Part of the recently constructed Witch Trial Memorial, Salem Massachusetts

Arthur Miller's The Crucible: A Fable for Adults

We could restate my reply to the last objection raised in Fable in the following way. The fable most likely originated in practical discourse and, in that setting, served as a more or less overtly analogical argument that what practical in nature, in the sense that it served mainly to influence human action. The literary fable is inevitably different from oral fable in important ways but, because of the constraints of the genre, it is mainly of practical interest, and has this practical interest as part of an analogical line of reasoning.

Of course, this is simply an observation about one literary genre: the fable. As it is usually understood, this is a rather peculiar genre, seemingly remote from the interests of sophisticated adult readers. Do my comments in the preceding section apply to adult literature?

I will put my answer to this question in terms of a distinction. A fable is any narrative that (and to the extent that it) serves as the first case in an analogical argument. An Aesopian fable is a brief, pithy fable which makes a relatively simple, primarily practical point about the conduct of human affairs.⁽¹⁾

With this distinction in hand, we are able to see that fables or, perhaps more accurately, narratives with pronounced fabulist elements, are both widespread and important in the literature that sophisticated adults read. We will see many examples of this later in this book, but a skeptical readers might need something now in the way of empirical confirmation for this sweeping claim if they are to have the heart to read on. I hope a brief discussion of a single clear example will help. It will also help us to see some of the interesting differences between fabulist writing for adults and its primitive Aesopian ancestors.

Arthur Miller's The Crucible is a clear instance of a fable, and, in fact, has rather prominent Aesopian (in my sense of that word) elements. The printed text comes close to having an overt moral in the form of a pointed epilogue ("Echoes Down the Corridor")⁽²⁾ plus rather long (and, to some critics, annoying)⁽³⁾ author's notes interpolated into the text. As seems to be the case with the morals in Aesop, these comments were late additions. This work also has another point of contact with Aesop in its pronounced concern with a practical issue: as is well known, Miller wrote his play about witch-hunting in old Salem because he was concerned about and, indeed, personally affected, by the anti-Communist "witch-hunts" that were raging at the time that the play was first produced (1953).

A cursory look at the play shows that its actual meaning is considerably broader than that. As the play begins, some girls the village have been seen dancing in the forest by an ultra-orthodox, politically embattled Minister, Reverend Parris. They were not simply dancing, however. With them is the slave girl, Tituba, who is using the voodoo practices she has brought with her from Barbados. We later learn that one of the girls, Abigail Williams, drank frog's blood in order to magically bring about the death of Elizabeth Proctor, the wife of a former lover, John Proctor, with whom she remains obsessed. In out terms, what most of the girls are doing there is innocent enough but, in their terms, such practices constitute witchcraft, a capital offence. After being caught, two of the girls, including Parris's ten-year-old daughter, fall into a bizarre sort of stupor. Their trances are probably feigned, but it is several days before they seem to wake from them. The Reverend John Hale, a reputed expert on witchcraft brought in for the purpose, interrogates Tituba. She is told that she could be hung for witchcraft, but Hale assures her she will be spared if she confesses. She quickly does so, and upon being asked to name other witches, gives them several names. The girls take advantage of the same course of action, claiming to be the pitiable victims of the schemes of various witches they name, and within hours many women are being rounded up.

A panel of distinguished judges is convened and the trials grind on for days. The Proctors hear that someone, no doubt Abigail, has been accusing Elizabeth of practicing the arts of Satan. John Proctor knows Abigail's real motive, but would be very difficult to expose it without revealing his own adulterous affair with her, thus publicly disgracing both himself and the wife he wants to save. Abigail finally finds an accusation the judges find plausible, and Elizabeth is arrested, as are several other respectable women.

John's efforts to save his wife focus on their servant, Mary Warren, who has joined in the accusations. She admits to him that the accusations, as well as their various symptoms of being under enchantment, are "pretense" aimed to cover up the scene in the forest. In court, though, she begins to falter as it appears the judges do not believe her, and as the girls close ranks and accuse her of bewitching them. Realizing that it is his only recourse left, John reveals his illicit relationship with Abigail. But when Elizabeth is questioned separately, she denies it, thinking that she is protecting her husband. Mary turns on John and, protecting herself, accuses John of working for the Devil. John is arrested.

