Post date: Feb 10, 2016 8:12:54 PM
Name________________________________________ Date________________________
The Crucible Post-Reading Exploration
For these activities, you will need to use a computer and go to the required URL or search for the required information. I’ve put this on our blog to make accessing the sites simpler.
1. Define allegory here: http://literarydevices.net/allegory/
2. Go here http://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/McCarthyism.html to define McCarthyism.
3. Read the article that follows the simple definition. You should see a connection to The Crucible. What similarities do you see between the events of McCarthyism and what happened in the play?
4. Read these excerpts from Arthur Miller’s essay “Why I Wrote The Crucible.” Define unfamiliar words in the margin—don’t just skip them; they may be important.
"The Crucible" was an act of desperation. Much of my desperation branched out, I suppose, from a typical Depression-era trauma—the blow struck on the mind by the rise of European Fascism and the brutal anti-Semitism it had brought to power. But by 1950, when I began to think of writing about the hunt for [Communists] in America, I was motivated in some great part by the paralysis that had set in among many liberals who, despite their discomfort with the [investigators] violations of civil rights, were fearful, and with good reason, of being identified as covert Communists if they should protest too strongly.
The more I read into the Salem panic, the more it touched off corresponding ages of common experiences in the fifties: the old friend of a blacklisted person crossing the street to avoid being seen talking to him; the overnight conversions of former leftists into born-again patriots; and so on. Apparently, certain processes are universal. When Gentiles in Hitler's Germany, for example, saw their Jewish neighbors being trucked of; or farmers in Soviet Ukraine saw the Kulaks sing before their eyes, the common reaction, even among those unsympathetic to Nazism or Communism, was quite naturally to turn away in fear of being identified with the condemned. As I learned from non-Jewish refugees, however there was often a despairing pity mixed with "Well, they must have done something." Few of us can easily surrender our belief that society must somehow make sense. The thought that the state has lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable. And so the evidence has to be internally denied.”
Based on the things you’ve read so far, explain why The Crucible can be viewed as an allegory.
4. Scan the article found at this link http://www.17thc.us/docs/fact-fiction.shtml and identify five things that Arthur Miller changed from the true history of Salem. For each one, explain why you think he, as the author of a play, might have made these changes.
a.
b.
c.
d.
e.
5. Read the article at this link for a theory about what might have really been wrong with the girls who seemed “bewitched” in Salem. Note: There are plenty of arguments both for and against this theory.
http://history.howstuffworks.com/history-vs-myth/drugged-salem-witchtrial3.htm
After reading the article, do you accept this as an explanation of the girls’ behavior? Why or why not?