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The Crucible (essay on John Proctor)

In Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, John Proctor is a flawed, conflicted character. Proctor is a man whose mistakes lead him to a place of self-doubt. Throughout the novel, he teteers on an inner scale of self-confidence and self-worth vs. self-hatred and self-deprecation. It is only at the end of the novel that he decides that his identity is worth clinging onto, although, paradoxically, this means being hanged. It is an important realization for Proctor that he would rather die as himself, with at least a shred of dignity and self-worth, than live feeling confined, oppressed, and used by Danforth and the church. Proctor is both a failure and an ultimate hero because his fatal mistake, his moral sin, leads him to acknowledge his flaws, forgive himself, and realize his personal worth and integrity.

Prior to the events in the story, John Proctor has a short-lived affair with Abigail Williams, who was the servant of Proctor and his wife Elizabeth. Out of some place of desperation or loneliness, and discontentedness with himself, Proctor lusted for this young, charming girl. He regrets his decision immensely and falls into a place of despair and self-hatred, convinced he can never right his wrong and is now forever dishonorable and sinful. Great stress is put on his relationship with his wife, Elizabeth, whom he still loves. There is a feeling of separation between them, a cold distance that discomforts them both. At the end of the play, Danforth and the others allow Elizabeth to see John before he is set to be hanged, his punishment for refusing to admit to witchcraft. John looks to his wife to help him justify his actions. Elizabeth tells her husband, “John, it come naught that I should forgive you, if you’ll not forgive yourself” (136). Elizabeth understands that John feels as though she must forgive him before he can forgive himself. But she also knows that ultimately, he must come to terms with his actions and that he can only set himself free from his burdensome guilt—she can’t do that for him. Throughout Proctor’s conversation with Elizabeth, he demonstrates that he is wrangling with his notions of morality, self-worth, and self-forgiveness. His determination to redeem himself and willingness to own up to what he did prove that despite making an appalling moral error, he is still a moral hero.

Proctor ultimately decides to deny allegations of witchcraft. He refuses to live under the false pretense of committing and admitting to witchcraft, appeasing the church, and being used as another name in the storm of accusations and anxiety occurring in Salem. By letting himself be hurled into the pool of the accused, Proctor feels that the church is taking his soul and using him, an important name in town, to make their cause look legitimate. He says, “God knows how black my sins are!” (142) and in spite of this, God doesn’t need his name nailed up on the church doors for the world to see—this matter is between him and God. Proctor’s inner strength and sense of self-worth are demonstrated when he declares to Danforth and Parris, “You have made your magic now, for now I do think I see some shred of goodness in John Proctor. Not enough to weave a banner with, but white enough to keep it from such dogs” (144). Proctor strives to come to terms with his past sins and acknowledge that he is more than his shortcomings—they needn’t forever weight him down. Similar to how Proctor’s decision to be hanged or confess changes back and forth, his belief in himself wavers, but he finally decides to forgive himself: in an ultimate inner battle for self-worth, Proctor prevails. He dies as himself, cognizant of his righteousness as well as of his flaws.

Throughout the play, John Proctor’s mistakes weigh him down and lead him to a place of self-doubt. Ultimately, he is able to forgive himself and learns to view himself as no less of a person than anyone else despite moral wrongs he has committed in the past. Ironically, by fully believing in himself and deciding that his identity is worth not giving up to the merciless Danforth and Parris, he is hanged. However, Proctor’s life ends when he is truly himself, flaws included, rather than continuing to live feeling used and oppressed by the church. Realizing that he would rather die as himself demonstrates Proctor’s growth and courage, making him worthy of the title moral hero. A man who has done no wrong is surely moral, but a man who has done wrong, recognizes it, finds a way to forgive himself, and learns deeper meaning from this emotional trauma is a moral hero.

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'The Crucible' Character Study: John Proctor

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Arthur Miller drew inspiration from Greek tragedies in his plays. Like many of the storylines from Ancient Greece, " The Crucible " charts the downfall of a tragic hero: John Proctor.

Proctor is the main male character of this modern classic and his story is key throughout the play's four acts. Actors portraying Proctor and students studying Miller's tragic play will find it useful to learn a bit more about this character.

Who Is John Proctor?

John Proctor is one of the key characters in " The Crucible " and can be considered the leading male role of the play. Because of his importance, we know more about him than almost anyone else in this tragedy.

• 30-year-old farmer.
• Married to a pious woman: Elizabeth Proctor .
• Father of three boys.
• Christian, yet dissatisfied with the way Rev. Parris runs the church.
• Doubts the existence of witchcraft.
• Despises injustice, yet feels guilty because of his extra-marital affair with 17-year-old Abigail Williams .

Proctor's Kindness and Anger

John Proctor is a kind man in many ways. In Act One, the audience first sees him entering the Parris household to check on the health of the reverend's ill daughter. He is good natured with fellow villagers such as Giles Corey, Rebecca Nurse, and others. Even with adversaries, he is slow to anger.

But when provoked, he does get angry. One of his flaws is his temper. When friendly discussion does not work, Proctor will resort to shouting and even physical violence.

There are occasions throughout the play when he threatens to whip his wife, his servant-girl, and his ex-mistress. Still, he remains a sympathetic character because his anger is generated by the unjust society which he inhabits. The more the town becomes collectively paranoid, the more he rages.