Miller skillfully invests this course of events with a sense of near-inevitable calamity. It becomes clear, even before the denouement, that Proctor's position is an all but impossible one. Partly, Miller achieves this impression by indicating, through the motives of his characters, the power and sheer number of reasons one can have for participating in witch-hunting hysteria. As we watch these extraordinary events unfold, the narrative is set up to make several explanations for their general tendency very plausible and gripping. One woman has lost seven of her eight children in early infancy, and will feel better about it if there is someone she can blame. Her husband would be glad to acquire land by taking advantage of the fact that the families of executed witches lose their rights to their convicted relative's property. Most importantly, the girls find that making accusations enables them to deflect onto others whatever guilt might belong to them. It also gives them enormous amounts of something that these girls have never had in any quantity before: social status and power. Overnight, Abigail's reputation has transmuted from that of a sexually loose girl to something of a saint.

These powerful sources of motivation on the part Proctor's adversaries, however, are only part of the available explanation for the terrible difficulty of his position. A more important part can be found in certain other obstacles Miller builds in the way of anyone who would try to resist the hysteria, ones which tend to impair the motivation of the resisters themselves. As one of the witch-hunters points out, witchcraft is a particular sort of offense, one that is invisible except to two people: the witch and the victim. This simple fact is a good part of the reason why the relation between accuser and accused, ordinarily an asymmetrical one, is much more intensely and profoundly so in cases of alleged witchcraft. For here the accuser always enjoys the prestige that attaches to the apparent victim: the appearance of the pitiable, of the worthy-of-protection. In the context of a moral code in which pity is a cardinal virtue, this can be an intimidatingly powerful advantage. The accusation is also convincing evidence that one's own values are the right ones, that one stands against this invisible crime and in favor of that which is good. This is important because a good part of this invisible crime simply consists in having the wrong values, of accepting a repulsively inverted morality. Indeed, it is partly for this reason that the crime is invisible.

These are reasons why the position of the accuser is intimidatingly strong. There are others which indicate that the position of the accused is intimidatingly weak. As Miller points out in one of his interpolations, the crime alleged in the accusation is literally one of diabolical evil.⁽⁴⁾ It is a act that seems to have no sort of positive value at all, and to admit of no possibility of justification or even of excuse. The accusation, in itself, is so horrible that its merely being made seems to soil the accused person. To some extent, the odor of guilt clings to the accused, no matter what they do.

Almost the only strong protection against the accusation is to dodge the position of the accused. One way is to confess and repent. This gives public evidence of the fact that, though one was wrong before, now one is on the side of the right values, the non-inverted ones. But a much more gripping sort of evidence, and just as easy to produce, is to switch to the opposite pole of the relation between accuser and accused. One can assume the role of accuser. Then all the advantages of that position accrue to oneself. This explains why the girls first make their accusations, and of course it explains why their strategy is so successful.

It also explains why Proctor's position is more or less insupportable. This is brought home to the audience, with terrific emphasis, by the play's final scene. Persuaded by a well-meaning minister, Proctor agrees to save his life by confessing. But the judges insist that he sign a written confession, giving as their reason that his signature "will strike the village" and quiet the growing discontent with the trials.⁽⁵⁾ He refuses to let them have his signature, no doubt for the same reason that they want it. They also insist that he bear witness against condemned witches who have refused to confess, arguing that they will hang anyway and that doing so will prove his soul's "whiteness."⁽⁶⁾ He refuses, giving as his reason that he would be robbing them of what is left of their good names. There is another reason which, in view of the situation in which Proctor is caught, must strike the audience as at least as obvious: that giving spurious evidence against others will have the same effect as a signed confession, of strengthening the trials which have already killed a dozen innocent people, and which he has tried to stop. Realizing that there is no way to save himself without doing something he believes to be wrong, he retracts his confession and is hanged.

Clearly, the temptation to acquiesce in the system that Proctor is resisting, either actively or by doing nothing, is almost overwhelming. Such a system is almost impossible to resist effectively without taking measures that are literally heroic, as he does. What is most interesting for my purposes, however, is the fact that Miller's narrative is a surprisingly persuasive argument to the effect that the same thing will be true of anyone who is in a situation that has certain highly general characteristics: 1, (a) there is some reason to think that people are committing a certain offense, (b) this offense is regarded as so completely evil that people have trouble thinking clearly about it, and (c) the offense is invisible except to the perpetrator and (if any) the victim. Characteristics 1 (a) and (b) will be present in high degree, and consequently the argument will apply more strongly, to situations in which: 2, the offense consists largely, or crucially, of thoughts or desires that are regarded as repulsively twisted. Further, the dangerous consequences of characteristic 1 (c) will be greater, and once again the argument will apply more strongly, to situations in which the only evidence, or the closest thing to evidence, is the testimony of people who can present themselves as victims of the offense.

