The Crucible MBTI Personality Type

The Crucible

The Crucible is a play written by Arthur Miller and published in 1953. It is Miller's best-known play after Death of a Salesman, and is similarly regarded as one of the greatest American plays of the 20th century. The play is a semi-fictionalized account of the Witch Trials of 1692–93 in Salem, Massachusetts, although Miller takes real people and puts them alongside his own fictitious characters, both for dramatic purposes and because little is known of the actual personalities involved. In Salem, the villagers' way of life is deeply rooted in Puritan ideals, and the townspeople firmly hold to the conviction that anyone who opposes them is Satanic and must be purged of the devil. Consequently, the same Puritans who escaped religious persecution in England ironically enforce it in America. The Crucible was written in response to the activities of US Senator Joseph McCarthy, who became notorious for his excessive zeal in rooting out supposed communist sympathizers. Miller lampshades the irony in the fact that the dichotomy between good and evil, throughout history, transcends religion and manifests itself into various ideas, including the Red Scare. Miller said that he had no doubt that some people practiced witchcraft in Salem; however, as with the fear of communism, mass hysteria was perpetuated through propaganda and turned into something worse than what it really was.