Proctor's Pride and Self-Esteem

Proctor's character contains a caustic blend of pride and self-loathing, a very puritanical combination indeed. On the one hand, he takes pride in his farm and his community. He is an independent spirit who has cultivated the wilderness and transformed it into farmland. Furthermore, his sense of religion and communal spirit has led to many public contributions. In fact, he helped construct the town's church.

His self-esteem sets him apart from other members of the town, such as the Putnams, who feel one must obey authority at all costs. Instead, John Proctor speaks his mind when he recognizes injustice. Throughout the play, he openly disagrees with the actions of Reverend Parris, a choice that ultimately leads to his execution.

Proctor the Sinner

Despite his prideful ways, John Proctor describes himself as a "sinner." He has cheated on his wife, and he is loath to admit the crime to anyone else. There are moments when his anger and disgust towards himself burst forth, such as in the climactic moment when he exclaims to Judge Danforth : "I hear the boot of Lucifer, I see his filthy face! And it is my face, and yours."

Proctor's flaws make him human. If he didn't have them, he wouldn't be a tragic hero. If the protagonist were a flawless hero, there would be no tragedy, even if the hero died at the end. A tragic hero, like John Proctor, is created when the protagonist uncovers the source of his downfall. When Proctor accomplishes this, he has the strength to stand up to the morally bankrupt society and dies in defense of truth.

Essays about John Proctor might do well to explore the character arc that occurs throughout the play. How and why does John Proctor change?

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The Crucible

Arthur miller, ask litcharts ai: the answer to your questions, john proctor quotes in the crucible.

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John Proctor: The Moral Center of "The Crucible"

Table of contents, introduction, the human flaws of john proctor, proctor as a symbol of resistance, the price of integrity, proctor as a tragic hero, works cited.

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Why I Wrote “The Crucible”

By Arthur Miller

As I watched “The Crucible” taking shape as a movie over much of the past year, the sheer depth of time that it represents for me kept returning to mind. As those powerful actors blossomed on the screen, and the children and the horses, the crowds and the wagons, I thought again about how I came to cook all this up nearly fifty years ago, in an America almost nobody I know seems to remember clearly. In a way, there is a biting irony in this film’s having been made by a Hollywood studio, something unimaginable in the fifties. But there they are—Daniel Day-Lewis (John Proctor) scything his sea-bordered field, Joan Allen (Elizabeth) lying pregnant in the frigid jail, Winona Ryder (Abigail) stealing her minister-uncle’s money, majestic Paul Scofield (Judge Danforth) and his righteous empathy with the Devil-possessed children, and all of them looking as inevitable as rain.

I remember those years—they formed “The Crucible” ’s skeleton—but I have lost the dead weight of the fear I had then. Fear doesn’t travel well; just as it can warp judgment, its absence can diminish memory’s truth. What terrifies one generation is likely to bring only a puzzled smile to the next. I remember how in 1964, only twenty years after the war, Harold Clurman, the director of “Incident at Vichy,” showed the cast a film of a Hitler speech, hoping to give them a sense of the Nazi period in which my play took place. They watched as Hitler, facing a vast stadium full of adoring people, went up on his toes in ecstasy, hands clasped under his chin, a sublimely self-gratified grin on his face, his body swivelling rather cutely, and they giggled at his overacting.

Likewise, films of Senator Joseph McCarthy are rather unsettling—if you remember the fear he once spread. Buzzing his truculent sidewalk brawler’s snarl through the hairs in his nose, squinting through his cat’s eyes and sneering like a villain, he comes across now as nearly comical, a self-aware performer keeping a straight face as he does his juicy threat-shtick.

McCarthy’s power to stir fears of creeping Communism was not entirely based on illusion, of course; the paranoid, real or pretended, always secretes its pearl around a grain of fact. From being our wartime ally, the Soviet Union rapidly became an expanding empire. In 1949, Mao Zedong took power in China. Western Europe also seemed ready to become Red—especially Italy, where the Communist Party was the largest outside Russia, and was growing. Capitalism, in the opinion of many, myself included, had nothing more to say, its final poisoned bloom having been Italian and German Fascism. McCarthy—brash and ill-mannered but to many authentic and true—boiled it all down to what anyone could understand: we had “lost China” and would soon lose Europe as well, because the State Department—staffed, of course, under Democratic Presidents—was full of treasonous pro-Soviet intellectuals. It was as simple as that.

If our losing China seemed the equivalent of a flea’s losing an elephant, it was still a phrase—and a conviction—that one did not dare to question; to do so was to risk drawing suspicion on oneself. Indeed, the State Department proceeded to hound and fire the officers who knew China, its language, and its opaque culture—a move that suggested the practitioners of sympathetic magic who wring the neck of a doll in order to make a distant enemy’s head drop off. There was magic all around; the politics of alien conspiracy soon dominated political discourse and bid fair to wipe out any other issue. How could one deal with such enormities in a play?

“The Crucible” was an act of desperation. Much of my desperation branched out, I suppose, from a typical Depression-era trauma—the blow struck on the mind by the rise of European Fascism and the brutal anti-Semitism it had brought to power. But by 1950, when I began to think of writing about the hunt for Reds in America, I was motivated in some great part by the paralysis that had set in among many liberals who, despite their discomfort with the inquisitors’ violations of civil rights, were fearful, and with good reason, of being identified as covert Communists if they should protest too strongly.