This suggests an answer to the question, which has perplexed some people, whether Miller's play is about the Salem witch-hunts or whether it is really about the "witch-hunts" of the late 'forties and early 'fifties. The answer is to be found in the fact that The Crucible is a fable in my sense of the word. The first case, the one that is stated, is about the events at Salem. If it were an oral fable, and it were somehow possible for Arthur Miller to utter his narrative in the manner of the historical Lincoln or the Aesop of legend instead of writing it as a play, the case to which he would have applied it would not doubt have been drawn from the instances of anti-Communist group hysteria then current. But of course it is a literary fable and not an oral one. The work does not include a second case. As such, insofar as it is not simply about the event in the case that it stated, its subject-matter is perfectly general. It is no more about the early fifties than it is about the many other concrete cases to which it applies. At various times and places, it can at least as well be applied to hysterical searches for interracial rapists, child abusers, atheists, sexual harassers, heretics, racists, and - the modern equivalent of the witchcraft menace - satanic cult practices.⁽⁷⁾

It is a mark of the universality of Miller's narrative that it actually applies more closely to some of these other sorts of cases than it does to the ones to which he would have applied it. The case of the Rosenbergs, which he might well have had in mind, resembles the case the Salem witches in that, like them, they could have avoided execution by confessing, but the offence of Communist espionage does not have individual victims who can step forward and inspire our pity, while most of the other offenses I just listed do.⁽⁸⁾ One of the important factors, then, that drive the collective hysteria in his narrative is missing in the anti-Communist cases, but present in many others. This could be seen as a fault in The Crucible if we see it as a play about "Macarthyism" while, if we see it as universal, it is merely an interesting fact about the phenomena themselves. This could explain the impression, which at least one observer has had, that The Crucible is actually better today than it was in 1953.⁽⁹⁾

1. Other characteristics that are customarily associated with fables - as that they involve talking animals or have explicit morals - are not necessary attributes either of fables in general or of Aesopian fables in particular. Both of these particular characteristics are typical of (though not universal among) a certain prominent body of fables that are Aesopian in my sense: namely, the ones that are attributed in ancient texts to Aesop himself.

2. In the 1997 film of the play, also written by Miller, the Aesopian character of the epilogue is more pronounced. There it is reduced to a single statement with an obvious point, to the effect that the with-hunting hysteria did not die down until accused witches began to refuse to avoid execution by pleading guilty.

3. Orm Ôverland, "The Action and Its Significance: Arthur Miller's Struggle with Dramatic Form," Modern Drama, vol. 18 no. 1, March 1976, pp. 6-8.

4. Arthur Miller, The Crucible (New York: Bantam Books, 1959), pp. 30-33.

5. Ibid., p. 134.

6. Ibid., p. 135.

7. On the parallel between the Salem trials and contemporary hysteria about satanism and satanic child abuse, see Peter Charles Hoofer, The Devil's Disciples: The Makers of the Salem Witchcraft Trials (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998).

8. The Miller's story is, at least to me, eerily similar to at least one recent reported case of preschool staff convicted, but later cleared, of running their facilities as child-molestation conspiracies based on satanic cult practices. Like these recent cases, Miller's story involves surprisingly uncritical reliance on the testimony of children in the absence of corroborating evidence, as well as reliance on testimony based on "recovered memory." (For Mary Warren's recovered memory, see Act II, p. 55.) For a detailed account of the satanic cult cases by a social psychologist, see Satanic Panic (Chicago: Open Court, 1993), especially Appendix V. My point, of course, is not that Miller has a mystic power of prophecy; it is that, though he is dealing in mythos rather than logos, he speaking of a phenomenon that has certain universal characteristics, including various factors which encourage illogical thinking on the part of accusers and judges.

9. See Richard Watts, Jr., in the Introduction to The Crucible, cited above, p. vii. Howard Warshow attacked the play as, in effect, a fallacious analogical argument in favor of the victims of anti-Communist investigations. He claimed that accused witches differ from accused Communists in ways that ruin the analogy. See "The Liberal Conscience in The Crucible," reprinted in The Crucible: Text and Criticism, ed. by Gerald Weales (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), pp. 210-26. The points he makes (that accused witches were always completely innocent of any wrongdoing while accused Communists were not always innocent, that accused witches were not dedicated to a cause that conflicts with the beliefs and interests of others while accused Communists often were) do have some merit. But this may only be true if Miller's fable is applied to the Communist cases. If it is interpreted as universal, such objections are much less important than Warshow takes them to be.