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

Title Re(dis)c everywhereing the Witches in Arthur millers The melting pot A Feminist Reading Author(s) Wendy Schissel Publication detail Modern bid 37. 3 (F solely 1994) p461-473. ascendant Drama Criticism. Vol. 31. Detroit Gale. From Literature Resource Center. Docu custodyt Type sarcastic essay Bookmark Bookmark this Docu handst Full Text COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage LearningTitle Re(dis)covering the Witches in Arthur Millers The Crucible A Feminist Reading (essay date fall 1994) In the hobby essay, Schissel offers a feminist de nonation of The Crucible, in an effort to deconstruct the phallologocentric sanctions implicit in Millers account of Abigails fate, Elizabeths confession, and illusions temptation and finis. Arthur Millers The Crucible is a disturbing work, non only because of the obvious moral dilemma that is irresolutely solved by bathroom keep an eye ons death, further overly because of the treatment that Abigail and Elizabeth receive at Millers hands and at the hands of connoisseurs. In forty years of disapproval very little has been said ab expose the shipway in which The Crucible reinforces stereotypes of femme fatales and c senescent and unforgiving wives in point to assert simply universal virtues. It is a morality be given based upon a suspicious androcentric morality.Like monitoring device, The Crucible roars d give Elizabeth, qualification her cin ace casede a fault which is non hers but of Millers making It require a wintry wife to prompt lechery,1 she admits in her final meeting with her husband. Critics drop seen gutter as a tragi identifyy hired gunic greens macrocosm,2 hu homoly tempted, a just art object in a universe g unmatched mad,3 but they strike never given Elizabeth similar consideration, nor have they deconstructed the phallologocentric sanctions implicit in Millers account of Abigails fate, Elizabeths confession, and pots temptation and death.As a feminist guideer of the 1990s, I am trou bled by the unrecognized fall give away from the existential humanism that 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 occasion of the sh ared consciousness created by the play. 4 It is time to reveal the vicarious enjoyment that Miller and his critics have found in a aperient male character who has enacted their exual and political fantasies. The setting of The Crucible is a favoured starting point in an analytic thinking of the play. Puritan New England of 1692 whitethorn indeed have had its parallels to McCarthys America of 1952,5 but there is more to the paranoia than xenophobiaof Natives and Communists, respectively. implicit in(predicate) in Puritan theology, in Millers chance variable of the Salem enchant trials, and all too frequent in the society which has produced Millers critics is gynecophobiafear and distrust of women.The half dozen heav y books (36) which the zealous Reverend Hale endows on Salem like a bridegroom to his beloved, bearing gifts (132) are books on witchcraft from which he has acquired an inventorying of symptoms, catchwords, and diagnostic procedures (36). A 1948 edition of the 1486 Malleus Maleficarum (Hammer of Witches), with a foreword by Montague Summers, may have prompted Millers comprehension of seventeenth-century and Protestant elucidations upon a work pilot lightly sanctioned by the Roman Church. Hales books would be highly misogynic tomes, for like the Malleus they would be premised on the belief that All witchcraft comes from carnal lust which in women is insatiable. 7 The authors of the Maleus, deuce Dominican monks, Johan Sprenger and Heinrich Kraemer, were writing yet a nonher fear-filled version of the apocryphal bad cleaning adult female they looked to Ecclesiasties which declares the wickedness of a charwoman is all evil there is no passion to a higher place the anger of a woman. It will be more agreeable to abide with a lion and a dragon, than to inhabit with a wicked woman rom the woman came the send-off of sin, and by her we all die. (2517, 23, 33) The Crucible is raise that Miller partakes of similar fears approximately wicked, angry, or wise women even if his complicity in such gynecophobia is unwittingand that is the to the highest degree generous thing we can accord him, a misrecognition of himself and his reputation-conscious hero nates as the authors of a topicivity8 which be aches totally to menthe run for generations of readers has been the same(p).In Salem, the major(ip)ity of witches chastened to die were women. Even so, Salems numbers were negligible9 compared with the gynocide in Europe Andrea Dworkin quotes a check off estimate of nine million witches executed at a ratio of women to men of as lots as 100 to 1. 10 Miller assures us in one of his editorial and political (and long and didactic) comments, that despite the Purit ans belief in witchcraft, there were no witches (35) in Salem his play, however, 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 missfriends into the dancing which has always been part of the communal celebrations of women healers/witches. 