Under the heading of “Beowulfian Protestantism”: A Puritanical society
going to an extreme, aided by one excessive (and dramatically contorted) female
[This entry may need minor
edits.]
The 1996 movie version of Arthur
Miller’s play The Crucible gives
cause for a large number of considerations. Miller, born in 1915 and having
died in 2005, was one of the giants among playwrights in the 20th century. His
most famous play is Death of a Salesman;
The Crucible is probably the most
likely contender for number 2, in fame and importance. I remember seeing
paperback editions of it at high school, looking somewhat forbidding with the
title and cover art, but I never ended up reading it in some class. That’s
probably just as well; to judge from the movie, it is a dense, demanding play,
mostly for conceptual reasons, and as a teenager I couldn’t appreciate it as
much as I would as an adult. But coming new to it in 2012, I find it a bit of a
tough drink, though rewarding, partly because, as it turns out, it makes for a
demanding movie. Miller himself wrote the screenplay, apparently at around age
80; even having cut material out, it still yields a movie of about two hours,
with talk and action usually coming at you pretty thickly.
Obviously this movie would not
be the cup of tea for a large swath of today’s young viewers, even if they do
eat up those little details of the Harry
Potter saga that are ostensibly similar to some of the subject matter of The Crucible: details of alleged
witchcraft. [Editorial note: I am not fully aware of all of the many details of
the Harry Potter world; one thing that seems a potent indicator of them is Harry’s
flying around on a stick of some kind, which resonates with nothing else so odd
as the flying on sticks witches were alleged to have done during witch-hunt
days.] Which brings me to one of the initial considerations I would outline,
before looking closely at the movie, and especially at two of its stars, who
give it its most accessible feature: Daniel Day-Lewis and Winona Ryder, who
provide the only modern-looking love story in the film, with Ryder’s character
especially posing a problem as a central instigator of a lot of the action in
the film.
Subsection 1 just below may seem
too dense and scholarly. For a more casual but focused discussion, you can go
to subsection 3, “A more incisive, and off-the-cuff, explanation of old
conceptions of witchcraft.”
[For “1. Preliminary assumptions,” see my May 4 blog entry for this; that
is the big “spicy meatball,” which for practical reasons was separated; it is
an important complement to the “spaghetti and sauce” that follows.]
2. The movie as dense costume drama, with modern-looking “romance”
buried in it
Young women’s initially innocent semi-lark leads pell-mell to a town’s fear
of witchcraft
When you first watch it, superficially
this movie reminds you of Witness
(1985), the entertaining film starring Harrison Ford and Kelly McGillis about a
Philadelphia policeman who hides out in an Amish village—an entertaining, nice
film that is very much of its time (especially in Mr. Ford’s character). But
the opening scene of The Crucible, of
long-skirted young women (having jumped right out of bed for the purpose) dancing
in the woods around a caldron of weird brew over a fire, might recall The Wicker Man (see my February 1 blog
entry) for its scenes of pagan ritual. The aims of most seem fairly innocent;
they want a man each of them envisions to take a fancy to her, to be her
boyfriend/whatever. But one participant “takes it to the next level”: Abigail
Williams, played by Ryder, has already had an affair with a village
paterfamilias, John Proctor, about which affair the other girls know; Abigail
wants her affair to go further.
Also, Abigail seems to push the
pagan dance to its extreme; maybe impatiently, she takes a live chicken wielded
by the facilitator of the event, a Black servant woman from Barbados named
Tituba, and breaks it on the caldron (I assume); Abigail then smears its blood
on her face and has an orgiastic, rhapsodic look like a cat that has snorted a
little too much catnip. (It is made clearer later that Abigail’s own wish for
which she sought to conjure a positive result for was to have John Proctor’s
wife die, so Abigail could have him to herself.)
