“we will burn, we will burn together” or: Re-reading The Crucible now – reflections on high school

Thanks for the reminder and encouragement to write after a long pause that I don’t want to get any longer. I’d reflected on how involved I’d want to get in a production I’ll never see, but this is an easy way for me to step back into writing as I make this weird life transition. So here we are. These posts assume basic familiarity with the plot and characters of the play.

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The title’s a quotation from one of John Proctor’s lines at the end of Scene Three of The Crucible. (In the scholarly business we call this sort of effect either allusion or intertextuality, depending on the degree of intentionality — Grace found a funny case of it recently with regard to Urban Grimshaw and the Shed Crew).

I’ve read The Crucible three times in my life, once in high school, once in grad school, and once since Richard Armitage has been cast as John Proctor for this summer’s production at the Old Vic. I’ve never seen The Crucible on stage, and I haven’t seen the film version for which Miller wrote the script, starring Daniel Day-Lewis. So just some reflections on the play from my perspective, here and now, starting with what I thought as a seventeen-year-old and how those thoughts appear to me today.

I wonder what Richard Armitage thinks, as he played Biff in The Death of a Salesman, the other play for which Miller is most remembered, before his LAMDA days, and thus has thought at least a little about Miller’s work before, even if it preceded his most intense professional training. I suspect he’ll do a lot more research this time. I wonder if I will. So many things to consider.

I still have the same copy of the book I had in high school (Bantam edition; ninth printing, 1974). Its binding is now totally dried out, and its pages are so yellow they’re almost orange. I read it in the fall of 1986, at the beginning of my senior year, in “American Literature 2,” which I had in sixth hour. I wonder if I was charged for not returning it, as it bears the school district’s stamp. Miller was already lauded then, although his work’s significance in American theater has only grown in the interval. I now find the scholarly introduction to the book by Richard Watts, Jr., unbearably funny and quite ridiculous. The excerpt from an American literature textbook that showed up on tumblr recently appears to me to be similarly silly; this isn’t a play about mistaking sexual hysteria for witchcraft, though historians agree that there’s a connection between religion, hysteria, witchcraft trials, and the slightly later Great Awakening. It’s certainly a play about hysteria and its personal and social effects. The framing thing for me for in examining my own history with the play: my fundamental perception now as then that Miller’s an extremely moral playwright and directly concerned with discussing, though sometimes obliquely, the social issues of the twentieth century. Moreover, while Miller’s moralism clearly points fingers, it does not do so, as in much of tragedy, at the characters in the play.

I think the big takeaway from this Miller play (as well as Death of a Salesman) is: at the end we’re supposed to realize that as the characters are pointing their fingers at each other, they also point them at us.

In this case, the tragic hero is the tortured and eventually trapped John Proctor, whom I find sometimes sympathetic and at others frightfully hypocritical, unreasonably and casuistically moralist (he puts salt in his soup secretly so he won’t have to lie to his wife about liking the taste — a moment in that play that has at least three different readings, and fascinated me even then), and overly endowed with a willingness to punish himself that inclines toward martyrdom. Even Proctor lies for gain, cannot control his desires, whether they stem from desire or from his own paradoxical notions of righteousness.

But most of us are less like Proctor and more like the other characters in the play than we realize at first. It’s easy to identify with the morally right position, which seems to emerge quickly — and particularly to us, living in 2014, who “know” that the witch trials were wrong and the “red scare” was bad. We’re “so much smarter” now. But despite the compelling protagonist, with whom we are supposed to sympathize, the inclusion in every character of some relatively base motivation or concern suggests to me now that we are supposed to leave, wondering — could that be us? Could we be the hypocrites with whom Miller peoples every corner of the play from the center of the action to its margins?

I think that the theater in the round, with the front rows of the audience being so close to the stage that audience members regularly make eye contact with the actors, should definitely enhance the potential effect of any such realizations.

But this general point about the audience in relationship to the characters was lost on my high school lit class — paradoxically making the moral point that Miller is forwarding, I suspect.

It was the tail end of the Reagan years, when it had long been buried that Reagan had named names before HUAC. He’d recently called the Soviet Union “the evil empire.” We were young, and culturally isolated, and most of us were actively religious. I went to Sunday School with half the kids in that class every week. We’d learned our close reading in Bible study, and so we read almost everything we were assigned in school at least in part the way we’d been taught in church to read Bible texts.

I personally loved the language of the play, and find that I still do, now recognizing in it echoes of the T.S. Eliot-style modernism that I discovered that same year in Murder in the Cathedral. (And one guesses, given his reading habits, that Armitage loves this, too.) In the class, we discovered that we loved the device of Elizabeth and John Proctor trying to protect each other in the courtroom, she by denying his infidelity, he by affirming it — which seemed tremendously romantic and tragic to us, with John exchanging his pride for the truth about his sins and Elizabeth sacrificing the truth for the sake of his reputation. (Now it mostly strikes me as a compressive, if nonetheless dramatically effective, reduction of O. Henry.)

Apart from that, however, I remember the main point of discussion during one period being Proctor’s responsibility for what happened to him.