11 But the most obvious witch in Millers invention upon Salem narration is Abigail Williams. She is the consummate seductress the witchcraft hysteria in the play originates in her carnal lust for Proctor. Miller describes Abigail as a strikingly beautiful girl ith an endless(prenominal) capacity for dissembling (8-9). In 1953, William Hawkins inviteed Abigail an evil kid12 in 1967, critic Leonard Moss said she was a malicious figure and unstable13 in 1987, June Schlueter and James Flanagan proclaimed her a whore,14 echoing Proctors How do you call Heaven whore Whore (109) and in 1989, Bernard Dukore suggested that if the stri kingly 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 can non derriere Proctor took me from my sleep and put kat onceledge in my centerfield (24). They, like Miller, play so as non openly to condone the inherent behaviour of a man tempted to criminal conversation because of a spring chicken womans beauty and precociousness, her proximity in a hearthstone where there is too an apparently frigid wife, and the repression of Puritan society and religion. Abigail is a delectable commodity in what Luce Irigaray has conditioned a dominant scopic economy. 16 We are covertly invited to equate Johns admirable mutiny at the end of the playagainst the unconscionable demands of implicating others in a falsely ac dealledged sin of serving that which is antithetical to community (the Puritans called that antithesis the devil)with his more self-serving rebellion against its shake upual mor es. The subtle equation allows Miller non only to project fault upon Abigail, but also to touch what is really a cliched act of adultery on Johns part much more interesting.Miller wants us to recognize, if not celebrate, the individual trials of his existential hero, a spokesman for rational feeling and disinterested intelligence in a play some integrity and its obverse, compromise. 17 Mary Daly might describe the scholarly accommodate 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 domicilhold of a Puritan minister, can have the knowledge of how to mark a man. The only rationale offered scapegoats some other woman, Tituba, complicating gynecophobia with xenophobia. ) The omission on Millers and his critics parts implies that Abigails sexual knowledge moldiness be inherent in her gender. I see the cond emnation of Abigail as an all too common example of blaming the victim. Mercy Lewiss reaction to John is another indictment of the sexual precociousness of the girls of Salem. Obviously conditioned of John and Abigails affair, Mercy is twain afraid of John and, Miller says, unlikely titillated as she sidles out of the room (21).Mary 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 dismayed Shes told you (80). Rather than condemning John, all these incidents are included to emphasize the vengeance of a little girl (79), and, I would add, to convince the reader who is supposed to sympathize with John (or to feel titillation himself) that no girl is a bang-up girl, free of sexual knowledge, that individually is her mother Eves daughter.The circumstance is, however, that Salems young 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 later Sarah Good mumbles her displeasure at universe turned away from the Proctors door empty-handed is explainable as a curse of a more periodic nature But what does she mumble? You essential remember, discretion Proctor. Last Montha Monday, I thinkshe walked away, and I thought my guts would burst for both 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 find ways to rebeljust because adolescence did not exist in Puritan society does not mean that the hormones did not flowthey are seriously repressed. And the most insidious survey of that repression, in a society in which girls are not considered women until they marry (as young as fourteen, or significantly, 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 Ch ristian girl to hang 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 animateness claim herself as his just spouse Elizabeth assures him that I will be your only wife, or no wife at all (62) and Abigail makes her hearts desire plain with I will make you such a wife when the world is washrag again (150). To realize her claim Abigail has sought the help of voodooTitubas and the courtsto get rid of Elizabeth, but not without clear provocation on Johns part. Miller misses an opportunity to make an important comment upon the real and sensed competitions for men forced upon women in a hoary society by subsuming the womens conce rns within what he knows his auditory sense will recognize as more admirable communal and idealistic concerns.The eternal triangle motif, duration it serves many interests for Miller, is, ultimately, less important than the overwhelming nobility of Johns Christ-like martyrdom against that the womens complaints seem petty indeed, and an audience 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, en endangerment 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 deliberately raised Abigails age (A Note on the Historical Accuracy of This depend) from twelve to seventeen. 