No small wonder that Abigail
becomes “first among equals” among the young women as things start to spiral
out of control: in the wake of one young girl (Betty) taking sick in apparent
shock at the fireside event, Abigail, after initially being honestly concerned
about the suspicion of witchcraft appending to their morning activity, becomes
the leader of the raft of young women (who are mostly teens, one would assume)
who, as the community’s view of the fireside dance hardens toward an
inquisitional attitude, act as a sort of hysterical clique of sensitive sorts
pointing out the supposed presence of witchcraft in the village. They not only
broadly “indicate” it (to the minds of elders) by their apparent group upset,
but they point fingers at various specific victims (seemingly on a brute whim),
and “as needed” they can allege currently seeing (or having seen) the Devil
comport with some hapless individuals. Abigail becomes a headstrong “point
person” in leading the women to act as a sort of squealing and fainting
barometer of the burgeoning witchcraft supposedly infecting the small
community.
Miller adapts history for a morality play, and distills a certain
aspect in Abigail
Arthur Miller, of course, has
taken a seriously intriguing historical event and employed some artistic
liberties; for instance, according to a Wikipedia article on the original play,
there is no historical basis (see “Historical accuracy” subsection) for a
romantic relationship between the real correlates of the play’s John Proctor
and Abigail Williams. Further, while a clique of teenage girls is historically
noted as comprising the instigators of the Salem
A few questions then arise: if
we grant that, in the real events, there was some group “young female hysteria”
behind how the teenage instigators of the Salem Salem
In short, there are a number of
issues layered in this arcane play that is almost European in its
existentialist and conceptually baroque construction: (1) What crazy stuff,
particularly regarding weirdly acting (if not simply grossly irresponsible)
young women, went on in 1692 in Salem, Massachusetts? (2) What may we (in
Miller’s role) add today to make this episode relevant to modern life (as
Miller dealt with it in about 1953; though Miller could have been a little
high-handed with this)—regarding modern-day witch hunts and regarding women?
(3) If the Abigail Williams character seems too distilled an instance of a crazily
pettifogging female character, what value might she have today, aside from
being essential to a romantic subplot that provides a hook for modern
audiences? And (4) what were the old-time witch hunts about, with respect to
women, that may or may not have educational value today?
I’ve answered the first three
questions to some extent; let’s try to answer number 4 a bit, and this with a
more accessible approach than I used in my May 4 blog entry.
3. A more incisive, and off-the-cuff, explanation of old conceptions of
witchcraft
My descriptions of witchcraft
and the Malleus maleficarum (in the
previous entry) may seem somewhat laboredly academic, making reference to
sources. Here is a concise description of what the Malleus was about, and what witches were alleged to have done, and
what the Church aimed to do with them, from my memory (and these remarks can be
found to accord with the various sources I’ve used).
Witches, as long as there were
inquisitions to root them out, were generally considered to be in league with
the Devil and to do bad in the world; often, witches’ practices preserved
rituals, etc., from pagan religion. The conception of a witch usually
(especially with the Malleus) tied to
a sexual appetite in the witch: i.e., being sexually voracious was part of the
quintessential character of this person. The Malleus went to lengths to argue that witchcraft existed; it described
all the supposed practices of witches; and it prescribed remedies, which
obviously usually led to execution of the witch. (The absurdity of testing for
whether one was a witch, or trying to make the witch accountable, could be
obvious: one test was to put the alleged witch in water; if she sank, she was
innocent; if she floated, she was a witch. Also, in The Crucible, we see the paradox of the fact that if people
confessed to witchcraft, their lives were spared; but if they were accused and
didn’t admit to witchcraft, they were executed.)
Witches were alleged to go to
sabbath-like gatherings that involved unbridled sexual activity; they were
alleged, as their most obvious effect on the concrete world, to do maleficia, or making bad things happen,
like making crops fail, or causing someone to get sick. In The Crucible, though they go by quickly, there are two instances of
what was regarded as maleficia, which
led someone to be brought into court as an alleged witch; someone’s hauled logs
fall off the sled, and someone else has a bonfire burst up surprisingly. In an
era when people were not educated in scientific matters, they could not
understand cause and effect in certain instances, or didn’t want to admit that
sometimes bad things happened by sheer chance. Perhaps sensitized by an ongoing
paranoia about the presence of witches, they started looking to attribute some
mishap to an efficient witch’s influence.