In any play, however trivial, there has to be a still point of moral reference against which to gauge the action. In our lives, in the late nineteen-forties and early nineteen-fifties, no such point existed anymore. The left could not look straight at the Soviet Union’s abrogations of human rights. The anti-Communist liberals could not acknowledge the violations of those rights by congressional committees. The far right, meanwhile, was licking up all the cream. The days of “ J’accuse ” were gone, for anyone needs to feel right to declare someone else wrong. Gradually, all the old political and moral reality had melted like a Dali watch. Nobody but a fanatic, it seemed, could really say all that he believed.

President Truman was among the first to have to deal with the dilemma, and his way of resolving it—of having to trim his sails before the howling gale on the right—turned out to be momentous. At first, he was outraged at the allegation of widespread Communist infiltration of the government and called the charge of “coddling Communists” a red herring dragged in by the Republicans to bring down the Democrats. But such was the gathering power of raw belief in the great Soviet plot that Truman soon felt it necessary to institute loyalty boards of his own.

The Red hunt, led by the House Committee on Un-American Activities and by McCarthy, was becoming the dominating fixation of the American psyche. It reached Hollywood when the studios, after first resisting, agreed to submit artists’ names to the House Committee for “clearing” before employing them. This unleashed a veritable holy terror among actors, directors, and others, from Party members to those who had had the merest brush with a front organization.

The Soviet plot was the hub of a great wheel of causation; the plot justified the crushing of all nuance, all the shadings that a realistic judgment of reality requires. Even worse was the feeling that our sensitivity to this onslaught on our liberties was passing from us—indeed, from me. In “Timebends,” my autobiography, I recalled the time I’d written a screenplay (“The Hook”) about union corruption on the Brooklyn waterfront. Harry Cohn, the head of Columbia Pictures, did something that would once have been considered unthinkable: he showed my script to the F.B.I. Cohn then asked me to take the gangsters in my script, who were threatening and murdering their opponents, and simply change them to Communists. When I declined to commit this idiocy (Joe Ryan, the head of the longshoremen’s union, was soon to go to Sing Sing for racketeering), I got a wire from Cohn saying, “The minute we try to make the script pro-American you pull out.” By then—it was 1951—I had come to accept this terribly serious insanity as routine, but there was an element of the marvellous in it which I longed to put on the stage.

In those years, our thought processes were becoming so magical, so paranoid, that to imagine writing a play about this environment was like trying to pick one’s teeth with a ball of wool: I lacked the tools to illuminate miasma. Yet I kept being drawn back to it.

I had read about the witchcraft trials in college, but it was not until I read a book published in 1867—a two-volume, thousand-page study by Charles W. Upham, who was then the mayor of Salem—that I knew I had to write about the period. Upham had not only written a broad and thorough investigation of what was even then an almost lost chapter of Salem’s past but opened up to me the details of personal relationships among many participants in the tragedy.

I visited Salem for the first time on a dismal spring day in 1952; it was a sidetracked town then, with abandoned factories and vacant stores. 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. But there was one entry in Upham in which the thousands of pieces I had come across were jogged into place. It was from a report written by the Reverend Samuel Parris, who was one of the chief instigators of the witch-hunt. “During the examination of Elizabeth Procter, Abigail Williams and Ann Putnam”—the two were “afflicted” teen-age accusers, and Abigail was Parris’s niece—“both made offer to strike at said Procter; but when Abigail’s hand came near, it opened, whereas it was made up into a fist before, and came down exceeding lightly as it drew near to said Procter, and at length, with open and extended fingers, touched Procter’s hood very lightly. Immediately Abigail cried out her fingers, her fingers, her fingers burned. . . .”

In this remarkably observed gesture of a troubled young girl, I believed, a play became possible. Elizabeth Proctor had been the orphaned Abigail’s mistress, and they had lived together in the same small house until Elizabeth fired the girl. By this time, I was sure, John Proctor had bedded Abigail, who had to be dismissed most likely to appease Elizabeth. There was bad blood between the two women now. That Abigail started, in effect, to condemn Elizabeth to death with her touch, then stopped her hand, then went through with it, was quite suddenly the human center of all this turmoil.

All this I understood. I had not approached the witchcraft out of nowhere, or from purely social and political considerations. My own marriage of twelve years was teetering and I knew more than I wished to know about where the blame lay. That John Proctor the sinner might overturn his paralyzing personal guilt and become the most forthright voice against the madness around him was a reassurance to me, and, I suppose, an inspiration: it demonstrated that a clear moral outcry could still spring even from an ambiguously unblemished soul. Moving crabwise across the profusion of evidence, I sensed that I had at last found something of myself in it, and a play began to accumulate around this man.

But as the dramatic form became visible, one problem remained unyielding: so many practices of the Salem trials were similar to those employed by the congressional committees that I could easily be accused of skewing history for a mere partisan purpose. Inevitably, it was no sooner known that my new play was about Salem than I had to confront the charge that such an analogy was specious—that there never were any witches but there certainly are Communists. In the seventeenth century, however, the existence of witches was never questioned by the loftiest minds in Europe and America; and even lawyers of the highest eminence, like Sir Edward Coke, a veritable hero of liberty for defending the common law against the king’s arbitrary power, believed that witches had to be prosecuted mercilessly. Of course, there were no Communists in 1692, but it was literally worth your life to deny witches or their powers, given the exhortation in the Bible, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” There had to be witches in the world or the Bible lied. Indeed, the very structure of evil depended on Lucifer’s plotting against God. (And the irony is that klatches of Luciferians exist all over the country today; there may even be more of them now than there are Communists.)

