The Crucible: Act One

As the play opens, Reverend Parris's daughter, Betty, is ill after having fainted in the woods. She was with a group of friends, and the cause of her fainting. The doctor visits the reverend's house and tells him that he believes there are unnatural things, meaning witchcraft and the devil, that caused Betty's illness. As a reverend, Parris is obviously a very religious man, so he is quick to deny the doctor's conclusion.

So far, the narrator and the play have focused largely on Reverend Parris. "He believed he was being persecuted wherever he went, despite his best efforts to win people and God to his side (Miller 3)," the narrator admits of Parris. The Crucible mentioned the importance of God very early on in the novel. As we know from class, the Puritans lived their lives based on how God would want them to live it. Puritans included many religious references into their writings as well.

One major characteristics that was seen between the Puritans and the Native Americans was trust. At first they didn't get along, but when they began sharing each others' techniques and methids, they were able to form a friendly bond between the sides. In The Crucible the community was unable to have such a friendly bond. When word got around that the Reverend's daughter might have been involved in witchcraft, the church members started getting opinions of their own. Mrs. Ann Putnam, who was described as a haunted woman, claimed, "There are hurtful, gengeful spirits layin' hands on these children (Miller 15)." Disscusions about sex, sin, and the devil were also mentioned as being very large issues during this time. In order to calm the members of his church, Reverend Parris said, "A wide opinion's running in the parish that the Devil may be amoung us, and I would satisfy them that they are wrong (Miller 27)."

In order to find out what really happened to Betty, Parris asks her friends what went on in the forrest. Some lies were told, and the friends put a lot of the blame on Tituba, the family's slave. The young girls proved themselves to be cruel characters in the novel and cannot be trusted.

One quote that really stood out to me in Act One is as follows. "When it is recalled that until the Christian era the underworld was never regarded as a hostile area, that all gods were useful and essentially friendly to man despite occasional lapses; however, the necessity of the Devil may become evident as a weapon, a weapon designed and used time and time again in every age to whip men into a surrender to a particular church or church-state (Miller 33-34)." The Crucible has involved mystery and drama so far, and I am interested to see what Act Two holds. I'm also interested to see how the truth about what happened in the forrest comes about. If witchcraft was truely involved, I can't wait to see how the church members and even the reverend will react.

Miller, Arthur. The Crucible. New York, NY: Penguin, 1996. Print.