The Crucible
(Nicholas Hytner, US, 1996)
It’s not inventions per se in a historical film that irritate me; fictionalisation can be used imaginatively and ‘authentically’. The trouble is that for me The Crucible’s inventions are as unsatisfying as they are inauthentic (and the two problems are probably inseparable). Not only does Miller’s invented love triangle do a serious disservice to the complex motives of Abigail and the other young women at the centre of the events in Salem village, it’s just a romantic cliché.
The film starts with a lie (the girls dancing in the woods) and ends with a lie (kicking away the stools before the condemned can finish their prayers on the gallows). The latter I find outrageous; the former simply sums up the crudity with which themes of sexuality and young women’s desires are frequently treated.
And yet… their desires may be beyond Miller’s comprehension, but on their fears, perhaps, The Crucible does better; it conveys a sense of how it all might have begun, in a claustrophobic dormitory with panicky fears of punishment by powerful elders, and how it developed into hysteria beyond anyone’s control, rapidly spreading across the Massachusetts countryside, filling a courtroom, on a destructive path to the scaffold.
Reading
The film and play
Arthur Miller, The crucible: a screenplay (London, 1996)
Arthur Miller, The crucible: a play in four acts (various editions)
Arthur Miller, The crucible in history and other essays (London, 2000)
Witchcraft in New England
P Boyer and S Nissenbaum, Salem possessed: the social origins of witchcraft (Cambridge, Mass, 1974)
J P Demos, Entertaining Satan: witchcraft and the culture of early New England (New York, 1982)
Frances Hill, A delusion of Satan: the full story of the Salem witch trials (London 1996)
C F Karlsen, The devil in the shape of a woman: witchcraft in colonial New England (New York, 1987)
…
Online Resources
Salem Witchcraft
(Salem probably has more online coverage in English-language sites than all the other witch trials put together, including much of very good quality; this is just a sample)
Witchcraft in Salem Village (University of Virginia/Danvers Archive Centre) a magnificent resource: includes full online version of the contemporary court records, as well as other important texts online; maps, and other local and historical information
Seventeenth-century New England (Margo Burns) all kinds of useful resources: bibliographies, teaching materials, organisations, witchcraft links, The Crucible
Salem Witchcraft Hysteria (National Geographic) interactive feature with a discussion forum and ‘ask the expert’ (who happens to be Richard Trask, historian and Danvers archivist); a fine piece of work (and a good-looking one too) as a teaching resource
Famous American Trials: Salem 1692 (Douglas Linder) primary documents, commentary, bibliography
Massachusetts
Bay Colony, 1640-1700 (Mary Kay Duggan) a set of useful documents
The film and play
Hysteria and Ideology in The Crucible (Richard Hayes) a 1953 review of the original play
Famous American Trials: The Crucible (Douglas Linder)
Resources for Teaching The Crucible
Hollywood movies and history (Margo Burns)
Fact and Fiction in The Crucible (Margo Burns)
Reviews of the 1996 film