As with most humans, panic sleeps in one unlighted corner of my soul. When I walked at night along the empty, wet streets of Salem in the week that I spent there, I could easily work myself into imagining my terror before a gaggle of young girls flying down the road screaming that somebody’s “familiar spirit” was chasing them. This anxiety-laden leap backward over nearly three centuries may have been helped along by a particular Upham footnote. At a certain point, the high court of the province made the fatal decision to admit, for the first time, the use of “spectral evidence” as proof of guilt. Spectral evidence, so aptly named, meant that if I swore that you had sent out your “familiar spirit” to choke, tickle, or poison me or my cattle, or to control my thoughts and actions, I could get you hanged unless you confessed to having had contact with the Devil. After all, only the Devil could lend such powers of invisible transport to confederates, in his everlasting plot to bring down Christianity.

Naturally, the best proof of the sincerity of your confession was your naming others whom you had seen in the Devil’s company—an invitation to private vengeance, but made official by the seal of the theocratic state. It was as though the court had grown tired of thinking and had invited in the instincts: spectral evidence—that poisoned cloud of paranoid fantasy—made a kind of lunatic sense to them, as it did in plot-ridden 1952, when so often the question was not the acts of an accused but the thoughts and intentions in his alienated mind.

The breathtaking circularity of the process had a kind of poetic tightness. Not everybody was accused, after all, so there must be some reason why you were . By denying that there is any reason whatsoever for you to be accused, you are implying, by virtue of a surprisingly small logical leap, that mere chance picked you out, which in turn implies that the Devil might not really be at work in the village or, God forbid, even exist. Therefore, the investigation itself is either mistaken or a fraud. You would have to be a crypto-Luciferian to say that—not a great idea if you wanted to go back to your farm.

The more I read into the Salem panic, the more it touched off corresponding images of common experiences in the fifties: the old friend of a blacklisted person crossing the street to avoid being seen talking to him; the overnight conversions of former leftists into born-again patriots; and so on. Apparently, certain processes are universal. When Gentiles in Hitler’s Germany, for example, saw their Jewish neighbors being trucked off, or farmers in Soviet Ukraine saw the Kulaks vanishing before their eyes, the common reaction, even among those unsympathetic to Nazism or Communism, was quite naturally to turn away in fear of being identified with the condemned. As I learned from non-Jewish refugees, however, there was often a despairing pity mixed with “Well, they must have done something .” Few of us can easily surrender our belief that society must somehow make sense. The thought that the state has lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable And so the evidence has to be internally denied.

I was also drawn into writing “The Crucible” by the chance it gave me to use a new language—that of seventeenth-century New England. That plain, craggy English was liberating in a strangely sensuous way, with its swings from an almost legalistic precision to a wonderful metaphoric richness. “The Lord doth terrible things amongst us, by lengthening the chain of the roaring lion in an extraordinary manner, so that the Devil is come down in great wrath,” Deodat Lawson, one of the great witch-hunting preachers, said in a sermon. Lawson rallied his congregation for what was to be nothing less than a religious war against the Evil One—“Arm, arm, arm!”—and his concealed anti-Christian accomplices.

But it was not yet my language, and among other strategies to make it mine I enlisted the help of a former University of Michigan classmate, the Greek-American scholar and poet Kimon Friar. (He later translated Kazantzakis.) The problem was not to imitate the archaic speech but to try to create a new echo of it which would flow freely off American actors’ tongues. As in the film, nearly fifty years later, the actors in the first production grabbed the language and ran with it as happily as if it were their customary speech.

“The Crucible” took me about a year to write. With its five sets and a cast of twenty-one, it never occurred to me that it would take a brave man to produce it on Broadway, especially given the prevailing climate, but Kermit Bloomgarden never faltered. Well before the play opened, a strange tension had begun to build. Only two years earlier, the “Death of a Salesman” touring company had played to a thin crowd in Peoria, Illinois, having been boycotted nearly to death by the American Legion and the Jaycees. Before that, the Catholic War Veterans had prevailed upon the Army not to allow its theatrical groups to perform, first, “All My Sons,” and then any play of mine, in occupied Europe. The Dramatists Guild refused to protest attacks on a new play by Sean O’Casey, a self-declared Communist, which forced its producer to cancel his option. I knew of two suicides by actors depressed by upcoming investigation, and every day seemed to bring news of people exiling themselves to Europe: Charlie Chaplin, the director Joseph Losey, Jules Dassin, the harmonica virtuoso Larry Adler, Donald Ogden Stewart, one of the most sought-after screenwriters in Hollywood, and Sam Wanamaker, who would lead the successful campaign to rebuild the Old Globe Theatre on the Thames.

On opening night, January 22, 1953, I knew that the atmosphere would be pretty hostile. The coldness of the crowd was not a surprise; Broadway audiences were not famous for loving history lessons, which is what they made of the play. It seems to me entirely appropriate that on the day the play opened, a newspaper headline read “ALL THIRTEEN REDS GUILTY” —a story about American Communists who faced prison for “conspiring to teach and advocate the duty and necessity of forcible overthrow of government.” Meanwhile, the remoteness of the production was guaranteed by the director, Jed Harris, who insisted that this was a classic requiring the actors to face front, never each other. The critics were not swept away. “Arthur Miller is a problem playwright in both senses of the word,” wrote Walter Kerr of the Herald Tribune , who called the play “a step backward into mechanical parable.” The Times was not much kinder, saying, “There is too much excitement and not enough emotion in ‘The Crucible.’ ” But the play’s future would turn out quite differently.

