One of the many questions surrounding Arthur Miller’s creative ‘treatment’ of the historical events behind the Salem Witch Trails of 1692 so as to ‘enlighten’ the corrosive and anti-democratic practices of the HUAC’s (House Committee on Un-American Activities) in the early 1950s is connected with the different ways in which critics and audiences (since the first staging of the play in 1953 up until present times) have come to understand the ‘historical terms’ of his playwriting endeavors.
Is the parallel between 1692 and 1952 a valid one?
If we are to conceive of Miller’s play as of a history play, such as I propose in my reading of the piece, then are we to agree that it does embody, to a certain extent, a view of (social) history, i.e., as the critic Michael J. O’Neal amicably points out in his essay, titled “History, Myth, and Name Magic in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible,” “[does] it [The Crucible] imagine forth through plot and character, a way of making coherent the manifold events of [one] culture’s past”? (84, brackets added)
What is the essence of Miller’s ‘projected history’? How does Miller re-conceive socio-historical phenomena while creating the historically-grounded parallels of the play’s ‘aesthetic opposition’?
O’Neal puts forward a rather visionary way of dealing with Miller’s concept of time present and past. In his essay on the historiographics of Miller’s play, he proposes that the audience (and the critic as an active member of the audience) understand Miller’s projection of historical evidence in the play as a projection of a ‘vertical view’ of history. He then proceeds to explicate the terminology he has proposed by examining the differences existing between a ‘horizontal’ and a ‘vertical’ view of historical events/practices. O’Neal regards the former of the two as the more ordinary approach to history (an approach that Adorno may relate to the edificating practices of ‘politically committed art’), one that we employ in our every-day understanding of life. Therefore, in O’Neal’s view, by addressing history as a “duration”, a “progress from point to point toward a destination” (thus, employing the ‘vertical view’, which, in turn, does not strike me as being too far off from Adorno’s conceptualization of the monad as a dynamic set of internally charged meanings) we seek “in history the antecedent conditions giving rise to any state of affairs under examination.” (84) With that in mind, O’Neal positions Miller’s use of history as one that “is less interested in exploring a diachronic sequence of historical facts,” but rather a methodology which attempts to depict historical events/influences synchronically, i.e., “vertically,” pointing towards “a recurrent pattern of human behavior independent of pre-existent conditions.” (84-85)
If we follow O’Neal’s delineation of Miller’s methodology, we must concede that the inhibiting practices of American political democracy in the early 1950s do not single-handedly define The Crucible’s historical framework, that is to say, “[both] the Salem delusion and post-World War II anti-Communist hysteria” act out as “coordinate elements in the same discontinuous historical subset, a subset that would include other historical “facts” as well.” (85) In an essay initially written for The New York Times (March 9th, 1958 edition), and subsequently reprinted in the collection The Theatre Essays of Arthur Miller, Miller discusses at length his reaction to the critics’ reception of the original Broadway production of the play. He voices his more than obvious disappointment at their inability to see the play in a larger human context of sociopolitical magnitude, suggesting a very similar premise for understanding its appeal to history to that induced by the critic Michael J. O’Neal. He writes, for example:
I was disappointed in the reaction to The Crucible not only for the obvious reasons but because no critic seemed to sense what I was after. In 1953 McCarthyism probably helped to make it appear that the play was bounded on all sides by its arraignment of the witch hunt. The political trajectory was so clear – a fact of which I am a little proud – that what to me were equally if not more important elements were totally ignored. […]
I was drawn to write The Crucible not merely as a response to McCarthyism. It is not any more an attempt to cure witch hunts than [Death of a] Salesman is a plea for the improvement of conditions for traveling men, All My Sons a plea for better inspection of airplane parts, or A View from the Bridge an attack upon the Immigration Bureau. […]
The form, the shape, the meaning of The Crucible were all compounded out of the faith of those who were hanged. They were asked to be lonely and they refused. They were asked to deny their belief in a God of all men, not merely a god each individual could manipulate to his interests. They were asked to call a phantom real and to deny their touch with reality. […]
The “heat” infusing this play is therefore of a different order from that which draws tears and the common identifications. And it was designed to be of a different order. In a sense, I felt, our situation has thrown us willy-nilly into a new classical period. Classical in a sense that the social scheme, as of old, had reached the point of rigidity where it had become implacable as a consciously known force working in us and upon us. […]
For me The Crucible was a new beginning, the beginning of an attempt to embrace a wider field of vision, a field wide enough to contain the whole of our current awareness. It was not so much to move ahead of the audience but to catch up with what it commonly knows about the way things are and how they get that way. […]
When we can put together what we do know with what we feel, we shall find a new kind of theater in our hands. The Crucible was written as it was in order to bring me, and the audience, closer to that theater and what I imagine can be an art more ample than any of us has dared to strive for, the art of Man among men, Man amid his works. (172-174, brackets added)
Nonetheless, these seemingly revealing words about craftsmanship and intent do not seem to appease even the contemporary critics’ backlash of Miller’s ‘infamous’ 1953 play. Some, like the scholar David Levin, have continued to regard Miller’s work in The Crucible as aesthetically fallible, since the playwright has proven himself unsuccessful in bringing into play the reality of the world that he pretended to unfold (namely, that of 1692 Salem, Massachusetts). Though Mr. Levin and his contemporaries may be right when pointing out the historical inaccuracies/discrepancies of Miller’s Salem (for example, the adulterous relationship between John Proctor and Abigail Williams is an artistic fabrication, then there is the rather sizable change in Abigail Williams’ age, from eleven to seventeen, and the like), they consequently fail to grasp the playwright’s illuminating use of historical events, past and present, which, in turn, constitutes a powerfully challenging aesthetics for confronting the audiences’ perceptions/definitions of reality, and their imprint on history. By pointing to a synchronous view of social and historical forces, Miller’s play ‘subverts’ the dissembling character of false consciousness, provoking us to question, constantly, the ‘essentially logical’ given of socio-historical linearity.
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