“If he didn’t want to get in trouble with the court,” someone said, “then he shouldn’t have been cheating on his wife.” There were nods.

“Isn’t it part of the point of the play,” Mrs. A. asked, “to indicate that his infidelity has nothing to do with his possible implication in witchcraft?”

“But he put his life in the hands of that crazy Abigail,” the same girl persisted.

“I don’t think he realized she was crazy right away,” Mrs. A. said. “Or at least, that wasn’t the first thing on his mind.”

We all laughed. In a high school like that, we certainly knew who the good girls (Elizabeth) were and how the bad girls (Abigail) could get their hands on what the good girls deserved by virtue of their virtue.

Our edition of the book included the Act II, Scene One (Abigail and John in the woods at night), which was eliminated from the first performance of the play because Miller thought it killed the tempo. It strongly influences one’s perception of Abigail’s motivation and in turn of John’s actions in response. If it seems rationally though baldly self-interested for Abigail to want to displace Elizabeth in order to marry John, when that scene is added, she becomes cruelly vindictive, malevolent, and more than a little obsessive. And John’s options as actor become more drastically circumscribed.

“Should Proctor be executed for witchcraft because he was unfaithful to his wife and the court caught him in a lie?” Mrs. A. asked. “Let’s talk about that next time.”

In the subsequent class, the nascent moral majority was more subdued, and we all agreed that the more important point of the play was not how Proctor deserved what he got, but how Proctor’s conviction was unfair, with most people in the class now arguing that he was a hero for refusing to confess to something he didn’t do, indeed to something that some people thought wasn’t happening, and then, in the end, to sign the written confession. It didn’t occur to us to weigh the moral weight of Proctor’s various lies and assertions of the truth. There was some posturing about McCarthyism on both sides, which was a controversial topic, given where we came from. But Mrs. A. didn’t say much about the historical features of the play, either about Salem or HUAC. As an English teacher, she was more interested in the work’s dramatic effects and she was always struggling with our inculcated tendency to read it morally. In the end she made us write an essay on which version of the play we thought most dramatically effective (with or without the scene in the woods). I don’t remember what I thought.

What I think, reflecting now about that discussion, is how sophomorically facile it was. About how simply we drew our moral categories.

Biographers today point out that Miller began researching the Salem witch trials after a conversation with Elia Kazan about Kazan’s HUAC testimony. Kazan was notorious for having given up his friends in the name of being able to pursue his artistic career. Though the play clearly comments on the base qualities and all-encompassing blind spots of a society that would allow itself to be infected by a hysteria over the evil within (we shouldn’t forget that in the 1950s historians still called the century of highest persecution of “witches,” “the witch craze”), it’s also likely that Miller was offering some kind of oblique comment, in the end, not just on the perpetrators, but on the victims as well — on the people who refused to testify before the tribunal. (Miller’s own refusal to name names came three years after the premiere of the play.)

If so, what a comment. In the last pages of the play, under cajoling from his wife, who’s been pressured by the authorities, Proctor agrees to confess to save his life, but then refuses to incriminate other witches or to sign a public confession. The only way he can see to save his notion of his goodness is to go to his death; when Hale points out that he can only “declare his truth” if he lives, Elizabeth supports him, saying that she will not take away his sense, achieved at the very end, that he is finally being good.

Depending on how this scene is played, I think it’s a tremendously ambiguous statement. Proctor can be a hero, dying for the truth, a martyr, or he can be someone who’s so infected by the mood around him that he succumbs to its power and silences himself permanently in the name of speaking truth against something crazy, with which there is no reasoning. If Proctor has the kind of personality that’s necessary to stand up to the witch-hunters, it seems, that personality is equally extreme and equally permeated with a hysterical reading of the rigid moral categories of his society. At the end of Act Three, Proctor admits the power of the mood, when he notes that he and Danforth stand in morally equivalent positions:

Proctor: A fire, a fire is burning! I hear the boot of Lucifer, I see his filthy face! And it is my face, and yours, Danforth. For men that quail to bring men out of ignorance, as I have quailed, and as you quail now when you know in all your black hearts that this be fraud —

And then Proctor concludes that it is the same thing that takes them both: “G-d damns our kind especially, and we will burn, we will burn together.”

(I’ll be curious to hear from audience members if this line makes it into the Old Vic staging of the play, and if so, to hear how Armitage delivers it. I’d give odds on either suppressed anger, or even a sort of backed off resignation.)

To me now, our conviction in school that we knew who the heroes and the villains were seems ridiculous. As Proctor’s lines suggest, any hysteria draws everyone, even its opponents and victims, into its vortex. Fear puts people into that position and it keeps them there. The level of fearlessness required to resist approaches inhuman levels. And to me it’s no longer clear, given the apocalyptic mood with which the piece ends, whether we should admire or be horrified by Proctor.

Where does Proctor’s death stand in relationship to hysteria — is it resistance, as he wants to suggest? Or it succumbing? Or is it neither? Equally, or even more than being moral or brave, Proctor is often, simply: stubborn.

~ by Servetus on April 30, 2014.