About a year later, a new production, one with younger, less accomplished actors, working in the Martinique Hotel ballroom, played with the fervor that the script and the times required, and “The Crucible” became a hit. The play stumbled into history, and today, I am told, it is one of the most heavily demanded trade-fiction paperbacks in this country; the Bantam and Penguin editions have sold more than six million copies. I don’t think there has been a week in the past forty-odd years when it hasn’t been on a stage somewhere in the world. Nor is the new screen version the first. Jean-Paul Sartre, in his Marxist phase, wrote a French film adaptation that blamed the tragedy on the rich landowners conspiring to persecute the poor. (In truth, most of those who were hanged in Salem were people of substance, and two or three were very large landowners.)

It is only a slight exaggeration to say that, especially in Latin America, “The Crucible” starts getting produced wherever a political coup appears imminent, or a dictatorial regime has just been overthrown. From Argentina to Chile to Greece, Czechoslovakia, China, and a dozen other places, the play seems to present the same primeval structure of human sacrifice to the furies of fanaticism and paranoia that goes on repeating itself forever as though imbedded in the brain of social man.

I am not sure what “The Crucible” is telling people now, but I know that its paranoid center is still pumping out the same darkly attractive warning that it did in the fifties. For some, the play seems to be about the dilemma of relying on the testimony of small children accusing adults of sexual abuse, something I’d not have dreamed of forty years ago. For others, it may simply be a fascination with the outbreak of paranoia that suffuses the play—the blind panic that, in our age, often seems to sit at the dim edges of consciousness. Certainly its political implications are the central issue for many people; the Salem interrogations turn out to be eerily exact models of those yet to come in Stalin’s Russia, Pinochet’s Chile, Mao’s China, and other regimes. (Nien Cheng, the author of “Life and Death in Shanghai,” has told me that she could hardly believe that a non-Chinese—someone who had not experienced the Cultural Revolution—had written the play.) But below its concerns with justice the play evokes a lethal brew of illicit sexuality, fear of the supernatural, and political manipulation, a combination not unfamiliar these days. The film, by reaching the broad American audience as no play ever can, may well unearth still other connections to those buried public terrors that Salem first announced on this continent.

One thing more—something wonderful in the old sense of that word. I recall the weeks I spent reading testimony by the tome, commentaries, broadsides, confessions, and accusations. And always the crucial damning event was the signing of one’s name in “the Devil’s book.” This Faustian agreement to hand over one’s soul to the dreaded Lord of Darkness was the ultimate insult to God. But what were these new inductees supposed to have done once they’d signed on? Nobody seems even to have thought to ask. But, of course, actions are as irrelevant during cultural and religious wars as they are in nightmares. The thing at issue is buried intentions—the secret allegiances of the alienated heart, always the main threat to the theocratic mind, as well as its immemorial quarry. ♦

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John Proctor's Power in The Crucible Essay Example

Power is defined as, “the capacity or ability to direct or influence the behavior of others or the course of events.” In the drama, written by Arthur Miller, The Crucible, constant power plays happen between all characters, whether that power is Referent, Legitimate, Expert, Coercive, Information, or Reward. John Proctor has built a name for himself in the town of Salem but that reputation is soon ruined. Yet, John manages to make excellent use of his power, forever uprooting the true inhumanity of the Salem witch trials. 

John Proctor has a good reputation in Salem, already having a solid foundation of Referent power, the power given to someone because they are liked and respected. John Proctor is described as “respected and even feared in Salem” (Miller, 144; act 1). This type of power is hard to phrasal. Referent power isn’t like Coercive power, using punishments or threats, or Legitimate power, power because of one’s position or title. They rely heavily on the will of people to obey them, making these powers extremely unreliable. 

All suddenly comes crashing down when John Proctor is put into a compromising position and has to confess to committing adultery, having slept with Abigail. He tries to delegitimize Abigail’s outlandish accusations by divulging Abigail’s true feelings of jealousy towards Elizabeth. John Proctor’s name is abruptly tainted. Then comes a second and final blow to his reputation when Mary Warren accuses John of witchcraft, exclaiming “You’re the Devil’s man!” (Miller 3.108-109). John Proctor admits to this false accusation, taken to be put in shackles and sentenced to death. A truly frustrating turn of events. 

Then, when it seems that John has completely lost all of his power, he makes the last-minute decision to not sign the paper to admit to witchcraft. John insists that “it is [his] name! Because [he] cannot have another in [his] life!” (Miller, 4.25-26), therefore completely stripping Danforth of any of his Legitimate power, a power which is given because of their title or position. This comes as a complete shock to Danforth, thinking that his position and power as a judge would never be tested like this. John Proctor does not take the easy way out; admitting to witchcraft and living a relatively peaceful life, but instead keeping his integrity and demanding respect. By choosing not to admit to witchcraft, John successfully turns the tables, regaining his Referent power through admirable defiance. But, his honesty is a double-edged sword, for he will be hanged. Although John could have easily lied, he instead puts the lives of his children before his own. Right up until the end he considers the consequences of lying, his two boys having to forever be taunted by the people of Salem for having a father who practiced witchcraft. 

