Unit 7: The Crucible, Acts 1–2

This predilection for minding other people’s business was time-honored among the people of Salem, and it undoubtedly created many of the suspicions which were to feed the coming madness.

It was also, in my opinion, one of the things that a John Proctor would rebel against, for the time of the armed camp had almost passed, and since the country was reasonably—although not wholly—safe, the old disciplines were beginning to rankle.

They were a band of individualists, and a much more ingratiating group than the Massachusetts men.

He is bending to kneel again when his niece, Abigail Williams, seventeen, enters—a strikingly beautiful girl, an orphan, with an endless capacity for dissembling.

PARRIS: Now then, in the midst of such disruption, my own household is discovered to be the very center of some obscene practice. Abominations are done in the forest—

In Proctor’s presence a fool felt his foolishness instantly—and a Proctor is always marked for calumny therefore.

When it is recalled that until the Christian era the underworld was never regarded as a hostile area, that all gods were useful and essentially friendly to man despite occasional lapses; when we see the steady and methodical inculcation into humanity of the idea of man’s worthlessness—until redeemed—the necessity of the Devil may become evident as a weapon, a weapon designed and used time and time again in every age to whip men into a surrender to a particular church or church-state.

I have no doubt that people were communing with, and even worshiping, the Devil in Salem, and if the whole truth could be known in this case, as it is in others, we should discover a regular and conventionalized propitiation of the dark spirit.

GILES: It discomfits me! Last night—mark this—I tried and tried and could not say my prayers.

PARRIS, in fright: How can it be the Devil? Why would he choose my house to strike? We have all manner of licentious people in the village!

ELIZABETH, a little loftily: I have no—

To ameliorate it: But not Sarah Good. For Sarah Good confessed, y’see.

He is different now—drawn a little, and there is a quality of deference, even of guilt, about his manner now.

PROCTOR, evading: I—have no knowledge in that line.

But it’s hard to think so pious a woman be secretly a Devil...