![]() ![]() When Tituba asks if Betty will be all right, Parris yells at her to get out of the room. Around her hover Reverend Parris, her father and the minister of the Massachusetts town of Salem, his 17-year-old niece Abigail Williams, and his slave Tituba. The Crucible shows how religious fervor fuels hysteria and leads to conditions that sacrifice justice and reason. Betty Parris has fallen into a strange coma. And if the devil is attacking your town, then ensuring that your neighbor is punished for selling you a sick pig suddenly becomes a religious necessity, a righteous act that protects the God you love and proves that you're not a witch or a devil-worshipper. ![]() Some citizens of Salem use the charge of witchcraft willfully and for personal gain, but most are genuinely overcome by the town's collective hysteria: they believe the devil is attacking Salem. In The Crucible, hysterical fear becomes an unconscious means of expressing the resentment and anger suppressed by strict Puritan society. Fear feeds fear: in order to explain to itself why so many people are afraid, the community begins to believe that the fear must have legitimate origins. Climax: The Crucible has an odd structure, in which each of the four acts ends on a climax. For young girls in Salem, the minister and the other male adults are God’s earthly representatives, their authority derived from on high. The town of Salem falls into mass hysteria, a condition in which community-wide fear overwhelms logic and individual thought and ends up justifying its own existence. Setting: Salem, Massachusetts in 1692, when it was a Puritan colony. Abigail is an orphan and an unmarried girl she thus occupies a low rung on the Puritan Salem social ladder (the only people below her are the slaves, like Tituba, and social outcasts). In The Crucible, neighbors suddenly turn on each other and accuse people they've known for years of practicing witchcraft and devil-worship. A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality study guides that feature detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major.
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