John Proctor, although he does lose his power halfway through the play, proves just how effective Referent power can be. His adamancy to remain with integrity and not succumb to the threats of Coercive power makes his name respected among the people of the town. John Proctor is truly a good man whose death surely disrupts the confidence Salem had in the witch trials being an effective tool to respond to accusations of witchcraft.

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John Proctor the True Tragic Hero

This essay will explore the character of John Proctor in Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible” and argue whether he fits the mold of a tragic hero. It will analyze Proctor’s virtues and flaws, his conflict with the societal norms of Puritan Salem, and his ultimate downfall. The piece will discuss the elements of tragedy in the play, drawing parallels with classical definitions of a tragic hero, and examining how Proctor’s character reflects the broader themes of integrity, guilt, and redemption. PapersOwl showcases more free essays that are examples of Hero.

How it works

Every tragic hero has an encouraging future until some fatal flaw or lapse in judgement shrouds all of their actions, leading to their eventual demise. In Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, John Proctor is no exception to this statement; he succumbs to his death because of a failure in reasoning. Another one of John’s characteristics that leads him to be labeled as the tragic hero of The Crucible is his relatable tragic flaw, which is also known as his hamartia.

In his constant effort to save his reputation after making a terrible mistake, he is the root of the deaths of many townspeople. At the end of the play, John will suffer the inevitable consequences of his flaws. He comes to realize that his fate is his own fault. John Proctor’s mistakes, relatable hamartia, along with realizing he is the cause of his own death by a lapse in judgement, characterizes him as the tragic hero in The Crucible.

John Proctor’s affair with Abigail Williams, who was once his servant, is his ultimate mistake that leads to his deathly downfall. In Puritan culture, the crime of lechery is only second to witchcraft in the harshness of the consequences associated with each crime. Proctor is having a conversation in the upper room of Reverend Parris’ house and tells Abigail, “Abby, you’ll put it out of mind. I’ll not be coming for you no more,” when Abigail tries to convince Proctor that he still has feelings for her and does not love his wife anymore (Miller 1139). He is trying in any way he can to get Abigail from coming at him in a romantic way. Proctor knows that if he lets the affair get too much further out, his life and moral, upright reputation could be at stake. As Proctor tries to keep Abigail quiet, he is also fighting a war on the home front. John’s wife, Elizabeth, fired Abigail seven months prior to John’s conversation with Abigail. Elizabeth’s actions towards John avertedly reveals that she knows of the affair, and John wants to mend the relationship between him and his wife; he says, “When will you know me, woman? Were I stone I would have cracked for shame this seven month!” Here, Proctor is telling Elizabeth how badly he wishes for her forgiveness. He realizes the severity of his mistake and is tired of dragging out the drama and tension between them since she found out seven months ago. In the end, John Proctor’s life ends because of his lapse in judgement involving Abigail, relating him to the title of tragic hero.

John’s conformality with his relatable hamartia of an error in judgement that was disastrous encourages him fit the character of unfortunate saint, or tragic hero. In Puritanism, the consequences of lechery were unimaginable. Proctor knew this and willingly confessed to that crime in light of bringing Abigail’s lies and deceit to a head. After Mary Warren reveals that she knows about the affair, she tells John, “I have known it, sir. She’ll ruin you with it, I know she will.’ Proctor, hesitating, and with deep hatred of himself: ‘Good. Then her saintliness is done with'” (Miller 1181). Even after Mary Warren reminds Proctor that Abigail will ‘ruin him with it,’ Proctor still wants to bring to light Abigail’s pretense. He knows he messed up, and he is willing to take the blame to save countless people from being hung. Later in the play, John Proctor is talking to Francis Nurse. In order to prove that he is telling the truth, Proctor tells Francis Nurse, “A man will not cast away his good name” (Miller 1206). Proctor explains to Francis Nurse that he is being legitimate about his accusation under the reasoning that he wouldn’t throw his good name away over a lie. He knows and understands that his fall occurs because of his actions. John Proctor is obviously described as the tragic hero in The Crucible on account of his consciousness of his hamartia.

The definitive reason for John’s passing was his failure to comprehend the issues at hand when they occurred. He did not comprehend the gravity of his actions or how they would affect his future when he committed the sin of lechery. Elizabeth and John converse in Act II about John going to Salem and being alone with Abigail; John admits to Elizabeth that he cheated on her when he says, “But I wilted, and like a Christian, I confessed” (Miller 1164). Here, Proctor is pleading with Elizabeth for her forgiveness and is telling her how sorry he is for what he did to her. He also reveals his knowledge of what he did, but it was not until after the fact that he really realized what he had done. Later, when John ends up confessing to Judge Danforth, the head judge in the witchcraft trials, he states, “I have known her, sir, I have known her” (Miller 1206). In this line, Proctor is confessing to his sin of lechery. It is here that Proctor gives up his life and reputation. John knows his inability to understand his troubling issues is a complete purpose behind his passing, further characterizing him as a tragic hero.

