Upholding Reputations: “How May I Live Without My Name?” (Miller 133) Imagine living in a society where if a lie was not told, then one was sentenced to death. Furthermore, envision one’s life being in the hands of a deceitful group of girls. In another situation, imagine seeing a classmate fall victim to a mystery illness. In Arthur Miller’s The Crucible and Katherine Howe’s Conversion, both literary texts involve communities stressing the importance of conforming to their ideas of a perfect reputation
“interpret the will of God”. In ‘The Crucible’, those who were to interpret the will of God enforced a pure a religiously rooted theocracy which later accounted for the mass hysteria during this colonial period. In William Bradford’s journal, the experiences of newly immigrated Puritans are documented expressing individual interpretations of God’s presence in their lives. The Puritans intertwined the tenets Irresistible Grace, Perseverance of the “saints”, and
The crucible: meaning a place or occasion of severe test or trial, it’s a test of how good or pure a substance is. The title alone symbolizes what’s going to happen in the play. The crucible is a play based on a true historical event that took place in Salem, Massachusetts (a small isolated town) in the late 1600’s. It’s basically little girls accusing people of being witches, and it causes a mass phobia, driven by fear, to break out. The people of Salem are Puritans, people who are plain, simple
his actions. For example, a speech by Stephen L. Carter, a law professor, regarding the differences between honesty and integrity states, “[W]hen I refer to integrity, do I mean simply ‘honesty’? the answer is no; although honesty is a virtue of importance, it is a different virtue form integrity” (Carter 3). The initial belief is that being honest as opposed to lying is what determines the goodness of a person, but goodness is actually determined by a person’s intentions. Integrity, the quality of
“witch-hunts” in Congress. 12. This implies that there is a higher level of importance in Act 1 that captures his reasons for writing the play. 13. Based on the overture, Reverend Parris is a not a good person at all. A numerous amount of people in the village do not like him. He feels like he is being persecuted wherever he went, despite his best efforts to win people and God over because he cares about his reputation. 14. The overture revealed that the Puritans lived a strictly religious lifestyle
never forgets to mention the vivid embroidered scarlet letter across her bosom. I conclude that the author wrote this way to continually remind the reader of Hester’s filthy sin and her reputation in the city, reminding others to be aware of Hester’s poor decision and past. Likewise, in Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible, Procter confesses that he “knew her” (Abigail) to his wife Elizabeth and the court (Miller 69). He admits to have had sinned and failed their marriage because of sleeping with Abigail