Abigail Williams The Crucible: Plot and Analysis

The Crucible is a complex and fascinating novel with incidents, characters, and themes comparable to almost any period of human history. It is natural for humans to fear change and what is unknown, this is magic and the devil in the play The Crucible, which can be seen by McCarthyism in recent times in the post-World War Two and Cold War United States. At the beginning of the play, Abigail Williams threatens to kill her pears because of what happened in the jungle.

Abigail Williams used scare tactics to instill fear in the people of Salem.

To protect herself, Abigail Williams in The Crucible threatened to kill the girls if they didn’t keep quiet about the witchcraft in the jungle. First, she said “And mark this. Let either of you breathe a word, or the edge of a word, about the other things, and I will come to you in the black of some terrible night and I will bring a pointy reckoning that will shudder you.

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And you know I can do it;'. This shows how if the girls didn’t keek their mouth shut they would have been killed by Abigail. Abigail’s argument is persuasive to others because she is threatening to kill them. They have no other choice but to listen to her.

Next Abigail Williams and Tituba are taken in for questioning and they confess to witchcraft. “Sometimes I wake and find myself standing in the open doorway and not a stitch on my body! I always hear her laughing in my sleep.

I hear her singing her Barbados songs and tempting me with” (Pg 44). This shows how Abigail explains how she feels when she does witchcraft and how it all feels to her. Abigail’s argument was persuasive to others because they thought she doesn’t have anything to lie and she blamed it on others.

Finally, Abigail yells at Mr. Danforth for douting Abigail about her story so she later said, “Abigail, in an open threat: Let you beware, Mr. Danforth. Think you to be so mighty that the power of Hell may not turn your wits? Beware of it! There is - Suddenly, from an accusatory attitude, her face turns, looking into the air above - it is truly frightening.”This shows how Abigail can change how someone can think. If Abigail didn’t do that everyone else was at risk.

Abigail Williams’s scare tactics instill fear in the people of Salem causing them to believe her. All the evidence that I gave above proves my claim because of how Abigail uses scare tactics to instill fear in the people. In my first paragraph, it shows how she influenced their decisions and it was the same in all three of my paragraphs. In my second one, it is different it shows how she was thinking and how she feels when she does witchcraft. What if Abigail had lied and sais that she was not doing witchcraft and how would the outcome be different.  

Works cited

1. Miller, A. (1953). The Crucible. Penguin Classics.
2. McCarththy, J. (1950). McCarthyism: The Fight for America. Beacon Press.
3. Bailyn, B. (1967). The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. Harvard University Press.
4. Morgan, E. S. (1997). The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop. Pearson.
5. Norton, M. B., Kamensky, J., Sheriff, C., Blight, D. W., Chudacoff, H. P., Logevall, F., ... & Murrin, J. M. (2017). A People and a Nation: A History of the United States. Cengage Learning.
6. Cressy, D. (1997). Witchcraft in Early Modern England. Routledge.
7. Fischer, D. H. (1989). Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America. Oxford University Press.
8. Boyer, P. S., & Nissenbaum, S. (1972). Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft. Harvard University Press.
9. Rappleye, C. (2013). Sons of Providence: The Brown Brothers, the Slave Trade, and the American Revolution. Simon & Schuster.
10. Williams, T. (2008). The Political Beliefs of Americans: A Study of Public Opinion. Transaction Publishers.