It was from a report written by the Reverend Samuel Parris, who was one of the chief instigators of the witch-hunt. But there was one entry in (Charles W.) Upham on which the thousands of pieces I had come across were jogged into place. In the gloomy courthouse there, I read the transcripts of the witchcraft trials of 1692, as taken down in a primitive shorthand by ministers who were spelling each other. I visited Salem for the first time on a dismal spring day in 1952 it was a side-tracked town then, with abandoned factories and vacant stores. They might, given very little provocation, ruin the life of a good man, and everything else in the world too. They’re confused about sex and about love. Women, unless they are very devout and very old, The Crucible tells us, are unreliable and changeable. There is no historical basis at all for Miller’s narrative about an illicit love affair spurring the panic. In fact, many sources say that Tituba later recanted her confession, stating that she was beaten and forced to deliver it. The playwright sets that story as the catalyst for a larger, quite literal witch hunt, stoked into a frenzy by a mostly unprovoked confession of witchcraft spoken by a fantastically-minded woman of color who’s been practicing sexy voodoo in the woods with the girls of Salem. In his telling, witch hunts are perpetrated by the marginalized rather than upon them, since, when sex is involved, women are inclined toward group-malice, sexual irrationality, and wholesale invention.īoth of these historic elements, however, were shaped by Miller into a story about a married man tormented by an orphaned, libidinous teenage girl seeking to punish him for a sexual transgression she participated consensually in. Lately, listening to discussions of #MeToo, I’ve been thinking about Miller’s versions of history again. It wasn’t until I saw the 1996 film that I began to wonder about the nature of the way Miller portrays the women in the story. I read it for the first time in a history class, and I thought it was amazing, subversive protest art, written to shine a light on the injustice of Joseph McCarthy’s Communist hunt. That’s how Miller approached Salem in The Crucible, still required high-school reading that’s shaped how many of us think about mob panic and life-ruining accusations. As a novelist specializing in the ways that history has depicted transgressive women, I spend a lot of time analyzing how stories about female victims are routinely transformed into stories about male heroes, tragic or otherwise.

Arthur miller and the crucible