The Crucible and Guilt

I am currently reading The Crucible by Arthur Miller.  The story is set in Salem in the late 1600s, during the infamous Salem witch trials.  Reverend Parris is hunched over his daughter Betty Parris, who has fallen into a coma like state.  He believes that Betty was the victim of witchcraft after witnessing Betty, Parris’s niece Abigail, and several other girls singing and dancing in the forest around a fire with the slave Tituba.  Betty passed out when Parris arrived in the forest and found them dancing.  Although Abigail denies that the other girls and her were participating in witchcraft, Parris still fears that if the news of this incident gets out and spreads to the rest of the town, Parris’s reputation in the church and the community will be ruined.

It is very important to Parris that Betty’s condition doesn’t spread because they live in a close community that is heavily reliant on the bible and religion.  If the fact that Parris’s daughter might have participated in witchcraft was released to the public he might lose his position in the church, get harassed by other members of the community or at the very have people lose their respect for what he says.  Because he lives in a devout Puritan town, other people seem very intolerant of sort of private sin that someone commits or is associated with.  This intolerance for bad deeds makes the people of the town probably want to be very secretive about things that they do that might be viewed as inappropriate by other townspeople.  This creates a lot of guilt on the person who carried out this “sin” or who is associated with it.

I think that Arthur Miller wants to show the reader that intolerance for what other people have done is not good in the development of a community.  People always judge people, its kind of an instinct for people to be opinionated about a certain topic or event.  Although some take it more seriously than others, people know that something they do or present will be critiqued to some degree by their peers.  Knowing that, some people are self-conscious about what they do that they might not want to share that with their peers.  Miller is trying to show that this constant judging is not good for building a community or friendship.  People are afraid that they won’t be accepted by the people they are around so they cover up certain information that they are self-conscious about sharing and then they don’t act like themselves.