the thought of the humiliation. And so although what he does in the end seems like a stand for justice, I don't think we can read it so simply as that...
Oh and yes, Miller's interjections *were* really annoying! Thank goodness he stopped inserting them after the first Act. :-)
~~Victoria~~