The Crucible, a play written by Arthur Miller in 1953, was based on the Salem Witch Trials of 1693, during which fourteen women were found guilty of witchery and hanged.
Miller wrote The Crucible as an allegory for the terror propagated by Joseph McCarthy during the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings in the 1950s, when hundreds of citizens, many of them performing artists, were accused of being Communists and jailed for refusing to report their fellow artists.
During the Republican National Convention in July, 2016, a lone woman was subject to repeated chants of “Lock Her Up.” One U.S. senator personally charged her with treason and death by firing squad, because she has the audacity to run for president of the United States.
In The Crucible, Miller’s Elizabeth Proctor was sentenced to death by hanging for having a husband who betrayed her and, worse, forgiving him, for having a small doll, a “poppet,” in her home, and for refusing to say she’d been possessed by the devil.
Our modern heroine also was betrayed by her husband; she, too, forgave him, and there’s no doubt she’s had many poppets in her home because she is also a mother. Like Elizabeth Proctor, this woman will not betray her beliefs, will not give in and live a “normal” woman’s life. For standing up to an ignorant, intractable, powerful man she now wears the red laser beam of hatred on her forehead.
During the course of the House Un-American Committee, no one was hanged or shot by firing squad. In 2016 America, Hillary Clinton has been accused of treason and carries a price on her head because, like her sisters 400 years ago and like Miller’s 1950s contemporaries, she is simply a woman who won’t back down.
Christine Ryerson
Pelham