When John Proctor commits the sin of lechery, he commits the action that will ultimately lead to his demise. Proctor knew this after the fact and willingly confessed to that crime in order to bring Abigail’s lies and deceit forward. Even after Mary Warren reminds Proctor that Abigail will ‘ruin him with it,’ Proctor still wants to bring to light Abigail’s subterfuge. The ultimate reason for John’s passing was his inability to grasp the issues at hand when they arose. He did not comprehend the enormity of his actions or how they would affect his future when he committed the sin of lechery, making him the tragic hero in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible.

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The Crucible John Proctor Essay

Follows the character development of John Proctor in The Crucible by Arthur Miller.

Related Papers

Eden Riebling

Dissent often provokes repression, because a dominant discourse tends to demonize those who dissent from it. That was America during the Salem Witch Trials; that was America during the Red Scare; and that is the lived experience of dissidents in many nations even today. But as the tragic heroism of John Proctor shows, in Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible, the evil that men do cannot prevent even one imperfect man’s doing good. Proctor is not a hero because he changes his world: He is a hero because he keeps the world from changing him.

Jared Robinson

Basaad Mhyyal

In the period immediately following the end of World War II, American theatre was transformed by the work of playwright Arthur Miller. Miller tapped into a sense of dissatisfaction and unrest within the greater American psyche because he was profoundly influenced by the depression and the war that immediately followed it. His dramas proved to be both the conscience and redemption of the times; allowing people an honest view of the direction the country had taken.1 Miller has his own concept of tragedy as a modern playwright. He believes that tragedy may depict ordinary people in domestic surroundings instead of talking about a character from a high rank, a king or a queen. Miller’s main concern lies in dramatizing the whole man as he is part of a family and as he is part of a society. In this paper, The Crucible is going to be considered in detail as one of the major tragedies of Arthur Miller. Miller’s The Crucible is based on the events surrounding the 1692 witch trials of Salem, Massachusetts. Miller used that event as an allegory for McCarthyism and the Red Scare, which was a period of time in which Americans were in fear of communism and the government blacklisted accused communists. The play was first performed on Broadway on January 22, 1953. The reviews of the first production were hostile, but a year later a new production succeeded and the play became a classic. The play in the present time is often studied in high schools and universities because of its status as a revolutionary work of theatre and as a document to political events of the 1950s. This play is regarded as one of the best plays of the modern age, due to its deep and captivating plot.2 Miller’s The Crucible is essentially a critique of McCarthyism and the communist scare of the 1950s. Miller saw the parallels between the witch hunts and the McCarthy trials, and found the witch trials to be a compelling vehicle for discussing modern events. The play is a great tragedy, but remains a tragedy for the modern times. The characters in this play suggest what Miller tries to show his readers the lessons from the witch hunts which still apply.3 After performing, the audience is convinced that this play remains relevant and powerful in the twenty-first century. This play can be related to the contemporary world events. It shows the willingness of human beings to blame anyone but themselves. It reinforces the belief that humans are not ready to take responsibility for their actions and would rather find a scapegoat. Miller went back to American history and dug up the records of the Salem witchcraft trails and created his own characters based on the few facts of “known behavior” of the persons involved. The result is a powerful indictment of mass hysteria and savage fury born of terror and superstition. In John Proctor, the tragic hero of The Crucible, Miller has created one of the few heroes of modern drama. A blunt, honest man, but neither an exceptionally good nor a complicated one, Proctor grows with the pressure of circumstances. Like most of Miller’s heroes, Proctor asks to preserve the honour of his name, his right to face himself and his children without apology. However, when a society has gone mad, such a simple reasonable desire makes a man on enemy of the state.4 This paper deals with Arthur Miller as a great playwright of tragedy. It consists of an introduction and two sections. The first section tackles Miller’s concept of tragedy and his view about the common man. Then, section two deals with The Crucible as Miller’s special tragedy and the conclusion reflects what is found out in this paper.

Pragmatics and Cognition

Mahmood sabbagh

Apart from the stylistic and cognitive studies which have already been done separately on Miller’sThe Crucible, this paper provides a new insight into the play and its system of characterization by integrating these approaches. To this end, the paper draws on Jonathan Culpeper’s cognitive stylistic theory of top-down and bottom-up processes in literary text comprehension and characterization. Based on this holistic framework, the paper takes advantage of such stylistic tools as speech acts, the Cooperative Principle and politeness theory to examine features of the language used by the characters Proctor and Danforth. In this regard, the article assimilates those linguistic elements with the embedded schemata within the play. Consequently, the study reveals that Proctor’s complex characterization does not coincide with the readers’ schema and thus they form their impression of his character based on piecemeal integration. On the other hand, Danforth’s character reinforces the readers...

OCIAL SCIENCES STUDIES JOURNAL (SSSJournal)

Khorsheed Ahmed

Many researches, although, have been conducted on American Literature in general, but this study focuses on The Impact of Transgression on the Human's Life in which is presented by Arthur Miller throughout The Crucible. The play explores several complex and trans-historic topics, many of which relate to the playwright's experiences during the McCarthyism era. Miller asks his audience to value independent and personal truths, which he defines as more morally right and good than social truth. This is because, in the playwright's mind, social veracities are often manipulated and exploited to gain a desired personal result regardless of how they affect people's lives. The study comprises four chapters. The first chapter includes the introduction, aims and value of the study, Socio-political background, The Crucible as a Tragic Play, Author's Biography and his major literary works and summary of the Play. While the second chapter concerns with the literature review. The third chapter focuses on the outcomes of this research paper which is Social Transgression, Political Transgression and Religious Transgression. The last chapter includes the main conclusions of the study.