Witches were also alleged to
have “familiars,” or a fellow bad spirit, which often was present in the body
of a cat (whether the familiars were as self-involved as normal cats can seem
is unclear). (In The Crucible,
something else is referred to as a “familiar.” Also, in that film, it is
alleged that someone’s spirit left their body to do harm to someone else; I
have not heard of this from my own research on witches, but it is relatively
“plausible,” no less crazy than some of this other stuff.)
Another odd “person” who did ill
was an imp or spirit that sat on your chest when you were sleeping, and could
cause nightmares and other bad things: a male creature of this sort was called
an incubus, and a female was a succubus. Witches were alleged to fly on forked
sticks (hence the later folk idea of witches’ flying on brooms). Sometimes
witches had certain unusual tools for doing their ill deeds like the “Hand of Glory,”
which was a corpse’s hand, exhumed and burned almost like a candelabra to have
some kind of bewitching or sleep-making influence. (One of these is seen in the
movie The Wicker Man.
Witches were checked for marks
on their skin, which, when found, were considered to be nipples by which a
devil or other evil spirit might suck from the witch (I think this was the idea). Another horrendous move made by someone
becoming a witch, as a symbol of her witchly commitment, was to scrape the
baptismal chrism off their forehead (this was the old allegation, but puzzling
to me: how could anything material have remained on a forehead from a baptism
after many years?).
The Wikipedia article on the Malleus mentions that this book is
considered misogynist. I think this both is true and understates the problem.
It is true that most people killed for being witches were women. Also, it has
been often questioned whether the reason some people were targeted as witches
was that they were mentally ill. I reach different conclusions from everything
I’ve read on this odd and not widely enough remembered period in Western
history. I think the way to look at this is similar to how the Nazi Holocaust
can be considered: though anti-Semitism under the Nazis was brewing through the
1930s, once the extermination process started in about 1941, the first victims
were the mentally ill (and certainly it included Gypsies, homosexuals, and
other undesirables), then the process became (maybe not in a rigidly
transitional way) overwhelmingly targeted to Jews. The category under which the
“program” operated was getting rid of “subhumans” or the like. But though this
category started as encompassing a range of people, it became focused on one
deliberately demonized subgroup, the Jews.
With the witch hunts, something
of the same happened. Both men and women were targeted and executed as witches;
and the mentally ill seem not-infrequently to have been identified as
candidates. But perhaps, similar to the Holocaust, after a while, with a narrowed focus that was like the
project getting more abnormally obsessive as it swung into high gear, it became
primarily aimed at women. (Certainly it is remembered as being thus
focused.) In a sense, it could thus have been considered a misogynist
“project,” but I think it is less “ideological” than that and more
fundamentally perverse, especially because it was embraced as it was by the
institutions of the Church.
For instance, in the modern day,
a male who has had disillusioning experiences with a few women can start
grumping about women, and maybe this finds a receptive audience of equivalently
grumpy men; but this is a subgroup, or a “mutual-support group,” of an
admittedly marginal, humoring-themselves set of people—“losers,” but not
hardened, militia-like, or socially dangerous misogynists.
But when an esteemed
organization like the Catholic Church (and to a similar extent the Protestant
churches) pursues a program that, after a while, seems to solely target one sex
of the human race, it is at once sick, hard to understand, and yet
understandable along maybe the following lines: in the late 1400s and early
1500s, Western society was dealing with a crisis of change—a move toward
scientific understanding, liberalized arts, breakdown in certain social mores,
and such things as the start of colonizing abroad and, later, imperialism;
crisis can bring with it a fear of the unknown and a start of blaming others
for certain perceived ambient excesses or signs of instability.
