“we will burn, we will burn together” or: Re-reading The Crucible now — John Proctor, cruelty and betrayals

Continued from here, a series of reflections on re-reading The Crucible in the wake of Richard Armitage’s casting as John Proctor at the Old Vic. This is going to be my last post on this particular topic, as we’ll have reactions to previous available in only a few days! The time has passed really quickly. A blog has been announced to collate the experiences of Armitage fans who see the play — follow it here.

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Tonight I want to write about my perception of the personal level of the play and the role cruelty plays between John Proctor, Abigail, and Elizabeth Proctor. I’ve illustrated it with a few period musical selections.

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Richard Armitage and Samantha Colley in rehearsal for The Crucible, Summer 2014. Source: Old Vic Theatre on FB.

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There are so many ways to be cruel, and I wonder which of them Richard Armitage will use John Proctor to plumb.

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I don’t know if the notes that Miller interpolated in the script are shared with the audience in performance, but Miller introduces Proctor early on in Act I with the note that Proctor’s low tolerance for hypocrisy and foolishness made him a target of “calumny.” The key statement, however, is Miller’s notation that Proctor is a sinner against his own notion of morality. “Proctor,” he writes, “respected and even feared in Salem, has come to regard himself as a kind of fraud.” I can only imagine the sort of ferment that that might have provoked in the mind of Richard Armitage the reader.

The lengths to which one will go to protect one’s own self-concept even against one’s awareness of how flawed it is. How cruel we can be to others in order to keep ourselves whole. I don’t know what Miller means when he says Puritan society lacked a mechanism for expiating sin; sin is not the problem here so much as Proctor’s inability to see himself as sinner in the way that counts most — from the inside.

In Act One, however, this contradiction is not yet visible, and Proctor is strong, powerful, and frightening, scaring his own hired woman when he enters the scene and flirting a little with Abigail, although, as it turns out, he has no intention of coming through despite the memories that animate the impulse to joke with her and his admiration for her “wickedness.” Here we see the basic cruelty of gender relations in the society of the play, and the way they affect the end of any intimate relationship — with the separating lover denying the telling of the common story that united lovers share. As Proctor says, Abby, I may think of you softly from time to time. But I will cut off my hand before I’ll ever reach for you again. Wipe it out of mind. We never touched, Abby.

It makes me wonder what Richard Armitage dreams as John Proctor — wild nights, brief encounters, violent joinings, curt brushoffs, with Abigail Williams? And his own inability to control Abigail, his threat to resort to violence to keep these women, disobedient servant, spurned lover, under control?

And what about Proctor’s relationship to his wife? What does Armitage dream about that?

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The psalter used by Parris’ congregation would have been a later edition of the Bay Psalm Book of 1640, the first book printed in North America. (You may remember that it is exceedingly rare, now, with only eleven known copies surviving, of which five are complete, and that a copy was sold last fall for $14.1 million.) Early editions of this work indicated only the melodies to which the psalms were to be sung; musical notation was not included until the 1698 edition. Below, a choir sings a setting of Psalm 23 (“The Lord to Mee a Shepherd Is”) harmonizing to the notation of the melody in the 1698 edition.

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The beginning of Act Two sharpens this conflict Proctor feels between rectitude and desire, and the line he’s willing to walk to keep his notion of himself clean, with the stage direction that when Proctor walks into the house, he puts down his gun, then tastes the food cooking on the fire and seasons it. I find this a fascinating moment — it could, indeed, be comic. But then it’s clear, once Elizabeth puts the stew on the table, that it was an artifice — for as she watches him eat it, he praises it as “well seasoned” and she blushes with the compliment. Think a moment about what might be happening there. John is not willing to eat a badly seasoned stew; neither is he willing to salt it in the presence of his wife; neither is he willing to lie about it. So he salts the stew himself so he can have it as he pleases without forcing himself to suffer nor lying to his wife. (Incidentally, salt was an expensive commodity in the early modern world, so parsimony with salt signaled either a thrifty wife or a stingy one, though I don’t know whether Miller knew this.)

John has, in the end, told the truth. He has avoided something that’s apparently a bone of contention between them, but only by adjusting the circumstances to fit his later words about them. Things about the scene suggest that he feels manipulated to this end by Elizabeth — he tells he wants to please her, but she is not willing to accept his affections — and then he has to ask her for a drink, so that he appears to be criticizing her anyhow. He says he wants to please her, but he himself manipulates the situation so that he may do so without wounding his own rather casuist sense of truth-telling. His desire not to be cruel is thus a superficial move on his part, for in the end, if we take the seasoning as a synecdoche, he changes nothing about himself in his attempt to please Elizabeth. And this, one suspects, is what he most needs.

