Mary Warren Essay

At the beginning of act three we hear voices from the court, of Martha Corey being accused of witchcraft, showing the extent that the accusation has risen to. Proctor brings Mary Warren to the court to tell the truth, that the girls and Abigail were making up everything about the women being witches, so as Proctor can prove his wife’s innocence and gain her freedom from jail. During the proceedings, Proctor is forced to sacrifice his name and admit to his affair with Abigail in order to damage her credibility, however, his wife, Elizabeth, not knowing of his confession, lies to protect her husband, saying that it was not the truth.

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When Abigail is confronted about this, she reacts in her usual way, which is to accuse Mary of being a witch herself. Mary can not take the pressure of the accusations and so, to save herself she, copies Abigail in how she gets herself out of trouble, by accusing Proctor of witchcraft and forcing her to the court in order to overthrow it.

Proctor is so angry at the state of the court and his faith, that, at the end of the act, he denounces God as her can not see any trace of divine help in the proceedings of that day.

Miller uses this rise and fall of tension throughout the act as a build-up of the final, and most dramatic end to the act, where Proctor seals his fate by shouting, “I say – I say – God is dead! ” Abigail’s accusations of witches in the society of Salem is similar to Miller’s own experiences in the 1930’s of McCarthyism and the “witch hunts” for communists in a capitalist country.

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The rise of communism in the East, which America stove to defeat, caused this rise in paranoia in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Almost any criticism of the government was seen as a declaration of loyalty to the communist ways.

In 1956 Miller himself was called before the court to answer charges of being a communist sympathizer, although at this time the power of the committee was waning and so instead of being imprisoned he was fined for Contempt of Congress. Miller began to link the activities of the committee with that of the witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts in 1692.. The feeling in both cases were if you don’t conform, then you are guilty. Millet emphasizes his aim to show, “The essential nature of one of the strangest and most awful chapters in human history. ”

He documents the events of the Salem witch trials, with dramatic licence, using the original records of the court proceedings and other pieces of primary and secondary evidence. The drama is based on real historical events of Puritan society and its fear of the Devil. They had moved from England brought their ways to the new land, American, were they believed the Devil lived in the woods surrounding their village, which was actually inhabited by the Native Americans. This fear and insecurity lead them to the ways of killing witches to protect themselves and rid their village of evil.

The fact that the play was based on real events adds to the tension as we know that innocent people actually suffered from untruthful accusations. To audiences of Millers time, there would have been a great sympathy with the people in Salem as the Americans were suffering the same way under the rule of McCarthyism, where the innocent were accused and sentenced. Proctor is seen as the voice of reason, though he is sinful, he tries to uncover the girls for what they really were. Throughout the events Proctor stands up for what he believes in and always suspects Abigail of lying and influencing the others as he knows her character.