pawan sharma

The present study attempts to examine the relationship of husband, John Proctor, and wife, Elizabeth Proctor, in Arthur Miller's play The Crucible (1953) by clarifying how their use of language in communicating with each other reflects the nature and the development of their tensed relationship. Their relationship, though personal, yet it has been influential in setting in motion the disastrous events which upset the whole community of the 1697 Salem, Massachusetts. Speech act theory associated with the work of J. L. Austin (1962) and John Searle (1975) is employed to reveal 1) a failure of communication between the two at the beginning of the play due to their troubled marital life, 2) a true rapprochement achieved by them near the end due to their long suffering during the witch hunt and also to Elizabeth's essential honesty and courageous self-awareness. Her heroic integrity forces her husband to face the truth and soon he makes his final noble choice i.e. death with ho...

rabbia rani

Psychoanalytic Study of Abigail's Mind In Arthur Miller's Play ''The Crucible'' Rabbia Rani M.A English U.O.S (M B DIN) Abstract: The present research explores the psychoanalytic study of Abigail's mind in Arthur Miller's play ''The Crucible''. This drama is about the Salem witch trial of 1962, in North America. .As it is clear like daylight that 'Crucible' is a container in which we melt the things to purify the purity of the people. This research suggest Abigail's mind under the umbrella of Psychoanalytic study. Sigmund Freud is the pioneer of psychoanalysis theory. He divides mind into three parts; Id, Ego, Super Ego. As Sigmund Freud discloses that ‘’the mind is like an iceberg, it floats with one –seventh of its bulk above water”. Abigail prefers id. It prevails 98 percent in our mind. Id is the only part that is present spontaneously in our mind. It subsist with carving, yearning, longing, ambition and fascination, impulses particular our sexual and aggressive drives. The findings of the present research is about Abigail’s personality has a confrontation between id and super- ego. Although, she follows id because her parents does not give love and affection to her and she wants to gets love and affection from hideous way. Keywords: Id, Ego, Super- Ego, Naive, love and Affection, Neurotic

International Journal of Psychosocial Rehabilitation,

arunakumari s

The Crucible, a play by Arthur Miller, was an adaptation of the Salem witch trials, which took place in the American province of Massachusetts Bay in 1692 and 1693. In the Crucible's play, all characters are all based on real people who lived in Salem. Although there are several similarities to our own time in the play, it is full of ideas and attitudes that were unique to Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692. To clearly understand the play, some knowledge of Salem is required. As a result, the following information discusses essential Puritan beliefs and customs, as well as history including its historical Salem witch trials. In particular, Miller's use of such Salem witch trials to critique upon this McCarthy trials in the 1950s discussed all these things throughout this paper.

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Home — Essay Samples — Literature — The Crucible — Analysis of John Proctor as Tragic Hero in “The Crucible” by Arthur Miller

Analysis of John Proctor as Tragic Hero in "The Crucible" by Arthur Miller

• Categories: John Proctor The Crucible Tragic Hero

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Words: 1530 |

Pages: 3.5 |

Published: Jun 29, 2018

Words: 1530 | Pages: 3.5 | 8 min read

This essay explores the character of John Proctor in Arthur Miller's play "The Crucible" and analyzes whether he can be considered a true tragic hero according to Aristotle's criteria. The essay begins by defining Aristotle's parameters for a tragic hero, which include being of noble birth, having a fatal flaw or hamartia, and experiencing anagnorisis, a moment of enlightenment and redemption.

The essay argues that John Proctor can be seen as the tragic hero in the play, as he fits many of Aristotle's criteria. Proctor is a respected figure in Puritan Salem, and his fatal flaw is identified as his hubris, particularly his obsession with maintaining his reputable name. His affair with Abigail Williams and his refusal to confess his involvement in the witch trials due to his pride contribute to his downfall.

However, the essay also highlights a key issue with Proctor's character as a tragic hero. While he experiences a form of redemption by tearing up his signed confession and standing up to the corrupt authorities, this redemption is rooted in his desire to protect his reputation rather than a genuine shift in values. This self-serving nature of his redemption detracts from his characterization as a true tragic hero, as he fails to undergo a true anagnorisis.

Works Cited

• Aristotle. (1996). Poetics (R. Janko, Trans.). Hackett Publishing Company.
• Miller, A. (1953). The Crucible. Penguin Books.
• Golden, A. L. (Ed.). (2010). The Crucible: A Play in Four Acts (Vol. 15). Dramatists Play Service.
• Bloom, H. (Ed.). (2009). Arthur Miller's The Crucible (Bloom's Modern Critical Interpretations). Infobase Publishing.
• Murphy, B. (2011). Arthur Miller (Modern Critical Views). Infobase Publishing.
• Bell, R. C. (2000). Understanding Arthur Miller. Univ of South Carolina Press.
• Bigsby, C. W. (2005). Arthur Miller: A Critical Study. Cambridge University Press.
• Koprince, S. (2017). The Crucible by Arthur Miller (MAXNotes Literature Guides). Research & Education Association.
• Meyer, M. (2015). The Compact Bedford Introduction to Literature: Reading, Thinking, Writing (11th ed.). Bedford/St. Martin's.
• Roudané, M. (Ed.). (2010). The Cambridge Companion to Arthur Miller (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press.

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