Indeed, the script suggests John thinks he’s already conceded enough, that he has no more obligation to suffer for his dalliance with Abigail, and that his wife’s suspicion of even a brief encounter with her is unfounded. As he says to Elizabeth, You forget nothin’ and forgive nothin’. Learn charity, woman. I have gone tiptoe in this house all seven month since she is gone. I have not moved from there to there without I think to please you, and still an everlasting funeral marches round your heart. I cannot speak but I am doubted, every moment I am judged for lies, as though I come into a court when I come into this house! And yet: it’s clear, he has lied.

And still lies. Elizabeth points out that she is not the judge, but his own heart — which points to guilt he still feels for things he still does. As he has no cause to whip his wife, he then turns to Mary Wolcott, whom he threatens to whip for her absence, in her place. When Elizabeth points out something they both know, tentatively albeit it reasonably — that Abigail wants to take her place — and urges him to disabuse the girl of any fantasy she might have of becoming Goody Proctor, John puts off the indictment of his own feelings by reading Elizabeth’s insistence as further cruelty to him. Agreeing to do as his wife acts, he nonetheless replies, I see now your spirits twists around the single error of my life, and I will never tear it free!

Elizabeth’s insistence that she will win, the curiously foreboding forecast that John will come to know that [she] will be [his] only wife, is then interrupted by the entrance of Mr. Hale. When John attempts to list the commandments, her attempt to save him by pointing out the one he’s forgotten is the prohibition on adultery thus strikes the reader as both a lifesaver and a condemnation.

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Richard Armitage and Samantha Colley in rehearsal for The Crucible, Summer 2014. Source: Old Vic Theatre on FB.

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At the very latest, the photos released earlier this week should have suggested the possibility that the scene that Arthur Miller omitted from the first performance of the play because it slowed down the tempo of the production, Act II, scene one, John Proctor’s encounter with Abigail Williams in the forest, will play a role in this production. (That placement doesn’t make narrative sense to me — it would work better narratively as Act III, scene one, which is why I am discussing it here.) That scene makes clear that Abigail is motivated by desire; jealousy / greed; and the desire for revenge. Miller’s script clearly adds madness to this list — or at least some kind of dissociation from the reality that Proctor is unlikely to marry the woman whose testimony hangs his wife — but this seems like overkill to me. Can a madwoman truly be cruel?

In this scene, it’s clear, Proctor’s decided — he’s going to ruin Abigail and defend Elizabeth (or try). One wonders why — out of loyalty to Elizabeth? But certainly out of a desire to preserve his own position and more importantly, his self-image. This move is, in part, a cruelty toward which his society forces him, a cruelty that Elizabeth has demanded as payment for his transgressions, but also, let us admit, a cruelty that he commits willingly or necessarily, particularly once he sees how far from reality Abigail is. To me, the more interesting thing about this scene than Abigail’s apparent madness or John’s apparent decisiveness — in essence, I think, he still gets what he wants here, if his plan works — is the bandying about of hypocrisy. Abigail’s real knowledge — the thing she knows that she can truly torture him with as no other person in the play can — is her awareness of his hypocrisy. Telling the truth about their relationship and confessing his fornication to the court, she points out quite astutely, makes him the hypocrite.

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One of the tunes recommended for use in the original Bay Psalm Book (the metrical index with of tunes can be found here) is Old Hundredth — the original melody for Psalm 100 as derived from the 1551 Geneva psalter and thus one of the oldest tunes of Protestant Christianity. Here’s a performance of that psalm following the melodic and rhythmic style of the seventeenth century (without harmony), beginning at 2:30. Note that the Puritans would not have used musical instruments in worship and that pianos of the style they are using were not current until the 1720s.

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Act Three of the play takes us to the courtroom, where John brings Mary Warren to the court in order to have her testify that the poppet used as evidence against his wife was given to her. The officials suspect this testimony, knowing as they do that Proctor is no friend of Parris and that his cultivation of a Christian life has suffered under this enmity. When they ask him whether his only impulse is to free his wife, and not to upset the court, he falters in his answer — on the one hand, as if he hadn’t thought they could think something of him; but on the other, I find myself asking, given the character’s history of showing that his only recourse when he loses an argument is to (threats of) violence, if there isn’t something to this charge.

I think most viewers will be inclined to sympathize with the Proctors in Act Three; Elizabeth is the target of a false accusation from Abby because Abby wants Elizabeth’s place, a false accusation that could bring Elizabeth to her death; John goes to court to prove his wife innocent and he’s fully willing to blacken his own reputation to do but even that will be insufficient. This reading, with the failure of the Proctors’ private lives made manifest as an ideological or political failure brought home at the hands of the crazed Abby, is fully in line with the Arendtian reading of the play I proposed last time and is close to Miller’s original thinking about the play. My understanding is that this is how the play is usually played, with the Proctors’ contradiction of each other seen as a sort of O. Henry paradox in which each sacrifices himself in order to save the other.