As an unfortunate result, women
might have been targeted on the basis of males’ glimpses of their engaging in
more carnally related inclinations than the (prudish) men in positions of power
wanted to see; and these qualities were ascribed to alleged evil. If a particular
woman was too sexually inclined, or otherwise seemed “not rational or serious
enough,” she was considered to be in league with the Devil. This sounds
oversimplifying, I know, but it is way to start to understand something that I
still find puzzling but fascinating. I believe two reasons it is still worth
trying to understand are that it went on, with all seriousness, for centuries, and it showed what havoc technology
could wreak: the Malleus, reproduced
by printing press, I think was the second most distributed book in Europe after
the Bible, in an age when not many books were about anything else than Church
business.
Another reason this is of
interest is I think why Arthur Miller wrote The
Crucible: because, as freakish as the Salem witch hunt seems to have been,
witch hunts of a less literal sort still go on.
This is aside from the fact that
the Abigail Williams character seems to
take the component of “teenage women going overboard with red-herring claims
about others’ witchcraft” to an extreme: far from being a female that was
the unfortunate victim of wrongheaded
witch hunts in Europe, Abigail seems to all appearances insane after a while,
either that or horrifically irresponsible—to the point where her inflammatory
and manipulative claims about others make her far more guilty of crimes of
commission than the hapless sorts she is victimizing.
4. Historical flavoring can be worked around to appreciate the story
The movie has enough archaic
language and style (e.g., among many other examples, “Goody” as a familiar form
of address for a wife—it is short for “Goodwife,” so that whom we would call
Mrs. Proctor is called “Goody Proctor”) that it may put viewers off just with
that. But the emotion most actors bring to their lines helps clarify the
meaning, similar to how Shakespeare may be clarified for some if they hear the
olden language performed. And where the language in The Crucible may leave you momentarily flummoxed, the main
characters are clear enough that we have a sense of where things are, or are
going, even without catching a specific line or phrase here or there.
Interestingly, the four or five
main characters are portrayed in rich ways that go a little beyond the more
starchy formalities of a routine costume drama that some of the minor-character
performances may suggest. Daniel Day-Lewis is the main male character who seems
the only citizen of Salem who works hard in the fields, owns a large amount of
property, and keeps service to a young family to heart (other men seem entirely
to comprise the elderly, officers of some sort, or offbeat types well handled
by a quintessential character actor). Proctor is also the only one who tends to
speak in a frank, sometimes skeptical, and/or steely commonsensical way, when
he doesn’t show simple brute passion (including in trying to set Abigail
straight in that he will not continue his affair with her, and later that Abigail
had better not bring harm to his wife). Several of the shots of Day-Lewis tend
to follow the fluidity and insouciance of his performance, because they are
framed a little haphazardly, or show him being a little oddly spontaneous with
all else, while many other characters are framed amid an overall pictorial
composition that seems a little overly fussy at times (with lines of objects within
shots seeming more appropriate to still photography or to artfulness rather
than to gripping motion potentially within the frame).
Ryder as Abigail brings what she
can to the role, which is a passion in her voice (overriding the slightly
starchy British-type accent) and a lot of expressiveness with her big eyes.
Paul Scofield as Judge Thomas Danforth, who arrives rather late in the film, is
presented usually pretty neatly, and though he may strike someone as “decidedly
uncool” (in the colloquially American sense), he actually has one of the most
adult roles in the film, as a seasoned judge who is trying to get to the bottom
of what is going on, not just factually, but within the constraints of legal
procedures and traditions. (The young-audience-oriented Videohound compendium describes him as “odious”; I look at him as
more ambiguous, as a judge who is trying to be a good judge within what today
would be an evil set of precepts.) Then, Joan Allen as Goodwife Elizabeth
Proctor, seems adequate, as a rock of good sense for her husband, but a little
too cool emotionally—her lack of passion helps explain why John in a weak
moment fell for Abigail. Allen was Oscar-nominated for a supporting-actress
role for this work, and I suppose she earned this, with her subtle performance;
but it strikes me she here seems about as exciting as sandstone, though maybe
the character required this.
