She Is Blackening My Name In The Village

“Now, Betty, dear wake up now. It’s Abigail. (She sits Betty up and furiously shakes her. ) I’ll beat you Betty. ” This violent language is a key to how violent Abigail’s behaviour is. She knows what she wants and she is prepared to do whatever it takes to get it. Abigail’s character has many flaws, people would think passion is a good thing, and it is, but Abi is too passionate, she is willing to have innocent people killed, just to get rid of John Proctors wife, so she can be with him.

Abigail Williams does not seem to be a very religious person. (This is proven in her later life. She was found in Boston later on in life, living as a prostitute. ) She is mischievous, a liar, an adulterer, and in a sense, a murderer. You get an idea of her character from the first few pages. “Uncle we did dance; let you tell them I confessed it.

” This shows she is not concerned about the fact she was caught breaking the rules. In puritan times people were not allowed to have fun as it was seen as ‘ungodly’.

The only time you could celebrate was when somebody built a new barn; they held a sort of barbeque. They have cider and dance. If there hasn’t been a new barn built then puritan life was uneventful. This is why I think all of the rumours of witchcraft were started. It was just people wanting to have some fun in Salem.

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Little did they know what this ‘fun’ was going to result in. Abigail Williams is a strong character throughout the whole play. All of the girls do what she says and they follow her every action.

She Is Blackening My Name In The Village

If she accuses somebody of witchcraft the others say that person came to them in the night as well. In one scene of the play Betty tells the judge that she can see a black man whispering in one of the defendant’s ear. When the Judge tells the other girls, Abigail says she notices it first and she points to ‘the man’ then all of the others do the same. Abigail’s relationship with John Proctor is very strange. She loves the man, but she is still willing to destroy everything he loves, to have him as her own. She has no regard for other people’s feelings.

At the start John seems to be on good terms with her, even though he is ending it all, but at the end he hates her, the audience begin to hate Abigail as well because they sympathize with John; she has ruined his life, his wife’s, his children’s, and hundreds of people’s lives who live in the village. Abigail’s relationship with Elizabeth Proctor is tarnished from the beginning, as you can imagine. Abigail had been previously employed in their house as a maid, but as soon as Elizabeth found out about Abigail and Procter’s affair, she threw her out.

This makes Abigail feel that Elizabeth is unworthy of John, and takes every chance she gets to undermine her in front of her husband. “She is blackening my name in the village! She is telling lies about me! She is a cold, snivelling woman, and you bend to her! Let her turn you like a-“(Page 19). She wants Proctor to leave his wife so she tries to make him think she isn’t worth being with. I think that Abigail Williams is a good character to create tension because she is unpredictable.

In the start she is just a teenage girl, or to be exact a young woman (although this is arguable), who wants to have a little harmless fun. By the end of it she has caused so much distress and disruption, I don’t even think she could have imagined that happening. Throughout the play, even though people are being killed, she remains to tell lies, so she isn’t thought badly of. I think this creates tension because up until the end you don’t know if she is going to right her wrongs. So all in all I think Abigail is an interesting and unpredictable character, she is in the centre of everything.