History and Other Spectres in Arthur Miller's The Crucible

History and Other Spectres in Arthur Miller's The Crucible E. MILLER BUDICK In his Defense ofHistorical Literature, David Levin has argued that Anhur Miller's The Crucible fails to achieve anistic profundity because of Miller's inability to project seventeenth-century sensibilities and thus to sympathize with them. The play, in Levin's view, and in the views of many other critics as well, is not seriously historical and, therefore, not seriously literary or political. "Mr. Miller's pedagogical intention," writes Levin, "leads him into historical and, I believe, aesthetic error. ... Since Mr. Miller calls the play an attack on black-or-white thinking, it is unfonunate that the play itself aligns a group of heroes against a group of villains." Levin concludes his discussion with the observation that "stupid or vicious men's errors can be appalling; but the lesson would be even more appalling ifone realized that intelligent men, who tried to be fair and saw the dangers in some of their methods, reached the same conclusions and enforced the same penalties.'" Miller's Crucible, it would seem, fails to reach the social, historical, and (therefore) moral depth of a great work of an, because it cannot imaginatively conjure the world that it pretends to describe. And yet, as Cushing Strout has pointed out, "Miller has argued for [the] historical truth [of the play] , pointed to its contemporary parallels, and defined its transhistorical subject as a social process that includes, but also transcends, the Salem witchcraft trials and the anticommunist investigations ofthe 1950s." Funhermore, Miller has declared that the Salem witchcraft trials, which form the central action of the drama, were of interest to him long before he confronted McCarthyism and decided to write a play implicating the country's contemporary hysteria.2 How historically accurate, then, is Miller's play? And what are we to make of its use of historical materials, both past and present? Though The Crucible is, to be sure, unrelenting in its opposition to the authoritarian systems represented by Puritanism and McCarthyism, its use of historical materials and the position on moral tyranny wh.ich it thus projects E. MILLER BUDICK seem to me far more complex than criticism on the play would suggest. For Miller's play is not interested only in proclaiming a moral verdict, either on historical or on contemporary events. It does not want simply to inculcate a moral by analogizing between past experiences, on which we have already reached a consensus, and contemporary problems, from which we may not have the distance to judge. Indeed, as Miller himselfhas stated, while "life does provide some sound analogies now and again, ... I don't think they are any good on the stage. Before a play can be 'about' something else, it has to be about itself." Analogizing, then, is not, I think, either the major subject of the play or its major structural device. Rather, The Crucible is concerned, as Miller has claimed it is, with clarifying the "tragic process underlying the political manifestation," and, equally important, with describing the role of historical consciousness and memory in understanding and affecting such a process.3 History is not simply a device which Miller employs in order to escape the unmediated closeness of contemporary events. Rather, it is a fully developed subject within the play itself. For history is for Miller precisely what enables us to resist the demon of moral absolutism. As Miller himself puts it: It was not only the rise of"McCarthyism" that moved me, but something w~ich seemed much more weird and mysterious. It was the fact that a political, objective, knowledgeable campaign from the far Right was capable of creating not only a terror, but a new subjective reality. averitable mystique which was gradually assuming even a holy resonance. ... It was as though the whole country had been born anew, without a memory even of certain elemental decencies which a year or two earlier no one would have imagined could be altered, let alone forgotten.4 It is this "subjective reality," and the problem of "memory," that are, I believe, at the heart of Miller's play. And for this reason Miller turns to the...