Another character helped by
somewhat histrionic performance is who may be called the second most
blameworthy (next to Abigail) for fomenting the climate of fear conditioning
the witch hunts in Salem: Rev. Samuel Parris, played by Bruce Davison, who is
the main clergyman in town (and is uncle of Abigail, as it turns out); his
property ownership and his awareness of a faction in town that has built
against him make him to be a hypocrite and coward who helps make the witch hunt
snowball. More apt to be sensible early on, when he presses Abigail—also more
sane at the time—on the factual aspects of the dancing in the woods (he reveals
his concern about his political standing), he later (indirectly) helps
elucidate the narrative (if the audience needs it)—he keeps us abreast of
action when it may be a little unclear—in suggesting what a spineless
pettifogger if not self-deluder he is on the witch issue.
I’d made plenty of notes as I
watched this film a second and third time, a re-viewing it stands up to well.
But I won’t flood you with more details. The main last theme, which is also
what stands out as the still-relevant point this play aims to make, has to do
with legal process.
5. The fundamental problem of a theocracy in a fit: justice subverted
by theological precepts, particularly on matters of evidence
To whatever extent Miller’s Salem reflects the actual Salem ,
this was one weird society, if one were to consider it as being in the U.S.
As Judge Danforth helpfully
notes, after the young Mary Warren has broken with her fellow accusers and
asserts that they are lying, “Witchcraft is an invisible crime. … There is only
the witch and the victim. Only the victim and accuser can be regarded as
truthful.” So here you have a situation
where there is no evidence of a crime outside what the accuser says; and
even when the accuser, like Abigail, seems to go into fits of making
accusations as if this is her only “Plan B” when she hasn’t gotten her way on
some matter previously, it becomes a
horrid travesty of justice in which the accused has virtually no way to prove
his or her innocence. The ludicrousness of this situation is shown when an
old man is being accused of having a devil talking to him right there in the
courtroom, by a young girl speaking directly to the judge; no devil is visible,
of course. And the old man pathetically tries to appeal to the girl by pointing
out she has known him all her life.
Things get so grim that at some
point, John Proctor disparages Abigail’s behavior—justifiably—as “a whore’s
vengeance.” When Abigail finds that the social/political monster of
denunciation and legal machinery chewing up lives that she has helped set going
has put John Proctor in a cell awaiting his execution, she steals money and
tries to run away from him. On principle, he stays put. She ends up fleeing Salem
The pessimism of the play seems
mitigated somewhat by the end card noting that after 19 executions, the witch
hunts ended. One ludicrous aspect of this community’s legal process was that,
if a person confessed to witchcraft, he or she escaped execution. But if the
accused person did not confess, he or
she was executed. What did people have to lose by confessing? Their good names
in the community, of course, which were not only matters of pride. That was why
some people staunchly refused to confess.
Initially the witch-hunt process
in Salem ate up 19 lives, but apparently so many more people refused to confess
that the system—in some way—realized it was choking on its own wrongheadedness
that it had set up. How much Salem
What we do know is that, on dark
occasions, political witch hunts have gone on since, and still occur today.
6. Missed opportunities for humor
I’ve found this was a tough film
to write on, though it is important. One way to lighten the discussion is to
note that, in the movie, the subject matter (or directorial decisions) don’t
allow many (obvious) moments of humor. Perhaps an anachronistic one would have
been to have a James Brown tune underscore the early around-the-fire scene led
by Tituba.
More apropos, I think, would
have been to spice up the scene in which, naturally, the Black servant woman,
Tituba, is hounded by the inquisitors first, specifically where the inquisitors
incite her to confess how she comported with the Devil. Her talk about how she
addressed the Devil sounds to me like the most self-parodying talk in the
movie, and close to what she could have veered into for fun: comedian Flip
Wilson’s character Geraldine vamping on about how “the Debbil made me do it,”
including detailed accounts of her coquettishly sparring with the “Debbil.”