At the same time, however, the problems set up by the triangle are potentially more complex than this. Leaving aside the problem of Abby’s madness, we still have the question of she can best get payback for Elizabeth’s decision to put her out and John’s turning away; it does not matter, in the end, if John is unwilling to marry Abby, for Elizabeth’s destruction is sufficient to remedy both her social disgrace and her having been discarded as lover. All Abby can do to get what she wants is to behave cruelly — the society gives her no other choice — but the act is nonetheless malevolent. John’s willingness to proclaim in open court of Abby, repeatedly and forcefully, that she is a whore, a harlot, is a lie — everything the play tells us suggests that he was as willing as she — and cruel to her. He blackens his honor temporarily but only strengthens the picture he wishes us to see of him, as the man who clings to the truth. He admits to fornication in order to prove that he has told the truth, just like he salted the soup in order not to lie to Elizabeth — again doing exactly as he pleases to support his view of himself but not telling us the whole story.

Finally — we have to ask ourselves, based on Act Two, about the extent to which we believe John’s charge that Elizabeth will never let him free of awareness of his sin. Is this John’s defensive posture or is it an accurate description of his betrayed wife? It’s John who tells us that Elizabeth lies to save his honor. But whether she does it to save her honor or to gain her own revenge, she ends up the victor on that score (especially since we know by this point that as a pregnant woman, she will not be executed immediately), even if not on the charge of witchcraft. And when John’s attempts to insist Mary tell his version of things fails and sets loose a wave of behavior that indicates demonic possession and ends in accusations against him, John realizes the mistake of this — that it is the man who “quails,” the man who cannot tell the truth, the man he has been all this time, arranging the circumstances, telling half truths, in search of maintaining his own notion of his rectitude — only when he sees that the possessed girls’ accusation against him is now inevitable and irrevocable. He may not have possessed Mary Warren, but it’s thoroughly clear that he must have threatened her.

John may not have come in order to upset the court, but in fact he does exactly that.

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Richard Armitage in rehearsal for The Crucible, Summer 2014. Source: Old Vic Theatre on FB.

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And Elizabeth?

Miller disappears Abby in Act Four, conveniently, and the audience is left with the problem of how the Proctors will resolve their relationship. Hale no longer believes in what he is doing, but the maw of the machine must still be filled, and so if John is to come free, he must do so in a procedurally correct way, by confessing. Hale tries to get Elizabeth to push him to do so — and it is at this point that one wonders most, independently of John’s charges that she lacks charity (the seventeenth century idiom for the term ἀγάπη, the love referred to in 1 Corinthians 13), exactly what Elizabeth’s feelings are. John enters the scene, clear that he is no saint — as if, perhaps, he’s realized exactly what his self-image has done to himself and his family. Elizabeth, while reminding him that part of his problem has always lain in his own stubborn insistence on clinging to his image of his responsibilities — for who can forgive someone who refuses forgiveness? and is not the refusal to accept forgiveness, the refusal to forgive oneself, the height of arrogance? — now concedes her own role, that part of what he has said about her coldness is true. And while she bends in this scene on some level, still the cold quality of her principle is clear — she will not beg John to abandon the self-conception that has brought himself to this point in the first place. She will not.

The end of the play is usually read as heroic, with Porter Proctor going almost eagerly, indeed heroically, to his death. Since high school, I’ve not cared for that reading; I see the end of the play as heavily ambivalent, for it is entirely irrelevant to a society that believes in witches on the level that Miller depicts this one as doing whether the victims are innocent or guilty — they serve as examples either way. If we prefer the roman à clef reading (sustained by an excerpt in the Old Vic’s teaching guide to the play, although it’s frustrating that they reproduce only Miller’s memories of this incident and not Kazan’s, because they are strikingly different) that Proctor’s death is some kind of reproach from Miller to Elia Kazan, it’s still not entirely clear that making the arrogant hero die pointlessly is really a statement in praise of naming no names. Proctor does die.

In the end, despite his disclaimer that he is no saint, Proctor goes to his death as proudly as he scoffed at the existence of witches in Act One; in the end, as Elizabeth points out when she refuses to plead with him to change his mind about the confession and says to Hale, He have his goodness now. God forbid I take it from him!, his picture of himself has been sustained throughout. We can read this as heroic if we want to see this play as the fate of the martyr before the totalitarian authority, I suppose. But in the end, John Proctor ends the play where he started it — a stubborn man who has maintained his notion of himself and is willing that others should suffer the consequences for him. He cannot remake his world in the way he salted the soup, but neither can he let go of the incredibly hubris of believing that he can somehow do so by dying. And Elizabeth? She supports this notion — he has his goodness now — but if she is as cold as she admits, this statement is can also be read as bitter rejoicing. She will not betray him. If this is a decision to be cruel, or to be kind — given the fact that he’s about to die — we can only leave to the actors and to the audience watching them.

And again, I wonder — I wonder so hard — how Richard Armitage dreams John Proctor’s death.

~ by Servetus on June 20, 2014.