The Crucible is bad, actually

I don’t think this is a particularly hot or relevant take, but I think The Crucible may be one of the most overpraised literary works of the 20th Century. People (or maybe just my high school lit teacher…) are always drooling and fluttering their eyelashes at the use of allegory, and sure it was controversial at the time it was produced for speaking out against McCarthyism. However, I think it fails both to seriously indict its historical context and as a story.

First let me history nerd a bit: the Salem Witch Trials and what may have caused them are fascinating subjects of historical research and conjecture. Theories include everything from psycho-active rotted wheat stores to the ultimate expression of a patriarchal society’s destruction of its most vulnerable members to the idea that groups of young women sought to gain political power in a social order that subjugated them completely.

What does Arthur Miller imagine was the root cause of such a famously cryptic historical event? A jealous teenager wants to continue to bang his self-insert character at seemingly any cost. John Proctor, of course, is not truly at fault for sleeping with his young employee. Even when he finally apologizes to his wife, she assures him it’s really her fault because she “kept a cold home”. Proctor is a man martyred not by single-minded societal pressure committed to political homogeneity as allegory lovers might suggest, but by the whims of a silly girl who just couldn’t control herself.

Anyway, excuse my random rant…I’ve been raging at this one for years.