Allusions In The Crucible

In Act four, of Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible from 1953, he demonstrates that one must bend to the will of the court of Salem or follow their own moral guidelines. Miller uses dramatic dialogue, ethos and allegorical allusions, showing that the people in Salem have to make person choices to follow or abandon their morals. This act’s purpose is to show the mental strain on the characters in the play in order to show the difficulty of the decisions the characters must make. The implied ethical argument is that it is unjust to force someone to choose between saving their life and abandoning their moral values and keeping their moral values and losing their lives. While the diction and syntax are understandable, the concepts and ideas in …show more content…
The characters fight to establish their own ethos to others around them, and by extension the audience throughout Act four. For example, Proctor fights to hold on to his own credibility within the town when he does not want Danforth to hang his signed testimony up in public. He does this because he does not want his friends to know that he has abandoned his own morals. John Proctor is not a witch, never has been a witch, and does not plan on being a witch, so signing his mane to his testimony is him abandoning his moral beliefs because his confession is a lie. He does not want others to know that he signed the testimony just to save his life. He knows he has sinned, but he believes that his confession should be between him and God, no one else. He refuses to give up the paper because he decides he can not abandon his morals, but his back-and-forth shows how difficult the decision was for him. Additionally, Danforth fights to maintain his ethos that he entered the play and Salem with. He does not want to stop the witch trial because people have already died, and then the people would think they died innocently and fall away from the church. He uses his previously established ethos to reassure the people that these witch trials are morally right because he does not want to think about what it means of those people he ordered to be hanged were innocent. In addition to dramatic dialogue …show more content…
By using allusions, Miller was able to place a contemporary event in the past, making his play an allegory. He parallels the choices of the judges like Danforth to contemporary judges. The same goes for the witch trials and characters like John Proctor who claimed innocence. The audience recognizes the choice that the characters within the play have to make and how difficult it will be, but the audience also judges those characters for some of the choices they make such as when Danforth decides to continue the witch trials when their contemporaries are making some of the same mistakes. Miller shows his audience that it is difficult to make decisions that may compromise one’s own morals, in the past or in contemporary times with his usage of allegorical allusions. Miller blends dramatic dialogue, ethos and allegorical allusions together in Act four of the Crucible in order to show the difficulty that people associate with making decisions that may infringe upon moral standards. He shows it is unjust to force someone to make that choice, especially when their life is dependent on the