20 He introduces us to John and Abigail in the number one act with Johns acknowledgement o f 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 backside behind his house and sweated like a stallion at her every approach (22).Despite Abigails allegations, Miller achieves the curious effect of making her the apparent aggressor in this sceneas critical commentary proves. Millers ploy, to blame a woman for the Fall of a good man, is a sleight of pen as old as the Old Testament. There is something too at rest in the detail that legend has it that Abigail turned up later as a prostitute in Boston (Echoes Down the Corridor). Prostitution is not only the oldest profession, but it is also the oldest evidence for the law of put out and demand. Men demand sexual services of women they in turn regard as socially deviant.Millers report of Abigails fate resounds with implicit forgiveness for the man who is unwittingly tempted by a fatal female, a assent witc h. Millers treatment of Abigail in the second scene of Act ii, left out of the original reading version and most actions but included as an appendix 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 ocean on that court Fear nothing (78)at the end of the first scene of Act TwoJohn returns to Abigail, alone and at night.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 defense that Elizabeth has adjured him to talk to her (61)although that is before Elizabeth is herself chargeends in a discussion that is dangerous to Johns position in the play. Miller wants us to believe, as Proctor does seeing 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 intend 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 realized he ran the risk of making her more sympathetic than he intended. Miller is intent upon presenting John as a man obsessed by guilt and aware of his own hypocrisy, and to make Abigail equally aware, even in a conjure up 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, because 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 call out for my sins when the wind lifted up my skirts and blushed for shame because some old Rebecca called me loose. And then you burned my ignorance away. As excess as so me December ree I saw them allwalking like saints to church, running to pay the sick, and hypocrites in their hearts And God gave me strength to call them liars, and God 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 played 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. Individual performers have consistently enacted the sirens role The look of Madeleine Sherwood, who played Abi gail in 1953, glowed with lust but Perhaps the most impressive Abigail has been that of Sarah Miles in 1965. A plaguingly sexy compartmentalisation of beauty and crossness Miles reeks with the cunning of suppressed evil and steams with the promise of suppressed passion. 23 Only the 1980 production of The Crucible by Bill Bryden employed girls who looked even younger than seventeen. Dukore suggests that Brydens solution to the fact that Johns seduction of a teenage 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 hag. But it is Elizabeth who is most in need of feminist reader-redemption.If John is diminished as Christian hero by a feminist deconstruction, the diminution is necessary to a balanced reading of the play and to a revised mythopoeia of the paternalistic monotheism of the Puritans and its twentieth-century equivalent, t he 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 conscience. 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 wrath Spare me You forget nothin and forgive nothin.Learn charity, woman. I have gone tiptoe in this house all seven month since she is gone. I have not moved from there to there without I think to please 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 antiquated framework in which the play is create verballymust be re-evaluated such a reading must be done in the light of Elizabeths logicparadoxically, the only cold thing about her.She i s good 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 understanding of young girls. There is a promise make in any bed (61). The uninitiated and obviously self-punishing Abigail may be excused for thinking as she does (once again in the excised scene) that he is singing secret hallelujahs that his wife will hang (152) Second, John does nurse some tender feelings for Abigail despite his indignation.Elizabeths question reverberates with insight if it were not Abigail that you must go to hurt, would you falter now? I think not (54). John has already 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 knowing smile on his face (21). And Johns use of wintry images of Elizabeth and their home in Act TwoIts winter in her yet (51)echoes the imagery used by Abigail in Act One. 25 John is to Abigail no wintry man, but one whose heat has drawn her to her window to see him looking 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 forth to his death. Miller may want to be kind to Elizabeth, but he cannot manage that and Johns heroism, too.Act Two opens with Elizabeth as hearth angel singing softly offstage to the children who are, significantly, never seen in the play, and bringing John his supper pout rabbit which, she says, it hurt my heart to strip (50). But in the space of four pages Miller upbraids her sixsom e times. First, John is not quite pleased (49) with the taste of Elizabeths stew, and before she appears on stage he adds saltiness to it. Second, there is a certain 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 perennial I think youre tragicomic again (51, emphasis added). And sixth, and in a more overtly condemning mood, 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 sympathy 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 awareness of springs erotic promise Its warm as blood infra the clods (50), and I never see such a load of flowers on the earth. Lilacs have a violet 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 stark 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 ways in which Elizabeth could improve herself. Neil Carson claims that 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 naked as a jaybird 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 admission of guilt for his wifeonce again, it seems to me, a victim is being damn. No critic, not even Carson, questions Millers insistence that Elizabeth is at least(prenominal) partially 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 again 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 Judge Danforth is Is present tense your husband a lecher (113). Elizabeth can in good conscience respond in the negative for she kn ows 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 perhaps 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 it 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 betrayal instead, her anger, elicited not specifically about the affair but about the incident with t he 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. After Elizabeths incarceration, and without her intractable 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 teach 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 maternal fashion tha t she does, but for John to respond and then is a sign of sensitive masculinity? Is it because the communal as defined by the Word is be 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 foolish to argue that John does not acquirethat, 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 con trol his character, Miller impregnates her. The court will not sentence an unborn child, so Elizabeth does not have to make a choice. Were she to choose 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 justify the taking of it (132), she would undermine existential integrity with compromise. I am not reading another version of The Crucible, one which Miller did not intend, but rather looking at the assumptions inherent in his intentions, assumptions that Miller seems oblivious 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 fiction, or more precisely, a crypto-friction that defies stratifications of canonical thought and transgresses generic boundaries 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 worry which is exace rbated by the hysteria around them. John does not try to intimidate Elizabeth with his anger, and she is not described as cold or condescending. Abigail is a victim of an ripened 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 calling 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 student who wa nted to know if part of Elizabeths motivation in not pressing 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 not identified 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 published in 1953, but all further references to The Crucible are to the 1981 Penguin edition, 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, minute Quarterly 321 (1990), 99-118 104. 5. Millers interest in the Salem witchcraft trials predated his confrontation with McCarthyism (see E. Miller Budick, level 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 popular respons e 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 Radical Feminism (Boston, 1978), Mary Daly says that during the European witch burningsshe does not deal with the Salem witch trialsProtestants vied with and even may have surpassed their catholic counterparts in their warmth 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 guess (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 kind Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics (London, 1982), 16-17.See also the 1990 National Film Board production, The Burning 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 disposed of, 85 per cent, it reports, were women. 11. The Burning Times discusses at length the place of women healers in Third-World cultures. 12. From Hawkinss check up on 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, Death of a Salesman and The Crucible Text and action (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 affair, 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 calumniate 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. 1 8. 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 hyponymy or suffering. Linda Loman and I would add Elizabeth Proctor suffers at least as much as her husband (36-7). capital of Seychelles Sullivan and James Hatch, as well, have complained about the standards of review a complaining female protagonist is mechanically less noble 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 Abb ys 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 extent 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 keen 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 physiologic attractiveness of Abby for John Proctor is obvious in the play, ut, I think, so is the passionate imagination which finds its return in one way in her and in another in Proctor (William T. Liston, John Proctors performing 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, re vised edition (Boston, 1980), 40, emphasis added. 29.I think it significant that the orphans are but one of the wasted possessions unattended to in Salem. The next part of the same sentence mentions abandoned cattle holla 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 Van Herk, In Visible 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